Tying Up Clouds

First of all, I want to say how frustrating Tony Hoagland can be sometimes. You'll get halfway through his essay, believing his argument is going in one direction and he veers right off into another. It's fustrating because I don't know where he stands, may times he just makes an arguement with himself, representing both sides like a bit from The Colbert Report.

Formidable Opponent - Business Syphilis

www.colbertnation.com

I suppose though, in this case, it is an appropriate tactic. The examination of elliptical poems warrants this approach, because in a way, they do that. They shoot off in a number of directions, or at least, that is what it seems like they mean to do. I don't understand some of the reasoning for calling one method of creating poetry better or worse than another; usually when it's done well, when it's done right, the quality of the poem expresses itself beyond the fashion it may belong to. I love First Person Fabulous. There are points in they essay I question, and given the culmination of Hoagland's essay, "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment", I'm not sure there is a clear answer except that there's room for everyone and remember to see the forest and examine the trees.


The poem that I found the most interesting was Cloud by Louis Aragon.


Cloud
A white horse stands up
and that's the small hotel at dawn where he who is always
   first-come-first-served awakes in palatial comfort
Are you going to spend your entire life in the same world
Half dead
Half asleep
Haven't you had enough of commonplaces yet
People actually look a you without laughter
They have glass eyes
You pass them by you wast your time you pass away and
   go away
You count up to a hundred during which you cheat to kill an 
   extra ten seconds
You hold up your hand suddenly to volunteer for death
Fear not

Some day

There will be just one day left and then one more after that

Then that will be that

No more need to look at men nor their companion animals

   their Good Lord provides

And that they make love to now and then

No more need to go on speaking to yourself out loud at night

   in order to drown out

The heating-units lament

No need to lift my own eyelids

Nor to fling my blood around like some discus

Nor to breathe despite my disinclination to

Yet despite this I don't want to die

In low tones the bell of my heart sings out its ancient hope

That music I know it so well but the words

Just what were those words saying

"Idiot"

It was one of the poems that Hoagland points to as an example of elliptical, which I don't dispute. It's beautiful and sad. What I challenge is that there is no narrative here. I would argue that the narrative is psychological, yes, but also literal. It's a musing, a contemplation on life, the potential pain and isolation one can experience, and like the modernists, a study of  the dismal, apathetic attitude of nature and or god. It's existential. What I think elliptical or angular poems bring to the table is that they are able to reveal some greater insight or truth of something, by showing us the "root system" of life. You don't see the tree in these poems, it's implied though, and you see more than that, you see how the tree is connected to a buried 50 year old aluminum bottle cap which it's roots have grown around, underground where no one else has looked. I also want to say something about the 'removal' of the reader. Is a poem effective if it doesn't make a connection?  Poems are meant, not to rot in books but to be shared and read and read aloud and live and be vibrant; if you intentionally remove the reader, I think that is detrimental to the work, no one likes a poem they have to write a thesis about first to understand and make connection. It's as silly as trying to tie up clouds.