Okay, blog-readers, get ready for our sixth pupil-dilating installment of “Why 
We Like It”—weekly reflections by our volunteers on why the good stuff in our pages is the good stuff in our pages. Little known fact: Our volunteers often act out the pieces they intend to write on, and the staff really enjoys these little performances, especially if there are props involved and someone remembers to microwave popcorn. Occasionally, however, a volunteer gets a little too immersed in his role, which is why there’s now a jagged crevasse in the middle of our office floor. While “weeding” the decades-old, dirt-colored carpet in our cramped office (which he kept referring to as his “word loam”), Eric Bliman got carried away with his trowel and carved the following insights into the building’s subterranean foundation.
Eric Bliman: Julie Hanson’s poem “Remedial Weeding,” in the Summer 2010 issue, transforms a familiar situation, even a familiar trope (using physical work to distract from the pain of a loss, say), into a brilliant meditation on the virtues of remaining grounded in the here-and-now, or on looking “no more than one weed ahead.” Her poem has that Dickinsonian quality of treating grief with formality, yet what makes it rare, appealing, and fresh with each repeated reading, is its use of a vocabulary that mixes learned and everyday speech, and that finds room for a neologism that is immediately recognizable to the general reader.
This neologism, the wildly precise image of roots as a “complex undermop,” whose echoing peaty sounds “comp” and “mop” remind us of the sounds of repeated digging, is an intriguing objective correlative for the speaker’s emotion: just as such wonderfully strange-haired things as roots thrive out of sight, so the speaker’s grief, or her heart’s “stunned” back-story, stays almost entirely hidden from view, while remaining for the speaker “dominant.” Such lines and images that allude to the speaker’s dilemma are characteristic of the poem’s tone of restraint, which is both compellingly modern and almost classical.
Midway through the second and final stanza the reader is afforded a glimpse of the action or situation that has driven the speaker to take on her task of remedial weeding: “For those times when the heart, still/ resonant and stunned,/ is dominant,/ this is the kind of work you want.” This partial revealing leads the speaker into a meditation that anyone who has felt staggered by loss, any loss, can relate to; moreover, it answers Auden’s requirement that a Prosperian poem (or loosely, a poem that’s moody and wise, as opposed to one of the Ariel sort, which is light and musical and joyous) must show us how to live, ending with the insistence that it is necessary to keep the eyes on something right in front of you, to lose yourself in “mindless work,” and “[drill] the focus downwards” to remain whole, and here.
