Remarks from the Fray:
Gail Mazur's poem "In Another Country" describes the narrator's dislocating experience -- probably as Poet in Residence, in Houston -- far away from her home in Boston. The contrasts between the two cities, as well as her ambivalence about her temporary "home," cause her to feel as if she is almost "In Another Country." But ultimately, the poem is not as good as Mazur's earlier poem about the same topic.
Perhaps the narrator and another poetry teacher had switched jobs, since she was living in the house of the man whose job she had assumed. And in the very first line, she states the problem – "For months I perched on the surface of his life." To perch on something suggests resting temporarily on an elevated place. In this case, the narrator could never delve deeper into the man's life. She only could know the surface details of his life – the alphabetized poets in his bookcase, the Saarinen womb chair from his mother-in-law, the double bed he must have shared with someone. Rather than become immersed in his books, she "turned the pages of one of his books, / then another." She sat in his chair just before sleep, probably because its womb-like form, its provenance, comforted her like a bowl of home-made beet soup. One of the few things they had in common was insomnia – sorrow or wanderlust for another place?
Houston itself was disorienting. Rather than the Charles River of Boston, she now had only a ship canal that is used to move oil, the smell of which may have been something natives were used to, but she was not. She says she liked the "the warm humid air, Spanish moss festooning / the live oaks everywhere." But when she starts describing the fossils embedded in the granite of her new classroom building, she trails off into an ellipsis while thinking about "tiny ancient sea creatures" so out of place (like herself) in this place.
Mazur uses the image of wearing one maroon shoe and one blue shoe to suggest she was in a mental place that was neither here nor there. In fact, she does more than suggest it, since she spells out that maroon is for Houston and blue is for distant Boston. And she heavy-handedly has the narrator dress in the dark, so she can "explain" the shoes in two colors.
Unfortunately, Mazur is just revisiting a topic she wrote about some years ago. And her earlier poem about temporarily relocating to Houston is a much finer poem, as it examines the narrator's sexual longings for a man in Boston, her doubts about her ambition by identifying with various, equally dislocated, animals in the Houston zoo.
--Mary Ann
(To reply, click here.)
"In Another Country" is a big , comfortable chair of a poem to write, a familiar and over upholstered seat in the middle of a crowded room where the poet can plop and sink into the cushions, gaze at the books and ephemera surrounding here, musing, or rather half musing, on a snail-paced account of the week that is more wistful than touching, brittle rather than robust. Mazur has written of being dislocated before, and has done some interesting things with the idea of culture shock within the larger stretches of one's own culture meeting up with minor key alienation to produce a sense of fleeting anxiety .This, though, is a return too many to the same well.
The writing is shiftless, too cute--are we really supposed to think that her Houston students are such hicks that they shyly steal gazes at her mismatched shoes in the assumption that this is a fashion trend from the East Coast?-and smug. Not that Mazur is smug herself, but there is a tone and an flapping disregard for thematic tightness where her comfort level for the details she is sifting through, highlighting and making half-formed asides about excludes the others in attendance, the readers. There's not a poet alive who hasn't written reams of poems one might consider "practice runs" or "finger exercises" that prepare one for a substantial bit of writing, and here Mazur suffers the embarrassing, albeit non fatal indignity of mistaking her notes for a poem for the poem itself.
She is more interior designer here than poet, moving the furniture from one corner to the next, bringing in new pieces, refusing to toss anything out; someone might tell her that it's a bad habit to exhibit one's erudition in the form of formula name dropping without a mention of an idea, a notion, a metaphor any of these writers have written or said offhand, let alone conducting the work to expand on the paraphrase and produce a discourse . The addition of these names to the poem's length reaffirms the amateur interior decorator analogy, as they're treated like pillows and throw rugs one leaves about a space to brighten the place up.
It's fitting that she end the poem with a paraphrase of an old joke relating to the mismatched shoes she stunned her Houston students with. Likewise, it's likely she has a dozen poems in her files just like this one, earnest gatherings of incidental autobiography and tidbits of wit and self-effacement, some of which make it out of the drawer and fulfill a reader's expectation. This isn't one of those lucky poems. This is dizzy, torn, and mumbled, and the associative leaps Mazur tries don't make it over that yawning abyss of self-reference and land in a terrain where her subject is less private and insulated, more animated, more full of life we can empathize with.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
(9/14)
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Remarks from the Fray:
Gail Mazur's poem "In Another Country" describes the narrator's dislocating experience -- probably as Poet in Residence, in Houston -- far away from her home in Boston. The contrasts between the two cities, as well as her ambivalence about her temporary "home," cause her to feel as if she is almost "In Another Country." But ultimately, the poem is not as good as Mazur's earlier poem about the same topic.
Perhaps the narrator and another poetry teacher had switched jobs, since she was living in the house of the man whose job she had assumed. And in the very first line, she states the problem – "For months I perched on the surface of his life." To perch on something suggests resting temporarily on an elevated place. In this case, the narrator could never delve deeper into the man's life. She only could know the surface details of his life – the alphabetized poets in his bookcase, the Saarinen womb chair from his mother-in-law, the double bed he must have shared with someone. Rather than become immersed in his books, she "turned the pages of one of his books, / then another." She sat in his chair just before sleep, probably because its womb-like form, its provenance, comforted her like a bowl of home-made beet soup. One of the few things they had in common was insomnia – sorrow or wanderlust for another place?
Houston itself was disorienting. Rather than the Charles River of Boston, she now had only a ship canal that is used to move oil, the smell of which may have been something natives were used to, but she was not. She says she liked the "the warm humid air, Spanish moss festooning / the live oaks everywhere." But when she starts describing the fossils embedded in the granite of her new classroom building, she trails off into an ellipsis while thinking about "tiny ancient sea creatures" so out of place (like herself) in this place.
Mazur uses the image of wearing one maroon shoe and one blue shoe to suggest she was in a mental place that was neither here nor there. In fact, she does more than suggest it, since she spells out that maroon is for Houston and blue is for distant Boston. And she heavy-handedly has the narrator dress in the dark, so she can "explain" the shoes in two colors.
Unfortunately, Mazur is just revisiting a topic she wrote about some years ago. And her earlier poem about temporarily relocating to Houston is a much finer poem, as it examines the narrator's sexual longings for a man in Boston, her doubts about her ambition by identifying with various, equally dislocated, animals in the Houston zoo.
--Mary Ann
(To reply, click here.)
"In Another Country" is a big , comfortable chair of a poem to write, a familiar and over upholstered seat in the middle of a crowded room where the poet can plop and sink into the cushions, gaze at the books and ephemera surrounding here, musing, or rather half musing, on a snail-paced account of the week that is more wistful than touching, brittle rather than robust. Mazur has written of being dislocated before, and has done some interesting things with the idea of culture shock within the larger stretches of one's own culture meeting up with minor key alienation to produce a sense of fleeting anxiety .This, though, is a return too many to the same well.
The writing is shiftless, too cute--are we really supposed to think that her Houston students are such hicks that they shyly steal gazes at her mismatched shoes in the assumption that this is a fashion trend from the East Coast?-and smug. Not that Mazur is smug herself, but there is a tone and an flapping disregard for thematic tightness where her comfort level for the details she is sifting through, highlighting and making half-formed asides about excludes the others in attendance, the readers. There's not a poet alive who hasn't written reams of poems one might consider "practice runs" or "finger exercises" that prepare one for a substantial bit of writing, and here Mazur suffers the embarrassing, albeit non fatal indignity of mistaking her notes for a poem for the poem itself.
She is more interior designer here than poet, moving the furniture from one corner to the next, bringing in new pieces, refusing to toss anything out; someone might tell her that it's a bad habit to exhibit one's erudition in the form of formula name dropping without a mention of an idea, a notion, a metaphor any of these writers have written or said offhand, let alone conducting the work to expand on the paraphrase and produce a discourse . The addition of these names to the poem's length reaffirms the amateur interior decorator analogy, as they're treated like pillows and throw rugs one leaves about a space to brighten the place up.
It's fitting that she end the poem with a paraphrase of an old joke relating to the mismatched shoes she stunned her Houston students with. Likewise, it's likely she has a dozen poems in her files just like this one, earnest gatherings of incidental autobiography and tidbits of wit and self-effacement, some of which make it out of the drawer and fulfill a reader's expectation. This isn't one of those lucky poems. This is dizzy, torn, and mumbled, and the associative leaps Mazur tries don't make it over that yawning abyss of self-reference and land in a terrain where her subject is less private and insulated, more animated, more full of life we can empathize with.
--Ted_Burke
(To reply, click here.)
(9/14)