{"id":1163,"date":"2013-05-10T11:18:38","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T11:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1163"},"modified":"2014-02-11T21:48:18","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T21:48:18","slug":"olivia-mccannon-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1163","title":{"rendered":"Olivia McCannon, “Map”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a pleasure and privilege to hear Olivia McCannon reading for Poets and Players. Some of the poems she read were very moving in quite a straightforward way. Others were more oblique, among them \u201cMap\u201d, which I thought I\u2019d share with you. You can find it in the Poetry Library Archives at http:\/\/www.poetrymagazines.org.uk\/magazine\/record.asp?id=16823<\/a><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t a difficult poem to take in. It has the kind of simple line through it that\u2019s essential if a poem is to communicate when you hear it just once. Its clarity of impact is partly a matter of form. Most lines have three strong stresses. Each line is a complete unit of sense, with a natural small pause at its end, and all but the last two stanzas are complete sentences with a longer pause at their end. The two stanzas that are minor sentences \u2013 ie sentences without a main clause \u2013 are given a bit of extra emphasis and deliberateness by being more strongly rhymed than most of the others. All these features contribute to breaking the poem down into sections that are easily grasped by a listening audience. Staying focused through the progression from one section to another is further aided by clear conjunctions and an element of repetition or reprise, like the repetition of \u201cuntil\u201d, or the way \u201cbeaten\u201d and \u201cpunched\u201d are picked up by \u201cThrashed and stretched and tanned\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cMap\u201d isn\u2019t difficult, but it is thought-provoking and ultimately mysterious. The combination of clarity with mystery is what gives it its particular kind of effectiveness.<\/p>\n

The sense of mystery comes from a kind of disjunction between the poem\u2019s elements \u2013 between the calm clarity of its overall composition and the violence of the ideas it contains, and between the ideas being compared to each other. There\u2019s a further uncertainty about the point of the comparison.<\/p>\n

The critical theorist I. A. Richards divided metaphors into two parts, tenor and vehicle. The tenor was the idea being expressed, and the vehicle was the image used to express this idea. That gives us a nice, neat \u2013 too neat \u2013 way of thinking about the imaginative processes involved. In \u201cThe Map\u201d I suppose you could say that the image of the destruction and disposal of a body was being used to express the real nature of cartography (perhaps to make us think about how reductive of the infinite complexity of living place mapmaking is) or you could say say the reverse, that cartography was being used to express the nature of killing. Personally I\u2019d say that the two ideas were being brought together or banged against each other to release a flurry of suggestions that can\u2019t be definitively pinned down, that will be different for every reader, but that are strongly felt.<\/p>\n

An obvious effect of yoking such heterogeneous metaphor sets together is that each is strongly defined against the other. The violence done to the body seems even more horrifying, gratuitous and densely physical when set against the abstraction of a map. At the same time, it makes us almost feel<\/i> the abstractness of the map\u2019s lines. The imagination is bounced between opposite poles, between the sensitive tissue of an eyeball and the brittleness of glass, between the ghastly idea of a nipple being beaten absolutely flat and the contour lines on a map, and also between the different connotations of words as they bind the different metaphor sets together \u2013 like \u201cpunch\u201d which makes us think both of the blow of a fist and of a piercing tool used on an inanimate surface, or \u201ctanned\u201d which suggests the curing of leather and the administering of a beating. There\u2019s a similar effect in the shifting of tones, from the pitiless elegance of \u201cthey\u2019ll slit me along my seams\u201d to the crudity of \u201cflopped innards full of stink\u201d.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a poem, in other words, that works simultaneously by the precision of its images and by the gaps between them. I suppose all poems do, but this one does to a marked extent. The biggest gap is the indeterminacy of who or what you are to imagine as speaking. This is what gives the poem its range of applicability, of suggestiveness. I find myself thinking of some kind of almost human fugitive creature in the first stanza, a creature that knows itself fated to an Aztec flaying ritual or the tortures of Marsyas, and later on of the world in the brilliant poem \u201cPelt\u201d in Michael Symmons Roberts\u2019 Corpus<\/i> (you can read \u201cPelt\u201d at http:\/\/www.poetryarchive.org\/poetryarchive\/singlePoem.do?poemId=3484<\/a> ).<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a pleasure and privilege to hear Olivia McCannon reading for Poets and Players. Some of the poems she read were very moving in quite a straightforward way. Others were more oblique, among them \u201cMap\u201d, which I thought I\u2019d share with you. You can find it in the Poetry Library Archives at http:\/\/www.poetrymagazines.org.uk\/magazine\/record.asp?id=16823 It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-olivia-mccannon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1356,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1163\/revisions\/1356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}