Bad Daisies

An Essay on Irony

I spent my weekend reading Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris.

The poetry collection, which won a Pulitzer in 1993, is set in a garden.

Through the subjective frame of the garden, each poem explores the theme of passage from one world to another.

By frame, I mean the form of the text; I mean its structural metaphors.

For example, Glück frames the lives of plants as they transition through different seasons: spring, summer, winter, and fall.

It’s important to note that for plants, winter and death are equivalent.

Although humans can approximate what this means, it’s probably not the same experience.

Instead, we rely on theological abstractions, which in the text are spoken of just as a human might speculate on flower cosmology.

The flowers are willing to enter the discursive arena regarding God and heaven, but they don’t believe in them per se.

Even if the flowers share aspects of human cosmology, their version of what’s “real” is directly rooted in their physical experience.

“Better than earth?” ask the field flowers about heaven. “How / would you know, who are neither here nor there, standing in our midst?”

In another poem, a red poppy says, “I have a lord in heaven / called the sun.”

One could say that the red poppy uses the frame of feudal property (lord) to explain its own relationship with the cosmos (sun).

Does this sort of substitution sound familiar?

It’s like writing garden poems that are actually about being human.

It takes a lot of poems to learn how to be a human.

“Daisies” is the thirty-fourth poem in The Wild Iris.

It is composed of a single stanza, twenty-three lines, and eleven sentences.

It speaks through the collective voice of daisies and addresses a second-person “you” colloquially, without internal rhyme or meter.

The daisies are defined in relation to their listener, a human onlooker standing at the edge of their meadow.

Ah, a person looking onto a meadow: how romantic, how introspective.

But this poem is not spoken by the human. It’s spoken by the meadow.

Also, Glück’s daisies are bossy.

They are superior flowers, in that they are superior to the listener.

From the first line, they assert their dominance, challenging the listener to “Go ahead: say what you’re thinking.”

What an inversion!

This second-person voice is very inclusive. Not only do the daisies address the listener, but, by association, they also address the reader.

The daisies anticipate our thoughts: “The garden / is not the real world.”

Here’s where we might pause to wonder what kind of world the listener-reader inhabits. After all, the poem was published in 1992.

We must pause to consider the rhetorical frames that allow this perversion, that a garden is not “real.”

What makes the garden unreality? What frames have brought us to this field?

I’m taking a break from the poem to walk in Willamette Park with my housemate’s dog, Rocket.

It’s a foggy Saturday, and we’re playing with a beloved orange frisbee.

I know better than to throw the toy into the water, but I do.

On the second toss, it’s carried upstream on the eddy, away from the beach.

I’m waiting to see if Rocket will go for it, but instead he looks at me as if to say, Are you nuts?

I duck into the brush to follow the frisbee upriver.

Meanwhile, I’m cursing myself that this wasn’t a stick.

Day-glo plastic frisbees take a long time to decompose.

It’s obvious that the frisbee doesn’t belong here, on the banks of the river.

I know that one of us will have to venture into the water to retrieve it.

And as I can’t communicate this to Rocket, or because he simply prefers not to be the one, it’ll have to be me.

I take off my shoes and socks.

The riverbank is cold and slick. The clay smells faintly metallic.

Feeling the mud squish up between my toes reminds me of canoeing trips on the Penobscot, the St. Croix, and the Allagash.

On trail, you are constantly making plans and revising plans according to your needs. You are always navigating the reality of the environment.

It’s a real world out there, that’s for sure.

But the kids I took on trail would often talk about going back to the “real world,” meaning back to mirrors and magazines.

According to them, the world we were immersed in, the world of waterways, was less real: disconnected: other.

Listening to my kids talk, I began to see how our stratified economic and social systems make it incredibly difficult to combine these worlds.

Humans want to move fast; our minds want to shine.

But it takes slowing down to shift a structural frame.

It takes a lot of repetition to shift a structural frame.

Now, you start to see what the daisies are up against.

The daisies in “Daisies” are the speaking subject of the poem.

They’re not passive instruments of capitalism, these daisies!

They deride the listener who prefers modern machinery to gardens and views modernity as emblematic of the “real world.”

In the listener’s world, gardens are whimsical, a contrivance of nostalgia.

The listener might visit occasionally, might even write a poem or two, but then it’s always time to return to reality.

The daisies are tired of all this.

The daisies are fed up with not being taken seriously.

These daisies are done with sentimental Nature Writing.

They’ve had it up to here with feeling trivialized by Nature Writing’s critics.

The daisies speak to address a rhetorical dilemma for which flowers have generally taken the flak.

They speak to undermine the listener’s presumption that the world of the garden, the meadow, isn’t real.

And because the daisies are so sarcastic, the poem doesn’t really count as Nature Writing either.

Perhaps it’s not bad to be bossed by a flower.

The human mind addressed in “Daisies” isn’t used to being bossed.

It’s used to being the discriminator, the critic.

Knowing this, the daisies tease the listener that perhaps “It is / not modern enough, the sound the wind makes / stirring a meadow of daisies.”

The daisies know that the human mind wants “to shine, plainly, as / machines shine, and not / grow deep, as, for example, roots.”

They’re able to repeat this with perfect disdain.

(You can see how this human wishfulness might warrant a daisy’s disdain.)

Now we get a little insight into the daisy way of doing things.

There’s something else that we need to know to understand the poem, with help from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

We need his help to understand what irony does.

Kierkegaard wrote of irony as “a distancing device, which folds immediate experience back on itself to create a space of self-reflection.”

It is this distance which makes listeners aware of their underlying beliefs.

Through the daisies, Glück speaks ironically of the listener’s belief that the garden is not real.

It’s extra ironic because Louise Glück is a human writing through the perspective of a flower in order to make a statement about humans.

Faced with their own frames, the listener finds themselves bamboozled between the possibility of ridicule or of missing the daisies entirely.

The situation becomes colloquially ironic, which is slightly different from Kierkegaardian irony.

It’s colloquially ironic that in the attempt to “see” the daisies for what they are, the listener has implemented them to serve their own introspection.

Meanwhile the daisies are working hard to undermine the dominant frames that the listener takes for granted.

According to Kierkegaard, irony shoves the listener into a space of self-awareness.

We could all use a good shove like this, don’t you think?

A shove shows you what’s at stake.

Once I take off my shoes and socks, it’s a slippery slope.

My bare feet notice all sorts of things:

The soft stones and the hard stones.

The rotting sheets of metal and their dark rust trails.

The decayed beech leaves glued to each other like leeches.

The rich, silky scent of rivermud drifting up as my feet sink into the soft bank.

I take a small step. The water comes up to my knees.

The colloquial irony here is that I’m a city kid.

The irony is that Rocket’s not even my dog.

The irony is that it takes only one bad throw to stumble on a responsibility you didn’t know you had.

It takes just a little shift to see the world as something we are responsible for.

I wonder if responsibility is what makes a world “real”?

I think my world just got realer with the 1,000-year lifespan of that plastic disc.

Does this seem a bit excessive?

I mean, I could have left the frisbee there.

It doesn’t have to be a hard choice.

But I didn’t leave, I stayed.

I stayed by that meadow.

I walked into the river.

I listened to the daisies.

I walked out of the river with its mud on my feet and a disc in my hand.

I put my socks on my muddy feet and I walked home with the dog.

I walked home and later I began to write.

In writing, I ran into a problem.

My problem was English.

My problem was that English hierarchizes subjects and objects.

If nature becomes subject, that means that humans are objects.

We don’t like that feeling.

After all, we know what happens to objects.

I couldn’t write about walking into the river without positioning myself, a human, as the center of the experience.

See: I’m doing it right now.

Rocket could have told the story better.

His story would probably start, “My dumb human did a dumb thing.”

Of course, that statement also implies possession; the inversion is too simple.

It’s hard to build a frame for intersubjectivity in a language that’s been used for violence and perpetuates violence in its very grammar.

But maybe that’s where Glück can help us.

There’s something about her irony that slingshots us into another frame.

By irony, I mean Kierkegaard. I mean saying one thing and meaning another.

The second that the daisies say, “machines are the real world,” we know that it’s not true.

We know what they know: the garden is the real world.

We know it because the daisies are talking.

But because this premise is not directly stated, we ease into it without thinking.

Louise Glück is very sneaky this way.

Before you know it, your frames have changed entirely.

Toward the end of the poem, the confrontation turns personal.

“It is very touching,” the daisies say, “to see you cautiously / approaching the meadow’s border in early morning, / when no one could possibly / be watching you.”

It seems these daisies know the listener loves them.

They know that the listener will continue to visit the meadow and to choose between silence and ridicule when they return to the city.

You have to wonder: why are the daisies doing this?

Don’t they love us the way we love them?

Maybe this presumption is central to why plants are “it” and not “they.”

Maybe we’re afraid that they won’t/can’t/don’t love us back.

Or that if they did, how would we know?

The uncertainty of love makes us uncomfortable.

We don’t have the frames for knowing; in fact, we don’t have frames for not-knowing.

We’ve made the mistake of wanting to be not just a subject, but the subject.

And forgetting that what we know is just a matter of framing.

It’s like thinking that there’s only one real world.

When what’s really real is a matter of power.

In fact, if there was any doubt about the daisies holding the power of the poem, the last lines of the poem erase it.

When the daisies say, “As for what you’re actually / hearing this morning,” they reaffirm the integrity of their voice and their legitimacy in speaking.

The daisies then push the listener away: “think twice / before you tell anyone what was said in this field / and by whom.”

How is the listener supposed to feel about this?

Whatever, the daisies don’t care.

These are bad daisies.

They are mean, mean daisies.

I mean, now they’re saying what they mean.

You can hear Kierkegaard laughing.

Meanwhile the daisies get the last word, and the listener is still listening.

Actually, the listener still faces a choice, a choice between worlds.

But perhaps now the listener sees their choice differently.

And maybe that’s a start.

Maybe that’s where this world can end, and the other begin.