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Derek Coyle published Reading John Ashbery in Costa Coffee Carlow in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Shine Strong 2020 poetry award for best first collection. Sipping Martinis under Mount Leinster is due in 2023. He has published poems in The Irish Times, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and The Texas Literary Review. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s in Ireland.
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The Object Poem: Embodied Emotion and Idea
in Eamon Grennan’s ‘Dublin-Poughkeepsie: Bread Knife in Exile’
and James Schuyler’s ‘To Frank O’Hara’
Writing poetry involves surmounting difficult challenges. One of these is how to translate abstract ideas or emotions, like love, friendship, loss, onto the page in a way that works poetically. One solution we see many contemporary poets pursue is by means of what we might call ‘the object poem’. That is, through a concrete object a person can be recalled, a relationship with that person explored, feelings about that individual are rendered visible or encounterable; and through this process the reader has a clear idea of what is at stake, expressed in very tangible terms. The move from the abstract to the concrete generally involves an appeal to our senses. To render this rather abstract discussion more tangible and concrete, I refer to Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Harvest Bow’ as a contemporary instance of this very tendency.
In ‘The Harvest Bow’ Seamus Heaney recalls his absent father to the scene of the poem, Heaney’s kitchen miles away from his home country in Derry; and in another time, the present rather than the past. Heaney’s subject is his father, but more particularly, a concern about his father’s affections for him; that is, in this poem Heaney explores the sense he felt of his father’s unspoken affection for him. Heaney’s object for exploring paternal affection is a type of bow that you plait from the left over straw at harvest time. This ‘frail device’ helps Heaney make tangible, make present, his absent father. Through this object aspects of his father’s personality are expressed too. We take it he was a taciturn country farmer, and the type of love demonstrated by this generation of rural men of few words, is felt more than expressed, hinted at rather than confirmed. The vehicle for Heaney’s excavation of this theme is the harvest bow his father plaited for the young Heaney and a version of which (if not the very one) now sits on the older Heaney’s dresser. Through this ‘throwaway love-knot of straw’, Heaney is capable of ‘gleaning the unsaid off the palpable’ – and this might be the phrase that captures the core of our argument about objects, and poems about them, in this essay.
And so, through the tactile object of the harvest bow, a world is opened: ‘railway slopes’, ‘an evening of long grass and midges’, ‘you with a harvest bow in your lapel’, ‘me with the fishing rod’. In a wonderful linguistic gesture, Heaney captures his father’s twisting of the straw into the bow within his internal rhyming across his lines, ‘but brightens as it tightens twist by twist’; a gesture mirrored late in the poem with the line, ‘still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand’. And so, the harvest bow becomes a tangible expression of the relationship between father and son; through its talismanic presence a past world is recalled, an absent man is made present, and a relationship and its attendant feelings are expressed and made ‘palpable’.
However, Heaney’s ‘The Harvest Bow’ is well known, as is Heaney himself. Rather, I wish to turn our attention to a rather less well-known poem, but an exemplary poem of this type, and a poet who should be more widely known and read: Eamon Grennan’s ‘Dublin-Poughkeepsie: Bread Knife in Exile.’
The object at the centre of this poem is the ‘bread knife’ of its title, and the abstract subject that the poet wishes to explore, as such, is the poet’s deceased mother, physically absent from the scene, but present to the poet’s memories and affections. How to translate all of this across to words and into lines and a poem? The narrative complication of this poem is that Grennan occupies two different spaces, regularly enough – the Dublin of his original family home and his mother’s primary location, and the Poughkeepsie home of upstate New York, where the poet has lived in voluntary exile due to his working life. The bread-knife the poet has carried from Dublin, Ireland, from his late mother’s kitchen, to his second home in Poughkeepsie, New York, is the key object through which the poet expresses his feelings and in almost talismanic fashion conjures his lost mother into the poem and our imaginations, and back into his affections and ours.
Here is the poem:
DUBLIN-POUGHKEEPSIE: BREAD KNIFE IN EXILE
Home from home again, the song of my mother’s bread knife
stops me mid-slice, tiny teeth of Sheffield steel making their own music
that’d cut through the cackle and half-truths of our first kitchen
as she’d sever the black crust of an elbow turnover
or slice into the burnt brown of the Vienna roll
she’d slather with country butter, its salty sweat
making our mouths water where we stood in the light
of the there-and-then world that has become the here and now
of the world as is: a few streaks of sunlight bringing in
fall flicker and stipple-shadow, leaves turning
amber, ginger, rust as the season beyond the window turns
and I settle a migrant heart again in this otherwhere,
hearing the persistent shrill stitching of one late September cricket,
which my mother, though only a ghost, cocks her one good ear to,
stopping the bread knife mid-slice to listen, stunned
to silence first, then turning to ask me what that strange insect
singing is – but before I can answer she’s smiling anyway, saying
yes in her old way to it, to what’s becoming, foreign as it is,
familiar as the music her bone-handled bread knife goes on making,
which long ago, now, and far away, she stopped noticing.[1]
The poem opens with a significant doubling phrase, one which reveals a doubling strategy from the start that will become more important as the poem unfolds: ‘Home from home again.’ This poet lives in two places: Dublin and Poughkeepsie; both are home to him. We see Grennan use his mother’s bread-knife, carried from that first home. Such an everyday, ordinary object. In one, purely material sense, not particularly valuable or significant. He hears its ‘song’, with a strong line-break, how it ‘stops me mid-slice’. And we encounter the first concentrated musical line of the poem, the ‘tiny teeth of Sheffield steel making their own music’. We hear those letter ‘t’s’, the sibilant ‘s’s’, the broad vowels of the ‘e’s’, the ‘m’s’. And so, the sound of the knife is made present in the poem, tangible and real – we hear it here with the poet. The sound recalls memories of the poet’s ‘first kitchen’, his home in Dublin, and suddenly he and we see his mother, severing elbow turnovers and Vienna Rolls. So, we have heard the knife, seen his mother, and now we taste the ‘salty sweat’ of the country butter his mother would ‘slather’ on these various breads. And so, a richly embodied scene is generated or conjured into the room via the bread-knife, a lost world is opened up and made tangible, and we enter it and encounter some of its essential dimensions.
Having first brought us so tangibly into a lost world which he has made tactile, vivid, plausible, and real, the poet now presents the first abstract sentence right in the middle of the poem. He speaks of how his mother and he, his original family, ‘stood in the light/of the there-and-then world that has become the here and now/of the world as is:’. We trust the poet at this stage, we are firmly grounded in the world he has conjured, and we are sure of our footing – and so we are ready to contemplate an abstract statement about time and space. By means of this statement the poet bridges the gap neatly and succinctly from the Dublin where he was to the New York state where he is. The knife carries us across the abstraction. The knife is the object that makes us capable of time travel and to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, from one seaboard to another. The knife began its life in the ‘there-and-then world’, of that distant, remembered Dublin, and carries us into ‘the here and now/of the world as is’ – rural, upstate New York in the fall. Formally the poet brilliantly suggests the moment of transition through the choice of the colon. It is the window or wormhole, if you like, that sees the poet (and us) travel across time and space. And so, we seamlessly move into the present and the poet’s current world. One side of the colon is Dublin with the ‘slather’ of country butter – a rural Ireland with its idiom, and the Sheffield steel, from its industrial neighbour; and the other is suggested with a shift to an American idiom, ‘fall flicker and stipple shadow’; particularly, the US ‘fall’ for autumn.
We note the strong line-break of ‘leaves turning/amber, ginger, rust’ – as we turn with the leaves, over the line, and into that finely observed, linguistically lively list of three colours, all subtle variations of red. The poet tells us, ‘I settle a migrant heart again in this otherwhere’ – another abstract but tangible phrase given how the poet has grounded us in this new place with its lively autumn colours. This place, different from, but similar to where he and we have just left. The knife is the talisman carried across the space. This is indicated with the second concentrated musical line in the poem, this side of the transitional colon: ‘hearing the persistent shrill stitching of one late September cricket’. And so, the two worlds are compared, and somehow, they are similar and different. All those sibilant ‘s’s’ in this world too, and the ‘t’ sounds – this place has its music too, a variation on what we have heard before.
And now the poet’s mother appears again – a memory recalled of her New York visit to the home of her emigrant son, or perhaps a purely imagined visit – it is hard to know for sure. The mother is ‘only a ghost’, but a frail ghost mother, an older human being, so humanely presented, cocking ‘her one good ear’ to hear the crickets. She stops cutting the bread with her knife to listen more intently. We have the strong line-break halting us at the end of the line, the word ‘stunned’, as we pause, stunned, before we turn over the line. The mother is silenced by the strange sounds of this place. She asks her son, ‘what that strange insect/singing is’ – but then proceeds to ignore the rambling answers of her son, like many a good mother must – there is more important work to be done, the food must be prepared, folk must eat. And by this means a very full and touchingly human portrait of the poet’s deceased mother is created, her presence is conjured into the world once again, this revenant who appears and speaks via the vehicle of poetry. And the breadknife she has in her hand is the conceit by which the magic happens.
The poem ends with the rather daring phrase, ‘long ago, now, and far away’, with its resonant suggestion of the fairy-tale. This mother, these memories, that first world of the Dublin kitchen, have now about as much substance as a tale told by a fire or bedside. It is indicative of the confidence we have in this poet and the world he has brought into existence in this poem that we buy this phrase. We might have doubted it, if it were placed at the start of the poem; but we believe it and accept it by the poem’s end.
Reviewing the poem then, having entered its worlds, we grasp the significance of its one sentence. There is a single thread joining this past, that place, that woman, and this present, this place, this now, this memory of this woman – and that thread is the bread-knife. The knife now suggests and embodies continuity and connection, a bridge across time and space. Formally speaking, the poem is a syntactical feat, a poem of one sentence, its twenty lines flowing seamlessly through word after word, concrete, and abstract phrase, across and through the symbolic ploy of that expression of transition, the pivot and the centre of the poem, the eye of the colon. The poet might be an exile, but he still carries his Dublin world and home with him; the poet may have lost his mother, but in significant ways she is still real, vital, and present.
And so, we can see the sheer magic an object can work at the centre of a poem. If well chosen, an object can bring us into an absent world via the senses. The object is something we can see and touch and so what could be vague or opaque can become a tangibly realized presence. Almost in the way that the poem itself – a tangible object, can generate worlds we can enter, see, and smell, and imaginatively touch. To illustrate this is no one off achievement by a fine poet, we’ll turn to an altogether different object and poet by way of comparison and contrast.
The American poet James Schuyler is less well-known this side of the Atlantic Ocean and deserves to be read more. Friend and flatmate of the poet Frank O’Hara, he wrote two poems to his friend who died tragically young from a freak accident. ‘Buried at Springs’ is the most well-known of the two, but I think there is an argument to be made for the later ‘To Frank O’Hara’ as the finer poem of the pair. ‘To Frank O’Hara’ first appeared in Schuyler’s 1974 collection Hymn to Life.
The occasion for this poem was the publication of the Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by his radical publisher and friend, Don Allen in 1971. Hence the dedication of Schuyler’s poem to Allen (and its significance). The central conceit or idea of the poem is that Schuyler is speaking to the new book of poems as if he is addressing O’Hara. The poems embody O’Hara, O’Hara is now his poems. Schuyler is giving us a modern variation of a classic technique here, poetic apostrophe. He is speaking to the absent O’Hara as if he were here, or Schuyler is speaking to the inanimate poetry collection as if it could hear him. Typically, poetic apostrophe often involves the allied technique of personification; and so, not surprisingly we see it come into play here too. Poetic apostrophe was beloved of the Romantic poets. We think of Shelley’s address to the West Wind in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, or any number of John Keats’s great odes, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘or the incomparable ‘To Autumn’. This device is as ancient as Homer, who used it in The Odyssey, and St Paul himself was familiar with the technique, as evidenced in his ‘First Letter to the Corinthians’. For our purposes though, James Schuyler gives us his own take on this classic device in ‘To Frank O’Hara.’
Our eye then is on how Schuyler conveys aspects of the life of O’Hara, dimensions of the man’s character, via their embodiment as he sees it in his poems, his work, now gathered up by Don Allen into his Collected Poems. So, the complex variety of a lived life, so wide-ranging, so hard to get your hands around (so to speak), is condensed and conveyed by the book, so thorough, so beautifully presented, through Allen’s efforts and care: ‘the splendour of your work is here/so complete’. Two features of book production are referenced in the opening quatrain, a publisher’s emblem, typically found on the title page, known as a colophon; and then, ‘a note on the type’, often found inside the back or final page of a poetry collection – indicating the care and precision that has gone into presenting the book. Given the fact that all of O’Hara’s poems are now gathered up and carefully and beautifully presented ‘people you never met will meet/and talk about your work.’ Given these references, the occasion of the poem, this new book in the hands of Schuyler is clearly established in the reader’s mind.
Here is the poem in full:
TO FRANK O’HARA
(for Don Allen)
And now the splendour of your work is here
so complete, even
‘a note on the type’
yes, total, even the colophon
and now people you never met will meet
and talk about your work.
So witty, so sad,
so you: even your lines have
a broken nose. And in the crash
of certain chewed-up words
I see you again dive
into breakers! How you scared
us, no, dazzled us swimming
in an electric storm
which is what you were
more lives than a cat
dancing, you had a feline
grace, poised on the balls
of your feet ready
to dive and
all of it, your poems,
compressed into twenty years.
How you charmed, fumed,
blew smoke from your nostrils
like a race horse that
just won the race
steaming, eager to run
only you used words.
Stay up all night? Who wants to sleep?
It is not your voice I hear
it is your words I see
foam flecks and city girders
as once from a crosstown bus
I saw you waiting a cab in light rain
(drizzle) as once you
gave me a driving lesson and the radio
played The Merry Widow. It broke us up.
As once under the pie plate tree
(Paulonia)
it broke you up to read Sophie Tucker
– with the Times in a hammock –
had a gold tea service. ‘It’s way out
on the nut,’ she said, ‘for service,
but it was my dream.’[2]
For the poem to build on its premise Schuyler must convince the reader that O’Hara can be found in his poems; his presence, his personality and concerns, can still be encountered and felt despite his absence and loss. We note the strong line-break in ‘So witty, so sad,/so you.’ Given Schuyler’s construction of the line, the stress falls on ‘you’ here, as we move across the blank space of the line-break, pausing as we do, and then landing on that ‘you’, which takes on an extra emphasis. And the ‘you’ is the last item on this short list of three – which highlights its importance. So, your poems are you, reflect you, your old sad and witty self – you who were or are a man of contradictions and contrasts, O’Hara. In a follow-on, strong line-break and verse break, Schuyler observes ‘even your lines have//a broken nose’. So, the poems even go so far as to reflect and contain aspects of O’Hara’s physical presence, for instance, here his infamous broken nose. Schuyler cleverly breaks his line to suggest O’Hara’s broken nose. In discussion with my students, not having a term (to the best of my knowledge) for when a poet tries to embody in his or her form the reality they are describing, one student came up with the term ‘depictive enjambment’.[3] Thinking of instances beyond the line-break for this poetic practice, a term for the concept in general, with the help of a Greek-speaking student, I came up with the term ‘estomimopeia’: ‘to make something like something else’.[4]
To really cement the association of O’Hara with his poems, Schuyler claims:
And in the crash
of certain chewed-up words
I see you again dive
into breakers!
This is the central verse for establishing the conceit on which the poem is built. We note the music, all those ‘cs’! And there is something rough and ready about O’Hara’s poetic style, his diction especially, so reflective of the character of the man, that Schuyler catches glimpses of him again. His wild actions especially; reflected in the depictive enjambment, the estomimopeia of the ‘dive’ across the link break and ‘into breakers’.
And now we have a dazzling series of examples of the form of the poem expressing the reality of the lived experiences conveyed within the lines; of estomimopeia. We have run-on lines across two and a half quatrains. So, a breaking out of the form and across the form, suggesting O’Hara could not be contained, his energies were that forceful. We have a series of apt comparisons: he swam in an electric storm, no, he was the storm; he is a cat with many lives; he was feminine and supple, like a cat, especially in his graceful dancing movements. Again, the line-breaks and verse breaks suggest the movements being depicted: the cat jumping across shelves or branches, and then a series of line-breaks suggest the poet in the pose of a dive, ready to leap. All this energy captures O’Hara’s force of nature personality, ‘your poems/compressed into twenty years’ – as the poet continues to build his central conceit: O’Hara’s poems now embody his anarchic energies, and outlook, and general stance towards life. ‘Compressed’ is such a well-chosen onomatopoeic word choice here.
The poem builds momentum as we rush on from here. We have more lively lists of three as O’Hara is compared to a racehorse with flaring nostrils, ‘steaming, eager to run/only you used words’. And so, the reader, following Schuyler, has a very clear picture of what O’Hara was like, of the type of man he was. Schuyler seems to be energized once more by the mere presence of his friend through this book of poems, such that he doesn’t want to sleep. Schuyler glimpses his poet friend’s passions and loves and locations in the poems, beaches and the skyline of New York, although:
It is not your voice I hear
it is your words I see
And we encounter here one of the poem’s brilliant images or ideas. Schuyler suggests that the way he sees O’Hara now, glimpsed in poems, seen through lines, words, and images in his poems, is like the time he saw him through the window of a bus negotiating the streets of New York, as O’Hara awaited a taxi. The rain was hazy, the window a barrier; the vision was slightly blurred, but it was you nevertheless – Schuyler’s images suggest, and this is how I glimpse you now, hazily, faintly, but it is you I see in these poems.
And now the poet draws on his well of personal memories of O’Hara as he turns the poem towards a close. This memory evokes a stream of consciousness in Schuyler. O’Hara was mad enough to give him driving lessons; they enjoyed light Viennese opera as they did so. We have the triple ‘as once’ scattered across these lines – building rhetorical momentum, cementing the phrases together. Then we have the double ‘it broke us up’, the energetic colloquial phrasing connected with the ‘It’s way out/on the nut’ of Sophie Tucker in the poem’s final memory. Both poets enjoyed the humane vitality of Tucker, her naiveté and innocence too. Schuyler remembers O’Hara reading him this story from The Times, lying back in a hammock – a relaxed and amused O’Hara, at home but still in touch with vital life – in the poem’s final, very personal, vivid, and concrete image. Tucker, an immigrant to the US, and a vaudeville star, a singer of bawdy songs, knew she had made it when she could serve tea in a gold service. This anecdote allows the poem to end on the word ‘dream’; so hopeful, so expressive of human ambitions for life, and yet how so many can be contented with so little in the end.
And so, by means of his poetic conceit extended across the poem, Schuyler finds a way to convey the life and real presence of his friend. The concrete fact of the book of the poems before him gives him a way to depict the man himself. A very tangible and vital image of O’Hara emerges during the poem, concluding with definite images of the man recalled from life through the memory of his fellow poet friend. Schuyler’s formal choice of the quatrains initially might seem like an odd decision; so solid, so traditional, so definite. Hardly characteristics of his subject. However, when we read them carefully, Schuyler’s quatrains are consistently being broken up, exploded from within, as O’Hara bursts out and across the lines in a series of enjambments that are as vital and dynamic as O’Hara himself. And so, by way of the form, Schuyler succeeds in conveying his essential understanding of his subject, O’Hara was a man of vitality and uncontainable energies.
And so, in both of our poems we see our poets use an object to express rather abstract ideas, persons and emotions. Grennan, the different worlds of a Dublin past and a New York present, his tangible affection for his late mother. We get to see and hear her in the poem and feel as if we have met her and liked her ourselves, all achieved through the talismanic bread-knife. And then Schuyler presents the character of Frank O’Hara to us by means of his Collected Poems – the book itself becomes the talisman that conjures O’Hara back into the room, grounding Schuyler’s affections and memories.
Again, both poets make intelligent formal decisions, demonstrating different aspects of what we are calling estomimopeia. The form of Grennan’s poem is a seamless unity, one sentence with two spheres joined and separated by that central colon. And so, the form is an expression of the poem’s central idea: experience is a unity, perhaps there is a bridge across the divides of space, time, and even worlds. The bread-knife is the tangible object that traverses all the spaces conceived within the poem (and will live on in the afterlife of art). And then, in a different way, James Schuyler’s ‘To Frank O’Hara’ is an embodiment of estomimopeia. The form itself conveys something of the reality of its subject of concern. O’Hara’s personality exudes from him, cannot be contained by his bodily frame, just as the energies of his life, his words, his vision, spills out from the book of his collected works – he cannot be contained within bounds, just as he bursts from quatrain to quatrain in Schuyler’s beautiful and intelligent depiction of him. However, it is the book itself that makes Schuyler’s poem possible; the concrete object ties all the aspects of O’Hara together. Once again, it is the talisman that allows Schuyler to conjure his friend from the grave and put the reader of the poem in touch with his passionate energies and vitality. We can be grateful for that.
[1] Eamon Grennan, But the Body (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2012), p. 42.
[2] James Schuyler, James Schuyler Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), pp. 112 – 113.
[3] This term was coined by Carlow College student Jack Dawson.
[4] My thanks to Carlow College student Marina Ioannidou for advice on the Greek.
The High Window 