First reading of Hannah Sanghee Park's 'And a Lie' (1)

A first reading, is it possible? I realize as I approach the poem how excited I am to open the package, find its surprise. This is what I expect when I read a poem. Poems are puzzles, and as I look upon this choicely narrow-looking “visual” stance, I want to jump in, but I stop myself: I do this a lot in my first close readings. Especially if the “look” of the poem immediately grabs me, as this one does: the title “And A Lie” suggests we are already in the middle of things, or at the end of a catalogue of “things.” And now a lie. I want to read for the meat to be found on these slender bones. Instead I count the stanzas, the lines in each, and discover that the four tercets of symmetrical length followed by a couplet amount to a sonnet. But this can be no ordinary sonnet; is the form lying about itself, disguising itself as a non-sonnet? My eye falls on the last word, “damsel,” a word associated with conventional archaic love poetry. I scan the poem for other such words: none. I still haven’t read the poem.  So I start from the edges, and now begin to read in earnest.

I’m stopped almost immediately, which is a good thing; the hiding of words in words holds me on the first line: “The asking was askance.” There will be more like this, I believe, and keep this taut wordplay in mind. Is it the way I read all poems for the first time? Yes — to the degree that I’ve been trained to handle the poem like a specimen, with tweezers, hold it up and examine its holes, fractures, or sheer elegance. And I become part of the process of the poem, getting inside its head, zoom in and out of it before I can even hold it to the light; by then it will be shadows.

So. “A lie.” Askance. Ask for a lie, and you have that answered; is this Plato speaking to tertiary poets — out of touch with immortal Truth? I eyeball the first four tercets, and note that the speaker signals herself only by the penultimate stanza with the phrase: “My iris I missed.” This prompts me to read from the top straight through, forcing myself not to comment on every tiny turn in this short poem. Eyes, or irises, can be “missed”: seeing is in a mist. Trying not to stop.

I can’t. I’m stopped again, by noting that the word “And” which appears in the first three stanzas for sonic reversion and hooking (the “and” I note returns twice in the poem’s last line). The parataxis the poem depends upon asks us to read straight through, like listening, without a wince, to a lie.   Now I read in earnest.

The asking was askance.
And the tell all told.
So then, in tandem,

Anathema, and anthem.
The truth was on hold,
Seeking too tasking.

I admire line four’s deceptive restraint, discovered in finding (then hearing) the “anthem” in the “anathema,” as well as the “tandem” — the haunting “them” one hears in the background. The passive voice of “[t]he truth was on hold” guides my hesitations, moving branch to branch, line to line in this poem, waiting for the “hold” to lift. The nationalist pride of an “anthem,” as much as the disgracing implied by “anathema,” leads me to surmise that the poem is saying something about driving home that the “truth” is nearly impossible to locate. The next two stanzas exfoliate easily into an anapest and iamb, followed by two iambs — all settling into place, beginning once more with the conjunction: “And the wool was pulled / Over as cover.” Words reside in words, the pull in the wool; over in cover — the poem cloaks itself, while enjoining the reader to move forwards, quickly. 

What did the “iris” miss? “The truth, now mistrust / All things seen, and this”: a line full of the reverberations of the prior three stanzas, AND tumbling into new unwordings, as language continues to cover.

                                                         and this//

Distrust, the sounded distress signal

                            Called and called and culled from your damsel.

“[T]his [d]istrust” picks up the “distress” as signal, a distrust that now forces me back to the poem’s opening words, the title, followed by an “asking.”  The shift from the double “called” (evoking a desperation) to “culled”: as if this calling (like the “dead man” still “drowning” in Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning”) insisted on a “culling,” a drawing out not desired by the “damsel.”

By now, in this first reading, I can’t read “damsel” as anything but mock-heroine. The poem has taught me to read for words in words, so I can’t help hearing “damn” the “self” or “sell” (even now rhyming with the “the tell” of the first stanza.) The “tell” in poker is the characteristic sign of a player who has a good hand or wants to fake one: the “tell” in this poem is both a tale of a lie and the “telling” of this poem, with its own characteristic involutions. The movement of the cloak may be the thing the poem catches …

The tercets establish that the poem has to be read as a synthesis always upsetting a thesis and antithesis: the couplet troubles me for awhile in its extra stressed syllables, its difference in line length from the prior four stanzas: the reward’s the rhyme “signal” with “damsel.” The poem signals itself, how its words betray the listener who wants to know how the truth/lie dialectic unravels: it doesn’t; it just keeps knitting up words, familiar and unfamiliar. I trust the mistrust. Which leads me back to a mistrust of my preliminary reading, one based, however, not on missing or dissing, prompting me to read the title as pure music: “andalie,” and here “a lady” in it to boot. 

My close reading practices are practically grafted onto my optics — so I’m skeptical of finding firstness. Yet, it dawns on me, this poem echoes the impossibility of trusting one’s own eyes; they aren’t blank slates.

And a Lie

The asking was askance.
And the tell all told.
So then, in tandem,

Anathema, and anthem.
The truth was on hold,
Seeking too tasking.

And the wool was pulled
Over as cover.
No eyes were kept peeled.

My iris I missed
The truth, now mistrust
All things seen, and this

Distrust, the sounded distress signal
Called and called and culled from your damsel.

Susan McCabe is a professor at the University of Southern California and teaches in the Literature and Creative Writing Program. A former director of the PhD in Creative Writing, she has published Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (Penn State Press, 1994), Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Swirl (Red Hen Press, 2003) and Descartes’ Nightmare, awarded the Agha Ali Shahid Prize (University of Utah Press, 2008). She is a past president of the Modernist Studies Association. She held a Beinecke Library Research Fellowship at Yale University, a Fulbright in Sweden, and was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She has completed a third poetry collection, and is currently finishing a literary cultural biography, H.D. & Bryher: A Modernist Love Story.