Arkansas
There are those who accomplish
their goals and those who give up
on them and those who keep trying
to achieve them with varying levels
of effort and urgency though the majority
perhaps will alter, change, or otherwise advance
to set more and more goals while others
just get through somehow while not
setting up anything much
of anything. I was picking up
the phone when someone called
and instead of saying “hello” said
some random greeting, like “Hard head!”
“Hot pump!” “Periwinkle!” “Charleston
Chew!” and found it an interesting
though irresponsible way to rearrange
the perspective and lack of inspiration that
had tunneled through me and set up small,
abandoned building yards in my brain. Cars
bled past the window. Tiny trees
started to grow then stopped. The little
alluvial pond shrank and expanded
like a large intestinal organ. There were
things going on in the private lives
of investigators, lots of thing. The tone
of the sky can harden or find the numb
center that is a poem that is the elusive
explosion of quietude in which one seeks
to sit and be still for a moment
the way a canoe finds an eddy and bumps
against the stones like a sad girl eating plums.
James Grinwis |
levelheaded: Arkansas
In our less equivocal moods, we might say no poem can be successful without being a little weird. We don’t mean all poems should feature a dinosaur eating a rabbit’s toes or a magenta robot dancing to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Too often esoterica is used as a stand in for thought, emotion, etc. So probably no poem should ever contain either of those things. But at least one line break or one syntactic combination should awaken some sense of curiosity or awareness. At its core, this poem is about poetry’s ability have this effect.
It starts slow when, early on, the speaker talks to us with the bland authority of a self-help manual. He seems quite sure that “There are those who accomplish / their goals and those who give up / on them and those who keep trying.” The speaker goes on with words like “urgency” and “majority” and “advance.” The language is serious but plain – almost businesslike. Its purpose is to order people into certain types. The speaker’s divide-and-conquer tactic is a too-literal take on Robert Frost’s idea of poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion,” and the settled language is a performance of his confidence in what he’s saying.
This mode of thinking and speaking is shattered when the speaker receives an unexpected call. Those random greetings – “Hard head!” / “Hot pump!” “Periwinkle!” “Charleston / Chew!” – stimulate his stagnating imagination. Then, bland authority gives way to surreal, strange, imagistic language. The poem’s changed mode is more expansive, more abstract, and more consciously “poetic.” The speaker describes cars that strangely “bled past the window.” It presents an abstract “explosion of quietude” which stands in for “the poem.” That “explosion of quietude in which one seeks / to sit and be still for a moment” is a rethinking of Frost’s idea. The speaker begins by actively battling against the chaos of the universe, and when that fails, there is an acceptance that the world in uncontrollable, but that we can aim find calm between the “eddy and bumps” by turning to the same language that can splinter our conception of the world.
-The Editors