Would Bakhtin like "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve?"

Since we are all familiar with the Adrienne Rich poem that we looked at last class, I would like to look at the same poem through the lens of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. We discusses extensively the extent to which poetry is, as Bakhtin claims, truly monologic. Does poetry sometimes contain the same dialogism and heteroglossia that Bakhtin says can create a "dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments, and accents?" (1074). I will argue that, while he may still prefer the novel, this poem performs a lot of what Bakhtin commends the novel for. The only thing lacking is perhaps the "grotesque realism."

This poem, however actually does exhibit "grotesque realism" in a sense. or it at the very least achieves the same affect that is hoped for through grotesque realism. The point of this grotesqueness is to "resist official culture, political oppression, and totalitarian order" (1074). This resistance is the "carnavalesque."

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread

sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

Based on a reading of this poem that we developed in class, there are two voices speaking. There is the first voice that is the poetic one, perhaps the common voice emerging from a culturally constructed romantic discourse, then there is the second voice. That second voice can be read as a parody of the first. Through reducing the language of the first half to an analysis of nouns and verbs, what is often thought of as romantic becomes grotesque. That is the carnavalesque and dialogism and heteroglossia are the tools that get us there.

There are other ways to read the poem. There is no reading that matches the poem just perfectly. For that reason, there are more and more voices and messages that are all held together in this particular combination of words, thus, heteroglossia, while it looks different in a poem, is nonetheless possible.