The poems in Carol Potter's 2008 book use a narrative voice with a feathery touch. The narrator guides a poetic scene through digression, bringing in bits of memory, shifts of emphasis and tangential significance.
The language is notable for its lack of subject pronouns. This voice gives the tourist-reader permission to watch the scenes through her own lens. She is not locked into the gaze of a controlling narrator.
The telling in these poems is straightforward and linear. And yet, time is in upheaval. The past arrives like a ghost and strips away the veneer of the present. The starting point becomes a new destination and the reader looks around midway to discover another landscape emerging.
The Surge and Return
In her 1935 essay “Poets with History and Poets without History,” Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva likens lyric poetry to the surge and return of an ocean wave.
The same water - a different wave
What matters is that it is a wave
What matters is that the wave will return
What matters is that it will always be different
What matters most of all: however different the returning wave, it will always return as a wave of the sea.
What is a wave? Composition and muscle. The same goes for lyric poetry.
The poetry composing Otherwise Obedient follows that surge and return. There is a flow from one source and there is transformation of that flow. Often, the poems present a scene, infuse it with overwhelming detail and allow the reader to undergo the transformation.
Take for examples the poems “Green Felt Gowns” and “Drinking Wine and Eating Chocolate Cookies.” Both are content-driven containers of the literal. Yet at their conclusion, the reader has traveled from mere observation to a different perspective. The details impress their way into the readers’ psyche.
The sheer force of repetition alters what seems apparent on a first read. The data of the evening news or observations of strangers on a street becomes a collective image with wider and deeper meaning. The wave engulfs the reader. The motion carries her along and then spins her out of its grasp. She looks back to the ocean, sees the same ocean but now with a fresh perspective.
The "god" Poems
In the end, Potter can accomplish this transformation only with the willing participation of her readers. We can ride the undulating waves of her lyrics with eyes squeezed shut or with eyes wide open. Her series of “god” poems encounter this omnipotence in the individual, whether a passenger on a bus or a gardener tending to his tasks. Omnipotence has its responsibilities though. It makes decisions about intentionality. It governs perception and response. Or it floats along, carried by the tide of indifference, consenting to its powerlessness.
The “god” poems seek identity and find it everywhere, in everything and everybody. Mostly, the “god” poems ask questions about determination. What will it be – a ride or a drive? Will we be changed or will we remain the same, untouched by our power to transform?
The poems in Otherwise Obedient encompass pain. The collection comes full circle in a journey that begins and ends with particulars. It pushes those particulars to their outer limits, to recognition of the difference between the person who is acted upon and the person who chooses to act.
References:
Potter, Carol. Otherwise Obedient. LA: Red Hen Press, 2008.
Tsvetaeva, Marina, and Angela Livingstone, Trans. Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press, 1992.
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