"Banish Misfortune"(title of a traditional Irish jig)

Remarks from the Fray:

I like the apt coincidence of lines like "in the wrong neck" and "fallen to the fading," or the deft precision of "excavation / of imploded rot"—these are evidence of a craft that must be taken seriously.

Less compelling are the manhandled enjambment of "circum- / navigation" or "the future's sun- / lit mud room"; still less wonderful is the incipient intellectualism of some of this poem. I got derailed early on by "birds intending stasis," for example. The idea is good, but did ever a bird "intend stasis"? Was there no other set of words to use to describe the hope for or assumption of permanence these nest-builders felt?

The intellectualism of the poem creates a distance, I think, because deep down this poem is dealing with a sentimental subject: the death of a pet dog. What else are the climactic "retired blue collar, / bangles of expired vaccinations" supposed to tell us? The poet's instincts are right: it is best to tread lightly here, for with such a subject it is a thin couple of lines between poignancy and mawkishness; and yet I still wanted to feel something a little more than "steam / rising from [my] coffee."

Maybe the project is hopeless; maybe there can be no poem about a dead pet that doesn't fall on one side of the divide between sentiment and the sentimental. That cannot be known, for you cannot prove a negative proposition. But for me this poem fails to offer proof that such a balance may be struck.

--rob_said_that

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The title brings to mind the misguided idea that if we dance the jig, we can banish our misfortunes. But Sneeden's poem reminds us that we're merely distracting ourselves from the inevitable facing up to those misfortunes.

We may think we're "out of the woods," i.e. past our misfortune, whatever it may be, but we're really only in a different neck of the woods. (I think this is a strange line, almost comical, but the narrator appears to be serious throughout the poem.) By distracting ourselves, we're not that different from birds that think they can achieve stasis by building a nest in a stationary car's grill, not realizing that eventually the car's headlights will come on and the car will move.

And then the poem moves to its major metaphor. A bee is burrowing around a windfall apple, exploring the "imploded rot" (i.e. misfortune) within. We distance ourselves by not watching the bee directly, but by watching the dog watching the bee. And because of our supposed distance from the rot, we can be amused. (And how can we forget the obvious reference to the apple of experience in the garden of Eden?)

But the narrator reminds us that we're fooling ourselves, that someday ("the future's" room) the intermediary between us and misfortune (the Irish jig or, in this case, the dog) will be gone (the dog's blue collar with its bangles of expired vaccinations hanging unused on the rusty nail). And when the jig is over, when the dog is dead, we still must confront our misfortunes.

I still don't understand "the steam rising from our coffee," and, as I said earlier, I'm not crazy about the "wrong neck," but by and large I like Sneeden's use of simple language and simple scenes to present his ideas.

--MaryAnn

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I have a real difficulty relating this poem's title to its other wherewithals. I was not/am not able to get past the motion that "Banish Misfortune" is a prescriptive word-set, while the body of the poem is a descriptive narration of observable natural events/sequences used to frame the 'We' of 'are not out of the woods/maby in the wrong neck ~ '...retired blue collar,/bangles of expired vaccinations.'; the only way I can connect the titie to this viewpoint is to posit that "Banish Misfortune" is a soto voce wishful thinking, as there is nothing in the poem, to me, that suggests that misfortune has been/will be banished except by the grave/coffin as suggested by the 'future's sun-/lit mud roon and rusty nail.' which is what I think is awaiting the "We"/'not out of the woods/wrong neck', that thing that lies beyond the deaf and dumb virons of the grave with which we pray/pussey-foot around with, depending on how close that 'grave/thing' beyond actually is to us. HOWEVER: once I let go of all this title/poem stuff, I find the poem a very good read, probably because the nature images found easy resonance in my own blue collar/rural background. Also, there is an intriguing, centrifugal sense of motion that comes from the poem's fixed things: birds that will move on, a junked car that once was a thing of motion, the bee, the rotting apple, coffee steam, sunlight; these all suggest a motion that is released into the ever ongoing flow of life, motion that was stalled inside objects set free again. Again, the poem is well worth the read.

--Bratsche

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Well, I liked this poem, convoluted as it might be. [...] The human watching the dog watching the bee -- that was pretty clever. Once a dog starts watching a bee, it is nearly impossible, despite previous painful memories, for the dog to keep from snapping at it. So we sense the rot and decay in the apple, how the bee is attracted to it, how the dog is attracted to the bee, and wait for the inevitable to happen (to both the dog and the bee).

And just as the owner has not experienced the dog's death, he senses it, too. He sees mortality coming, can do nothing to stop it, so in some future sunroom the dog is already dead and his collar and vaccination tags hang from the wall.

I wouldn't call it a morbid or even depressing poem, more a philosophical musing wherein a certain ironic beauty exists in a world where birds build nests in temporarily parked cars. The transiency of life, the sudden speed at which it can change, the shocking dangers of existence are all encapsulated in a little backyard vignette.

--islandtime

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The aspect I enjoy is that the language is almost impenetrable, a series of concentrated images that elide into one another in what can be described as an entranced narrator's soft murmuring description. [...] This is a poem of sitting still in momentary respite away from traffic, cell phones, demanding children or creditors, where the mind balances and weaves together a number of vaguely recalled strands of thought, while the eyes brings to the conscious level arrangements within nature that are there before our intruding gaze and seem extraordinary when noticed. Even more extraordinary is the fleeting feeling of stepping back away from the frame one's imagination has placed around the tableau and senses themselves as part of the strange little diorama, the observer feeling them self observed.

Sneeden uses simple, clear words to make his motions clear and concise, and provides us with a descriptive style that gives us vision, like a slow panning camera simulating a set of eyes taking in the terrain and its incidental arrangements. [...] This is not a poem that tries to abolish the world in pursuit of the perfect imagistic center to find refuge
within; Sneeden's soft spoken narrator acknowledges the material world beyond this delicate frame and finds a hushed wonder in actually seeing what one has known only in theory, that nature will eventually and always grow around, over and through the best constructions humanity can throw at it. The birds building a nest in the grill next to the head light of an abandoned car is the simplest , clearest evidence that nature will not be contained, fenced in, or asphalted over.

--Ted_Burke

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