‘I can almost see you in the air’ Twonewpoetry collections explore the art of reflection
Poet Sharon Olds follows her 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Stag’s Leap” with a new collection called “Odes.” These are not exactly Horatian odes, but a contemporary update that is more in the spirit than the letter of the form.
Olds pays homage and celebrates, in the tradition of Walt Whitman, all the things women might not have been able to address in previous centuries, and she does so with aplomb. With odes reflecting upon and praising everything from body parts (including “withered cleavage,” “wattles” and “fat”) to fellow poets (as in “Stanley Kunitz Ode”) to nature, there is much to admire here.
This collection feels less like an array of odes and more like a series of confessional epistles — letters musing on aging, beauty, the physical aspects of our bodies that lead us out of ourselves and into the realm of experience, as in the opening poem, “Ode to the Hymen,” in which she acknowledges that “you unscrolled the carpet, / leading me into the animal life / of a woman.” Olds reminds us that there are more losses than just the standard loss of innocence, particularly for females.
Olds also focuses on the way experience reveals the multiple roles one plays over the long haul: naïf, lover, wife, political observer. But her most powerful poems are those in which she is in transition from one role to another. In “Ode of Broken Loyalty,” for instance, she begins with a striking image of independence from a whole constellation of cultural imperatives and expectations: “I want to go back to that day, when it / was broken in me, the loyalty / to family, when I was cut free, / or cut myself free, from the fully human, / and floated off, like an astronaut untethered.”
The images are often violent, as when she is cut off from something, “aborted” or “broken.” In “Ode to My Whiteness,” Olds addresses her own white privilege as something that was “invisible” to her at one time, but now, through the vehicle of the poem, she can acknowledge as her “stealth,” her “drone,” her “collaborator,” her “magician’s cloak of steam.” By acknowledging her own blindnesses at different stages of life, Olds allows us to empathize, shake off the inhibitions of polite conversation and see our foibles and denials.
Her reflections on her own child abuse will catch you off guard, break your heart. But my favorite moments are when she does, indeed, lapse into a more traditional ode, as in the Keatsian “Ode to Thought” in which she marvels that “I can almost see you, in the air — like a species / in your own right” — and she waxes quasi-philosophically that “O thought, you were / inside me, but it didn’t seem so, / I thought of you in a skirt of dazzle, / flying.” Emphasizing the primacy of the imagination, Olds never lets us forget that even the loftiest ideas and feelings are still in things: the amaryllis, legs, woodwinds, trees, whiskers and dirt.
Olds is a feminist poet, yet she is one without the predictable preachiness that can quickly become boring and thus undercut its own trajectory. Even her “crone beauty” is lyrically celebrated, which is a statement in itself.
••• Houston native Monica Youn, a former attorney and award-winning poet who teaches at Princeton University, offers an eclectic collection in “Blackacre,” which takes its title from a legal term that refers to a hypothetical estate. Here she is extending that notion to hypothetical emotional states — sometimes reflecting on the past, sometimes projecting into the future. This is a sophisticated and intellectual group of poems, deriving some of its inspiration from John Milton’s excruciating sonnet on losing his sight, “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” (also called “On His Blindness”), and some from Francois Villon, the Bible, T.S. Eliot.
It is refreshing to read poems from someone so well read without the poems carrying some sort of insufferable condescension toward the reader. On the contrary, Youn draws parallels between her own suffering (some of which involves struggles with infertility but can be applied to any enterprise that might simultaneously offer fruition, then disappointingly deny it). But she is also inspired by history, popular culture and literary criticism itself, and even transforms an interpretation of Milton’s struggles into a lexical exploration in “Blackacre,” a two-part prose poem that mingles personal suffering, rhetorical and not-so-rhetorical questionings, and literary interpretation.
This practice, ironically enough, reminds the reader of the ways poems should work: We beat on against the current, and the poem brings us back ceaselessly into the past — the best teacher devoid of pedantry. The first section, including poems such as “Interrogation of the Hanged Man,” and “Portrait of the Hanged Woman,” evokes the highbrow modernism of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the mysticism of the tarot card and the suffering and wistfulness of Villon.
Youn is technically innovative, easily moving from unusual numbered one-line stanzas, to prose poems, to staggered lines, to lines in columns that defy traditional reading, forcing the reader to go back and forth between columns, mirroring the poet’s ambivalence about motherhood’s promises, expectations and potential disappointments.
She can be witty, as in the short poem “Against Imagism” in which her perfectly rendered image is destroyed by “a squashracket-shaped bug/ zapper brand-named SHAZAM!” At times Youn is downright Dickinsonian, a queen of pain, as in “Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket,” which she begins: “To section off / is to intensify, to deaden. / Some surfaces / cannot be salvaged.”
If after great pain, a formal feeling comes, Youn has translated such feelings brilliantly, in a kaleidoscope of forms that escapes some of the quicksand of confessional poetry, in which one is carried down, down, down into someone else’s heaven or hell. Instead, she invokes the muses of both high and popular culture, makes us realize the terms we hear repeatedly are representative of emotional states that respond to the frustrations of a spectrum of emotions.
Her images might seem simple, as in “a green car pulls away,” or, “A muted bang, like a tin box falling to the floor.” Yet these are not just objects or images but the associations we retain when in challenging, even unbearable circumstances. Youn makes us realize that our longings and disappointments are captured in the images of our lives — both the immediate and the recollected.
Both Olds and Youn reflect on old forms but infuse them with risks and intensity, each poem whipping up a certain element of surprise, or, as Youn puts it, “A distant police siren, wire thin, in a swift crescendo.”