Robert Frost ends his poem "The Oven Bird" with these lines:

     The bird would cease and be as other birds
     But that he knows in singing not to sing.
     The question that he frames in all but words
     Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Joyce Carol Oates begins her review of Anne Tyler's latest novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, by quoting these lines in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.  "The Oven Bird"--and especially the phrase "what to make of a diminished thing"--has been haunting me recently, so its appearance in the review seems a good occasion for a few thoughts.  In the review, Oates reinforces what I've felt about Tyler's recent work: that although I, like Oates, enjoyed the modest humor and compassion of Tyler's early work, the last several novels have been so quiet that there's not enough dramatic energy to hold our interest.  I used to love Anne Tyler.  Once, thirty years ago (tempus really does fugit), I read several of her novels in a row and was so impressed that I wrote her via her agent.  I got a lovely and funny handwritten reply from her home address in Baltimore (always the setting of her books).  A few years later, again impressed by one of her novels, I wrote her at the same address.  She was still there (Baltimoreans have a firm sense of home and place, she said), and again she wrote back.  So it's been sad to have been disappointed by her newer novels and to cross her last one off the list of books to download.

"The Oven Bird" is a sonnet, describing the loud songs of an oven bird who has, as the poem progresses, less and less reason to sing.  In one startlingly original line, Frost uses a mathematical ratio ("Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten"), the world already diminished by 90% by mid-summer.  But the oven bird continues, knowing "in singing not to sing" ("I sing because I'm happy. I sing because I'm free"--the traditional reasons for singing no longer applying to the bird).  Rather its song becomes a question about the meaning of the diminished thing which is this world.  The bird is, of course, like Frost the poet, the "dark" Frost not his public persona.  Frost's poetry is an extended and various meditation (framed in words) on our diminished natural and personal world (Frost's poetry rarely deals with the mediating social world).  And for me over the last few months, that question has been my own: what to make of, how to deal with a diminished world of possibilities and still keep, well, not singing, that would be frightening for everyone, but thinking, talking, writing.

I always taught "The Oven Bird" in the second half of the American lit. survey, and there was almost always a student who, despite a footnote explaining what an oven bird is and despite the fact that the poem takes place in the middle of a woods with nary a human in sight, would conclude that the bird was a Thanksgiving turkey, the oven was, well, an oven, which was probably a symbol of hell, and then suddenly the whole poem became symbolic of the beauties of American democracy or the perils of endzone celebrations or god-knows-what.  The students would often become indignant when I wrote "WRONG" or "LMAO" in the margin.  "Aren't all interpretations valid?" (No.)  "If I can support my interpretation, isn't it valid?" (No again.  We can all support our beliefs or else we wouldn't believe them.)  I'd invoke Popper's idea of falsifiability, but that never worked very well.  I'd try forbidding the word "symbol" in any essay, quoting Nabokov on students' finding symbols as like discovering their own tracks in the snow.  That didn't work any better.  On student evaluations, one word that they often used to describe me was "opinionated," which wasn't meant as a compliment.  My modest ambition in teaching poetry was to teach students that the basic unit of a poem is a sentence, not a line (students paused at the end of each line, whether it was end-stopped or not, and started the next as if it were the beginning of a new thought, often reducing the poem to nonsense) and that the poems we read consisted of English words conveying first of all a literal English meaning.  Does that mean a poem has one and only one meaning? the students would ask.  I hope not; otherwise, I'd have been out of a job.

Often after that class, I'd teach Critical Reading and Writing, and, wondering what I was doing and why I was doing it, I'd launch into a discussion of Deconstruction with its focus on what's not there: here an aporia (impass), there a passage sous rature (having been "erased"), and everywhere absence as presence.  I used to teach Derridean Deconstruction by starting with a Kabbalistic creation myth: tsimtsum, or contraction.  Unlike most creation stories in which a god fills a void by creating something new, in this myth, since the creator initially fills the world, there is no space for creation.  So the creator contracts to create a space for creation, an absence that enables presence.  And then, to apply the principle, we'd attempt a deconstructrive reading of Mishima's story "Patriotism," focusing first on all the words that derive from pater and mater, and noticing that in column two, there was either absence (there is no 'matriotism,' for example) or negative connotations (to be a patron is good, to be matronly not so much) and then seeing how the story, inadvertently, deconstructs itself by undermining these pairs.  So, too, with actor/witness, in which the first term is the strong one, but in the story realizing how the actor (the male hero) is actually dependent on the witness (Mishima always describes the wife as, for example, the moon to her husband's sun), while by the end of the story, the wife/witness becomes the truly independent actor.

As you can tell, I was always proud of my attempts to demystify deconstruction to a group of students who had had trouble reading a sonnet and whom I had just told to be nothing if not literal.  Ah well, as American writers from Emerson to Ellison, from Whitman to Fitzgerald have argued, consistency is overrated.  And, like the oven bird, as you also can tell, while feeling that I live in a diminished world, I just keep talking and writing.