A Fine Art of Balance

Poetry Review

As anyone who’s ever taken a course in literature knows, the two basic elements of any narrative are plot and character. Without these bare-bones elements a narrative loses its legs and collapses. Yet the hard part every writer struggles with is how to make their choices about plot and character com-pelling. Put bluntly, readers want to read about interesting beings doing interesting things. In a sense all literary works are measured against our own internal sense of whether and how well that happens.

Some narratives are heavily descriptive and become interesting simply through what their authors show us. These people are usually close observers—eschewing jargon and convention, they find a way to really get into the person, place, or thing they are describing. In the vein of great describers I think of Pablo Neruda and his odes. Reading Neruda’s poem “Ode to the Watermelon,” for exam-ple, you get the sense that he really understood watermelons; we who would deride watermelons now had to look at them in a different way. Other writers are more plot people. Even as the characters they invent are lightly sketched, what those characters do makes them endlessly fascinating. I think here of Stevens—a great plot poet—who, for example, in “The Idea of Order at Key West” has his nameless heroine create an entire world by singing along the seashore. In the end, whether a writer chooses to emphasize plot or description, it’s the interplay, achieving the difficult balance between these two, that makes for compelling verbal art.

I was recently reminded of the push and pull of description and plot reading the first poetry books of two energetic Canadian writers: Asa Boxer and Nick Thran. Though they approach the elements of narrative from seemingly opposite emphases on plot and character, their different takes end up demonstrating the powers and limitations of narrative itself. One way this happens for these writers is through a particularly poetic concern for insufficiency, for the ways that, though language is our best connection to other minds and hearts, a gap remains between direct experience and the reproduction of life writing makes in our minds.

Boxer (despite the pugilistic last name) is the describer here. Like Neruda, Boxer feels very much at home in the ode—a concentrated meditation on a particular subject. In his book The Mechanical Bird (Signal Editions) Boxer gives us poetic studies of the ordinary objects that surround us: maps, polar bears, a young man called Amad, a gear train, hammers, and the mechanical bird of the title. Though his choice of subjects at times seems random, one of Boxer’s main interests here is correcting just this sort of assumption. His poems, across their different subjects, argue that there is a deep similar-ity in the apparently random differences between say, a damselfly and a tool box. This similarity is a poetic one grounded in the central idea of an ode—that we should attend to who and what we too often forget. Even in his rare ode about a person, such as the poem “Amad,” Boxer wants us to re-member the overlooked. “Where, in God’s name, will Amad find love?” Boxer’s lines ask, because clearly finding someone to love is as important for us as it is difficult.

One of the most effective instances of this is a poem simply titled “The Lobster”:

Sunk behind its dingy window
in a supermarket aquarium,
the lobster turns a muzzy eye
on the great élan of air.

Boxer’s skill shows itself in the unexpected use of the French word “élan,” which though it trans-lates strictly as momentum, also has connotations of balance, of speed, and of flight. By turning a “muzzy,” (blurred or confused) eye on the majesties of air Boxer gives the lowly lobster a truly noble height. Where Eliot, in the “Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” enlarged on his malaise by declaring “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” Boxer gives the bottom-feeding lobster a stoic courage:

You will never hear the lobster cry,
“What crime could be so great it moved the sea
to single out a bloated shrimp like me.”

Boxer here plays with the evident contradiction that the lobster cannot speak, much less intone the elegant iambic pentameter couplet he gives as its unspoken speech. Yet the moment works—like a kind of anti-Prufrock, the versifying lobster eloquently accepts its fate. We might say that what Neruda did for the watermelon, Boxer tries to do here for the lobster. Their focused attention on what we otherwise pass over works as a kind of verbal lovemaking for which the poetic ode is peculiarly suited.

Some of the romantic sensibility possible with the ode is shown in the title poem of the collection “The Mechanical Bird.” Birds have long been a common poetic subject. Few, for example, can read Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and not be moved. But most machines are poetically dead to us, and odes to them are rare. Boxer knows this, and in his better poems like this one, he creates a synthesis between the living and the dead that helps bring to life an otherwise lifeless thing:

And she engages the heart
in her suit of dead feathers…
forgotten during God’s dispensation of grace;
and overlooked during the allotment of will.

Though one might object to the preaching—telling the reader that “she engages the heart” instead of showing it—(a classic error), the “suit of dead feathers” is nevertheless a powerful image of life conquering death, a way of vitalizing the machine-bird by clothing it in living substance.

In contrast to Boxer’s thoughtful ruminations on the lowly, Nick Thran, in Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press) is a poet who records the unexpected actions of human life. Of course there are states of mind here; equally there are moments without movement and poems about dead objects. But far more than Boxer, Thran often seems to take pleasure in the way actions drive a thought. One can imagine him enjoying the lines of Robert Creely’s haiku-like poem “I Know a Man”: “…shall we &/why not, buy a goddamn big car,” simply because the car will take you somewhere, anywhere, over the next hill to a new experience. Like Creely, Thran versifies like a man who enjoys journeys and collecting the knick-knacks of personal history he finds along the way.

Although their books occasionally have similar poem titles, Thran’s results are very different from Boxer’s. Take for example the ode-like poem “The Coin O’rama Laundromat, A Dedication”

This is for the Coin O’Rama
after it empties. The last one there –
the Korean woman with slender fingers
picking lint and old dryer sheets deep
from the bowels –
how the final moment must feel
when she closes the lid
of the trash can
filled with clouds.

Despite its title, this poem is not so much about the Laundromat as the people who go there. Like Boxer, Thran is asking us to attend to something overlooked—in this case the Korean woman doing laundry, but Thran’s history is a resolutely human one; he links how the woman feels with what she does. Unlike Boxer’s lobster poetically describing its miserable state, Thran’s human subject speaks solely through her actions. If Boxer’s lobster remains largely still, with only its eye in motion, Thran’s washer-woman moves her hands against a silent and unchanging background.

The glory Thran takes in motion is shown in his poem “Bloor Street,” Toronto’s main east-west thoroughfare.

Once in a Bloor moon the joke goes, and mother
rubs his hair. Then she and her husband head
to bed to make love. That’s “B” for the bed,
“l” for love, and the “o!” and the “o!”
a string upon which they wish
they could balance forever…

Knowing the poem is called “Bloor Street” we eagerly wait for the “r” that never comes. Instead Thran hides it in the words “string,” and “forever,” and in his final coda of Bloor as “the most ro-mantic street in the world.” The unexpected linking of the ugly word “Bloor” with the sexual ecstasy of the two parents is a powerful sign of how language is both essential and yet insufficient to express the depths of what we feel. Names, as Thran says, are often inadequate. Poetry tries, but only rarely reaches the wordless pleasures of an orgasm.

Another moment of the interplay between language, thought, and action occurs in the poem “Azucar.” The title seems to promise an ode, but like “The Coin O’rama,” it ends up being a lyric about the power of simple human actions to alter circumstances. In this narrative the writer’s mother has been learning Spanish. She lives below a Hispanic couple who constantly argue.

…Mother,
who tries hard to good in this world,
marched upstairs,
banged on their door till it opened
enough for her to ask
in a friendly, foreign voice
for azucar,
the Spanish word for sugar
she’d made a point to learn before bastard,
prison, abuse
and asshole, you leave her alone.

The sugar the mother borrows is used to make banana bread that she then carries upstairs. The woman’s courage and humility—not accusing, not calling the husband an asshole, and intervening with the ancient neighborly tradition of borrowing a cup of sugar, shows an unusual sensitivity to the power of ritual. The first ritual of sugar borrowing leads to a second—that of the sharing of food. And this second is a ritual that heals.

Thran ends the poem observing the cooling of the slices: they are okay now…(and after a stanza break) to eat. The double reference of the “they” as both the slices and the angry couple neatly links the readying of the treat to the promise that it has already brought some soothing sweetness to their dis-cord. The Mother’s faith that there is sugar to be found in this household symbolizes her belief that despite the distrust here, there is also goodness. That all this word-action is happening in Spanish—a foreign language for the mother—only adds to the power of her gesture. Thran’s poem makes an aesthetically appealing and narratively convincing argument that sweetness is a sure recipe for happiness in any language.

Inevitably, writers make different choices about how to move their readers. This is as it should be. But for poetry the emphasis on plot or description can make a big difference in whether its words matters to us. Ever since Wordsworth wrote The Prelude, many English-speaking writers have been privileging feeling and thought over action; they have insisted that how we feel drives what we do. Boxer’s The Mechanical Bird works largely within that tradition. Thran, on the other hand, in Every Inadequate Name comes from another place, one conceptually but not linguistically closer to the novel, where action is the mainspring of our feelings and thoughts.

published at Vehicule Press Blog

C. Durning Carroll