Reading prompts for November 3: Walcott, Rich, Rankine, Reilly
Write on any (or more):
1. Consider this poem by the St. Lucian Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott (also in last class's powerpoint), "The Sea is History" (1978) and compare it with Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck". (1972) from an ecopoetical perspective.
2. Watch the following situation video (2020) by the poet Claudia Rankine and her partner, the documentary photographer John Lucas. Considering that two of Rankine's poetry collections are subtitled "An American Lyric", do you see rifts and evolutions here in the concept of "lyric" that tie in with V. Jackson's overview in her academic entry for "Lyric"?
3. Explore what Evelyn Reilly's poems "Song of" and "Yet the Wor(l)d can still be very pretty", from the sequence SELF (in Echolocations, 2018) do to the notion of "lyrical I", or other means of relating the I to the world.
1. The poems by Derek Walcott, The Sea is History, and Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck, present an interconnection between man's history, myth and the sea – with the sea (and nature) not only as a sort of repository/representation of man’s myths and history, but as part of that history itself.
ReplyDeleteDereck Walcott’s poem establishes a tight relation between the sea and the history of man in the tittle; however, as we read on, that connection seems to be made as much through history as myth (or religion) and nature. In the first lines, the subject poses questions proposed concerning the testimonies of man’s history (the monuments, battles, martyrs, tribal memories, usually registered in some form), and juxtaposes the idea of nature – by claiming that the answer lies in the sea; departing from this idea, he relates the history of man from before its inception (chaos, the birth of life in the sea, the population of hearth by creatures originated in the sea and so on) through the modern world (marked by words more associated with modernity, such as “secretarial”, “police”, “vote”, “ambassadors” or “judge”); history is patent in several direct references, such as the tidal wave in Port Royal or the Renaissance; it is, however, also closely linked with myth, in particular with the Christian myth, through moments, elements or characters in the Testament (Genesis, Exodus, the Ark of the Covenant, Babylon, Solomon, Jonah, Gomorrah) and a direct reference to the New Testament. There is a questioning of a certain traditional fusion between the two, “but that was not History, / that was only faith”, as well as the exclusivity of the recording of history through the feats, actions or mythologies of man. The poem offers, thus, history also in nature: the rocks, the flies, the heron, the bullfrog and so on, and the sea – the natural element present since the beginning of times, which thus encases and offers in its depth a testimony of man’s history, ability for story and word, and interconnectedness with nature itself.
Rich’s poem points in the same direction, by placing the subject, in representation of man, “I am she: I am he”, alone before the testimony of the sea. As the subject dives alone, he/she becomes part of an element which exceeds concepts relevant to man, such as power, “it is not a question of power”, demanding immersion and belonging, “I have to learn alone/to turn my body without force/in the deep element”. Between stanzas five and seven, the three elements present in the previous poem also merge in Rich’s poem: though adjusted, among the creatures in the sea and breathing with it, the subject must detach from its fascination, to fulfil a purpose: to examine the “wreckage”. In the first lines of the poem, there is a reference to “the book of myths”, which may also point towards the Bible; the subject goes back to it in these stanzas, as it confronts the enticing element of nature (he/she has become the “mermaid”/”merman”), the word and stories of man, and its reality engulf by the sea, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”. By identifying with the several elements of the wreckage, human and non-human, the subject integrates at once nature, which has taken over its carcass and history, patent in “half-destroyed instruments” and a “fouled compass” that measure man’s progress across the sea. It questions, therefore, as does the poem by Walcott, man’s history expressed as myths – whether religious or historical - in which “our names do not appear.
Both poems draw parallels between the man and the sea, but in slightly different manners. Rich’s poem has more of a story-telling technique with well connected continuation and description of the story itself, while Walcott’s approach is more encrypted while still using plenty of historical references and imagery. In her poem “Diving into the Wreck”, Adrienne Rich starts with describing the preparations for her ’journey’ into the underwater world. The reading of ‘the book of myths’ can point to the way our history is designed, scripted or created and following this, how us humans have an affinity with the world before us (in opposition to not being concerned with what is actually happening in this moment whatsoever). She continues explaining her way to the ocean, feeling like an insect on the ladder with the seemingly infinite ocean surrounding her. We can (and usually do) feel small and insignificant in comparison to the foreign environment where our lungs cannot provide us with oxygen and where we’re forced to rely on external devices to even survive. The poet goes on by mentioning all the others who have always lived ‘down there’, possibly referring to the aquatic life and positing herself as an intruder to this world. The wreck itself is the reason for her journey into the sea and the sight of it brings up thoughts about all the damage that has been done, all the sunk objects (and perhaps people) that are now left at the bottom for eternity and now only ‘stare towards the sun’. Later in the poem, Rich assumes the body of both a female and a male, relating herself to the bodies left ‘sleeping with their eyes open’ and ends it by stating how we all have this want and need to explore the history or the unknown, the history which we are essentially not part of. On the other hand, Derek Walcott explicitly declares in the title itself that the sea in fact is our history. He starts by addressing the ‘martyrs’ which could be the victims of sea battles, the slave triangle, etc. According to them, all of the collective memories and monuments are deep below; a history hidden underwater. Walcott relates the sea to the genesis of the world itself, making it an essential and irreplaceable part in the process of our creation. He ties the sea to Christian mythology (using words such as Genesis, Exodus, Solomon, Jonah, New Testament, etc.), inserting a direct connection of the human and the perception of our past through the stories and myths of historical occurrences. The several animal references at the end of the poem can also be connected to the Bible as an allusion to the ten plagues and through this imagery, he refers to the clergy, politicians, intellectuals, ambassadors, etc., as the ones with which history had begun.
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