Contributor’s Marginalia: Shira Dentz on “Wild the Sea” and “Out of the Sea” by Aaron Krol

While reading Aaron Krol’s poems in the Fall/Winter 2015 issue of 32 Poems, I felt Elizabeth Bishop’s influence in their concrete objective description/images, and perhaps too in their evocation of a sea landscape. I was with the poems as they unravelled—feeling their sensations. In other words, they grabbed me.

As I lived the sensations described in the poems, I noted how I like having this interactivity with a poem—the internal process is similar to that of figuring out a math equation, but doing it experientially and without thought. Somehow, after reading these poems, I had a thought that I don’t think I’ve had before about poetry, about the poetic use of language. Suddenly it occurred to me that language, as an art medium, is paradoxical in that it’s the most abstract medium of all—unless one is working with chance operations wherein one is toying with pre-prepared language—one begins with nothing tangible. With visual art, dance, music, theatre, etc., one starts with something materially tangible. This dimension of language has, of course, been a source of argument from at least Aristotelian times onward in debating which is superior, words or art? mind or body? spirit or spectacle? invisible or visible? But, the paradox is that, given poetry’s starting point as an abstract materiality, I think it’s able to penetrate further in another’s intimate solitariness than other art forms. Two disclaimers here: 1. yes, one could say that even though words are abstract, they have sounds, and that’s what a poet works with—but I venture to say that sound isn’t necessarily a poem’s starting point. 2. I’m sure people could argue about how other art forms are more accessible and therefore they reach more deeply, and that my insight is really an expression of personal preference. Still, I will maintain my position as everyone has something like a “vault” inside them—each of us is finally alone and we know this in ourselves. It is this place that I think poetry can reach into most deeply.

As an aside, who would have thought that I’d be chiming in in this historical debate while reflecting on Krol’s poems? Certainly not I!

Besides that these poems gave me a significant insight, I wonder whether my line of thinking was influenced by his poems’ subject matter, and not just their incredibly vivid concrete images. After all, there are several allusions to Buddhist teaching about the relation of desire to suffering/hardship (Siddhartha too makes an appearance in “Out of the Sea”) and enlightenment: hence, a tension is expressed about the value of materiality vs. abstraction.

The two poems here, “Wild the Sea” and “Out of the Sea” both begin with “The sea” and the first poem contains the phrase that becomes the title of the second poem. Each also looks about the same: the first poem is two stanzas, 13 lines and 14 lines, and the second poem is 13 lines and 12 lines. “Wild the Sea” seems to me to contain a sonnet given the number of lines in the second stanza and what seems to me to be a volta in the last two lines. The echo of the sonnet structure, however off a little, in both these poems also gives rise to my thinking that something philosophical—an angle of thought—is being pursued; enlightenment.

Another thing I notice is that in “Wild the Sea,” the sea is not just personified, but it “describes,” as a poet does. It “describes what it’s craving.” The sea also “wears out the unfinished shore—not with temperance, / no artful work with the hands” and while the next image is “the seagull who gets the meat from a horseshoe crab,” one could also substitute this with the image of an artful poet’s hand writing.

One last thing I would like to note about these poems are their unfamiliar syntax and the syntactical variations within them. I think that their syntax contributes as much to their phenomenological effect as does their oftentimes brilliant imagery. The work their syntax does moves one through the poems, and its movement enacts the sea as it’s described. One also can’t help but see the mechanics involved, analogous to the way the sea’s mechanics are observed in the poem and “mechanics” is the frame of reference the poet uses to characterize the sea’s activity. I find it curious and therefore noteworthy how there are sometimes complete sentences, subject and verb intact, and then at crucial times—such as the beginning of the first lines of the second stanza in “Wild the Sea”—a reader is left looking for the subject. This dislocation of agency is something that recurs in spots in both of these poems, and while one can infer the subject/agency, there’s a play between what’s visible and not, between distance and attachment. In the last line of “Wild the Sea,” the poem asserts value to being able to observe something kinetic that’s as-yet-undefinable, hence abstract (like time), evidenced through the material/stasis: “But it’s good to watch a quantity diminish: / it’s like how time moves. Not at all, then all at once.”