Dan Chiasson’s “Obituary” was first published in the January 6, 2014 issue of The New Yorker and is available here for subscribers.
Dan Chiasson’s “Obituary” is interesting but difficult. I am not exactly at sea with it, but neither am I safe on shore. This is an accounting of some of the thoughts I had while studying the language of the poem, and, because I am attending to the language, this piece is long, no way around it. My accounting of the poem’s many tentacles is detailed, but my accounting lacks a neat and beautiful conclusion. I offer my thoughts, nevertheless, in hopes of a conversation.
The poem’s stark title “Obituary” tells us there has been a death, but after several readings, I am wondering if the death could be one of several, or also, simultaneously, the death of an opposing force or movement or enemy. The recent notable obituary would have been that of Nelson Mandela. Whether or not the obituary in question is Mandela’s is not clear. Someone has died, for sure, but it could any of a number of people, or all of them together, or the life force that drove them.
What the poem will not be is emotional, personal, or lyrical; it is no traditional elegy. The flatness of the title warns us that we should not be surprised to encounter a similar flatness in the poem. The title is serving notice, and the poem may be serving notice as well.
Stanza one of “Obituary” begins:
Dawn awoke and rose one person down that day.
Across the universe, the obituary and I
Engulfed a granola-and-yogurt parfait.
Despite the rhyme and the conventional meter, the poem maintains throughout an awkwardness that fights any ordinary beauty. The rhyme of “day” with “parfait” is an example; line one goes from the sublime to the ridiculous in line three. Awkward.
Someone has noticed a death in the morning paper, but has also noticed the lack of reality this death has for them. The death feels a universe away. Perhaps the death is actually half a world away, but the person is preoccupied with eating breakfast, or with having just made a delightfully perfect confection of layers of granola and yogurt. But then, the parfait on the table is swamped by, or in a chasm between, the person and the newspaper, perhaps because the person is holding up the paper, or looking at a lap-top. The “perfect” construction of the parfait is swamped by death.
Somehow, “parfait” also reminds me of the perfection of some elegies. In this case, however, the person may feel too swamped to communicate in a delicately layered and perfect manner. This poem is layered, after all, but it is not transparent, as the container of a “parfait” often is.
The first line in stanza one says: “Dawn awoke and rose one person down that day.” I notice lots of things about this ambitious, awkward, sentence. The poem reminds us of Homer and his heroes and his rosy fingered dawn, but we already know this will not be a “parfait” piece of writing. There may be heroism, but it will be cloaked, fragmented, and mirage-like. Awkwardly, Dawn, who begins the poem, could be either a person, personified dawn, or the goddess of Dawn. Despite the shards, rubble, and fragments that make up the poem, it does ultimately bear out such an ambitious beginning.
The first line of the poem has a lovely sound: the d’s of dawn, down and day heighten the formality as well as a sense of doom. There is also the word “rose,” a word with the connotation of the color of dawn; a word that is also a symbol of love; a word that also has religious associations, in Christianity with the five wounds of Christ, in Islam with divine love; and a word that in politics as a symbol of European social democratic parties. (Wikipedia-“rose”) the poet has placed this word in his poem on purpose. Obviously, rose is a word best avoided if you don’t want any of that baggage attached. So I am surprised by its appearance and that baggage, straight off in the first line of the poem.
The second line of stanza one opens: “Across the universe.” The poem seems to be awkwardly asserting that it will address something larger than the scene at hand, or that the person reading the paper is dwarfed by the significance of the obituary, or both. There is the obvious contrast of the yuppie’s yogurt parfait to the universe, and there is the obvious contrast of the yuppie to the regal “Dawn.” There’s a sense of “Wake up!” here.
In addition, there’s an awkward suggestion of “uni-verse,” the idea that all verse ought to be the same, serve the same goals, sound the same, etc. Obviously, this poem is across the universe from that.
Stanza 2: The poem has another drop dead line in
I found my focus in his rifle’s sights.
This feels like another person speaking. Perhaps it is a quotation in the obituary of something the dead person said. It is a line that is appropriate to many a martyr: Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela, just to name three. Again, there is a neat alliteration in “found my focus” that supports the idea, as well as a neat reversal around the idea of sight: from “my” focus to “his” gun sight.
At any rate, King, Gandhi, and Mandela were all in danger from the white society’s guns, real and symbolic. While King and Gandhi preached civil disobedience and non-violence, Mandela risked guerrilla warfare and violent retaliation. The reader hears explosive, threatening language in the repeating f’s of “found my focus in his rifle’s sights.” At any rate, the lives of whoever is being mourned were determined by the “sights” of the enemy.
The poem goes on to say,
I was crossed out in the list
Of his next of kin
and the reader senses a great divide, as if between two peoples or two races or two cultures, a great denial. The denials of Apartheid were a kind of “crossing out”; Apartheid was an outright denial of the kinship between all men, an outright denial of the brotherhood of man. Racism in any form “crosses out” the people’s identity; in a racist society, some people’s humanity is made to be invisible.
The puzzle of stanza 2 is “Halifax black-and-white.” Halifax is a rare type of flowery font, as if Apartheid were printed in an ancient, outdated, impossible, almost illegibly flowery print. Halifax also reminds me of “Holy Facts” — whatever those might be. For instance, those who espouse Apartheid or any similar exclusionary policy often consider their policies to be sanctioned by God, and so such laws would be holy facts. But that’s a stretch. As for “black-and-white,” I hear in this phrase the rigidity of such societies, as well as the reminder that we often see humans as “black or white” or whatever other dichotomy we wish to choose — as able or disabled, for instance.
Stanza 3 makes an abrupt switch to the pronoun “He,” but he is never called by name. The poem is definite about that when it says, “He changed his name.” Stanzas 3, 4, and 5 all refer to someone as he, but each stanza refers to a specifically different person. The implication is that the people represented in stanzas 3, 4, and 5 share something universal in common.
The “He” of stanza 3 appears to be Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1953), who was a French “paleontologist turned priest.” According to the poem, “He bowled frame upon frame of erect Jesuits.” According to Wikipedia (you can’t write about a poem like this without Wikipedia), Teilhard de Chardin’s writings about evolution and original sin threw him into conflict with both the Jesuit hierarchy and the Vatican. Although Teilhard’s ideas have a complex philosophical structure, one strand has to do with the actions of man in the world as a means of drawing closer to God. Within the frame of this poem, Teilhard de Chardin brings the work of a man like Mandela into the scope of drawing closer to God.
But the phrase “erect Jesuits”? Yes, I see the self-important piety being skewered here, but I am confused by the sexual connotations. The rest of the poem supports a sexual reading of that phrase only if you see that it is important to confront the sexual sins of the clergy. But the reader has to make that leap. The poem only skewers the priests, doesn’t really explain why.
The poem says that this speaker “changed his name.” Perhaps it means from scientist to Jesuit back to scientist again. Or perhaps it is the poem’s method of scrambling identities, given that others in this poem have changed their names. Mandela was born Rolihlahla Mandela and given the Anglicized name of Nelson at 7. But I remind you: Mandela’s name is never mentioned here. I only surmise he might be the subject, or perhaps the occasion.
Stanza 4 says, “He taught the Inuit [. . .]” I think this stanza refers to the Canadian Metis agitator and leader Louis Riel (1844-1885), who was executed by the Canadian government for his role in the North-West Rebellion. He was a passionate supporter for the rights of the Metis, the mixed blood people who were descended from white Canadians and Native Peoples, among them, the Inuit. He stood for equality of civil rights in land ownership, language, and religion for the Metis. While Riel’s execution shows how much he was feared, Riel’s beliefs, if not also his violent actions, are now viewed as heroic and defensible.
Thus the poem combines Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with Riel, and by extension, men like Mandela, Gandhi, and King. Louis Riel is tough territory; it’s a little like arguing that John Brown is a hero.
Stanza 5 continues in this stratosphere: it appears to be talking about Pope John-Paul II, who “flew to Seoul” and who also once on a trip to Slovakia blessed a pair of (formerly) conjoined twins. The poem says, “He flew [. . .] to twin Filipinas with my features.” I note that a speaker is interjecting the idea that some twins had his features. Who is speaking? Another person with the same condition? When the pope (embraces) any disabled person, there is an echo of Mother Theresa saying that her dying patients in Calcutta were Jesus in disguise. I hesitate to go there, except that the poem appears to be, reluctantly, leading me there.
The idea of conjoined twins is important, as it echoes the idea of kinship and brotherhood, but it also echoes the idea of peoples and cultures other people want to erase.
I do not know what to make of the “pope” going to an “Icebreaker mojito outing” except that the mojito is a signature Cuban cocktail, and the pope did go to Cuba, perhaps as a gesture of “icebreaking.” Again, Cuba is an isolated nation, almost disabled in its isolation.
One long sentence stretches through Stanzas 6, 7, and 8, thus suggesting that this is one speaker speaking. Who is this speaker? Not clear. That the speaker is Jesus-like is suggested by his reference to the “cock-crow cul-de-sac alarum,” reminding the reader of the warning to Peter that he will betray Jesus three times before the cock crows; the “cul-de-sac” reminds the reader of Jesus being apprehended.
Getting the gist of this long concluding sentence (and gist is about all I am able to get) is difficult.
Midway through this long concluding sentence is a play on the word “loot.” The speaker says he is the looter and the loot, as if he has raided something precious and there is a price on his head. Jesus raided the authority of both the Jews in charge at the time and the Romans, and there surely was a price on his head. Mandela “looted” the authority of Apartheid, and there was a similar price on his head. If you were to include Martin Luther King, the price on his head was death, like Jesus, and like Louis Riel. As for Teilhard, he looted the authority of the Vatican, and the Vatican’s price was that he lose his teaching job and have his books silenced.
Stanza 6 does somersaults with the words “sentry,” “reentry,” and “absconded.” To abscond is to go into hiding. Mandela went into hiding, and when he came out of hiding he was absconded into prison. While in hiding in prison, Mandela also was secretly absconded from prison to conduct negotiations with the white government. I cannot make this riff fit any other scenario, but it fits Mandela only awkwardly. Louis Riel also went into hiding and was also taken into custody, but in contrast to Mandela he was executed. Because of the reference to the cock-crow, an idea of Jesus floats in this stanza, being particularly alive in the sentry — reentry business because of the cave, and also because of the riff on absconded, given that his body disappeared. But don’t assume I mean any of these parallels in any rigid manner.
As for the beauty of the language, I notice that the riffs on loot, sentry-reentry, abscond, and theft all remind me of rap, a poetic form distinguished for its verbal virtuosity and concern for the empowerment of the disenfranchised.
The last lines read:
and so concludes
My offensive, possibly illegal, vaudeville act.
“Vaudeville” is the people’s theater, and Wikipedia suggests that it has been thought that the origin of the word was “voix de ville,” or voice of the city. So in this vein, the speaker’s “vaudeville act” is action on behalf of the people.
But the speaker wryly describes his work as “offensive” and “possibly illegal.” Part of Mandela’s work was simply speaking from prison, thus making the self-deprecating lines ironic.
Here’s the thing. The poem expresses itself in a few Christian words and one famous Christian philosopher and at least one one pope. Rose, cross, witness, the cock crow, and alarum are all echoes from the story of Jesus. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggests that we should make all of our actions sacred acts.
The last word of the poem is “act.” The poem begins with the word dawn, and it ends with the word act.
In the words of the poem, all of these people: Gandhi, King, Mandela, Riel, and Tielhard de Chardin were engaged in “offensive” acts; they were on the offensive, and their acts were offensive to people — more offensive to some than others. And these acts were “possibly illegal” in one view or other.
The last lines refer to the cock-crow and to the “curtain” falling, both of which refer to death more than anything else.
I hear a lot going on in this poem: someone has died, possibly someone who should be celebrated, possibly Mandela. Instead, others are praised in a roundabout way; no heroes are elected, no dictators selected. Ego is discouraged.
The lack of soaring language is shocking; the confusion regarding just who this poem is about is shocking. When Whitman wrote of Lincoln’s death, it was oblique, but not this oblique. If this poem is about Mandela, then he is praised by his company: Teilhard, Louis Riel, the pope(s), and echoes of Jesus.
It is the anti-elegy elegy. What is perhaps the most curious is the sense that on the occasion of this one man’s death, the opportunity is seized to celebrate the group of men to which he belongs — as if the reader is being encouraged to think that it is a group he ought to think about joining.
If the poem is about anything, I think it is about making whatever work you do in the world sacred, or about the few who have managed to do that.
If this is Chiasson’s obituary for Apartheid, he surely got my attention, but I still question the excessively opaque nature of the style. It’s a leap of faith to think this poem can achieve a wide readership, given that it has taken me a week of inquiry to get as far as I have with it, with quite a few wrong turns along the way. Surely someone will write to me and say I’ve gone about reading the poem in the wrong way, that I’m not supposed to “think too much” about it. But that’s the way I’m wired. I just hope I have thought and written about the poem Chaisson wrote, not the poem I wish he wrote.
So this poem speaks in ambitious terms. I hope I have read it fairly. I would welcome any more light anyone else has to shed. This is a style of poem that invites discussion — as if shock and subsequent discussion are the very purpose of this poem’s style and inception.
Thank you, Betsy, for such an interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking post. I know you struggled with this poem for some time, writing and deleting, and we are the fortunate beneficiaries of your work. Even if you don’t come down with a definite answer to the poem, your thought process is nicely put down in this post. We all know you turn over more rocks than most when you’re devotedly giving authors your time, and this shows that so well.
As for the poem, I have read it several times and I don’t have a better answer for you. The one thing I noticed when searching for Dan Chiasson was that Wellesley College, where he is an associate professor, has a Christian a cappella group called “Awaken the Dawn.” :-) I’m not saying that the first few words of this poem are a shout out to them, but I sure hope they read those words.
I have no idea what the poem is about, but thinking about it, and reading you thinking about it, has been a wonderful way to spend some time the last couple of evenings.
I read this totally differently. I read this as the recent execution of Kim Jong-Un’s uncle – Jang Sung-Taek.
It is possible I am very wrong – but the uncle seems to be the one saying:
“I found my focus in his rifle’s sights
I was crossed out in the list
Of his next of kin, in Halifax black-and-white”
The uncle was under house arrest in 2004 and re-emerged in 2006, accompanying Jong-Un’s father on a trip to China – so he maybe the one here as well.
I stood sentry and watched my own reentry
In the 2700 word statement indicting him, the uncle was described as “The despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust” – clearly the uncle seems to be the one in the last stanza as well
Somewhere the cock-crow-cul-de-sac alarum sounds;
I am not sure if the uncle visited Seoul. Kim Jong-Un’s father didn’t – both the Korean leaders met in 2000 and 2007 in Pyongyang. Did the uncle visit Seoul? If so, that stanza could be about him. The twin filipinas is a reference to something that happens in asian gentlemen’s clubs that I am hesitant to elaborate on further. Suffice to say that the uncle has been accused of various acts of debauchery.
Of course, many parts of the poem do not fit this theory either.
Sorry, I missed this out in the last comment:
The first stanza was the most troubling. If the narrator of the poem is the Korean leader’s uncle and he has been executed, who is the one with the Obituary and the Parfait? Is it Jong-Un himself? Or must one read the entire thing as a poetic equivalent of “An occurrence at owl creek bridge”?
avataram –
Your last question first. I answer as a fellow traveler rather than as any expert – which I am not. My assumption about this poem and many other contemporary poems is that there is often a jarring transmogrification of identity. The person who identifies him or herself as “I” in one line may disappear in the next, only to a totally different identity take up the veil of “I”. It’s a conversation of multiple identities who are never identified, who may be different aspects of one personality, or who may make up a group identity. Sometimes these poems feel like the Greek chorus speaking in a Greek tragedy.
Then, I have to agree that my first thought was Kim Jong Un’s uncle as well. But with him front and center, I didn’t know what to do with the paleontologist priest .
The martyred Louis Riel reading fits somewhat with Kim Jong Un’s uncle perhaps wanting to save his country, given that someone is going to have to do it, sooner or later.
And I will agree – the last 3 stanzas could be a demented Kim Jong Un talking to himself…saying that, for instance, that this will be the last instance of me doing something demented for show, doing something “possibly illegal”.
I spent several days fooling around with Uncle Jang Song Taek. But then I didn’t know what to do with Teilhard de Chardin.
Then I wondered if Chiasson meant the poem to be able to be read forward and back, so to speak, so that two opposing readings could be supported at the same time, thus increasing the puzzle factor exponentially.
I find the Christian frame puzzling in relation to Kim Jong Un. I know there are many South Korean Christians. I have not, however, tried to consider whether any of this frame is originiating from a South Korean Christian speaker – which it could be.
That the twin fllipinas might have a completely different role to play than what I proposed is new to me and interesting. Could the poem be dominated by the image of conjoined twins? That there are two interlocking ways to view anything?
For instance, when you think about Teilhard de Chardin, (which I never have until this), what leaps out is his attempt to justify the simultaneous truth of science and faith, of goodness and sin.
So, is all the linguistic contortion of this poem on behalf of the idea there are always versions of the truth? I know that juxtaposition of paradoxical realities is the meat and potatoes of contemporary poetry.
But I really like all of your evidence – especially the quotation from Kim Jong Un’s speech about “thrice cursed acts of treachery”.
avataram – what do you think about the Christian frame having something to do with both South Korea and something to do with someone assuming a disguise?
So glad to hear a voice in the wilderness!
I’m not certain, but I wonder if this poem will be in Chiasson’s forthcoming book, Bicentennial, which Knopf will publish in March. If so, I imagine “Obituary” was written some time before these rather recent historical events — not that that means we cannot refer to them (I’m thrilled you both did).
To throw some more light — or darkness — on “Obituary,” here is the publisher’s synopsis for the upcoming book:
Is this a poem about his father? Reading it with that in mind, it makes me wonder if the young Chiasson was afraid his father, some kind of formless monster, was going to come take him away in the night. And now, knowing his father has died, all that flight has ended.
Trevor, that is interesting. “Historical cycles and personal history” are clearly at work here, and in a sideways way, “elegy”.
I find the “individuals always vanishing in time” apt to “Obituary” in that traces of Teilhard, Louis Riel, and Jesus, and maybe the pope(s) as well, can be found in this poem, but little is left but strange traces, and no names.
Betsy, I was so convinced that the poem was about the North Korean uncle that I connected your reference to Teilhard de Chardin to the fact that he found the “Peking Man” – to the allegation that the uncle was the “Peking Man” of North Korea, looting from exports/imports to and from China, the only country with which North Korea trades.
But now I feel I made a Bed of Procrustes with this North Korean business, and pulled the poem here and there and cut off its legs so it would fit my theory. There is really too much Christian imagery for the poem to fit a North Korean execution, as you say.
Also, if the poetry editor of the New Yorker decides to publish a poem of his in the first issue of the new year, the poem should be either something deeply personal or something much bigger than a North Korean execution. Mandela fits the bill, but maybe it is about someone else.
Trevor’s comment on Chiasson’s life makes me think of an entirely different angle. As I understand, Chiasson’s father abdicated his responsibility, but Chiasson found that the best answer to fatherlessness is fatherhood.
In 2013, Pope Benedict XVI, “Father” to more than a billion Roman Catholics, decided to abdicate his responsibility and Pope Francis took over as the new Pope. The new Pope is widely praised as synchronizing “Christ” and a Jesuit like Teilhard de Chardin, synthesizing seeming opposites.
Seen from this angle, the first two stanzas could refer to Bendict XVI thinking after his abdication. The third stanza is about Pope Francis.
The fourth refers to the conversion of the Inuits using Siqqitiq and the Inuits picking up English as a second language (E.S.L?) – not sure how it connects to the rest of the poem, it feels like a throwaway stanza in any interpretation, simply there to rhyme Jesuit with Inuit.
The fifth is about Pope John Paul II as Betsy said. I feel the 6,7,8 stanzas comes back to Pope Benedict and his abdication, but I am troubled by the reference to the looter and loot- maybe it is a reference to Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, of the Vatican bank, accused of money laundering for the mafia, who was arrested in June 2013, after the new Pope took over.
The entire poem is an Obituary – for someone who abdicated – for Pope Benedict’s papacy, or for Chiasson’s father, who died in 2009.
I don’t know anything about Dan Chiasson’s personal life. If his father “abdicated”, however, it reminds me of Nick Flynn, and I would like to look into that comparison of how two almost opposing styles can work to express (or even resolve) a deep conflict.
That “Inuit” stanza I feel sure relates to Louis Riel.
As for the general idea of abdication – well! – this poem is so complicated I feel the need to think on that. Be back to you tonight.
Puzzling over this poem, I looked around the web for Chiasson’s interviews and found this in The Economist’s “Intelligent Life”:
Dan Chiasson’s poetry is “unsettled and unsettling,” wrote Kay Ryan in the New York Times. “So much in Chiasson is uncomfortable and misproportioned. So much suffers. At the same time, his poetry is mischievous and meant to be understood playfully.”
http://moreintelligentlife.com/blog/erin-dejesus/qa-dan-chiasson-poet
I asked myself the question – “Can there be a poem about an ousted dictator?”. The question naturally leads to Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and the unreliable commentary on John Shade’s poem by Charles Kinbote. (another poem in which the first line and last line are connected).
It is possible that the poem is a deeply personal one, possibly about his father as Trevor said, and the playfulness is in publishing it at this time (Chiasson is the poetry editor of TNY after all).
If the poem was written in early 2013, it could not have been about the Pope’s abdication, Mandela or the North Korean Uncle. But by publishing it now, Chiasson makes all of us into Kinbotes, interpreting the poem in one way or the other.
I feel Louis Riel was a leader of the Métis and the Métis and Inuit are not the same, so the stanza may not be about him. But with so many red herrings in the poem, one never knows. I couldn’t find any reason for putting the Inuit in the poem except that the word rhymes with Jesuit.
Hi avataram –
To me, Riel is connected through the language and religion link – he stood up for people having a right to their native language, and that would apply to both the Metis and the Inuit.
The stanza relating to the Inuit never mentions Riel, but the fact that he was a martyr somehow ties in to the poem in general.
I got so distracted looking for “meaning” in the poem that I totally missed the inuit-jesuit rhyme. I like your suggestion that fragmented poetry might sometimes be led only by rhyme, but at the same time, I see more links than that.
The fragmentary nature of every thought in the poem is matched by the feeling of historical fragment – as if what we are reading is like the fragments found in ancient sites.
Your Kinbote connection is rich.. Contemporary poetry appears to have a great interest in forcing the reader to construct meaning.
I picked this poem to write about because I was dazzled by some of the wordplay. But the path from the word-play to meaning is a frustrating one. Of course, meaning in contemporary poetry may be derived through different paths.
For one thing, I keep running into the concept of the poet “undermining” the meaning of both individual words and thoughts.
Another wave of undermining may be in the way identity is not used in any conventional manner.
A third wave of undermining the meaning has to be in the fragmentary nature of the information presented.
But why?
Betsy, The poem is very puzzling, but probably that is what makes it fun to try and interpret. As you say, what is really attractive is the wordplay and some wonderful lines.
In one of his interviews, Chiasson says that he constructs the poem line by line – he does not move to the next line unless he feels this one is perfect. In his review of Carl Phillips, he says the same thing:
“I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips, who has published fourteen books in the past twenty years. Poets work primarily in lines, and often dream of writing perfect ones; this is why every poet is an innovator of sentences, dissecting them, ranking them, scattering, by means of line and stanza breaks, little cliffhangers across their lengths.”
(from http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/04/15/130415crbo_books_chiasson)
In prose, this way of writing, reminds me most of James Salter. (Has Mookse covered “All that is”?)
It is his sentences that readers come back to. Sentences that for many, including Richard Ford, are unmatched by any other living writer. Perfectly hewn, perfectly weighted, they can strike at the heart of a person, an emotion, a time of life and pin it like a butterfly. Taken out of context, they don’t have the same heft, but lines such as ‘The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers’ (Light Years). ‘One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish’ (A Sport and a Pastime) and ‘Billy was under the house. It was cool there, it smelled of the unturned earth of fifty years’ (‘Dirt’) give the merest hint of the shimmering yet spare style that is uniquely Salter’s.
(from http://thequietus.com/articles/12373-james-salter-all-that-is-review-interview)
But I feel even a very playful poet like Chiasson will not go that far – a poem with great wordplay and brilliant lines that is so full of red herrings that it makes any interpretation impossible?
avataram, These passages you offer deepen the discussion. But as you say – the poem is full of red herrings.
About sentences. I notice that the poet ends the first line of stanzas 1,2&3 with a period, and that each of these is a drop dead sentence. And I notice that the poet uses a colon twice, a semi colon twice and three dots once. I think that punctuation offers structure that pleasures the mind.
I like some of the turns the poem makes, like rap, like the metaphysicals.
But that the poem trusts the reader almost not at all, that the poem privileges its information for the very few – that’s troubling.
Well, it’s time for me to give this poem a rest. There is assuredly much more to say about this poem than I can see, but I offer my reading experience, limited as it is, as a kind of testimonial of an interested reader. Below follow some of my conclusions. I note that “concludes” is a word in this poem – the conclusion of which is couched in the word “possibly”.
1. Death is the topic of this poem: obituary, one person down, engulfed, rifle’s sights, crossed out, traded their own pelts, theft, looter, curtain falls, alarum, so concludes, what happens to me now, no one can say.
Who or what has died is not clear, but death, night, and change are a constant, as is dawn.
2. Religion, and in particular, Christianity (or Christian thought) , is a frame in the language of this poem: dawn (light), awoke, rose, (Halifax), Jesuits, Christ, priest, with my features, witness, cock-crow.
The understanding of religion, however, can die or change (Teilhard).
3. Language itself is something that can die: the Inuits “traded their own pelts for the cool E.S.L.”
4. Relationships can die: “crossed out in the list of next of kin”.
5. Words change their form: looter to loot; sentry to reentry ; the sun breaks to “it …breaks even”.
6. Violence is a present: engulfed, rifle’s sights, crossed out, traded, theft, absconded, looter, offensive.
7. Mystery and muddle is the state of being: I and he have no names and may in fact be multiple identities.; who is who is completely unclear; paleontology, which has only bones as meaning, is a topic; the speaker doesn’t know what happens next; the reader cannot make any easy sense of any stanza, nor of any obvious connection of one stanza to the next..
8. The poet mocks his own talent: memorable and “ universal” lines have fractured, illusive or lost meaning.
9. Surety is mocked: “black-and-white” is the method of crossing out
10. The untrustiness of writing itself is a topic (poetry, drama, history, science): obituary, focus, sights, list, crossed out, witness, curtain, vaudeville – crossed out being the most important.
11. Impulses to pronouncement, grandeur and intellectuality are mocked: parfait, erect Jesuits, reggae gymnasium, dawn breaks even, offensive, possibly illegal, what happens to me now, no one can say.
12. Methods of the metaphysical poets reappear: their use of the conceit, the twists on words, the puns, the twists on point of view, the puzzley nature of the writing.
13. The writer as looter and loot: consider that the writer must “loot” experience in order to write, himself, friends, relatives, colleagues. Sometimes he loots other writers. And then he is loot himself – he loots his own self to write, he becomes loot to other writers, and to readers he is the corpus delicti.
14. The writer as sentry and witness – only to be witnessed himself; the writer as absconder who is then absconded by the reader.
15. Writing as theft on both sides – by the writer and by the reader.
16. The (possible) value of the “offensive, possibly illegal vaudeville act” as a part of the “break-even” dance between dawn and death, action being the operative element in the break-even process.
17. The poem as stumbling block: I am lured in by the poem’s turns of phrase and I’m interested in the topic(s), but I find the speakers’ refusals to communicate maddening.
18. The poem is as earth overheard from outer space: an incomplete transmission in an unfamiliar language..
19. Relationships to literature: the speaker(s) feel stuck in the verbal equivalent of Beckett’s bodies entombed in piles of sand, in Pinter’s silences, and Joyce’s extremities language play.
20. As a single poem, it’s a locked room mystery. Possibly the poem is more sensible as part of the poet’s larger body of work, philosophy or school. As a single poem, I question its success or durability.
Except for this: adolescents across the world welcome secretiveness, refusals, sarcasm, and trickiness. Being still adolescent in many ways myself, I recognize the impulse to wear the costume that this poem wears.
21. I imagine Chaisson’s high school English teacher wondering who stole her favorite student.
Thank you for your patience, as I puzzled through the poem, always many steps behind you. As someone reading the poem and your comments closely, I have to say I like your 21 point comment even more than the poem! 8,15,18,20 are all spectacular sentences – ideas.
The poem may be maddening, but I take away some wonderful lines/sentences/ideas from Chiasson, Salter and Betsy. I never got so much out of 24 lines in TNY.
Thanks for your kind words, avataram.
When I began writing commentary for Mookse and Gripes, I initially wrote one comment about a story I liked a lot (“Costello” by Jim Gavin) . I enjoyed the challenge.
I decided to write one comment a week for a year – to see if I could establish a regular habit of focused, somewhat disciplined writing. I did, and it always took me about a day to write the piece, and sometimes it was not easy at all..
Then I had some other writing I needed to finish (I was working on a resource guide for educators of students with Down syndrome, something that turned out to require a lot of time.) So I took a year off.
Then I returned, and did another complete year of reviewing every story.
The more I do, the harder it gets. I begin to see my mistakes. I begin to have a glimpse of what it means to choose writing as a way of life.
(The mistakes! the mistakes!)
When we began writing about Alice Munro, the whole experiment deepened in difficulty and interest.
The writing life is so interesting that what you are reading and thinking is often more interesting than anything else. That’s a difficulty.
I decided I wanted to understand (and celebrate) the poetry I was reading. Trevor was okay with me reviewing a poem now and then. So that was great. But these are not reviews. They are simply a record of my thoughts on one particular poem at a time (never a book of poems).
To talk in an unguarded manner about a poem is difficult: it’s so easy to be naive, unsophisticated, sentimental, untutored, over-enthusiastic, incomplete, biased, judgmental, unfair or wrong. It’s easy to make mistakes you don’t even know you are making.
But I had a great uncle who lived long ago in a pretty little hollow in West Virginia, and dared to call himself a poet, when all around him men were working in the gas and oil fields or digging coal. I was told he named the town, formerly Day’s Run, Daybrook. As a child, I puzzled over why he didn’t name it Daybreak. I always loved Daybrook, where I had cousins galore and sometimes a pony and baseball games and stories and uncles dipping strawberry ice cream in the dusk. Being there always felt like Daybreak to me. Now I know, of course, that some people would say my great uncle was gentrifying Day’s Run, prettying it up. But to me, he was celebrating it. But I still think it would have been better if he’d called it Daybreak.
So thinking about words and thinking about meaning is how my mind has always wanted to work. Writing about a poem, talking about poem – what a lot of fun. When I was teaching, I loved nothing better than a 60 minute hour of us all talking and talking about one poem.
Writing as I do now, about a quarter time, I do not live the life or face the challenges of the writer, I glimpse them. Writing as I do now, I write about literature, I don’t create it.
Dan Chaisson is a poet. He lives the life, he has chosen the life. I am grateful to him for his choice. I love these lines he wrote:
“Dawn awoke and rose one person down that day.”
(For me, I cannot read the line without thinking of my mother.)
“I found my focus in his rifle’s sights.”
(Where am I here? Is someone pointing a rifle at me?
Or is the I looking through his father’s rifle –
looking at life the way his father would look at it?
Am I rejecting or accepting a way of life?)
“I stood sentry and watched my own reentry.”
(How often have I done this/gloriously/sheepishly/fearfully?)
(I love the power we have to observe ourselves…)
“Both looter and loot, at night, on foot…”
(This one reminds me at this moment of being a daughter,
with all its perils for either daughter or parent.)
“When the sun breaks now, it just breaks even;”
(One warm summer morning when I was 13, I rode my bike out at dawn – why, I don’t know. Morning was alive, I was alive: the air, the light, the colors – the feeling something was just about to happen. That was Daybreak. When the sun breaks now, it just breaks even, and I am happy even for that.)
“The curtain falls and so concludes/My …. vaudeville act.”
(How perfect. At my age, almost 70, I think about that often – all the judgments implied about a life well lived or not.)
My point is perhaps the poem intends we use the lines to experience our own lives as deeply as possible – never mind any other scenario.
Betsy, your last two long comments are fantastic. I have read and re-read this post and your comments with pleasure. Is there anyway to bump up your comments to the main post itself?
Thank you, avataram. You reassure me. I’ve had doubts about this whole endeavor.
Here’s the thing: the commentary, in order, makes clear the long process that a poem requires, demonstrates the way understanding evolves. .
Fiction can be thought-provoking, but the discursive nature of a novel gives you both the novelist’s guidance and the long time to process the whole. By the time you’re done, you may have formed an accurate take on the whole thing – the form of the novel and its demands on your time both lead you there.
Poetry is compressed, so you have to read it in a different way. You do not have the novelist as your Virgil. You have to find your own way.
In a way, drama is midway between the novel and the poem; often, you need to see a good play or movie more than once to grasp its richness or intricacy.
It’s true, a good short story may take several days to process. But a poem may take twice that. So having the discussion maintain its linearity is the whole point, I think. It’s just takes time to process a poem, and you may end up in a different realm by the end. I think this is as true for Keats or Whitman as it is for Dickinson or Eliot or a contemporary poet like Chiasson.
I take your point that reading only the first post would be misleading. But the reader, if they’re worth their salt, ought to realize that 17 comments suggests there is more than the initial post! Maybe even a debate, maybe even a change of tune.
But thanks. I’ve enjoyed your company on this journey.
Betsy and avataram,
I got a lot if pleasure (if not much understanding) reading the poem, and still more from your Mandela and Jang-Sung Taek interpretations; they immediately brought “Pale Fire” to mind. Many thanks.
This poem seems to be the gift that keeps giving. Just when I thought it was time to stop trying to find “meaning” in the poem and just enjoy the beauty of the poem, I find something else.
In Coron Island in Philippines, there is (are) a twin lagoon(s). It is a popular place for divers. The first lagoon is easily reached and one can dive into it. To reach the second lagoon, one has to dive underwater in the first lagoon, and go under a rock arch to reach a second, hidden lagoon – the photos below show what it is like:
http://www.choosephilippines.com/go/islands-and-beaches/482/twin_lagoon_coron_palawan/
So, “Twin filipinas with my features” – maybe the poem talking to us. You dive into the poem, find a meaning – say the North Korean uncle, and then dive deeper, and find a second, hidden meaning – possibly Chiasson’s father, possibly Mandela, possibly something hidden, something private to the poet.
I have heard of self-referential poems, but nothing like this one.
Welcome, Paul. thank you for your kind words. Looks like I need to read “Pale Fire”. My husband suggests starting with Pnin, who I notice, also makes an appearance in “Pale Fire”.
Wow, avataram, that twin lagoon in the Philippines is a really pleasant sight on this dark January night.
I am in the middle of reading a book of essays by Rae Armantrout. (A poem of hers appeared recently in the New Yorker.) She is fierce on the idea that a poem should resist resolution or closure – since that’s the way life really is.
When I saw your post, I was reminded of the gamesmanship in Chiasson. This is a poem that doesn’t want to be wrestled to the ground.
The poem is about regret. In this fantasy of his own death, and of his obituary being read by his own family — in Canada presumably — there is a prospective experience of the shame of — metaphorically at least, and maybe literally — of having fathered children in a foreign country (Korea), and abandoning them (“absconding”). In effect, his life has been rendered into an offensive, and possibly illegal vaudeville act. The idea is that irresponsibility is so easy to do in life and so difficult to retract or make amends for. And by the way, the idea of an illegitimate child — or twins in this case — is not at all so farfetched. But one can take it as metaphorical, part of the colorful exoticism of the tone throughout. Again, part of the vaudeville act of getting lost in the words of rationalization, so easy to do in life. So, yes, It is a moral poem, and could certainly be read as Christian parable of living the right life.
Welcome, Charles.
“Obituary” is included in Chiasson’s recently published book, “Bicentennial” (March 2014). I think I have read that two thirds of the book is devoted to his relationship with his father. I also think I remember that his father became a priest.
In searching for reviews, I find nothing of any real depth, nothing of the depth that Chiasson himself devotes to reviewing poetry. I include below the introduction to a poetry review he wrote for the New York Review of books:
(article here)
He deserves the same care, but I am not finding it.
I have to say that the obscurity of “Obituary” was not helped by being published apart from the collection in “Bicentennial”. Whether that was his decision or someone else’s is, of course, not clear.
Just want to add that in this week’s New Yorker (June 2, 2014), Chiasson has a terrific review of Rachel Zucker’s “The Pedestrians” and “MOTHERs”. This review gives Zucker the utmost of respectful attention and gives the reader a real sense of the writing. I liked his open minded take on what a woman has to say about her own life. A great review of what sounds like a great book.
Again, it would be nice if someone with Chiasson’s talents as a reviewer would review his book.