Hi guys -
Hope this is okay - I thought I'd go ahead and post for Feb 1. I'm trying to get some poems together for a March 1 residency deadline, and "Parking Garage Poem" is a little weird. Separately, to provide a little more context for what I'm trying to do with the Kansas poems, I've included "New Commute," the opening poem. No need to comment on "New Commute" here; it's just for context. Since everyone has a full plate and we haven't decided on cadence yet, I totally understand if folks don't get to commenting this month, just thought I'd give it a shot for anyone who has the time. Happy February!
NEW
COMMUTE
Today, there are whitecaps peeling across the Kansas River and a
bald eagle,
and, even at eighty miles an hour, I am starting to be able to tell
the difference
between the dark clumps in trees that might be hawks
and the others—rotely reappearing
in the same places every day—
that are only caught
plastic bags.
PARKING GARAGE POEM
SUNFLOWER:
|
In general, Kansas is subtle.
A horizontal scene of greens and silver greys, large in scale, and not
readily accessible. You can understand
why local marketing people would latch on to the sunflower. When I could make it out of the house in
the mornings in time to park my car on Sunflower, I was having it all.
|
MEADOW:
|
In real life, aren’t meadows just uncut grasses, and don’t they
make you sneeze and make your legs itch, and you worry about stepping in a
yellowjacket nest? For Kansas,
wouldn’t prairie have been more
accurate, or better yet, plain? Yet the concrete box of Meadow did enjoy the prettiness of the
word.
|
LAKE:
|
Throwpillows in
Kansas gift shops read, What happens at the lake, stays at the lake.
Lake of the Ozarks and Table Rock and El Dorado and Lake Wabaunsee. Some of these lakes have fields of dead
trees sticking up above the surface, but when it’s ninety-five degrees out
with ninety-five percent humidity, it’s always better to be swimming.
|
WHEAT:
|
On our puzzle map
of America, Kansas is emblazoned with a wheat stalk, and at the wedding, the
men wore wheat stalks as boutonnieres.
The boutonnieres punctuated that groomed hillside overlooking
Lawrence, a quarter mile from where I would, six years later, live with my
wedding-met husband and our young children.
Shake a little wheat on everything, I can’t get enough.
|
LIGHTNING:
|
The Lightning level
was so far off the deck of earth that you had to drive through an additional
automated gate to get to it, and then park uncovered, risking, depending on
season, sleet, rain, grit, the roasting sun.
However, there was a view of the city to the south and you got a good
rush of sky and an accurate read on what the light was doing. In Kansas, oh was there lightning, actual,
blue-white lightning cracking the sky. I loved the lightning for bringing brewing
background tumult into immediate, foregrounded crisis. If we could have collected it, we would
have a barnful of forked, bone-white implements like giant coral pieces to
hand down to our kids. Then there was
the lightning that struck us and our wedding-family. It left a painful, blackened streak; it
twisted all the silverware and burned up all the old photographs and started
a fire that still smokes, if it does not smolder. Our leaving Kansas was at once noiseless
and excruciating.
|
Hi Darcie, Thanks for sharing this! It’s also exciting that you’re applying for a residency. This poem has a lot at stake: it’s about how Kansas appears at first glance (beautiful and subtle) and the pain under that image. There’s an “I” narrating the poem, but also a “you” which I understand to be a general “one.” One question that I had as I was reading was whether this poem is lyrical or narrative in nature (not that it has to be one or the other, of course). A lot of the narrative about the lightning and pain/loss happens in the end. The last stanza stuck out to me because a lot of information happens here and the poem seems a bit “bottom heavy” for lack of a better word. I wondered what would happen if you experimented with structure and the release of information to the reader in a way that played moments of description off of one another. There’s the wonderful tension of this poem, for example, between a slow lyricism and the trauma of losing everything in a fire. So what would happen if you thought about juxtaposing these dynamics even more? Something like: “In general, Kansas is subtle. A horizontal scene of greens and silver greys, large in scale, and not readily accessible. But then the lighting hit. It left a painful, blackened streak. In real life, aren’t meadows just uncut grasses, and don’t they make you sneeze and make your legs itch.” I’m not suggesting that you order these lines exactly like this, but I wanted to show you what I meant. This way, the poem builds towards the central dramatic tension from the start. You could play with the reader’s desire to know the story a bit more. The poem’s slowness is one of its strengths, so perhaps draw out the narrative a bit more? I also wondered what the role of each detail is in the poem. For example, the “a yellowjacket nest” seems less important and doesn’t come back at the end of the poem. I wonder if you could prune your images a bit and streamline them so as to direct our reading a bit more? I understand that these details are setting the scene, but they were all so wonderfully evoked that I found myself unsure as to which ones would unlock my understanding of the poem. As for the form: I like it a lot, but was trying to figure out the logic of the ordering. A sunflower is the smallest thing and it’s also the stereotype/icon of Kansas. This made sense. But why meadow, then lake, and wheat? I was/am curious about this. It made sense to end lightening. Finally, I’m not sure the title is helping me understand the poem’s stakes. There are cars in the poem and visually the poem looks like a parking structure, but I otherwise wasn’t sure how the title was helping me read/understand the poem. Thanks for sharing this lovely poem!
ReplyDeleteDargie, thanks for posting both of these. I'm loving reading this series, feeling how the poems speak to each other - one of the things I most admire is how different they are formally, so far, and at the same time how they're linked through the narrator, who seems to me to be puzzling out her relationship with place, in a voice that's curious, sometimes baffled, sometimes wondering. I love the questions I think she's asking, in various ways: what is this place, and how did I get here? Such basic human questions - made specific by this particular landscape and the narrator's very specific relationship with it. Re Parking Garage: like Shannon, I love the form, which feels orderly and yet allowing for a certain amount of chaos and questioning and uncertainty within its structure. And I also feel the sections build - toward more emotion and more personal revelation on the part of the speaker - we learn how she met her husband and also learn she's left Kansas in a "noiseless and excruciating" (great juxtaposition) way. The shift from the more humorous, somewhat whimsical first sections to the final two feels deliberate and appropriate. I'm curious as to whether some of the details of the narrator's life are fleshed out in other poems in the m.s. - I don't have a strong feeling about whether there's a "right thing" in terms of revelation/amount, but I realized I'm holding that question in my mind.
ReplyDeleteDargie- thank you for posting this most original poem, and my apologies for not commenting sooner. Feb. was more hectic than I expected. Shannon and Kasey offered some wonderfully detailed observations-- I have to tell you that I find something thrilling about this poem. I'm impressed by the brisk, casual, conversational, down to earth, unpretentious tone of it all. I appreciated how much the drama and resonance built as I read from one level to the next, culminating in the very full "Lightning" stanza. I had a whiff of "Wizard of Oz" resonance and wondered whether there are other references elsewhere in your ms. to this Americana touchstone. My main suggestion is to be sure to take care with the diction, since I found myself stopping at certain words and wondering whether they were truly the best most specific words for your piece. I guess this is the fine line between deliberate "casual" unaffected speech and uneffective speech. For instance: In SUNFLOWER, I questioned the word "accessible"-- since that word suggests material access to me (ie. wheelchair-accessible), and not a cognitive or aesthetic understanding, as the color words just preceding it are suggesting. (As a side note, in MEADOW: I would take advantage of the opportunity for repetition-- don't they make you sneeze / don't you worry about stepping. ) Back to diction: In WHEAT: why 'our' puzzle map and not 'my'? In LIGHTNING: I'm not a fan of the (roasting) sun. But I LOVE the 2 lines in the middle--'In Kansas, oh was there... to our kids." The image of the forked coral is stunning. Best of luck for your residency!
ReplyDeleteYes, that forked coral image -- wow! Dargie, my apologies for not commenting until now. Let us know how it goes with the residency! I really like what you have done in NEW COMMUTE, hinting that the poems will have learning a whole new, deeper way of seeing as their focus. I can see that going on in the parking garage poem -- how it moves from the generic "marketing" image of the sunflower to that strikingly powerful and original forked coral image in the last stanza. The poem digs deeper and deeper as it goes. When I first saw how the poems lays out on the page, I was intrigued and excited. As I read it to the end, though, I found myself tangled up a bit by the fact that the "upper deck" of the garage is the bottommost stanza. (And I keep wondering if the levels of the parking garage are actually named Sunflower, Meadow, etc.? If so, that is really cool -- much easier to remember and more poetic than Level 1A!) I wish that the poem could be reversed -- the lightning stanza being the top and first stanza, and the Sunflower stanza being the final one -- and read from the bottom up. Is that crazy? Other things that I love: the lakes with trees poking up, the line "Shake a little wheat on everything, I can't get enough" and all the place names in Lake. Because the poem is set in a concrete parking garage, I feel the heat/humidity references more! It is fascinating work, Dargie.
ReplyDeleteLove the suggestion on flipping the order, though I'm trying to figure out if there is a stylish way to tip off the reader to start at the bottom. Will work on this! Thank you! And yes - those were really the names of the levels. That parking garage just wanted to be a poem from the very beginning :)
Delete