And Because It's Friday...

A favorite around these parts--Carolyn Forche. "The Museum of Stones." I've just started analyzing this, as I read it for the first time while out in Cali last week. Would love to hear what folks think after we digest for a couple hours.

UPDATE: OK, comments open. Like I said, I just read this last week. So I'm not sure what I think. As usual her sense of rhythm is just sick--"stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown." And then that one beautiful simile--storks crying "like human children"--just sitting in the middle of all this concrete detail is great. Carolyn Forche's poetry is always so muscular--just vivid, precise detail, and then a lovely abstraction right where you least expect it.

The Museum of Stones

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,

collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,

battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,

stones loosened by tanks in the streets

of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,

schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,

pebble from Apollinaire's oui,

stone of the mind within us

carried from one silence to another,

stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,

agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,

chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,

stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,

stone from the tunnel lined with bones,

lava of the city's entombment,

chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,

paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,

stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,

those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,

feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,

fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe

of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,

stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,

from a chimney where storks cried like human children,

stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,

altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,

bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,

stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,

stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,

concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,

all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk

with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become

a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,

like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

 

Comments

BelleIsa October 31, 2008 3:39 PM

First reading: If these walls could talk, if I could be a fly on the way it wouldn’t just be about voyeurism, or finding out secrets. The commonality of our experiences of our humanity is what the walls, or stones would tell us all. Perhaps the destruction these stones have seen.

Second Reading: In “The Museum of Stones,” it’s violent, walking from room to room and experiencing the history of inanimate objects, which I believe can icily illustrate death, and loss. (Think the scattered belongings of a family perished after a natural disaster) Forche stylizes the poem—created with steady and controlled pacing, to build into this violence. Each layer of it constructed diligently until it escalates towards the end with even syllables and alliteration and finally “the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.”

Third reading (It’s simmering): How could I have missed the narrator? What of the narrator who notices the indiscretions of these stones…and collects them. Why collect all of this physical evidence of human misery and disconnectedness. Also, there’s the quiet; the problems with silence. “Carried from one silence to another,” is it that the narrator doesn’t want to forget? The people punished for not keeping silent “paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army.”

I’ve been reading “The Country Between Us,” thank you TNC.

Tessa October 31, 2008 4:22 PM

Very thought provoking.

I feel like she might be saying something about how detached we are from the realities of our human history. Generations leave behind evidence (a museum of evidence) of our humanity, and lack thereof, but we don't always see it, or choose to look. But she doesn't really seem to be talking about indifference: "concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf" so I feel like it's not about us not choosing to look at reality, it's more like unconsciousness or something. In any case that line is driving me crazy...am I way off in hinterland?

BelleIsa...ooo, the narrator, you're right.

Joybells October 31, 2008 4:31 PM

Oh my. As a stone collector myself, I find this poem almost unbearably intense, even moreso when I read it out loud. In the line about the Buddhas of Bamiyan, I first misread the verb as "martyred" instead of "mortared." I suspect the connection is intentional.

These stones will steep for a long time. I second BelleIsa's thank you.

Nick October 31, 2008 4:36 PM

It is funny, you don't really think about it too much, but stone has been a vital part of the human experience since, well, since the sun "entered the human dawn," and you could really trace human history through a museum of stones.

After my first read through I went back and was thinking, could the narrator be referring to something tangible when she says "This is your museum of stones..." which we would hope, "taken together, would become a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred..." and at first I just pictured the earth itself floating through space. Perhaps abandoned, perhaps nuked to hell, perhaps globally warmed beyond sustainability, but as the last record of human kind. Cheery, no? Being a social studies teacher, my second thought was that this would be excellent in the beginning of a history book. Of course, a book is not as eternal as stone, but lots of kids think history is immovable and sacred (or at least beyond reproach)!

Sporcupine October 31, 2008 5:01 PM

First, it's experience, skipping through the sheer vastness and variety of the world and the human touching of the world.

Second, it's certainty that there's something precious, magic, sacred about experiencing the many bits together.

And then, it's a pause in the certainty. Maybe it's just drunk hope and wasted effort. Maybe an ossuary isn't actually an important to have made. Maybe.

Only, the pause at the end can't outweigh the tumbling wonder of the many images from earlier in the poem.

Highly satisfactory.

Gully October 31, 2008 5:42 PM

Stones ... the plural seems important to me ...

Stones as part of civilization, and the history of civilization ...

Different kinds of stones, stones of all types. Stones coming together to form buildings or as remainders of buildings.

People as stones?

My impression is a meditation on people coming together and falling apart in the constructing and deconstructing of civilization .. and of course the passage of time ... dust to dust or big stones to smaller stones ... from the dawn of human time.

.......

Thanks Ta-Nehisi, beautiful and thought provoking.

CitizenE October 31, 2008 5:51 PM

Forche came into the picture in the late 70's, wrote the poem book on El Salvador, the generalissimo with his jarfilled with human ears.

This--Whitman first--the grand catologue--with Gary Snyder piled on mineraly, etymologies like so much riprap, lost trails, days gone by:

saw the Bamian Buddhas myself in 69, sat on top of one of them. Half the road that went from Herat to Kabul across Afghanistan was paved in asphalt by the States, the other half in concrete by those Soviets. They had a democratically elected government back then. The women covered from head to foot with birdcages on their heads were a vision out of Salvador Dali. The rug salesmen tried to get all the American hippies so stoned they wouldn't know how much they were paying for that rug to send home. It was a joke--"In Afghanistan, everything is 'finished.'"
Bamian was up into the mountains northwest from Kabul. Long, high desert valley--one stony spot. Lots of camels. Teahouses where truck drivers and such played tambouras.
From there we went up to the lakes of Band-I-Amir--5 lakes Lapis Lazuli blue, one plateau up from the another, with hundreds of waterfalls and streams so clear and filled with fish you could slap them with your hands out of the water--like few places anyone on earth ever gets to see. When we got there, high in that windswept desert, the people came out in ragged clothing and begged us for chapstick. Chapped lips, chapped cheeks, faces so windblown, the color of desert stone; if we only had known.

karsten October 31, 2008 6:55 PM

TNC I'm a student critic and editor of poetry and I simply don't get your selections, they're all very plodding and underpowered, when are you going to post the real stuff by poets I've actually heard of or are you interested only in noncanonic traditions?

Juniper October 31, 2008 7:37 PM

This one grows on me as I re-read it. It strikes me as kind of a counterpoint to thinking of humans as part of the animal kingdom--it pushes you to see us as made up of our component elements, especially the "stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry" line, where it seems like the plant world too is swallowed up in the stillness of the mineral world. I'm not sure what those lines literally refer to. Is "stone apple" independently meaningful to anyone here?

"the mind within us/carried from one silence to another" is powerful. Together with "all earth a quarry, all life a labor" it gives me this feeling of struggling against an inevitable stillness.

I love the gentle allusiveness of "stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt."

AL October 31, 2008 7:56 PM

Wow, great poem. Couple thoughts:

All one sentence: "This is your museum of stones... with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become a shrine or holy place." So the "this" is the list, the poem: Forche is describing but also building.

I like Juniper's comment on the "stone apple" etc. "Stone-faced, stone-drunk" is startling in a similar way: Forche is literalizing cliches here.

One of the things I really find moving about the poem is the alternation between use and material. "Feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert": ordinarily, these words mean nothing to me (I'm no mineralogist), but this list of stone names takes on something like life when placed in the middle of a set of stone's uses.

Anyone follow the Apollinaire reference? The "dream of stone" is Baudelaire's, not Apollinaire's, right? One of the statue poems?

Ramdu October 31, 2008 7:57 PM

"stone of the mind within us/carried from one silence to another" seems Zen or Taoist to me. Also get the sense that "this assemblage" at the end refers to the poem as much as to the museum of stones. Words as enduring things, but not forever.

Love this poem, and last week's too. Have pointed other people here for both the poetry and the politics.

Ta-Nehisi Coates November 1, 2008 11:20 AM

"TNC I'm a student critic and editor of poetry and I simply don't get your selections, they're all very plodding and underpowered, when are you going to post the real stuff by poets I've actually heard of or are you interested only in noncanonic traditions?"

I don't really understand this--"real stuff by poets I've actually heard of?" "noncanonic traditions?" If you have suggestions, e-mail them to me. Otherwise, like I always say, please start a poetry blog. People love talking about it.

Patrick D November 1, 2008 5:28 PM

Love all the comments on this beautiful poem. No expert in poetry , but comparisons to Whitman and Snyder above seem right on.

The muscular quality is always a sign of a good self-editor; concrete imagery and musicality, both, so hard to get right. Forche's always been a master.

Here's the musical thing I dig in a nutshell:

First line, the rhythm of "THIS is your muSEum of STONES" is answered with "asSEMbled in MATCHbox and TIN".

That rhythm is echoed in line 2 and sets up an implicit expectation of rhyme; just substitute a word like "bin" for the word "viaduct" at the end of line two, or any other strong rhyme with "tin"... instead of which she eludes the half-expected rhyme beautifully with a clangy, 3-syllable word with vowels as far from "tin" as possible.

There's also that nice contrast between the Anglo-Saxon "tin" and the Latin "viaduct" that is a motif throughout.

Then, in the next line, sudden and surprising and densely packed assonance between "threshing floor" and "abbatoir", and the alliteration of "battlefield" and "basilica".

The whole poem works like that. Love it.