Hospitable Poetry #15

Melanie Bettinelli on "Tin Foil" by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Melanie was one of the first people I met on Substack when I joined a year and a half ago. Quick to answer my questions and help me think things through, she is a generous and attentive reader. Thanks to her essay about birdsong, I downloaded the Merlin app and have become a more knowledgeable bird ethusiast. I have loved participating in her ekphrastic challenges because of her warmth and community-building (and because she writes some of the most beautiful ekphrastic poetry on Substack). I always read everything she posts. Please subscribe to enjoy her book reviews, travelogues, and poetry. In today’s post, she pushes back a little bit on the idea that hospitable poetry needs to be about something other than writing, and I’m so glad she does.

One of my favorite parts about running this series is getting to email poets (some of the kindest people on the planet). For today’s post, I was also privileged to witness the email exchanges between Melanie and Doireann Ní Ghríofa, who gave permission for her gorgeous poem to appear here today. We want to thank both Dedalus Press and Wake Forest University Press for granting us permission, and we offer our gratitude to Doireann Ní Ghríofa for, not only writing such a beauty, but also letting us enjoy it here today. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts in the comments!

River Lee South Channel, Cork, Co. Cork, Ireland taken by J. Crocker (2017)

Reflection by Melanie Bettinelli

Poems are not meanings but experiences.
–John Ciardi

Tinfoil. You might call it aluminum foil rather than tinfoil, but you almost certainly have a roll in your kitchen. And you’ve probably had the experience of having it escape, unroll across the kitchen floor like a silver stream, and trying to roll it up again and fit it back into the box—largely unsuccessfully.

This poem has haunted me since the first time I read it. I copied it out into a letter I sent my sister. But it didn’t immediately spring to mind when Abigail asked about hospitable poetry. In fact, I drew a blank. Late to the party, I didn’t settle on the poem until I’d read the first few essays in the series.

I typed up a rough draft and then looking it over I thought, “This sounds horribly academic.” I was writing in the wrong register. I started to have doubts.

So I decided to read the poem to my husband.

My husband is not really a poetry guy, though he isn’t completely closed to it either. As he puts it, he’s a Tolkien fan who re-reads the Lord of the Rings religiously; but he usually skips the poems and songs when he comes to them. (Though after twenty years of marriage to me, he admits that I’m rubbing off on him. On his current read-through he’s actually slowing down to read them.)

Reading and discussing this poem with him was my trial balloon. If he can get it, then it’s a hospitable poem. If he hates it, then I need to go back to the drawing board, no matter how much I love this poem. (He suggested that I might think about an A.E. Stalling poem—“That American woman who lives in Greece,” he called her. “I like her poems. They’re very accessible.” And, yeah, I thought of her as well, but I really want to promote Doireann Ni Ghriofa, who isn’t very well known to American readers and American poets.)

I read “Tinfoil” to him once, while he was impatiently waiting for me to cut his hair. His first reaction was a little pushback. (His first reaction to anything is usually pushing back, challenging, questioning, qualifying.)

“I’m not sure this is an accessible poem,” he says. “It’s rather long. And it lost me a few times. I think an accessible poem should be very short. That will invite me in. Like that one about the plums.”

And yet, when I pushed forward, he was able to discuss the poem at length based only on that single reading. I clarified that we were actually using the word “hospitable” rather than “accessible” to define the kinds of poems we mean. “Ah leave it to poets to use a word that itself needs definition and clarification,” he says. “What does it mean for a poem to be hospitable?”

“Well, for one,” I say, “it starts with an everyday experience. In the kitchen with an everyday household object. We all have a roll of aluminum foil in the pantry. We all have the experience of it being unrolled and having to try to roll it back up.”

“Yeah, it never fits,” he says. Exactly.

He says he likes the way the foil becomes a river and is two things simultaneously. You’re in the house: it’s going down the stairs and under the sofa and into the kitchen and around the table legs and under the cupboards. And yet you’re also outside: it’s a river, the walls are the banks. The kitchen is the city-kitchen. It’s both/and. You never quite leave the house and yet you are carried off into another world.

And yet that other world is also a familiar one. No, he doesn’t know where Gougane Barra is—neither do I—but we both can see the foil/water flowing down the stairs/hill. We might not have seen that particular spring or river, may not have watched salmon swimming; but we have stood on riverbanks and watched the fish.

And then I open the book and point out the shape of the poem on the page. The way the short opening lines look like the foil unrolling, and then how they open out to longer lines precisely when the foil becomes a river overflowing its banks.

“See the line lengths are hospitable, too,” I say. “Look how they are so short to begin with. Anyone can read them. Easy, everyday words.”

“Yes,” he agrees, “and by the time you get to the longer lines, you’re committed to the reading.”

Even when the lines get longer, the poem is still using everyday language. Even in these longer lines, the words are common words, the sentence structure is straightforward. There is no convoluted syntax. It eases the way for you to keep reading. The poem’s language is never something you need to work at. And in fact the line breaks give you even more space. It’s almost prose broken up into very short paragraphs.

He says he might not pick up such a long poem on his own, and yet he agrees that it’s not inhospitable. There is a bit of a challenge to it, but nothing that closes the door on him. Yes, he would be more likely to read a very short poem—he cites the plum poem¹—which is the height of hospitality. It’s even a meme.

But just because this poem is longer doesn’t mean it’s not hospitable. He compares it to a steak versus beef bourguignon. The fancy dish might be a little less straightforward, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by someone with pretty simple tastes. Or it’s like being invited to eat at the house of an Indian family when you aren’t familiar with Indian cuisine. They make a curry that isn’t very hot because they are very hospitable. You might not be familiar with the flavors and the presentation of the food. You might have to push yourself a bit to enjoy the meal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t being hospitable. Hospitality doesn’t mean you don’t experience any resistance at all. But it means that you feel invited to make the effort.

Our discussion of the poem lasted through his haircut, and we even talked for a bit after I’d finished. He agrees that this poem is a hospitable poem and he approves of the fact that I’ve reshaped this essay to follow our conversation. That is more accessible and hospitable as well, he points out, a departure from my more usual academic style. By shaping it as a conversation rather than a lecture or an academic essay, I’m inviting the reader in.

---

Tin Foil² / (Scragall Stain³)
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

O aluminum roll,
o silver scroll,

confined
in a cupboard,

bound
in cardboard,

restrained
behind a jagged blade

that tears lengths away
to mute the bowls and jars

of the fridge—
o small,

spare
existence.

I would free it, this twisted tin. I’d lift it
from its cabinet and spin a river of it

to loosen a smooth grey spool
through our rooms.

At the summit of the stairs, the source would spurt up
from Gougane Barra, setting a mountain stream to gush,

and I’d lift it and give it a push, I’d let bright waters
rush down the slope until the hall filled with spilled silver ribbon.

Under the bridge of our couch, shadows of salmon
and brown trout would swim in and out of river weed.

Those waters would surge onwards then, swirling under doors
to the city-kitchen. Where gulls screech and shriek high,

I would thrust swifter currents that might make islands
of table legs and riverbanks of walls.

I’d give the water a voice
to hum through the culverts that run under cupboards,

a lilting city song lifting from liquid
speckled with gloom-shadows of mullet.

Song of frost.
I’d put a single seal there, lost,

and conjure the only person who’d glimpse it,
a red-haired girl on the docks.

I’d heave that river back then,
I’d haul it in brash armfuls

all the way back
to me.

Shrunken,
crumpled,

torn, I’d fold
it, and close it

back in its cupboard
once more.

---

The poem opens by addressing the foil directly, "O aluminium roll, / o silver scroll," with an expression of sympathy for the foil, which seems to be in a kind of captivity. Look at the verbs that describe the roll of foil: confined, bound, restrained. And there is a "jagged blade" that "tears" it. Note the way the foil is used to mute bowls and jars, closing their mouths. Everything is constrained and there is an undercurrent of violence. "O small, spare existence." The foil is imprisoned. Is the speaker also feeling imprisoned in the kitchen, in the daily routine?

Then begins the section of longer lines: “I would free it” the speaker says, and just like that the poem breaks free from its confinement and the lines begin to sprawl across the page. “Spin a river of it.” Suddenly the foil is not confined, and it immediately becomes a river as it unspools through the rooms of the house.

Now the foil/river traces two parallel geographies: it flows through the house and it also traces the path of the River Lee from its source in the mountains of that flows into the lake at Gougane Barra, then through the countryside until it reaches the city of Cork, flows through the city and then out to sea. In each stanza these parallels play out as the poem traces the flowing of the river while words and phrases remind us that we are still at the same time inside the house: the foil river rolls down the stairs, through the hall, under the couch, then under the door to the kitchen where it flows around the table legs and under the cupboards until the speaker finally gathers it back into its box.

Abigail’s Hospitable Poetry series began in response to a provocation by poet Steven Searcy at New Verse Review in which he critiques what he perceives as an overabundance of poems about poetry. Searcy protests that a poem that focuses on poetry “distances itself from general readers who want poets to give voice to meaningful experience but are uninterested in the experience of being a poet.”

I chose “Tinfoil” because it’s a poem that has been haunting me. But I also felt a little impish delight in offering it as a hospitable poem to include in this series because it is, in a sense, a poem about the experience of being a poet. It’s just that the theme is implicit rather than explicit.

The tinfoil is a scroll. A scroll is one of the most ancient ways to preserve writing. Wealthy Romans would have cupboards full of scrolls. Each scroll would contain a story, a poem, a book that would have to be unrolled in order to be read. Ni Ghriofa’s foil is a scroll that has a story to tell, a hidden metaphor, waiting to be freed by the poet as she imagines. As it unrolls, it becomes a river, flooding through the house and sweeping us out into the Irish countryside, opening up from the humble kitchen cupboard into the wild world of nature.

And thus the poem is about tinfoil, but from the beginning the word “scroll” pings in my brain and makes me think that the foil has a threefold meaning: it is the thing itself—a scroll of foil, and it becomes a metaphorical river, but it is also an image of the written text—the book smuggled in under an unfamiliar figure. Thus, the poem is also an enactment of the experience of shaping metaphor and of the process of poetic creation.

The repeated “I” that is often the subject of the sentence in the poem’s longer lines is the figure of the poet entering into the poem, showing you how she is spinning the story. She sets the scene, not in a passive way, but with strong verbs that emphasize the speaker’s active role in crafting the scene:

“I’d lift it and give it a push,” she says and “I would thrust”. The scene doesn’t just unroll itself, it’s pushed and thrust into being by the poem’s speaker with verbs reminiscent of a mother giving birth, a common theme in Ní Ghríofa’s verse. Here you can see the artist at work.

More, she invokes the poetic art itself, putting music into the scene: “I’d give the water a voice / to hum . . . a lilting city song”. Not only is she arranging a magical bifocal scene for the reader, she’s lifting the veil and allowing the reader to see how the trick is done: “I’d put . . . and conjure” she says. The metaphor-creating poet is both a singer and a magician, she reminds us.

And then almost before we know it, she moves out of the scene that she’s conjured, “I’d heave” she says, “I’d haul”, returning again to that blended imagery as she pulls back the waters, transforming them once more into tinfoil. The lines get shorter again as she crams it back into its cupboard.

You don’t have to read “Tinfoil” as a poem about poetry, but you can do so if you choose to follow that line of thought. The poem is clearly an experience of the poetic artist at work. It is the poet’s task to magically transform tinfoil into water through the power of metaphor, but the speaker of the poem makes the process of metaphor creation much more an explicit part of the reading experience. And yet the magic of the poem, unlike more obvious ars poetica poems, is that the reader can be oblivious to (or deliberately choose to ignore) that layer of meaning and be completely charmed by the transformation of the foil into a river without thinking too closely about the mechanics of the poet’s art. Perhaps the best and most hospitable kind of ars poetica is the kind smuggled in the back door?

1. “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams | The Poetry Foundation

2. First published by Dedalus Press and Wake Forest University Press and reprinted with permission from the publishers and the poet.

Scragall Stáin

3. Scrolla fada airgid
srianta

i ngéibheann
an chófra,

lúbtha
ina rannóir cairtchláir

le lann fhiaclach
a sracann as

chun béalbhéasaí
a chur ar bhabhlaí

agus ar phrócaí
an chuisneora—

saol bocht,
suarach.

D’fhuasclaínn é, an scragall stáin. Dhéanainn
abhainn as, lí mhín liath scaoilte timpeall an tí.

Ag barr shléibhe an staighre, d’éiríodh an fhoinse
i nGuagán Barra, agus as sin, scaoilinn cláideach

uiscí geala síos le fána, ribín liath
ag rith tríd an halla, faoi dhroichead an toilg,

scáileanna na mbreac rua is na mbradán ag snámh
faoin duileasc inti.

Leanadh na huiscí uathu de chuar timpeall na ndoirse
go cathair na cistine. Faí agus fáir na bhfaoileán thairsti,

scaoilinn uiscí sciobtha a dhéanadh oileáin de chosa boird
agus bruacha de bhallaí, a chuireadh glór na habhann

ag canadh faoi thóchair na gcófraí, abhainn chathrach
déanta di, breac le scáileanna dorcha lannacha.

Chuirinn rón aonair ar strae inti agus cailín óg rua
ar an aon duine amháin a d’fheiceadh é.

Tharraingínn an abhainn le hualach a scéalta uile
ina diaidh agus lúbainn í siar chugam.

Craptha,
sractha,

cúlaithe,
d’fhillfinn

í ar ais
sa chófra arís.