Forgetting

1.23.11

Robert Pinsky’s Gulf Music

In Robert Pinsky’s “Poem of Disconnected Parts”, the first poem in Gulf Music, he says, “I write for dead people”. This statement becomes more apparent throughout the rest of the book as Pinsky writes about the past and how it relates to the present. As I read his poetry, I found myself rushing to Google and trying to recall historical facts, which was initially really frustrating. Eventually, I realized that Pinsky’s goal was not to flaunt his intelligence or confuse his readers. Rather, he believes that we can maintain our knowledge of the past by transferring it onto paper and that poetry can be a powerful form of communication. He expresses this opinion in his poem “Book”, which says, “Look! What thy mind cannot contain you can commit/to these waste blanks…we read…columns of characters that sting/ sometimes deeper than any music or movie or picture,/ deeper sometimes even than one body touching another. He also suggests that by taking time to analyze our memories, we can gain a better understanding of how we became who we are and who we may become.

In section one, Pinsky discusses the past both by recalling important historical figures and events and by recalling his own experiences. In “Gulf Music”, he talks about how the hurricane of 1900 affected Galveston, Texas, describing it as “the worst natural/ calamity in American history”. He also tells the story of how his grandfather immigrated to America and came through the port of Galveston, where he eventually met and married his grandmother Becky in 1910. The other poems in section one differ in subject, but they are all similar in nature. Most of them begin by introducing a historical event and then go on to explain how that event has affected people and how our perception of it has changed over time.

The poems in the second section continue to follow the same theme, but Pinsky uses a different perspective. He explains how like people and events, even the simplest things experience the effects of time and can serve as a window into the past. The section begins with a set of definitions, and Pinsky notes, somewhat humorously, that even the word thing has evolved over time from “the sense of a matter at hand, an issue for debate” to “the nearly opposite sense of a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing”. The poems that follow describe a book, glass, a jar of pens, a photograph, and other objects that are seemingly insignificant. In the fourth poem, “Jar of Pens”, we get the image of the pens “huddled in their cylindrical formation…in their rinsed-out honey crock”, and he develops the image into a story, personifying the pens and giving them all unique experiences. For example, the second pen “strains to call back/ The characters of the thousand/ world languages dead since 1900, and he ends the poem by referring to the pens as “scabbards of the soul, [that] have/ outlived the sword-talons and wingfeathers for the hand.” All of the other objects in this section are described in the same manner- we receive a concrete image, which develops into an abstract image that increases the significance of the object and somehow tells a story.

Identifying all of the poems in this section as having a single defining characteristic would feel a bit forced, but each of them alone fits the theme, and seven out of the seventeen refer to the concept of allusion. As I mentioned, Pinsky alludes to certain people and events throughout all of his poems, but in this section, he is much more direct. The second poem, “In Defense of Allusion” jokingly explains that people should not criticize him for his allusions because “the world is allusive”. This defense serves as an introduction to the six poems that explicitly allude to the works of other poets. “Work Song” begins by responding to W.B. Yeats’s “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”, and uses that to transition to other related topics. In two of the poems, “From the Last Canto of Paradise” and “The Wave”, Pinsky only offers a translation of the original work. Although I would not identify any of the poems as outliers of the volume, I have trouble determining why certain poems are in certain sections. Some of the poems in section three, like “El Burro Es un Animal”, seem like they belong in section one. In this poem, Pinsky relates his having to take Spanish class to his observations of Fidel Castro. Like many of the other poems in section one, this poem relates a historical figure to one of Pinsky’s own experiences. “Akhmatova’s “Summer Garden”” also seems like it should be in the third section with the other translations. These contradictions lead me to believe that either I misunderstood the sections, or section three is composed of random poems.

Almost all of Pinsky’s poems are either couplets or triplets, and he does not seem to alter the form of the poem to correspond with the meaning, except in “The Thicket”, “Newspaper”, “Pliers”, and “The Dig”, in which he shaped the poems to mirror what he was describing. He typically ended each stanza with a period, but left out a lot of punctuation within each stanza. Pinsky does not seem to confine the poems as a whole to any specific length because they vary in length from two lines to multiple pages. He used enjambment often, but he capitalized the first letter of the first word in each line, regardless of its function in the sentence. I did not notice any specific meter throughout his poems, and he only uses subtle internal slant rhyme, except in the poem “Rhyme”. The subtle rhyming can be seen in “Work Song”, which has rhymes similar to “Fascination that dries the sap out of Yeats’s veins”. Pinsky also likes to repeat words throughout his poems, which we also see in “Watch Song” with the repetition of the word difficult. The only poem that sticks out structurally is “The Material” because the length of the stanzas varies, and all of the other poems have stanzas of equal lengths.

The poem that I would say best characterizes Gulf Music as a whole is “The Forgetting”, not necessarily because of its structure, but because of the voice that Pinsky uses in it. All of the poems fit the overarching theme of the book, but I think this poem alone captures the essence of what Pinsky is trying to show in the others because it describes the act of forgetting. In this poem, Pinsky does an amazing job of describing the effects of time by asking, “What if the Baseball Hall of Fame overflowed/ with too many thousands of greats all in time unremembered” and pointing out that “hardly anybody can name all eight of their great-grandparents”. He explains that even though we are sometimes unaware of it, we lose memories with the passing of time as both an individual and a member of a collective group. We create ways of remembering-our attempt to distinguish people from the larger whole makes them over time undistinguished. Our attempt to remember events by assigning names to them fails because names too are eventually forgotten. Even our written records in the form of letters, journal entries, declarations, and poetry will eventually become part of the inevitable cycle of forgetting.