November by Maggie Dietz
October's closing up shop and yielding to the stark reign of November
November
By Maggie Dietz
Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.
Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough—the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees
Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge
On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.
Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.
The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This week's poem is, fittingly, November by American poet Maggie Dietz.
Another October has come and gone, and the most tolerable form of winter along with it. October represents, at least to me, the very best aspects of a changing season. There is a clear delineation between summer and autumn, represented by some of the very finest amber, ochre, and orange colour palettes that nature has to offer. Especially here in Ireland.
The light in itself makes every fleeting moment, every skittering leaf worthy of a photograph, a pause, a moment to remember. Then finally it peaks with a festival of ancient origin now rife with mischief and decoration. In short, October is everything you could want in a season; sadly, it's got to end; more than that, it has to be followed.
November is the hour of winter. That incredible colour palette is replaced with a cold steel aesthetic that bleeds days together to more a gradient smear than a set. The temperature plummets, the leaves say goodbye and rustling is replaced with wind. As for light, the little we get of it is brief and unsatisfying. No one would be blamed for wanting to hunker down and wait it out.
Nothing does a better job of encapsulating the strange disappointment of the long November quite like this poem. Maggie Dietz has a real talent for gilding the everyday and does so, not with the intention of raising it up, glorifying it, but rather with the hope of triggering the observation in others too.
Her mentor and noted poet, Robert Pinsky, praised her prowess in this writing.
“Her achievement — and the source of excitement for her readers — is an urgent fidelity to both that surface and the underlying caves and rivers of the imagination.” (Fitzgerald 2006)
The surface and the underlying are always present in Dietz’s work and very much so in this poem. There is a fluid ballet of opposing images, juxtapositions and dichotomies. The imagery oscillates between stark November sights and glorious quiet moments of nature. The voice of the poem begins bombastically, like a declaration, but stumbles over quiet, introspective questions that snag the speaker. The point of view is a pendulum between external observation of the world and existential internal investigation. How will we deal with November?
Dietz builds a documentary of November through a flurry of accurate moments that make up a month. All the while it remains dynamic, never getting bogged down in the starkness it was to enshrine.
Dietz sets the tone from the very first stanza:
Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.
The voice is that of a barman closing up or a ringmaster winding down. It signifies an end but does so with a comfortable familiarity in the phrase, folks. This showman’s pattern, the well-worked script, and the beating heart of any performance are the perfect way to kick off an ode to a cyclical season. October comes around over and over. We've been here before, but we'll do it again. It is an odd note of hope that isn't immediately obvious. We have another October to look forward to next year and isn't that great. As if to double down on why this is good news, the next line gives the month a rhetorical performance review: And didn't October do a bang-up job?
Maggie Dietz pulls us, her readers, into the poem through collective address and rhetorical questions . It's a way to establish that November is the month we all have to deal with, and we are bonded in the shared trial of endurance.
What follows from there is a testament to Maggie Dietz’s incredible skill of description in poetry; glorious October is snapshotted in verse:
Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.
It is nothing short of amazing. It captures the nature and gothic of the time of year. The poet's scenes are not static but moving. Push of winds, bellows of animals shaking soundwaves, and furious beating wings. Dietz’s October is a rush of change. We might get swept away by this if not for the gorgeous coral moon. I think it brings the stanza to a gentle rest.
This is ideal as the next stanza becomes a touch more introspective:
Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough—the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees
This stanza is bookended by more observations on the natural world. What leaves have managed to cling on are a paltry imitation of the once roaring ember palette of October, all that's left is fool's gold; the sickly yellow of what's left.
At the other end of the stanza is the briefest mention of bees. I adore the cleverness of this decision by Dietz, as, at a glance, it might seem as though the mention of the bees seems almost shoehorned into the verse. The reason for this is made clear in what's placed at the centre of the stanza, though. The listing of natural occurrences is interrupted by a sudden question of gratitude and wonder: Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage?
While it lasted? Was I dazzled?
The speaker of the poem is unsure of whether or not they truly took stock or appreciated what they had. The dwindling glory of autumn has left them reflective, and we feel as readers that thoughts like did I love it enough or was I dazzled might have a deeper, universal echo. The speaker is examining far more than just leaves.
The enjambment, a bleeding of one line into the next, of the bees pulls our focus back to nature and directly into the next stanza, mimicking a stream of consciousness complete with its unwelcome and unbidden thoughts.
In the next stanza, it is nature who is bunkering down for the miserable reign of November:
Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge
Even bees, that famous symbol of industriousness and productivity in human imagination (Beswick 2020), have called it quits. They can struggle no longer and will hide for now. Dietz creates an image of the insects that directly evokes the shaking of trees in the winter breeze and the last desperate cling of a few tenacious leaves to trees. It's a gorgeous bit of almost onomatopoeic writing. The whole world feels like it has gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
These micro observations come hard and fast in this poem and, as I said, are a testament to the mastery of descriptive writing that Maggie Dietz has. It’s been described by critic Johnathan Farmer as: description as its own justification, lit by worries that the life in which such observation happens isn’t worthy of attention. (Farmer 2016)
It’s a beautiful turn of phrase that perfectly captures the importance of this attention to the minutiae of life; it reinforces that it’s a life worth living. This seems to be one of Dietz’s great causes as a poet: to stand firmly as a champion of Socrates’s famous utterance: The unexamined life is not worth living (Plato 1904).
The animals facing this November, though, have no time to stop and smell the roses and are instead focused on getting the hell out of dodge. Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge
That colloquial voice, an informal, casual tone for communication (Bex and Watts 2002), hinted at by the carnival bark in the first stanza, makes a comeback in hit the barns. That voice is there to avoid overromanticizing the month. A real risk when you spend so much time describing nature in a poem. It’s done with the intention of grounding the problem. A colloquial voice attempts broad appeal; it also gets used for the universal. November is the problem we all face.
Enjambment continues and we carries us as an audience directly into the next stanza:
On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.
The enjambment now makes me think of falling leaves, each stanza falling one after the other, mimicking the behaviour of the trees they are describing. Natural imagery is the mainstay again. Squirrels feeding from the bark of trees: busted chestnuts. Then that grim November sky gets a moment to shine, or dull, as may be more appropriate: A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. That cold grey sky that never seems to budge—the constant, relentless static of winter is there. Hovers is a perfect verb to describe the sky we all look up at, at least in the parts of the world that go through significant seasonal change. Even the rivers feel the emptiness of November; they change from sparkling veins of life in the summer. Now it is ill and coughing; the dead plant life that has withered is being heaved to the banks as it just tries to get through the winter.
No doubt if you’ve been listening this long then you might be enjoying the episode and I’d like to ask you a favour: please consider giving the podcast a review wherever you listen or sharing it with someone who might also be struggling with November these days. With that being said, on with the episode.
You may or may not have noticed a subtle rhyme scheme running through this poem. stanza is three lines long. Also known as a terzet or terzet. I'm never really sure how to pronounce that one. But the last word in the first line of each stanza rhymes directly with the final line of each stanza, with the middle line receiving its own sound. For example, in stanza one, it is Do cries moon.
In the second, it is trees, foliage, and bees. And the third, it's forage, clusters, and gorge.
Now, this is probably easier to see when you're looking at the poem. There's a link below in the description to do so. Or you can check it out on Substack.
But you'll notice that, uh, That when we follow this type of structure, it is known as A B A. C D C. Each new rhyming sound receiving its own letter of the alphabet. And so on, and so forth. But you may also now be listening to me saying, Ben, those are not obvious rhymes. Do and moon are not the same.
No, they are not. Maggie Dietz is using the wonderful technique of assonance to rhyme an internal sound as opposed to an exact match for each one. Do and moo, trees and bees is an obvious one, and then the GE sound at the end of forage and gorge. Sometimes it's obvious, and sometimes it's not. But all the same, it provides a wonderful lilting structure that mimics a falling leaf as it winds its way to the ground.
At least in my opinion.
It also has the added benefit of giving the poem a slightly cyclical feeling with repeated rhyming sounds coming again and again. It is a nice nod to the cyclical seasons being mentioned within this poem.
The next stanza continues that elegant rhyme scheme and creates an echo of imagery from earlier in the poem:
Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.
The only thing that could hold a candle to the chaos and buzz, excuse the pun, of bees in human society is probably children. They, too, have given in to November’s chill. Their swarm is more of a whispered murmur now. There is an acknowledgement that it’s not all bad; November is winter’s big excuse. The alibi we all give for missing a party in favour of a cosy night, the ultimate get out of jail free card for dodging social commitments—it’s just too grim. Much better not to brave that November bite and surrender to the boxed in allure.
Dietz reminds though that true warmth remains a distant memory in the 11th month of the year, as TVs ricochet their artificial glow around the walls and battened down pulled curtains.
Humanity is beautifully observed here by Dietz. She is acknowledging that we are creatures of comfort. She brings this reality to bear in her poem without judgement. She is not skewering the people taking refuge in front of their screens. She is not judging them for not doing something more productive.
But rather showing that sometimes what we need to do is hibernate too. It is a gorgeous reminder that for all the trappings of humanity, we are just like the other animals in her poem.
Her ability to bring what some might consider a grim aspect of reality into her poem, on a global scale no less, is something that Maggie Dietz is often praised for. In one interview with Dietz, critic and journalist Sara A. Lewis lauded this. She wrote:
Dietz’s gaze is alertly trained on the wide world, and her speaker’s entanglement in it… “Mankind cannot bear much Reality,” Eliot wrote, but Dietz’s poetry seeks it, passionately. (Lewis 2016)
The final stanza continues to seek out reality passionately and delivers it with a wallop:
The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.
This final scene feels like those classic Norman Rockwell paintings to me. There’s a genuine sense of urban Americana in the idea of throwing up the closed sign at 4. Albeit a slice of American Life cut with the melancholy of Edward Hopper’s work.
Of course, Dietz is anthropomorphising a winter’s day, that is to say giving it a human quality of ending a workday, when in fact it’s just getting dark so much earlier. (Masterclass 2022).
The poem ends on the crushing of a final dreg of hope as some hapless customer, presumably one who’s forgotten the time of year, arrives to find that much like everyone else, a shop has gone to ground like all of humanity, all of nature, even if this poem is anything to go by. The lights are out and the doors bolted shut.
I can think of no finer image than that, as a summation of the shock to the system that November is every year.
It would be easy to classify November by Maggie Dietz as little more than a complaint with flourish. However, as with much of her poetry, Maggie Dietz brings a glorious feeling of humanity and camaraderie to a grim month. Yes, every living thing in this poem is fleeing from the cold wind of winter, but in that collective fleeing we are all united.
Dietz shines a light on the litany of ways that things close up shop. Her gorgeous imagery is all at once a homage to October and a damnation of the month that follows it. It is a gorgeous document of seasons changing that manages to be full of beauty without sinking into the morass of sentimentality that sometimes plagues romantic poems trying out the same thing.
One critic wrote of her work that:
When reading Dietz’s poems, one can often sense an aperture widening or constricting as she deftly engages the movement of light and shadow across natural and human cycles. (Poetry Foundation, n.d.)
The human and the natural cycles have overlapped wonderfully in this poem. Dietz has shown us that winter affects us all. She has done so at times using humour, using breath-taking imagery, and always with ground realism. You’d be forgiven for thinking the poem held little hope, but in her review of the seasons cycle are many acknowledgements that it is just that—a cycle. And like any time on fortune's wheel, November’s rain will come to an end.
What did you think of the poem? As always, this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me, there are a few ways to do so.
References
Beswick, Anne. 2020. “The story behind the Manchester bee—and why it's used everywhere in the city.” Visit Manchester. https://www.visitmanchester.com/ideas-and-inspiration/blog/post/the-story-behind-the-manchester-bee-and-why-it-s-used-everywhere-in-the-city/.
Bex, Tony, and Richard J. Watts. 2002. Standard English: The Widening Debate. Edited by Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts. N.p.: Taylor & Francis.
Eagleton, Terry. 2007. How to read a poem. N.p.: Wiley.
Farmer, Jonathan. 2016. “Extra Ordinary.” Maggie Dietz and Tess Taylor, poets of the everyday, reviewed. https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/maggie-dietz-and-tess-taylor-poets-of-the-everyday-reviewed.html.
Fitzgerald, Brian. 2006. “‘Perennial Fall’ melds pain and humour.” BU Today. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2006/perennial-fall-melds-pain-and-humor/.
Lewis, Sara A. 2016. “Poetry Spotlight: Maggie Dietz.” Memorious Magazine (April). https://memoriousmag.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/poetry-spotlight-maggie-dietz/.
Masterclass. 2022. “Anthropomorphism vs. Personification: What’s the Difference? - 2024.” MasterClass. https://masterclass.com/articles/anthropomorphism-vs-personification#4UADJNceWYZc0a5F5qEs5z.
Plato. 1904. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Translated by Harold N. Fowler. N.p.: Loeb Classical Library.
Poetry Foundation. n.d. “Maggie Dietz | The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed November 10, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maggie-dietz.