One of the key strategies in a work of literature is to
start deliberately from a certain polarized place, and then end somewhere
opposite by the end. In fiction or drama, this could involve a character or characters
having a certain goal or outlook, and then finishing with an almost opposite
state of mind by the climax of the story. An example would be George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the animals begin
with an idealistic and egalitarian rebellion, and then their revolution becomes
increasing compromised until the leaders of the farm are chowing down with the
same farmers they overthrew.
In poetry, this transition from Point A to Point B often
involves starting with a certain mood, emotion, or idea, and then shifting
almost 180 degrees by the end of the poem. An example of a poem that does this beautifully
is Robert Hass’s “Meditation
at Lagunitas.”
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| Robert Hass |
At the start of the poem, the speaker defines a way of thinking that is current and popular in intellectual and artistic circles: “All the new thinking is about loss.” Hass goes on to describe how this sense of belonging to a fallen world without meaning has become pervasive:
The idea, for example, that each
particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general
idea.…
…Or the other
notion that,
because there is in this world no
one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry
corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
At this point in the poem, we have hit a low point, a world
in which even common words no longer seem to have any fixed or real significance,
an idea that many contemporary writers and philosophers have propounded, such as the structuralist thinker Jacques Lacan, whose work became trendy in universities in the 1980s and 90s.
But even as Robert Hass describes this idea, he starts to
inch the poem in a different direction. Notice how carefully he describes the
“bramble of blackberry.” The precise and original language he uses throughout builds a foundation that words actually are capable of describing something
real.
The turning point in the poem comes in the next section:
After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything
dissolves: justice,
pine,
hair, woman, you and I. There was
a woman
I made love to and I remembered
how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands
sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her
presence
like a thirst for salt, for my
childhood river
with its island willows, silly
music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the
little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.
It’s one thing to give some credence to the idea that the
word blackberry has lost its meaning,
but when Hass adds the phrases woman, you
and I, this suddenly calls up a
memory for the speaker of an actual romantic encounter, with its unforgettable and remarkable
particulars. Hass conveys the specifics of how that lovemaking felt on an
emotional and spiritual level so clearly that we are no longer in the bloodless
realm of philosophical skepticism. We are in a world where certain realities are
too specific and compelling to be denied, and those facts sweep along with them
even the almost trivial memories of the pleasure boat and the fish called pumpkinseed, the way a river’s current
carries in it all sorts of flotsam.
The poem then concludes with almost a complete reversal of
the world as initially described. Now the undeniable reality of that romantic episode
ripples through all words, giving substance to the smallest mundane things:
There are moments when the body is
as numinous
as words, days that are the good
flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons
and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Initially the blackberry was the perfect example of how
words have become trivial and have lost their meaning. In just 31 lines, Robert
Hass has taken us all the back way around to a state of grace where an everyday occurence, such as saying the word blackberry,
testifies to the possibility of goodness and meaning in the world.
To make this point more generally, often when we writers are
struggling with a draft, we haven’t yet found the potential opposites in the
work. Those opposites can be implicit in an early draft, but buried. The
challenge is to heighten and bring forward those contrasts, even if they seem
extreme and scary. By emphasizing those polarities, and by being open to ending
at a completely different point than where we started, we can surprise
ourselves and the reader with a realization that can suddenly appear at the end,
as unlikely as a rabbit popping out of a top hat.
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
