"Why a Bride Wears White," Wednesday's poem, was one of those odd ones that come to me after I've written myself into some kind of altered state. (Yes, it happens. Or anyway, it happens to me. Somewhere in hour two of non-stop writing, usually.) I didn't understand it when I wrote it, and therefore thought it probably wasn't much good. Richard Wilber said "It's not difficult to be difficult," and Dylan Thomas said "when all else fails, confuse the buggers." So when a poem is confusing, I usually feel it's failed.
On re-reading (and some minimal rewriting) I like "Why a Bride" better. I see how the images line up to make an argument of sorts. I won't go on about that. We should avoid "tying the poem to a chair and torturing a confession out of it," says Billy Collins. But I also see a surprising amount of form -- not a rhyme scheme or a meter or anything like that, but still, a form. The three stepping stones of "here's" that lead through to the conclusion (here's science, here's the myth, here's why); the Alice quotation that frames the poem, and signals that the answer to the title question is coming; the physicality of the metaphors in the middle part; etc.
Spotting this formalism is handy: these are things I can strengthen or pull against in rewriting -- for instance, that rubber band should be less twentieth century.
But what really
puzzles me: where did it come from? Not from a well-thought out plan -- not, indeed, from any plan at all. Some I must surely have picked up from the book I'm reading, Robert Alter's magnificent translation of Genesis. In his notes he makes explicit the ideals of Hebrew rhetoric of the period: physicality, allusion and punning, framing repetition, the beat of repeated stock phrases (like "here's" or "and he said," etc) to draw the reader along. The book is working its way in, I think -- in fact, I think I'm a little drunk on it. The rest of these ideas -- from years of reading and writing poetry, I guess.
I'm amazed that mind, left to its own devices, is so formal.
Why the bride wears white is a broken link. My address should work now.
I went to your husand's page. I think he can also relate to my professional frustration in ESL being recognized as not general labor considering his frustration at reading someone say anyone who can speak it, can write anything