levelheaded: Ambition

Like all but three (and why these exceptions? Something to look into…) of the 12 stanzas in this poem, ambition is double-pronged; it is desire, elaborated upon. A cheerful readiness to go after something, as well as a duality of acknowledged desire and willingness to act, resides in this poem’s sweeping title.

Might most, or all, of these couplets have the ability to break down into one line pointing to the desire, and the other, to the action, each pair of lines a mathematical problem? Maybe. Not a direction we’re ambitious enough to pursue right at this moment—but it’s certainly a possibility worth mentioning.

When we picked up on the vagueness of the opening couplet, “A threadbare sheet, a face / to kiss upon,” and, later, how “You again / press wall to hand, […] and mouth,” it made us think of the hugeness, the disembodiedness running parallel with these lines, of ambition. That first couplet’s indefinite articles make the sheet and the face striking in their vagueness. The a’s there are really loud; they’d be quieter were the couplet more specific. And the omission of any articles in those later lines has a similar dreamy effect, leaning toward ostentatiousness—dreamy like when we lose ourselves in our loftiest ambitions. Don’t we wish for an exciting life; for fame, or to be a household name; to write a book, or star in a movie (not the highest-grossing film of summer 2013), etc. Ambition is at least as broad, as general, as it is earnest.

So far we’ve focused on ambition, as a result of that single word naming the poem. A lesson in the potential spark of a title, especially a title whittled down to one word.

Switching gears: Line 3, “casually as windowed glance / checking for rain,” and, later, “when removing night moths / windowsill’d looking.” Both times windows surface, so does looking, which inevitably recalls the centuries-old idea of eyes being the windows to the soul. Were you to have Googled, sometime in May 2013—maybe because you were ruminating about Plasek’s poem—“eyes window to soul,” the first and the third hits would have revealed people writing about the findings of scientists and psychologists in a way that referenced that eyes-window-soul impression, sloppily building the saying, which is of course utterly impossible, up to irrefutable fact. These folks claim the eyes really are the windows to the soul.

This bundling of 1) repulsion from the figurative (because it calls for deeper thought?), 2) abuse of literalness, and 3) slipshod handling of language seem to be a trademark of our times—in conversation, on the internet, in print. With its care and creativity and form, Plasek’s poem refreshingly contradicts this dismal devolution. Poems rely on figurative speech and lingual precision. Poems, it may be fair to say, are inherently abundantly ambitious, kinetic utterances.

– The Editors