Finding the Undertow

On revealing our deeper subject matter. (Plus--upcoming classes)

Subjects A and B                                                 

   So—something I want to talk about is the apparent subject of the poem, and its second, buried subject. People have different names for these two tiers, whether in an essay or in a poem.  And, regardless of what we call the two tiers, every successful poem has both of these.

   In other words, the poem may seem to be about a corn field, but underneath, it may be about loneliness, or impermanence, or lost love. Take, for example, Mark Doty’s beautiful poem “Little Mammoth.” It is, on the surface, about the discovery of the remains of a baby wooly mammoth. It begins with the physical description of the body and ends with,

“and I am still one month old, and

forty thousand years without my mother.”

    Instantly, it deepens to a bottomless elegy, a longing not just for the physical mother, but also, the primal longing we all have for that lost seat of “home.”

   A poem is always doing a sleight of hand: on the surface, I give you one thing to contemplate. Underneath, I am stirring up something else.

Undertow

I like to call this “something else” the Subject B. Or “The Undertow”

This is how I’m going to refer to the second subject : as undertow. An undertow is something dangerous. It’s hidden and can carry you out to sea, unexpectedly. This is what a good poem does. It carries the reader out into deeper waters than they’d planned, and usually has them in its grip before they’ve noticed.

So, in another example, Jane Hirshfield’s wonderful short poem, “A Cottony Fate,” begins with a grammar lesson from her one and only writing teacher.

“Avoid or,”                                          the poem warns,

“it troubles the mind

as a held-out piece of meat

disturbs a dog.”                                       It ends with:

“Now, I too am sixty.

There was no other life.”

We’ve gone from a simple writing suggestion to a lesson in regret. Why regret anything? There was no other way. No “or,” as it were.

Poets are purveyors of the hidden. Sellers of the unsaid. Vendors of the void. They point toward what is just out of sight, just below the underbrush, off the path.  Jericho brown (as I believe I mentioned earlier) says, “It’s not that people don’t like poetry, it’s that they resist the soul-work it requires.” 

The job of poets is to make sure that that the surfaces of their poem engage and even entertain the reader, while what lurks below pulls the reader out to sea.

Subject A, The Initiating Subject

Subject A is usually identifiable and concrete: ie, this is a poem about flies. Or this is a poem about camping with my father, for example, or about a picnic. Or it’s about mice. Or it’s about someone falling from a bridge. There is a presenting subject. It can be concrete, as per the above examples, or it might be an abstract idea or state. Such as “happiness” or “regret.” A poem about desire. At any rate, it’s something we can sum up in a few words. Often just one. It may also be a dialectic, where it is talking about two things at once. I have a poem about a bird and kissing, for example. It could even be a braid, with three topics. In which case it can have a composite subject A. No worries! It will still move towards a singular subject B.

Subject B, The Undertow

Then along comes the Subject B. There might be echoes of it as we move through the poem. In fact, there usually are hints of what’s to come. It’s the current that begins to sweep into the poem and carry it out to sea––to distance it from its other relationships and bring it out into new territory.

 I say dangerous, because it’s at this point that the writer might begin to feel a slight anxiousness and exhilaration, as though they are being carried up into the air in a glider. We don’t know where we are going or what is going to happen next. In the writing process, this is a good time to let things into your poem, to see what kind of accumulation begins to build, which images suggest themselves. It’s a time to be porous and expectant. It’s the stage of writing many of us dread and live for.

    When subject B does reveal itself, either spontaneously, or as the result of having tried a number of things and decided on one, I find it tends to differ qualitatively from Subject A. While subject A may be something ordinary, or at least, concrete, subject B is much more likely to exist in the realm of the mind: “This is how we are as humans.” “Here is what desire does.” “There is only this moment.” etc.  There tends to be a more mental quality to subject B, as it takes the initiating topic and expands it to include a greater realization or awareness of the world.

(To be continued in class!)

If you are interested in learning about how we get to the currents underlying our poems, keep an eye open for upcoming announcements of spring 2023 classes. I intend to lead a small group/small groups of poets into a deeper dive with craft talks and generative writing time.