Close read: ‘Great Grandmother’ by Alex Josephy

To give this blog a bit more of a regular structure, I’m going to start doing one close read a month, probably of something contemporary I’ve read recently. This is from Again Behold the Stars, which I read last month.

The poem

Great Grandmother

A young girl lives inside Bisnonna.
She's besieged by a body
that has weathered eighty winters,
Tramontana wind, hail and sun,
has no use for misericordia.
Under skin, a second line
of attack: a cramp of iron muscles
forged by walking the hill. Aches
bombard her, cares dig trenches,
starve and ravine her cheeks.
Even the laughing days cast nets
around her neck.
     The wise girl waits,
watchful, behind fading blue shutters
she keeps almost closed.

Glossary

Bisnonna: Great-grandmother

Tramontana: the north wind

Misericordia: Latin for ‘mercy’

Analysis

Not quite a sonnet at fifteen lines and without a strong rhyme scheme (we’ll get to the assonance in a moment), the poem nevertheless has the feel of a sonnet, and not only because it appears among so many others. A classic feature of the sonnet is the ‘turn’, usually after the eighth line in the Petrarchan sonnet or, even more abruptly, in the final couplet of the Shakespearean form.

Something similar happens here at line thirteen. We even get a tabbed space to show us where it happens. Ever since the typewriter was invented, whitespace has been a favourite method for poets who want a pause but don’t want to use anything as abrupt or definitive as a punctuation mark or a linebreak (which is also whitespace).

The central conceit of the poem is an extension of the literal siege that has run through the collection as a whole into a metaphor for aging. Cleverly, it’s not time conducting the siege, but the body itself, as both victim and perpetrator. This complicates the idea, suggesting an enemy within, treason and sabotage perpetrated by the body (politic) against itself. This is surely a common fear and suspicion during a siege. A traitor might do something as obvious as unlocking the gates, as subtle as sending secret messages or taking more than their fair share of food. The body, too, is both subtle and obvious in its war on itself, but these are inverted depending on whether they’re seen or felt. The enemy within is the ‘cramp of iron muscles’, which she feels, but others cannot see, while the external signs of aging, that ‘ravine her cheeks’ are more seen than felt.

Again, Bisnonna is both the walls and the town, the besieging army (seen in the ‘second line / of attack’ and the digging of trenches) and its victims. The use of the word ‘starve’ continues the doubling: it can mean ‘to suffer starvation’ and ‘to be starved’.

This then gives way to the most complex image of the poem: ‘Even the laughing days cast nets / around her neck.’ Those ‘laughing days’ – are they expressing joy or mocking her? The doubleness of the poem suggests both, but the negativity is reinforced by those nets cast around her neck. The nets are both the visible signs of aging, wrinkles and veins, and once again the internal ones, the shortness of breath and the sense of the tightening noose of death.

At the turn of the poem, another ‘double’, almost doppelganger, steps back into view. We began the poem with the ‘young girl’ inside the old lady. Now, she is still young but ‘wise’ also, after her experience of the siege, perhaps. It’s the siege, too, that’s made her ‘watchful’ behind the blue shutters (eyes or eyelids? I’d lean to the latter). But what is she watching and waiting for, exactly? It can only be the end of the siege of aging but for Bisnonna, that can only mean death. Wise as she is, she knows this. And those almost closed shutters – are they partially open to watch the enemy – or to let them in?

Poetic features

There’s none of the straight rhyme we’d expect in a Petrarchan sonnet, though it’s hinted at at points, as in ‘Bisnonna/sun’ and ‘nets’/’neck’. Notably, more than half of the lines of the poem (eight out of fifteen) end with an s sound: winters, muscles, Aches, trenches, cheeks, nets, waits, shutters. It suggests the difficult breaths of someone whose muscles were ‘forged by walking the hill’ and the fuses of artillery (‘The Aches / [that] bombard her’).

We also see some alliteration at the turn ‘the wise girl waits, / watchful’. The sound reaches back for its echo at ‘weathered’, ‘winters’ and ‘walking’, connecting the girl with the aging woman.

Final thoughts

Its the sense of doubling that makes this poem work. In the final analysis, what kills the victims of a siege isn’t the weapons themselves. Its the failure of their own bodies to withstand the siege. This logic, perhaps a little cold, certainly no defence of the soldiers committing the siege, is applied cleverly to the process of aging, the final failure of Bisnonna’s body to live up to the demands of the girl within it.

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‘The Apple’s Progress’, by Maitreyabandhu

‘The Apple’s Progress’ follows in the footsteps of a long history of poetry about art, famous examples including John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and WH Auden’s reflection on Pieter Breugel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, both of which you’ve likely read if you’re already into reading blogs about poetry. I’ve got a great little book that I picked up in New York while I was being a metropolitan liberal (which is always), which is made up entirely of such poems and includes this fantastic poem by John Taggart, which you may not have read, and which I highly recommend.

Anyway, here’s ‘The Apple’s Progress’. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Maitreyabandhu or Bloodaxe so that I can get permission to reprint it here, please let me know. Equally, if you are Maitreyabandhu or Bloodaxe (or lawyers working for them) and you’re not happy with it being up here, let me know and I’ll take it down. As is often the case, I first read this one in The Poetry Review. You can find out a bit more about the poet on Bloodaxe’s website.

The Apple’s Progress

The rosy apple passed down by the snake

with a putto’s chubby face and toddler hands

to be taken by an already reaching Eve

restrained, at least dissuaded, by beefy Adam

in Rubens’ copy of Titian’s original

inspired by Raphael’s fresco and Dürer’s print,

appears a hundred and fifty years later

in Le Buffet, another still life by Cézanne.

This orange, if it is an orange, finding

its necessary weight. This lemon turned

towards the orange, which is so empathically

full-face. This propped-up apple almost erotic

in curvaceousness and stem-end. This distance –

intimate, standoffish – between the apple

and a second lemon. This fellowship of fruit,

these colours conversing together and apart.

The tablescape maintains a swaying balance

between illuminate and shaded – colour

begetting colour – its gaucheries at home

in evident design. Neither artful nor showy,

a few estimated and cherished things

join hands across a space as actor-objects

and sensual fruit, shadows, sugary fingers

on a plate, teacups and troubled saucers.

It might be summer’s marriage hymn: a bottle

taciturn in brown, a chalice-beaker,

blue and bling, a cloth and walnut dresser –

each stubborn thing relieved of contradiction

by assiduity of thought. Love is a candle

lighting many candles without surcease.

It is this apple next to this lemon next to

this other lemon in a still life by Cézanne.

The poem mainly refers to this painting by Paul Cézanne. He also refers to The Fall of Man by Rubens, the work of the same name by Titian, this fresco by Raphael, and this print by Dürer. All share the same theme and the title of the Fall of Man, or Adam and Eve (or both). Also worth checking out is this later oil painting, also by Dürer, where Adam completely looks like he’s telling Eve what an apple is:

ADAM: You know, the Tree of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life are totally different trees, common mistake, though. I actually talk about it in my very cool blog about poetry…

Appropriately enough for a poem that is itself part of a long lineage, the theme of this poem is the influence of artists upon one another, as laid out in the first stanza: Cézanne has taken an apple from Rubens, who got it from Titian, who got it from Raphael and Dürer, who of course got it from the Bible, albeit without visual clues (it’s not even an apple in Genesis, another fun fact for you all, there – #PodFact), which itself drew on earlier texts and folklore for its account of the Garden of Eden. Maitreyabandhu’s explication of this process of artistic legacy handed down across centuries clearly echoes the serpent passing the apple to Eve, who then of course hands it off to Adam: though here he is restraining/dissuading, we all know what happens next. Per Paul the Apostle, we’re already doomed. Per Milton’s clarification, we’re ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’.

Maitreyabandhu’s linking of folklore’s most famous fruit (don’t @ me) with Cézanne’s still life seems at first glance to be mainly free associative. At the literal level, bar the roundness and the fact that they’re both in paintings, there’s not much to link Rubens’ apple with Cézanne’s (Cézanne’s looks more like a granny smith, whereas I’m getting russet vibes from Rubens, perhaps just because I love russets and would absolutely take one if it was offered to me by a talkative snake with a dubious back story). If any art historians would like to correct this contention, please do.

Regardless of how he got the idea, Maitreyabandhu links his various paintings by describing the Cézanne in terms that could just as well, or even a little better, be applied to the earlier painting: the latent eroticism in the ‘curvaceousness’ (and everything entailed by the usual use of that word) and the angling of the objects towards each other, and the use of shading and colour. Cleverly, some aspects noted here, particularly the ‘sugary fingers’ are literal in one painting, but metaphorical in the other. The ‘orange, if it is an orange’ echoes the vague identification of the Biblical fruit, leaning on the metaphorical resonances of the Genesis narrative that people have been picking up on from Augustine to Freud and on. So, whatever it was that initially prompted Maitreyabandhu to see Genesis in a still life, he lays a pretty clear trail for the reader to follow in making the same link.

That done, he then moves to his final rhetorical flourish. Riffing off the disparateness of items in the still life, he suddenly, almost out of nowhere, produces a final pair of metaphors: love as ‘a candle / lighting many candles’. Love, in fact, is what he’s been talking about all along: the eroticism, intimacy, ‘fellowship’, ‘marriage’ of objects/ideas weren’t just flowery poetic descriptions of, as the poet acknowledges, basically just a bunch of stuff: it’s all in there to prepare us for the final flourish of the candle. It’s like he lights it for us. And, of course, it all makes sense at another level, because everything he’s been describing is painted. The medium of painting is not oil and canvas but, as every art student knows, light. Art bringing forth the candle.

As well as preparing the ground for the sudden introduction of love with his choice of words, Maitreyabandhu also subtly varies the rhythm in the final stanza so as to make the final couplet feel like a natural resolution: having tended towards long sentences throughout, the line and a half with which he introduces the candle decelarates the feel of the poem, while the last two lines recapitulate the central theme (of handing off without losing anything) by repeating the structure of the poem in miniature, with their own repetitions (‘it is this’ in particular taking on a near-biblical resonance when repeated) likewise echoing those earlier in the poem.

The tension in the poem comes from following the chain of ideas that Maitreyabandhu links together. The jumps in conceptual space are fairly dizzying, but he makes them feel smooth: the literal depiction of an apple being handed over becomes the seed of inspiration from artist to artist becomes the shared colours between two images and that, improbably, becomes a lit candle, which is love. It’s a masterclass in using a poem to yoke together disparate concepts in a way that makes human sense, and also does all this while somehow finding a new resonance in the old metaphor of love as as a flame.

“‘The Apple’s Progress’, by Maitreyabandhu” by Frank Podmore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

‘first time “posh”’, by Andrew McMillan

I got in touch with Andrew, who kindly allowed me to re-publish the poem here, so it should be easy to follow what I’m talking about this week. Here’s the poem:

first time    ‘posh’

how many other young lads did this    took
themselves to bed in order to prepare
for the real thing    like pregnancies
in the dark ages  the self shut away
only to emerge empty yet somehow
more important    the body that is only
true in private    the undressing the legs
slightly raised  the pinch and roll that feels
almost surgical    then afterwards
something like peeling back a stocking
a possible life seeping out the end
you didn’t know to knot before binning
the tiny deaths you would come to know
the smell of  and their ghoststains on the sheets

I first came across this in The Poetry Review from summer last year.

Let’s just preface this by saying, yes, this is a poem about wanking. It’s the only one I can think of on the subject, which is interesting because it’s a fairly major aspect of human existence, and there’s been plenty written on the topic in other media, whether it’s Ulysses or American Pie. Please feel free to comment below with your recommendations for other poems about masturbation, as I’m sure they must exist.

Of course, the question of what a poem is ‘about’ is rarely a simple one. It might be more accurate to say that this poem uses wanking as a jumping-off point to discuss some other things including, but not limited to, wanking.

For those unaware, a ‘posh’ or ‘posh wank’, which is what I’ve always called it (on the many, many times I’ve felt the need to refer to it), involves putting on a condom, then masturbating. Obviously what makes this a ‘posh’ wank, as opposed to a neutral, common or garden-variety wank, is the fact that condoms cost money, turning something you can quite easily do for free into a small expenditure. Yes, the British obsession with class has extended into our slang for wanking.

Andrew McMillan has gone for an e.e. cummings-style no caps, minimal punctuation approach in this poem, with most lines and the title using tabbed white space to separate clauses and suggest punctuation, starting in the opening lines: ‘how many other young lads did this    took / themselves to bed in order to prepare / for the real thing’, where the extended space in line 1 takes the place of what would be a question mark in normal prose.

Before addressing the question, it’s worth asking why so many poets, from the early-20th century onwards, have shifted away from the traditional capping up of the first letter of each line of a poem. Partly it might be a general shift away from capitalisation: no newspapers now insist on writing things like ‘HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN spoke from her residence in LONDON’ in ordinary body text to show that certain people or places are especially important. In the case of initial caps in poems, though, there’s no implied emphasis. If there was any meaning to it at all, historically, it was just a way of further marking the start of a line, which people mostly did just because That’s The Way It’s Done. But poetry is all about expression in language, and making use of caps optional rather than compulsory creates new possibilities for expression. In this case, the lack of capitalisation suggests quietness and perhaps timidity, especially when you remember that online, ALL CAPS MEANS SHOUTING. Either way, it makes sense for the normally private act of masturbation, and the definitely private act of an adolescent trying out this particular form of masturbation for the first time.

Additionally, McMillan is 30, meaning he’s of the first generation who have done most of their writing in contexts where capital letters really are optional (online, in text messages, etc.). There are millions of people out there who only really use capital letters when they’re writing something formal or public-facing, so avoiding them can perhaps suggest intimacy, too.

The poem starts off with a rhetorical question which the title half-answers: clearly, enough young lads did it for it to have its own slang term. The choice of the word ‘lads’ here is interesting: when I was a kid it was a faintly Scottish term of affection, but with lad culture (whatever that was) making negative headlines from the early ’00s onwards, and the founding of the Football Lads Alliance (read: a bunch of fascists), the press for the term has been mainly not good. Perhaps using ‘young’ here takes the sting out of the increasingly pejorative term. When McMillan follows up with ‘took themselves to bed’, it’s especially disarming, emphasising the delicacy of the act in question.

If there’s a spectrum of cultural responses to masturbation, at one end would be American Pie, where there’s loads of wanking, but its depicted as a source of shame and embarrassment, and at the other you could put something like The Inbetweeners, where it’s yet another potential source of macho boasting. Either way, the basic attitude is one of humour. For less-humorous, more literary approaches, that nonetheless exist on the shame/bathetically-macho axis you could go with that bloody book about Copernicus by John Banville, where Copernicus whacks off then experiences supermassive medieval/Catholic guilt for whacking off (while his weirdo brother watches), for all the shame you might need, and to American Pastoral, where Nathan Zuckerman reminisces about youthful circlejerks which were, of course, a competition to ‘see who would “shoot” first’.

McMillan takes the unprecedented approach of treating the topic with tenderness: there’s no humour and little shame, here. And the sense of intimacy and affection is increased by the choice of form: a loose sonnet of 14 lines with scansion mostly close to iambic pentameter, but no rhyme.

While there’s little suggestion of shame, we do see the self being shut away and emptied in lines 4-5. But then, it emerges ‘somehow / more important’. There’s a suggestion of coming (excuse me) of age, even though he’s explicit that this is only preparation ‘for the real thing’. The fact that the ‘you’ in the poem understands this is part of the reason the narrator’s empathy never tips into pity, which in turn is how McMillan avoids having you laugh at the slightly po-faced prep for the real thing.

It’s interesting how long it takes for a pronoun to appear in this poem, which allows it to hover between possibilities, before landing on ‘you’ – perhaps delaying the revelation that this is someone else is how the poem avoids voyeurism?

In classic sonnet style, the last couplet or-so contains the poetic equivalent of the punchline. In this case, it’s a play on the undergraduate’s old mate, l’petit mort, a concept which allowed every 19 year-old student us to fatuously link death and sex in every other essay we wrote, when we had an extremely limited conception of either. Not being an undergrad, McMillan doesn’t do anything so heavyhanded. The ‘tiny deaths’ are not the orgasms, but the ‘possible life’, the sperm, which here ‘ghoststains’ the sheet because the protagonist(s) didn’t know how to dispose of the used condom. Ghoststains is a great neologism, with its midword consonant cluster suggesting a sort of stutter.

What sets this poem apart from the ordinary cultural discourse around masturbation is the distance and the focus on the before and after, and the implications, rather than the act itself. The description of putting on a condom as ‘almost surgical’ could apply equally well to the poem: there’s a sense of peeling something back, revealing something both true and private. Meaning is layered such that the poem both reveals and manifests what it reveals.

If you’d like to find out more about Andrew, he has a website. This poem appears in the collection Playtime, published by Cape Books, which you can buy from the Poetry Book Society.

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Effigy Mounds National Monument, Iowa, by Jennifer L Knox

If you read last week’s blog on Vahni Capildeo, you may be wondering whether a less-structured, less formalist, less obviously-rhyming poem can bear the same level of analytical whatd’y’call, scrutiny, as ‘They (May Forget (Their Names (If Let Out)))’ did. Okay, in all likelihood you’re not wondering that, but I am, so enjoy the next few hundred words of me finding out.

The poem is about the passage of time, with its opening couplet setting the theme: ‘Before there was the time we see / there was the time we saw through’.  So, the present and the past. What at first seems bizarre, perhaps incomprehensible, reveals itself to be a clever way of describing the continuous now (‘we see’, rather than ‘we’re seeing’) and the always falling-away past, with ‘saw through’ (my emphasis) suggesting both that it’s over (as in, ‘We’re through’), and, more surprisingly, that it’s mysteries have in some sense been revealed (as in, ‘I see right through you’) – but as we’ll see, it’s inevitably more complicated than that. The thread of time comes up prominently again in the slowed-down, echoing bird song in stanza IV, and in the poem’s two part denouement, where the individuals in the poem are subsumed into the ever-repeating patterns of nature and made ‘eternal / immutable / from every possible angle’.

Styles upon styles upon styles is what I have

Jennifer Knox is a great example of the kind of loose, informal poetic style I associate with Frank O’Hara, who famously dashed off annoyingly great poems on his lunch break.

I’m not going to waste a lot of time drawing direct parallels between the two, not least because I don’t think I could sustain it for more than a paragraph or two, but there’s a commonality there; a sense that their poems don’t sound much like ordinary speech, but nonetheless hold themselves with a sense of ease and confidence and fun, the latter of which is rarely found in poetry, except in its all-too familiar, threadbare, donnish mode, which really isn’t fun at all.

Slanted and enchanted

This week’s poem (which you can read here), uses italics to express direct speech, first in stanza III (‘Whoa!’) then explicitly in stanza V (‘Is that a yes or a no? the birds asked’). I often find direct speech in poetry a bit irritating. Most lyric (that is, to put it simply and controversially: short) poetry tends to avoid it, perhaps because it’s hard to get the rhythms right when you keep having to chuck in the odd ‘she said’, or maybe poets just don’t like speechmarks, which do clutter the place up a bit. As we’ve seen, the use of italics here keeps things enjoyably vague in the first instance, as it’s not clear who’s speaking, if at all: the ‘Whoa!’ could be the birds, the bears or the narrator, and the italics could simply be for emphasis. Later on, we find out it was actually the birds, probably! Whoa!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111111111111111111111

Exclamation marks are risky business. Where I work, there’s an office rule that no email should include more than one of them, and everyone knows that using more than one exclamation marks in a row is a sign of insanity!! Here, Knox pushes things a bit with three in total: ‘woof!’ and two ‘Whoa!’s. Even more controversially, it’s a bear saying ‘woof’, which any one of my kids’ storybooks could tell you is the sound a dog makes, not a bear. But then, this is ‘the biggest bear’, so perhaps it’s best not to argue.

Green grow the rushes, o

Stanza VI is a lovely mini stanza, the scansion of which deserves analysis by someone better at scansion than I am:

Green grass grew over them,
which was a long, green love song.

I read that as

Green grass grew over them,
which was a long, green love song.

But I’m open to other interpretations. However we chop this up metrically, the effect is one of deceleration in the second line – I think it’s to do with the use of iambs coupled with alliteration/repetition, something about waiting for that second ‘green’, and the way the ‘ong’ in ‘long’ anticipates the end-rhyme of ‘song’.

Whatever it is, it’s a great example of how you can achieve rhythmic and emotive effects in free verse.

Onomatowhatever

(Obviously I can spell it, but it’s more fun to complain about the spelling.)

We’ve got two: woof, the sound of the biggest bear exhaling, then ‘bubbled’. ‘Bubbled’ is surely some kind of doublebonus-onomatopoeia (told you I could spell it) because it not only sounds like the thing described by the verb ‘to bubble’ but also looks like the thing described by the noun ‘bubble’, with all those rounded ‘b’s. You’ve got to hand it to bubble, is what I’m saying.

The impact of ‘bubble’ is increased by the repetition of alliterative ‘b’ sounds throughout the poem, as in ‘biggest bear’ in stanza I, and by its close repetition in two consecutive lines, and reappearance as ‘bubbling’ another two lines on from that.

Pop

I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the bubble, not the bears and birds (consonance again) is the central image of the poem: the notion of delicate boundaries vanishing vanishing appears explicitly twice in the poem (they’re both exhaled and lost). The boundaries dissipate with a classic onomatopoeiac noise, although granted its ‘woof’ rather than ‘pop’. The ‘holes in space’ of the last stanza again could suggest bubbles. Then, riffing off Albert Einstein/Star Trek, Knox also plays with the idea of space and time as relative in that final stanza, where the animals and their shapes are ‘eternal, / immutable, / from every possible angle’, i.e., whether they’re viewed in space or time – or both.

Taking this time/space idea back to the bubble, we could imagine a bubble of time as a delicate moment, with discrete boundaries and a distinct ‘shape’, which reappears eternally. That is, we’re back with the continuous ‘now’: always the same, always different. What’s more, bubbles are transparent, something ‘we saw through’ back in line 2.

If I’m right, here, and not stretching too much, this solves the riddle of the first two lines: a bubble distorts the view through it; just because you saw through something (the past) doesn’t mean you saw clearly.

Water, water everywhere

The flow of time and the flow of water are frequently compared in art – think Finnegans Wake with its circular structure parallelled in Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is among other things the anthropomorphised River Liffey. Here, Knox does this allusively, rather than explicitly, with bubbles, as we’ve seen, and also in the oxbow lake with which the prone bears are compared. Interestingly, oxbow lakes are formed when meanders of rivers get cut off from the main body of the original river, usually because its eroded a quicker route to the sea. Thus, the image of the oxbow lake here suggests again the idea of an isolated or contained moment in space and time, outside of the main ‘flow’, like the bubbly ‘holes in space’.

Summing up

Should I include a reference to Finnegans Wake and A Tribe Called Quest in every blog? I probably could. Bonus points if you caught the ATCQ reference without needing to be told, and extra bonus points if you got the other ’90s pop reference, too. You don’t get any points for Coleridge.

DID YOU KNOW that if everyone who read this blog donated just one million pounds, I would have exactly one million pounds? Crazy, right? Donate here, if you feel like it.

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Something completely different: Vahni Capildeo’s They (May Forget (Their Names (If Let Out)))

I’ve decided to start blogging about poetry, because it seems like it might be less stressful than blogging about politics. The approach I’m going to be using here is a deliberate and shameless ripoff of what Ruth Padel used to do for the Guardian, as collected in her book 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, which I recommend you immediately borrow from a library.

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Venus as a Bear, Vahni Capildeo’s sixth book, was the Poetry Book Society‘s selection last quarter. The PBS seems to alternate between fairly conventional books and more avant garde choices each quarter (this quarter’s selection is mainly made up of extracts from imagined official documents). Venus as a Bear is the former because, while not strictly adhering to formalism, it’s on the whole less likely than some other poetry to make your nearest poetry-sceptic start asking questions like ‘Aren’t poems supposed to rhyme?’. Indeed, the poem I’m going to be looking at today is actually the most poemy of all poems: a sonnet.

Let’s start at the top.

Title

The title, with its nested brackets can be read in four ways:

1. They
2. They May Forget
3. They May Forget Their Names
4. They May Forget Their Names if Let Out

When written out as a list, you can see explicitly what the brackets imply: echoes or repetitions. Brackets often force (or request, or demand, depending on how compliant you’re feeling) re-readings, especially if they come in the middle of a clause, as in this sentence. So, even though the repetition isn’t on the page, the reader repeats the words as they reiterate over the last line or two to check if they’re following the meaning. Neat trick. You can also see the use of brackets to imply echoes in the name of drone rock band, Sunn O))), and in the weird habit of antisemites online of enclosing the names of Jews in brackets, to suggest the ‘sinister’ echoing effect used on some benighted fascist podcast when discussing Jews. Fucking internet, right? At least this mention of racism bridges the gap between my rantily, didactic, political blogs, and my chilled, didactic, poetic blogs.

Anyway, back to the cheerier topic of a nice poem I like.

The title refers to the main theme of the poem: the wildness of animals, even when kept as pets. The use of ‘they’ invites ‘us and them’, suggesting the fundamental ‘otherness’ of animals. This is a theme of this section of the book, Creatures, the word choice here likewise suggesting something strange and unfamiliar, sitting oddly against the more snuggly implications of a poem about pets. Their names are a human quality, something we impose on them, so if they’re let out, they’ll forget the human signifier of their name and return to the wild.

Structure

Back to the cheerier topic of a nice poem I like: we know Capildeo is intentional in her use of ‘echoing’ brackets because repetition is central to the effect of this poem.

A glance is enough to tell us it’s a sonnet, with the traditional 14 lines and closing rhyming couplet that we’re all familiar with from GCSE English, and with a variant on the usual rhyme scheme: AABBCDCDEFEFGG here, as opposed to ABABCDCDEFEFGG (the difference is in the first quatrain, made up of two couplets here, rather than alternating rhymes).

Since at least the time of Shakespeare’s famous sonnets, they’ve been associated with (unrequited) love, and Capildeo reflects this in a tongue-and-cheek way, writing about the love between pet and owner, rather than between, um, an elderly poet and a young boy (society’s attitudes towards these things being slightly more malleable than society would like you to think).

Lastly, we have a rough five-beats-per-line metre here, reflecting good old, trusty iambic pentameter, the one poetic metre every Anglophone with a secondary-school education knows. In addition to playing with the rhyme scheme, though, Capildeo also messes about with the rhythm a lot, with dactyls (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: ¯ ˘ ˘) predominating.

Rhyme

Not only does the poem rhyme, most of the rhymes are actually repetitions. This is traditionally considered cheating, as when Black Sabbath gave us the deathless couplet ‘Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses’, but here it’s safe to say it’s both deliberate and effective: with one exception, all the words used for end-rhymes are, in fact, repetitions.

Rendering only the end rhymes as part of the rhyme scheme does this poem a disservice, as much of the action is going on with internal rhyme, that is, full rhymes that don’t come at the end of the line. Most lines have three or more examples of internal rhyme  and most of these also rhyme with an end rhyme which, within the already existing strictures of a sonnet, shows a high level of control and technique: it means the poem relies heavily on just a few repeated phonemes. This means, for example, that the very first sound in the poem, ‘pet’, anticipates the end-rhyme of the closing couplet on pet/reset, suggesting the limited sound-world of a pet and the closed world of the home it’s never let out of, lest it ‘wild default reset’.

Capildeo additionally, through repeated rhythmical units, emphasises her use of half-rhyme, as in lines 6-7: ‘brass doorbell what name / tin waterbowl what name thrilled vomitfall’, which somehow successfully makes ‘doorbell’ rhyme with ‘waterbowl’ and, um, ‘vomitfall’.

Wakeisms

Along with vomitfall, meaning obvious, and petcitement, which Capildeo’s defined, we also get ‘carpet (pronounced ‘car-pet’ (‘kɑː.ˌpɛt), a pet who goes in the car?) and, in the last line, ‘petfetch’ and ‘petcome’. ‘Petcome’ suggests both ‘become’ and ‘outcome’, and so perhaps a foregone conclusion, given that default appears moments later.

Repetition

Repetition could be said to be a fundamental quality of poetry, whether it’s the sentence-length repetition throughout the Odysessy (the rosy-fingered dawn) and other oral poetry, or the repetition of phonemes and phoneme clusters that characterise rhyme, alliteration and assonance. Here we have plenty of examples from both ends of that putative spectrum.

The heavy use of repetition begins in the first two lines: ‘petcitement incitement of a pet to excitement / petcitment incitement into the excitement’. The heavy repetition of ‘-citement’ and ‘pet’, and the assonance of the repeated ‘e’ sound in pet/excite, help us through the wonky rhythm: iamb, anapaest, iamb, iamb, anapaest, then an extrametrical unstressed syllable at the end. The rhythm could be rendered symbolically as ˘¯, ˘˘¯, ˘¯, ˘¯, ˘˘¯. Or, if you prefer, typographically, as ‘petcitement incitement of a pet to excitement’. I’m tempted to descibe it as syncopated, by analogy with music; it’s actually quite close to the traditional 4/4 drum beat of bass, snare, bass-bass, snare, where the snare is the stressed beat.

One interesting element of repetition of the written word is the patterns it makes on the page. This might just be me, but when I’m reading I often perceive patterns in the white spaces around text at the edge of my vision, which are much harder to see when I look directly at them. Often the repetition of a single letter, particularly ones that dip below the line, like g and y, on subsequent lines can kick off this effect, but it can then cascade strangely down the page. It’s all quite weird. Reportedly, some people with dyslexia have the opposite experience: when they look at a block of text, their brains focus on the white space, which is why they struggle to read the letters.

I have no idea what effect, if any, this might have on my reading of the poem, though. Does it drag my eye down the page? Maybe.

Back in the poem, the first two lines, on a re-reading, reveal themselves to be mock dictionary definitions. You could render the first line thus: ‘Petcitement (n): incitement of a pet to excitement’ and the following lines as either corrections (the rhythm makes you want to emphasise ‘into’, in line 2, which suggests this reading) or as a supplementary meaning.

Overall, the effect of the various forms of repetition suggest the repetitiveness of animal sounds: barking and miaowing. They also suggest the repeating, babytalk way we talk to pets. For another literary rendition of this, see the Calypso section of Ulysess, where Bloom talks to his cat: ‘Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens’ (note Joyce doesn’t use quotes for speech, the wanker).

’90s rap references(?)

Line 12 reminds me of the last couple of lines of Dinco D’s verse on A Tribe Called Quest’s epic posse cut, Scenario. Compare and contrast:

Dinco:

Funk flipped, flat back, first this, foul, fight, fight, fight
Laugh, yo, how’d that sound?

Vahni:

from food fleece floor flea cloth car poll card dot blank bit door

Coincidence?

This raises very important questions: is Vahni Capildeo into ATCQ and/or Dinco D’s regular band back then, Leaders of the New School? Would Vahni Capildeo agree to take part in a rap battle against Dinco D? Where is Dinco D? Has anyone seen any member of LONS other than Busta Rhymes lately? Given the sheer physical mass of modern day Busta Rhymes, is it possible that he absorbed the rest of the band? Would Vahni Capildeo agree to take part in a rap battle with Busta Rhymes?

Tune in again next week, for the answers to none of these questions, and less.

The effect

The cumulative effect of the poem is of a limited world, from which it’s perhaps not surprising the pet wants to escape (or ‘walk wilder and further’). The impact of the limited sound palette is combined with the minimal visual clues (polkadot blanket, brass doorbell, the ‘turded on welcome mat’ and the door – note that all but the blanket are associated with the way in/out of the house) to suggest a narrow world, even if an affectionate one. Despite the best efforts of the owner to own its pet and create a loving world, full of petcitement, blankets and wild(er) walks, it’s the pet, the suppose subjugate, that gets the God-inflected Latin epithet ‘in nomine domini’ suggesting not that the pet is divine, but that it’s wildness is.

Next week…

I’ll be looking at a poem by Jennifer Knox, if I can remember where I read it.

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