I came across this poem the other day and I love it. It's from _Modern American Poetry_, ed. by Joseph Coulson, Peter Temes, and Jim Baldwin, 2002 edition, p. 376. It's Mark Strand's "Keeping Things Whole:"
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Having spent as yet little time with this poem, I am first struck by the palpable sense of space; the perception of boundaries between the speaker's self and the environment. The speaker is what everything else is not. The poem strikes me as quite poignant in that the speaker is "what is missing," and yet seems forever alienated, at least spacially, by what surrounds him/her. The speaker "keep[s] things whole," but not by adding to or blending in with what surrounds him/her. Perhaps if the speaker stops moving, and does not allow the air to "fill in the spaces" behind him, that place of non-air becomes some kind of blot, or taint, or at least a disruption of the wholeness and balance in the world. This seems a lot of responsibility for one person to carry.
The ineveitable question that comes to mind at the end is "Why do I keep moving?" I'm going to sit with this a while.
4 comments:
Hi, Sigmund, thanks for your great comment.
I love this poem. I can write or talk about it for hours. I believe the narrator is expressing an inability to define him/herself without an environment to provide the "other," the contrast. Therefore, without the "field" or other surroundings, he/she does not exist. That's where I think your impression of emptiness comes from. And, if one always views the world in terms of self/other, one will always feel alienated.
Thank you, Kandro, for your comment. It's wonderful the way this poem has travelled with you--first as a child, who learned it for the sheer joy of it, then as an adult who has more awareness of its meaning. I wonder what this poem will mean to you in another ten years?
When I first read the poem, almost negative things keep on entering my mind but when I read it again and again, I come to realize that those negativity cause something positive, in the sense that "WHOLENESS" is being created...
Actually, we have not discuss this poem yet in our lit class but I am really excited to share my views and perceptions about the poem...
Sometimes I also feel that somehow I am just nonsense in this world... When I considered myself in a solitary confinement, I always try to recall all the things that I did, that in many ways had affected this solitude I am experiencing...
On the other side, I realized that even though I consider myself as "nonsense", "useless", "irrelevant", "mistake", etc., there are still marks left on the people I've been with... In connection to that, though I consider myself someone that "disappear", I believe that there is something or someone in this world that may remember me... I mean... It is not possible to be "untouched"...
Going back to my realization about this poem, I believe that Strand was able to express his own feeling of "existence" and how it can affect someone else existence...
Ahmad,
I also feel very affected by this poem, and I understand what you mean by thinking at first that there is someting negative being stated. At least in the West, we feel that ideas of emptiness are inherently negative, i.e.emptiness=non-existence. I think the speaker here makes it clear that emptiness has form, even if that form is defined by the boundaries of environment. Definitions of self and boundaries are purposefully left ambiguous, and, as you say, it is difficult to separate people/objects/events from each other. It is all interwoven.
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