The Name of the Poem
A brief look at a quote from Alice Munro's short story, "Meneseteung."
Soon the glowing and swelling begins to suggest words—not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her. Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem. Isn’t that the idea—one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? …All this can be borne only if it is channeled into a poem, and the word “channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be—it is—“The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem—with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and it desolating spring floods. Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating.
This week’s quotation is from Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung,” in the collection A Friend of my Youth. The story is a dizzying ars poetica (a story about the act of making art with words). In the story, the narrator attempts to better envision the life of a 19th century poet, Almeda Roth. At times the narrator lets us know her sources; at other times she is clearly inventing, envisioning, falling headlong into the act of creation, just as she imagines Almeda falling into her dizzying, powerful epiphany above—and behind it all, of course, is Munro, the “actual” writer of the fiction. In the quote above, wholly “created” by the narrator, Almeda is all at once making grape jelly, which is overflowing on the floor, even as she drips menstrual blood, leaving footprints of grape and blood on the floor…. Anyone intrigued by the complex, essential human process of creation, the interplay of writer, narrator, implied author/artist…should give this story a close read. Or just read it because every story Munro writes reveals her as the great story teller of our time.
Use my affiliate link to purchase A Friend of My Youth (currently on backorder, unfortunately; the individual story can be found at The New Yorker archive, but you will need a membership. A search for it will also yield several “unofficial” pdfs of the story…). You can also browse/purchase other Alice Munro collections at my Alice Munro page at Bookshop.org. Purchasing here will support small bookstores and give me a small commission at no extra cost to you (you can also always let me know of a book you’d like to purchase, and I will send you an affiliate link 🙂).
Love this, and all things Munro.