Time: Winter, Sophomore Year
The Class: Contemporary Poetry
The Assignments: 1. Analyse the use of order in a poem. 2. Do a close reading of a poem (I think? I just have them marked as “Paper 1” and “Paper 2”, unfortunately)
You can read “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly here, and you can get all of Gahl Liberzon’s Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies (including “Redefinitions”) in PDF form here. You should definitely read both poems before continuing (they’re not very long).
Final Drafts
The Role of Order in the Music of “Song”
“Song,” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, is a musical, seemingly effortless work. Yet, as with many pieces of music, the poem is a product of intention and order.
The ordering principle of the poem is established in the first line. “Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.” That first word, ‘listen’, is not followed by a comma, as if it were preceding an excuse, but by a colon. It is a request or, perhaps, a demand. Either way, the reader is drawn in immediately.
The first line also tells us that this is not just a poem, but a story as well. The narrative structure contains the poem, confining it to certain boundaries, and confining our interpretation to the same boundaries, which is especially important, as the order or disorder of a poem can often rely as much on the reader as on the writer. The narrative structure also gives the poem an inherent order, as any story must have, with one line leading logically to the next. This sense of continuity is further emphasized by the way Kelly uses enjambment. For example, “In the night wind, the goat’s head / swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly / the way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away / beside which the goat’s headless body lay.” This enjambment creates a natural flow that unifies the poem.
The line breaks also control the pace of the poem, making the reader read it in a specific way. Like a rhythm section in a song, the line breaks can either drive us on, with the use of enjambment, or hold us back, as in the lines following the description of how the boys killed the goat. Almost all the lines up to this point have been enjambed, but here we get two end-stopped lines, and five short, declarative sentences: “The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. / The head called to the body. The body to the head. / They missed each other.” This sudden change forces us to slow down, to stop and fully observe the situation. It focuses our attention on the separation, on the sadness. Only when the speaker is sure that we have absorbed the full impact of this moment do they move on.
The poem is also unified by the image of the goat’s head hanging in the tree, which we are given in the first line, and which provides a focal point around which the rest of the poem is built. In fact, all of the images in the poem lead us back to that one image. The bird flying “back to its cage and the familiar perch” is describing the goat’s heart flying to the head. The “night’s bush of stars,” the hair “dark as well water,” the “eyes like wild fruit”—all of these are describing the goat’s head. The “sweet sound of the train’s horn / pouring softly over [the girl’s] bed” is paired with the sound of the goat’s bleating. Even the storm that “strip[s] the branches of fruit” recalls the eyes of the goat.
The poem is a story, but it is also, as the title suggests, a song, and some of its order is derived from a unifying musicality. This musicality is due in part to some of the techniques already discussed, such as enjambment, but also to a technique which is prevalent throughout the poem: alliteration. For example, the four lines following the first line. “All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it / felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing / the song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then / they lay back down again.” There are two patterns of alliteration just in this section: hung/heard/hurt/hearts/hearing, and there/those/their/they/the/they/then/they. The poem is full of alliteration, all the way to the end. “There / would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song, / the low song a lost boy sings remember his mother’s call. Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all.” This section has even more alliteration than at the beginning: would/whistle, hum/high, last/low/lost, song/song/sings/song, not/no/no/not, and call/cruel/cruel.
All of these things combine to create a highly intentional and ordered poem. But how does this order relate to the overall meaning of “Song”? The meaning itself is stated fairly clearly: “This song / is sweet,” the speaker says. “It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.” I would argue that the fatal sweetness of the poem is due to its ordering techniques. How sweet would it be without that first word, “listen,” that creates such a personal space for the poem? How sweet would it be without that narrative structure that appeals to that basic human attachment to stories? How sweet would it be without those lyrical images or that beautiful musicality? If this same story were told without any of those techniques, we would be left confused, puzzled by this strange, disquieting situation. It is because the poem is so well ordered that we are able to be filled with its sweetness, painful though it may be.
* * *
Paper:
A written document on the subject of Gahl Liberzon’s “Redefinitions (Hell, Death, Heaven, Overcome, Solitude)”
I’ll admit it—I’m a sucker for definition poems. The connotations of words are often much more complicated than the dictionary definition, a complexity which definition poems attempt to capture. The best definition poems have a revelatory quality, and a certain audacity, that liken them to the words of a prophet.
Now, I’m not saying that the speaker of Gahl Liberzon’s “Redefinitions” is a prophet. (Gahl Liberzon, of course, is definitely a prophet. No confirmed miracles yet, but that’s mostly because no one knows who the authority on poet-prophets is; not the Pope, obviously.) This speaker does, however, possess some prophetic qualities. Just by using the form of definitions, he cultivates a certain authority. Like many prophets, he touches on the subjects of Heaven, Hell, and Death (and eternity, for that matter). Also like a prophet, the speaker seems to be addressing someone, the “you” found in all but one of the redefinitions.
Actually, leaving aside the question of propheticy for the moment, let’s examine the “you.” The second-person perspective is tricky. While it can be used when specifically talking to someone else, we often use it more abstractly, as a way of establishing the universality of an experience—like when you say, “Like when you say…for example,” for example. This seems to be the way the second-person is used here, especially in ‘Hell’ and ‘Heaven,’ which both start with that keyword, “like,” and it makes sense that he would use the universal “you” for definitions, as definitions are usually intended to be universally applicable.
If, though, the speaker is trying to establish universality, why, then, does he use the first-person in ‘Overcome,’ when he could just as easily have used the second-person? It’s a strange discontinuity, especially coming in the middle of the poem. Its placement gives it an almost sinister effect. Here we have a poem in the universal second-person. Suddenly: “I’m as broken as anything god made.” This extremely personal first-person voice appears, so intimate and vulnerable that it feels like a cry for help – and then that voice is silenced, whether by some outside force or by the speaker himself, and it’s back to the second-person. It gives us the feeling that when the speaker says, “You have to fill up the empty space, or it’ll drown you,” he’s speaking from experience.
This interpretation also changes the meaning of the first three definitions. Whereas before we might have read them as relatable, maybe even insightful, but generic, now we can look at them as being more personal. It is easy, then, to believe that the speaker once sat on the grass by a soccer field waiting for someone to pick him up, or that he was thrown a surprise birthday party.
But what, then, are we to do with ‘Death?’ If the “you” in ‘Solitude’ implies a warning, and the “you” in ‘Hell’ and ‘Heaven’ is to universalize a personal experience, what is the “you” in ‘Death’ doing? On first reading, ‘Death’ struck me as simply a wry observation, in which the “you” was universal. “Things keep happening. Well, / except you.” It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Liberzon’s poems, however, are rarely that simple. In his collection, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, “Redefinitions” is in the section titled “שבעה (SHIVÁ),” which refers to the Jewish tradition of a seven-day period of mourning. The poem immediately following “Redefinitions” is “Why It’s Easier to Fake Sick Than Happy,” a poem about the recent death of his close friend and fellow poet. Consider, too, that Liberzon’s speakers tend to be fairly close to Liberzon himself, and it is not a large leap to suggest that the “you” in ‘Death’ is his friend, or someone else he knew, or maybe even everyone he’s known who has died. Given this interpretation, that second line of ‘Death,’ “except you,” is perhaps the heaviest line in the whole poem, weighted down with all his grief and, perhaps, frustration with a world that is seemingly indifferent to his loss, since “things keep happening” as they always did. Although, frustration doesn’t seem like quite the right word. Disappointment, maybe, or resignation. There’s no anger here; he doesn’t seem to have the energy for it.
Which brings us back to the subject of propheticy. “Oh, does it?” I hear you ask. Yes, it does. “But propheticy isn’t even a real word,” I hear you point out petulantly. Well, that’s beside the point. “And what is the point?” you say, obviously just trying to get on my nerves now. The point is that a lack of anger sets this speaker apart from traditional prophets. Nowhere in this poem is the righteous condemnation we normally associate with them. There doesn’t seem to be any judgement at all, except, maybe, self-judgement in ‘Overcome.’ Given that, I don’t think we can classify this speaker as a prophet in the traditional sense—and I don’t think he’d want us to. Remember, he’s “as broken as anything god made.” He’s not perfect, he’s not holy (or only as holy as anyone else). His revelations did not come from on high; he had to come by them the hard way. He’s fought through ‘Solitude,’ and he’s been ‘Overcome;’ he’s been to ‘Heaven’ and to ‘Hell,’ and he knows that ‘Death’ is something else entirely. He is not the prophet of God, but maybe he’s the prophet of experience.
Grades: A+, A
Professor’s Comments: I do actually have the comments for these…and they are frankly embarrassingly glowing. I don’t know that sharing them would serve much purpose beyond inflating my ego. Suffice it to say my professor thought these were very well-written, well-crafted essays, specifically appreciating the “open, humble, and authoritative voice [I] use in analytical essays,” which is a point I’m going to keep hammering home—professors will notice (and the good ones will appreciate) when you are confidently yourself in your writing, and not just adopting some dry/stuffy/pretentious academic voice you think they want you to use. It can be a risk if your professor’s not down with letting their students be actual humans, but it’s worth taking the risk to find the ones that are, because those will be the professors that actually help you grow.
My Comments:
I paired these together because I don’t have much to say about the essays themselves, both of which are in my opinion (not to contradict my esteemed professor) just fine in terms of the writing—the “Song” essay feels a little clunky, especially with how I’m forcing in the required terminology, and the “Redefinitions” essay is, if anything, a little too loose. But I do think the analysis is pretty good, and I know that poetry can be somewhat opaque to a lot of people, so I thought these might be useful as examples of how to do a close reading of a poem.
The main thing to remember when analysing poetry is that there is no detail about which the question, “What is this doing for the poem?” cannot be asked. That doesn’t mean you should necessarily ask that about every single aspect of the poem—if you did that you’d probably end up writing a book and/or driving yourself insane. But if you notice something, some small thread that you’re tempted to dismiss because surely that’s too small to matter, tug on that thread—it might lead you to a completely new understanding of the poem, which should make for a compelling essay. Conversely, if you already have an idea of what you want to say and are building your argument, don’t be afraid to get minute with your supporting evidence. Nothing in a poem is necessarily insignificant. (And line breaks are always important. Don’t be one of those terrible people who quote poetry without noting line breaks.)
Also, keep in mind that the question of “What is this doing” is about your reading of the poem, not necessarily the poet’s writing of it. I don’t know for a fact that Brigit Pegeen Kelly intended for the line about “rain / stripping the branches of fruit” to echo the description of the goat’s “eyes like wild fruit,” but what matters is that I can clearly see it, and make you see it too.
Pre-Production
Sorry, nothing to see here. If I had any notes for these they’ve been lost to the æther. But hey, as a fun additional challenge for bonus achievement point trophies, you can read all of Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies and then see if you can spot all the references in my poem about the “dancing plague” of 1518.
Certain of Eventual Failure 