Poem: 'Unsaid', by A.R. Ammons
Read the poem HERE.
Poem: 'Looking Up at Night', by William Stafford.
Hear and read the poem HERE.
Done + not done = ?
We think of a person as defined by what they do and say, but the narrator of 'Unsaid' invites us to consider the weight of what is left undone or unsaid. To know the narrator fully, we must look to what was not done, what was not said.
The narrator emphasizes the weight of the undone and unsaid with oxymorons:
hear
the hum of omissions,
the chant of vacancies, din of
silences:
And tries to make the missing tangible with logical contradictions:
of them, as you must be, or you will miss
the non-song
in my singing: it is not that words cannot say
what is missing: it is only that what is missing
cannot
be missed if
spoken: read the parables of my unmaking:
If the narrator says what was not said, then it becomes said, and no longer missing. So the reader must feel for, or guess, or divine what was not done, not said. If the narrator reveals it, it no longer is missing. But readers also play a role in what a poem means, and if the reader articulates the missing, is it still missing? If each individual reader articulates the missing differently, either slightly or dramatically, does this mean that the narrator is altered?
Oxymorons and logical contradictions twist our minds around the complementary or neutralizing nature of the done and not done.
Drawing a comparison
In the second stanza, the narrator uses another common and powerful poetic device: drawing a comparison between the main subject of the poem and what seems an unrelated subject—matter and antimatter (is the essence of creativity the discovery of unexpected unity?). We are told only that antimatter is the other side of matter, and the the proton, an example of matter, has mass, while the antiproton, an example of antimatter, has negative mass. Together, matter and antimatter perhaps tell a whole story, just as do the done and the not done.
At first glance, this comparison is not a perfect fit. For one thing, the narrator uses a very unfamiliar subject, to most readers, to illuminate something already familiar. More frequently, a poet (or a teacher) compares a strange thing to something familiar to bring the strange thing under a brighter light. Perhaps this reversal is fitting, given the nonintuitive nature of this poem.
But there also appears to be a problem with the information the narrator provides. As a scientific statement,
we
have measured the antiproton: it has negative mass:
is simply incorrect. Antimatter has mass, positive mass, just the same as matter. And to say so might actually fit better with the later statement:
that
side has weight, too,
When a respected poet like Ammons appears to make a mistake—we all know that the antiproton does not have negative mass—you, as reader, have two options. The first is to crow with delight at finding a mistake, Goliath taken down by far less a force than David. The problem is that this response cuts off a potentially productive search for meaning.
The second option, which is far more interesting, is to ask, “What’s he doing? What’s up his sleeve?”
After all, it is not that the concept of negative mass is complete nonsense, and it is not that the idea has never been pressed into use by a science desperate for consistency. After all, an ill-fated notion called phlogiston was proposed as the explanation for losses of mass during combustion, and then when accurate measurement demonstrated that combustibles actually gain mass on burning, a first crack at salvage, ultimately futile, was the possibility that the lost phlogiston has negative mass. The concept of negative mass is also part of highly speculative ideas such as space-time wormholes. Finally, the most sound thinking that might entail negative matter is that the dark energy that makes up the majority of the universe appears to push, rather than pull on mass, as if its own inertial mass were negative.
The fact is, however, that according to experiment, the negatively charged antiproton positively has mass, exactly the same mass as its matterish sibling, the garden-variety proton. With certainty, Ammons, along with many Cornell chums off whom this poem likely bounced, knew that.
What's he up to?
Negative mass, according to Newton’s law of universal gravitation, would repel mass (gravitationally), and thus would have lift rather than weight. It would balance mass, but this poem implies that the not-done/not-said somehow complements the done/said, and that the weight of the two add up to make a whole. In a sense, however, matter and anti-matter DO make up a whole: the universe.
While antimatter is in no meaningful sense anti-mass, antimatter can in fact negate matter: when a proton and an antiproton collide with enough force, they both disappear in a flash of energy. The two masses add up to no mass at all (though energy is equivalent to mass), so just as +1 and -1 add up to zero, the proton and its antiparticle add up to zero mass. So in a poetic sense at least, the antiproton plays -1 to the proton’s +1. Perhaps the said and the unsaid can sometimes neutralize each other. For example, I might loudly preach equal rights, but fail to act when I see rights denied. Does that add up to nothing?
Wrong?
If saying that the antiproton has negative mass is scientifically wrong, is it wrong in a poem? Can a poem be wrong? When I encounter a statement in Scientific American or Science that is wrong, I look for the name of the author (usually a journalist, not a scientist), and expect that soon an erratum will appear in the magazine, acknowledging the error. But in a poem, I am reluctant to say that the poet made an error. Before doing so, I believe that I should assume that the poem is as the poet wants it, and that I should ask what the poem means. Perhaps Ammons means negative mass in a poetic sense that better fits the comparison he is trying to make.
Also listen to or look at William Stafford's 'Looking Up at Night' (HERE). Then read this explanation, from a reliable source, of the changing distance from the earth to the moon. How does this affect your interpretation of the poem? Has Stafford made an error? Does he have something else up his sleeve? Watch for another essay on this one.
Share!
Have you found poems that appear to have errors about science or nature? Share them with me, along with your thoughts about what the poet might be up to if the "error" is intentional.
Contact me at the email address on the home page of One Culture.
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