![[Home]](images/thumb.png)
Of Mister Miner’s poems included in this volume, “Plaything”, “The Silver Circle” and “The Coffee Line” are the earliest. Mister Miner said to me that
[they] came shortly after the formative stage of my development—you know, the sort of end of the beginning. Although I suppose there are glimmers here and there these predate Simplism. I was more fixated on keeping with the Coleridge school insofar as I strove for ‘the best words in the best possible order’. Sound play was my opiate when I wrote not only ‘Plaything’ and ‘The Silver Circle’, but also ‘The Coffee Line’… Still, for better or for worse, I am an occasional user.
I have decided to utilize here (as opposed to in my commentaries on “The Silver Circle” or “The Coffee Line”) this fragment from my interviews with Mister Miner because it is my belief that “Plaything”, of the three, displays most readily the “sound play” he mentions. As far as his mentioning of the Coleridge school, I believe I understand his intentions; “Kubla Khan”, one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s more enigmatic works, is a quintessential example of how a poem’s melodiousness can excuse its confoundedness. “Plaything”, however lacking in simplicity is duly pardoned by its richness in meaning and melody.
In essence, “Plaything” is a poem of primal passion. It was only after some debate with Mister Miner that it was not replaced by another less powerful poem. His feeling (much as it was with “Love Detonator”) was that it was too sexual and would taint his more innocent poems. I believe it to be pardoned by its cogent encapsulation of human desires—“We all have them,” I said, “why feel guilty?”.
I will not go into as extensively into textual analysis with this poem as I would with most, but I will examine a few of its touchstones. The first stanza has a brilliant percussive quality of sound, placing emphasis on hard aitches which are characteristically hushed. There is an ambiguity in the stanza as to whether the clothes are being worn by the girl, or the clothes are indeed wearing her: are her hips hugging the denims, or are the denims doing the hugging themselves? Is it the halter-top that is “drawn tight” or is it the “top” of her body? I believe these are called into question as intentionally as they are left unanswered. It is also interesting to note that a “halter” was originally a rope or strap often fitted with a noose.
By the third stanza the speaker longs for reciprocation. He wants to be wanted like a deer jacked by a hunter; this theme of cheating is carried over from the preceding stanza, but in a much different light—he can only enjoy his plaything as a plaything himself.
The final stanza is more the voice that has become so familiarly Mister Miner’s. The light of nature, even after having been reflected from the moon to the thighs of a woman, is yet enticing and perhaps more so as a result. To all mankind, the light of nature is the source of endless passion, and its reflections are “never through”.
I would classify the core quality possessed by “Plaything” as mystical. Unlike his Simpleist work, “Plaything” takes on mutable aspects and interminable interpretations. The poem itself is feral and untamable. It stimulates us in our darkest, most unexplored, most primeval recesses where riddles are not delicately decrypted, but savagely torn asunder.
In lieu of a complete analysis, I give you this, an early Mister Miner work entitled “Lightening” which, although he did not wish it in the collection, I deem it far more sinful to leave it out as it explains (and in part laments) our emergence from prehistory:
Remember in the wilderness,
The same from which I’ve come—
The moon before you knew her name,
The howling and the drowning rain,
Her countenance and true embrace
And faces facts disgorged of grace
Beneath a bleaching sun.