Since Olson’s poem is famously difficult and puzzling, and
since I claim no great knowledge of the work, I thought it might be helpful to you if I
simply reported what a few students of the poem have said about its language and visual
design.
Charles Bernstein, for instance, writes that
a
stirring,
iconic voice rises up in this poem, one phrase tumbling upon the next, hectoring,
charged, bursting through the dead silence and complacency often associated with [a]
proto Cold War moment in U.S.
history.
Bernstein thinks
that the language of the poem challenges the conformist attitudes of the time. According
to Bernstein,
The poem is a bracing test of nonlinear reading:
because it quickly loses the reader trying diligently to
“follow,”
so that its
language demands multiple re-readings that never resolve into absolute clarity, at least
in Bernstein’s view.
Thomas F. Merrill notes that the poem
has been read both as a polemic (against the kind of poetry written by T. S. Eliot) and
as a parody (also of Eliot’s verse), although Merrill himself suggests that both of
these approaches to the language of the poem are inadequate. Merrill himself, however,
offers such a very detailed reading of the poem that it would be difficult to summarize
it here.
Daniel Belgrad, who considers “The Kingfishers” to
be a “dialogic poem,” argues that the work is a
chain of associations that progresses into the
past. The narrator thinks back after a moment of awakening from a troubled
night.
Stephen Fredman notes
that the poem
consists of many short poetic
units, whose continuity with one another can be hard to detect.
(http://tinyurl.com/3vvpsy4
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Meanwhile,
Edward Halsey Foster suggests that the poem is indebted, in its shapes, both to
ideograms and to the process of making collages,
which bring seemingly unrelated
material into a new resolution.
http://tinyurl.com/3hxwbhb
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