TOP63-DES60
This Old Poem #63:
Laurie Sheck’s Medusa
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 8/23/03

  Laurie Sheck is 1 of those unimaginative poetasters that has spent her life writing utterly banal poems while occasionally trying to ape a greater poet- in her case, Sylvia Plath. Note that this TOP will focus on a poem with the same title as 1 of SP’s most famous poems. Note, too, that the preceding TOP featured that SP poem, as well as her daughter’s take on this subject. Frieda Hughes failed, as does LS.
  But nothing great should be expected of a person whose career is as prototypically banal & unadventurous, not to mention generic, as LS’s: 

  Laurie Sheck was born in the Bronx, New York. She is the author of four collections of poems--Black Series (forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf, November 2001); The Willow Grove (1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Io at Night (1990); and Amaranth (1981)--and has published her poems widely in such magazines as Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review. Her poems have also been included in two volumes of Best American Poetry and three volumes of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. Laurie Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, and currently teaches in the MFA Program at the New School. She lives in New York City.

  If you think that was painful to read then check out these 2 ‘poems’:

This homesickness of mind
    Like cuts made almost tenderly in flesh. The surfaces of things grown slow and
Dangerous
    Beneath the desire to apprehend. September light I cannot hear your quiet.
So much elsewhere unsettling each surface, so much annul.

  Here’s the 2^nd:

Trees bending, shockwaves of mind. Tender maelstroms
    Of astray and sunder. And shudderings of late summer light on the hill
As when hurt pathways of thought
    Become habitable scars, strange comfort of roughness, hectic-calm.
No captions beneath them, no marketing director saying, ‘Our job is to make people
    Buy things they don’t need or want.’

How secretive the brain is. So many banishments inside it, so much sting.
    I watch the leafdarks sway among the lit ones,
Cureless in their turnings, flicks of wind.

  You may be wondering why I’ve not given the titles to these 2 dull workshop approved pieces of tripe. Well, what would be the perfect title for 2 description-laden pieces of swill? You’ve got it- both poems are titled Poem!
  On to the titular piece:

Medusa

I can almost taste the glassy air. Where are the birds in it,
wings lifting as currents buffet them like echoes, bright
chaos of atomized instances,
storm-light gashing, hurrying, dispersing? I can almost taste
the stillness. Are there faces in front of me? Are those eyes?
And tongues in a gathering wilderness of mouths? Always it is strange
to watch them change when he lifts me from the sack and makes me look-

my eyes a chisel, then a shroud, wrapping them,
colorless, frozen there, all stone.
Inside the sack I remember the soft
contorted flickerings of skin
before I drew my gaze completely up
and entered, still amazed at how my eyes
enact their mandate. And I think of how, from out of my own body

(which is lost to me now, rotting in some nameless place,
torso, arms and legs gone piece-meal, mossy, rank) a horse with wings
was born, flying up past dirt, past swirling
dust, into the winds that sweep past stone,
past all the dead and trees and leaning stems, and past the steady
weapons of my eyes. How did that horse come to grow
in me, that winged and unbound thing? It was like
something I dreamt, a whispering I might have heard

in the long-ago of light and mist and rain
imprinting unreadable coins on the rooftops.
What is safety? How can the world shelter itself
from itself? If I could stay blindfolded forever-

and not turn each thing into a caption, rigid and shatterless,
perfectly intact. There are quick particles of light
behind my eyes, neurons acidly scattering
small suns, unhooded sky (or my body, wholly lost to me now, or the horse's
wings prospering and beating). Then I taste the glassy air again,
hear the steady breathing, and then the hands (I think of them
as voices speaking on a soundtrack that re-winds,
repeats, repeats) reaching to undo
the sack, lift me into sunlight, make me look.

  As with most Plathian imitators they do not realize that Plath’s forays in to melodrama were girded & bounded by strong set-up lines- they were not merely hurlings of word & frantic descriptions that really mean little. Let’s trim & revise this bathetic ‘uphurling’ of emotion:

Medusa

I can almost taste. Where are the birds in it,
wings like echoes, bright
chaos of atomized instances? I can almost taste-
are there faces in front of me? Are those eyes?
And tongues in a wilderness of mouths? Always,
to watch them change when he makes me look-

my eyes colorless. Inside the sack

I remember the soft 
before I drew my gaze up
and entered, still amazed at their mandate.

And I think of my own body

(which is lost to me now, rotting in some nameless place),

a horse with wings, born, flying up past swirling
dust, into the winds that sweep, past the steady
weapons of my eyes. How did that horse come to grow
in me, that unbound thing? It was
something I dreamt, a whispering heard

in the long-ago of light and mist and rain
imprinting unreadable coins on the rooftops.
What is safety? How can the world shelter itself
from itself? If I could stay blindfolded forever-

and not turn each thing into a caption, rigid and shatterless,
perfectly intact. There are quick particles of light
behind my eyes, neurons acidly scattering
small suns (or my body, wholly lost to me now, or the horse's
wings prospering and beating). Then I taste again,
hear the steady breathing, and the hands (I think
as voices speaking on a soundtrack that re-winds,
repeats, repeats) reaching to undo
the sack, lift me into sunlight, make me look.

  A little trimming makes some notable differences. This is still not a good poem, but too much trimming would have made the poem too different from what it was. The description is less & the reader can do more to imbue the poem. Some line breaks have been improved so that the poem is less ‘precious & the images more direct. But, most of all, the poem is a little less Plathian.

  Compare stanza 2:

my eyes a chisel, then a shroud, wrapping them,
colorless, frozen there, all stone.
Inside the sack I remember the soft
contorted flickerings of skin
before I drew my gaze completely up
and entered, still amazed at how my eyes
enact their mandate. And I think of how, from out of my own body….

  with Plath’s 1^st stanza:

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head-God-ball,
Lens of mercies….

  Plath’s eyes are described more uniquely & are the acted upon, not the actor. All the descriptions, in just this stanza, outdo their counterparts in the LS poem. Why? Because they provoke with their uniquity, & cohere with each other in ways not seen prior to SP- in short, they are mnemonic. This is 1 of the tenets that good poetry, much less great poetry, always has. It is NOT about posturing & throwing big words up on a page. It’s about a unique perspective- often a Visionary 1. Poetasters like LS, & even SP’s own daughter, should take heed. But they won’t. That’s why I write these TOP essays!

Final Score: (1-100):

Laurie Sheck’s Medusa: 62
TOP’s Medusa: 72

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