Word: strand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strangeness, Strand's room uses a poem about poetry effectively...
Poems about the writing of poems can be pretty unbearably self-indulgent or just plain dull. Strand makes you forget that, while Orr barely escapes the problem...
...FIRST came upon a style similar to Orr's while sitting in the waiting-room of a doctor's office. Appearing in the New Yorker was a single poem by Mark Strand called "The Room." It describes a place much like that waiting-room: antiseptic, empty, bereft of any outward emotion, full of silent anticipation. A sense of detachment in the short, simple lines emphasizes an underlying presence of death and sorrow. And Strand's dreamlike collection of everyday objects paradoxically works to produce a coherent poem. Orr's poetry used the same simplicity, the same etherial contrast of commonplace...
Conveniently, Orr has also written a poem entitled "The Room." Since both poems are statements about poetry, the room being the poem, a comparison between the two can show how Orr departs from reality, and what makes that departure so attractive. As you "enter" Strand's "room," a strange one-sided dialogue ensues: he puts questions to you are thinking. While he recognizes his own place in the poem, he remains "at the back/of the room." The words themselves have to do the job of the poetry, to 'fit' the reader...
This room is slightly more gimmicky than Strand's; it leads to another place in the same manner Alice's lookingglass does. And this "other" world is never complete in any of Orr's poems because he uses a number of recurring symbols, which only become complete over a series of poems. Even common phrases like "threading" one's way through trees takes on a new meaning when, in another poem, a man's life is a "skull of red yarn/that unravels as he walks," and in still another poem, "behind you the dream burns the empty nests,/and before...