Strategy Exercises

In Regard to Lydia Davis's "A Mown Lawn"

With her “prose poem,” or “flash fiction” piece, Lydia Davis complicates and challenges traditional categorization. Unlike an ordinary short-story, she refuses to indent the paragraph. Unlike a conventional poem, she refuses to break the line before the end of the page. Her brevity lends itself to poetic concision, however, and her wordplay in regard to her title, “A Mown Lawn,” produces an attention to linguistic detail reminiscent of what we’d normally consider poetry. Furthermore, her sober subject matter, in addressing the history of the American lawn, the evolution of labor toward maintaining that lawn, the appearance of the lawn in American suburbia, and the gender politics inherent in the history of the lawn, becomes considerably less grave in tone due to her mischievous tinkering with sounds and word significations. By doing so, she transforms her arguably political content into something accessible and almost fun. Her experimentalism and defiance toward traditional categorization speaks in concert with her experimentalism and defiance toward traditional ways of approaching political subject matter. In her postmodern setting of disassembling the dynamics of our ideological inheritances, of dancing on the surface of plural significances rather than investing in singular notions of meaning, she explores multiple ways of thinking about “a mown lawn” to the point of comedy—closing her piece with: “Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.”

Strategy Exercise on Carolyn Forche's "For the Stranger"

The title, “For The Stranger,” makes certain that the “you” on the train, whom the speaker shares “nothing” with, is a stranger. However, essentially there’s no mention of gender, only implications suggesting that the stranger’s a man. The stranger, presumably a man, gives and gives until the speaker says neither of them have anything; so they give “nothing” to each other. But that nothing is beautiful. There’s communion in that nothing because that nothing is everything they have. They can share that nothing, as a last option. He tries to repeatedly replenish her cravings, to feed and feed, with “dark bread” and “coffee,” but in the end his offerings add up to “nothing” but a short-lived fulfillment. She will always get thirsty again, hungry, cold. However, the poem remains present-tense throughout, until the end when it becomes suddenly future-. Their giving of mutual nothingness takes place in the future. It’s not now. It’s not in the present like the rest of the narrative. They “will give it to each other” (my emphasis). Why?

He’s away from his family, possibly forever - maybe they have passed - while she has no hint of an outside family. She’s solitary. First, “there is only this train,” but in the same first stanza a mention of “telegraph poles” through the windows manifests, suggesting the world outside. Further, they both act like they don’t understand English - their supposed native language - performing like foreigners to it when the English-speaking mothers on the train tell their children to “sit still, sit still.” Since the poem takes place on a train where neither of them “really knows” - ambiguous in location - and since the speaker and her stranger thrive off of that ambiguity, the two of them are paired with the children rather than adults in the train. They avoid confrontation with a nagging mother because they consider her nagging about sitting still trivial. They don’t want to “sit still” either. They want to move and move, from region to region, together, “each time” finding each other “between the cars.”

The stanzas shift from hefty (nineteen lines in the first stanza), to a ten- to six-liner, then stretching to fifteen for the last. The second stanza states that “there are few clues as to where we are.” The meandering of the amount of lines, and the text as a whole, parallel the “few clues” we have about the guts of the train. But the dizziness and disorientation proves fascinating, just as their being lost on the train. The text emphasizes non-linearality, mobility, a lack of minute particulars. And the particulars serving as “clues” consist of images of human life still existent, of signs that there are still people out there. For example, “men [] stand on every border / waving.” The speaker and her stranger, though, are not outside.

They remain indoors, inside the train, where they wipe “ovals” in the foggy window in order to “see [them]selves,” implying that they cannot see themselves otherwise. Perhaps they can see only each other, without the window’s reflection. Interestingly, the stranger “touch[es] / the glass tenderly wherever it holds [the speaker’s] face].” When he can see each of their faces, he doesn’t look at his own but at hers, and tries touching its reflection rather than her physical face. This lack of actual contact, and the yearning he has for it, foreshadows the final stanza where he “hurr[ies]” his “mouth” into hers. He realizes he has nothing to give but the nothing he has himself, and vice-versa, for the text asserts: “We have, each of us, nothing. / We will give it to each other.” When he shows her photographs of a “woman and children / smiling from the windows of [his] wallet” - the potential hint at his gender - the text has as recursive the notion of windows representing what’s outside their present condition. There’s a suggestion that the train, at least in their experience and perception, is timeless, a time machine, some sort of transcendence through travel, while the world outside is not physically in their reality. It’s only simulacrum. All signs of outside are seen for them through some sort of window, some sort of filter. The crucial turn for the last stanza, and essentially for the text at large, occurs in the line: “until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you.” At this moment the stranger realizes that although they only have windows to everything outside, and that “there are no more cities,” nothing outside, no more simulacrum, they can touch each other, emptied of everything, and he acts on his own agency to affirm that.

For Adrian Matejka's "Language Mixology"

In Adrian Matejka’s Mixology, his final poem, “Language Mixology,” plays with language in order to further emphasize the poem’s content. Throughout the poem, he explores the topic of naming race, of using language to define identity. Having a “mixed” heritage himself, he challenges traditional assumptions about race as something definite and singular and suggests its inevitable hybridity. The speaker claims how “silly” we are to tag certain uses of language only with one type of race, as in “izzay” being “verbed blackface / for black folks.” Therefore, he addresses the issue here of language in American culture often perpetuating divisions in identity. He uses an image of a piano to characterize the idea of “mulatto”—a social identity marker itself of hybridity—which effectively implies a body with both black and white, but a body that cannot have one without the other, that is always both. To bring it all home, his closing lines—“states weren’t called states, even though / the pedigreed mountains, the high- / styling lizards were already in place"—emphasize how realities pre-language are what they are without our titles. It’s not until we label them that they become divided, he suggests. Just as chunks of land were simply chunks of land before we divided them into states, humans were simply humans before we divided them into races.

Concerning Matejka’s “Do The Right Thing”

In “Do The Right Thing,” Adrian Matejka has his speaker meet Spike Lee after seeing Lee’s film Do The Right Thing in order to, among other effects, complicate the notion of “doing the right thing.” While Lee, an African-American himself, has created the film as a hit for the African-American community, the speaker, who has just seen it, becomes ridiculed by Spike himself because of the speaker’s light skin color. Therefore, while Spike’s film assumes a calling for progression toward race equality, Spike himself, in the poem, is victim to racial prejudice and social pressure (his fans egging him on around him). The text produces sympathy toward a hybrid racial identity—mulatto—because that “mixed” identity cannot find grounding on either side.

Also, while exploring popular culture here, rather than academic culture, as we may (narrowly) suspect from poetry, Matejka expresses through his neat structure and linguistic concision that he has high awareness of the poetic tradition. In other words, one could easily write a poem addressing the popular culture and fall victim to either trying too hard to be “hip” or fearing rejection from that popular culture, but here Matejka characteristically walks the line with seeming effortlessness between MTV and the classroom. Also, stylistically, he has both quotations and italics throughout the poem, which could potentially distract the reader. However, he uses them tastefully by using quotations when pointing to the speaker, and italics when pointing to Spike and his audience.

Concerning Robert Hass

In “Meditations of Lagunitas,” Robert Hass begins his poem with four lines of abstractions: “thinking […] loss […] idea […] each particular […] luminous clarity.” Like William Carlos Williams, though, in “The Red Wheel Barrow,” Hass uses his abstractions to lead him straight into physical images: “the clown-faces woodpecker […] dead sculpted trunk […] black birch.” In effect then, he illustrates how abstractions must come into the realm of the concrete. He uses images to embody his discourse, in other words, after suggesting it. He continues to use this method throughout the text. For example, he has the line “a words is elegy to what it signifies” lead into a grounding of that theory with a “talk about it last night” and making “love” to a “woman” of whom the speaker “hold[ ] her small shoulders in [his] hands sometimes”--language that evokes examples we can imagine. By doing so, the text illustrates how a poem can “work” with abstraction, yes, but only when the text turns those abstractions into lucid imagery. We're taught exhaustively of the dangers of abstract language—good advice, to be sure, especially for beginners of the craft—however, here Hass nods to and counters that advice by placing abstractions forever-tethered to the physical. If the poem were to consist only of language like “no one thing,” “violent wonder,” and endless distances,” we'd remain lost and disappointed, yearning to literally see what the speaker's referring to. Further, Hass ends his poem with an image—an image in fact repeated three times in italics for heightened emphasis in its physicality: “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.”

Strategy Exercise for John Poch’s “Dolls”

Poch begins the text with reference to a strip club named “Baby Dolls,” only to move into meditations on his daughter and her dolls, her as his doll, God as our doll, back to an actual instance from “Baby Dolls.” Crucially, his mobility here reads as effortless. He uses multiple connotations of dolls in order for him to explore topics from selling our bodies, to simulacrum, to the commodification of identity. And perhaps all of the above link inevitably together; for the text, they uncannily do. I admire his use of the word “doll” as a springboard into navigating contemporary conditions of capitalism. More than that, I consider it a bright move to begin the poem - to bookend the poem, actually - with a strip club, which for all of us, for various reasons, catches our attention. His first stanza generates such playfulness, humor, with a last line that introduces the element of sober social contemplation threaded throughout the remainder. Furthermore, his technique of bookending is something, of course, not unique to Poch, but that nevertheless anchors the poem immediately in clarity in order to make room for the body of the poem to have buoyancy. His blend of particulars - like the strip club, his daughter, the dropped names, etc. - with abstractions - like God, “Truth,” and “eternal youth” - operates the same way: his attention to particulars allows room for exploring abstraction. In addition to mixing anchored setting and mobility, particulars and abstraction, is contemporary language/reference paired with historical language/reference. For instance, he speaks of a strip club named Baby Dolls in a stanza that’s in strict AABB rhyme scheme; he speaks of Barbie and Moses, James Bond and Keats. In result, he attends (arguably) to the dance of the “radical middle” - where we, too, often aspire to situate ourselves.

In Regard to Sandra Meek's "The Mechanics of Failure"

In “The Mechanics of Failure,” Sandra Meek begins her poem with dangerous subject matter: 9/11. However, she explores this event in fresh and unexpected ways, avoiding exhaustive associations on the topic and instead allowing the event to lead her into seemingly unrelated content: the speaker’s wedding and Shakespeare, etc. Dodging the threat of sentimentality and straightforward sympathetic reflection toward 9/11, the poem shifts organically into meditations on her broken marriage and the roots of America as a nation of Shakespeare lovers. Her buoyancy in subject matter provides ventilation into such a serious topic; the text bookends the event as a thread and lets the middle-body of the poem explore topics indirectly related to suggestions of the “jumpers.” If she were to harp on the actual event in each line, the poem would most likely suffocate itself in tired language. But, for her to allow the center of the poem to stray from directly addressing it, she succeeds in alluding to it in the form of nuance. I think we can all learn from this technique, even if we don’t approach such a serious subject as 9/11. With any autobiographical detail that may catalyze a draft, there’s always a threat of clinging too closely to the “facts” or worrying too much about presenting it correctly. With Meek’s poem as a useful guide, we can approach a tender or “caustic” subject by generating associations our imagination makes concerning the topic rather than assuming a particular fidelity to expectations about how one “should” navigate it.

Strategy Response for Trethewey’s “Miscegenation”

In “Miscegenation,” Natasha Trethewey’s first line ends with “laws of Mississippi,” preparing us for the poem’s exploration of Mississippi in terms of legalism. In the poem, the speaker’s parents have to escape the state to marry, since mix-race marriage is illegal there in 1965, and later flee Mississippi “the same as slaves”—implying the state’s perpetuated racial enslavement. Having each second line end in Mississippi, too, allows Trethewey to approach that state-name from multiple angles; and to rotate rhyming “name” and “same” for each stanza’s first line, she invests the poem in exploring the act of naming and the several significations embedded in each name. In fact, by doing so she prepares us for her own naming, given to her by her father, comparing herself to Joe Christmas from Faulkner’s Light in August in terms of mutual ambiguity, hybridity. She’s a mixed child, of course, having parents of different race, and even harps on the text’s address to hybridity further by having the father reading War and Peace when naming her: a conflicted title in itself. When the text introduces the speaker’s reception of her name, the significations of Mississippi alter. Instead of emphasizing the enslavement and prejudice of Mississippi, as the text does prior, after mentioning her birth and naming “it was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.” Her awareness of her name provides some sort of transcendence for the speaker, it seems, because she “know[s] more than Joe Christmas”—she knows that her name, Natasha, means Christmas child, “even in Mississippi.” The repetition of her poem operates to play with name signification, with hybridity. She gives us an exemplary depiction of using a potentially numb technique like repetition to actually reverse it’s supposed effect by having “Mississippi” signify differently for each stanza.