212. New Yorker poems (2)

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Everything in the world

has a name

if you know it.

That's the sentence the second poem in the current New Yorker begins with.  It affronts me because it is false.  Things have names whether or not I know them. 

I have an explanation for my affront: I am reading the sentence the way I told my English composition students their readers would read sentences.  "Your readers expect sense, your readers are skeptical, your readers want to be treated with respect."  I am affronted because I have made myself one of those readers.

That's not right, I know.  I should be the reader I am now, knowing what the New Yorker is, knowing what contemporary poetry is, knowing that all poetry asks us to move out of the prose classroom.  But those old comp-class readers are still around, and some of them are buying New Yorkers.  They should a least know that there are poets who themselves believed that poetry "should at least be good prose," and that their expectations are respectable.

So slap them right off with a flat falsehood, that "everything has a name if you know it," as Maureen N. McLane does (New Yorker, 8-12,19-13) and they are going to take offense.  "You expect me to believe that?  What do you think I am?"

I'm not the only retired composition teacher with former students out in the world.  There are going to be a lot of offended people out there.  It's not just me.  I know we'll be told that if the above is our response then we shouldn't be reading the New Yorker.  Maybe we shouldn't even be reading poetry.

Fair enough.  We'll keep our $6.99 and accept our position as common people.  Let the nation of the educated fall into an aristocrat-commoner division.  You can believe that it already has if you read McLane's next sentence.  Here's the whole stanza:

Everything in the world

has a name

if you know it.

You already know that.

We may think the first sentence is false but what do we know?  We don't even know ourselves.  We've already accepted it.  And we don't even know we've accepted it.  Not until the one with authority reminds us.

The lordly tone of that reminder confirms our position.  "Believe it because I tell you."  Yessir, yessir.  Sorry I asked