Tony Hoagland | March/April 2013

NOTES

“Art is a house that tries to be haunted.”
      —Emily Dickinson

One of my fiction writer friends says that, in the process of working on a novel, his minor characters are always threatening to become major characters, and that his major character is always threatening to become a minor character. In other words, the process of storytelling is a seething, fermenting, somewhat unstable business. Such unwieldy shifts in proportion are also common, maybe even more common, in the making of poems—where a luminous image or statement can stage a coup d’état at any moment, disrupting the apparent agenda of the poem. Any digression can become more interesting than the main thematic line. It is hard to keep the poetry train on the tracks, and the willfulness of doing so is often death to a poem. Art requires strange collaborations between decisiveness and surrender.

This constant threat of imbalance, of eruption, or potential amorphousness is especially present in the writing of free verse poetry. A sonneteer or a writer of villanelles has at least a pre-ordained form to fill—to tell her roughly where the poem’s beginning, middle, and end belong. But the free verse poet is always wondering about structure—guessing where the end of the poem might be, trying to detect what optimal dramatic shape might be emerging. This is why free verse poems, when not in the possession of a strong governing prosody, often seem, even if they are energetic and nutritious, somewhat sloppy.

The reason concise dramatic shape is important, even in “loose” associative poems, is because poems are pressurized containers. A poem must contain energy; that is, hold it in. You can’t carry water in a colander. And in order for the poem to contain, accumulate, and release pressure it must have a shape, a dramatic progression.

Housing and Transmission: Let us liken a poem to an internal combustion engine. It is mounted, or housed, inside a sturdy frame. The structure must be sturdy because the contents of the poem are combustible; the vibrations are fierce. The housing contains and directs the explosive force of combustion with precision.

I know that these principles apply to fiction and nonfiction as well as poetry. But structure is an especially crucial issue in poems. Why? Because poems have so few words, and, given the small space they occupy, the relative proportion and relation of words to each other can change very fast. Suddenly, the theme turns out to be different than expected, or an image appears which is so resonant, it becomes indisputably structural. In genre, in general, odd proportions and pacing are more acceptable in poetry. One need only think of Tender Buttons, or quote in toto a small poem by Robert Creeley: “No way to/tell you anything/more than/this one.”¹ Here, emphasis shifts with each line break.

This unpredictability of poetry may be one reason why more so-called normal readers don’t read poems—poems demand a lot of concentrated attention. They are full of misleadings, red herrings, carrots and sticks, ruses and wild goose chases, as well as great centrifugal centers. Reading or listening to a poem is a play of prediction and uncertainty about where the prominences are, or the center is, about what will be the defining principles and components of the poem that are coming into view. During the whole of the poem-reading experience, we are scanning and reconfiguring, asking ourselves questions like:

What kind of poem is this?

How big is the whole?

Where is the center? What is the central element?

Am I reading this for sound, sense, story, or image?

Is this image centrally significant?

What is the general perspective or tone?

What are the extraneous or secondary parts?

Here are two general but useful assertions:

1. Each of the lines and moments in a poem has different degrees of force and prominence; each moment has a relative weight, color, intensity, and sound. And some of them are—and must be—more important than others. In other words, poems are hierarchical.

2. As soon as we decide on the primary moments, we can know what is secondary. Then, the secondary materials begin to orbit around those primary moments in a supplementary role. The primary moments define the contexts for the other moments.

To exemplify this process, consider two poems by Jean Follain, the French early-mid 20^th-century poet, whose poems are marvelous little landscapes of rural life. In scale and housing, Follain’s poems are especially rewarding of close study. They possess not only great charm, but the paradoxical quality of being economical and yet expansive; of being both calm and dynamic; of being naive yet worldly; of being soothing and yet surprisingly ruthless. One can learn a great deal about the principles that make poems work by studying these small machines. Here is Follain’s poem “Signs For Travelers:”

Travelers from the great spaces

When you see a girl

Twisting in sumptuous hands

The black vastness of her hair

And when moreover

You see

Near a darkened baker’s shop

        A horse lying near death

By these signs you will know

That you have come among men²

“Signs for Travelers” is pretty clear in its shaping conceit. Using the rhetorical grammar of address, the poem presents itself as a Baedeker guide for a visitor from outer space. “These,” the poem says, “are the wonders of the world: a girl with big hair; a dying horse; a closed bakery.” Or, one might paraphrase: “Beauty, youth, death, commerce, and food.” Or, one might summarize: “sensuality; mortality; simultaneity.”

The housing here, the operating premise and context of the poem, is the straightforward occasion defined by the opening clause whose tidy rhetorical triangle encompasses speaker, audience, and theme. The images in the poem and their sequence are important, of course, but they play a subordinate role; they furnish enrichment for the framing conceit. In “Signs for Travelers,” the images don’t become major characters. The major drama is the conceit itself, of a slideshow for extraterrestrials. The poem signifies the contextual primacy of this narrative in multiple ways. For instance, the elevated, Biblical-sounding inversion of line ten, “by these signs you shall know,” forcefully reiterates and develops the premise of travel-guide. Also, perhaps, the use of the hyperbolic word “vastness” for the girl’s hair communicates something contextual; implying that such hair is worth the intergalactic attention of a visitor. The context is: behold the wonders of the Earth.

Nonetheless, even a small poem is as complex as a Swiss clock, full of pendulums and cogs. One fine, unobtrusive complexity that illustrates the characteristic interplay between housing, pressure, and contents is the interesting discrepancy between the poem’s first line and its title: They are similar, yet subtly different. They overlap and modify each other.

What is that difference? The first line of the poem conjures up an exotic Twilight Zone fiction narrative: This is the world, earthling. In contrast, the poem’s title, “Signs For Travelers” is more encompassing. “Signs for Travelers” is not a greeting; rather, it strongly suggests that the images in the poems are not mere things, but signs. Moreover, they are of significance not just to aliens, but to all travelers, a category that includes all of us mortal pilgrims.

In this way, we can say that as a housing, the title enlarges the application of the poem to deeper, more universal, and more existential implications. The premise of an address to outer space visitors may have more exotic, grandiose flavor, but the title of Follain’s poem has more gravitas. And this discrepancy, doubling, or jostling between the title and the first line is typical of how a poem works—we read and reread such a poem, because its various resonances, nuances, and inflections reveal themselves to us successively.

II

A different Follain poem, “The Art of War,” is more complex and jumbled than “Signs for Travelers” —it has a more fluid, shape-shifting organization. As you read it, notice how your impressionistic identification of context and contents, and their relationships, keeps shifting:

The Art Of War

At the window a rose

the color of a blonde’s young nipple

a mole walks underground

Peace they say to the dog

whose life is short.

The air remains full of sunlight.

Young men

learn how to make war

in order to redeem

a whole world they are told

but they still find the book

of theory unreadable.³

So much adventure in a small space! Many details or moments in this poem compete for primacy. As we read it, we wonder, which is more crucial in the idiom of the poem? Nipples, roses, dog, peace, kindness, remains? Which details or images are primary, and therefore contextualizing, and which are secondary, and therefore supplemental? Which is the nucleus around which all the other details orbit in supportive subordination?

No moment in the body of the poem does more to “contain” or “house” the poem than its title, “The Art of War.” The individual lines themselves are so diverse, it is inevitable that we resort to the title as a helpful unifying header.

If, however, we were to identify the internal dominant moment of “The Art of War,” we would choose the complex final sentence, identifiable by size, grammatical momentum, and complexity, with its many turns and developments.

Young men

learn how to make war

in order to redeem

a whole world they are told

but they still find the book

of theory unreadable.

Follain’s poem has a loose structure, and Follain’s work in general is the quintessence of the associative mode, which is to say, the relationships between its parts are largely inferential. Little is explicit, yet this last sentence in “The Art of War” carries much of the intelligence of the poem. It is a sequence in which, as the sentence unfolds across line breaks, a chunk at a time, we watch the poem’s emphasis and stance complicate and shift.

You can see, by the way, that this is a sentence that builds pressure through syntax, lineation, and, not least, meaning. And you could say that this sentence is crowded with complex relations: young men act on the world, but they in turn are acting in response to the world’s instructions.

We apprehend it all in a second; our cognitive process is swift, nimble, and resourceful at recognizing and adjusting the parameters of the poem, determining what is the essence of the poem, the housing. Every other inflection of the poem turns upon that structural recognition.

And, this second Follain poem leaves us on the doorstep of a veiled enigma, a raised eyebrow of inference. What is “the book of theory”? And why can it not be understood?

*******

You can see that this business of housing has everything to do with the interdependent nature of parts and wholes, the shifting relations between foreground and background. For, indeed, we have to perceive the whole in order to see how the parts work, in order to see what the hierarchies of primary and secondary information are—and that includes primary and secondary tones.

What, ultimately, does the omniscient speaker of Follain’s poem suggest? What is being emphasized among these diverse and subtle chords? Perhaps it is most wise here to be guided by tone. The tone in “The Art of War” might best be described as sorrow, registered at a considerable philosophical distance. The narrating voice practices a simultaneous tenderness and detachment. One can see that a didactic potential lies readily within the poet’s grasp—this could easily have been an antiwar poem—but that choice is not made by the writer.

In “The Art of War,” the play between contexts and contents is dynamic. The elements of the poem are in active and intelligent, intelligible conversation. We have the challenge and pleasure of responding to its veiled suggestions, and, to our best ability, we will integrate and hierarchize its many suggestions.

The interplay between any single detail of a poem and its whole shape is like the relationship between the string of a guitar and the resonating chamber behind it. The chamber of the whole is a background, which catches and echoes back rich complications and integrations, timbre and poignancy, irony and depth.

One striking example of such interplay between a detail and the whole can be found in lines four and five: “Peace, they say to the dog/whose life is short.” Though seemingly quite different from the dominant sentence of the poem, these lines resonate with sweet, slightly comic, and poignant relevance to the central spirit of the poem. It is a secondary moment which nonetheless substantially echoes and influences the whole, both reinforcing its center and enriching its tone.

If only half-consciously, we intuit the parallel between soldiers and dog; both are innocent, ignorant, and probably short-lived. Thus the blessing of dog by man seems especially poignant, prescient, and ignorant at once.

******

What if a friendly reader rearranged Follain’s poem to straighten out its odd kinks and “irregularities,” as you yourself might, if this was your poem and you were following workshop advice about clarification? What if our goal was to make the poem more unified and less ambiguous in its emphasis? Seeking to clarify its emphasis, one might cut and paste a little, and arrive at something like the following:

Why I Grow Flowers

The air remains full of sunlight.

a mole walks underground.

Young men

learn how to make war

in order to redeem

a whole world.

Peace they say to the dog

whose life is

short.

At the window a rose

the color of a blonde’s young nipple

This rebuilt poem has quite a different thrust. This version emphasizes the pleasures of peace, and seems to infer some sound reasons for applying for conscientious objector status. After all, it concludes with palpable arguments for peace: a flower garden and the promise of erotic adventure. In its favor, this revision is distinctly more unified than the original. Yet, unfortunately, it is a less dynamic and less interesting poem. Loose as it still is, and not without nuance, this version is a lesser poem.

Though inferior, this shuffle and reorganization, this turning up and down of volume, inflection and motif, is more or less what we do, is it not, every time we write a poem? In revision, we are seeking a dramatic shape for the best poem among several poems. We are hunting it to haunt it.

Such is the dialectic of parts and wholes, and such orchestration makes the difference between competence and ambitiousness, between formula and vision. All the agencies of sensibility are brought to bear in a collaboration of word choice, arrangement, suppression, addition, and syntactical choices.

The Elliptical Mode

To reiterate: poems have centers of gravity and complex internal structures. Apollinaire coined the term, “the internal frame,” to describe the way that a single internal detail—be it tone or image or statement—can be the establishing center or the organizing principle of a poem.

My examples, drawn from Follain, might suggest that a loose structure is the most dynamic for the reader and writer. Follain’s poems have hidden coherences, elements of distraction, and misdirection or obliquity. Part of their charm is their erratic quality. When elements are loosely conjoined and available for reshuffling of understanding, a high degree of skillful subjectivity is elicited and called for from the reader. Such poems can be more neurologically participatory, and exciting for the reader. Follain’s poems, as representative of the associative poetic tradition, would suggest so.

Yet, “looseness” is a tricky business in aesthetics, and a writer in an excited state of composition can easily misjudge the degree of coherence in the connect-the-dots mode. Which brings us to the perils of under-contextualization. Consider “Shooting the Bear,” a poem by a well-published contemporary American poet:

Shooting The Bear

Like the novel in verse, the novel inverse, dogs in this town

  drive cars.

Houses expose themselves slowly.

It’s flammable linseed oil to which the cabinetmaker who

  made our

Feeders after losing his fingers loses his shop.

We must think of the little nun’s happiness.

If we shoot the bear, it won’t bother the feeders.

The birds love our willow trees, and love is the word.⁴

What holds “Shooting the Bear” together, and is it held together enough? Anecdote? Whimsical tone? Lyric intelligence? As previously, we look for a moment or an element which is primary, which serves as an organizing principle around which the other moments can be arranged supportively. We look for a housing.

The best candidate for nucleus in “Shooting the Bear” is the complex third sentence, which contains the most story, and is staged in the most interesting way. The tale of the cabinetmaker feels like a parable that might provide the key to the gestalt of the entire poem.

It’s flammable linseed oil to which the cabinetmaker who made our

Feeders after losing his fingers loses his shop.

The syntax is intriguingly odd in a way that feels significant and intentional. Given a little time, we can sort out the tangled narrative information. Yet the construction is awkward, and places grammatical emphasis on linseed oil rather than cabinetmaker—but to what end is hard to fathom. It does not clarify, or strategically infer a scale of primary and secondary significance. And what about the lines preceding and following our sentence? What relationship does the linseed oil fire have to the little nun’s happiness, or to the assertion that dogs in this town drive cars? Dimly in the background, like a distant bell rung in a far-off monastery, seems to lie a thesis that life requires choices and includes damage, but it is a faint bell.

If we can’t identify a center of gravity, around which other elements can organize themselves supplementally, then we may be in the presence of a democracy, but not a poem. In reading “Shooting the Bear,” we taste the excitement of suspense, but not the gratification of closure. Ultimately, we have only the mystique of mystification. We may appreciate the pleasure of an eccentric mind, or oddity of style, but not the way that style is recognizably a resourceful response to experience.

“Shooting the Bear” is representative of a certain strain of contemporary American poetry, an aesthetic whose idea of art is to obscure context. It favors a drunkenness of ellipsis and arrangement. The idea is to cultivate the pleasure of elusiveness, which is close to the pleasure of mystery. But there is a difference between elusiveness and evasiveness, and between mystery and obfuscation. Such a poem may seem generous for its inclusion of such diverse contents—yet it does not enclose them, it does not house or contain them in a precise and directive way. Therefore, it does not gather or contain power.

The main device of “Shooting the Bear” is ellipsis, the art of leaving things out; and in poetry, we love the synaptic challenge and promise of an elliptical poem. After all, the juxtaposition, of unlike things is a basic principle of poetry—think of the elegant minimalistic constructions of Joseph Cornell.

In contemporary poetry, the surface of Association and the surface of Disassociation can look very much alike. Associative thinking arises from delight about the way things go together. Disassociative poetry arises from an emphasis on how things do not connect. The difference between “Shooting the Bear” and “The Art of War” is that Follain’s poem is better-designed to echo and orchestrate the proportions of experience.

In contrast, “Shooting the Bear” is a sort of bemused mirage of a poem. It wears a confidence that sounds plausible, but, we must remember, poetry is not a faith-based charity. No housing means no containment of energy, no portability, no accumulating pressure, and therefore no shelf life. What energy is here will dissipate, will leak away quickly. It is remarkable how a poem or a poetics can have a temporary charisma, which lasts awhile but then fades away when the cultural circumstances, or the neurological moment, passes.

The Orchestral Mode: Boland

In sharp contrast, Eavan Boland’s poem, “The Parcel,” is a masterfully precise and complexly hierarchichal poem. It contains many useful lessons about the relation between details and housing. “The Parcel” is a poem which operates on a whole other level of rigor and complexity than Follain’s. It is rich with primary and secondary elements that balance forward momentum and sideways enrichment. It contains intellectual work as well as personal, emotional, coloration and emphasis.

The Parcel

There are dying arts and

one of them is

the way my mother used to make up a parcel.

Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood.

The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly

or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.

It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open

and it unrolled quickly across the floor.

All business, all distance.

Then the scissors.

Not a glittering let-up but a dour

pair, black thumb-holes,

the shears themselves the color of the rained-

on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up

in the season of lilac and snapdragon

and stood there arguing the rate for

sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair

and this one. All-in.

The ball of twine was coarsely braided

and only a shade less yellow than

the flame she held under the blunt

end of the sealing wax until

it melted and spread into a brittle

terracotta medal.

Her hair disheveled, her tongue between her teeth,

she wrote the address in the quarters

twine had divided the surface into.

Names and places. Crayon and fountain pen.

The town underlined once. The country twice.

It’s ready for the post

she would say and if we want to know

where it went to—

a craft lost before we missed it—watch it go

into the burlap sack for collection.

See it disappear. Say

this is how it died

out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains,

the tracks for them disappearing

before our eyes,

next to station names we can’t remember

on a continent we no longer

recognize. The sealing wax cracking.

The twine unraveling. The destination illegible.⁵

One can feel how concerted, which is to say, how concert-like this poem is, how concise and coordinated in every dimension, and yet how rich the relationships are between its parts.

One of the most interesting aspects is how the poem opens. “The Parcel” is largely a poem of personal memory, yet Boland uses a discursive premise, or envelope, in which to wrap that narrative. “There are dying arts,” she says, imposing an intellectual and social frame around the poem, “and one of them is how my mother made up a parcel.”

It is the kind of decision we all make when we are beginning a poem. Yet how much depends upon that first step! The stakes become more evident if one considers what the opening would sound like if Boland had begun with the line, “My mother used to make up a parcel.”

What are the motives for this interesting, opening strategy? The answer is pretty clear; the poet wishes to resist an autobiographical sentimentality, to control the flow of emotion. For a poet like Boland, with a very controlled temperament, this is a brilliant choice, one which counterweights passion with intellectual reserve. This opening also has a profound consequence on the scale and housing of the poem—the framework is officially not “my family story,” but the larger notion of “dying arts.”

The opening is not the only way in which emotion is curbed in “The Parcel.” Another technique of restraining passion is visible in the poet’s recurrent use of terse grammatical fragments: “Paper first. Mid-brown and coarse-grained as wood./The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly.” Such curt units of speech, with no pronoun attached to them, disguise and restrain the pressure of personal feeling that might overflow in a more expressive grammar.

Another marvelous instance of complex relations between housing and details in “The Parcel” is to be found in Boland’s athletic use of metaphor. Often, substantial amounts of narrative are smuggled or enveloped inside an extended figurative passage, like the one that starts in line ten: “Then the scissors./…the shears themselves the color of the rained-/on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up/in the season of lilac and snapdragon/and stood there arguing the rate for/sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair/and this one.”

Even in the middle of a sentence, complex relations exist between packages and contents. Reading this passage is like a rollercoaster ride, and it demands of us, and rewards us, for doing all the complex work of going back and forth between part to whole. Boland exerts the same skill a moment later, in the next line, when she describes the ball of twine as “only a shade less yellow” than

the flame she held under the blunt

end of the sealing wax until

it melted and spread into a brittle

terracotta medal.

Every distinctive poet has a particular, peculiar way of putting things together, of constructing relations of subordination and dominance, and Boland’s metaphorical virtuosity is one example. The hierarchies through which we measure and represent the world are perceptual, grammatical, and metaphorical. We each do it in our own way. Ultimately, such devices and habits are what constitute sensibility.

For all its restraint, “The Parcel” has unmistakably intimate points of emotion: “It’s ready for the post she’d say,” or in the vision of the mother’s tongue between her concentrating teeth. These are intimate, emotionally charged moments, but they are sparing and undramatized in presentation; moreover, they are embedded in the surface of a much more objective, cool narration.

In the conclusion of “The Parcel,” the poet chooses to dilate and enlarge the perspective of the poem once more (as she did at the beginning of the poem), making her subject much larger than one person’s personal loss. Thus, “The Parcel” becomes an elegy for the past and for the future, which has lost such tactile intimacy with things and places. The poem is an elegy in which the personal and the collective loss are joined in a way so that they richly augment each other. Again, we might consider how different Boland’s poem would have been if it had begun “My mother often used to make up a parcel.”

We might call the personal anecdotes in “The Parcel” subsets of the whole. All poems have subsets; as long as the relationship between the elements and the whole of the poem is clear, such subsets can contain vast, deep materials. This too is a matter of hierarchy, whether it is loosely implied, or tightly constructed by grammar. One can do very worthwhile things in a subset of a poem.

*****

Another way to describe the purpose of effective housing is to say that any poem should hold up its best moment to its greatest advantage. If you cannot recognize the best moment of your draft and position it, you risk obscuring your primary treasure among a lot of other effects. You will make a muddy poem. Thus, to design a good housing is essential.

*****

Ann Carson’s poem “God’s List of Liquids” provides one final example of the infinite athleticism and dexterity with which contents and contexts are constantly reorganizing themselves within a poem. Carson’s poem, to utilize our terminology, has multiple shifting contexts, yet they coexist in conversation, and somehow don’t trip over each other. Here is the poem:

God’s List Of Liquids   

It was a November night of wind.

Leaves tore past the window.

God had the book of life open at PLEASURE

And was holding the pages down with one hand

Because of the wind at the door.

For I made their flesh as a sieve

Wrote god at the top of the page:

And then listed in order:

Alcohol

Blood

Gratitude

Memory

Semen

Song

Tears

Time⁶

The structural genius of Carson’s poem lies in the way it uses the interplay between categories and particulars: Pleasure, Liquids, and Sieves with gratitude, semen, tears.

Carson’s poem begins with the great convenience offered by narrative frame: God has a book in November. Within that fabular frame we get three contexts: Pleasure, Liquids, and Sieves. The genius of Carson’s poem is the way it engineers the interplay of these categories, like a crossword puzzle.

The book of life is opened to the page of Pleasure. The existence of “a list of liquids” is also central, as represented in the title. One more framing concept is given to us in the idea presented by the italicized, Biblical sounding phrase, “for I made their flesh as a sieve.” The human body therefore is characterized as something that liquids flow through pleasantly. All three of these key word-concepts act as framing contexts for the poem. As we read Carson’s poem, and especially when we arrive at the list of “substances,” we are forced to collate and coordinate each item in terms of these three presiding contexts: liquid, pleasure, sieve.

On its own, the device of the list is a fairly primitive literary form. Primitive because it is not subject to any grammar but sequence. But in Carson’s poem, the list functions richly and complexly because of the surrounding contexts, and the irregular way in which the list-items conform or don’t conform to our expectations. While a reader works through the list, he is scrambling to contextualize the items—“alcohol, blood, gratitude.” The unlikeness of the items on the list makes this an adventure between contents and contexts, wholes and parts, backgrounds and foregrounds. As we go on correlating and collating, as the list expands conceptually to include more dimensions of the human condition than we might have expected (memory, tears, time), we are also involved in a drama of escalating poignancy and implication. The last few items on the list amount to a climax—tears and time. Song, tears, and time are all, we understand, liquids, and, all, we must acknowledge, are forms of pleasure, all of which, we understand, pass through us. We are thus brought, in a very tactile way, to the realization that we cannot hold anything.

What the radical interplay between details and contexts, between housing and items, and the constant reorganizing that “God’s List of Liquids” provokes us to do is complex, yet perfectly lucid. This is the kind of dramatic power that can be achieved in an infinite variety of ways formally if a poet is ruthless and attentive to structures and priorities. Such ingenious, surprising poems are a perpetual motivation to keep keen our ambition in learning and discovering new ways to construct our poem’s world.             

Tony Hoagland’s collection, Unincorporated Persons In the Late Honda Dynasty, was published by Graywolf in 2010. Real Sofistikashun, essays on craft and poetry, was published in 2006. He currently teaches in the graduate writing program of the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.

Notes

1. Robert Creely, “No way to” from “Eight Plus,” Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2. Jean Follain, “Travellers,” translated by W.S. Merwin, Transparence of the World (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2003).
3. Follain, “The Art of War.”
4. Lesle Lewis, “Shooting the Bear,” from Small Boat (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003).
5. Eavan Boland, “The Parcel,” from In a Time of Violence (New York: W.W. Norton Publishers, 1994).
6. Ann Carson, “God’s List of Liquids,” Glass, Irony, God (New York: New Directions Press, 1995).