PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

First of all, this poem: First of all, this poem throws me a curve.  I am used to the poems' centers of gravity shiting locations from poem to poem, because Pop Stevens did that; so that is a greatness she shares with him.  But to locate the center of gravity at the very end?  Well, it is her poem, and she has long ago proven her skill at writing Poetry (not just poetry) and the wait is well worth it.  This poem is like a time machine---at the final two lines, the sense of the poem doubles back to collect and summarize the entire past of this poem, as that past is measured by its own lines.  I am stating that clumsily---my fault.   She also gives us an allusion---in her statement about building a home on ruin, a true home---to one of Stevens' most famous poems, "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour," in which the speaker and his lover have only one candle to light, and are there dwelling is, perhaps, chilly, bur all they have is a single shaw in which to cuddle together to keep warm.  And the poem exults in that.  Stevens' impoverished scene in the Final Soliloquy is a poetic equivalent to the ruins on which the home is going to be built.  She is putting the ruins to work, as does Stevens' "Man On The Dump" as well as the final voice in T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land at the point where the poem, in that voice says, "These fragments I have shored against my ruin."  Eliot's life and his peace of mind was falling apart, and from the fragments he reconfigured himself.  The speaker in Patricia's poem is building a home which is also a place in which we can shore up the ruins of the day, or the fragments of a rough workweek.    A couple of stanzas north of the center of gravity, she discloses one of the most mysterious, but yet most sustaiining and salvific functions of poety which happens when it makes every day a poem, not always lovely, but familiar and decently rhymed (and I use phrases right from the poem).  Here she has described the transformative power of poetry to take the plain plane of mere existence and turn it into the balanced landscape of triumphant life.  In her introductiom to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley stated that Poets and writer do not create out of nothingness but out of chaos.  This is so axiomatic and basic when stated by a writer like her, but so many of us do not get to that realization without the help of Poetry.  And this is where Patricia's cosmic perspective asserts itself, for and on our behalf, in her poems:  she shows us that every day (and, by extension, every life)  is a poem, if not always lovely, but familiar and rhymed decently.  And this is real life, whether one is at the pinnacle of power and influence; or, like Stevens' speaker who shares with the paramour a chilly dusk, a single candle, and a shaw they must share in order to keep warm---and they enjoy that.  Stevens concludes his poem with the phrase, "Being there together is enough."  Patricia's poems, and this poem, show us, through the cosmic perspective, that being there together (with those who are the "cast of thousands" in our individuated existences; and with the cosmos that surrounds and embraces us) is enough, is sufficient, is triumphant over those things that we define as negative.  Patricia brings correction to Eliot's "Hollow Man" by overturning that poem's central point:  in its place, she reminds us "not with a whimper, but with a celebration on a scale from the humbly human to the grandly cosmic."  In my conclusing simile for this comment, I will suggest that Patricia's poetic accomplishment, across her entire collection but also epitomized, today, in this poem, is like the channel markers that used to fascinate me on our annual vacations to Lake Michigan.  Each summer they were exactly where they ought to be:  you steered your boat through them so as not to scrape bottom, and alsothey became associated with the best spots for fishing---perch by this one, bass by that one, and the ferocious pike in the submerged weeds around that other one.  My life is better and more spiritual because of her poetry;  like Stevens, Eliot, and Vergil, she marks the channel of that lake we call Life, and we can find the special spots on that lake through their proximity to those markers.  This is why her Poetry is vitally important---to the great collection of Western Poetry, to postpoems, and to each reader who thrives upon her words.