TOP73-DES70
This Old Poem #73:
Joyce Carol Oates’ I
Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window
Copyright © by Dan Schneider,
11/28/03
Joyce Carol
Oates is 1 of those writers that feels it’s a necessity for her to append the
word ‘poet’ to her c.v.- even if there is no logical reason for it. Yes,
technically she has written poetry- & it’s not the worst garbage you’ll
ever read- but it is so unremittingly unpoetic that you just wonder why someone
so noteworthy in the prose field feels a need to soil her reputation in this
manner?
That said,
she is occasionally redeemed by the fact that- unlike most published
contemporary ‘poets- only’ or ‘poets- 1st’- she is not always
dead-serious & solemn. Witness this playful picture poem to doggerelist
Billy Collins:
Kite Poem
for Billy Collins
Some-
thing there
is in the American
soul that soars with
kites that soar! Some-
thing alive with the roar
of the wind lifting the kite
that soars above rooftops, tree-
tops, and awestruck heads! And yet—
Something there is not in the
American soul to adore the
kite that fails to soar.
I've seen it, I've
feared it, and
so have you.
The
kite whose tail
is tattered in the
TV antenna.
The kite that rises
thrillingly
at dawn
then crashes
vertically
at your feet.
in a
heap
Ironically, it’s in a poem like
this that JCO is actually at her best as a poet- she’s passable! Yet, like so
many others of her generation JCO feels a sort of scorn for art that is
‘fun’. Yes, she can be a little bit ‘commercial’ in her novels &
other prose- but poetry; that means real artistic business. But, before we snoop
at her biz- here’s the formal ‘need to know’ that JCO pastes on several
dozen other websites that fete her:
Joyce Carol
Oates (born 1938) was born in Lockport, New York, one of three children in a
Roman Catholic family. She began to put picture stories down on paper even
before she could write, and she remembers that her parents "dutifully"
supplied her with lined tablets and gave her a typewriter when she was fourteen.
In 1956, after Oates graduated from high school, she went on a scholarship to
major in English at Syracuse University, but she did not devote most of her time
to writing until after she received her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in
1961.
Discovering
by chance that one of her stories had been cited in the honor roll of Martha
Foley's annual The Best American Short Stories, Oates assembled the
fourteen stories in her first book, By the North Gate (1963). It was the
first of almost seventy books, making Oates one of our most prolific writers. In
addition to short stories and novels, Oates regularly publishes poems, plays,
literary criticism, and essays including her much admired essay collection On
Boxing (1987).
As a
writer, critic, and professor at Princeton University, Oates dedicates her life
to "promoting and exploring literature...I am not conscious of being in any
particular literary tradition, though I share with my contemporaries an intense
interest in the formal aspects of writing; each of my books is an experiment of
a kind, an investigation of the relationship between a certain consciousness and
its formal aesthetic expression."
Impressed? Well, have a bite at her list of poetry publications: Anonymous
Sins & Other Poems (1969),
Love and Its Derangements (1970), Angel Fire (1973), The
Fabulous Beasts (1975), Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are
Money (1978), Invisible Woman : New & Selected Poems 1970-1982
(1982), The Time Traveler (1989), & Tenderness (1996). As far
as I know the new millennium is safe from her versifying prowess such as this
bit from Passing An Afternoon:
Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.
Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.
It hurts.
Need I even explicate how poor
& juvenile this writing is? I trust you. Let’s turn, instead, to the poem
this essay seeks to explicate & rehabilitate:
I Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window
I saw a woman walking into a plate glass window
as if walking into the sky.
I saw her death striding forward to meet her,
shadowed in flawless glass.
Dogwood blossoms drew her, a lilac-drugged air,
it was beauty's old facade,
blinding,
blind: the transparency
that, touched, turns opaque.
The frieze into which she stepped buckled in anger
and dissolved in puzzle parts about her head.
* * *
I saw a woman walking into sunshine
confident and composed
and tranquil to the last.
I saw a woman walking into something that had seemed nothing.
As we commonly tell ourselves.
The trick to beauty is its being unassimilable,
a galaxy of glittering reflections,
each puzzle part in place.
Not this raining of glass and blood
about the amazed head.
The unfathomable depths into which she stepped became
the merest surface,
Pain and noise.
* * *
I saw a woman walking into her
broken body
as if she were a bride.
I saw her soul struck to the ground because mere space
could not bear it aloft.
I saw how the window at last framed only what was there,
beyond the frame,
that could not fall.
My throat filled with blood:
you would not have believed how swiftly.
The original tries so hard to be Plathian, yet is so pallid- the repetition of the title in the 1st line is a tipoff that this poem is gonna be quite banal & prosaic. The best way to improve this poem is to drop all the ‘I saw’ lines- the repetition does not help, the italicized phrases are mawkish, & clichés line each stanza. The best way to rehab the poem is to focus on the core stanzas in each of the 3 sections:
I Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window
Dogwood blossoms drew her, a lilac-drugged air,
it was beauty's old facade, blinding,
blind: the transparency
that, touched, turns opaque.
* * * The trick to beauty is its being unassimilable, a galaxy of glittering reflections, each puzzle part in place. Not this raining of glass and blood about the amazed head.
* * * I saw how the window at last framed only what was there, beyond the frame, that could not fall.
We do not get a great poem, but without the melodrama it has a chance to be a bit unique. The best example is to look how the 2 versions end. The original ends with an almost laughable slack-jawed ‘moment’: ‘My throat filled with blood:/you would not have believed how swiftly.’ We get shown a poor image, & are then directed on how to react. In the rewrite we simply get a description that abruptly ends, & leaves the reader wondering. It- in effect- implicitly trusts the reader to draw a conclusion. This is not the level of poetry that an Archaic Torso Of Apollo operates on, but it is higher than the original’s. &, after all, that’s the real focus of the TOP series.
Final Score: (1-100):
Joyce Carol Oates’ I
Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window: 40
TOP’s
I Saw A Woman Walking Into A Plate Glass Window: 62
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