Problems with Poetry Papers

The problem with writing poetry papers is of course, the poetry. 

This may seem strange. I’m a voracious poetry reader. I love the stuff. It’s my favorite form of connection between the mind and the soul. Nonetheless, poetry papers are the WORST.

Poetry takes a lot out of me. I have never been able to read it passively, to study it with that layer of detachment that opens up the academic tome and develops the informative tone. Quite frankly, reading poetry exhausts me. The good stuff, the real stuff, pulls at my soul like iron to a lodestone and the process of extracting that from the text and the taste and sound of the poem in order to create a diagrammed explanation is work indeed. Poetry makes me take my glasses off, stretch my eyes, makes me crane my neck, and elongate my mouth until I can see (am seeing) what the poet sees, I can say (am saying) what the poet says, and become (am transforming) into the poet’s own self or the poem which is both the same thing and a very different creature. All this to say, I’m working on a paper about Persephone and the idea of life in between the mother and death. I cannot stop seeing elements of Eros and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, the transformation of Death into the lover, the transformation of the earth into a grave. There’s something very very important there. This paper may or may not get at it, or get to it but eventually I’ll work it out and trap Andrew on the couch while I explain how it fits together, and why. And he’ll understand how wonderful the story is because he loves stories. 

Anyway, this is one of the poems I’m reading over and over again at the moment. 

Myth of Devotion

Louise Gluck

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.