Word: poeme
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...poem begins tranquilly, with recollections of childhood. The narrator's father is a real estate developer; his mother, in an upstairs bedroom of their pleasant suburban home, is dying of cancer. Here are the themes, announced at once: In the child's mind, place is a masculine proposition, a dubious promise of the good life sketched out in survey maps, prospective buyers, and the cheerful desolation of lots. The female propositions--death, repose--flower from the middle of that promise. Place, which is everywhere present and palpable, is not quite real; and death, which is not present and everywhere palpable...
FEELING ANXIOUS and hungering to be in a place--sleep--where you can't be, is a metaphor for American restlessness, for all our desires for place and roots. It is a central irony of the poem that in order to achieve the American--or any other kind of--dream, you must be asleep, which these displaced lowans who come to California aren't exactly...
...these are consciousness for McMichael, and what consciousness does is worry and plan, though it hungers like the wren to say "Here I am," to make a place out of sleep or to make "Pasadena" or a house like a nest, to make love. This is a long American poem remarkable in that it stays completely in the world of ordinary consciousness, of history and fact and daily life. It does not wander into myth, the dark of nature, or sexuality, fun as that might be to read. The passage about lovemaking is about sex manuals--technics--which is just...
...first book-length American poem, Walt Whiman, with a great sense of how comic the idea was, made love to all of us, to the whole future. We could, he said, make the future now with our imaginations--like the man in the TV ad says today. McMichael does the opposite. To him, the present is always future. Partly he sees this as the human condition (we are displaced; we do have to plan) and partly as an economic one, with capitalism as the engine which continually displaces the present. It exists in terms of consumption only, what is being...
...provide a shield against uncertainties in the market, and the export of adulterated foodstuffs to the underdeveloped world. The detachment of Four Good Things, its precision and meditative quiet, are new especially powerful, with the power art sometimes has of stinging us awake. In the last lines of the poem, as the narrator is falling asleep his wife describes to him an afternoon spent skiing...