1min snip

The New Yorker: Poetry cover image

Richie Hofmann Reads Henri Cole

The New Yorker: Poetry

NOTE

Continuity through Linguistic Shifts

The poem undergoes a shift that signifies its closure and a transition in meaning. Despite the shift, the poem continues evolving, maintaining interest through linguistic changes and extended sentences. The sudden change in tone, from a children's fable to an apocalyptic setting, adds depth. The incorporation of the black bear as a central figure and the consistency in rhyme contribute to the continuity of the poem.

00:00
Speaker 1
If what was discourse or explanation, we might get a directed dress. There's a change in the poem that is both intellectual and musical. There's a kind of shift in that key moment that kind of signals the poem's closure, that signals are gestures at some kind of meaning. And one thing I love about
Speaker 3
this poem
Speaker 1
is that it just keeps going.
Speaker 2
The mind is the most interesting thing. Right. There's a turn, but as you said,
Speaker 1
it extends. Yeah, it extends, but it even happens in the middle of a sentence. And I think that's kind of remarkable. It becomes kind of apocalyptic, like the sudden death of the son. It's kind of like, I thought we were in the world of the children's fable, and now we're in the apocalypse. It seems implausible that darkness will swallow it, or that anything is lost there,
Speaker 3
like a black bear.
Speaker 1
And through that technology of the sentence, through the simile, through the like, we go back to the black bear in the tree. So even though we've kind of turned, we've shifted the kind of language the poem's going to be operating in, we keep coming back to that central figure of
Speaker 3
the bear. There's
Speaker 2
the rhyme there too.

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