Four years ago, I vowed never to post on this site again. Well, never is a long time, and my life is
different now from what it was then. Which
is to say that I now write about, rather than helplessly endure, the emotions
engaged in “Siren.” Which is to say that detachment is easier—negative criticism
no longer cuts to the quick. BTW, I have
continued to read the Poetry Fray during those years of silence.
Before saying anything, I remind you that poets work partly
by instinct and often have a very imperfect grasp of what they are doing. The most spectacular example is probably T. S.
Eliot, who wrote critical essays advocating impersonal classicism, whereas the
poems themselves tell a different story, of a poet haunted and obsessed by
inward demons. Of course, I don’t claim
to be in his league—I’m just saying that if a great poet and brilliant critic
such as Eliot can be mistaken about his own poetry, any poet can. All I can do is tell you what I hope I have
done.
To the objections of Falcon and Savory Goodness that the
poem lacks evocative imagery, I would reply that the “show don’t tell” rule,
like all rules, sometimes has to be broken.
One of my favorite living poets is Frank Bidart, who often turns not to
imagery but to ruthless, beautifully precise statements. Louise Glück also does this. Another favorite is Alan Shapiro, who is sometimes more
interested in capturing voices than in visual evocation. If you want images, try my earlier Slate
efforts “The City,” “Mouth,” or “Rhododendron.”
This poem is primarily about voices. The exception is the last two lines, which
Mary Ann found a bit heavy-handed. They
are there to move the poem back from the past to the present moment, and toward
a stronger empathic identification with the imagined victim. The fire and heart attack are meant as guesses—indeed
one doesn’t know why the siren is sounding, but both of these are likely
possibilities. I hoped to create a
nervous balance between uncertainty—who is in danger, and why—with the
certainty that someone is, and that some day or other, it will be one’s own
turn.
I have written many poems in rhyme and meter, but this one
seemed best done in free verse and in a plain style. The grammar of this poem, BTW, is impeccable,
unless you consider the intentional sentence fragment in the closing lines a
fault. I wanted it to move quickly and
avoid getting bogged down in description.
It evolved from a spontaneously-written prose journal entry, and what I
hope makes it poetry rather than prose is the handling of line breaks, which
are the main rhythmic marker in free verse. There is a deliberate balance between the
heavily-enjambed lines 3-11, in which the accusing voices speak, and blunt
end-stopping at the beginning and the end.
It is shorter than the journal entry, with everything that seemed ornamental
or digressive pared away.
Mary Ann, Soccer Freak, and Cutter McCool seemed to “get it”—at
least their sense of what’s going on in the poem is close to mine. White Rabbit’s comment on the wide gap
between this poem’s world-view and that of Donne’s famous meditation seems to
me true. (It is a great and probably
undeserved honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Donne at all.) My position is agnostic rather than atheistic—we
just don’t know what, if anything, happens after the medics give up.
Zen Buddhism, which I am beginning to consider
my religion (except that in so many ways it isn’t quite a religion) says only
that the Buddha-nature is in everyone and everything; that it cannot be expressed
in any language or image; that it is a simultaneous fullness (the word “Buddha”
originally meant full) and emptiness; and that we are constantly distracting
ourselves from awareness of it in the present moment (Zen meditation is the
process of cutting off the process of self-distraction as it arises--never
entirely successfully, of course). Reproaching
oneself for past wrongs or worrying about the future (as the speaker of this
poem does) prevents the experience of one’s own life as it continuously arrives from
one moment to the next. Zen has the reputation of being touchy-feely, but it is
the most philosophically rigorous religious doctrine I have encountered.
Point of information:
Although I have lived around the corner from the fire station for a very
long time, there are still moments, if I am absorbed in reading or thought,
when it takes a split-second to identify the siren as a siren rather than a voice. Maybe if my name were Richard or David or
Robert I wouldn’t hear the siren as my name—Cutter very observantly notes that
the vowel in my name is a bit siren-like.
That's a lot of jawing after four years of silence! Thanks for your patience.
