The City Planners - Margaret Atwood

The City Planners

Margaret Atwood

Summary:  The Canadian author/poet Margaret Atwood creates this piece of poetry, addressing the perfection, robotic, bland and uniform structure of the city as she takes a cruise through it on a relaxing Sunday weekend, something that she finds completely sickening. Throughout the poem, she addresses the sickening sense of conformity that she finds in the city as well as the hidden hand behind all of this – the ‘evil’ politicians of this world, she says.

Significant poetic devices and their significance (egg: Metaphors, symbols, rhyme scheme, form, imagery, repetition… etc)

Structure level analysis

1.       Note that as the poem continues, the size of each stanza starts to decrease in size.

a.       This can illustrate the level of suppression that we see in terms of self-expression due to development. Development is occurring at a fast rate, especially in this era where more educated people are appearing, creating wonderful inventions that we have never before thought possible. Therefore the paragraphing deals with a time shift that as this continues we start to experience oppression more and more.

b.      Alternatively, she could be addressing the transition from the urban area to rural area as housing becomes smaller and more and more packed together and furthermore becomes taller and taller. It can in a sense bring a sense of claustrophobia as we feel that our area of movement becomes more limited, similar to how the size of the paragraph becomes smaller and smaller as we continue reading, limiting the amount of content that we can include in it.

Word – Based Analysis

1.       “Cruising these residential Sunday streets in dry August sunlight”

·         This is meant to create a calming and relaxing background to use as a foundation to which the poem is based upon, which is the initial objective of the poet so that she is able to address the difference in atmosphere more starkly so that the reader can feel a bigger contrast between the two. This is similar to the works of Hunting Snake by Judith Wright which creates this beautiful imagery for the same purpose. Take note of the use of the time frame to create such an image as well. For Christians, Sunday is considered the holy day that Jesus risen from the dead. It is therefore a day where you spend time with your loved ones and the ones that matter most to you. Of course this inspires a sense of happiness and a slow relaxed feeling as you recall a day with your family, free of any worries or stresses of work.

·         Alternatively it can be used by the poet to illustrate the perfection of the city, that it can even manipulate the weather to create perfect conditions. This is very similar to the works of The Planners which exaggerates upon development having a more profound power over nature, something so powerful previously that has been alive and thriving for over hundreds and hundreds of years even before the coming of man.

2.       “What offends us is the sanities:”

·         This is the turning point in the poem that we see already, that we know that it is not really the positive poem that we hoped it to be.

·         She finds sanity an issue obviously because she finds it strange for everyone to be completely sane. It is the insanities that make us sane. What is something without its contradictions? When everybody’s sane, no one really is. Therefore she could be implying that everyone is sane, which is completely insane.  

                                                               i.      On the other hand she could be expressing the fact that everyone in the city is complying by the rules and regulations of what is sane and insane, representing conformity throughout the city and limiting self-expression. She doesn’t like this, being the right-brained socialist poet that she is. She believes that all form of self-expression should be expressed and trying to put a stop on that is bad.

                                                             ii.      She is sickened by this fact as she does not believe that society should tell you who you are. Who are you to call someone else insane? Nowadays there are treatments and illnesses for everything. If you are not normal, you are mentally ill, which is not right at all. Be a little agitated and you have ADHD. Get angry and suddenly you have anger management issues. Can’t everyone be different? Sickening

·         Note the colon, which foreshadows the fact that she is about to list a bunch of aspects that she finds completely sane (or insane) about the city.

3.       Here she is about to list. I am not going to structure it according to the poem but according to the point for the sake of improving my reference techniques.

·         “The houses in pedantic rows

o   This gives a sense of imagery about the houses being in complete straight rows, down to the very last centimetre. The state of the housing also reflect the lifestyles of the people, demonstrating the concept that ‘because the houses are completely the same, the lifestyle of the people must be constant too’, creating the sense that the city is actually a very boring place to live in as everything is completely robotic and that everybody lives under the rule of something greater than themselves. This is what the poet hates the most about these cities. Conformity and consistency. It is always in times of this that I picture the scene in Spongebob Squarepants where Squidward moves to Squidville, where everything is completely the same.

The buildings are similar, so the lifestyle of the people must be as well.

·         The planted sanitary trees

o   This demonstrates development’s hold over nature. Nature is being oppressed to grow in a peculiar way in a peculiar location, just for the sake of decoration in the city. This in a way is a sense of mockery of nature by development as nature always tends to be free and uncontrolled, which is the direct opposite of the implied city that the poet is describing.

o   Furthermore the fact that it is sanitary bring about a sense of urban dominance over nature as we are applying our own urban rules to something that is not part of what we have done, as if we have conquered it and subjecting it over our authority.

§  Furthermore nature requires filth. It requires the beautiful bacteria and animals that live in these things to survive. By removing this, the writer has created an image of the tree and thus nature itself being tortured into being something that it’s not, putting urbanisation and development in a bad light.

·         Assert levelness of surface like a rebuke to the dent in our car door.

o   This once again addresses the fact that everything is so perfect that being normal is considered wrong. Everything is so level and straight that having a dent in the car (which is considered normal for car drivers) is considered wrong. The perfectness in an insult to the imperfection.

o   Ever heard the phrase ‘you don’t feel like you own a car until you put a scratch in it?’ the same may apply here. The fact that everything is perfect creates the impression that everything is owned by someone else (presumably the government) and that you have no power, even in your own home. This induces a feeling of suppression as you start to think that everything is run and owned by someone else and that what you do has no impact on someone as powerful as them. Of course, we are referring to the politicians and governments that run the city, the City Planners that Margaret Atwood describes as evil and fundamentally conspirators.

·         No shouting here, or shatter of glass;

o   Notice that the line here sounds like an imperative rather than a description. “No shouting here”. The poet here is addressing the many rules and regulations that we find in the city, as if it is because of this that we find a lack of everything she describes, which it is of course. It also makes it sound way too harsh. It makes it almost sound illegal to do such things. In a way, this can be put in the poet’s perspective as she finds many of the rules that we already live under too harsh and has made such things that are legal sound harsher so that we get an idea of her opinion. 

o   Furthermore note that the things mentioned are usually incidents done by children in their youth. Therefore she is trying to imply that the stresses of the urban lifestyle has put a stop to all those little events that you look back upon in hindsight that sound serious at the time but things you can laugh when you are older. Those events are usually what make up your childhood. Therefore the poet is trying to imply that the urban lifestyle has destroyed the childhood of many, one of the most enjoyable time of your life. Many of us now living in the urban world don’t really have the childhood we wish we could have. Some consider going out the door creates a better childhood than staying inside to play games. I personally think it does too.

·         Nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swatch in the disencouraged grass”

o   Note the fault in her vocabulary. The word disencouraged is not a word at all. This can display the poet’s sense of rebellion towards development. ‘Who are you to dictate what is right and what is wrong!? I can do whatever I want!’ this source of rebellion could have come due to the fact that she does not live in the urban area at the time, as she drives through it during the weekend. Most people living in the urban area do the opposite.

o   Take note of the word rational. How can a sound be rational? This of course, is a tool used by the poet. This implies a sense of control once again over the things that we thought we couldn’t control, like nature. The poet has implied that development has put control over sound as well to make it completely logical and precise, like how we have managed to build the house in exactly the same row with none of them out of place. Sound is something we can’t possibly hope to control… or can we?

o   The fact that the adjective disencouraged is used to describe grass once again put nature in a pitiful position, as if development and urbanisation have put a leash on nature or has tied them up, waiting for the entity of nature to line up so that we can ‘cut them down’. Isn’t that what we are doing with gardens? We are growing them, to cut them down.

4.       It is here that the poet addresses the slight flaws of urbanisation that she sees. Note how she overexaggerates them so that she makes it look really bad in comparison with the rest of the area, as if a person with OCD was screaming “OH MY GOSH! I GOT DIRT ON MY SHOE!”

I’ll try to make this paragraph as short and sweet as possible, because I wanna sleep and I got one more poem left to cover. 

·         “But through the driveways neatly sidestep hysteria by being even, the roofs all display the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky, certain things:

                                                               i.      Once again she points out the slight faults of the place, and how they are so minute that it makes everyone completely accurate (eg: the slant from the roof, mathematically calculated so that it is as efficient as possible) and sane… or insane. Also note how she mentions everyday items, indicating that it is something that we find everywhere in the whole city, implying that the whole city is insane.

·         The smell of split oil a faint

·         Sickness lingering in the garages

·         A splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise

·         A plastic hose poised in a vicious coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows”

·   This gives the image of a snake, poised to strike. As if at any time, everything in the city will break as we cross the threshold from sane, to completely insane.

·   The too-fixed stare of the wide windows is personification, used to create the sense of insanity as insane people often tend to give a very-fixed stare at nothingness, like the house, before doing something completely crazy. The fact that you can point that out from looking at a house is scary enough if you ask me.

5.       It is in this stanza that the poet starts to make a prediction of what is going to happen when we start to get too full of ourselves. Of course the stanza is completely surreal, making it a metaphor for something else rather than what she is implying. I will be going through its wider meaning… if I can find it of course.

“Give momentary access to the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster when the houses, capsized, will slide obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers that right now nobody notices.”

·         She could be expressing her ideas on how that given time, the old will be replaced with the new as the cracks in the buildings begin to show up (urban regeneration). Note the metaphor used for the house as a ship, as if a crack in the building would send water rushing into the boat. The clay sea represents the rubble that is rarely recycled, and how all buildings will ultimately end up in it, depending on how fast it breaks down. The fact that it is gradual as well illustrates the fact that we won’t even notice is, because it will take so long for one ‘ship’ to ‘sink’

·         She could also be implying that nature will come back to strike and destroy the area, perhaps in the form of plant growth or natural disaster, of which the metaphor of the buildings will make more sense if she implied a tsunami or storm surge. She is making the point that ultimately you cannot control nature, and one day it will come back to strike. Also, perfection defies nature, and it is for the same reason that it will come back to strike. You can control nature and maintain perfection, but only for so long before you suffer the retributions.

·         She could also be illustrating her issue with how the city itself will eat itself alive as it grows in size. Such examples could be Syria facing civil war or even Indonesia suffering from tremendous amounts of corruption.

6.       This is the bit when she starts to name and shame who is to blame – the City Planners. ”That is where the City Planners, with the insane faces of political conspirators are scattered over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard;”

·         The word unsurveyed is also a colloquial term rather than a real English term, once again emphasizing on the rebellion that we see in her vocabulary.

·         Note the word insane used to describe the faces of political conspirators. This can exemplify their constant mood, as they try very hard to alter the course of nature and try and maintain it.

·         The use of the phrase political conspirators is used to put the politicians in a bad light, as if they are manipulating the urban area for their own gain rather than of the benefit of many. In Atwood’s perspective, this can be very true as she might think that putting a limit on creativity in exchange for education will benefit taxpayers more rather than the person themselves.

                                                               i.      The phrase political conspirators indicates a form of criticism over the controlling nature of these people, forcing others to live in a particular manner and conform; a critique of the city planners as purposely creating future chaos.

1.        The blizzard can have a say in this as it could represent the madness they will fail by trying (or failing) to reach ultimate perfection and full conformity.

                                                             ii.      This may show a lack of awareness on the issue on behalf of the poet as she may be unaware that what usually benefits one person, benefits the people are her as well. One cannot benefit without another benefitting as well (in a non-corrupt world of course and judging by the way everything is so neat and tidy, it looks to be true)

                                                            iii.      In the phrase “scattered all over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard”. This can show a misunderstanding, or a reference to the politician being both a politician and a businessman, that each one is corrupt and only wishing to do what benefits them.

1.       The fact that they are scattered all over unsurveyed territories could be a description of them looking about for business ideas and investments they can go into.

a.      The phrase concealed from each other can be an indicator for the fact that they are in economic competition with each other on the market, further exemplifying the fact that they only care for themselves and do not care for the benefit of others, even when it benefits themselves in the long run (can’t help but think about mergers here).

b.      Margaret Atwood talks about each politician or City Planner being in their own private blizzard this can be a metaphor for money, as the investment of the politician brings in a lot of money. On the other hand it can also refer to a disaster, as wealth often brings about the worst in people.

7.       “Guessing directions, they sketch transitory lines rigid as wooden borders on a wall in the white vanishing air”

·         This can extend on from the ‘business’ aspect she could be implying from the politicians. This phrase can represent the business ventures that they take, as if they are guessing directions in order to make their investment, suggesting potential urban sprawl.

·         The white vanishing air can be a reference to pollution that always comes with development and that it is the smog that is coming and making the clean air vanish into oblivion.

·         The fact that it is transitory (temporary) that often the actions of the ‘politicians’ are often rash, irrational and did not have a lot of thinking done in the background.

                                                               i.      On the other hand, she could be exemplifying how the ‘businessman’ often do their work very quickly, that we don’t even have time to respond. Time is money after all. 

8.       “Tracing the panic of suburb order in a bland madness of snows”

·         Once again note the grammatically incorrect use of the word snows, illustrating a sense of rebellion over the whole concept of development.

·         This indicates that the line that they trace to mark out future investments always cause panic in the suburb as they are to be destroyed. Furthermore the use of the word panic create a sense of pity for the suburban areas as they are painted as the fearful underdog, which they are.

·         The white feature of the snow described can be a reference to the white vanishing air made in the previous line – pollution that comes with development. Furthermore it can represent the soot that often comes with burning, which can at first be mistaken as snow due to its grey colour.

·         Note the juxtaposition when panic and order are put in the same line. This can exemplify the fact that the suburban areas has its own form of order and that the new order to them, and to the poet, brings more chaos rather than the latter.

·         Bland and madness. Oxymoron. This could be in relation to what I said before. The wave of ‘blandness’ that is viewed as from the urban world can be madness to the people of the rural area, as well to people like Margaret Atwood.

Speaker of the poem:  The poet herself, Margaret Atwood

Speaker’s attitude toward the subject of the poem: Negative towards urbanization, conformity and the sense of everyone being a robot that comes with it. Expressionist, moralist… (hippie?)

Paired poems (Identify poems in the anthology and why they are appropriate to be paired)

1.       The Planners due to the reoccurring problem of urbanisation being bad for society being expressed over and over again. On the other hand, The Planners didn’t necessarily state that development and urbanisation, as well as all the things that came with it, was bad.

2.       Where I Came From in the sense that both poets favour the rural area, coincidentally the area of their birth over urban areas and development.

3.       A Different History as both poets share an equal hatred over a certain concept, A Different History and The City Planners being colonisation and urbanisation accordingly.

Memorable lines (that reinforce poetic devices)

1.       The houses in pedantic rows…

2.       But through the driveways neatly sidestep hysteria…

3.       With the insane faces of political conspirators are scattered over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard;

4.       Tracing the panic of suburb order in a bland madness of snows.