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Daily Notes on Poetry

21 November 2004. Yesterday, or the day before, Barry Spacks posted the following poem at New-Poetry:


In the Fields

rainingrainingraining

I believe he considered this a parody and intended it to show how silly my effusions on the value of infraverbal poetry are, but I liked it a lot--especially after Jim Cervantes corrected it (tongue-in-cheek, I believe) to


Fields

rainingrainingraining

Here's what I said, slight revised, about the poem to Barry at New-Poetry: "Okay, about your poem, as improved by Jim Cervantes, I sincerely consider it an excellent infraverbal poem and plan to do a piece on it at my blog. It's a poem about fields where it's not just raining, or even "raining and raining and raining," but "rainingrainingraining." That is, the rain is so constant there aren't even the kind of pauses in it that spaces and "ands" would suggest.

"If this was all there was to the poem, I wouldn't think much of it, but it has one detail more. I notice such details because of long experience with this kind of poetry, and often miss such details nonetheless. But, of course, it doesn't take much sensitivity to notice it--the least experienced reader might see it at once. It helps to be on the outlook for such a detail, though, as I try to be. Haste can make the best of us miss a lot.

"It is the word, "graining," twice repeated. So the poem is saying that the continuing raining merges with a continuing graining, or growth. We start with a raining, and it becomes in one step a graining, a graining that will continue and make Iowa proud and happy.

"Trivial? Yes, to people without whatever it is that I and many others I know have that allows us to get enjoyment from such small accidents as the fact that "graining" is inside "rainingraining." Not to mention the micro-detail of the repeated instances of "in." But a yow to those of us who do.

"As I reflected on how hard it would be to convince someone who doesn't automatically get a yow out of such things that people who do aren't pretending to in order to seem superior in some way but really do get such a charge, I thought of rhymes. I love them, and I think just about everyone else does, too. But why? A rhyme is nothing but two (or more) syllables each of which contains the same sound. What could be more trivial? Consider how hard it would be to convince someone who can hear a rhyme but can't appreciate it that you really do get something of value from hearing it."

Anny Ballardi added her thoughts: "and you even forgot grain, the symbol of the union of Demetra and Zeus, a single grain to commemorate contemplation - the evolving of the seasons; grain as the symbol of life, stolen by the old Dogon blacksmith from the sky to offer it to the earth." I sorta thought that was implicit in "graining," as I told Anny. But she was right to say the archetypal background is also important, and I didn't mention that. Barry seemed to appreciate what she and I said about his poem. That pleased me. And Richard Dillion praised what I said, bringing up one of Aram Saroyan's cricket poems:


 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

 Crickets

Thanks for the kind words, Richard. The preceding poem is not one of my favorite Saroyans, but it's been published all over the place, and I do admire it--particularly considering when it was done. Like "field," it breaks a reader out of standard subject-verb-object expectations to halt him in a single repeated word. And that word becomes all there is--nothing but crickets in the Saroyan, nothing but rain in the Spacks; for the right reader, the Saroyan poem will put him into an evening; for the right reader, the Spacks will put him into . . . visions of Ceres! The Spacks is more advanced, I think, because it disconceals a second very meaningful word. It is also unlike the Saroyan in having a title. Some would claim this to be superfluous, but I'm in favor of it--because, while the Saroyan poem defines a time and place (some anywhere out-of-doors), the Spacks defines a process which a specified place renders more real, for me.

You know, it seems to me Saroyan's poem would be better if its first word was "cricket." Or is that too cute? He's done more than one version of this poem, by the way. Here's one I like better:


crickets
crickess
cricksss
cricssss
crisssss
crssssss
csssssss
ssssssss
ssssssts
sssssets
sssskets
sssckets
ssickets
srickets
crickets

Here's one other poem by him in its entirety: "eatc." I was going to combine what I wrote above with a detailed explanation of why some people appreciate such minimalism and others do not according to my theory of knowlecular psychology, but got so bogged down trying to uncomplicate what I was saying, I had to stop. I still hope to finish and post the explanation sometime, though.

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