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reclamation

 

veins on my hand

like veins on a leaf

like bas relief

or cruel applique

 

thus begins

my reclamation

my invitation

to decline

 

nights now fall

full fathoms deep

dreams of sleep

swallow me whole

 

the days are golden

and portend

summer vacation

at its end




Mary Humphrey Baldridge

levelheaded: reclamation

 

What stands out most about this decadent poem is its comparison, right off the bat, of the speaker to art. That’s LIFE imitating ART, flip-flopping the MIMESIS (ART imitates LIFE) refrain we’re used to hearing.

 

Oscar Wilde was a pioneer of this idea of anti-mimesis, saying that art sets the aesthetic principles by which folks perceive life. As the reversal advances the power of art, LEVELER must say we can see eye to eye with Wilde—and with Baldridge.

 

There’s a religious implication to this switcheroo, too. When imitation comes into play, a hierarchy gets locked into place: that which imitates is lesser, is learning from what’s superior. When LIFE imitates ART, the influential party is the ART, necessarily with its MAKER/CREATOR. Whereas in mimesis we’re looking up to LIFE, which COULD or COULD NOT have a definite MAKER/CREATOR, when we’re in the thick of anti-mimesis, life becomes an act of worship, it becomes an after the artist.

 

We know the life-imitating-art thing means a lot to Baldridge—she opens her poem with it: “veins on my hand / […] / like bas relief / or cruel applique.” She segues then into “thus begins / my reclamation / my invitation / to decline,” underscoring that the genesis of her reclamation event is the simile. Later, her “full fathoms deep” recall Shakespeare’s The Tempest—the speaker is reading her environment via a line from the play. It never becomes clear exactly what the “reclamation” refers to, but sometimes in a poem this open-endedness is a good technique, preventing the thing from becoming a too-neat package.

 

Another, more subtle reversal is embedded into the last stanza of the poem: “the days are golden / and portend / summer vacation / at its end.” Who immediately comes to mind when you say “summer vacation”? Kids. (Okay, okay, and secondarily: teachers. And Europeans! Those lucky devils, with their lengthy summer holidays.) But kids are arguably the primary connection we make, and that rubs against the grain of the previous talk of “my invitation / to decline.”

 

One of us editors used to call Syracuse home, and we couldn’t leave this levelheaded without mentioning a famous traffic light—a fairly universally accepted symbol that dictates our movements—in one of that city’s neighborhoods, a very Irish section known as Tipp Hill, that flips the red and green. This so as not to give the wrong idea about who was on top in those parts: the Irish, not the Brits.

 

Sometimes we really must applaud subversion, both in literary and in real life, for its rascally motivation.

 

 

– The Editors