Poem of the Week: “The Ideal City” by Michael Salcman
This week I’d like to take a quick look at a poem published this past March in The Bangalore Review: “The Ideal City” by Michael Salcman. I chose this poem because it’s a good demonstration of how the form of a poem should complement the subject matter.
“The Ideal City” is an ekphrastic poem, a poem written in response to a work of art. As the title suggests, the speaker of Salcman’s poem contemplating The Ideal City, a 15th-century painting by an anonymous artist. The speaker thinks about both the experience of being in the ideal and the philosophical implications of the painting.
His thoughts on the painting are complicated, to say the least. He certainly finds it appealing on some level, as he “vanish[es] right where it hangs,” drawn in by “its studied perspective and funneled point of view” (lines 1, 4). And yet that “funneled point of view” is a bit disquieting, because it represents “a particular political view” (line 11). These conflicting impressions are the core of the poem’s matter.
Rather than progressing from one view to the other, the speaker shifts back in forth between enchantment and unease. One moment he’s almost euphoric, riding “an imaginary ray, emptied / of any direction but true” (lines 22-23). The next, he’s bemoaning that no “two-sided view // is allowed by this unknown artist’s hand” (lines 24-25). By the end, he’s yearning for nuance, for “a more cosmopolitan view” (line 32). The speaker’s thought process, more than anything else, is the subject of the piece.
So how does the form of the poem reinforce the subject?
In addition to being an ekphrastic poem, “The Ideal City” is a sestina, a fixed-form consisting of 39-lines and defined by a cyclical repetition of end-words. It’s quite a difficult form: when done poorly the repeated end-words call attention to themselves, and its length makes sustaining the flow of ideas difficult.
If, however, the poet wishes to show how a thought process oscillates, repeatedly hitting similar points, the sestina form makes perfect sense. The form cycles though a handful of words as the mind cycles though a handful of concepts.
Further, many of the end-words Salcman chooses to repeat are directly related to thought, underlining the poem’s central concern. All the variations on “conscious” (un-, sub-, semi-) show an awareness of one’s own thinking. “View” refers both to perception and perspective, both of which affect how the mind proceeds. Even the word “square” serves this purpose: it can mean “to bring into accord,” as it does in the second stanza.
We are not merely told that the speaker has conflicting thoughts on the painting. We get a glimpse into machinery of the speaker’s mind as well. Here’s someone who can’t stop thinking, and who can’t stop thinking about thinking, and who for some reason can’t get much further in the process than that. There’s just something about that painting...
The end result is a piece that not only expresses a particular thought process but also allows the reader to feel what that process is like. Because the form of “The Ideal City” reflects the subject, the poem becomes a more meaningful experience for the reader, one which they are more likely to remember once the envoi is completed.