Welcome back, peeps. This time, we're diving into quite a different poem from Ada Limón's Bright Dead Things poetry collection.
Mowing
By Ada Limón
The man across the street is mowing 40 acres on a small lawn mower.
It’s so small, it must take him days, so I imagine that he likes it. He
must. He goes around each tree carefully. He has 10,000 trees; it’s
a tree farm, so there are so many trees. One circle here. One circle
there. My dog and I’ve been watching. The light’s escaping the sky,
and there’s this place I like to stand, it’s before the rise, so I’m invis-
ible. I’m standing there, and I’ve got the dog, and the man is mow-
ing in his circles. So many circles. There are no birds or anything, or
none that I can see. I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden,
disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not
sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people
and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than
anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine,
and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let
the savage grass grow.
Thoughts going through my mind:
The overall format of this poem is quite different from the poems with line breaks we have seen before. Here, Limón prefers the format of a prose poem––a single-verse paragraph of text. What is the relationship between poetry and prose? When reading "Mowing," I thought the prose aspect of the poem provided a greater sense of freedom when attempting unravel the poem's meaning––it was almost like reading an essay or a short story rather than a poem.
I also found this interview that Limón took part in as part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s online Interview Series. When asked about the format of prose poems, she responded: "I think of poetry as the compression of language. A pressure cooker. Something distilled. And so whether or not the poem is lineated, what I am most interested in is the way the language is holding its truth. Have you ever been in a room with a couple you don’t know very well, but suddenly, by witnessing only one interaction you are able to discern so much about their entire relationship? That’s poetry to me, the moments in life where everything is revealed. A poem doesn’t have to have line breaks to do the work of revealing; what it does have to do is expose life in a new way, unearth a larger thing through one small moment. A reader only needs to know that the biggest difference between a lineated poem and a prose poem is pacing. The prose poem moves faster. It doesn’t have the line breaks to slow it down so it’s supposed to read like you’d read any piece of prose. The speed allows for a sort of surreality to take place, for the pressure cooker to get turned up."
"Mowing" seems like a follow up to "The Last Move" as she continues to outline her experience in a new environment
"be more tree than / anything else" = natural world --> reflection of (a version of) narrator?
"imagine what it must be like to stay hidden" = self-reflection becomes so much more challenging with social expectations and norms; especially when immersed in a fast-paced life, it's easy to get entrapped in a repetitive cycle and lose a sense of purpose
"it's hard not to always want something else" = tendency to mindlessly chase something else without appreciating what your given in the present
I'm personally learning a lot about word choice and the beauty behind Limón descriptive language = ex) rather than directly telling the readers that it's getting dark, she writes, "The light’s escaping the sky"
Thanks for tagging along. If you would like to share anything, feel free to send me a private memo or drop any comments below. I'll see you tomorrow.
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