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tomg52
Registered User
(12/26/00 7:55:19 am)
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looking for a fairy tale
I'm looking for the fairy tale referred to in these lines from a Jorie Graham poem: "In the fairy tale the sky / makes of itself a coat / because it needs you / to put it on." Can anyone help?
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karen
Unregistered User
(12/26/00 7:40:39 pm)
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re: your query
Could you please specify which poem you're referring to?
Ta,
K.
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tomg52
Registered User
(12/27/00 6:33:49 am)
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Re: looking for a fairy tale
"Manteau" from _The Errancy_ (97), but there's not much more about the fairy tale in the poem. T.
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Helen
Registered User
(12/27/00 6:48:08 am)
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Re: looking for a fairy tale
I don't know the source of those specific lines (though it sounds suspiciously like a varient upon a Russian folktale, I can't remeber which one) but I remember seeing a review that mentioned the *manteau* idea in Graham. You can find it at the Boston Review site, under Bonnie Costello's reviews - I'd post a link, but I'm right next door to being a Luddite, and don't know how.
Hope it helps,
Helen
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Helen
Registered User
(12/27/00 6:49:59 am)
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Re: looking for a fairy tale
bostonreview.mit.edu/Bost...tello.html
Figured it out.
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tomg52
Registered User
(12/27/00 7:31:23 am)
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Re: looking for a fairy tale
Thanks. I know that review--it's a good one, but she doesn't discuss the fairy tale. T.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(12/27/00 11:02:07 am)
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Manteau Three
Tom,
I've read through Graham's poem a number of times now (and read through "Pascal's Manteau" as a sort of cross reading to see how she is using the image of the coat). I am thinking that Graham may not have had a specific fairy tale in mind, but the idea of the fantastic voice, the place of transformation, of imaginative narrative where a coat takes one yet another symbolic meaning (and GRaham has many "coats" int hese poems), and one in nature. The second reference to the "fairy tale" is as ambiguous as the first: "The fairy tale beginning to hover above--onscreen fangs, at the desk/one of the older ones paying bills--the coat in the sky above the house not unlike celestial fabric..." Here the fantastic in the fairy tale coat hovers above, beyond the reach of the ordinary.
I could be wrong, because I realize that she has so many references inserted in her text, ponting to other texts and that she is building up layers of meanings...but most of those references are literate and to specific texts that have their own history. The fairy tale is a variable text, without a fixed literary place...so it may be used here to suggest that fantastic openess between the natural world, between imagination and between a text which is itself constantly changing, making it a kind of textual reference for creative potential--"It collects its motes. It condenses its sound/ track, all the pyrric escapes, the pilgrimages/ still unconsumated/, the turreted thoughts of sky, it slightly liquifies/ and droops, the hum of the yellowest day alive." There is something about this passage and the one immediately following which is evocative of nature in the form of coat of sky descending, infusing the senses with a vague awareness of an imaginative potential.
let me know what you think. I'll still try to think if I can find a fairy tale that has such a specific image as the sky handing down a coat...but other than tales where the sky (or more specifically clouds) agree to hide heroes/heroines or move them one place to another, or the heroes get taken up into the sky for one reason or another (usually some form of fantastic education), I can't really think of something that might be exactly the reference of this poem.
great poem though! the whole collection is pretty amazing.
midori
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Midori
Unregistered User
(12/27/00 11:09:47 am)
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second thoughts
Tom,
You know, I was thinking a bit more...there are some other tantalizing fairy tale references in this poem. (the red shoes for instance, the shy bride, the teller) and also references to a "movie"--maybe this isn't a fairy tale, but a film of a fairy tale, something Cocteau might have made? ("not knowing perhaps that now is as the fairy tale/ exactly, (as in the movie), foretold/
Sorry, the more I read this poem, the more interesting it gets and the more dense I feel.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(1/5/01 4:42:47 pm)
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silly assumptions
Hey Tomg52,
I just realized I spaced your username and assumed your first name was Tom...sorry about that, especially if you are not a Tom! Have you had any other luck with the Graham poem. It's a real beauty...dense and demanding.
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