Tion
paperbble-puff
leaf Whittier
sior. His
cobbles in
ster grass
rockweed, riparian
excelsior.
ballast for
mediate then
sue paper.
I brought Caroline Knox’s “Tion” (see above) to a poetry discussion group, thinking we’d have a spirited talk about challenging common notions about poetry—then something amazing happened. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First things first: the title. How are we to pronounce tion? Like shun? Moreover, what word is it the suffix for? Well, there are roughly a gazillion words that end with -tion, so let’s come back to that question later.
Next question: Is “Tion” a poem? Hmm, I have a pretty broad definition of poetry, & I trust Knox as a poet, so my immediate answer is yes. But even from a more traditional perspective, looking at the way “Tion” appears on the page, broken into lines with a hard left margin, it certainly looks like a poem. Also, although they’re not regular, the poem employs end rhymes: paper, Whittier, excelsior, for, & paper again, as well as slant rhymes: in, riparian & then. I’d probably argue his & grass, but maybe that’s just me.
Such trimmings & trappings don’t necessarily a poem make, I know, though they might strengthen the case for some. Maybe so, or maybe “Tion” is just a bit of Dada whimsy. Nothing wrong with that. I quite like Tzara myself, so much so I named my Blood Elf after him.
For that matter, maybe “Tion” is a found poem. If so, it certainly seems serendipitous that the first word is paper, given that we’re supposedly looking at a strip of paper in which the hefty left side is clipped off.
Here’s
where it begins to get interesting—so I guess you can skip all the stuff I
wrote beforehand. Anyone
who has ordered merchandise online knows strips of shredded newspaper are often
used as packing material to protect merchandise in transit—as, too, are (bu)bble-puff
(line 2), (Ea)ster grass (line 5), excelsior (line 8), & (tis)sue
paper (line 11).[1]
Lines 3-4 provide additional insight. It seems obvious that leaf Whittier refers to John Greenleaf Whittier, but to connect the dots to sior, one may need to don one’s sleuth hat & search the net. It is there I learned that in 1887, Whittier, along with fellow poets James Russell Lowell, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, & Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, appeared in Christmastide. As it would happen, Longfellow’s contribution was his famous poem “(Excel)sior.”[2] Of course, a less convoluted explanation would be that Whittier's books were often published by Excelsior Publishing House, so let's go with that.
To return to the title, if I were to hazard a guess, I’d suggest “Protection” or something in that realm because many of the words, including the ones previously discussed for mailing, refer to materials used for protection, albeit cobbles, rockweed, ballast, & (inter)mediate don't serve the narrative I’ve constructed in regard to shipping & handling. It's unwise to shoehorn meaning into the poem, so I should probably stop here.
 |
| John Greenleaf Whittier Home in Amesbury, Massachusetts |
On the other hand, any deconstructionist worth an indeterminate weight in deconstructed salt would tell you the need for protection implies value & vulnerability, for instance, if mailing a nearly 150 year old book by Whittier (maybe even a rare first edition of Christmastide, let's say, so my research doesn't go for naught) used here perhaps to represent both the value & vulnerability of poets/poetry. (Also, if tion is pronounced shun, are we to think poets & poetry are shunned? Has Whittier been shunned? Maybe meaning itself is shunned?) Admittedly, I could be completely off base. Like reading Sappho, it's difficult to say anything definitively, given the "incomplete" nature of the text, doubly so with Sappho if you don't speak ancient Greek.
I'm reminded of the opening lines to Wallace Stevens's "Man Carrying Thing": "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." As for that, it is precisely what’s missing that makes “Tion” work. Here, with Knox, the reader must piece together what the poem says beyond its surface meaning, but isn’t this how poems often work? As such, "Tion" serves as a cryptic yet delightful Ars Poetica.
Many thanks to the poetry group for a stimulating & enlightening conversation!
[1] The completion of the word fragments is speculation on my part. Other possibilities abound, so feel free to make it a game. Have fun!
[2] Quotation marks added here are mine, but you’re more than welcome to them once I’m done.
Comments