I've been a consistent, perhaps not so effective, proponent of using accessable, understandable and expressive language and originality in modern poetry. Certainly 'Hermit' meets these subjective criteria of mine. That said, it just didn't deliver the goods for me. It started pretty good, setting the stage to speak about the solitary philosophical quest but for me it strayed too far from the topic. The metaphors, both used and implied, were forced and often missed the target. Overall it might have benefited if it was shorter. Much of the middle content could go away and I think it would have been more consistent and read-able.

Reading the posts this week it's obvious everyone understood what she was basically saying. We can discuss different takes on this couplet or that, but the poem is not good enough to merit much discussion. It's OK - but...next!

hi schizoidman_21,

One the things I've learned to appreciate over the years I've been on the PoemsFray is the different approaches to what a poem is "supposed to be." Pre-moderns, I think, thought a poem should be the product or end result of organizing one's thinking. Some moderns/postmoderns think that alternatively, a poem can also embody the process of thinking, without necessarily organizing the thinking or coming to a conclusion.

Although I think Mazur's is a fairly conventional poet, I think "Hermit" represents the latter kind of poem, embodying the various turns her thinking takes as she ponders some of life's imponderables.

Perhaps that's why you think the poem is inconsistent, long in the middle, etc. Perhaps you were expecting a finshed product after she figured things out. And what you got instead were her meandering thoughts.

What do you think?

MA

Maybe that's what it is MA...long in the middle. But I do see what I think you mean by forced or missed metaphors, schizoidman.

I agreed with most of what Paul Breslin wrote in his post, and I appreciate much of what Mazur does in this poem, but ultimately I'm either confused or dissatisfied.

On the one hand…

I see and appreciate the shell as the metaphor for one’s story. I understand and accept that the word story can imply many different things, from the way one understands one's place in the universe to the way one remembers one’s mother. I also like the image of the how vulnerable or unfastened we become when we abandon and change our stories. I also love the word unfastened in this context.

But on the other hand…

to use the shell as the metaphor for what finally becomes the central theme here-- how we adopt and change our stories to identify ourselves-- is to abandon or at least to radically de-emphasize the images of solitude invoked earlier in the poem.

In other words…

the shell as a metaphor for a story doesn’t seem to have much to do with the shell as a metaphor for withdrawing from society. To me (at this point, anyway) when the poem settles on one’s story for its central theme, it converts the facts about wormy companions,crab evictions, and the Greek word for desert, into trivia.

MA, I know that you suggest otherwise when you write that free will vs determinism, solitude vs society… are the driving force of our personal narratives. That’s a good point, but after Mazur writes that Greeks were also the first in that world to work out a philosophical justification for living alone…she is done talking about solitude, yet she has fourteen couplets to go.

MA, perhaps my difficulty with this poem can be explained by your point about the difference between an orderly explanation of a pre-developed idea and a meandering, poetic record of the process of developing that idea. Maybe I do expect the former and so I'm disappointed when I get the latter. But I think a more accurate description of my expectation is that the latter will be the former disguised as the latter...if that makes any sense. I don't always expect this meandering to lead to a pat conclusion, but if the route includes a false start or a detour, I do expect that the poet might cover some of her tracks and present us with just the highlights of her trip.

To me the thought process you describe, stripped of most of the language and all of the subtlety, might go something like this...

Hermits...they lived alone in the desert, and you know there's a kind of crab called a hermit, too; so-called because they live alone in a shell. Except they don't always live alone, but anyway it's a neat evolutionary trick they play in order to survive, because they wouldn't last a minute outside of their shells. But what is really interesting is how they will change their shells, and you know that's not unlike what we humans do from time to time and what I myself am thinking of doing soon.

I know that's an over-simplification, and it's not meant to mock a poem which, on balance, I do like; but the point is that about the only purpose served by including the desert hermit and the bits about Aristotle and the Greeks is that the word hermit makes her think of the crab. Once she focuses on the crab, she's finally off and scuttling sideways toward her central theme.

Of course people expect a finished product when they read a published poem! When I buy a book-case I expect it to hold books; I don't want the carpenter to give me a bunch of boards and tell me to go to it.

It isn't that I don't want to think, but I want the poet to have given enough thought to what they're doing to justify me giving it thought; otherwise I'll just think about things and leave them out of it.

To the poem's credit, it did have something it wanted to talk about. To it's discredit, it never figured out what it wanted to say meandered around following inconsequential tangents and never got anywhere.

There's nothing wrong with pondering imponderables, but you''re either speaking because you think you have something to say that should be said or that whatever you say is worth hearing because you said it. The first is how something worthwhile happens. The second is how PAP happens...

PV – For what it’s worth, “Hermit” is not a poem I’m going to save in one of my poetry Word docs. The more I think about it, the less successful I think it is. For one thing, I think most of us don’t really change shells or stories as we grow older. I can understand doing so if, as zinya suggests, you discover your old story was toxic to you or others, but for most of us, I think we just start a new chapter in the same old book. If I were to write a crab poem about self-identity (relax, I won’t), I’d use a crab that moults its old shell and re-grows a new, more expansive one.

I don't always expect this meandering to lead to a pat conclusion, but if the route includes a false start or a detour, I do expect that the poet might cover some of her tracks and present us with just the highlights of her trip.

I agree. The more I think about Mazur’s wandering, the less realistic it seems. It’s as if she had to fill up a certain number of lines before she got to her conclusion.

PV, I don’t know if we’ll see as much of you once you start teaching again, so I’ll say now I hope you have a good year.

Foobs – A couple of hours after I posted the above post, I realized I hadn’t explained my ideas as well as I should have. PV does a better job when he distinguishes between

your point about the difference between an orderly explanation of a pre-developed idea and a meandering, poetic record of the process of developing that idea.

Both kinds of poems are “finished products,” but one exemplifies the conclusions the poet came to, and one exemplifies the process by which he did or didn’t come to a conclusion. I wish I could think of a better poem that exemplifies the latter than Mazur’s poem. I’ll keep thinking.

FWIW, I do think Mazur had something to say at the end – that she wonders if she’ll have to courage to change stories someday (and I appreciate her honesty here), but as I said to PV, I no longer think her thought process to arrive at that ending is realistic.

I do see what you're saying. MA, about a finished piece not coming to a conclusion but being more about the thought process. I would say a good example of that type of writing is Bob Dylan. His best writing had a meandering, stream of consciousness style, but he always brought it back to the point - often multile times. I'm thinking of the lyrics of Mr. Tambourine Man, Highway 61, or Subterranean Homesick Blues. It takes some work to understand the layering, etc. but the reader stays engaged through his interesting use of language and imagery. I purposely said reader, not listener, because adding a musical component makes it like comparing apples to oranges. I wrote an essay in college for a literature class comparing 'modern' musician lyricists/poets to classic 'high art'. (I guess I've been making the populist vs elitist argument for a long time :-) )

For example, in my analysis of Subterranean Homesick Blues puts me in mind of Rothke's sense of rythm and association, it's internal rhymes and onomatapea - like hinx, minx, jinx. The line "Maggie come fleet foot, face full of black soot, talkin that the heat put plants in the bed bug. Phone was tapped anyway, Maggie say the the man'll say, must bust in early May, orders from the D.A." is loaded with rhyme, association, and onomatapea. It is also loaded with imagery - alot is being said there without being forced. Without writing the entire lyric, it's set up as 4 couplets (8 lines) that create the image in the readers mind (like my example) followed by 5 couplets (10 lines) that form an indictment or judgement of sorts as presented in the first 4 couplets.

What I'm getting at is that Dylan's style could be compared to the process Mazur is attempting to utilize, there are some similarities, but this piece just doesn't have the language, imagery, or technique to hold my interest long enough to make me want to work at enjoying the poem. The indictment or judgement she makes at the end is vague. I agree with foobs and with your last statement...or to quote Elaine Benis "it's not sponge-worthy".