I have a few problems with what passes for poetry...

Mark Strand's poetry has always been problematical although I can claim a victory and say what I have always suspected, that there is much less there than meets the eye. This one for example:

Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand

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.

He's really saying in his musicless fashion that in an orchestra he is the absence of music, that he's what's missing in the score. This is the real confession to me as I believe that poetry is music and language its instrument. So, what the hell. I thought I might rehabilitate Strand and play his fiddle my way. I have rendered his abstractions concrete. Verily, August doth shimmer, Mark. Have you never walked through waves of hay? And what I have done, here? Turned his ironies to myth. Wound up meaning more than I said, and only subsequent re-reads will reveal the tiny revelation of true mind that is the world's own mind coiled like a wise and ancient snake at our feet:

In a field I am its absence
moving in the August hay
disruption lolling in a shimmer
through the rolling waves of day.

I part the air as it moves past
as always is the case with me;
where I have moved the absent air
assumes the new void absently.

And as I move so do the lot
who track a path through waving roll,
given reasons all their own:
I merely move to keep things whole.


I'll pick on someone else tomorrow.