Fall Poetry Anthology

Collected by Victoria Liu

My Thoughts

This is a poetry anthology centered around the word “fall.” “Fall” is a versatile word; it can mean to physically move downward; to be defeated; an object that is falling; autumn; a decrease in intensity. Along with these various denotations, there are a multitude of connotations as well–might it symbolize loss, inevitability, resistance, striving, aging, death, gravity, or simply time for warmer clothing? In each of the selected poems, the poets explore their own meanings of “fall,” whether the word is central to the poem or a small detail tucked away in a stanza. The poets confront the concept of fall in their own ways, with ambivalence, acceptance, resistance, or optimism. But regardless of how the word “fall” is used, it represents a universal agent of change that must be reckoned with.

Alberto Rios’ “I FELL TO THE GROUND AND KEPT ON” explores the concept of falling to the ground and entering a fantastical realm of “outer space of deep underneath”. The poem takes place in six sections, whose separations allow the reader the follow the journey with clarity and sense the expansion of time within the dream land. Here, “fall” is at first taken to mean a physical move downward, but as he moves into the “dream ground,” there is a blurring between falling, sitting, standing, and drifting. The unexpected whisking into fantasy-land sounds unsettling at first, as this may “perhaps in the history of the world” be the “one time” that anyone has been loosened into cells and sucked through the grate of the floor; in addition, the “vast frontier of the spaces-in-between,” is “obsidian” darkness. However, Rios does not panic. He is polite to the other inhabitants of the world and passively observes the stars. The reverie ends when “just as quickly as it happened,” Rios is back in the kitchen where he fell. When Rios returns to the real world, he muses that “falling was easy, comfortable” and admits that he still visits this fantasy land sometimes, now that he “know[s] the way.” Rios’ ability to deal with the wholly unexpected and come out with a sense of comfort percolates optimism and gives the reader a feeling of invincibility–maybe any “fall” can open up new opportunities.

Marilyn Chin’s “Autumn Leaves” tackles multiple facets of the word “fall.” The title and the sweeping of leaves evokes the changing of seasons and the responsibilities that come along. The first two words, “the dead,” immediately reminds us of aging and death; although “the dead” refers to dead leaves, “the dead” colloquially refers to humans that have passed on. The idea of aging is reinforced when Chin tells us that “all that blooms must fall”. This is not a profound fact that requires the Dao to arrive to, but simply a fact of life. A third meaning of “fall” refers to the the physical fall of the leaves onto the Wong family’s patio. This line can be interpreted metaphorically as the concept of the younger generation helping the older generation as they grow older. As such, Achilles Wong is the one who completes the task; her namesake and description as “blossomed, tall, benevolent” suggest that her youth and vigor allows her to finish cleaning the leaves, a task that another family in their “autumn” is unable or unwilling to do. Nevertheless, since “all that blooms must fall”, we are left to wonder who will clean up after Achilles Wong when she “falls” as well.

In “The Waterfall,” Mary Oliver describes a waterfall using a concrete poetry structure, where the increasing indents remind one of a waterfall. Initially, the word “fall” literally refers to water falling, and Oliver uses both imagery and to place us at the scene. The feminine imagery of “lace legs” and “womanly arms sheeting down” feels disconcertingly intimate when used to describe an expansive waterfall; is the waterfall is a metaphor for an intimate encounter? However, since this metaphor is not continued beyond the first stanza, we are left to assume that the metaphor may have been more innocent than originally thought. The layers of imagery in the next stanzas–”unspooling // like ribbons made of snow, or god’s white hair” and “a fall of flowers” seem cliché and sentimental at first, and likely purposefully so, because the true gravity of the poem starts with the fifth stanza. Here, Oliver ponders the meaning of gravity and the struggling of the water–”that third eye–can do a lot but hardly everything.” A streak of darkness unexpectedly enters the poem, and the clichéd metaphors in the previous stanzas contrast against the concept of the water not being able to do everything. Oliver imagines that at the end of gravity, at the end of the long fall, there may be “some slack and perfectly balanced blind and rough peace” in the “utterly motionless pools after all that falling,” suggesting that despite the change and the falling, maybe there is peace at the end of it all.

Chen Chen’s “Night Falls Like a Button” is more whimsical and less straightforward compared to the others. At first glance, the poem looks like a paragraph of prose, but its vivid collage of imagery and metaphors make it poetry. In this poem, “fall” refers to a transition: the rapid falling of darkness, from zenith to horizon. The poem appears to be set indoors, by the “night-burps of the sleeping computer,” but the real focus is the outdoor sky and the stranger. With the “aging spine of the black sky,” Chen now has license to create wild yet endearing metaphors between the stranger’s actions and astronomical bodies. What exactly does “Your smile in the early dark is a paraphrase of Mars. Your smile in the deep dark is an anagram of Jupiter.” mean? Later on, what does Orioles have to do with the oranges, and who is the architect? Perhaps the real gem of the poem is not in understanding exactly what Chen Chen meant to say, but rather the fact that the metaphors make just enough sense that we keep revisiting the poem over and over again and end up appreciating that maybe the deeper meaning can never be fully grasped. And in going through the poem over and over again, we notice other treasures, like the near rhymes between words such as “tuxedo” and “gelato”; “Orioles” and “tomorrow”; “hair” and years”.

In “Mr. Darcy,” Victoria Chang wonders how a woman decides to marry a man. Is it because she has fallen in love? Or, is it because of his nice house? Whether he is good at winning things? More specifically, she considers the specific reasons why Lizzy marries Darcy and why Cinderella marries the prince. The poem questions if it is possible to distinguish a man’s material possessions from the man himself; is a man still the same husband material without his earthly possessions? This question harkens back to Pride and Prejudice’s first line: “a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” which suggests that the man and his possessions are taken into account together. Chang’s graduated rhymes and puns make the distinction between man and material even harder–is Cinderella in love with the “prince” or the “prints?” What is the value of a “house” and a “horse” and would a man without either be “worse?”

The word “fall” is hidden in stanza 6: “but she falls in love// with him when he has the money.” Taken out of context, the woman sounds rather cruel. However, Chang gives a list of practical reasons why a woman must consider a man’s material possessions–if it “rains every fifteen// minutes it would be foolish to// marry a man without an umbrella” and “what if he didn’t own the house,” where would the couple live? It is possible to read this poem as a continuation of sexist stereotypes, where the man must provide for the woman. However, I read this through the lens of a woman trying her best to play the patriarchal system, where structural barriers prevent her from attaining the same level of wealth as a man, and so she must forego love in search of financial stability. Indeed, the concept of falling in love seems to be a foreign one, an unwelcome change of goals that is deliberately pushed out. By the end of the poem, Chang is already dreaming of bagging another husband, one “with a lot more bags.”

Thank you for stopping by my poetry anthology, and I hope you enjoy the poems. Each poem is “colored” by the mood of the poem (as I felt it as), and there is an audio recording of each poem as well.

Acknowledgments

Thank you Jenny, Laura, Shalini, and Andrew for a great term of poetry. Thank you to the poets whose work I enjoyed and collected for the anthology. And thank you Griffin Chure for this cool website template.