No.47 - January 2021
For a good while now I have wanted to write something about Mekeel McBride’s “I Want to Be a Ferris Wheel,” yet for some reason I’ve struggled to
find a good way in. This is my sixth draft of an introduction, in fact. Which is to say, the poem resists and fascinates me equally. Which is also
to say, I really love this poem. I have known it for nearly twenty years, and used to teach it, too. It made a fine prompt for poetry workshops:
Class, your title is ‘I Want to Be____.’
Fill in the blank with something unusual, and just start writing.
The poem’s mix of fantasy, playfulness, and something darker and unsettling provides tension; the vividness and sweep of its imagery is worth imitation; and the poet’s wide-ranging associations make her a good model for surprising oneself, stretching one’s imagination beyond the purely personal. So finally, after discarding my five previous introductions, I took a hint from my own classroom practice, put down the title you see above, and began rapidly writing the introduction you just read.
But before proceeding further I had better give you the poem, in case you don’t know it or haven’t read it recently. It comes from McBride’s 2001 collection, The Deepest Part of the River, from Carnegie-Mellon University Press.
One of poetry’s signal virtues is how a poem can connect with various people in various ways, and connect differently at different times. There is no single
authentic way, of course. Another glad fact is that a poem can speak deeply to you before you fully understand why, if you ever do. I was immediately attracted
to this poem’s capacious and strong imagery and its often oddball shifts of scene and turns of thought. For example, those “insomniac sisters playing mah-jongg
/ by aquarium light”: where did they come from? How did we get from the carnival’s Ferris wheel, with all its public glitter and display, to this particular
intimate afterhours scene? Still, how wonderful to meet them! Likewise that “song as stringy / as Christmas lights on plastic palms / in Florida.” Weren’t we just
in the wheat fields of the Midwest, and before that the salmon rivers of the Pacific northwest or Maine? Image after image, and metaphor after metaphor, this poem
swoops around the nation as freely as one of Whitman’s long arias to our vast and varied country.
Given the title it’s clear the poem could have veered in nearly any direction, from straight-ahead surrealism to a more conventional extended metaphor, something like the conceits of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets. The first line seems to suggest a surreal or dream metamorphosis, as the speaker envisions her “soft body turning to shining steel.” But immediately McBride shifts attention not to herself, not even to the metamorphosis, but to very particular, realistic details of setting: “clean windows of the Midwest,” neon lights, carnival workers, sights and smells of the midway, and beyond. All this realism is punctuated regularly by abrupt imaginative swerves, though, as when she notes that “a tree wouldn’t really recognize” the “weird” shade of green cast by the neon lights, but that “aliens might, if they happened to be / looking in this direction.” So there’s clearly a thread of dreaminess within the realism. And by the time we finish the second stanza, the original conceit announced in the title seems to be abandoned. The speaker no longer is the Ferris wheel, but “just want[s] to be carried” by it over and over heavenward and back to earth. She has entered her own fantasy and become its passenger.
I confess that when I first encountered this poem I didn’t bother to understand, just enjoyed it. There are so many delights of both description and fancy to savor. Caught up by this poem’s friskiness and amplitude, McBride’s control of diction and tone, plus her sure handed eye for detail, I didn’t even recognize at first why I responded to it so viscerally. If I thought about theme at all—which I don’t recall doing—no doubt I considered it a kind of loose Whitmanesque celebration of the power of imagination, with the Ferris wheel as a unifying symbol, maybe, of the cycles of life, always in motion, always the same.
What I missed in my early encounters with this poem was that it’s quite clearly and concretely a poem of small town and rural America, especially in the remembered past. The poet does not underline this fact explicitly, but note that although the images range widely across the national map, among its welter of details are none that are unambiguously urban: no subways, no delis, no high-rise buildings, no traffic jams. McBride thus taps into deep memories of my small town boyhood.
Johnstown, New York was and is a little mill town far from any large metro areas. Moreover, I grew up before theme parks like Six Flags began to displace small traveling circuses and carnivals for rural entertainment. The occasional visits of ragtag circuses were thus highly memorable and exciting. Likewise the county fair that took place every summer on fairgrounds about four miles south of Johnstown. Last I heard, the Fonda Fair (founded in 1841) was still operating, at least pre-pandemic. I don’t know its more recent history, but in my boyhood in the Fifties and early Sixties it had all the old-time attractions you can imagine, from prize livestock and pie baking contests to a few amusement park rides that dazzled me as a boy, but which I now realize were fairly rinky-dink. There were musical acts, of course, plus a midway rich with the smells of caramel apples, popcorn, and cotton candy; games of all kinds; a house of horror; and many cheap trinkets for sale wherever you looked. One year when very young, I even remember being taken to what we then called a freak show—which was just as appalling as you might think. Strangely enough, my mother loved this sort of thing—fond memories of the circuses of her own girlhood, I imagine.
We didn’t get there often, but every summer there was also Sherman’s Amusement Park, fifteen miles up the road in Caroga Lake, a family-run outfit with a small merry-go-round, minor Ferris wheel, dance hall, and the usual games and foods. It was an old-fashioned operation, and had been operating ever since my own mother’s Johnstown girlhood.
I respond so strongly to McBride’s poem, I now realize, because it triggers such resonant memories, depicting a time and setting that I know in my bones. All the details about the Ferris wheel itself suggest not a modern theme park with its towering structures and professional gloss, but rather something that might appear for Fourth of July weekend or Memorial Day. As far as I was concerned, nothing was quite so exciting as when the circus came to town, setting up in some farmer’s field at the city limits, or in the broad parking lot of the old Acme supermarket. It’s significant that by definition such circuses were transient. However thrilling the Ferris wheel might have been, the whole outfit was typically packed up and gone by Monday. The Ferris wheel in the poem also seems to be operated not by clean-cut, uniformed corporate employees, but by one skinny kid named Joey. The telling detail of “not one tattoo on him” makes me wonder if he isn’t some local farm boy recruited for the weekend to help out when the carnival finds itself short-handed.
McBride thus taps into a potentially rich vein of nostalgia for small town life in our steadily urbanizing America. Yet she tempers any sentimentality with expertly chosen details. For example, note that the movie theaters, those dream palaces, are closed. The fishermen aren’t catching any salmon. Everybody wants “to kiss someone real bad,” which lets us know that any dreamed-of summer romances aren’t happening. Moreover, a number of her images are two-edged, balancing sentiment against low-key reminders of loss, mortality, and so forth. The speaker wants to “be carried into heaven / over and over,” which implies the inevitable return to mundane earthly reality. The quiet moment of communion shared by those mah-jongg sisters is a result of sleeplessness, which suggests illness or unrest. The undertaker carefully painting violets on the dead girl’s eyelids is a small gesture toward beauty within a larger suggestion of the cruel loss that any child’s death is. The Christmas lights are stringy and no doubt unconvincing, draped around those plastic palm trees in Florida (and why not real trees? it’s Florida, for heaven’s sake). Even those car mechanics waxing nostalgic about the Detroit gas guzzlers of yesteryear remind us that, well, those days are in fact long gone and never coming back.
What unites all these disparate images, settings, and incidents, I think, is a pervading sense of yearning and loss, artfully balanced against the festive and celebratory symbol which the Ferris wheel supplies. The fact that the wheel, for all its glitter, doesn’t actually take you anywhere and will likely soon be just a memory, is an apt symbol for the brevity of youth and beauty and its inevitable loss. The wheel is “one big circle / that is the same and in the stationary turning / isn’t the same at all.” The poem’s language remains alert and energetic, its descriptive touches memorable, even while the emotional tone strikes me as melancholy. And one target of this yearning appears to be the remembered past, when rural and small town America saw a lot more of these traveling carnivals, each one funky and unique, as opposed to the uniformity of corporate theme parks.
Moreover, upon repeated readings I’ve come to believe that the unemphasized core of the poem occurs in that central stanza, where those would-be lovers long in vain for a partner as they ride the big wheel to the sky and back. Romance is in the air, but never achieved. Unrequited love, in other words, is the engine driving the wheel. Like any amusement park ride, the Ferris wheel is a diversion, its pleasures gaudy and valued precisely to the degree that they are unconnected to daily life. McBride’s slide into the colloquial with “to kiss someone real bad” of course suggests the aching sadness of the lovelorn.
That phrasing stands out sharply from some of the more glittery diction elsewhere, and catches my eye for that reason with its jolt of unfiltered personal emotion. The poem I quote is as it first appeared in McBride’s 2001 book The Deepest Part of the River. I was a bit mystified to see that she revised the line in her 2006 new-and-selected poems to the following: “to kiss someone else.” My guess is that she made the change so as not to repeat the same colloquialism she employs at the start of stanza two, when the wheel “just rolls real slow through the darkening air.” Yet to my ear her revision (“kiss someone real bad” to “kiss someone else”) dilutes the impact notably. I grant that others (maybe including the author!) may interpret the poem differently, but in my eyes the big wheel’s central meaning resides in “scratching out” its local and universal “declarations of love” for everyone, everywhere. Declaration of love, of course, is not the same as its fulfillment.
In any event this poem’s imaginative flights enliven and complicate the sense of sadness but do not erase them. At least not permanently. After all, the wheel as it turns makes its “declarations of love” into “a song for whoever / needs it.” Thus the poem’s song, however “stringy,” however brief, however futile (think of those cows awake in the slaughterhouse), is not useless. It offers what precisely imagined lyrics of loss have always offered, a vision of consolation and sympathetic understanding. The speaker may want to be and imagine herself as a Ferris wheel, like a child first experiencing its excitement, yet as the poem shifts from first to third person, she also wants everyone to have access to the pleasures that an enriched imagination can provide. Against the ache of yearning, the poem dreams of offering what it actually does offer, a “song for whoever / needs it.”
In other words, I really love this poem.
Class, your title is ‘I Want to Be____.’
Fill in the blank with something unusual, and just start writing.
The poem’s mix of fantasy, playfulness, and something darker and unsettling provides tension; the vividness and sweep of its imagery is worth imitation; and the poet’s wide-ranging associations make her a good model for surprising oneself, stretching one’s imagination beyond the purely personal. So finally, after discarding my five previous introductions, I took a hint from my own classroom practice, put down the title you see above, and began rapidly writing the introduction you just read.
But before proceeding further I had better give you the poem, in case you don’t know it or haven’t read it recently. It comes from McBride’s 2001 collection, The Deepest Part of the River, from Carnegie-Mellon University Press.
I Want To Be A Ferris Wheel For Russ Hall This soft body turned into shining steel, stretching toward farms and spiders and the clean windows of the Midwest. Neon lights on me, that weird kind of green that a tree wouldn't really recognize but aliens might, if they happened to be looking in this direction. A skinny kid, blond, named Joey, not one tattoo on him, hits the switch and the big green wheel just rolls real slow through the darkening air, like dreaming. Whoever needs to can just sit back and be carried into heaven over and over. I don't care if there are owls or stars or clouds or even an Elvis sighting in the sky. I just want to be carried, everyone spinning together in this one big circle that is the same and in the stationary turning isn't the same at all; air smelling of ponies and gear grease, burning leaves, fried dough, the end of summer; everybody wanting to kiss someone real bad even if they're in a seat alone. And my heart, as dependable as the engine, being fed by power from some waterfall full of fat salmon all the guys with hooks can't figure out how to find; a waterfall so fierce meteor showers of August hurl half their fiery selves there to cool off and not even one scrap of water sizzles. And the wheel scratching out declarations of love to wheat fields and empty cinemas, to garage mechanics in blue cover-alls who still adore every old car with fins and just this once making a song as stringy as Christmas lights on plastic palms in Florida, a song for cows still awake in the slaughterhouse, for the undertaker painting violets on a dead girl's closed eyes, for insomniac sisters playing mah-jongg by aquarium light; a song for whoever needs it. In late wind, green wheel communing with car chrome, running dreams of collarless dogs, and the electro-deluxe, gone-to-dawn stars.
Given the title it’s clear the poem could have veered in nearly any direction, from straight-ahead surrealism to a more conventional extended metaphor, something like the conceits of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets. The first line seems to suggest a surreal or dream metamorphosis, as the speaker envisions her “soft body turning to shining steel.” But immediately McBride shifts attention not to herself, not even to the metamorphosis, but to very particular, realistic details of setting: “clean windows of the Midwest,” neon lights, carnival workers, sights and smells of the midway, and beyond. All this realism is punctuated regularly by abrupt imaginative swerves, though, as when she notes that “a tree wouldn’t really recognize” the “weird” shade of green cast by the neon lights, but that “aliens might, if they happened to be / looking in this direction.” So there’s clearly a thread of dreaminess within the realism. And by the time we finish the second stanza, the original conceit announced in the title seems to be abandoned. The speaker no longer is the Ferris wheel, but “just want[s] to be carried” by it over and over heavenward and back to earth. She has entered her own fantasy and become its passenger.
I confess that when I first encountered this poem I didn’t bother to understand, just enjoyed it. There are so many delights of both description and fancy to savor. Caught up by this poem’s friskiness and amplitude, McBride’s control of diction and tone, plus her sure handed eye for detail, I didn’t even recognize at first why I responded to it so viscerally. If I thought about theme at all—which I don’t recall doing—no doubt I considered it a kind of loose Whitmanesque celebration of the power of imagination, with the Ferris wheel as a unifying symbol, maybe, of the cycles of life, always in motion, always the same.
What I missed in my early encounters with this poem was that it’s quite clearly and concretely a poem of small town and rural America, especially in the remembered past. The poet does not underline this fact explicitly, but note that although the images range widely across the national map, among its welter of details are none that are unambiguously urban: no subways, no delis, no high-rise buildings, no traffic jams. McBride thus taps into deep memories of my small town boyhood.
Johnstown, New York was and is a little mill town far from any large metro areas. Moreover, I grew up before theme parks like Six Flags began to displace small traveling circuses and carnivals for rural entertainment. The occasional visits of ragtag circuses were thus highly memorable and exciting. Likewise the county fair that took place every summer on fairgrounds about four miles south of Johnstown. Last I heard, the Fonda Fair (founded in 1841) was still operating, at least pre-pandemic. I don’t know its more recent history, but in my boyhood in the Fifties and early Sixties it had all the old-time attractions you can imagine, from prize livestock and pie baking contests to a few amusement park rides that dazzled me as a boy, but which I now realize were fairly rinky-dink. There were musical acts, of course, plus a midway rich with the smells of caramel apples, popcorn, and cotton candy; games of all kinds; a house of horror; and many cheap trinkets for sale wherever you looked. One year when very young, I even remember being taken to what we then called a freak show—which was just as appalling as you might think. Strangely enough, my mother loved this sort of thing—fond memories of the circuses of her own girlhood, I imagine.
We didn’t get there often, but every summer there was also Sherman’s Amusement Park, fifteen miles up the road in Caroga Lake, a family-run outfit with a small merry-go-round, minor Ferris wheel, dance hall, and the usual games and foods. It was an old-fashioned operation, and had been operating ever since my own mother’s Johnstown girlhood.
I respond so strongly to McBride’s poem, I now realize, because it triggers such resonant memories, depicting a time and setting that I know in my bones. All the details about the Ferris wheel itself suggest not a modern theme park with its towering structures and professional gloss, but rather something that might appear for Fourth of July weekend or Memorial Day. As far as I was concerned, nothing was quite so exciting as when the circus came to town, setting up in some farmer’s field at the city limits, or in the broad parking lot of the old Acme supermarket. It’s significant that by definition such circuses were transient. However thrilling the Ferris wheel might have been, the whole outfit was typically packed up and gone by Monday. The Ferris wheel in the poem also seems to be operated not by clean-cut, uniformed corporate employees, but by one skinny kid named Joey. The telling detail of “not one tattoo on him” makes me wonder if he isn’t some local farm boy recruited for the weekend to help out when the carnival finds itself short-handed.
McBride thus taps into a potentially rich vein of nostalgia for small town life in our steadily urbanizing America. Yet she tempers any sentimentality with expertly chosen details. For example, note that the movie theaters, those dream palaces, are closed. The fishermen aren’t catching any salmon. Everybody wants “to kiss someone real bad,” which lets us know that any dreamed-of summer romances aren’t happening. Moreover, a number of her images are two-edged, balancing sentiment against low-key reminders of loss, mortality, and so forth. The speaker wants to “be carried into heaven / over and over,” which implies the inevitable return to mundane earthly reality. The quiet moment of communion shared by those mah-jongg sisters is a result of sleeplessness, which suggests illness or unrest. The undertaker carefully painting violets on the dead girl’s eyelids is a small gesture toward beauty within a larger suggestion of the cruel loss that any child’s death is. The Christmas lights are stringy and no doubt unconvincing, draped around those plastic palm trees in Florida (and why not real trees? it’s Florida, for heaven’s sake). Even those car mechanics waxing nostalgic about the Detroit gas guzzlers of yesteryear remind us that, well, those days are in fact long gone and never coming back.
What unites all these disparate images, settings, and incidents, I think, is a pervading sense of yearning and loss, artfully balanced against the festive and celebratory symbol which the Ferris wheel supplies. The fact that the wheel, for all its glitter, doesn’t actually take you anywhere and will likely soon be just a memory, is an apt symbol for the brevity of youth and beauty and its inevitable loss. The wheel is “one big circle / that is the same and in the stationary turning / isn’t the same at all.” The poem’s language remains alert and energetic, its descriptive touches memorable, even while the emotional tone strikes me as melancholy. And one target of this yearning appears to be the remembered past, when rural and small town America saw a lot more of these traveling carnivals, each one funky and unique, as opposed to the uniformity of corporate theme parks.
Moreover, upon repeated readings I’ve come to believe that the unemphasized core of the poem occurs in that central stanza, where those would-be lovers long in vain for a partner as they ride the big wheel to the sky and back. Romance is in the air, but never achieved. Unrequited love, in other words, is the engine driving the wheel. Like any amusement park ride, the Ferris wheel is a diversion, its pleasures gaudy and valued precisely to the degree that they are unconnected to daily life. McBride’s slide into the colloquial with “to kiss someone real bad” of course suggests the aching sadness of the lovelorn.
That phrasing stands out sharply from some of the more glittery diction elsewhere, and catches my eye for that reason with its jolt of unfiltered personal emotion. The poem I quote is as it first appeared in McBride’s 2001 book The Deepest Part of the River. I was a bit mystified to see that she revised the line in her 2006 new-and-selected poems to the following: “to kiss someone else.” My guess is that she made the change so as not to repeat the same colloquialism she employs at the start of stanza two, when the wheel “just rolls real slow through the darkening air.” Yet to my ear her revision (“kiss someone real bad” to “kiss someone else”) dilutes the impact notably. I grant that others (maybe including the author!) may interpret the poem differently, but in my eyes the big wheel’s central meaning resides in “scratching out” its local and universal “declarations of love” for everyone, everywhere. Declaration of love, of course, is not the same as its fulfillment.
In any event this poem’s imaginative flights enliven and complicate the sense of sadness but do not erase them. At least not permanently. After all, the wheel as it turns makes its “declarations of love” into “a song for whoever / needs it.” Thus the poem’s song, however “stringy,” however brief, however futile (think of those cows awake in the slaughterhouse), is not useless. It offers what precisely imagined lyrics of loss have always offered, a vision of consolation and sympathetic understanding. The speaker may want to be and imagine herself as a Ferris wheel, like a child first experiencing its excitement, yet as the poem shifts from first to third person, she also wants everyone to have access to the pleasures that an enriched imagination can provide. Against the ache of yearning, the poem dreams of offering what it actually does offer, a “song for whoever / needs it.”
In other words, I really love this poem.
© 2021 David Graham
Editor's Note: If you enjoyed this article please tell David.
His email address is grahamd@ripon.edu. Letting authors know you like their work is the beginning of
community at Verse-Virtual.