Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Michael McClure’s "Grafting: 18" is a surreal and visceral meditation on pain, memory, and the ghostly persistence of past emotions. The poem moves between historical suffering, phantasmagoric imagery, and a keen sense of physicality, creating a dreamlike narrative that blends art, nature, and human sensation. Like much of McClure’s work, it fuses the biological and the mystical, the personal and the mythic, while maintaining an awareness of the sensory world.

The opening—"FACES TWISTED in pain from the old times when love hurt so much that it is spotlights filled with legs and mouths writhing."—immediately establishes an intense emotional landscape. Faces twisted in pain suggests memories of past suffering, particularly within the context of love. The phrase when love hurt so much carries a dual resonance: it could refer to heartbreak, emotional turmoil, or even the ecstatic, overwhelming intensity of desire. The use of spotlights introduces a theatrical element, as if love’s pain has been turned into a staged spectacle, exaggerated and inescapable. The legs and mouths writhing reinforce this performative suffering—love as something consuming, chaotic, bodily, and uncontainable.

The next shift—"It is all like the painted scroll of garish ghosts having a wedding."—introduces a striking visual metaphor. The comparison to a painted scroll evokes traditional East Asian art, particularly Japanese and Chinese ghost paintings, where spirits are often depicted as grotesque and exaggerated. A garish wedding suggests a surreal or unsettling ritual, an event that should symbolize union but instead appears eerie, artificial, or excessive. This reinforces the poem’s theme of love as something shadowed by past wounds, its ceremonies infused with an unsettling, haunted quality.

The scene that follows—"One of them with a misshapen face is selling a chubby fox, bound with silver cords and lying on a stool, to another ghost who leans forward, fascinated."—is deeply symbolic and strange. The misshapen face suggests distortion, something unnatural or grotesque, as if the figure has been warped by experience. The chubby fox is particularly evocative; in many mythologies, foxes represent trickery, transformation, and the supernatural. Bound with silver cords, the fox becomes a captive offering, a commodity in a bizarre transaction between ghosts. The leaning forward, fascinated reaction of the other ghost suggests desire, curiosity, or even longing. This moment feels both ceremonial and absurd, reinforcing the poem’s vision of love as a ritual that has lost its organic essence, turning into a staged exchange between spectral figures.

The poem then delivers a jarring E X A C T L Y, a single word spaced out vertically for emphasis. This interruption acts as a moment of revelation, as if the poet is recognizing something profound or confirming an essential truth. The exact nature of that truth remains ambiguous, but it signals a moment of heightened awareness, a realization about the nature of love, pain, and memory.

Finally, the poem expands into a cosmic, organic movement—"there are hummingbirds and physical pains flying around one another and looping in big free patterns." This closing image contrasts the earlier ghostly transactions with something more alive and dynamic. Hummingbirds, known for their rapid motion and delicate beauty, symbolize fleeting moments, agility, and energy. Their movement—looping in big free patterns—suggests a chaotic yet natural rhythm, in stark contrast to the eerie, constrained imagery of ghosts and bound foxes. Physical pains become intertwined with these movements, suggesting that suffering, like the hummingbirds, is always in motion, part of a larger cycle that resists stagnation.

The final note—"above Nebraska — remembering a scroll in the Cleveland Museum of Art."—grounds the poem in both physical space and memory. The vast openness of above Nebraska contrasts with the confined, detailed imagery of the scroll, creating a sense of distance and perspective. This suggests that the poem is not only an observation of a work of art but a deeply personal recollection, filtered through time and place. The reference to the Cleveland Museum of Art gives a specific anchor to the surreal imagery, highlighting how art and memory intermingle to shape perception.

"Grafting: 18" operates at the intersection of history, mythology, and personal experience. McClure uses the imagery of ghosts and ceremonial transactions to explore how love, pain, and memory remain intertwined, creating an emotional and visual landscape that feels at once ancient and immediate. The presence of hummingbirds introduces a counterpoint to the spectral scene—suggesting that even within pain, there is movement, energy, and perhaps a kind of freedom. The poem ultimately questions the nature of love and its rituals, asking whether they are vibrant and alive, like hummingbirds in flight, or whether they have become mere transactions between ghosts, repeating themselves endlessly in the paintings of the past.

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