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Debates about poetry, and the analysis of a poem, can be fervent, even if the participants are few and the audience for the debate not much larger. I remember one such, on a poetry listserv I participated in, about A. E. Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees,” which starts out with a breathless evocation of the beauty of cherry blossoms in spring: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Then it abruptly switches. It’s still a poem, in Housman’s easily controlled rhymed couplets and iambic tetrameter, but the breathless wonder is gone, and so is the evocation of beauty. Now it’s become something of an actuarial table: Now, of my threescore years and ten, But then he puts that back into perspective. No matter how you count the numbers, it adds up to a short life. We’re just passing through this world of breathless beauty that will outlast us, as it outlasted the Savior who had not even fifty years on this planet, and who passed through it and died at just this time of year – except hey, maybe he didn’t. Eastertide is about resurrection, and eternal life. But that ain’t gonna happen for those of us whose lives are counted in actuarial tables, so we’d better get busy appreciating that beauty: And since to look at things in bloom We’d better take a hint from the poet, and take advantage of the little time we have to see that brief yet eternally recurring (Housman didn’t know about climate change) miracle of the snow white cherry blossoms. Right? Some members of this group didn’t think so. They said no, no, that’s all wrong, Housman is saying fifty springs are nowhere near enough time to look at cherry trees, so I’m going to go out in the winter, when the trees are hung with snow. To which the first group said no no no no no no no. The trees are hung with bloom, the bloom is white, and you people are Philistines. I’m not going to say the discussion got rancorous, but it was certainly spirited. And limited. As Phil Ochs said, I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody, outside of a small circle of friends. And, as those of us who’ve taught mandatory Intro to Lit courses to bored freshman and sophomore non-majors, it’s an esoteric exercise that people sit through grudgingly, “don’t get it,” and would not be bothered with beyond grudgingly written assignments for this class. Except, maybe… Maybe a somewhat larger circle of friends. I’ve written (“Step Right Up,” V-V December 2021) about a remarkably similar fracas that arose in a country music group on Facebook, and was a continuing debate among country music fans in many for a: What is George Jones singing about in “The Grand Tour”? Did his wife walk out on him, taking the baby (cold-hearted bitch) or did she and the baby die in childbirth (tragic heroine)? The arguments on both sides very closely resembled the Housman arguments in that they relied on close textual analysis, subtle and sophisticated reasoning, cultural sensitivity. And in both cases, I thought that one side was dead wrong, but that’s another story. And about a really large circle of friends? Did you happen to catch the Super Bowl half time show? No? Surely some of you did. If not, there were 133 million other people who did (more than the total who watched the game, estimated at 126 million). And of those, a smaller circle of friends, probably no more than a few million, are fervently debating and analyzing Kendrick Lamar’s performance, both culturally (“an intricately detailed work of performance art that spoke directly to so many different strands of American history”) and textually. The colors red, white and blue, which dominated the whole presentation—an ironic tribute to American patriotism (also reflected in Samuel L. Jackson’s mocking Uncle Sam)? To an analytic mind, that’s just the beginning. Lamar wears blue as a sign of his allegiance to the West Coast (blue is the color of the West Coast street gang, the Crips). Red and blue together – the colors of bitter rival gangs Crips and Bloods – symbolize the unification of Black resistance to the white power structure. But let’s dig a little deeper into the textual analysis. Lamar’s “Squabble Up” begins “Woke up, looking for the broccoli,” and Lamar’s exegetes have had a field day with it. Broccoli, we are told, is slang for money – the first thing on his mind when he wakes up is his next payday. Or it could be slang for marijuana – he wakes up wanting to get high. Or perhaps he’s hungry. But then, why broccoli? Why not look for bacon and eggs, or grits, or quinoa? Perhaps it’s a symbol for health – “eat your veggies” – he wants a healthier lifestyle. Or of growth and regeneration – the force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives his green age. All right, I tossed in the Dylan Thomas reference as my contribution to Lamarology, but all the rest you can find on the internet. And more. In short, what we do, and ask our poor unsuspecting freshmen and sophomores to do, when looking at a text by Keats or Donne or Frost or Stevens or Hecht, is pretty much what others of their generation, not necessarily with the same educational advantages they have, are doing by choice, and doing very well. On the same listserv that spawned the cherries hung with snow debate, a high school teacher wrote in to describe his experience teaching Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” to a bunch of inner city kids. They had spent some serious time and a hearty discussion in figuring it out, and had come to the conclusion that the poem was about a group of hookers at the death of their pimp. Their interpretation, and the work of the poor high school teacher, was largely rejected by the listserv group, but I thought he, and the kids, had done a hell of a job. They’d probably mistaken the roller of big cigars for the smoker of big cigars, and they only had one context for the word “horny,” but given that, they’d done some seriously good work. So maybe this textual analysis stuff is a natural human instinct. John Lennon wrote “I am the Walrus” to prove that textual analysis was bunk and that it was possible to write a song that had no meaning whatsoever, but is it really? You can’t write anything except what’s in your head, and if it’s in your head, something put it there. Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town, said that “it is impossible to write meaningless sequences…when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.” And what John Lennon actually accomplished was to provide particularly challenging fodder for textual analysts – not to mention historical-cultural analysts, Marxists, Freudians, and – with Allen Ginsberg -- Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! And perhaps, every now and then…Breakthroughs! |