Jody's Notes
Ah this poem.
So maybe a bit of background is needed. First of all, I was a strange reader as a child. I'd spontaneously hit on reading in a completely visual way--I didn't subvocalize, or hear sounds as I read. Furthermore, I read the words--perhaps even larger chunks of groups of words--as visual patterns that were meaningful, and I did this without parsing those words into letters.
I was a miserable speller, as a result. And, even though my reading skills had reached "college levels" by sixth grade, I could pronounce correctly perhaps only a fractions of the vocabulary I had. It wasn't that I was pronouncing the words differently; I wasn't pronouncing them at all.
(Grade school teachers had trouble understanding what was going on with me. If I was that good a reader, then I was being lazy--that's why I was a bad speller. And why I couldn't pronounce so many words? Who knows what they thought about that?)
I started to realize what I was doing, and how different I was from other readers when I decided to read Shelley at about 15. I couldn't see the point of him at all. It seemed pretty awful until I spontaneously realized I wasn't hearing it--that I had to read his work aloud in order to appreciate what was going on.
(I'm not like this anymore: my inner ear turns on and off as needed. For the most part, anyway.)
This explains (possibly) my early aesthetic choices in poetry. (Certainly around 1976 when this was written.) Imagery--so I thought--was everything. A poem was to be an extended construction of images, emotionally rich, and tied together. Sound was a secondary consideration (a leftover consideration from earlier archaic times when bored people sat around reciting poety aloud to one another and trying to remember it).
Okay, okay, I exaggerate, I'm even exaggerating my views from that time a little. But when people asked me how they were supposed to "read" this poem, I could only assume they'd missed the point. They were supposed to look at it and take it in.
As a result the poem is full is visual maneuvers--reciting it aloud is inappropriate.
The focus on imagery has stayed with me, although not the aversion to sound effects. Over the course of the next seven or eight years I started to work on poems I could say aloud. But that's later.
I remember reading how Pound stressed the importance of the image (coined several slogans about it, as he tended to, made up a poetic movement or two). I remember being very disappointed by his work. Real imagists are rare in poetry, actually. And yet, I still think (or maybe it's that I still feel--because this is an emotional thing) that imagery really is everything. In poetry, anyway.
This poem is maybe the epitome of what I was trying to do in poetry at that time: visual poems built entirely out of imagery. I remember reading Aristotle's Meteorologica, and seeing it as extended images about clouds, etc. (Not as science.) Snow, crystals, memory, mirrors, all crystalized when I saw garbage men slide a long mirror into the back of a garbage truck. I realized when I jumped as the metal slide came down on the mirror that I had expected the mirror to explode. And then I thought of the images that mirror had stored during its lifetime exploding out. Over the course of three days, I built the poem.
One friend of mine said to me, after reading this. "Well that's it, you've done it, you'll never do anything better than this." And years and years later (many years later) when a colleague of mine looked at The Lust for Blueprints, he said, "That poem, Wintertime. That's the best, that's genius."
These are terrible things to hear from anyone. Because (in the first case), you're finished. (And there's so much more damn life to go through--trying, trying, trying.) And (in the second case), there's so much life you've gone through already. Pointlessly, apparently.
In any case, I moved on. With my poems. The images didn't have to be so systematically intricate. There were other things I could do too. So I started to try.
The best metaphorical representative for
Humanity is a bear. He is tall, dignified, and
doesn’t live in the jungle.
—P.H. Flannery
This, folks, is an epic poem:
I. The Background
The bear leaves his cave come spring.
Spring is made totally of images.
Nothing exists but images.
There is no vacuum, no space between images.
A. The View from Inside: B. The View from Outside:
Each image seen is stored in Everywhere only images
duplicate in our eyes. exist. They are palpable.
(Have you ever squashed an eye They deteriorate on contact
and watched images spurt out with View (Breathing has
like oil on water?) no function in this myth.)
The upshot: Spring is seen only once
A. The View from Inside B. The View from Outside
(cont’): (cont’):
His eyeballs fill up. The Bear looks and
Instead of storing new images shatters images
he sees old ones already in into snow. After a
his eyes. They age and crumble lifetime snow is
with use into white particles. everywhere.
This brings on Winter.
It will be Winter forevermore.
II. The Bear dies (Winter Comes).
This is to be a bloody journey
Instead of you reading between
for snow is ground-up glass.
the lines, let me write between
Some think it’s cloud-droppings.
them: as the blood flows out
The Bear begins to suspect
in front of the bear, he sees
In winter everything has something is wrong as he dyes
a fabulous memory. how it layers itself through
Snow is broken memories— the snow a pretty color.
but also underneath the the snow. It is flowing out
snow which is shards of He feels an affinity with the
images, are images never on many levels at once. This is
seen, and never to be seen. snails used by Kings.
We would have to turn the how memory works, the Bear
blood-dyed snow upside down Purple is close to red and
with bloodied (from snow) thinks.
hands to find Spring the bear soon crawls.
which would only be lost in our
icy gaze moments later.
III. Exegesis
What did the now dead bear suspect?
Snow is opaque. He suspected that Transparency (Innocence)
is hard to achieve. He was right.
A It is a complicated procedure.
mirror A window is a bleached mirror.
I will go into the structure of a mirror
mourns shortly, but we must mourn for the Bear
myth: first by offering a romantic myth:
True love makes eyes sweat.
This, when gathered and frozen
A window is a window.
Now back to Reality. To inspire us,
let us remember the Bear on his last legs
shreds (or shreds of legs actually).
A bleached mirror is a lobotomy
(Remember?—by asking that I am
bitterly sarcastic)
and a mirror, I have discovered,
eyes. is frozen eyes.
They are mixed together, homogenized,
poured in a tray
and chilled in a refrigerator.
A mirror is flat yet it holds countless images.
That is why it is brittle and can shatter
explosively, cutting everyone around it.
A photograph is an happy idiot
by comparison.
Only one image:
it can be bent or stupidly
peered into without
fear.
Appendix
Recipe for Jewelry (Winter fun!): Jewelry can only be made in Winter, for jewels melt on Spring days. Luckily, after childhood, Spring is over. Just scoop up a handful of snow, melt in nearby furnace, and pour into mold. Often bits and pieces of senile memories can be seen in it after it hardens. Jewels are hoarded in Wintertime. They can be used again and again instead of real images without deteriorating into snow. The fact of their total artificiality is usually forgotten by the time they are supposed to be used.
© 1977, 2001 Jody Azzouni