Frank PodmoreA close read of ‘Passport’ by Margaret Atwood: flashfares and noonhours
I have a longstanding dislike of hyphens or, if you prefer, a long-standing dis-like of hyphens. There’s something temporary about them. No one writes ‘e-mails’ any more, for example. They’re used for words the writer isn’t sure about. Like any punctuation, they have their place, of course, but they feel old-fashioned (there you go). They were often used in the days of moveable type just to separate letters that would otherwise break one another. This, as James Shapiro explains in the excellent Contested Will, is why Elizabethan typesetters wrote things like ‘Shak-spear’ on the title pages of the plays: the ‘k’ and the long ‘s’ (ſ), especially in italic fonts (Shakſpear), were at risk of overlapping and breaking one another. The hyphens in such words then ended up hanging around as a typographical appendix.
Poets love coining new words. Shakespeare, again, was famous for it, but the fondness for portmanteau words (two words smooshed together into a new one – without a hyphen) is I think something that really took off with James Joyce, who used the device literally thousands of times in Finnegans Wake, of course, starting with the very first word, ‘riverrun’, but also in Ulysses. Examples from a single page1: ‘hundredheaded’, ‘horsenostrilled’, ‘basiliskeyed’, ‘jackpriests’, ‘Dringdring’, ‘Dringadring’, ‘ladychapel’ and, this one not his coinage, ‘eyeballs’2. In the novel as a whole, there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of further examples. My attitude towards this kind of portmanteau, which I seem to share with many other poets, is that if Joyce can do it, then so can I. Or, more simply: my thoughts are just so original that I need a whole new word to express them.
And so can Margaret Atwood, who has a little more authority than I do. Her poem ‘Passport’, itself a word that might once have carried a hyphen, features several further examples, starting with the familiar ‘haircut’ and proceeding with the neologisms ‘fisheyes’, ‘noonhour flashflare’ and ‘jacklit’, before returning to the familiar with ‘blackout’ and ‘onshore’. As far as hyphens go, they’d be unnecessary and unattractive here, whether in the older words of the newer.
What I like about the use of these various portmanteau words is that their distribution follows an arc common to contemporary poetry. The poet introduces something familiar, here a passport, discusses it in such a way as to make it feel unfamiliar, then returns us to the original idea with our new perspective. The pattern of familiar-unfamiliar-familiar portmanteaus follows the pattern of familiar-new-return of the poem itself.
Interestingly, Atwood’s coinages are all something to do with light. I can’t produce any stats on this, but I’m sure that contemporary poets particularly love using portmanteaus to describe light. Here we have ‘fisheyes‘ (which perceive and reflect light), ‘noonhour’ (when the light is brightest), ‘flashflare‘ (both lights) and ‘jacklit‘ (among other things a conjugation of the verb ‘to light’, with the whole word evoking a jack o’lantern which is of course a thing with a light in it). Why do poets love doing this? Light is such an evocative idea that it’s irresistible to write about it, but it’s also perhaps a little too obvious. We all know to avoid ‘moonlight’ and ‘starlight’ as all-too-obvious pathetic fallacy (and who actually sees starlight anymore?). Perhaps coining new words about and around light is one way we try to avoid cliche, but once you’ve started to notice it, you might think that this kind of coinage has itself become a cliche. Whoops.
Much of the collection this poem comes from is concerned with aging, including this poem. Some of the images, particularly the sequence of photos of her face as ‘greying disk’s which first evoke and then explicitly become ‘moon phases’ later on in this poem, come up more than once in the collection. Here, the passports, with their stamps and photos, serve as ineffective reminders of ‘trips I barey remember’. I like this idea of the inability of mementos and keepsakes to actually do the intended job. This is part of that poetic arc I mentioned before, of defamiliarising a familiar object. Here, the passport is deprecated as a way of remembering. Even as an official record, it can’t do the job of recapturing the real Margaret Atwood. Even if a historian could use it to discuss her whereabouts on a given date, Atwood herself can’t tell us why she was there.
Meanwhile, the passport ‘pics’ show us the passing of time, each face ‘altered / to something a little more dead’. Finally the required emotionless expression of each photo ‘cursed if she smiles or cries’ leaves us with the suspicion that it’s the very nature of the passport as an official record that makes it useless as a personal one.
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