Seeing Things

Continued to think about some of the distinctive features of poetry today, in my experience as a reader of the stuff. Pondered on how often a poem that has seemed to me on first reading distinctly unpromising has come to genuine life when I’ve persevered in attempting to grasp how it works.

This is exactly what happened to me last week when teaching Margaret Atwood’s Salt to a class. Frankly I wasn’t looking forward to subjecting the poem to any kind of rigorous analysis since I felt I’d not really grasped what the writer was doing in a satisfyingly coherent manner. I understood the basic idea and found the allusion to the tale of Lot’s Wife looking back on the cities of the plain and suffering the consequences interesting. But getting involved with the intricacies of meaning wasn’t appealing.

However, by the time the class and I had done the necessary I felt the poem working for me. I was seeing the heaped salt glittering by the final stanza as I think Atwood intended me to. I can’t say I knew exactly what the glittering meant, if it meant anything at all. But I saw it and that was enough.