Or in My Throat
Or in My Throat - meaning Summary
Self-alienation Turned to Writing
Or in My Throat presents a speaker who experiences divided perception and growing alienation. Everyday scenes and memories appear as a latticework of regrets, producing a reversed dream that becomes a nightmare of isolation. That ongoing split—seeing himself in two arrangements—leads to frustrated grief and social distance. The poem ends with the speaker renouncing ordinary engagement and adopting poetry as a corrective refuge, a controlled response to emotional disorientation.
Read Complete AnalysesTo the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets, through which You can see the funny street, with the ends of cars and the dust, The thing we always forget to put in. For him The two ends were the same except that he was in one Looking at the other, and all his grief stemmed from that: There was no way of appreciating anything else, how polite People were for instance, and the dream, reversed, became A swift nightmare of starlight on frozen puddles in some Dread waste. Yet you always hear How they are coming along. Someone always has a letter From one of them, asking to be remembered to the boys, and all. That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey, stupid!
from Shadow Train (1981)
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