Re: Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest with al
WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Sat, 26 Jul 1997 11:42:27 -0600 (MDT)
john makes good sense if we put ray ford (poet) in between corrine and
bunny (muses) and remember rays's first muse (mom). Where a poet goes to
"trigger" poems is pretty individual, but I've been trying to say that
most good poets go to dark places in themselves to get poetry and
IF is, in my reading, about the sad understanding that ford must choose
darker places (after getting beyond them). To get back to his real poetry
includes a decision to choose bunny who is echoic of ray's mother. Ford's
muse in not about decent, honest Park Ave life, but about problematic
women. Ford is pretty removed from day to day life as a character, so I
think it's safe to guess poetry is what motivates him on both a day to day
level and on a life level, plus I think the eliot allusions guide us to
frame the story with ideas about poetry and poetry writing.
I don't think jds could ever make the same decision, but understood that
some of the deep places good writing comes from are disjunctive with
typical expectations about how to live a decent middle class or upper
class life. If you think about it, salinger manages to pose ford's lower
classness in some pretty powerful ways without condescending and
considering that jds was basically a middle class child whose family rose
to uppper middleclass life, then you have to admire his insight and
ability to reach beyond himself...I think jds was so successful because he
may not understand a lot about lower class life, but he understands
poetry more than most. To take this "inverted forest" thinking into the
"poet-tree" forest of modern poetry, what I admire about salinger is that
he knows being a poet involves much more than writing poems...that the
white space on the poet's page is the poet's life forcing the black ink to
hold onto something of the poet's living moments, and in many ways, is
more about the poetry than words can ever be...will