Kim Addonizio
skewers you ab initio.
Her first lines
have tines.
These notes were written to introduce Addonizio to the Finding Poetry book club, at a meeting in which we considered ‘Wild Nights’, a selected poems published by Bloodaxe.
‘Near Heron Lake’ is the second poem at this link: http://www.forpoetry.com/Archive/kaddonizio.htm
I don’t often like the blurb on poetry books, but the blurb on the back cover of ‘Wild Nights’ does a good job, I think, in picking out the most obvious and distinctive qualities in Addonizio’s writing: ‘provocative and edgy’, ‘intense’, ‘gritty’, ‘raw’…. but also, and importantly, ‘a wild tenderness’.
I discovered Addonizio’s work through her collection ‘Tell Me’, which was recommended by one of my first poetry tutors, Grevel Lindop. Grevel had a recent (at the time of our book club meeting) essay about Addonizio in an edition of the poetry magazine The North, in which he makes the observation about first lines that my clerihew celebrates.
Addonizio’s modal poem is very direct, aggressive almost. It’s vivid and inventive and daring. But, as Grevel points out, it can sometimes be gentler, and I’ve chosen one of these more gentle poems to discuss.
If two of poetry’s main tricks are: 1) the telling scene or episode and 2) metaphor, then an interesting thing about this poem, it seems to me, is that its key episode is doubly symbolic – it is not only telling, a remembered highlight from a marriage, but also a structural analogy for that marriage.
It’s telling that the couple drive off together for a holiday they ‘needed’, sleeping in the van, swimming naked. The description of the scene is very vivid, very cinematic. I’m watching an indie movie, first shown at the Sundance festival.
And the scenario is metaphorical in that it has the structure of the marriage— the couple are together, but not quite sharing the experience; the poet notices what her partner does not (or perhaps he barely notices but suppresses that— how deeply that sub-metaphor of his sleeping movements can be taken, if you dwell on it). The poet worries, and makes guesses about her partner’s consciousness. And of course it’s a transient interlude, like the marriage itself: it’s soon over.
Also, there are the horses. A distant noise, like thunder, a warning. Their scary approach, an unidentified threat. Their peaceful passing. Wild horses, maybe putting us in mind of the Rolling Stones song— more blues-influenced art and similar, it seems to me, in tone and mood. Wild horses couldn’t keep us together.
Addonizio certainly uses form in her work, but ‘Near Heron Lake’ is very free verse as far as I can tell, so that the only purely formal device is the line break. The way line breaks are used roughly mirrors the phases in the poem’s development.
Up to ‘You slept on’, the line-breaks come at the end of meaning-units (if you allow pass-close as a verb). But thereafter, lines are broken in a way that introduces tensions and ‘what’s coming next’ uncertainties: lines end on adjectives or verbs waiting for their nouns or objects— ‘enter/ our life’, ‘that slight/ stirring’…
until we reach ‘The next morning’, when the key episode and its tensions are over, and the line-breaks revert to stable phrase boundaries.
Everything now is ‘calm’ and ‘beautiful’, but only on the surface, and only briefly.
‘I thought the marriage might never end’ is such a double-edged expression, containing its own counterfactual (‘might’, not ‘would’) an expression that instantly undercuts its superficial optimism.
Stephen Payne 