July 8, 2006

Dorianne Laux, Antilamentation versus No Regrets

Our July 2006 prompt has the poem "Antilamentation" by Dorianne Laux (pronounced "low") as a model.

I realize that using it and the idea of "anti-" as a prompt might seem like simply being against something and I wanted your poems to be more.

I brought up the idea that lamentation is a fairly common poetic theme (probably more in older poems) and mentioned "The Song of Hiawatha Hiawatha's Lamentation" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Butler Yeats' "The Lamentation Of The Old Pensioner", as well as the contemporary "Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation" by Stanley Kunitz.

And if her poem is against lamentation (mourning), then is it like Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"? It's not quite that black and white.

I do think Laux is rebelling in her poem against lamentation, the lamentation traditionally found in poetry. She is also promoting her case for no regrets.

Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

I think she is recommending another approach to life. Is she recommending another approach to poetry?

I listened to the poem being read again and thought I heard something of Laux's own early life doing "ordinary" work before she attended college-

to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.


and the small things we do that seem now a waste of precious time -

the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
[Not] the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,

as well as the big things that we really regret

the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness


and I heard some acceptance of all this as the path to Now, to a good place at which she has arrived. Should I call it Fate? I'm not sure that's it, but it's a starting place.

What are your thoughts?


photo of Dorianne Laux
by her daughter, Tristem Laux



4 comments:

  1. you are right that it is not a for/against proposition. To be pro- the war is not to be anti- the peace.

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  2. I wish that you had broadened the prompt for this poem to include regret.

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  3. the prompt is actually wide open. there is no topic other than the idea of being against something.

    what's the opposite of regret?

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  4. I like the twist at the end of this poem, which you quoted above. As I started reading, I initially assumed she was saying not to regret the mistakes but to embrace or accept them. When I got to the last few lines, what I read was her saying to just let go of the mistakes, to live in the moment now, and to look outside oneself and remember there's a whole world there...all those people going by. I would have to assume that THAT, more than just not having regrets, is what she's in favor of, if she's against lamenting.

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