Letter from the Editors
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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.
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Don Selby & Diane Boller
Editors
Martha Rhodes's Poetry Month Pick, April 10, 2009
Rondelet
by Anonymous
I never meant
For you to go. The thing you heard
I never meant
for you to hear. The night you went
away I knew our whole absurd
sweet world had fallen with a word
I never meant.
Martha Rhodes Comments:
How do we read this poem?
How do we hear I never meant/for you to go… As the speaker’s loud and angry response to the person who has left? Or as an utterance whispered with tail between (his) legs? And who is speaking? A man? A woman? Forgive me, gents, I’m going to go with the speaker being a man for now. I guess because I hear a man saying one bad word that does it all in for them. Too, the word “meant” sonically suggests “men” and I admit to being susceptible to such influences.
We know this is an obsessive poem. The form tells us that. The poor shmo is repeating over and over, not only in the poem but probably in his head, that he said something terrible, he didn’t mean it, and boy o boy is he paying the price. He refers to what he said at first as “the thing” and then “the thing” becomes a word. A single word, unadorned, unexplained here and falling at the end of the penultimate line, giving it all the more importance, with the poem’s last line weighing it down.
One word. The emphasis, the weight, the pressure in the poem is on the one word that is withheld from us. First it’s “a thing” that was said/heard. Later, in the penultimate line, it’s referred to as “a word” (that rhymes with the preceding “heard,” and “absurd world,” giving a word even that much more weight.) “Word” only appears once in the poem but because our ear has been tutored to hear it through the rhymes, we are prepared for it.
When it appears in the poem, it has weight, heft, resonance. There’s a finality to the last line. We really don’t feel that there’s going to be a reversal of relationship fortune here. “I never meant” repeats three times. When it appears here, at the end, it feels anchored. There’s just no lift, no hope. Fini.
This is truly an example of a poem for which the form is the means to the poem, rather than the reason for it. The very repetition, the poem’s brevity, the unadorned diction and plain syntax—the very straightforwardness of the poem—cooperate to make a tight little package of intensity.
About Martha Rhodes:
Martha Rhodes is the author of three poetry collections: At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1999), Perfect Disappearance (New Issues, 2000), and Mother Quiet (Zoo, 2004). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program, and serves as the director of Four Way Books, a literary press in New York City.
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