Angel, I still have to disagree. The poet isn't using words to evoke a psychologically confrontational attitude towards her mother. She is trying to "consider her mother's mind," not strike a against her mother's influence by resorting to highfalutin language. That strikes me as a little juvenile for this narrator. She chooses her words because they are beautiful and specific to the images she is trying to evoke. The lights of the factories stand as a counter orientation to polaris, the traditional way one orients oneself in the world, and here also meant to evoke the mother/daughter relationship as you point out. Given that she is trying to evoke not only the factories' luminosity, their status as counter-orientation, and a post-industrial landscape "cor-us-clang-shuns, coruscations (it also kind of sounds like crustations and constellations suggesting a sort of underworld counter constellation) becomes the perfect word, even if it sends her readers running to the dictionary the first time through the poem.

August, good work. I think your interpretation gels with the text of the poem best, certainly better than mine. I admit that given the grammatical structure of the poem, homunculus does seem to refer to the memory.

If that's the case, however, I think the poem suddenly is seriously compromised. If the first image is meant to evoke the mother's mind, travelling back back "into my childhood suburb", the mother's mind is now in the rimed ruin. If that suburb is a homonuculus, however, it should be the object that's in the mind, animating it. That it stands at the mind's edge suggests that the mind is no longer animated properly at all (hence the alzheimers suscpicions that I will go along with). But this is a muddle. Either the mind has entered the memory or the memory should have entered the mind, but instead stands outside. You can't set up an image where the mind occupies a memory and that memory, the mind's activating force is supposed to occupy the mind. These are two completely different contradictory ideas about the interaction between mind and memory.

An excellent debate indeed -- and a great chance to flex those muscles on PFray for a change. I am in the throes of several projects at work and I'm building my own website at the same time -- crazy times. So I haven't been able to watch my post today very well. Maybe later tonight or tomorrow I can check on what everyone is saying.

Excellent fun, though, this poem -- at least in the sense of the layers of possibilities.

Angel

Again, I don't find the words pleasant at all. Not to my ear. I am coming back to this later -- huge day at the office and working on building my website simultaneously. Not much room for watching my posts here today. Will check back as soon as I can. I like all this discussion, don't you?

Angel

hola august! and it's only july! [:-)] ...

I must note first that Mary Ann will i'm sure now be doubly disappointed she's on vacation this week, missing a Pinsky i dare say she'd relish noodling and taking on, and now you to boot, given that she had just recently lamented your absence. Given that i'm still mostly absent (not really here even now :-), coming from me, the sentiment doesn't carry quite the force, but still...

hope all's well.

and also nice to learn that you share at least some of my reading of the poem, always a pleasure to read yours ...

Okay, to task:

Having now a tad more time (though I shouldn't be), I've just now learned myself that actually the very first definition of "orient" as an adjective is "pearly, lustrous" as in "orient gemstones." Who knew? I didn't. So "orient coruscations of car factories" says to me that she's recalling them in their prime, unrusted, when their gleamings and glintings were lustrous (well capitalistically speaking) ... and Detroit was a mecca, a 'motown'...

As to 'homunculus', just to get concrete here, a Miriam-Webster dictionary def. offers: "a miniature adult that in the theory of preformation is held to inhabit the germ cell and to produce a mature individual merely by an increase in size"

What for me this suggests is an echo of Great Bear, Small Bear, the daughter who will become the mother ... the notion of a 'germ' of the present buried in the past, kind of a wish for backward time travel, .... but there's more ... and it seems to require backtracking, especially given the syntax in this portion of the poem..

A syntax which makes -- to my mind -- SUCH an artful transition, just seamlessly really -- pivoting on the verb "lumber" ... What "lumbers" are things (in my first associations) like bears and like trucks ... Trucks lumber along six-lane highways ... and 'lumber' also bearing overtones of building, progress, even while the verb itself conveys ponderous slowness...

But the narrator pivots here and with the lumbering, what has so far in the poem been physical description goes from across space to across time, backwards... back to her "childhood suburb, that rimed ruin" and first honing in like a telescoping camera on an image which must have been salient either for repetitiveness or some marked meaning, namely a picnic with the "fruits" (or rather vegetables) of their garden to eat. That memory says something about self-sufficiency, probably frugality, and it evokes a mother's role as probably the mother tended the garden, and prepared the picnic -- with such unusual picnic fare as "shucks" (from corn on the cob?) and leeks.... Produce chosen surely, i would think, also for their multiple resonances -- "shucks" as in "aw shucks" or also reference to something humble, of little worldly value, that which also encases a "germ" of a thing ... and "leeks" being another rather 'downtrodden' sound and word, homonym of "leaks" and in my experience typically something cooked to death...

That she further anthropomorphizes the garden's "dregs" (?) on their picnic table -- the shucks being "dispirited" and the leeks being "obeisant" -- worked for me as a powerful yet surprisingly unforced conveyance of the "vibes" of her childhood... In this, I sense a family which was as lost as to what its direction was as Detroit in retrospect also was, losing footing. I sense there wasn't joy in either parent or child in those days, a kind of dreary plodding through the motions of having a family which bonded them in remembered struggle but more as if playing out the inscrutable drama of the constellations ... "obeisant" ... "dispirited" ...

Such that by the time she gets to "homunculus / at the mind's edge -- I can't get back to you" I read this as being quite masterfully evoking a "you" which was the past (as if to wish to go back and take a different path, the one less traveled by perhaps, not just muddled along as if prescribed) and also a "you" which is her mother and specifically her mother's mind... wishing she could fathom her mother and how she perceived it all back then as much as she wishes to fathom her mother's mind now, which is -- by stages -- once again the "germ" of where she may see (and fear) her own mind is heading ...

Again, when she says "though I believe you're calling me / from the polar house of hibernal fear," I also believe the "you" works on those two levels -- her/their family's past and her mother, the one who is "padlocked" inside the shell -- "shucks" -- that remains of the mother who once managed gardens and picnics and who brushed her hair ...

I think the "angry mirror" of this fear, the fear hiding perhaps under the skirted vanity table, is conceivably also the anger of mother (and child) at the turn of fate which has blitzkrieged her mother's mind (i.e., Alzheimer's, in my reading) which quite typically evokes anger, empassioned anger, at the loss of mind which IS perceived by the one losing it ...

(See also my reply to Angel a bit ago in which I already discusssed my views about the "angry mirror" and the skirted vanity table I recall from my own childhood and how I see it playing out here.)

The winter garden which was sustenance for hibernation, the hibernation which is the skirted-vanity home of fear ... of the unknown reverberates, to me, back and forth from childhood to present to what lies ahead ...

The "you" -- in both senses -- is calling to the narrator, calling from a place of cold fear (winter, cold, cobalt, hibernal -- there's no sun in this poem -- night, stars, and winter cold) with a "wavering frequency" not in a key of music, nor in the "key of life" as a glib lyricist might say, but in the key of "oblivion, mammalian, contracting" ... the choice of "mammalian" invoking the maternal nurturing aspect of humans, but in an animalistic, almost rote sense ... amid the oblivion of a mind that is going and "contracting" presumably in the sense of shrinking, growing inward, but conceivably also another reverberating meaning in the sense of 'making a contract' ... the "deal" that is human life, the vision, the starstruckness, the vanity, the memories now left chiefly to the daughter/narrator to project, the poignancies, to live to the fullest or not, and then the 'payoff' in mortality where the mind may go first, undercutting much of the lure of the deal, sort of like "orient coruscations" rusting before their time.

[yowsa, methinks i doth, once again, wax a trifle melodramatic, or something -- Needless to say (?), i like this poem and it is still growing on me, hence all this verbiage to mire myself in ... with apologies for excessiveness, august :-)]

Hi, z.

I still can't stop to read and enjoy all this. I do like what you said above regarding the angry mirror, though.

Meanwhile, I am working on my new website, and was wondering if you might be interested in something. I'm adding a "cafe" for online readings of poetry. When I get this completed, would you be interested in doing a soundfile, and maybe Montfort also, to read on there? I am going to be inviting some of my friends from PFray and others, perhaps, also,

There won't be commentary on there -- just a place where people can come and listen to us read our own poetry or the poetry of others.

Anyhow, if you're interested, I would definitely invite either or both you and your husband to participate.

It's a growing concept -- in progress. I thought it might add a new dimension to those of us who seriously discuss and write poetry if we could have a place to read it also.

Angel

Neither do I consider her in any way "confrontational" -- quite the contrary. I think she ran away and is still not going back there -- not answering that call from the hibernal cave.

Angel

You are not a dumbass. And see my post to zinya about the website I'm setting up. I started doing a blog and decided to take it a step further. Anyhow, I'm hoping to solve our problem about doing readings online, and I hope you will participate if I do. I think it would be so much fun to read our things online. And there would be no comments there -- we could talk about it here on PFray or on my blog if I decide to add that. And any such comments would be by invitation only, so it couldn't be crashed by any discordant people. Let me know if you're interested.

Thanks for reading my commentary.

Angel

I am going to read your post as soon as I can take a longer break. You and I often agree on these things, it seems.

Angel

I am in computer la-la land today, too, august -- but you NEVER cause "trouble." I always love reading your posts - you poetry, too. Let me ask you as I did Doug and zinya -- if I complete my website and make an area for online readings, would you like to send a soundfile of a reading of one or two of your poems to post there? I am thinking of putting together an online cafe where we can read and listen to each other's readings. No comments will be made online -- listening only. Possibly later, a blog will be added by invitation only so those who read can chat about the readings if anyone wants to do that.

Let me know if this interests you. Meanwhile, I don't agree about homunculus here -- but ain't it grand to have a meaty poem for a change???? Look at all this talk. Very good day on PFray.

Angel

I can't match the specificity of your reading (a style I greatly enjoy at whatever cost of verbiage). My PFray habits are quite lazy (I overdosed doing a poem-a-month in April), as I fear is my thinking. Whatever I do here feels like it is at the expense of something else, and it just depends on the conversation whether I feel the cost is worth it.

To the point -- certainly there is an anthropromorphizing of images of the rimmed ruin -- but I took that to be in part their relationship to the mother (to whom the leeks are presumably obeisent). Clearly there's a lot of wordplay going on, and I agree with what you said to Mark that the poem as a whole makes that wordplay less annoying than it might be -- so sure, the adjectives also say something about the daughter's relationship to the scene, and we agree that it's a moment of transition, but I still think the movement is the mother toward, but not quite into, the scene. I think my reading of it as ruin and your reading of it as past are pretty equivalent, the ruin being a figure of a previous life -- but I think the spatial orientation is at least as important as teh temporal (maybe -- to pick up my earlier image -- an x, y, an z axis) .

I'm now better seeing Angel's argument about homunculus as daughter (which you now agree with -- or am I misreading everybody?) -- but I'm still thinking the image is -- mother trying to get to this place to regain a kind of footing, daughter considering that mental maneuver, daughter reflecting that it is not a maneuver that she would make (I can't return to you -- again, the you is the mother at that time, so I think your temporal reading and my (naive) reading are congruous --

-- so too the angry mirror. I love your reading of the daughter seeing her own image, but of course that self/other moment maps neatly onto a mother/daughter relationship.

And now I don't know who I'm copying, but the ending for me is the daughter being in the very place that she said she couldn't go "I can't return to you" proven false. So this mental space I will call "here"

Present mother -- not "here" but trying to get "here" -- or somewhere

Past mother -- "here"

Past and present daughter "here" and deeply disturbed by the experience because

1. The past was a distressing time

2. The present, revisiting of that past takes the daughter to a place she had not imagined she'd go

3. That occupation of past time, of memory, means that the daughter completes a motion that the mother's mind had been attempting but not reaching. (Am I pushing this idea too far -- a great deal for me rests on the phrase "at the mind's edge"? -- and the poster whose nic I can't remember (sorry!) identified something of a contradiction of being both in and not in, which I think is partly resolved by the overlapping narrations of past/present mother/daughter),

4. Thus, there is, as you pointed out, a kind of placement of the current daughter in the position of the present day mother, and thus a certain fear of taking the mother's role, perhaps as a mother, perhaps as a mind that is unsettled, probably both.

I don't know if that makes sense. But for me it's helpful to think of the poem as having those four characters (past daughter, present daughter, past mother, present mother). Ted I think captures the language of the thing. It's remarkably artful on any of these readings. Thanks! I'll come back if you do...

Sorry, you are the poster whose nic I couldn't remember. Probably I'm not spelling it correctly. Nice to meet you. I'm august. I pop in once in a blue moon. I don't know if my multiple-character reading helped resolve the in/out issue. Also, I know the central meaning of homunculus is of a guy growing inside something, I've certainly seen it used to denote simply a little person (but not a child -- although as noted, Angel's reading has its appeal). I think the connotations are negative, in any event. At any rate, thanks for your thoughts.

but in principle, sure. Happy to take part. If you want it linked in some way to wikifray, let me know. If not, no worries.

Dear Zinya,

I consider this poem as both tortured and evasive, as you seem to think. For goodness sake, if you're going write about "your mother's mind," why mess around, the way this poem does?

My mother, who was a wonderful reader (NYtmes every day, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and her last read novel, Angela's Ashes) was stricken by both glaucoma and AD in her later years. (What am I complaining about? My mother is 96.) But at least one can write about one's mother's mind without being so abstruse and affected. I don't like the poem in the least, and am prompted to post my own poem, Visiting My Mother.

That would be fun! All you would need is the free SoundForge that they offer on their website -- it's like a 30 day free trial, I think. I'll check. And a set of headphones with a mike built in. The cheapies are fine. SoundForge is really easy, and your files go onto your computer in .wma format. I hope you can join in if this goes well. I'm having a ball doing this, and I thought our voices might add a fun dimension to sharing our work. I especially thought of you because I so enjoyed reading your work duing the April Poetry Month thing.

Angel