Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets.
It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an essay written by Renee Gladman in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.
I'd like to share one such poem, published in the Denver Post, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing of something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem about something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:
Noun Poem
A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns
The bird unwinds its tale of read
in which a woman paints a postcard for her son
This is a sentence with two nouns
One is the noun we all know
the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:
a widower in search of a bride
Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,
can I have a glass of milk, Mom?
She fills him a glass and watches him drink
the brush poised in her hand
The bird and boy whistle one to the other
red spooling from incongruous mouths
This is a song with two swallows
The other gathers others in the skies
This, a sentence with two eyes
One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries
The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:
A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns...
Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:
The bird unwinds its tale of read
The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of a yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."
So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.
I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it.
There are three places in which an assertion is in the poem made about the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:
One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries
The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: This is a song with two swallows. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a song. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of music. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.
But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.
I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing.
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