NOTE AT THE BEGINNING: I realize I don’t know how to...
NOTE AT THE BEGINNING: I realize I don’t know how to pronounce Emily Toder’s last name. Last night when my wife and I were talking about Toder’s book, she pronounced Toder with an “awe” sound, and I pronounce it, as you can hear in the audio, with an “oh” sound. Alas.
ABOUT THE POEM: There’s a really fun feature to this poem. Namely, make everything that happens, everything the speaker has happen to her (or maybe him—the speaker can, after all, be either “leading lady” or “leading man”) happen “in my poem.” Like all the ways that this speaker is going to declare that “I am X. I am Y. I do L. I bring M.” it all happens “in my poem.” A point which would seem fairly innocuous. A point that could border on gimmick-y. But in this case, there is a bit more involved.
The “in my poem” move frames the poem as more than just language-occasion for writing. Here, poem can be seen as an actor on the scene. Meaning, the poem seems to have a way of acting on the speaker, or at least taking a conscious role in defining the setting for the speaker, so that the speaker has to react, and who wouldn’t welcome reacting to a poem that creates such favorable circumstances to be acting in or toward or to or at. I like acting! I like acting the part of this speaker! Please, poem, define the me who I am!
And, well, I would invite people to read Toder’s Science, even if you don’t know how to pronounce her last name. Because this method of definition seems to be the line moving throughout the book, especially in the “Brushes With” section, where shapes, like squares, and rhombi, and circles, and toes (I’m kidding! No toes!) all get imbued with meaning by virtue of their surroundings. Or maybe the shapes aren’t really meaning anything. They’re just being weird and sterile and abstract. And only a poem can competently make these poor shapes feel like they have a place in the material world. It brings an interesting shade to the speaker of “The Buck Stops Here.” Is he/she an abstract entity just looking for a little material to make life feel more real? Enter poem. And if tumblr let me add one more audio file, maybe I would make it “Enter Sandman,” so you could really understand what a poem is capable of.
