Remarks from the Fray:
There are real chronological problems with this poem. That was the year he abandoned the couch, but "it will now be carted to the dump." In other words, this narrator has already attempted to place the abandonment of the couch in the past, even if it is happening right now. Everything he places in the past as having already happened in "that year" is happening now: the mourning the abandonment of fictions, etc.
But how is displacing the present into the past an abandonment of fiction? To claim that he has already mourned the things he needed to mourn "in that year" when that year is right now is a way to displace having to mourn at all, and to sound mighty Romantic about it too. The opening lines, rhetorically and romantically satisfying as they are, are a bluff. My darlings, he is trying to draw us into his web of self-deceit.
This is also seen in the walk in the botanical garden to find the "clearing." For someone who has abandoned Reason to groove on a new, Taoist philosophy, it is awfully strange to be using a botanical garden, where the plants are forced into a rational scientific system of labeling etc, as one's final metaphor. The metaphor implies escape from the rational structures of the botanical garden to the "clearing", but it seems as though this is to retread the path already taken on the green couch: in which rationality itself (the botanical garden) leads to irrationality.
If he has really found a clearing and let go, why give us the very tedious laundry list of places the couch has gone? This list threatens to destroy the poem, it is a pointless list of facts, unless the point is to show something about the narrator: his psychological attachment, despite his desire to become one with nature.
This is a guy who has stopped struggling and has told himself the ultimate fiction: that because his past struggles at comprehension only led to fictions, giving up and tuning out and emptying oneself is actually a heroic, romantic embrace of the real truth. This is a guy who wears his trousers rolled.
--slippedvoussoir
(To reply, click here.)
This is a weepy little exercise, written by a professional poet who knows the audience he was writing this poem for, an intimacy having less to do with shared values than knowing which subjects and what words can move a reader to awaken some easily agitated nest of sentimentality. Hirsch is one of the better grey-suited lyric poets of our time, but there are times when his professional kicks in - when his inspiration is flagging - and we end up with stanzas that seem to exist only to push buttons and bring the unexpected tear. "Conceit" has everything to do with Hirsch's "Green Couch", drawing upon a poet's life of homes and apartments filled with bookshelves and tacky furniture, a life characterized by the fact that the narrator remembers personal milestones by what turns his reading habits took.
This [poem] might be marvelous if Hirsch had spared us the tangents and conditional ironies and provided rest spots along the way, a lacuna supreme. "Green Couch" would work well if it had been boiled down to essentials, those fewer items of physical detail and biography that would have more plausible secret history. One then could poeticize about how these things get intriguing, as conspiracy towards making you understand the complexity of existence as one ages. But what we have here are several plots of several B movies.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
"Green Couch" by Edward Hirsch is a lovely meditation on how one must re-create his life on a smaller scale after he loses his youthful fictions.
The narrator has reduced his world to very small things. "I go back and forth to work" suggests a routine, suggests a job, not a career. And the last two lines are heartbreaking – he walks, not in wild nature, but in a manufactured "botanical garden," and only on the weekends, when it doesn't interfere with work. And even in this manageable garden, he "take[s] a narrow green path to the clearing." "Green" is now a narrow path, not a suggestion of infinite possibilities. His goal is not an over-arching understanding suggested by the philosophers, but merely a "clearing." (The poem nicely parallels this measured, controlled approach with its lack of much enjambment between stanzas.)
Has the narrator "settled" for something less, or is he merely coming to terms with the way things are? Will he succeed in his attempt to speak the language of the unconscious? In this lovely and wise poem, Edward Hirsch leaves these questions for us to answer in our own way.
--MaryAnn
(To reply, click here.)
(7/26)
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Remarks from the Fray:
There are real chronological problems with this poem. That was the year he abandoned the couch, but "it will now be carted to the dump." In other words, this narrator has already attempted to place the abandonment of the couch in the past, even if it is happening right now. Everything he places in the past as having already happened in "that year" is happening now: the mourning the abandonment of fictions, etc.
But how is displacing the present into the past an abandonment of fiction? To claim that he has already mourned the things he needed to mourn "in that year" when that year is right now is a way to displace having to mourn at all, and to sound mighty Romantic about it too. The opening lines, rhetorically and romantically satisfying as they are, are a bluff. My darlings, he is trying to draw us into his web of self-deceit.
This is also seen in the walk in the botanical garden to find the "clearing." For someone who has abandoned Reason to groove on a new, Taoist philosophy, it is awfully strange to be using a botanical garden, where the plants are forced into a rational scientific system of labeling etc, as one's final metaphor. The metaphor implies escape from the rational structures of the botanical garden to the "clearing", but it seems as though this is to retread the path already taken on the green couch: in which rationality itself (the botanical garden) leads to irrationality.
If he has really found a clearing and let go, why give us the very tedious laundry list of places the couch has gone? This list threatens to destroy the poem, it is a pointless list of facts, unless the point is to show something about the narrator: his psychological attachment, despite his desire to become one with nature.
This is a guy who has stopped struggling and has told himself the ultimate fiction: that because his past struggles at comprehension only led to fictions, giving up and tuning out and emptying oneself is actually a heroic, romantic embrace of the real truth. This is a guy who wears his trousers rolled.
--slippedvoussoir
(To reply, click here.)
This is a weepy little exercise, written by a professional poet who knows the audience he was writing this poem for, an intimacy having less to do with shared values than knowing which subjects and what words can move a reader to awaken some easily agitated nest of sentimentality. Hirsch is one of the better grey-suited lyric poets of our time, but there are times when his professional kicks in - when his inspiration is flagging - and we end up with stanzas that seem to exist only to push buttons and bring the unexpected tear. "Conceit" has everything to do with Hirsch's "Green Couch", drawing upon a poet's life of homes and apartments filled with bookshelves and tacky furniture, a life characterized by the fact that the narrator remembers personal milestones by what turns his reading habits took.
This [poem] might be marvelous if Hirsch had spared us the tangents and conditional ironies and provided rest spots along the way, a lacuna supreme. "Green Couch" would work well if it had been boiled down to essentials, those fewer items of physical detail and biography that would have more plausible secret history. One then could poeticize about how these things get intriguing, as conspiracy towards making you understand the complexity of existence as one ages. But what we have here are several plots of several B movies.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
"Green Couch" by Edward Hirsch is a lovely meditation on how one must re-create his life on a smaller scale after he loses his youthful fictions.
The narrator has reduced his world to very small things. "I go back and forth to work" suggests a routine, suggests a job, not a career. And the last two lines are heartbreaking – he walks, not in wild nature, but in a manufactured "botanical garden," and only on the weekends, when it doesn't interfere with work. And even in this manageable garden, he "take[s] a narrow green path to the clearing." "Green" is now a narrow path, not a suggestion of infinite possibilities. His goal is not an over-arching understanding suggested by the philosophers, but merely a "clearing." (The poem nicely parallels this measured, controlled approach with its lack of much enjambment between stanzas.)
Has the narrator "settled" for something less, or is he merely coming to terms with the way things are? Will he succeed in his attempt to speak the language of the unconscious? In this lovely and wise poem, Edward Hirsch leaves these questions for us to answer in our own way.
--MaryAnn
(To reply, click here.)
(7/26)