Analyzing Jennings's Poem 'The Interrogator'

The poem moves from a consideration of conditions conducive to rhyming, to an illustration of the poetic mind in action. The poem shifts to a final awareness of the inevitable limitations of the artifact. Utrillo’s painting remains on the wall,:“the nun is climbing up those steps,” but for the patients “the only hope is visitors will come /And talk of other things than our disease…/ So much is stagnant and yet nothing dies” (193)

The poem itself is a watchfully crafted artifact which relies on the tension created between startling images of human suffering presented in a matter of fact tone to communicate the intensity of Jennings’s concern with the operations of the mind in all situations, including extreme emotional states. In each stanza,

It can be read as a poem about the relationship between a psychiatrist and patient. The poem dramatizes the pressing effort of the speaker to affirm a sense of personal value in a world that is dominated by the oppressive force represented here by the male interrogator:“He is always right./However you prevaricate or question this motives,/Whatever you say to excuse yourself/He is always right”(196)

The repeated clipped lines referring to the male who is always right encircle the longer, more discursive lines which refer to the ineffectual attempts of the speaker to defend or explain herself. This stanza pattern provides an example of male power and female powerlessness. The effect of the regular and emphatic rhythm and metre and of the lexical repetitions is to intensify the pervasive, all encompassing sense of male

Malkoff puts: “whether or not the decision to expand the boundaries of the self involves the risk of sanity, if not the risk of life itself”(Malkoff 101) Another critic Alvarez suggests that: the “Extremist” poet may even give himself over to the sickness he felt himself pray to “for the sake of the range and intensity of his art”( Alvarez 101). Malkoff suggests that there is no real chance of resolving the question”(101) In her typical manner of relating inquiries about the nature of the self to questions about the nature of art, Jennings addresses the issue of creativity and madness in a poem about the life and work of Van Gogh. She writes: “All your best paintings, I have heard, were/Made when you were mad” (195).It is the painter’s attentiveness to detail that she seizes upon and links both to his success as an artist and to his