Welcome to our first installment of The Hinge Poem, a regular feature inviting readers throughout the Triangle (and beyond) to read and discuss a single poem by a leading local author–and to talk directly with the poet him- or herself.
We’re leading off with Alan Shapiro’s “Wherever My Dead Go When I’m Not Remembering Them,” which appears directly below. To get started on the conversation, scroll down, read the poem, and then post your questions, answers and observations in the comment section (if you’re on the home page, you’ll first need to click on “Leave a comment” below or the headline above.) Read what others have written, engage, discuss–just be respectful. It’s fine to disagree, but we’ll delete ad hominem attacks and insulting language.
Most importantly, remember to come back on Sunday, October 16, from 3:00-5:00 p.m., when Alan Shapiro will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
WHEREVER MY DEAD GO WHEN I’M NOT REMEMBERING THEM
Not gone, not here, a fern trace in the stone
of living tissue it can somehow flourish from;
or the dried-up channel and the absent current;
or maybe it’s like a subway passenger
on a platform in a dim lit station late
at night between trains, after the trains have stopped–
ahead only the faintest rumbling of
the last one disappearing, and behind
the dark you’re looking down for any hint
of light–where is it? why won’t it come? you
wandering now along the yellow line,
restless, not knowing who you are, or even
where until you see it, there it is,
approaching, and you hurry to the spot
you don’t know how you know is marked
for you, and you alone, as the door slides open
into your being once again my father,
my sister or brother, as if nothing’s changed,
as if to be known were the destination.
Where are we going? What are we doing here?
you don’t ask, you don’t notice the blur of stations
we’re racing past, the others out there watching
in the dim light, baffled,
who for a moment thought the train was theirs.
About the Author: Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including, most recently, Old War. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Shapiro will be publishing two new books next year, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin) and the novel Broadway Baby (Algonquin). He will offer a free lecture through the Hinge on Thursday, October 20, 2011.
The conversation starts below. And once again, remember to come back on Sunday, October 16, from 3:00-5:00 p.m., when Alan Shapiro will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
Such a visual experience reading this with so little visual langauge. At first I resist both the subway – too familiar, too loaded, too New York – and then the you – me? not me! – but then the vivid faces of the people watching the unstopping train knocks me back six paces. I lost someone this summer and this poem about the strange shifting space of grief and loss and memory hits home.
I still remember dealing with the death of a friend; my first close ‘death’ experience. I went for months thinking about her at least once every day and thought there was no way I would pass a single say without having her in my thoughts. But one day I woke up and realized that I hadn’t thought about her the day before ad I totally panicked wondering about where she was. Your poem reminded me of that time.
The subway platform becomes a kind of mythical underworld, where the dead wait and wander for eternity, until summoned by someone’s memory…this was my reading, but I’m not entirely sure the poem is that simple? “as the door slides open into your being once again my father” makes me think that the dead are not waiting, are only remade at the union of someone’s memory and the respective “file” in that person’s mind…the slot the dead’s info has been stored in. Like mental roulette. Or is it the speaker, the living, waiting on the platform?
I love the alternating sound repetitions in the first line (“fern trace in the stone”), and the way it mimics one version of memory before the imagined rush out onto the platform and the idea of being known as a kind of destination offers another. And then the play with motion again as the speaker disappears down the track of memory and I’m left out there baffled and watching for my own train at the end. The range of emotions this poem works me through makes it feel like a kind of journey. I could read it again and again. Thanks for posting this!
Eric, Pam and Lisa–thanks so much for the great comments. I’m curious to know if anyone has an answer to Lisa’s question: who do you think is on the platform? and what is the implication for the existence (or nonexistence) of the dead when the speaker isn’t thinking of them, as in Pam’s terrified realization about her friend?
Maybe the people on the platform are the others who were left behind? The ones who aren’t currently remembering the dead loved ones– or who were just unsettled by, but not in a way they can put a finger on, the memories were just jogged by the passing, unstopping train? Absence makes itself known in the strangest ways.
Tara–Thanks to you, too, for getting involved. I love your feel for the poem’s pleasures, and I’m intrigued by your comment that “I’m left out there baffled and watching for my own train at the end” in relationship to Eric’s initial hesitation about that “you,” as well as both his and Pam’s ability to bring their own dead into the poem. I’ll be interested to hear more about the ways that people do and don’t feel implicated in the poem’s take.
I stumbled on this through a Facebook connection and I hope this is not intrusive.
Lisa, it seems to me that it must be the speaker waiting on the platform, solitary, for the dead -in their vast passing horde of individuals, are “gone”.
The poet sees only that absence and stands as close to the transition as he can examining the passing crowd for confirmation that they -the ones gone from his life- are someplace and not just gone.
This is a beautiful poem, it touches on the hardest problem without a trace of mawkishness or hortatory answers,
“…as if to be known were the destination.”
Superb insight!
I can’t be here on the 16th but many thanks to Mr. Shapiro.
Tim–Not intrusive at all: thanks so much for joining us. And I like your emphasis on “as if to be known were the destination,” which is one of the lines that first caught my attention and bent my mind toward the strangeness–at least for me–of the poem. I hope we’ll have the chance to spend some time on specific lines and phrases (including this one) that intrigue and maybe also mystify people as this continues.
This poem hits me as being almost journalistic, but I am reaching the age where I “see dead people” all the time as friends and family pass away so I am perhaps overly sensitive to that transit station.
The loss of everything they are -except for memory- is difficult to accept. In fact, I’m not sure it is possible for many of us to accept death.
That’s, I suppose, why we say they are “gone” instead of “done”.
This is a great poem, one I am going to keep re-reading.
Thank you very much for presenting it.
[...] “This morning, the Triangle’s new literary center launched The Hinge Poem–an attempt to get readers throughout the Triangle talking to each other around a single poem. We’re starting with Alan Shapiro’s fantastic “Wherever My Dead Go Whenever I’m Not Remembering Them,” which you can find here: http://hingeliterary.org/2011/10/introducing-the-hinge-poem-alan-shapiro/ [...]
One of the really intriguing–and, in some ways, puzzling–moments in the poem for me is the phrase “a fern trace in the stone/of living tissue it can somehow flourish from.” There’s so much motion here (to use Tara’s very apt term) in so little space. Add to that the fact that Shapiro seems to be resisting the logic of his own metaphor (“somehow”), and it becomes a perplexing figure. For me, that act is really powerful, but I wonder how others feel about it, as well as how people end up interpreting it.
Dear Jonathan:
I read that “fern trace in the stone” like the imprint left in a fossil by the (long gone) living fern that caused it (the print) to flourish — the memory-trace of the dead person is like that: not here / not gone, even when not actively thought about. (Maybe I sorted this out because I was just visiting Mt Auburn Cemetery, admiring ferns carved in stone, and the actual ferns flourishing near them — visual images NOT pertinent to the image in this poem…)
Yours in the common pursuit,
Jennifer
Jonathan, I was also puzzled by the fern line, particularly the idea that the fossil/trace is currently flourishing. Those who are lost to us can, in a strange shadowy way, continue to grow simply through our reaching out for them–their influence, spirit, or just the unanswered questions they have left behind. The line speaks to that truth, for me, but I am still unsure about the “living tissue.” That could refer to physical part of our mind/brain that does the remembering, but it seems like it means more.
I love the ‘fern trace’ line. That’s my favorite part of the poem. I thought the ‘living tissue’ referred to ‘us’,those who can remember. In a way we’re the ‘Earth’ that holds the fossil which is neither here nor gone, just like the dead we remember.
I also love the fern trace line. I think it is at least partly about the fern itself. Ferns date back to the ages of the dinosaurs and are fossil plants. If you’ve seen them growing out of an old stone wall, they seem to grow out of inert and lifeless rock.
The poem reminds me of how long it takes to heal from loss; of how wounds reopen at the oddest moment; of how memory and time work together to create a sense of what is “real.” And, it makes me wonder, as each loss does, about what constitutes our “essence” as a human being…. What holds us together here? Who/what are we anyway? Do we continue to exist if we are no longer remembered? This last thought particularly brought on by my favorite line in the poem: “as if to be known were the destination.”
Without rhymes or contorted syntax, the sound activity in the poem is still terrific. Examples from just the first three lines of echoing sounds: (1) gone/stone, (2) tissue/flourish, (3) channel/current. That kind of thing brings the language to life, makes it sparkle. I like the poem for a number of reasons, its lively language one of them.
Laurence, I agree about the sound activity. “You don’t know how you know” is downright acrobatic. Which brings us back to the question of who is on the platform. Who is You? I feel like the author is addressing the dead in this poem, and “You” could be anyone–his father, mother, brother–and that when the dead get on the train they are suddenly recognized again, “To be recognized is the destination.”
[...] The Hinge Literary Center has begun a wonderful project to host a weekly discussion about a single poem. At the end of the week, the writer him/herself will weigh in on the discussion. Join in on the conversation! Details below: This morning, the Triangle’s new literary center launched The Hinge Poem–an attempt to get readers throughout the Triangle talking to each other around a single poem. We’re starting with Alan Shapiro’s fantastic “Wherever My Dead Go Whenever I’m Not Remembering Them,” which you can find here. [...]
Thanks to everyone who’s taking part in the conversation. It’s fascinating to read your takes. One other source of curiosity for me: many of you seem to find this to be a pretty compelling reflection of your own experiences of grief and loss. Are there other pieces or writing (or, for that matter, music, film, etc.) that you also value for their take on this subject? What makes this or that work of art particularly useful for you? What’s the point of reading or writing about loss?
My favorite piece of prose involving death and loss and remembrance (or mostly lack of it) is “The Unknown Soldier” by Luc Sante, here:
http://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/stories/sante.html.
I think it really blurs the lines between genres and I find it beautiful and moving – it could be called an essay, a story, or a prose poem. Each sentence covers one person and their death and memory. Here’s how I originally heard it, 46 readers reading one line each, with Sante reading the last paragraph, which I pretty much have memorized by now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr0WoQgNqHw
Whit–that’s amazing. Thanks for the link. That profusion of voices, the “everywhere under your feet” of it, is terrifying, as is the feeling of needing to account for all of the dead (and, most strangely, for the specific moments of their dying.) In its own way, I think it summons the sense of being responsible to the dead that Pam mentioned above, even though I assume Sante’s dead are fictional. It also makes me wonder about the possibility that “the dead” can be too defined by their having died–the ways that our memories might be made more one-dimensional by the overwhelming fact of this person’s being gone (as well as our desire to make them *not gone*)
Coincidentally, I’m learning today at Andrew Sullivan’s Dish that Luc Sante is the translator of Felix Feneon’s “Novels in Three Lines,” three-line crime and accident reports that appeared in Le Matin in 1906. It’s not hard to see where the influence and inspiration for “The Unknown Soldier” came from, even though Feneon’s reports are a lot more whimsical.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/10/the-grim-tweeter-ctd.html
I love this syntax: “the spot / you don’t know how you know is marked / for you” — and the internal near-rhyme of “ask” and “past” later. Great, great combination of sense and music. I aspire to this in my own writing.
What first struck me about the poem was how the fluidity of the pronouns (“they” becomes “you,” which in turn becomes “we”) invites us to experience loss from every point of view – that of the living and the departed. At the same time it gets at that existential confusion that happens when someone close to you dies — you imagine the departed watching you grieve; you imagine yourself gone, looking back at the living; you question who you are without that person in your life.
For some reason this also brought to mind Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” – worlds apart, obviously, but maybe some echoes in the themes of identity and mortality? And mass transit.
It’s funny, it’s such a small thing, but the most puzzling word to me is the first one in the title: “Wherever.” It has such an offhand, casual tone, and suggests that the question of “where” isn’t really of central interest. Anyone have thoughts on that?
Claire–this is a fascinating take. I like your point about the reciprocity of loss and lost identities. And I agree about “Wherever”–it’s a strange and troubling word, with a suggestion that it’s unknowable but also a strange register–a little like our idiomatic “whatever.” Another word that troubles and intrigues me is “it’s” in the fourth line. “It” could very well mean the phenomenon in general, but I can’t help hearing it as preliminary to the introduction of “you” as well, some sort of state before recognition, before being restored to humanity, to “you”ness, by being recognized. What other word choices stand out for people? Are there descriptions that bring you up short or cut against your own experiences and expectations?
What a great conversation! Claire, I was struck by that word “wherever” and also by the title as a whole. To me, the title suggests that through the act of remembering, we (the living) are able to ground the dead in a specific location. If we remember a specific memory we shared with someone who is gone, then that person exists in the location we are remembering. But, when we are not remembering the dead, they could go “wherever,” which to me suggests two interesting thoughts–anywhere or nowhere–nowhere perhaps being the answer the living do not want to address. This circles back around to Banu comment: “Do we continue to exist if we are no longer remembered?”
One other subject we haven’t discussed that much is the momentum of the poem. It has a kind of headlong quality–this hurry that makes for a sense of being repeatedly surprised, driven by discovery and accident. In fact, the poem doesn’t even “think of” the subway metaphor until the fourth line, after trying out a couple of other metaphors, and then it gets so engrossed in that figure that it abandons the earlier metaphors of fern-trace and river channel. How does that approach affect your experience of the poem? What does it mean here to be almost out of control?
I’m really moved by this poem, especially given the number of compelling registers it’s operating on. On the low(ish) end, it puts me in mind of that seemingly unanswerable (but ever-tantalizing) philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?”; and on a higher level it makes think of one of the implied admonitions of another grand poem about loss, grief and redemption, Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS, where we are being told, in a sense, that too little remembering will ruin us as will too much. By both conflating and separating the “you” and the “we” in his poem, Shapiro is touching beautifully on the tension of what it means to “re-member” something (in Eliot’s poem, the impossible but necessary task of putting the dismembered dead back together again) while also reminding us, paradoxically, that we are alive only so long as the dead stay dead. Yet once the dead are “re-membered,” Shapiro would also seem to be asking, what happens to us? Do we lose a little bit of our lives (e.g., “the faintest rumbling of the last one disappearing”)? Do the dead come back to life a little? (e.g., “you hurry to the spot you don’t know how you know is marked for you”)? And if the answer is “yes” to each of these questions, then where do we/they need to be positioned in “our” minds at any given moment (and at what cost!) to make life worth living, let alone bearable? That the poem is partly set at the midnight hour in a subway station (again, another nod to Eliot) helps to further emphasize the baffling, shadowy, haunted, humorous, simultaneously paralyzing & activating realm of memory. Love it!
The power of this poem, for me, lies in the pronouns (much as Claire commented above). From the purely personal “my dead” and “I’m” of the title, Shapiro moves almost immediately to the use of the very impersonal “it” to refer to the dead person being (or not being) remembered. This distance gets reined in by the repetition of “you” and “your,” then pulls in closer with “my” which gets expanded to “we” by the end.
The final switch from “we” to “theirs” feels very right but also leaves me wondering, on rereading the piece, what exactly is going on? It’s not readily apparent, to me anyway, since the “you” being introduced is not even hinted at by the title and first lines. At first glance, I thought the person on the platform was the speaker, the one doing the remembering. With subsequent readings, it seems to me the “you” on the platform is the dead subject of the poem, and the “others” who are waiting for trains not “theirs” are also dead, just unremembered.
I, too, loved the wordplay of the opening lines, and the image of the fossilized fern. And while I’ve greatly enjoyed rereading this piece, the more I do the more the fern bothers me. Such a beautiful thing, as an object and a metaphor, seemingly discarded. Is that, too, a resonance with the poem’s subject? The ability of death to cut things off in mid-leap? Or a reference to the disloyalty of our living thoughts and memories, their inconstancy? I’ve tried reading the poem without its first three lines, and I’m curious to know why Mr. Shapiro chose to keep them in — the strength of the subway platform image seems to remain, though the fantastic tangle of words from lines 1 and 2 is gone.
For me, it works superbly as a headlong rush that I’m pulled through by way of pronouns and sentence structure.
I think an interesting idea, if the remember-er is the potential passenger waiting for the train, and the train is a representation of memory or memories–those that we miss, those that we try so hard for, and those that actually arrive–is the idea of waiting. Waiting for memory. The attempt at memory. The train provides an interesting model. I know, especially late at night, I wonder if another one will ever come. I check and re-check the schedule. What if there’s construction that has suspended service, etc. It’s a panicky feeling. Not unlike Pamela’s I suppose.
I also like the idea of a fossil flourishing. Or the idea that one person (let’s say a father), being remembered by multiple children, is remembered in different ways, so that the same fossil is flourishing into two or three different plants or something like that. The idea of memory as fiction or myth is in play at that point.
I think the “you” on the platform is the dead person who has been lost to the living. That person is waiting for the opportune moment to board the train of memory, into the mind of us who are left on earth. Somehow the dead know just the right spot to stand to catch that train back to us; when we need their wisdom or example, or just the comfort of their presence in our minds. Anyone who has waited for a train in a crowded city knows the anxiety one feels waiting for the right train. I don’t think the dead are anxious about their destination in the same way we are. When there is an opening which we (perhaps unwittingly)provide, they will appear in our memory banks to comfort or remind.
“I don’t think the dead are anxious about their destination in the same way we are” –well, I wouldn’t presume to know what if anything the dead think but in the Jewish tradition the only afterlife available to you is in the memory of your descendents so if there is anything to be anxious about in the other world it would be whether or not you’re being remembered in this one. In the Odyssey when Odysseus goes down into the underworld to consult Tiresias the dead swarm around him eager to drink the blood of the slain cow in order to speak to him; they’re all so insistent, he has to fend them off with his sword. In the poem I’m imagining the dead as aimless and it’s only when the train comes through that they begin to know who they are again. Without the train they’re no where. I’m not making a claim about anything here; I’m just imagining things a certain way in the interests of a certain feeling.
This does seem like a supernatural train since the one that arrives does so “after the trains have stopped,” so I think that supports your supernatural reading, Robin. This makes me think that “between trains” is the transition from normal to paranormal…the last train we see fading into the tunnel is the last real train, and the one that then stops to pick up our passenger is unreal.
If you haven’t seen the Indy’s great write-up on the Hinge Poem, it includes the following quotation from Alan Shapiro: “I’ve never done anything like this before so I don’t know what to expect or anticipate. I hope the poem will spark a conversation about the process of writing, how one finds one’s way through a poem from the first inklings to the final choices, how one knows when to start writing and when to stop. Something like that, I guess.” It’s a reminder that we haven’t really touched on what it means to try to *write* something like this–what it might take, beyond talent, to get us to this point. For those who write poems (or fiction, or essays, etc.), how do you position yourself to take on a subject? And for those who don’t think of themselves as writers (and for those who do), what would you like to know about the process and challenges of writing this poem?
Also, do feel free to start leaving your questions for Alan, especially if you might not be free when he’s online. He’ll be able to answer questions that are already in the thread, as well as the ones that come in between 3 and 5 on Sunday afternoon.
I noticed the same thing as Claire, the way the pronouns evolve over the course of the poem, and even the multiple uses of “it,” the unknowable signifier, which seems appropriate in this case.
And the imagery of souls on a train passing other souls of course brought to mind one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, from Miyazaki’s SPIRITED AWAY, when Chihiro and her friends ride the train of spirits to the sixth station. (It’s on YouTube, sort of, edited, with the music from THE PIANO inexplicably superimposed upon it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwMSSzjlJaw )
As for questions for Alan: I’d like to know how much of this poem was composed in the headlong rush that its rhythm implies.
To tell you the truth I don’t remember how it was composed but I can tell you that in the blank verse I’ve been writing over the past several years (unrhymed iambic pentameter) I tend to play the phrases off against the lines in such a way that the poems do move fast, that is I want the line to function as a measure but i want the syntax to constantly pull against it even as the line attempts to slow the sentence down. I do think that’s sort of the natural inclination of syntax and lines: the syntax wants to pitch forward, and the line wants to hold the syntax back, so that at every point in the poem one feels (I hope) the dynamic tension between the two. In a way, what is memory but a holding back something from the onward rush of time; so I think it’s not too far of a stretch to consider the line, the repetitive structure of the line, the formal symbol of memory, and the syntax as the obliterating force of time.
The line, “as if to be known were the destination,” struck me hardest as well. It seems to both underline our need for recognition–in life, in death–and yet mock it at the same time. It’s hard to imagine the point of an afterlife (either literally or via remembrances) if we aren’t at least known to ourselves and/or to others, and yet the poem says, “as if.” It seems to hint at a deeper knowledge, where being known isn’t so significant, although everyone waiting on the platform is waiting for “theirs.”
My question for Mr. Shapiro is how much of his process is conscious and how much unconscious–either for this poem specifically or for his work generally. Thanks!
One craft aspect I love about poetry is the ability of a smart line break to serve the poem, and I think Alan has a great one in this moment:
Where are we going? What are we doing here?
you don’t ask, you don’t notice the blur of stations
The quick negation of those questions we all ask with “you don’t ask,” is a surprising twist and one of my favorite moments in the poem. Does anyone else have favorite line break moments? And my question to Alan: How do line breaks work for you in the writing process? Do they seem to naturally occur, or are they a thought-out decision? Do you write a poem without considering line breaks and then go back through to see where breaks would serve the poem?
Thanks!
I’m on here a day early just familiarize myself with the site but I do want to thank everyone for the wonderfully serious attention to the poem. And since Catherine has posed a question to me about how much of the writing process is calculated and how much instinctive, I thought I”d start by answering her. When we think about ‘the creative process’ (whatever that is) we tend to think in exclusive dichotomies–conscious/unconscious; intentional/unintentional; rational/irrational; intellectual/emotional. And in general whenever I’m presented with an exclusive choice I always look for the excluded middle, the place on the continuum where the opposites cohere or at least touch. In the poem above, I started with the paradox of where our memories go when we don’t remember them; I started by just listing metaphors for what a neuroscientist would regard as just an electro-chemical activity or pathway in the brain, which may be true in one sense but sure doesn’t feel like that if it’s your brain, your mind, your memories. But where are they when they’re not in mind? So I started with some figures, not knowing where I was going. Unremembered memories are like a fossil (fern trace in stone) but in this case it’s the stone of living tissue that the memory somehow comes back to life through or from. Somehow fern trace suggested riverbed and absent current, the there and at the same time not there quality of it, and then out of that somehow comes the subway which is the one I obviously fits the experience more suggestively and the rest of the poem use teases all that. The ‘you’ addressed is the not yet remembered father or sister or brother, whomever, that the speaker is in the process of recalling, the person who (when he or she is not being yet remembered) is waiting for the train, the train then being the conscious memory; everyone else that’s outside the rushing train are all the other people one may have lost but that one is not thinking of at the moment. Well, that’s how it felt as the poem took shape. I think there’s unconscious allusion to the dead waiting on the River Styx for Charon to ferry them across to the other world but that’s I think a more private association. Well, none of this answers Catherine’s question about intention. People have spelled out some of the craft features of the poem, line breaks, figures of speech, sonic effects and all that, and I’d be lying if I said I thought all that out in advance or even as I went along. But to say it happened below the level of conscious awareness wouldn’t be accurate it either. There’s a famous moment in the NBA finals during Michael Jordan’s first title run (I forget the year) when Jordan goes up on the right side of the basket and while he’s coming down shifts the ball to his left hand and lays it in while all the defenders are moving to the right–it’s an amazing shot, an incredible act of improvisation and creativity in the heat of the moment. Did he know he was going to do that before he left the ground, before his defender (James Worthy) took his fake? Yes and no. He was totally inside the moment of that play; he wasn’t thinking exactly and he wasn’t not thinking. He was reacting to what was taking place before him. But behind that moment of sheer improvisation lay years and years of conscious effort, of mechanical drills, of learning everything he could about the game so that at such a time he didn’t have to think, the knowledge was just part of his body, the memory a body memory. I think that’s the way it is for all of us when we write. We bring years of practice, years of conscious intention, to bear of those moments when everything seems to happen on its own as if all we were doing is taking dictation. Those lucky moments are luck but that doesn’t mean we haven’t earned them. Look forward to writing more tomorrow. Thanks everyone. Alan
Surely everyone needs to see the shot, right? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7vsjOHq5E0
Again, Alan, thanks for such a moving–and movingly provocative–poem. As I’d been when first reading the piece (and had tried to say as much in my earlier comment about the work), I’m still quite taken by the way in which its midnight-hour subway-station setting calls to mind other great subway/subterranean scenes in other elegiac poetry & literature–i.e., in the manner that great poetry is possibly always about other great poetry, and more often than not earlier, long-ago works. I’m heartened to know, then, that in this piece “you think there’s unconscious allusion to the dead waiting on the River Styx for Charon to ferry them across to the other world….” I also was quite quickly put into Greek hell, among other high and low places, while riding your rails. I’m also intrigued but a bit confused by your immediately following assertion that the Greek stuff was “a more private association.” What’s actually private in a poem, especially in terms of the risk a poet necessarily takes (and should?) to stoke the canonical memory of his reader the second he puts pen to page (or finger to key)? So although you might’ve thought the associative reference to Styx and Hades was too oblique or eccentric for it to be considered one of the poem’s primary engines or legacies (an argument in its own right), I’m wondering if finally (or initially) it doesn’t matter what you believed or intended in this respect given how, like in a certain view of politics, the personal within poetry automatically becomes the political–and in the truest sense of that word: that or which concerns everything for/by/within the polity and its collective consciousness. In this sense, I’d be interested in hearing you speak more about how and what you think a poet is responsible for when he writes, regardless of what he literally intends (or not) and what he holds in his literary awareness, private or otherwise.
That’s a huge question, and I’m afraid I don’t really have much of an answer. I feel (for me) that each poem should be its own particular reckoning with life (experience) and with language. I’m not taken by poems that feel written by a method. That said, beyond that, in the poems I write I try to be responsible to the truth of feeling, and the feeling of truth (in all its myriad forms). You try to get down as much life onto the page as possible, and those ways of writing that promote a more inclusive frame of mind and heart toward life and language are the ones I’m drawn to. I like poems that redefine what I thought possible within the limits of language. But as far as intention goes, I think I am trying to communicate when I write; I’m not merely trying to express myself but you’re right when you say on some level what I intend doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter exclusively. On the other hand that doesn’t mean the poem is a Rorschach test for the reader, a blank screen onto which one projects one’s own private preoccupations.
I’d like to know about the decision to keep fern fossil intro. I’m so glad it stayed, but I feel that it might have been “workshopped out”…I can hear someone saying, “You’re spinning your wheels there…this poem is really about the subway/memory metaphor.” Another way to put it is, when is it ok to NOT kill your babies?
Yes, I think I would have convinced myself that I really had two poems to write. Somehow, that second poem never gets written, and some good writing is lost…
I’m really interested in hearing more about this, too. The more I read it, the more I really love the way the poem figures itself out and gathers speed.
Lisa’s comment is interesting to me about convincing herself she really had two poems. Reminds me of something Eudora Welty said, that every story is really two stories, and that the art of writing involves discovering the story within the story. It’s when a poem goes somewhere you don’t or hadn’t anticipated that the fun begins. That’s where all the discovery occurs. And Caroline’s observation about how the poem figures itself and gathers speed is spot on at least in terms of my hope. That is, I want the poem to be a realization or enact the sensation of realization, rather than simply put down on the page something I might have figured out in advance of the writing. There’s a lovely poem by a seventeenth century colonial poet, Philip Pain, that addresses this directly. It’s about the difference between knowing you’re going to die and realizing you’re going to die. Knowing is knowledge held only in the mind or in the poem he says “and to my ear methinks it is no news” whereas realization is knowledge carried from the mind into every part of the body. For me the good poems induce a permanent realization not just for the writer but also for the reader. In the poem what’s interesting to me is how as the poem turns from knowledge to realization everything in the poem changes with it, cadence, diction, syntax and relation of line to syntax. Here it is:
Scarce to I pass a day but that I hear
someone or other’s dead, and to my ear
methinks it is no news. But oh did I
think deeply on it, what it is to die
my pulses all would beat, I should not be
drowned in this deluge of security.
I enjoyed reading this poem. I am also very glad the Hinge has started this project. I love the title of this poem, and I love the comparison to the train station platform and the feeling of waiting for the train. I love the last line the best.
Alan–thanks so much for giving us both your poem and your time. I hope it’s OK if I ask a question of my own. A number of years ago I heard you speak, and you talked about the reasons we want to write and read about things that are unpleasant. You compared poetry to a passage in the Odyssey, where “Egyptian medicine” makes it possible to talk about sad things without experiencing grief. Reading this poem, which exists on the other side of acute grief, in some more enduring if irregular state of *having* lost and memory, I end up thinking back to your comments then. It feels important (and, to be honest, really, really pleasurable) to have this poem, and I think the comments here show just how much value you’ve created in writing a poem that is full of specifics but specific to no one person. But I’m interested in the impulse to write this un-memorial poem–one which doesn’t steer any one person back toward being recognized. Could you say a little bit about the inclination to write about “my dead” in general instead of any any of the people you’ve lost and the degree to which those individuals *were* present in your thinking as you wrote? And, to bring it full circle, does that have any parallel in your notion of creating a medicated (so to speak) state in which these sources of sorrow and pain (but also value) can come back to us?
I’m terribly sorry I don’t have time right now to read the other comments before responding. But, when I read this wonderful poem, I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “Procedures for Underground.” Atwood describes the archetypal process of making that strange journey to the underworld and then returning–something that typically only epic heroes can do. Shapiro’s exploration of the topic seems opposite. He seems to be writing for the rest of us–not the heroes–all the uneasiness of “not knowing.”
When I read the title, my first thought was that it was something my slightly death obsessed 4-year old might say. So I almost had the expectation that the poem would be written from that perspective, and I was jarred by how adult the poem’s voice was. Did the way children think about death–when they’re first grappling with the concept–figure into your thinking at all?
I think as I said below in the presence of the mystery of death we’re all as helpless as children. One of the things I find most annoying about believers is their smug certainty about what happens to us after we die. Not only that, we feel all the fear that children feel in the presence of what they don’t know and can’t understand or control. I don’t begrudge anyone his or her belief in something transcendent; when it’s presented to me as a belief I understand it and respect the need for it; when it’s presented as an absolute incontrovertible truth that they feel can be proved, then I bridle. The pain, helplessness and fear in the poem or in the tone of the poem (isn’t childlike of us to want to play with different images for what we know is coming, for the terror of it? Isn’t poetry a kind of game, a serious playfulness or playfulness about serious things–maybe that’s why the sonic pleasures of poetry are often so far in excess of its semantic content, because it’s turning that content which is usually so sad and complicated, into something pleasurable, something that makes us feel okay in the presence of what outsdie the poem might be too horrible or sad to confront.
I also had Dan’s juxtaposition of that scene from Spirited Away in my head as I read the poem.
I was struck by the words “my dead” in the title, that these memories do seem to have a form of life independent of the one who grieves, yet are at the mercy of his memory. There’s a tension here, it seems to me, between knowing that the dead are just memory and a desire (or perhaps trace of a belief) that they not be really gone all the way. But these places where the narrator’s dead go aren’t particularly pleasant, and they are put there by the narrator’s inattention. Do you feel that this sort of secular ownership of the souls of the dead creates an extra burden on the living?
This is a fantastic insight or idea. I guess in lieu of a belief in god and an after life of some kind we do have to shoulder the burden of remembering the dead, since there’s no other place for them to be. On the other hand, the dead do inhabit us in so many ways–in our DNA, in all the characteristics we inherit from our forebears, human and animal, terrestial and astral, in the things we use that the dead invented, in so many of the stories and values we belief in — like dignity of the individual, democratic society, charity, freedom, cooperation–etc., all of these values were bequeathed to us by dead people. Our bodies remember our forebears even if our minds don’t. And without memory we’d instantly drop dead. If you’re someone like me memory, which isn’t much, is still all we have
Alan,
Thank you so much for your very thorough and insightful answer to my question, and thank you, Dan, for the basketball clip! I have a follow-up question about process, should you have the time to answer it. I work as a playwright/screenwriter, and I always know when my work is finished, not because of any inner satisfaction with the work (although that happens sometimes) but more often, because there’s a deadline looming. I’m wondering: what do deadlines mean to a poet? Do they exist? Do they factor into the finish line at all?
Thank you so much for your time. What a great forum!
Cheers.
When I read this initially, the fern traces and the dried-up rivers mentioned at the start of the poem, while imaginative, seemed without enough purpose. The rest of the poem could easily stand on its own. But I think Angie’s comment on those lines makes sense: to me they try to evoke the sense that beautiful lives are cut short. The poem appears to be addressed to the dead relatives, who wait in the depths of subconsciousness to board the people’s trains of thoughts, when they arrive — these trains are frequent immediately following the death, but there is a “last train”, after which the trains are less frequent. When they do arrive, however, we (the poet and the dead relatives) are together once more. I really liked this vision.
Thanks, Alan, for this poem! Unfortunately I shan’t be able to join the live chat. Cheers!
That the dead belong to the speaker exclusively interests me as well. I love how the title interposes–like Dickinson’s fly–on what the poem sets out to do: include us in a mind putting together what happens, what may happen at “that last onset.” It’s Jonathan’s latest question I’m echoing. I am so curious about the act of remembering displaced in the title married to the act of member-making (welcome, passenger) this poem accomplishes.
“include us in a mind putting together what happens” is exactly what I’m trying to do here–not to define a truth but to dramatize the mind in the act of looking for something like the truth, the truth of feeling if of nothing else.
Alan and Jonathan, thanks for posting this wonderful poem. The poem’s opening and its subject remind me of Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, particularly of his use of Darwinian language to express two opposing senses of grief. As in Tennyson’s poem, here Alan describes a hurt that feels stupefying (“a fern trace in the stone,”) but gives way to a lived grief (the “living tissue it can somehow flourish from”). Why shift the imagery of the poem from this natural imagery to the industrial/mechanistic imagery of the railway station. Relatedly, I’d love to hear more about how you understand the status of elegy in poetry today: what does it mean to write a poem about grief when poetry has such a long history of writing about grief. Must you think of image differently when working through such a historically loaded form? Finally, how do you see the confusion of the ending (which doesn’t simply seem confusing but also utterly *without* the consolation the elegy usually brings) working with the elegiac form? Many thanks again for posting this!
Hi Claire, thanks for the really smart and difficult to answer question about elegy. Yes, this poem and many others I’ve written do place themselves within the elegiac tradition. In the case of this poem even the form to some extent, the blank verse line, speaks to that or evokes that tradition but of course nothing deadens a tradition more than predictability or mindless repetition. What keeps a tradition alive are the vigorous arguments about tradition that constitute the tradition itself. In my case, I’m obviously attracted emotionally to the notion of an afterlife and to the possibility of living in a universe in which suffering makes sense or service a purpose or leads to some eventual redemption or recompense. Emotionally I’m attached to this vision but intellectually I can’t abide it. I think in all the elegies I’ve written I’m soliciting this traditional and very attractive and comforting idea in order to dramatize how unavailable it is to me and to most secular oriented members of our culture. Hence all the speculative and highly qualified rhetoric in the poem–I’m not addressing questions of faith here but of the nature of memory and consciousness, and to what extent if at all memory is an after life and if it is where in the brain is it when we’re not consciously recalling the ones we’ve lost. Consciousness feels to be like an utter mystery; the more I read about neurological accounts of awareness, the more mysterious and less explained it feels to me. How matter becomes conscious of itself–jeez, what could be more amazing or miraculous as that. I like the comments above that remark on hos childlike the tone of the title is, because in the face of death and nature of mind and awareness all of us are children, utterly helpless and in my case utterly stunned by the unlikeliness that we have minds, that there is life, that there’s something rather than nothing. But that’s about as consoling as I can get, or rather it’s about as consoled or solaced as I can get. The elegy that memorializes the lost brother or sister, or wife or parent or child, however beautiful, however memorable, is a shitty substitute for the person him or herself. Ben Jonson can elegize his son or daughter and feel like his grief has found some recompense but I can’t. And in my elegies I try to build into the very verse itself the feeling of inadequacy in the exchange of poem for loved one. To convert suffering into beauty is inevitable and maybe necessary but it is also always in my experience inadequate. The pain isn’t transformed. So maybe that’s why I’m drawn more to the industrial/urban imagery in favor of the pretty nature images that begin the poem, images that are more in keeping with the traditions of elegies at least in Western poetry. I’m not a nature guy. I’m so allergic to everything in nature I’m like a human no pest strip. My wife calls me a rugged indoorsman!
Hi Alan, I just read your response: many thanks. The fossil image in the first two lines just reminded me of the darwin sections of In Memoriam, and to me, this poem works in conversation with that poem (one I think struggles with seeking a consolation which the poet can’t rationalize or think through — good company, huh?). Your comment about Jonson underscores the other part of my question: is elegy a form which has its failure in-built; if so, what purpose — if any — can the poetic utterance serve? This seems especially important in poems which, as this one does, comment on or formally refer to earlier elegiac modes. This is a lovely poem; thank you for posting it, Jonathan, and thank you for discussing it.
Jonathan, I may not quite follow your question about specific losses rather than loss in general, my dead rather then the dead–but honestly I don’t feel anything in particular for y9our generic dead guy or gal. As I get older, more of my family is dead than alive, my dead are specific people, my sister Beth, my brother David, my father, my old friend Timothy Dekin, my friend Wil Mills who just died of liver cancer this past summer at the age of 41. These are the people I have in mind, these are the people that populate my emotional underworld and whom I “bring back” to life when I remember them. And Catherine about dead lines: I don’t test well, never have and so I don’t do well with dead lines and try to avoid them at all cost. I work on poems until I get finished with them whether or not they’re actually finished. If my interest in each poem were inexhaustible I’d work of them forever but it isn’t; after a while the impulse or emotional fuel that drives the writing just burns out and I find that all I’m doing is moving words around on the page, not discovering anything. it’s at that point I put the damn thing away.
Hi Alan, thanks for talking with us about your poem. As a secularly-oriented person, this concept is very striking to me: “to what extent if at all memory is an after life.” It brings up issues of responsibility for me–to extend the existence of my loved ones, I have to regularly and deliberately remember them. Ritual is inevitable, isn’t it?
Yes, I’d certainly agree with that; ritual is basically fellowship with others, some shared ceremonial activity by which we perform our connection to each other and to the ones we’ve lost. And in that sense, the ritual field, so to speak, or space, is like the line in poetry–the line marks off the language from “profane” uses and purposes and defines what takes place within it as sacred in a certain way. I do believe in the sacred even if I lack belief in a deity. But yes I agree that ritual in life like form in art is essential. Maybe they’re essentially the same thing
This is fascinating. As a reader and writer of poems, I’ve never made that connection–that the form of the genre itself is artificial the way ritual is. And in that artificiality, we are able to preserve meaning and memory and everything else, because of its enforced nature.
Off topic, just wanted to comment. I too was struck by the fern in stone imagery, and the stone does connect to the concrete in the subway, and all the living that is done within the walls there. The fleeting faces as they pass by on the train is just as ephemeral as our lifetimes. But even a fern can become eternal and we do all change something in the world around us. This poem also makes me think of friends & family that are far away, that the traveling of the train could bring close.
Thanks for this lovely comment. The longing for that closeness even beyond the grave is certainly germane to the poem.
Ruminating while doing the dishes- ferns always bring fractals to mind for me. Echoes of things tiny that reverberate & recreate the same patterns. Thus the fern in stone as a smaller representation of mankind once past & gone – trapped/preserved in stone as well- our houses, tunnels, subway stations. And yet while we live there’s still a motion. It blurs with the redundancy of day compounded on day, person compounded on person.
Thanks for the poem Alan, and thanks for the forum Jonathan!
To pick up on your comment, Julie, about the nature of ferns and stone, both within the poem’s world as well as within the world itself, I was also struck by the aptness of the imagery with regard to the poem’s broader concerns about the living and the dying, the remembered and the forgotten. As with the dead and wherever they go when they’re not being remembered, it seems to me that a fern having imprinted itself uncannily on the equally uncanny (and paradoxical) “stone of living tissue” is akin not only to the very real organic processes by which memory is called forth or suppressed with our skulls (something Alan has raised in his earlier discussion about the neuroscientific notions of memory), but also how the skulls themselves–and, by extension, our entire skeletal system–is in a sense a “stone of living tissue,” with our marrow being the sustaining but invisible substance supporting that system, a fact in itself that, as with the rest of our body’s internal life, we’re usually not consciously and consistently thinking of as we move through our days and nights. That is, not thinking of it until we suddenly are, for whatever reason. But obviously that stuff–our marrow, our blood, our memories, our dead–is always there so long as we’re alive, even when we’re not remembering it.
what he said!
I need to step away from the computer for a bit. I will check back later and respond to any late questions or comments that come in. Thanks everyone for the lively exchange and for the serious attention to the poem. Alan
Looking forward to hearing you speak on Thursday!
I love the structure of this poem. it really brings out the tone about the loved ones that we leave behind. I can’t explain what i felt when the train came, it was exihillerating. This was a very descriptive way of metaphorcally speaking about the way we wait for our train to come. When we realize that we all are the last one left out of the clan that train really takes a long time. Alan Shapiro has made me look at the way i recieve death forever. I’m excited to say that this poem made me smile about being able to read it!! Can’t wait until he writes somthing new.
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