Tag poets

tremoring with Mona Van Duyn

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

One of my favorite happenings in a poem is when something seemingly distant from our personal lives is brought closer. This week’s poem, “Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri” by Mona Van Duyn, is a profound meditation of a far-off quake deemed “nothing personal.” The speaker in this poem pushes against this assertion and interrogates the possible meanings of the tremors felt. The poem becomes a space for lingering and dwelling, the most exquisite moments of which happen in the second stanza:

But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.

milky wayHere, I’m moved by the turn from the outside world to the inner workings between two people. Not only is the natural occurrence put in terms of a relationship, it becomes conspiratorial. When the speaker notes “what secretly moves you, moves me” and makes it a suggestion from the earth itself, the far-off motion of a quake is juxtaposed with desire. Suddenly what is privately known is, for a moment, potentially exposed.

That the form of the poem is a sonnet further adds to the conspiratorial argument. In fourteen lines of rhymed and nuanced pacing, we are invited into the tremors of another’s thoughts.

Earth Tremors Felt in Missouri – Mona Van Duyn

The quake last night was nothing personal,
you told me this morning. I think one always wonders,
unless, of course, something is visible: tremors
that take us, private and willy-nilly, are usual.

But the earth said last night that what I feel,
you feel; what secretly moves you, moves me.
One small, sensuous catastrophe
makes inklings letters, spelled in a worldly tremble.

The earth, with others on it, turns in its course
as we turn toward each other, less than ourselves, gross,
mindless, more than we were. Pebbles, we swell
to planets, nearing the universal roll,
in our conceit even comprehending the sun,
whose bright ordeal leaves cool men woebegone.

from Selected Poems (Knopf 2003)

* reading with wayne miller

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This week, I thought I’d share a poem from Wayne Miller’s latest collection, Post- (Milkweed Editions), which I wrote about earlier this week for the Cincinnati Review blog.

In my review of the book, I spoke about poems that engaged with the idea of inheritance in relation to the nature of language itself. This week’s poem, “Inside the Book,” explores such territory.

In this poem, the speaker meditates on their daughter’s efforts at reading “these trenches of script.” The lyric quickly develops a sense of the physicality of reading; when the daughter is described as wanting “to lift that world / into her own,” the reading act is being understood as a visceral experience. The effort is narrated in physical terms, which imbues the daughter narrative with a great deal of determination.

This meeting of “worlds” culminates in an ending that takes the poem, poet, and reader to a metaphysical level, indirectly pointing out the ways in which language and reading act as hinges between us.

pexels-photo-69004

*

Inside the Book – Wayne Miller

For my daughter: these images,
these trenches of script. She keeps
reaching to pull them
from the page, as if the book
were an opened cabinet;

every time, the page
blocks her hand. They’re right
there – those pictures
vivid as stained glass,
those tiny, inscrutable knots.

They hang in that space
where a world was built
in fits and erasures – she wants
to lift that world
into her own.

Meanwhile, this world
floods her thoughts,
her voice; it fills
the windows, the streets
she moves through;

it reaches into her
as the air reaches into her lungs.
Then, before we know it,
here she is with us
inside the book.

*

Happying booking!

José