There are two over arching schools of literary criticism that incorporate either internal or external material when evaluating a work of art.
Those who follow the external school, almost anything goes, meaning that a work can be evaluated by factors beyond the boundaries of the work itself to include the artist’s biographical data, looking for aspects of that artist’s life that may have influenced the creative process.
Purists, however, believe an evaluation must include only those elements contained within the framework of the art itself. If something isn’t in poem, for instance, it shouldn’t be used, unless there is some allusion inside the work from which an inference can be made to something beyond.
Most criticism is hardly one or the other and generally even the so-called purists sometimes draw on biographical and other materials if they can build a strong enough case for them.
In dealing with her poems to this point, I’ve bended to use a purist approach, keeping things out of my evaluating her poems that I might know happened to be transpiring in her life, focusing instead on what she appears to be trying to convey in the poems rather than explaining her motivations.
With the poem she posted today, I need to deviate from that methodology, partly because there are several overpowering external influences that clearly influence the creation of the poem, one influence less significant than the other, the other which might be seen as a macro vision of her life as a whole.
She seems to be evaluating her struggle, her successes and failures over time, how she seems to return to the same spot where she must start again.
But in her view as expressed in the poem, each time she has to start over – at that point where the whole thing might fall apart permanently – she seems to start at a spot slightly more advanced than the last time she had reached that plateau, suggesting that if she continues to struggle, continues to work her way through the maddening pattern of climb and fall, she will eventually reach a point where she attains what she is seeking.
Yes, she reaches a point at which she started but just a bit beyond.
Each of her efforts seem to be structure the same. She begins a cycle as a novice, and then at some point her ambition kicks in and she sees herself as having earned her wings, only in each case, it all comes crashing down on her, leaving her pretty much clinging to the place she started, on the precipice of total collapse, but don’t quite, and so she starts all over, the claw to the top at some new chosen profession with the hope this will lead her beyond.
The poem calls this “the giving point” at which things could go either way, down or slightly up.
She, of course, is writing this poem at a point in the current cycle where she thinks she has moved beyond novice. She just met with the owner to ask for a raise and may even have made big plans for what she might do to ascend to the next level.
The poem’s language use suggested a great struggle in her “creeping” passed the giving point and defying gravity that has the potential to bring her down.
She seems well aware of the potential for failure.
Unfortunately, some of the factors have changed and the poem seems to reflect this.
We have seen a change of leadership at a critical point in her rise, from a mentoring temporary boss to a harsh task master in the regular boss returning from maternity leave. The land scape poses more risks.
Leaving out the internal office politics that might better explain our boss’ need to put her in her place, the poem leaves open the question of how far she has actually come and raises the specter of continued struggling as well as the risk gravity might still pull her down after all.
In some ways, she seems to be retelling the myth of Sisyphus, who faced punishment by being forced to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down once he got it near the top. Her poem seems to seek a way out of that dilemma, offering herself a molecule of hope that she has advanced towards the top if only slightly.
If this is indeed an allusion to Sisyphus, you want to wonder what she thinks she is being punished for, why the Gods or fate denies her what she believes she deserves to achieve.
And as with all mythological gods faced with the prospect of eternal torment, she is desperate to find some sign of progress no matter how meager that will provide her with some sign of eventual redemption.
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