
Recovering techie with an MFA, working on like a kajillion writing projects at once. Check out the Post-Self cycle, Restless Town, A Wildness of the Heart, ally, and a whole lot of others.
Trans/nb, queer, polyam, median, constantly overwhelmed.
Current hyperfixation: SS14
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Is the poem, strictly speaking, an "Ode?" Were any other form names considered, in whatever decision making process settled on the collective name?
Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars:
In terms of the actual form, it is well known that it is constructed of ten stanzas of ten lines, and each stanza takes the following (very vague) form:
- The first line is presents a thesis. "That which lives is forever praiseworthy,"
- The second line expands on the thesis: "For they, knowing not, provide life in death."
- Lines three through six provide an example or explanation: "Dear the wheat and rye under the stars: / serene; sustained and sustaining. / Dear, also, the tree that was felled / which offers heat and warmth in fire."
- Lines seven through nine echo each other, most often in the form of a series of linked questions: "What praise we give we give by consuming, / what gifts we give we give in death, / what lives we lead we lead in memory,"
- The tenth line provides a quippy conclusion: "and the end of memory lies beneath the roots."
The poem itself is titled "Ode to the end of death", and yet the conclusion offered, if one could be said to exist, is that there is no such end; or, rather, that the end of death is that death be some inevitable, unstoppable force such as taxes are. It describes death as not just something that must be greeted with open arms, but something that one must desire to meet. It is the treating of death as reclamation rather than annihilation.
It is perhaps not a very good poem, in the end, but it is an admirable effort for something constructed out of what amount to the free association of words that dogged the author while they were trapped in a dream. It is a poem that a mad person might write because it is a poem that a mad person wrote.
In the end, it is an ode in its tone and approach to this supposed end of annihilation, and yet its construction keeps this form merely a suggestion. It only in the vaguest sense an ode, and yet that is the name that we are stuck with. Michelle Hadje picked the clade structure almost on a whim, and when we thought about it and whether we ought to change it to, say, the Verse clade or what have you. If our lives are a ceaseless memorial to the poet, then so, too, is the name of our clade.
Fascinating, so one could possibly read "end" not in the sense of "the stopping point" but in the sense of "purpose?"
Rye:
Yes, I think so. Second stanza, first line: "Life breeds life, but death must now be chosen."