In this Spinning World - Analysis

As a reader of poetry I find it relatively easy to break down other people’s poems into form, device, denotation and meaning -- partly because I enjoy the illusion that what I’m doing is an objective act -- words have specific meanings; metaphors have implied significance. If I look long and hard enough I imagine I can articulate what the poem is trying to say. But this is the kind of mythology that comes out of English class -- the idea that a poem has one, universal meaning. Understanding a poem, any poem, is probably as much about what you, the reader, gets out of it, as it is about how masterfully the poet has articulated the what-it-is they are trying to communicate. In that way, how (and if) 'In this Spinning World…'holds together as a poem depends as much on you, the reader, as it does me. So, in that light, instead of telling you what this poem ‘does’ I will tell you what I intended it to do.

In this Spinning World, Who Knows Which is Up? is a free verse poem written in two and one line stanzas with a structured indentation. The indentation signals the reader that the line should begin with silence -- like a caesura in music. The intention of the pause is to create a tension between what is already presented in the poem and what follows. In this way ideas and images ideally exist as themselves for an instant before they are modified or changed. (The gallery exists as itself before we add the student and easel, the paintings of boar hunts and ruined cities exist as themselves for an instant before we see the student’s copy ‘made smaller and still.’) I wanted the effect to work in two ways. Firstly I wanted the pause to allow for a sense of revision (and therefore movement). Ideally the image in the first line of the stanza is fixed in the reader’s eye (for example, the reader might picture a still painting of Saint Sebastian ‘tethered in a dark wood’), then, because the next line is indented the reader pauses -- sitting with the previous image for a second so that it becomes fixed -- before reading ‘Where owls once purled’ which should create a revised image -- of the past, of owls having purled in that wood where we now see a still Saint Sebastian.

The second function of the caesura is to create confluence within a state of disjunction. For example, the pause between ‘a painters imagination’ and ‘a deathbed curtain lightly drawn’ is meant to allow the deathbed curtain to exist as an actual deathbed curtain (implied by the list structure as a painting of a deathbed curtain) and, simultaneously, as a metaphor for the painter’s imagination. To leave out the caesura would be to reduce the image to a metaphor.

I like to think of this poem as a series of hinges -- one idea swinging into the next, logical but still surprising. Even a stanza as simple as ‘two splay-legged mongrels, / Thread in russet’ is intended to be a hinge. The word ‘thread’ used at the beginning of the line after the pause means that it can be read as a verb or a noun. My intention was that it might exist briefly in the reader’s consciousness as both.

This poem, in the end, is meant to feel disjunctive. One of the things I’m trying to talk about throughout the collection this poem comes from is how we can’t know the past (but how we strive to know it anyway). We see this idea in lines like ‘the frayed border of tapestry / dropped as fettle to the floor / cannot be resewn’ and ‘It isn’t the gods we are trying to please, / all this re-creation’. But ‘loss’ is an abstract and so this poem uses art (document), our collective mythologies -- St Sebastian, the Virgin, those small g ‘gods’ and Narcissus (obliquely implied by ‘the shallow pool’), our artists and historians as hooks to place the poem in a world that we can see.

If there is a formal influence in this poem it is the Persian ghazal. A very regimental form, North Americans (and Canadians in particular) have recently taken to a more relaxed version of it wherein the strict rhyme structure falls to the wayside and only the essence of the form is retained: a poem of two-line stanzas written with tangential associations that accrue meaning. 'In this Spinning World' is not a ghazal, but it was thinking about the ghazal and its imaginative leaps that gave me permission (in a poem that was becoming quite narrative) to make the leap from the painting of the Virgin to the idea that ‘a man once took my face in his hands, / Tilted the shallow pool of it / Up / And did not kiss me.’

Most of 'In this Spinning World' was written in the Louvre. Not as a poem but in note form -- lists of things that struck me as I walked through the galleries. In the past year a good number of my poems have come from two or three-line ideas scratched over a period of months in my notebook.

What is this poem about? In part it’s a meditation on loss, it’s about the accumulation of ideas and events, how recasting them reduces them or eliminates them altogether. It’s about great art, the kind that captures the essence of life versus the approximation of life in art. I guess too, it’s about desire. And love.

Oddly enough -- given that I chose this poem to talk about -- I must confess that this is one of the few poems I’ve written where I’m still not sure about the last stanza. I went back and forth with those last two lines, deleting them -- sometimes for weeks -- but then always adding them back in. To end the poem on ‘And did not kiss me’ would have mirrored the shock and surprise implied by the uncompleted act. It would have been an abrupt ending that would have sent the reader looking for meaning (conclusion), which would have correlated emotionally with the state of the ‘I’. But to end the poem there would have reduced it to a ‘relationship’ poem, and my interests were larger than that. In that way I think the last stanza is necessary. It also makes the poem slightly optimistic. We go from a poem that contains ‘all this stillness’ ‘staged grief’ and ‘held expressions’ to something real, painful and alive.

Read more... Writers who have inspired me