How do we know–really–what makes for a good poem?

I have few ideas. Why do I go back to Frank Stanford who had a wonderful power for schemes of variation and precision, like the surface of ice, which is a precise and desperate surface.

We are not the only ones

then they are far away,
Such a distance a cripple
like me Can’t imagine.

POV says the writer has an answer, the reader another. But what if one is a reader and a writer? Part of me says it shouldn’t matter and that the reader should read and go with their gut. I’ve read and taught enough Shakespeare to know when I’m being tricked and when I’m getting the slam. Lear just keeps coming back. I step away from the text shaking my head with wonderment, as I do with Stanford’s.

I’m writing about the experience, not for the school student of poetry who wants to know how to write a sestina.

The poems that I know have a frame of mind, authority over something. They float above the surface, not quite ink, not quite pixels. Better than stone.

In Miles City, Montana, Alice Munro is just too subtle. Everything adds up–slowly and with measure. And it’s all there too: space, maps, roads, rivers, water, borders. She even says it herself:

. . . I was happy because of the shedding. I loved taking it off. In my own house, I seemed to be more often looking for a place to hide–sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing what I wanted to hold onto. But on trips here was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at–a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volswagon on a revolving stand–and pouring lemonage into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted.

The outside and the inside are prominent here, an expression of mind and landscape, several maps at work here, and it just so happens that the next section of the fiction rolls onto the subject of maps, roads, and then to fiction itself, the narrator talking about laying her children out as characters. “We had them firmly set to play their parts,” Munro writes.

Everything is significant. Everything feeds back and links together. The map is map and referent to curving journeys. Water is relief and a killer. Parents are just always at the edge of tragedy; caregivers they are, loving their children, but also delivering them up to their webs of secrets and dishonors, and “giving consent to the death of children . . . ”

In the story, before leaving on a trip in ’61, the narrator’s daughter says, “‘Goodbye, house.’ Then she said, ‘Where will we live now?'” The other daughter thinks this is funny. “‘Mother! Meg thought we weren’t ever coming back!'”

How wise the first is and how the second will learn. Yes, you will come back, but you will come back changed.

The story is a retrospective. It looks back and in its own internal logic finds expression of an earlier misgiving in more concrete terms. We may remember a moment in time long ago. That moment may be mysterious, but something about it lingers. It’s hard, seed-like, or comes like the sense of another presence in a dark room. In this case, it’s a death, a funeral, and a feeling that something else is going on behind it all.

We’re starting off this semester in Contemporary Fiction with Alice Munro’s story Miles City, Montana, rather than as we have in the past with Paz’ My Life with the Wave. Why? Because a lot of what we’ll be doing in the course is learning about and relating different sorts of aesthetic expression in the huge arena of “fiction.” What are the modes? The affects? The methods?

Munro is a favorite of mine because of her focus on memory. Fiction and memory: yes. Thus her fictions trail and path-out in different ways than do Paz’ and Borges’. In Miles City, for example, we’ll have a chance to talk about the orientation of the narrator “looking back” on her life. As does Paz’ narrator. But what they see and have experienced in the expressed fiction will be different and will take a different shape. Munro’s story is a complicated but interesting structure as expressed. In the story she relates and compares different events that have a common center, but how they are related and compared unfolds in a crisp, steady, and wonderfully measured cadence.

Yes, Munro is a favorite.

Just finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country and came away a little disappointed–for reasons I’m not quite comfortable with but probably need to explore. One of the problems has to do with patterns. My response to McCarthy’s fiction after Blood Meridian, excluding All the Pretty Horses, which I felt explored a few character issues beyond the Judge and the Kid, was that it took no risks beyond what had already been accomplished in the imagery, landscape, and characters of Suttree and Blood Meridian. In those novels, McCarthy explores and ranges around the limits of narrative language that tells of events and marries landscape to fictive human flesh. What can come, if this can be called up? They weren’t explorations of plot, of connectivity, of knots to tie up and to resolve. Blood Meridian is an argument, a test, a hypothesis in the form of a journey. Blood Meridian is a contained “place” that can’t be judged by the terms of “real world” morality and won’t be contained by theories of art. But neither will Borges be “so contained.” Or Moore.

No Country, however, doesn’t seem to live on its own terms or create its own dilemmas; it appears to rely on patterns already presented, like paisely on paisely. I still come back to Suttree and Blood Meridian to look for more, to experience again for freshness. As I hear Chighur speak about whys and what must be done “because it already had been done” (not a quote from the novel) to Carla Jean, I clench. I get the third power, I get that now implies then, and that a multitude of historical crash courses are interesting to ponder, and that the idea of a terminal paradox is at play. Does Chighur go beyond the judge? I don’t think so. Moss beyond the Kid or John Grady Cole? Do they have to? I’d like them to, sure. But it’s just what I would like. Carla Jean’s story: try that.

Let’s say C listens to CJ and takes her as correct. Then what? Or maybe Wells doesn’t have a deathwish and isn’t as dumb as he’s written. Wells is a kind of glue, but is that enough? Then what? Maybe M blows C’s head off in the hotel at Eagle Pass because his finger slips. Then what?

A piece of Hiroaki Sato’s translation of Masayo Koike’s The Most Sensual Room from How2

From the open window I hear the sounds of the neighbor’s house. Why aren’t you finishing your homework? The noise of plates. Would you come here and help me a bit? The noise of plates. What did you do with that? The noise of a washing machine. The soft ringing of a telephone. Hello, hello? Hello, hello? The beep signaling that the washing machine finished its work. We don’t know the faces of our neighbors. Nonetheless, they come in. Like a flood. Our neighbors’ daily routines, into this vacant room.

Thanks to Daniel Green for the opportunity to find this.