A Poem @ The Junction: Considering the Snail
Welcome to The Junction. I'm Daniel Lazar. The Junction is the intersection, the the nexus, the the junction, if you will, of my passions and curiosities. Now over the past couple years, I've become increasingly curious and increasingly passionate about poetry. And no one has sparked this passion more than my friend Joshua Weiner.
Daniel:Joshua is a poet and professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. And over the years, Josh has hit me to poems and ways of thinking about language that I might not have discovered without his always gentle encouragement. So I'm grateful, truly grateful that he's joining me today. Josh, welcome to The Junction.
Joshua:Hey, Daniel. It's great to be here with you in the poetry space.
Daniel:It is great to have you in this poetry space. So this is the first in what we both hope will become a series of conversations about and around poems. We'll say more about the project as it unfolds. But for now, I just kind of want to dive into a poem. So Josh, to inaugurate our project, you selected Considering the Snail by Tom Gunn from his 1961 volume, My Sad Captains.
Daniel:Can I be so bold as to humbly request that you read the poem to me?
Joshua:Well I've been reading this poem for like forty two years so I'm happy to read it for you Daniel. Thank you. Considering the Snail by Tom Gunn. The snail pushes through a green night for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes where rain has darkened the earth's dark. He moves in a wood of desire, pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts.
Joshua:I cannot tell what power is at work drenched there with purpose knowing nothing. What is a snail's fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress.
Daniel:Thank you for that. Now Josh, of all the poems ever written, why did you select Considering The Snail as the first poem for our project?
Joshua:Well you know I don't know man. It's a poem that I've been reading for all these decades and when we were talking about doing this program and how we might start, it's just the poem that popped up in my head and it's been just an important poem to me over all this time and is one of the poems that led me into writing and kinda showed me a path to writing that I felt like I could follow and be a part of and make mine. And the poem has so many qualities that have been instructive to me and that I've learned from. And there's something about the poem that continues to to speak to me that I continue to think about. It has some kind of mystery at the center of it which keeps me wondering about things.
Daniel:I think we might get back to that mystery as the conversation goes on. But before we get there, in preparing for our conversation which was I might add a total pleasure just sitting with this poem and reading some backstory. I came to learn a bit about Tom Gunn, but I know you must know infinitely more about him than me. Can you tell me a bit about Tom Gunn?
Joshua:Yeah, sure, of course. Tom Gunn is probably one of the most important poets I've made some kind of connection to through poetry and and he's someone that I got to know, and he became a friend, and a little something of a mentor to me out at Berkeley when I went out there in 1986. I went there specifically to make some kind of connection with him too, to in my own mind kind of apprentice myself to him. I took courses with him and served as his TA over a number of years, wrote a couple of theses under his direction and such. But what I can tell you in terms of like really salient biographical kind of information is that Gunn was born in 1929, which is significant.
Joshua:So he's born kind of in the middle of a third generation of modernist writers. And he lives and writes through the twentieth century into the twenty first century. He was born and grew up in England. Coming into his adolescence discovered that he's gay, and this was a dangerous feeling to have in England at that time, and in The United States as well. And as he comes into writing poetry, he's discovering really like his talent and his skill.
Joshua:In high school, what we call high school or in college. And he's becoming a really bold, imaginative, inventive, exciting writer who's really working through the lyric tradition of English poetry over you know four hundred years or more. And he becomes a quick kind of master of traditional English metrics. Often with end rhymes and complex stanza structures. He's writing in a plain style, and he's finding for himself poets who you know are in the canon now of English poetry, especially the poets of the Renaissance like John Donne and George Herbert, Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer, etcetera.
Joshua:And he meets an American guy, Mike Cate, and they fall in love. Mike was in England for a little bit. And Tom follows Mike back to The United States, this is the mid fifties, so he arrives in San Francisco around 1954. Homosexuality, living an of out gay life is still not really possible in The United States, but there are pockets where one finds more freedom to live, and obviously San Francisco is one of those places. And so they settle into the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco.
Joshua:Tom is at Stanford for a little bit with a really influential important critic and poet and teacher of poets at that time named Ivor Winters, an American. And Gunn is having an adventure in America of like many different dimensions. So like one of them is really exploring his sexuality and also like what the possibilities are for living a gay life in partnership with somebody. They set up house in the hate. And he's really investing himself in being in America and discovering like what is this place all about also in terms of poetry.
Joshua:So he's reading American poets such as like William Carlos Williams, and Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan. And really paying attention to kind of more open freer poetic forms. Free verse basically.
Daniel:Yeah.
Joshua:But he can't do it really because his ears are so tuned to the rhythms and meters of traditional English poetry. But he really wants to. And so we're getting to this poem. So he starts to he starts to he starts to experiment experiment with a a poetic form which is which has a lot of clarity and definition to it, but is not as rigorous in its adherence to certain rhythms that are traditional in English poetry. And this form is called syllabics.
Joshua:And that's what this poem, Considering the Snail, is written written in metrically. He's working with counting the syllables of each line. And you can't really hear it when one one reads the poem out loud. The measure is a lot more subtle. And so he's playing with that, it gives him this kind of in between space between like traditional, accentual, syllabic meters of English poetry and free verse, which he hasn't quite grasped yet how to do.
Joshua:He will, he will become a master of free verse as well. But this is this kind of in between where he kind of measure where he he has this openness, but also the metrical definition of the syllable count. So every line is in seven syllables. And I'll just read the first stanza again with an emphasized ending at the line ending so that you can kind of hear it. Yes please.
Joshua:So if I'm just reading the poem the way the verse movement works, it sounds like this. And you just heard it. The snail pushes through a green night for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes where rain has darkened the earth's dark. He moves in a wood of desire. That's like how that poem moves.
Joshua:But if you're just gonna read the line as its own unit and emphasize the line ending it would sound like this. The snail pushes through a green night for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes where rain has darkened the earth's dark. Moves in a wood of desire. So you could hear it, if you sat down with a pencil you could you kind of like tick off the syllable count of each of those those measures. But the poem is actually much more fluid than that and that's just just how Gunn is kind of working with what we call verse movement, the way that a sentence unfolds in relation to the measure.
Joshua:This is incredibly exciting for him and it's one of the things that gives the poem as kind of terrific subtle and kind of quiet energy which you know may be also kind of analogous and consonant with the power of the snail. Yeah. And so we can kind of move now into the center of the poem, which is the occasion of the poem, which is like seeing a snail and observing it and wondering about it. I think interestingly, the title is not the snail. Right.
Joshua:It's not like an ode to a snail. Right. It's considering the snail. So in a way the poem has two subjects and one of them is the object of the poem, the snail. That's one object we could say, but the other object is Gunn himself or the poet himself or the person who's in that moment of discovering observation.
Joshua:It's about considering the snail. Yes. It's really about the moment of observation, perception, questioning, insight, identification with. That's an integral part of the subject is the act of reflection, the act of inquiry, of imagination. But you know one of the great things about the poem is that Gunn in his modesty acknowledges or indicates in the way the poem moves that there's a mystery about the snail that he can't really penetrate, that he doesn't really know about.
Joshua:The insight into the snail's phenomenal life, like there's a limit to that. There's something that there's there's something about the snail that that he can't know, That he he can't enter into. And that's part of the drama of the poem. He doesn't actually kind of figure that out before the writing of the poem, he figures it out in the writing of the poem. And the poem then becomes a kind of form of discovery in addition to all the other formal aspects that it that it has.
Joshua:There are these four words in the poem that all alliterate, they all start with the same consonant sound. And they're paired. And they're not just paired acoustically but they're paired spatially too. If you saw the poem on the page. Yes.
Joshua:And the two, there are two pairs and one pair is power and purpose that's at the center of the second stanza. So these are this is a poem with three stanzas, each stanza having six lines. And then the other pair is at the end in the third stanza, at the very end of the poem, passion and progress. And this is not an accident, you could say. This is an understanding that comes up in the active composition of the of the poem.
Joshua:I cannot tell what power is at work drenched there with purpose. That's in the middle of the poem. I would I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress. That's at the end. And if you see the poem on the page, what you see is that power is lined up with purpose metrically.
Joshua:What power with purpose and passion and progress are lined up metrically. In other words each of those words power and purpose and passion and progress in their pairing shows up in a parallel position on the line. Is like a kind of hidden aspect of the form. Well I say it's hidden but actually it's it's in plain sight. Yeah.
Joshua:Yeah. But it's it's it's but it's something that we we wouldn't necessarily notice just reading the poem for the first time or hearing it. Because there's a lot, there are many aspects of the poem structure that that you can't hear when you just hear the poem, have to actually see it on the page. So it has this kind of double life for us too.
Daniel:Yes. What do you think led him to write this particular poem?
Joshua:Well this, you mentioned the book that that this poem is, you can, it can be found in. It's called Mice Had Captains and that's a volume in 1961. So it's at a moment when Gunn has has been in The States for about five years. He's practicing with these kind of more open metrics. He's discovering what it's like to live a kind of open gay life.
Joshua:He's making all kinds of discoveries for himself, kind of existential discoveries. He's also taking a lot of acid, that's part of his discovery, that's part of like what's happening with him is like he's really part of the scene in San Francisco at this time. And his use of LSD is actually breaking down a lot of barriers, a lot of walls, and this is allowing him to kind of move into a new kind of embodiment of what his life is gonna be like. So I actually imagine that he was tripping and came across this snail in the grass and just spent an incredibly long period of time just watching it slowly move through the grass. And it's typical of Gunn that he will take an experience like that, which is basically kind of formless, the LSD experience, and find with within it a clear definition of what that experience was like for him and kind of then later bring that back to to an act of composition.
Joshua:He really didn't try to to write when he was when he was on LSD, it would have been a disaster. But he holds onto like the flavor and texture of these experiences and and and what he learns from them. And he brings those lessons back into kind of a different different quality of of waking life and finds the forms of poetry in them. So that's one thing. Yeah.
Joshua:Is that he's learning how to drop a lot of the rhetoric of traditional English poetry and just observe and describe what he's seeing. And that's actually a hard hard lesson for him because he's been so kind of, it's the traditional English poetic lyric is just like a part of his DNA you know. So he's trying to learn new habits. So the discovery there of the snail's slow passion and deliberate progress, I think this is where we hear Gunn really identify with the snail. Even though there's this mystery about the snail.
Joshua:He is making his own deliberate progress, Gunn is with with with a slow a slow passion which is is in part a continued kind of apprenticeship in poetry. But at the feet you could say of a new set of masters who are not English but are American now. So I think that's part of what's happening here. We also have to acknowledge something that's really a kind of deeper connotation in the poem which is just Gunn's sexuality. I mean that snail is like the way a snail comes out of its shell is just a phallic image, know, it just kinda is.
Joshua:And that trail of broken white across the litter, you know in a deeper connotation is semen. It's not that in the scene of the poem but it's has that value you could say in Gunn's imagination. We can kind of reverse engineer this a little bit and cast forward if we wanted to to a poem from the nineteen seventies called The Miracle, which recounts a kind of anecdote about gay sexual encounter in the bathroom of McDonald's. And there's an image of semen on a guy's boot that in the poem Gunn describes as a snail track. Oh my.
Joshua:You know. So the image kind of carries forward for him from this moment in the early nineteen sixties into the nineteen seventies. And that you could say is activated by this notion of passion. Not the suffering of like the passion, not that kind of endurance of the passion, but passion in the sense of experience or inclination or intense desire. Yeah.
Joshua:That's really in there. It's not just a sexual passion for other bodies, other desirable desiring bodies, but a passion for just experiencing, for experiencing the world, for having one's adventure in the world, for making discoveries life, about what it means to be alive. That's such an interesting word in that second stanza that's at the heart of Gunn's question, what is a snail's fury? Yes. That's such an interesting question to ask about a snail.
Joshua:Yes. And it's such an interesting word like the, that word fury will bring forward the word passion later. Rage, passion, desire, what is that? What is that word? He moves in a wood of desire.
Daniel:That's what I wanted to get you talking about. Like you've mentioned all of these lines that really pop in the poem and make me keep coming back for more but I was hoping you'd get to this, he moves in a wood of desire. Please talk as much as you're willing to talk about that.
Joshua:Well the snail is moving over a bright path he makes. That's the first element of desire is like the snail is secreting its slime in order to lubricate the ground on which it travels so that it can do that because it's such a soft vulnerable delicate creature, you know? So he's moving over the bright path he makes, he's making his own path where rain has darkened the earth's dark. He moves in a wood of desire but what is the wood? So the wood is like a matter of scale.
Joshua:The wood for the snail is the grass that's heavy with water. It's a forest but it's a forest of grass. So from Gunn's perspective it's just grass. From the snail's perspective it's this incredibly dense wood that the snail can't kind of see with a sense of scale in order to navigate his way. He's just kind of reaching out intuitively an inch ahead of him, a half an inch ahead of him.
Joshua:So he's in a kind of a labyrinth, this wood of desire. And what he's discovering in his desire, in the wood of desire is his desire. You know? If we wanted to tag back to Gunn's own sexuality and our sexuality, one of the things that we know in our experience of sex is that is that like as you discover it, you want more of it. And as you want more of it and get more of it, you want more of it.
Joshua:And that's part of that bright path that you one is making in one's you know sexual adventures as a young person. He moves in a wood of desire. But as he extends himself in his desire through that wood, he makes himself you know very very vulnerable. Very very open to, yeah to attack and to predation. That's part of it.
Joshua:It's not a romantic poem you could say that filters out those complications. It actually kinda welcomes those in. After all those grass, those pieces of grass are described as blades. And that's a common way that we talk about grass, so like blades of grass. But one of the actions of any poem is to make us notice words and their energies and their connotations and the different ways that they cut.
Joshua:Take for example that word progress at the end of the poem, it's such an interesting word to end this poem on. The slow passion of that deliberate progress. So part of the meaning of the word is the history of the way that that word has been used over time. And Gunn is very aware of this so he would be very much in tune with a poem from the early seventeenth century by the English Renaissance poet John Donne called Of the Progress of the Soul. And he would have been very hip to a sequence of paintings by William Hogarth in the middle of the eighteenth century called A Rakes Progress.
Joshua:Which is a kind of satirical set of paintings that shows you know, villainous and amorous activity of a dangerous sexual predator through the social life of England at the time. So he's aware of the history of that usage. You know the progress report, the idea of social progress, what we call progressive politics now, that sense of like a sequence of events that are leading to some kind of improvement, advancing moving forward. That's also very much a part of what that, Gunn's use of that word calls up. And these are not elements of the words meaning you could say that are active at the surface of how Gunn uses that word, but they're just present.
Daniel:So I feel like you really did a bang up job of walking through the mystery that you alluded to at the head of this conversation. But also at the head of this conversation, said that you'd been reading this poem for four decades. Can you talk a little bit about how this poem has changed or somehow opened up for you over the decades you've been reading it?
Joshua:I think when I first really connected with the poem, some like the the more kind of complicated connotations of it. Those pairings of power and purpose and passion and progress, they really spoke to me as as you know, a young poet who, a young person who was trying to write poetry, not yet a poet. And I guess I identified with Gunn's trajectory as a poet and also my own attempts to move forward in my, you know, in my writing of poetry. And I could see that my passion was a slow passion, I'm a slow learner. And it requires a kind of deliberation, it requires a kind of intentionality.
Joshua:And I could see that I was making something that I felt like progress, you know, I was writing better poems. So that was encouraging. As I got older, yeah I saw the slow passion of that deliberate progress to kind of speak to other aspects of my life like you know, falling in love with someone, wanting to kind of enter into other stages of life. Like getting married, committing oneself to a partnership, having children, raising children. It took on like a new meaning and then I think there's something about the modesty of the poem that really speaks to me too.
Joshua:Something about the acknowledgement of limitation that has to do with also respect. To me it's a surprising kind of notion about limitation that there's actually a kind of power that comes from acknowledging one's limits. Yeah. I mean knowing that you knowing that you knowing that there's things that you can't know about a person or a thing or phenomenon, knowing that also creates a kind of grounds for becoming more intimate with that thing too. You know, it's the releasing of a kind of presumption.
Daniel:Yes. I don't know if I'm being selfish but I'm gonna I'm gonna make an ask of you. To help to drive this train into the station, could I get you to read the poem one more time?
Joshua:Oh I'd love to. That's like asking me if I care to have another helping of ice cream. Alright. Well you're stupid Oh as you're no, I couldn't possibly. You absolutely couldn't pause.
Joshua:Okay. Considering the Snail by Tom Gunn. The snail pushes through a green night for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes where rain has darkened the earth's dark. He moves in a wood of desire. Pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts.
Joshua:I cannot tell what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing. What is a snail's fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress.
Daniel:Oh, so good. Thank you so much for bringing this poem into my life and to making the time to bring it just front and center during this conversation. What a treat. I think a lot of people reading this or listening to it, they're they're going to dig this poem. They're gonna look up Tom Gunn.
Daniel:If someone does dig this poem, is there another poem by him or by another poet for that matter that they should check out?
Joshua:Well I mentioned Marion Moore, this wonderful book Observations which came out like in 1924 and that's an incredible book. There's also a poem that Gun no doubt knew from, the mid eighteenth century by the English poet William Cooper called The Snail. So if you wanna find more snail poems, there's some great ones out there. But I would also point you to that 1961 volume that this poem appears in, My Sad Captains. One of the things I didn't mention is that it's a kind of experimental book for Gunn because one half are poems in these traditional English metrics that I've been mentioning and then the other half are in these syllabics that Considering the Snail is a part of.
Joshua:And so you can really see like the sense of movement in Gunn's own imagination and the kinds of skills that he is deploying in his writing of poems like from the beginning of that book to the end. Yes. I would also point to a really amazing poem that I love. That's a famous poem of his called Tamer and Hawk. He speaks in the voice of the hawk and the tamer is his lover.
Joshua:And that's in his first book, his debut book which had the bold title, Fighting Terms. Oh. It's a fantastic, fantastic poem. You cannot just read that poem once and walk away.
Daniel:Yeah. Well then I won't. I will read it many times over. Thank you for those references. I will link to everything that you mentioned, Moore and Cooper and of course this 1961 volume and all the other poems and poets that you shared in our conversation, all of that will be linked to.
Daniel:Josh, thanks again for for sitting with me, for engaging with this extraordinary poem, and for encouraging me to consider what was there all along. And to anyone listening or reading along, thank you for doing so. If you enjoyed this conversation, if you loved it, I would love it if you'd share it with someone who might appreciate it. Josh, you're a superstar. Thanks for being in conversation with me.
Joshua:Really fun. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for indulging me.
