I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.
One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:
I came from a meeting - a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages -
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.
The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.
Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash
Lifesaving Poems 
Love this. While I don’t know how to analyse poetry, I do know I love that line. Feels more like a conversation with the reader.
LikeLike
Hi Rae.
It is kind of you to comment here.
It’s so interesting what you say – I think most people would say the same.
It’s a legacy of a certain kind of English teaching that most of us are put through.
But I don’t think poems are written in the first instance to be analysed. That is just a creation of an education/examination system (not the same thing) that needed to bolster the rational-mind credentials of a subject (English) in competition with so-called ‘hard’ subjects like maths and physics.
Poems are written (this one is a good example) because a human sat down and wanted to say something important to them.
You are absolutely right to say it sounds like someone having a conversation. This is what Michael Rosen has said about the function of all poems.
As I get older, I tend to be more interested in poems that seem open to having this conversation with me than ones that aren’t. This is, of course, an entirely subjective thing. Which is what is trained out of us at school.
With deep appreciation as ever
Ant
LikeLiked by 1 person