November 14, 2013

Some arrows; future perfect.

(This is the second in a series of letters about poems and what I love in them. You probably subscribed to these letters when I sold you a chapbook of Horse_ebooks poems; feel free to unsubscribe at any time.)When you read this, I will have been married. That's in future perfect: a tense that's always fascinated me for its name and the assumption such a way of speaking makes. It states the future as a fact, perfectly neat. Things tend not to happen with the clearly delineated borders that future perfect puts around them: even when I'm married, how will I have been changed?"I'm obsessed by Time Magazine," wrote Allen Ginsberg, but I'm just obsessed by time. A poem is a way to manage time: the time it takes you to form its syllables, the time it spends in your memory. Preparing for this wedding, I've thought often about the ending of "The Whitsun Weddings" by Philip Larkin, a poem that's deeply attached to time. It's on the long side, but it's worth taking a little while to read the whole thing.It begins in time ("late getting away") and ends in time uncoupling: "this frail / Traveling coincidence" of strangers together only once is nearly at its end. And what this wedding day holds is "all the power / That being changed can give."  Where scholars will claim cornily that the arrow-shower at the end is Cupid's, an image of fecundity, I've always read the arrows as the vectors of those separate lives sent out of sight somewhere. They're arrows of time's continuous thread lived out in parallel, making unknown lives grow. Nearly ten years after the first time I read this poem, I remember those two last lines exactly, and I doubt it's just because I wrote them on my blog and my shoes as a mopey English major kid.What those lines say, how they sound, with the soothing sighs of "shower," "sight," and "somewhere" all accrued, the rhythm (just akimbo from iambic pentameter), and their meaning: this all combines into a sticky memory. Reading poems, I find ways to remember and ways to understand that act. That's a lot to assign to a pile of words, but it's also viscerally human and real.It takes more time to read a poem than a piece of prose. I usually read a poem at least twice: first, pretty quickly, to get the sense and story of it, and another time to see its sounds and shapes more closely. In that first reading, I’m often looking for images that catch me, like the arrow shower in the coda of "The Whitsun Weddings." On the second reading, I'm listening for how the sound of the words and their position in lines creates its own beauty and compliments the images.If you're someone who doesn't read a lot of poems, maybe this is a strategy to start with. If you're someone who does, how do you read them? How do they bend time for you?Yours,Erin