My own poetry often has few details. I think the shift occurred when I became tired of narrative poetry. I started to focus on other things, one of them being the objects themselves. The physical things – a hand or an elephant – became more important than a plot. The story still existed, but it became an undercurrent. Things were kept beneath the surface, not to be malicious or indirect but because the objects were growing in power. They had their own stories to tell if I’d let them.
I read a number of object poets. Vasko Popa, for instance, writes about pebbles and boxes and weaves a poem with those elements. Yannis Ritsos, a Greek poet, also focuses on objects but in an entirely different manner than Popa’s. In Ritsos’ mythology, the Greek gods still have stories to tell. Their statues could come to life at any moment. History and myth and day-to-day living collide in his poetry, resulting in poems like “Absence”:
The setting sun is a red lion.
Smell of sun and burned horsehair.
A rose girl at the door.
A yellow girl under the trees.
A blue girl on the mountain. Nothing.
Broad, inexplicable, immaculate absence.
The sky lifts high the girls, the houses, the statues.
Ada Limon is another poet with a propensity for objects, be it oranges or push-pins and post-it notes. Her poem “Little Obsession” is one of my favorites; it’s diminutive, but it encapsulates obsessive-compulsive behavior:
I am not obsessing.
I am just sitting here
perforating this post-it
with a push-pin.
The key to understanding the obsession with objects perhaps is found in another of Limon’s poems. In the final poem of the collection, the narrator states:
…to know that in order to go on,
we must accept the cage we are given
that some day we will be released,
into the unimaginable
and until then, praise the walls
and all the parts of us they manage to hold so dearly.
Objects, then, are a way to bring order, to hold things together. They allow one to focus on the parts that make up the whole without becoming lost in or overwhelmed by that whole. At least, I think that may be why I choose to focus on a single object rather than multiple ones.
Do you read poets who are invested in objects or “thinginess”? The comments are yours.
Image: Patrice Perez (CC BY NC SA 2.0)