Unidentified Apple Picker
(1)
Black-and-white 3/4 length re-
print of Grover Cleveland Alexander (left)
and an unidentified man (right), apple-
picking. Both wear three-piece suits, overcoats,
[canes] and [top] hats. Posing for the camera,
each reaches up to grab an apple
gloved in a branch. Down
to bite an apple. Back to throw
an apple like a baseball. Forward
to shake hands.
(2)
Grover Cleveland Alexander and unidentified
man here called Apple Picker. Yesterday
may forget your name, Mr. Picker, but
because of you I remember the whole round
feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach
up, the snapping pull down. The sluice
from the bite. The sun in our eyes.
-Rebecca Holifield
About the poem:
“Unidentified Apple Picker” was inspired by a photograph in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. This poem is part of my master’s thesis, “Digital Pastoral,” which theorizes a few ways in which the internet and the digital archive have altered the tradition of the pastoral poem, at least in my own work. If the internet is the city in which we get lost, it is also the pasture in which we can find ourselves again. This poem begins with stuffy-sounding found text, describing the found image, and gradually redirects until it ends on a connection to the personal, the sensory. From the vague and impersonal, we make our own connections and imbue things with our own meaning. From the search engine comes the search, from the search comes the image, and from the image comes the personal connection we form with it. - Rebecca Holifield
Rebecca Holifield is a poet with a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Two): Rebecca Holifield
Rebecca Holifield’s brilliant and enticing poem, “Unidentified Apple Picker,” does not depend upon the photograph it speaks to. Indeed, the poem places the photo at further removes by telling us that it is “3/4-length” and a “re- / print.” Nonetheless, we are provided the positions of its two inhabitants and what they are wearing. One is a baseball player, a famous pitcher called “Grover Cleveland Alexander,” named for an even more famous person, a president, whose most notable accomplishment may have been marrying his much-younger ward.
Why the brackets around “cane” and “top”? For me, they function to emphasize the photo’s distance from us in time—and that time’s degree of formality.
Indeed, the poem’s details consistently emphasize one another, with “Grover Cleveland Alexander”’s almost too-elaborate name contrasting with “unidentified man”’s total lack of one.
Part of the poem’s quaint, Victorian formality is its highly posed nature, mimicked by the lineation of the second half of section (1). The poem is arranged as formally as the photograph, to humorous effect, as its images reference Grover Cleveland Alexander’s more famous role, as pitcher rather than “picker.”
Section (2) addresses itself to the speaker’s relationship to and with the second man, who is here somewhat more fulsomely identified as “unidentified / man here called ‘Apple Picker’.” Then, following a wonderfully deft personification of the past, “Yesterday / may forget your name,” the speaker exuberantly dubs him: “Mr. Picker,” a move all the more comic because parenthetical.
And it is “because of you,” because of the second, anonymous man, that the speaker, and we, receive the encompassing epiphany of the last four lines:
the whole round
feeling of apple in hand, the steady reach
up, the snapping pull down. The sluice
from the bite. The sun in our eyes.
Our kinesthetic, tactile experience of apple picking ends with the double climax of “The sluice / from the bite” and “The sun in our eyes”—the dazzlement of looking upward at a ripe apple—and our dazzlement by the photograph the poem develops just for us. Its darkroom, the poet’s mind; its emulsion, words.
-Angela Ball
Enjoy the poem. and like this metaphoric summary: Its darkroom, the poet’s mind; its emulsion, words.
Posted by: J. Zheng | January 31, 2023 at 09:52 AM