Polar (2005)

Gibson, Dobby. Polar. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2005.

Talking about the weather usually works

So, I'm taking a few dips into contemporary American poetry. For reasons I no longer remember, I picked up Polar from my local public library. Ideally, local poet Dobby Gibson would be a Minnesotan Du Fu for me, opening up worlds of the inner world of our thoughts and emotions with the noble symbols of the northern winter: the snow, the frost. Cold. Know what I mean? But it hasn't worked out, at least not too my satisfaction with this book. So much so that I may not have given it a fair reading. I did read all the poems aloud, but I could almost always feel my mind wandering off to a whole other topic, even as I returned to the beginning and started again and again. Why? Why is it so damned hard to read this stuff?

Poetic Difficulty: First thoughts

The back of this book has praise from what are presumably other American poets. One named Dean Young says, "In figures as elaborate and beautiful as frost, Dobby Gibson reinvents poetic argument, often as surprised and deligthed by its own wild and energetic means as it is by its wild and sometimes mordant conclusions." This comment clicked into place quite nicely for me, because I know just what he means by "figures." All of Gibson's poems are arranged into short units that have some kind of witty verbal trick to them. For example,

Always this body, though never its consequence,
the light which appears open and, therefore, impossible.

The shear complexity of this figure must be what good readers find interesting. I presume they also find it interesting to try to put the figures together into the "poetic argument." This poem, for example, is called "Upon the Pillsbury Poppin' Fresh Doughboy's First Visit to Mill Ruins Park, Minneapolis." As a general reader, and not a poetry reader, I must have failed from the first by wanting to see how the poet would portray the doughboy. I thought of the commercial and the cute little sound he makes when some unknown hand pokes him in the stomach ('hm-hm!'). But instead, what I got was, "Always this body, though never its consequence/the light which appears open and, therefore, impossible." It's very tight, very stylish, I'll give it that much. "This body," though...what body? My body? The poet's body? The doughboy? The Ruins? I'll presume for now that he wants us to ask this question and sort of merge all the images into one. "Always this body, though never its consequence." Huh? "Always this body, though never its consequence/the light which appears open and, therefore, impossible." Okay, I can't really read this, not in the sense of letting the words evoke a world, and also not in the sense of putting together a sequence of logical statements. But I guess that's not the point. Given that the thing must have some internal logic, though -- it is a "poetic argument," yes? -- the fun of the thing might be in the process of picking it apart, figuring it out.

Okay. I'm really gonna try here. I'm gonna read this poem, take it on its own terms, and I'm not going to become angry and give up.

"Upon the Pillsbury Poppin' Fresh Doughboy's First Visit to Mill Ruins Park"
BY DOBBY GIBSON

Always this body, though never the consequence,
the light, which appears open and, therefore, impossible.

Dogs stumbling into us in their tenderness.
Like all the people we walked past today

and said nothing to, and the way all of it was ignored
by the tiny cameras--millionaires

sipping spritzers in their condos, medieval limestone,
the ghosts of flour dust, laughter exhaled like air

from a slashed tire. Memory is the one
word we have for this, memory of a sudden sweetness in a dream

that was the world as we thought we knew it,
disappearing in a fire that was never named.

Who would have thought the new order we created
to destroy the old order would now live among us

as yet another birthright? Everything about the end
had been rehearsed in advance, even the ribbons they let us cut

merely for reaching it. One river bank staring at another,
barges slipping downstream at a speed

mysteriously slower than the river's own. A strangeness
still soft in the middle, still desperate for touch.

Reading the whole poem, a certain understanding of the basic sense of the lines, combined with different levels of appreciation for their beauty, comes in patches, but then goes away. I suppose good poetry readers will have a greater capacity to listen and remember, and thus have fewer patches of nonsense floating in the mind's image of the poetic argument. But they will still fail to understand every single line, which means the good poetry reader must possess a sense of indulgence as well. If sense fails, then search for the beauty, and vice versa, I suppose. A few notes from my own process of sense-understanding and beauty-understanding.

Sense-understanding

Well I think I get the conclusion. I think the line "barges slipping downstream at a speed/mysteriously slower than the river's own" is a nice reflection on the sense we often get that we ought to be doing more in the world, that the world, like a river, seems to be full of strong, swift currents and eddies moving all around, but we feel sort of fat-in-the-head, unable to keep up, but perhaps also marveling at our own ability to feel distant from the world as well. The use of the word "mysteriously" evokes a first-person perspective of this image, the barge in the river, but it also makes us ask "why 'mysterious' and not another word, like 'strangely'?" Thus we put together the sense of the poem at this point. The final image is the long awaited portrait of the doughboy, which is by now clearly a symbol for the sense of self that the poet has crafted and wants you, the reader to recognize. So there is an internal logic to the piece, and does have something to do with articulating thoughts and feelings that we are all likely to have had, but not likely to have been able to state effectively.

Beauty-understanding

"Always this body, though never the consequence,/the light, which appears open and, therefore, impossible." This is an extremely vague description of light, and I suppose it really does no more than state the setting. So I've firmly resolved to give up trying to analyze this couplet into sense value, and simply see "light" as the key term. Instead, I'd like to describe what is going on verbally in this part of the poem, but actually I'm unable to do that either. There's nothing like rhyme here. There is a rhythm, which has a sort of rolling structure: "Always," a trochee, begins the first line, while "the light," an iamb, the second line, so there you have something with just two beats to start the line. But clearly, both lines also grow complex quickly as the proceed from word to word. I'm very surprised that "and, therefore, impossible" does not sound too patronizing or just too angular and prosaic when I read it out loud. But it doesn't; it really does sound like poetry to my ears, even if I can't quite say why.