"The Climb Down," by Kate Rutledge Jaffe
from The Believer, October 2011
I prefer my elementary school understanding of plate tectonics. The world shifts. There are these giant continental plates. In the beginning there was Pangea, and after a lot of shifting and wandering, we now have seven continents. And then, of course, the great mythological explanation in the tectonic universe: when two plates collide they form a mountain range. Does this really explain what a mountain range looks like? Sure. I don't have the patience to actually watch the real plate tectonics at work. And quite frankly, I fear what it looks like.
Language is unstable. In the poetry world, this fact is pretty much a foregone conclusion. It is not only done. It's done, did, and don't do it, please don't or I'll cringe. And yet, Kate Rutledge Jaffe's poem, "The Climb Down," is trembling with instability. It's like she put the poem on a fault line, and then a whole mountain range sprung up from beneath it. How's that for a mythology in only 12 lines!
What makes it unstable? To start with, I can't tell if the poem is told in first person or third. It might seem obvious: "I is the glance. I never finding stars." I would seem to signal a first person speaker. And for a contemporary American poem, an opening like this is jarring, but that alone shouldn't rule out the first person. Let us enjoy an irregular verb tense. Let us be made aware that there are verbal mechanisms in language. But what about when "I is us, unless us is a nebula, // then I is stars and Dad and Mom is good for little arms"? Is that still a first person? Has the poem made first person or third a matter of the reader's discretion? For me it is easier to make sense if I arrange these different characters (I, Dad and Mom) as a group of people, all in the third person. Then I can picture them as a nebula. Then I can enjoy this comparison of a nebula to a family unit.
Jaffe is playful with the language and point of view, but this play keeps us occupied in a certain quadrant of meaning. Yes, she subverts the normal grammatical usage, but all of this happens within a subject of family, with accessible observations about it. I don't feel lost, because the poem isn't willing away meaning. For instance, "Dad table-sighed: Toast? Insert and kick it under. We is animal." The family is eating. Dad is being funny with the toast, or he's preparing toast. And we're rambunctious or we're ravenous. Jaffe has moved me to a domestic quadrant, probably at breakfast. I don't need to know exactly what is happening so long as I can gather these basic pieces together.
Is Jaffe saying the family unit is unstable? She wouldn't be the first. But the great irony here is that the poem actually takes great comfort in the domestic. I sleeps "a green sleep." I "wears a glittering hat" while being pushed down the street. I am inclined to view this as an infant speaker describing how content she is with her family. I watched the Miranda July movie "The Future" this past weekend. I imagine this speaker like the cat voice in that movie. Sentimental and not fully equipped with the language to say everything she means.
Recommended links:
Kate Rutledge Jaffe homepage
The Believer
