Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998

What Our Readers Are Saying

Share your thoughts on this title!

Average customer rating 4.3 (3 comments)

---

`

Midnight Salvage. The title interests me because ?salvage? is used to mean something saved from danger. Midnight Salvage gives me a feeling of darkness, but not necessarily in terms of hopelessness. From the definition of ?salvage,? I can conclude that there is hope to be found. It is there; it does exist. It may just be extremely difficult to find when you?re not in the light, metaphorically speaking. Many of Adrienne Rich?s poems involve war-torn countries and obliterated villages searching for the true definition of freedom and happiness. ?Shattered Head? is a poem with these themes. ?But time is a bloodshot eye/ seeing its last of beauty its own/ foreclosure/ a bloodshot mind/ finding itself unspeakable.? This work deals with the indescribable experiences of living through the war and Holocaust, experiences that everyone wishes could be forgotten, left in the past, and not taken into the future. (?Char?, 2, is one of my favorite war poems.) I especially enjoyed the discussion in ?Camino Real? about the baffled state the author found herself in when hearing stories of torture and suffering. She felt herself into the situation, saying that she was the one who was there suffering. Happiness being described as a glimpse of the unhandicapped life is quite interesting. Rich?s definition of happiness is living without confinements placed on you by society, being free from mental burden and physical oppression. Rich attempts to find poetic beauty in everything, even gruesome events. She talks about war and torture in such a poetic way, describing the vivid details and getting across the point to the reader, while simultaneously maintaining her viewpoint. Artistry is a common theme in her poetry as well. For instance, the obstacles faced by artists, poets, painters, such as acceptance by society. ?This horrible patience which is part of the work/ This patience which waits for language for meaning for the/ least sign.? (pg. 14) I took this statement as one implying the difficulties of writing poetry. When your writing is hindered in some way, it is often hard to deal with. It is not simple finding beauty in unbeautiful things or situations. ?Art is a register of light.? (pg. 36) Art is indeed an indication of enlightenment, insight, and understanding. I believe the cover picture is very fitting for the book. When I look at it, I feel the red first and then the dark blue. In ?Midnight Salvage,? Rich writes, ?Thought?s blood ebb between life- and death-time/ darkred behind darkblue.? (pg. 8) It makes me think of despair, terror, bloodshed during dark times. Also, the yellow is imbedded into the picture minimally. This may demonstrate the fact that there may not seem to be a bright side, but there is. You just have to look good and hard for it. That is the beauty of Rich?s poetry; her ability to find beauty in everything. Rich?s structure is unique compared to other poets? form. The majority of her poems are broken into subsections and numbered. This provides us with individual situations or general ideas converging as one by the end. I believe this is more effective than combining all of these sections into one section. Her method of structure allows us as readers to first absorb each subsection and then reevaluate the entire poem as a whole and find consequential meaning. Conflicting ideas through direct and indirect contrast and repetition are a big part of Rich?s poetry as well. ?Modotti? is a perfect example of consistent repetition of words, phrases, and lines. Her imagery and descriptive vocabulary add much to the meaning of each poem. It allows us to feel and believe each situation, to relate as much as possible, even if it is impossible. Who knew that ?A Long Conversation? would be such a long poem? 16 pages! It undoubtedly demonstrates the versatility, depth, and style of Rich?s writing. Every poem is structured differently. Some consecutive lines rhyme, increasing the poem?s overall effect on the reader. Half the poem deals with Karl Marx?s Communist Manifesto, discussing the ideas in his book about societal issues, evil, and warfare. This especially jumped out at me. The section creates an image of a room or classroom filled with adults during a book discussion. It is very possible that this was the image Rich intended to make in her readers, and that is one reason she named it ?A Long Conversation?. One of my favorite lines is ?You and I are caught in/ a laboratory without a science.? in ?Letters To a Young Poet?, 2. You are where you?re supposed to be, but it seems as though you have no reason to be there because something significant is missing. It seems pointless that you have the tools, but nothing tangible to work with. You?re stuck in a state of baffled understanding. The author and the other ?she? in the poem are both in contemplation of their artwork. They are searching for the impossible beauty to bring out in their work. ?She? is there with it, but is having trouble recognizing it, and this is tearing her apart. Recognizing the invisible is beyond difficult. ?Seven Skins? probably confused me more than any poem I?ve ever read in my life. What I got out of it was that it would be very difficult to have sex with a paraplegic. I did like the lines ?What a sac of eggs what a drifting flask/ eager to sink to be found/ to disembody.? Rich is possibly stating that she was insecure and desperate for attention during her earlier stage of life. The ?She? in the poem wanted to lose herself in order to have that feeling of being newly discovered. She got that spiritual feeling from Vic? She accomplished something through her unique experience. Overall, I really enjoyed Adrienne Rich?s ?Midnight Salvage.? Her distinct themes brought out a plethora of feelings and emotions in me, such as sadness, bewilderment, and acknowledgement. I could directly imagine scenes she was describing and this made it all the more moving and effective. She is quite a talented poet and it shows in her work.

`

Midnight Salvage Andy Taylor Adrienne Rich?s ?Midnight Salvage? gave me a fair amount of trouble through the first half due to the fact that I had a hard time catching on to what the central points of some of her poems were. In particular, this occurred with the poem titled ?Midnight Salvage?. Though I enjoyed each entity of the poem, the combination of all eight parts did not make too much sense to me. This is because she jumped from talking about looking out of a window and searching for something that will not change to the fact that one can not eat an egg. Thus, I don?t really comprehend the major theme of the poem in its entirety. I do, however, love some of the language that she uses in this poem. For instance, her reference to Whitman?s ?O Captain, My Captain? in depicting something that seems a worse fate than death was really interesting to read. I had to read the part a couple of times to understand that she was saying her captain had not been murdered but rather was tangled up with a bad lifestyle, but once I got it, it really made me think about how there are a lot of things far worse than death (i.e. suffering, causing others pain, wasting one?s life/potential, etc.). Also, my favorite line of perhaps the entire book was, ?When I ate and drank liberation once I walked arm-in-arm with someone who said that she had something to teach me?. This line makes me imagine a two women walking together after a long night at a bar, or similar date spot, rambling about different ideas and such that they want the other person to know about them, and I love how she articulates it. Once I crossed the half way mark, the book seemed to be making more and more sense to me as to what the author was trying to convey through her poems. ?Seven Skins,? in particular, made me really feel like I understood that she was trying to depict how different things can be for someone who does not have all of the functions of what most would consider ?normal people.? The diction she chooses in this poem evokes such powerful imagery, as well, that I know what she is talking about without her having to describe each detail. For example: ?what a body ready for breaking open like a lobster.? That simile makes me imagine this poised form laying on a bed somewhere, waiting for that someone to come and be with them. It?s a beautiful image that I never would have gotten without that particular order of words. It is exactly this kind of language that makes the poem enjoyable for me. My favorite poem of the book, however, was ?A Long Conversation?, due to the subject matter of an inner-turmoil over whether to become what you know you will enjoy (i.e. being gay) or to find a place in society that suits the needs of those around you. It was really interesting to see the author reference the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as well because it added another element of how, at many times, individuals are thrust into their jobs by a social call to fill a vacancy. This is especially driven home by the line ?the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population,? which makes me think of how anyone is susceptible to become a lower-middle class ?two-piece suit? (as Sam Taylor puts it) who shows up to work every morning ready to complete a task he/she thinks is worthless. I had to stop for a few minutes on this page as the language Rich used gave way to some of my own thoughts about my future and where I will end up. Will I end up a ?philosopher trained as an engineer,? who doesn?t follow a calling simply because it is deemed undesirable by my friends, family, society? It seems extraordinarily relevant considering the point at which I stand in my life right now, due to the fact that I will have to pick a major soon and set my bearings on what I would ultimately like to achieve. Thus, I enjoyed such a topic as the subject matter for her poem. Rich also made me laugh out loud with her line ?the Arts, you know---they?re Jews, they?re left-wing, in other words, stay away? It was fun to see that she managed to incorporate a political viewpoint about the arts into her poetry, especially since such a connection between the arts and liberalism is made everyday. Painting, music, art, poetry; all of these are considered, so to speak, hippie fields of work, and are often looked down upon, even if not intentionally, by those that have filled more mainstream voids in society, such as a banker or engineer(not to say that such people always look at the arts in a condescending manner). Therefore, I enjoyed seeing her provide a good representation of what society is like. I found Rich?s book well-written and thought out. Many of her poems were pages long but I managed to stay with them due to her interesting rhythm of writing that changed from page to page, as well as her vivid imagery used to portray the physical nature of some of her poems. Though I did have trouble understanding some of the major themes of her poems, I still felt I gained from the enjoyment of understanding the pieces of the poems that made the whole. Ergo, I would not say that my lack of understanding impeded me from taking pleasure in reading her poems.

`

I found the structure of Rich?s poems to be confusing at first, but appropriate for her style. I usually prefer short poems, so Rich?s eight-section or seventeen-page poems (?Midnight Salvage? and ?A Long Conversation?) were a bit hard to swallow for me, partly because my attention span is not so great, but also partly because I couldn?t really tell how the sections fit into one cohesive poem. I felt like, on the whole, Rich?s poems were not cohesive. I felt that they ended unresolved, unexplained. Many of her poems have very little punctuation, especially periods, which makes it hard at times to tell when one thought ends and another begins. ?For An Anniversary,? for example, has no periods, and only one comma, and even ends without any punctuation. At first I was bothered by this syntactical open-endedness, but I found it mimicked the content of the poems, and was thus a fitting style for Rich?s poetry. The stylistic elements I found effective were the line breaks and the way Rich positioned the sections of her poems on the page. I found that Rich?s poems progressed well. I also think that, because her poems are so heavy with allusion and philosophical musing, it was wise of her to only place one section on each page, instead of just leaving a space, the next number, and then the next section. This format provided a little break for readers, and also allowed them to fully digest one section before moving on to the next. While this structural choice highlighted the complexities of each section of Rich?s poems, I found that it was not effective in unifying the sections into cohesive poems. In ?The Art of Translation,? I couldn?t find the connection between two people with a stick between them and a customs booth (sections two and four). I felt that each section worked well, was beautiful, on its own, as a little snapshot, beautifully written and simple, and that when Rich put many of these snapshots together under one title they often just confused me as I tried to find a common link. This confusion detracted from the quality of the work. The reader had to make too many steps to get over the bridge, and thus could not appreciate the view. I think the strongest element of Rich?s poetry is her language. The words flowed flawlessly, and sounded quite lyrical. I started reading silently, but found that I understood, and enjoyed, the poems much more when I read them aloud. Lyrically, ?Char? was my favorite poem. Its first line demonstrates what I like about Rich?s language: ?There is bracken there is the dark mulberry.? The line has both hard and lagging sounds (bracken versus mulberry), and the lack of punctuation facilitates a flowing nature that the poem could not have had if it was grammatically correct. Some reoccurring themes were happiness, as the quotation in the beginning of the book would suggest, and also politics, as there were a lot of references to Communism. But I didn?t feel like Rich was confining herself within themes; instead, I think she focused on keeping the sound and concreteness of her poems constant, thus creating a cohesive book of poetry.