Over at The Plumbline School, Andrew Shields discusses how Kit Robinson’s “Seventh Street” moves from description to commentary on the description (ie description of description), finally bringing both together in the concluding lines:
“Telling” is not being privileged over “showing,” in a critique of those who would privilege “showing” over “telling”; rather, the inevitable interaction of the two modes is being acted out, through both modes at the same time.
This interaction becomes completely clear in the poem’s final sentence:
…. Your
station stop is
this writing’s end.The “lazy / description” and the mode of saying “something about conditions” have been kept in separate sentences until now (hence my emphasis on sentences), but they meet here in the conclusion, as the train ride stops and the poem ends. The two modes are not opposed; they interact. And they are, the poem argues, both necessary to the making of a poem, and to its interpretation.
Thus the poem not only occupies a threshold space between telling and showing but actually represents an argument for the necessity of this liminality in poetry. That this argument should be made through the vehicle of a train station is especially appropriate given the liminality of such locations. The crowds in a train station consist of people on the edge of going and at the end of coming, people waiting to greet or to say goodbye. Train station moments consist of transitions into being together or being apart; they begin the liminal state of being (sometimes living) neither here nor there—being, that is, in transit.
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