Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

The Arresting and Fluxing Image

21 The Arresting and Fluxing Image Victoria Chang In the poem “Portrait with Commentary,” Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet and psychologist, calls a newspaper “that big dirty butterfly.”1 Tranströmer’s image is both stunning and memorable. In another poem, “About History,” he likens anonymity to an unexpected image: “anonymous as grains of rice.”2 While reading Tranströmer’s poems, one is immediately and continuously struck by such images. In “The Half-Finished Heaven,” a lake “is a window into the earth.”3 In “Vermeer,” gold studs in a chair “flew in with incredible speed / and stopped abruptly / as if they had never been anything other than stillness.”4 In “Storm,” constellations are described as “far abovetheoak/stampingintheirstalls.”5 In“Lament,”the“mothssettle on the windowpane: / small pale telegrams from the world.”6 In “Early May Stanzas,” he observes “[i]n the silent pools, midge larvae—their dancing furious question marks.”7 And although seemingly impossible, there are many more images as startling as these. At the most obvious level, Tranströmer’s images are arresting because they are oftentimes surprising. But surprising images alone would not make Tranströmer’s poems truly memorable; rather, the manner in which he transforms images is what renders his poems both memorable and appealing. His poems are particularly powerful because his images are always in flux—they both stretch and morph and at times have tremendous velocity. But the morphing and movement of images also serves a greater purpose—to function as the medium or channel that Tranströmer uses within his poems to travel across conventional boundaries of time, space, the self, and consciousness. Tranströmer, like many poets, is a seeing poet, one who hones in on the image, but unlike many poets, his eyes and mind never rest too long on any particular image. When he observes, he always seesbeyondwhat’simmediatelyinfrontofhim,fromtheseeminglybanalto the infinite. Tranströmer’s way of seeing, through a mobile image, stretches )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 Victoria chang 22 his poems beyond our immediate canvas of the knowable world into the mysterious and the unknown. In “Along the Radius,” themes of individual insignificance and the unknown appear readily. The title itself raises a series of mysterious questions —what radius, who or what is along the radius, and what is happening along the radius? The poem is divided into three sections where the first section provides the context, the second section articulates the speaker’s stretching and wandering mind, and the final section returns to the thoughts relayed in the first section, but something has changed. In the first section, Tranströmer establishes the physical setting and introduces the first-person speaker: Electronic Text Rights Unavailable. These first two stanzas appear deceptively motionless and silent; in fact, “silence” occurs twice—once in each stanza. But upon closer investigation, the “ice-bound” river is “blazing with sun” and the speaker is “spinning gently.” Even in the first section of the poem, things are already beginning to spin, stretch, and change. And not only has the “ice-bound river” naturally morphed already from a previously flowing body of unfrozen water, but in the second line, the river stretches beyond its frozen tundra to instantaneously become “the world’s roof.” Such rapid changes allow Tranströmer’s images to grow beyond their respective selves. In the second section of the poem, the images exhibit their most bendable moments. Electronic Text Rights Unavailable. the arresting and Fluxing image 23 It’s as if the speaker is resting at the center of a metaphorical wheel. The trope of a wheel seems like a disjunctive leap from the first section, but it can be seen as an alteration of “silence / spinning gently” in the prior stanza; instead of silence spinning, we now have a “wheel” that spins. But this wheel “spreads out endlessly,” and instead of the first-person speaker who sits on an upturned boat on the bank, the speaker in the form of “I” disappears from the poem and becomes a less self-conscious, less selfabsorbed observer. Even the self has changed; even the self has a roving eye that can roam from interiority to exteriority. As the wheel keeps getting larger and larger, it expands at its outer edges beyond space, time, the known self, and consciousness. Initially, the image of the wheel stretches into the more physically tangible and conventional images such as “the...