Suggesting Meaning

I came across a poem online today, at Anti-, by Amit Majmudar. It's called "Money Shots" and begins with the following lines:

Money grows the way stars die, and stars die
the way hearts beat: white-dwarf systole, red-
giant diastole keeping the flow
of capital as capillaries lined with the same
porous silk as a day trader's pockets.

Of course, I don't read much current poetry, so I don't know exactly what's in fashion, but as someone who enjoys responding to literature, I thought I'd post a few remarks. I'll admit up front that this is a sort of reader-response sort of response, in the sense that I'll go through my impressions upon first reading the poem.

The poem begins with an intriguing simile that joins money and stars together in a temporal consideration. I found myself drawn in by this first comparison because it stretches the vast distance between an everyday earthly object (money) and the vast and almost unimaginable distances of space. Such a divergence of scale provokes a defamiliarizing response. But for me, a defamiliarizing response provokes a careful examination. I try to slow down and figure my way through it, and that's when things started to break down.

Majmudar attempts to elicit a feeling of growth and decay, a sense of cycles. And he succeeds on that level. But the comparison doesn't work as well when he shifts to the "flow / of capital." Money might "flow," but it seems a poor description to suggest that the violent explosion of a nova is a "flow." Furthermore, the "capillaries" through which this ejecta is said to flow don't really exist in a galactic system like blood vessels and capillaries. Also, the violence of the stellar reference is not fitting with with the "porous" sense in which money flows through the "day trader's pockets."

In short, this simile is merely suggestive. Similes cannot be exact, of course, or they would not be similes (they would be equivalences). But Majmudar does not seem to strive for a more complete comparison. He appears to want a glancing blow rather than a more traditional comparison. I don't think this is a result of a writer who is unwilling to take better care with metaphor and simile. Instead, it feels as if the thinner, less complete comparison is actually the desired strategy.

The next line provides an example: "Time is cyclic. Come again? Crime is cyclic." He plays with sound in substituting "crime" for "time." But he doesn't develop a contrasting view of time and crime; instead, the sound allows movement. One idea flows into the next, but in sound rather than in conceptual connection. This is enough to sustain the poem's movement.

Majmudar returns to the use of stars at the end of the first section: "these men in pinstripes are the stars, / the heartthrobs money loves, the actors who make / money's heart go boom-bust: lub-lub: nova." I appreciate the return to the heart/star comparison because it gestures toward a resolution, but he misses a full connection in the traditional sense. Are the men really the stars? The stars are supposed to be the hearts, but now they're the men? These (clearly shifty) men are best characterized by a heart metaphor? But they're so clearly distasteful. Does the money then really love the men, who are heartthrobs? I could see that the money loves the men, but the men now are stars, which are money. It's all so confusing. It seems that a lust rather than love metaphor would have worked better. And if money loves pinstriped men, why do they have porous pockets?

My point here is that the poem is bouyed more by the suggestion of meaning than it is by meaning. A series of glancing blows provides a kind of movement that perfect or locked metaphr does not. As long as the reader is held aloft by this movement, poetry like this can succeed. I'm not so sure that I'm one of those readers, however.

Wallace Stevens and What the Imagination is Allowed to Do

It's a stale and obvious fact that Wallace Stevens places great faith in what the imagination could accomplish. He feels that the imagination helps shape the facts of the world as we perceive them. (This concept is probably borrowed from Coleridge's careful description of two levels of imagination, the first being that which pulls sensory input together into the ideas needed to conceive of the world).

At any rate, Stevens's faith in the inherent power of the imagination allows him to construct surprising scenes in his poetry. The most well-known examples of this transformative power are probably in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which shows scene after scene of blackbirds in varying relations to the observer and the world. But I want to focus on the closing section of "Farewell to Florida," which transforms the men in the streets of Stevens's Hartford, Connecticut into the waves of the ocean.

My North is leafless and lies in wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

I choose this image not because it is the most staggering allowance afforded the imagination in Stevens's work, but because it raises an important question about the ethics of imaginative power. The poet's imaginative metaphor changes the men (in the abstract) into dark water that is "cloven" by the ship. We're aware that Stevens was an elitist, but this act of imagination allows him to tear through the men of the masses in the poetic act. The world doesn't seem to dictate to him as often as it maybe should. That's a value judgment, of course, but one that his poetry asks us to either affirm or reject.

Being In and Out of the World

I was looking over several unpublished poems and drafts by Elizabeth Bishop and was struck by a commonality that may shed light on her ideas about the self's interaction with the world. Her poems often describe interior scenes or people contained in dreamworlds who are confronted by the real world.

The poem "In a Room," begins with "There was a stain on the ceiling" and ends with "'But here I am in my room,' I awoke."

A poem titled "A Short, Slow Life" begins with the enclosing concept of "We lived in a pocket of Time," but ends with "Roughly his hand reached in, / and tumbled us out."

In a review of a collection of Emily Dickinson's letters, Bishop even singles out this line of Dickinson's for praise: "but so sure as 'this mortal' essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again."

We find this same sort of reintroduction of the self into the world in Bishop's published poems. Perhaps the most noteworthy example is "In the Waiting Room," with its abrubt end to ontological investigation in the final stanza, which begins "Then I was back in it." I'm struck by the way these poems enforce an ultimate end to meditation -- but not an end to dislocation. In other words, the emphatic reality of the world, its concreteness, is unarguable. But its appearance is not able to wipe away the uncertainties of the other experience. The reader's experience, like the speaker's, dwells on the unsettling contemplations contained within the poem. For Bishop, the entrance of the world is requisite for her poetry's accuracy, but it doesn't ground things as firmly as one might expect.

In another untitled and unpublished poem, she writes that "One day a sad view came to the window to look in, / little fields & fences & and trees, tilted, tan & gray. / Then it went away." The world seems to have an unsettling agency of its own. Reality does not come across as unbiased and uninterested. To be reinserted into reality after contemplation is not to have questions answered. I always look back to Walt Whitman's examination of philosophical contemplation and his insistence that actuality (especially the actuality of human contact) is enough to drive those questions away.

But the same isn't true in Bishop. "Little Exercise" is a good example of this. The world sends a storm "roaming the sky uneasily," but though Bishop describes its effects, she encourages us at the end to "Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed." In one sense, this is another example of Bishop depositing her character into the world, but in another, this worldly existence barely rouses him. We are "tied to a [...] root," but we nonetheless float in our own place. In "Cootchie," the sea is even "desperate, / will proffer wave after wave." So there's a continual struggle between the world created by human contemplation and the world that buffets us with its forces. We seem to exist in them simultaneously. And though modernists like Wallace Stevens might discuss the world as meditation (in the poem titled "The World as Meditation"...and all his other poems), Bishop would seem to inhabit the gap between meditation and the world.