A Close Reading of Diane di Prima’s “The Quarrel”
Diane di Prima’s “The Quarrel” is seemingly about a woman who is angry with her artist husband/partner/Mark as he draws “Brad who was asleep on the bed” while she has both an external and internal dialogue about her feelings of being ignored and overworked. She states that she is “furious” and he replies minimizing her feelings by replacing “furious” with “bugged”. After this, it is at times unclear what she is saying and what she is thinking, but most of the poem seems to be her thinking things about her life with Mark and how she feels tired, lazy, invisible, stuck in a gender role she doesn’t want to be in, etc. The poem ends with Mark telling her, as she’s doing the dishes she didn’t want to do, that “Picasso produces fourteen hours a day” in order to justify his importance to his art while she wonders why she said anything to begin with and hopelessly foreshadows what will happen as a result of her silence.
Di Prima uses down-to-earth language with simple sentences ending with periods which read very informal. With the lack of commas, the sentences read flat and feel endless and full of void which I believe, mimics the female character’s hopelessness. The patterns of the words and lack of comma use make the sound pattern flat and drawn out, though the poet uses the word “thought” repetitively which all gives the sensation again, of hopelessness and beating a point home so much that now rather than say it, the woman is left with her thoughts beating through her mind over and over again. The poem is very personal and uses images such as someone “asleep on the bed” and the wood falling out of the fire and being poked back in with her “toe”. Much of the poem is open and vulnerable and very familiar language. It feels intimate.
The pace again, feels steady but the beginning does move forward faster when she is angry. The ending slows with sadness and an inevitable realization that is so human we all feel it the moment she realizes what her silence will do to her relationship, “that will be that and what a shame”. It stops you when you read it because you are slowly watching the end of what was likely once a good relationship and most all of us can get an ache in our chest when we relive such an event.
The poem’s setting feels warm and cozy at first since there is a fire in what feels like a small space since the woman can see the man drawing someone who is in bed from beside the fire, but by the end of the poem, the poet has transitioned to a cold, distant, almost concrete feeling. The sink feels much further away from the man than the fire does. The poem evokes a wide range of feelings from hot anger to a profound loss and loneliness. The women begins with telling the man she is furious from beside the fire, but then ends with doing the dishes in silence. The words in the beginning give a sense of warmth such as “furious”, “fire”, “stuck my feet out to warm them up”, “scorched”. The woman’s passionate anger mirrors her words. She wants this man to see her, to care about her, to realize and engage her feelings, but as the poem concludes, the mood changes with the word “uncool”. Though the poet doesn’t use the word pertaining to temperature at all, the presence of the word “cool”, followed by the woman’s distance and acceptance of her future silence and what that will mean for the relationship is marked. To drive the point home, the man calls from the living room and uses a pet name “hon” then proceeds to tell her how many hours a day Picasso works as to justify his absence and inattention, proving what the woman has been feeling and saying in the poem correct. His use of a pet name lets us know that he doesn’t care that she’s just told him she’s “furious” and then “god damned bugged”–he just wants her to keep on supporting his dreams in silence. The last sentence acts as the final cooling off of the mood in two ways: 1) His tone is pleasant and she is given an opportunity to reenter the cycle of talking about his art and dreams, making his feelings and needs the priority until she feels furious again with his lack of attention. And 2) It could serve as a final straw for her in the relationship–a reminder if you will, that he isn’t listening or paying attention and never will which will allow her to have an ultimate “cooling” for him and the relationship.
It seems to me that this poem is multi-layered and can, like many poems, be read at face value or much deeper. As a collective, if we notice something that’s wrong and even if we speak out but are unheard, the thing continues and so many times, we simply stop talking about it. We think “it doesn’t do any good” or “no one is listening anyway” so what’s the use. This could be read through many different lenses including political, socioeconomic. There are many injustices that get overlooked simply because the people noticing them aren’t able to get through to the one’s in charge that could effect change.
Did anyone else notice anything similar or different about the poem?
Excellent reading of this poem–I love how you engage the poem’s pacing and its affect and how the placid surface formed by the syntax (just like the “thought” unable to break through into speech, gives this sense of something fierce building beneath that sense of numbness. The gender dynamic here still feel so contemporary, and I like how you relate this to broader concerns about “having a voice” and whose voice is privileged and how certain people are often forced into a kind of silence for risk of being, as di Prima notes in this poem, “uncool.’ That’s such an great indictment of Beat misogyny and artistic self-regard. Great reading!