Ok, so here's the deal. Today in class, we analyzed a random poem. I do this on occasion to show how I go about the process of analyzing a poem. Today's threw me for a loop. Yesterday's was great... "At the Vet's" by Maura Stanton. What a discussion we had! Today, we had Galway Kinnell's "Hitchhiker" Both of these were poems on The Writer's Almanac... Garrison Keillor's daily litcast. I have some thoughts on it, and we had some good discussion... but, when all is said and done, I am still feeling a little bit unsure. Take a look at this poem, and see what you see. If you have knowledge of it, I would love to know what is really happening here. Thanks!!! Hitchhiker by Galway Kinnell After a moment, the driver, a salesman for Travelers Insurance heading for Topeka, said, "What was that?" I, in my Navy uniform, still useful for hitchhiking though the war was over, said, "I think you hit somebody." I knew he had. The round face, opening in surprise as the man bounced off the fender, had given me a look as he swept past. "Why didn't you say something?" The salesman stepped hard on the brakes. "I thought you saw," I said. I didn't know why. It came to me I could have sat next to this man all the way to Topeka without saying a word about it. he opened the car door and looked back. I did the same. At the roadside, in the glow of a streetlight, was a body. A man was bending over it. For an instant it was myself, in a time to come, bending over the body of my father. The man stood and shouted at us, "Forget it! He gets hit all the time!" Oh. A bum. We were happy to forget it. The rest of the way, into dawn in Kansas, when the salesman dropped me off, we did not speak, except, as I got out, I said, "Thanks," and he said, "Don't mention it."
I'm not sure it's wrong to be unsure about this poem. That jump that gives it a dream-like quality means that it's not going to be easily reduced to a single meaning. There are some concrete details like the usefulness of a Navy uniform for hitchhiking that gives it a more realistic error. But, then there are some interesting lines, like the way "don't mention it" takes on a psychological meaning as opposed to its normal job as an alternate to "you're welcome." I wonder what book of Kinnell's this book originally appeared in. That might help determine a little more clearly what he's up to with it. But even as a free-standing poem, it looks to me like a dream narrative
I actually had checked that. It's from Imperfect Thirst. Yes, the students did pick up on that double duty "don't mention it." All kinds of interesting discussion came out of it. Some thought perhaps the man bending over the struck man was his own ghost. Others were very literal and asked if the fact that the driver was an insurance salesman was significant... perhaps that the man who was hit was one of those people who gets hit by cars on purpose to collect insurance money or payoffs... hence the "he gets hit all the time" Anyway, I was left feeling a bit confused myself. They did challenge me to look it up and see what other people have said, but no one is talking about it online, though many people have put it, sans comment, into blogs. Garrison Keillor has used it three times in the writer's almanac.
(1)"After a moment" puts the whole incident into a vague perspective. The reader is left wondering what took place in that "moment". (2)"I knew he had..." tells us that the passenger, as he says later, would have been content to sit and ignore the fact the driver had hit someone. Ultimately, this ties in with his remark about his father. I'm not sure how to interpret it, but it seems inescapable. (3)"The round face, opening..." creates a certain tension for me. I think the poem is a little "closed", or to say it another way, "obscured" by the vagueness of how the principals react to what happens. (4)"I thought you saw..." -- Ordinarily, I think we would say, "I thought you saw him". Leaving "him" out seems to suggest that there is a blindness of a sort operating. (5)These two "it"s refer to different people: to the man struck by the car; to the passenger. This creates more miasma, I think.
This is a more detailed set of reasons for what I was trying to get at. The poem tries to create a sense of uncertainty the way it unfolds. Which is the main reason why I liked it. It turns out to be fairly memorable (if not immediately memorizable* to those not named Galway Kinnell) which is interesting given the lines "forget it" and "don't mention it." *hinting to the fact that I've seen Kinnell read three times: about 90% of what he "reads" he actually recites from memory**, and about 10-20% of that won't he his work, but the works of, say, Keats, or Patrick Kavanagh, or friends of his like James Wright or Robert Bly **especially impressive when you note that his poems don't employ the trappings that make poems easier to memorize, like standard meter and a predictable rhyme scheme.*** ***Can I possibly be more pretentious?
then you would be a grim combination of you and me... i really like the poem. i majored in Eng Lit w/ a creative writing emphasis ( now, ashes and dust ) so we did a bit of plowing through detail in poems to tie together what the writer was about. i'm used to thinking in terms of "the objective correlative" (Suzanne Langer?), which, of course, puts me into that academic bore/boor category we love so much.
Great digging here, Stilts! I'll add my .02 (which may be rusty, since I haven't been able to do this in years). (1) The idea of being in "a moment" is important because it frames the decisions or actions of people in the poem. When they are framed like this, they can be judged. I think that this gives us insight that there is a feeling of regret with the narrator (author). (2) Dealing with the theme of regret ("I knew"), the narrator seems to have trouble facing up to what he knows to be true. He tries to ignore the driver hitting the pedestrian and knows that he could have kept ignoring it. (2a)The idea that he could have "sat next to this man all the way ... without saying a word" shows the reader that the narrator has ignored things before. He probably has a heavy sense of regret. (4) "I thought you saw" shows me that the narrator is concerned with how things are perceived. He is curious to know if others perceive him as he perceives himself - which is something that he has trouble facing up to. (***) In regards to the "father", I'm pretty certain that the main sense of regret is this veteran leaving his family behind - the way an 18yo leaves for service - and not coming back to re-establish a relationship as his father (i.e. the narrator's past childhood) dies by the roadside behind (allusion to passing time) the car (metaphor for the passing of time). These last parts are real important to me. The car, the road, the driver. A) The car is a good metaphor for travel in terms of time/years. B) The road is life. C) The fact that the narrator is _not_ driving plays a big part. I think that needs to be discussed the most in any interpretation of the poem. Why is this passenger relying on others to take him through life? How does this affect his thoughts about the past decisions he has made "moments"? Gee, that was fun.
wow. not much rust. good point about the passenger being ferried about. plus, as was previously stated, he's wearing a uniform, which means that he's looking for an edge, something to ease the burden of trying to get others to do work he won't do. how long has he been out of the Navy? also, excellent perception about ignoring things. somebody said that the most renewable resource in possession of Man is the ability to rationalize. ignoring is a form of rationalizing, i think. i give you a A-. you would have gotten an A, but you capitalized "stilts". bad form. really bad form.
I'll take an A-. It's only fair with all the grammar mistakes I made. Ignoring certainly makes it easier to rationalize. I also think it is important that the narrator feels that he isn't alone in his decision to ignore ("We were happy to forget [hitting the man]"). I think that is part of the reason for the uniform as well. Blending in, anonymity, having to take orders, etc.
Hey, Stilton neg-repped me for not capitalizing "writer" in the Robert Parker obit thread I started. But since I've been whinging about grade inflation for two decades now, I can't complain.
power or authority structure: driver>hitchhiker>bum bum gets hit all the time, hitchhiker doesn't feel need to mention it, hitchiker and driver happy to forget about it, driver says don't mention it. this would seem to echo military authority structure
My interpretation is that it's just a goddamn piece of microfiction broken into lines, with no effort whatsoever put into any of the musical or rhetorical devices that poetry makes available to the writer. I can assure you, with 100% confidence, that you could change the line breaks in this poem or convert it into a block of prose, and nobody would detect any harm done. I would also point out that it's not very good, but that becomes evident to the reader as soon as he or she sees the words "by Galway Kinnell."
i did not neg rep you. i pointed out the fact that it was an anomaly of the highest magnitude. big difference. i've only given neg rep twicet in years and years. both times it was for such egregious and flagrant jerkness that Mother Teresa would have kicked the guy in the 'nads had she been party to the infraction.
A couple questions that have come up.... will review to see if they've been answered, but I didn't think so in my quick glance just now. 1. The uniform. The speaker says that it's still useful for hitchhiking. With that in mind, how long has it been since it's been useful as a uniform? As in, the war is over, but he's still wearing it... just for hitchhiking, or is he still in the military, just not in a war? Some of the kids thought maybe he was AWOL. 2. Who's the man bending over it who becomes the speaker for an instant? Where the hell are they? It seems odd for someone to be hitchhiking to Kansas and not only come across a person who is hit by a car, but another person there, with knowledge of this man, to witness it. If this is something figurative, what's the story? 3. The fact that the vision of himself bending over his father is interesting in that it's a flash forward. I wonder if it has something to do with him acknowledging that, for some reason, he won't see his father again until this becomes a reality. 4. Kinnell was born in 1927. He lived through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and even Persian Gulf I. Which war was the speaker in? The language, frankly, doesn't sound modern, though the poem was apparently published in 1996.
Questions 1 seems worthy of a good discussion, but I think 2-4 are waaay too literal for this poem. I think the idea of selling this as a "dream sequence" could negate some of the more literal questions. What age are these kids? The uniform is useful for hitchhiking because it symbolizes some safe and trustworthy. Well, at least, it should. You could talk about how that in itself sets up a paradox. Classic deconstruction. But, first, you might want to go through semiotics and have them see the objects as "signs" rather than tangible objects to be taken literally. * AWOL - probably not. even Rambo wears his old military gear as he walks the streets. * War? The war is internal. The man is fighting with his regreat and conscience. * He may or may not still be in the military. I'd have to re-read it for clues, but I don't think it shows us. Note: The salesman sells traveler's insurance. Isn't it a bit funny that he hits a pedestrian? Am I the only one that found it funny? Double-note: Hitchhiker meets man who sells traveler's insurance? That's begging for a deeper exploration.