I find most of the poetry in Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "The Orchard" to be impenetrable (at very best). What is this disgusting garden? Why is everything in it smelly or wet or rotten? Why are all the animals lactating?!? I don't know. I hope we discuss the answer sometime in class, because this is an extremely well-decorated poet whose work, so far, has only the effect of making me want to skip page after page after page. Warm milk dripping from the "breasts of a lion" (24), "rancid honey" and flies around the "filthy fur" of a sheep (22), "Things painted on plaster to keep the dying company" (21), a "diseased dog" (19) [an image over which my classmates, Rebecca Howard and Alex Sheldon, have actually written absorbing and incredibly helpful posts below], a sheep's nipples (17), a "bodiless head" (15), "acid-bitten leaves" (13), bitter, "burning leaves" (13), "a giant bird / With burning feathers" (11)... I know there is a point to these images beyond decay and morbidity, but at the risk of sounding juvenile in my assessment, I'm having trouble getting past them to the actual heart of the poems.
"Sheet Music," though, has offered some points at which I can begin to dig out a sense of what the poet MAY be getting at. The "lanky figures" (25) of the dogs, nebulously described as first one, then two, then three, first passed me by, but the lines "The rain / fell hard, and now the mist rises, consolidates, disperses, / That thought, this, your face, mine, the shapes" finally made it concrete enough to me that we're not talking about dogs sniffing around a garden here. The speaker asking herself, "How will I follow? And which [dog]?" couldn't describe any better the type of mental processes that go on in a mind when someone can't sleep, and their brain is flush with too many images/thoughts coming too quickly to all be followed. The "mist" that "moves about [the speaker]" seems to me alike the haziness that falls over such a mind before sleep, and the "low-bred murmurs" that grab at the speaker from all directions seem to me representative of the negative thoughts that can tear at someone relentlessly when they're struggling with thought control and mind quieting. The "dark sound that begins at the edge / of the mind" (26), although perhaps more on-the-nose than some of the metaphors or images the poet has played with in her previous poems, was a welcome relief to at least let me know some of this interpretation is within the correct bounds. We're talking about the mind. (That sounds basic, but it's as far as I've gotten with any poem in this work so far!)
All that said, the image of the speaker trying to grasp at the dogs' leashes but failing (26) ("Will the dogs come? Can I gather their trailing leashes / And hold them in my hand? They cannot be held.") was just lovely, and I think it's a useful one in relaying the hopelessness that comes with being unable to control one's own thoughts.
This entire work of poetry was definitely quite the challenge to interpret. Yes, there seems to be themes and possibly tropes carried from poem to poem but the odd abstract approach is confusing to me. I don't know if the point of the poems are to just invoke certain feelings or just a practice in the abnormal but I couldn't get much out of each poem. Dr. Porter mentioned dichotomy, and maybe the chaos of the text is suppose to be the yang to the yin of traditional poetic forms. In regards to sheet music, I felt that it might be an observation of value that when birds are perched on multiple power lines that they often look like notes on a staff in sheet music. I don't know how this plays along with the poem but I found it kind of cool to look up pictures on Google of this phenomenon.
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