Post by ekswitaj on Jul 17, 2008 15:52:24 GMT 2
Writing on the Brink: Peripheral Vision and the Personal Poem -Renee Ashley
The Poetry of Motion
If a good personal poem is, as I believe it must be, a thing in motion, a thing on its way to some place that beckons or threatens, then Toad has it right. Look closely at what he has to say. He’s talking about poetry.
One of the difficulties in personal poetry is that autobiography has often been confused with what may be called the personal. I’ll define the two this way: the personal is what you have become, what you are in transience or may be becoming; autobiography – which may or may not be factual – is what you did, what you do, or what you already knew about yourself before the poem began. The personal is an open mode, and dynamic; the autobiographical is a closed mode that relates a done thing and is static. It’s that which figures beyond such a static state I’m arguing for – in what is peripheral to the autobiographical: the personal.
I’m drawn to what flutters nebulously at the corner of my eye – just outside my certain sight. I want a share in what I am routinely denied, or only suspect exists: I want to move with the poem in the act of becoming or of encountering motion. I long for a glimpse of what is beginning to occur, both in the margins, the periphery of the poem, and in a life.
It is all too easy to locate, however, what pretends to be the personal in poems. If we have been curious at all, we have met with a plethora of books and workshops that pronounce the personal as accessible through memory via vivid visual recall, colorful concrete or figurative imagination, or through forthright accusation – more workshops than we can shake an eraser at that tell us to “write what we know.” We have myriad poems of precedent to look to. But don’t let me misled you: I am in full support of recall, imagination, and the occasional sharp-toothed and bitter accusation. It’s just that contemporary poems are so often, so utterly, chock full of the pretend personal that somewhere along the compositional line, or perhaps even before, the poem as art/artefact, and as peripheral playing field, has been lost. Though verse-looking pieces such as these may seem personal to their authors, and, perhaps, their authors’ loved ones, they leave me – and I would assume many other readers as well – behind the glass: full-frontal and not caring too darn much. These poems, then, make of themselves a means of telling what we can know – in its raw, factual state – rather than a means to suspect or intuit the consequences of what we do not know.
My bias for such mystery, however, by no means precludes autobiography within the confines of such an idealized poem. In fact, in most cases, something like autobiography must be present in order to ground the less-than-concrete. But I, as a reader, want to be allowed in there with the autobiographical – into a space built into the poem in which I may interact with it – as opposed to my being relegated to mere observer, to peeping-tom. The head-on, other-side-of-the-glass sort of peeping serves no purpose as far as I can see except to transmit literal information (the way your refrigerator manual might, step-by-step, tell you how and how often to vacuum your coils). And of course, the obvious (or not so obvious) exception, the thrill of voyeurism. I’m greedier than that. I want to be lured and compelled. And I want in. I need to see some movement from the corner of my eye and get curious, want to know what it might be, what fleeting, unnamable, shapeless-but-in-motion thing – acknowledged but uncertain – is skirting my certainties and may, for all I know, be lingering threateningly, or downright dangerously, at the edge of my vision, at the brink of my recognition, making up some unknowable bulk of the periphery of my, or the writer’s, precarious life. Now, that stuff out there has the potential to contain something that could directly and immediately affect life as I know it, or, at minimum, my perception of it. That’s what’s urgent. That’s what I find interesting.
The philosopher Suzanne Langer puts her slant on it this way:
The motion is the emergence. That place that wasn’t there before? That’s where I want to go.
Here Today – In Next Week Tomorrow!
The built-in space within the poem I spoke of is the field on which such mystery’s action may take place. And I find that one of the primary spacemakers of such energizing territory is time.
Tess Gallagher speaks of “deep time,” and the term seems marvelously apt. Muriel Rukeyser, when she wrote of a “multiple time sense” within a poem, was talking, I’m certain, of the same phenomenon. They’re both describing a sort of simultaneity in which all the poet’s considered “times” coexist – so that, despite our common perception, time is presented not as a merely linear, countable passage, is not unidirectional as we tend to assume, is, in fact, not directional at all, but is instead dimensional. Gallagher spoke of those “psychic spaces in the poem that expand the time dimension of the poetic structure,” and so, when she, in another place, says that “the photograph is the enemy of poetry,” she speaks exactly to both our points – the static photograph cannot address time in its expanded sense. The only time-motion that might occur because of such an isolated prompt – that photograph -- is in the space between a predisposed viewer and the artefact of the picture itself which can merely hold a concrete subject captive. The field of interplay is not of the photograph, not built into the print itself. It can’t be. The photo is a single micro-moment shot dead. The predisposed viewer may make connections, but it is not the photo or the static poem that embodies them; it is the viewer her- or himself. Those connections are not written into, or inherent in, the art/artefact. The photo is clean of dimension and is time-locked.
Eavan Boland in an essay in the Partisan Review stated beautifully that “[T]here is a foreground and a background. Or, to put it another way, a poem is an assembly of perspectives.” I propose that when those perspectives are spread across time, the good poem is possible. When they are not, the poem is likely to aspire to photograph-ness rather than poem-ness. The interplay of those perspectives can be the key that opens up the poem to deep time and, therefore, psychic space – my peripheral playing field.
Villages Skipped, Towns and Cities Jumped…!
That area past where you already know yourself to be, past what you – at the very least – are, is the resonance-making territory that lifts the poem off the page. What do you carry that others cannot see? What hovers about you? What is elliptical? Leap-frogs, if you will? With the right lens, the right field, the poem is much more than quantifiable or externally qualifiable information; it can be offset by the poem’s abstract subject which functions as a lens through which to re-view the traceable matter of the poem. Langer says, “The total result is much more than a literal statement….” You can’t explain your way there. The leap must be made in order to arrive.
In Stephen Dunn’s essay, “The Good, the Not So Good,” he places my concerns precisely.
The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence
of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite,
and that that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable.
Note it’s the unsayable, not the unspeakable. The unspeakable falls within the purlieu of autobiography. Not the unspeakable to shock the reader, for the current market value of a rotten life, but the ineffable – that which resides in mystery, in uncertainty and reminds us “we have a soul.” In Dunn’s short prose works, Riffs and Reciprocities, he makes it even plainer: “It’s only about uninteresting things that we can be certain.” And “[c]ertainty is what we feel when we know a little less than enough.” Platitudinal? Perhaps. But correct, nonetheless, understandable, and marvelously useful in assessing a poem’s ambition. It is in the space made accessible by uncertainty that the energy of a good poem resides. It reverberates there; it moves. It demands my attention, and the answering is less important than my own cloud of unknowing in which my becoming takes place. Thomas Disch focuses on the same concept, but more brutally and more practically: “Nothing so sustains a poet as an irresolvable dilemma.” Irresolvable? My cup of proverbial poetry tea. And how to do this? How to open the poem up? Dunn gives us an answer.
I do want the richer poem. I want unruliness within an identifiable environment. I want the poem that absolutely buzzes with that torque between the known and the unknown. Dunn again:
And Langer:
And the unity is the enclosure of the good poem, its environment. Order vs disorder. Ease vs uneasiness. There are ways to accomplish this: “…[R]efuse beauty, refuse paradise and ease…,” Jane Hirshfield insists. “Poems are excursions into belief and doubt….” I propose this qualification: the good ones make those excursions simultaneously – and the tensions thereof are the catalysts of thought and urgency and resonance.
In a nifty little book called Approaches to Writing, Paul Horgan, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, says
Therein lies my point. A better poem, in its movement, transfers energy to the reader, and if, as Rukeyser believes, “human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions,” then the case history lacks the essential energy for such an exchange. The case history is anecdote, is information, data of the autobiographical sort.
One of the prevalent confusions, and what seems often to be the source of flatness, claustrophobia, and exclusion in the poem, is an issue of truth – and what we mean when we use that word. Urgency, meaningfulness, and movement are seldom the by-products of truth-as-fact. “It happened.” “She really did that.” “But that’s how I felt.” All facts, no doubt. Yet confession itself is neither always noble nor is it necessarily art. Facts, or editorials on them, are not enough.
The poet’s dilemma is this: good art seldom has the same shape as life. We need to go past the seemingly true, past the factual or seemingly factual, beyond the narrative, if there is one, into poem-ness. Of course, it’s a frightening thing to do, and there’s the risk, I suppose, of real disruption in doing so, but until we understand the stakes we’ll continue to be trapped in photograph-ness, and, in all likelihood, we’ll leave the reader out of the action.
I recently returned to Ted Mooney’s 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, and, by chance, read the back cover: “His novel is about communication. The place is a world … where people who can’t talk to each other suffer from a disease called ‘information sickness’” – a world, say the poetry world, where the unsayable is replaced by information or even the unspeakable. Here I must call up Suzanne Langer’s “fundamental distinction between the informative and the evocative use of words” – the body-knowledge, the sensation of the work. Not reportage by any means, not even insight necessarily, but movement towards what might become insightful: realism wrought by uncertainty.
For many reasons, psychological and social, some writers believe that “risk-taking” involves the telling of secrets. That seems to me entirely too post facto, too static, too late. Real risk, I believe, lies in the task of discovering new secrets.
Thomas Disch describes poem-seeming verse this way: “[T]here are no formal challenges, no musicality, no effort to find the mot juste or the telling epithet. There is simply candor….” – a matter of engaging in factual autobiography versus a more spiritual or, at least, abstract affection of the reader. I like a poem that engages relations rather than relationships. A past, a present, and a presumed future. When the muse is the mere self in the spotlight, trouble hangs over our heads. When art takes the light and the self steps into the background, I figure something interesting is likely to happen. Resonance and consequence travel beyond the reported, beyond the enacted, beyond the tellable to something that speaks. Not resolution, but a stab at confrontation. The actions of the past are over; their repercussions are, in all likelihood, not. They’re still percussing.
That’s Langer. It speaks to the photograph-ness I spoke of earlier. “The logic of consciousness itself” – that’s where we live despite our attempts to simplify, quantify, and to name. Heller:
…[T]he poet’s possession of his experience is different from
the possession of him by the experience. The poet’s view
is somewhat more spacious, large, aerial; his experience is seen
in a open context, its energy, its quality is felt.
In the poem that has achieved poem-ness, the speaker suspects more than she has told. In the poem that has achieved poem-ness, the poem has gotten bigger than the poet. That’s the constant warning: if the poem is merely as large as the poet, the poem has, in all likelihood, failed. The poem that makes room for the reader might be conceived as a poem, not only of inclusiveness, but of transcendence, or, perhaps even, a series of transcendences: it transcends the past, the now, and the poet her- or himself.
Somebody Else’s Horizons
In poet Jane Cooper’s foreward to Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, she states that Rukeyser “liked to say that poems are meeting-places….” Dunn puts it this way: “The personal is what matters…. And the expansion of what the personal means….” A fusion of concerns. Dana Gioia puts it under a colder light: “Good poetry … actively seeks [its readers’] imaginative and intellectual collaboration by assuming and exploiting a common frame of reference.” (215) Exploitation. It’s a word with a nasty connotation. Like manipulation. But the truth we must work with is this: good art is most often manipulation via exploitation. It is directive. Not didactic, but directive. Contrary to a frighteningly common belief that poetry can mean anything the reader wants it to, a good poem cannot. The good poet will have defined the arena and directed the reader’s attention and emotions -- manipulated the art via the common “frame of reference” in order to achieve a desired effect. It’s what we do as poets. Or, at least, what I think we should attempt.
Let’s take a look at Dunn’s “The Sudden Light and the Trees.”
At this point, we know the degree of this narrator’s involvement – and that his participation in this narrative was prompted by, according to his “facts,” justified fear. The baseball bat becomes an emblem of his fear. The word “fear” or its synonyms have not yet been used.
We have moved from the autobiographical to, I believe, a startling confession. Something has opened up, has begun to resonate and it is enough for the reader to grab on to. The autobiographical then continues:
The tension that was posited earlier has come to fruition. Because of our earlier purchase at the point of confession, our stakes are higher than they might have otherwise been. And then another surprise: we move from the image of a potentially powerful weapon to this:
That small brown bird is an interesting and sudden deflation of our expectations and will remain so until fourteen lines later when the gun once again takes the foreground.
It’s an interesting story and a story that has opened itself up beyond its principals: the sparrow now has taken its place – and that place and its significance will grow.
Look who owns that verb “burst”! Look who owns that “hopelessness”! Suddenly – and in the same sentence as the narrator’s “remember,” “felt,” and “got,” the sparrow takes on the active, forceful role – and now, in that beautifully calculated shift, that fragile, menaced bird embodies all the narrator’s emotions to that point: his “clear-eyed brilliant” fear. The earlier, prevailing emotion is now finally named, creating a real tension with his earlier culpabilities. And the bird, right then, surprises us once more, but this time with its forcefulness: the sparrow “burst” the human hand open. It is the explosion we have been waiting for all along, but placed, now, in a receptacle, a symbol, if you will, and in a manner that opens the poem to a broader-than-autobiographical reading.
Let’s go on to the poem’s end.
This poem by Stephen Dunn, despite its clear nod to autobiography in its date/placement line (again, factual or not), despite its simple and elegant form, despite its absolute specificity of narrative, speaks for the human in the larger sense. That final stanza is a real coup – the gun and that participle – as though the slapping continues in its arena of tense silence right up to the present telling. Time here, and its careful arrangement in this poem, has opened up more than just inclusion. It has made an imagistic impact that holds tight long after the reading of the poem has been completed.
Thomas Disch, one of my favorite critics, asks these crucial, albeit delightfully inflated, questions:
Oh, yes. Dunn’s do.
The “plot,” even in its anecdotal form, is startling – a point Dunn argues for both by example and, in his prose, elsewhere, articulation. And so much has been internalized via emblem – the baseball bat, the sparrow, the gun, as well as its menacing participle. But the bird’s usurpation of the verb “burst,” and the “slapping” of the biker’s gun are, as Langer gracefully puts it, “…outward showing of inward nature….” But the end of the poem, the reader has assimilated the movement and the images – the torque between threat and the strength inherent in “hopelessness” are at work against each other. If, as Paul Horgan says, “Every act of art is an act of alteration,” and I believe good art is, then “The Sudden Light and the Trees” is art. The speaker is changed, is complicit, and the reader has, no doubt, reached a point of invited-identification, participation, and is alerted and altered by that. The poem is an enactment and a contemplation of the continuing tensions involved. Dunn catches exquisitely – and surprisingly – John Berger’s “ambiguity of experience.” Nothing here is flat or simple. Dunn’s poem accomplishes much and renders my world and my experience wider and clearer. My life is increased.
Oh, Bliss
I do ask a lot. I know that. But it’s my prerogative to seek the grail-poem. I want ambition, eloquence, music, accomplishment. I want what Langer wants: “… not statement but poesis.” I want the time to be deep time; I want the lines to be taut, meaningful units, not prose that’s been whacked into the shape of what a poem might look like; I want tension; I want meaning beyond information; and I want to be included in discovery. Time, torque, truth in its broader sense, and transcendence – too much to ask from a poem? I want to be able, as high school teacher Frank McNabb refers to it, to “read the lines, read between the lines, and read beyond the lines.” And I want the poem to pay off after such scrutiny.
Facts aren’t enough. In fact, I propose that facts, by themselves, are inevitably an impoverished commodity. Muir states it exquisitely: “Exact knowledge is only a fragment of the knowledge we need in order to live.” He says,
And Toad, says, “Oh my! Oh my!” Yes. That’s it. Oh my!
Works Consulted
Boland, Eavan. "In Perspective." Partisan Review #2, Spring 1993. 316.
Disch, Thomas M. The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters. New York: Picador, 1995.
Dunn, Stephen. Landscape at the End of the Century. New York: Norton, 1991.
---. Walking Light. New York: Norton, 1993.
---. "Reciprocities." Southern Review Winter 1997. 91-102.
Gallagher, Tess. A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1986.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? St. Paul: Graywolf, 1992.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. New York: Dell, 1969.
Heller, Michael. "Poetry Without Credentials." The Ohio Review Number 28. 94-102.
Hirshfield, Jane. "Facing the Lion: The Way of Shadow and Light in Some Twentieth-Century Poems." Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft. Kurt Brown,ed. Boston: Beacon, 1996. 14-32.
Horgan, Paul. Approaches to Writing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1988.
Langer, Suzanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1953.
---. Problems of Art. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1957.
McNabb, Frank. "Teacher to Teacher: Approach and Reflection." Starting With Delight No. 1 (Spring 1993) Newsletter of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program: 3.
Mooney, Ted. Easy Travel To Other Planets. New York: Ballantine, 1983.
Muir, Edwin. The Estate of Poetry. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1993.
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1966.
“Glorious, stirring sight!” murmured Toad. . . . “The Poetry of motion! The
real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow!
Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizons! O
bliss! O poop-poop! Oh my! Oh my!”
-- Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows
real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow!
Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizons! O
bliss! O poop-poop! Oh my! Oh my!”
-- Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows
The Poetry of Motion
If a good personal poem is, as I believe it must be, a thing in motion, a thing on its way to some place that beckons or threatens, then Toad has it right. Look closely at what he has to say. He’s talking about poetry.
One of the difficulties in personal poetry is that autobiography has often been confused with what may be called the personal. I’ll define the two this way: the personal is what you have become, what you are in transience or may be becoming; autobiography – which may or may not be factual – is what you did, what you do, or what you already knew about yourself before the poem began. The personal is an open mode, and dynamic; the autobiographical is a closed mode that relates a done thing and is static. It’s that which figures beyond such a static state I’m arguing for – in what is peripheral to the autobiographical: the personal.
I’m drawn to what flutters nebulously at the corner of my eye – just outside my certain sight. I want a share in what I am routinely denied, or only suspect exists: I want to move with the poem in the act of becoming or of encountering motion. I long for a glimpse of what is beginning to occur, both in the margins, the periphery of the poem, and in a life.
It is all too easy to locate, however, what pretends to be the personal in poems. If we have been curious at all, we have met with a plethora of books and workshops that pronounce the personal as accessible through memory via vivid visual recall, colorful concrete or figurative imagination, or through forthright accusation – more workshops than we can shake an eraser at that tell us to “write what we know.” We have myriad poems of precedent to look to. But don’t let me misled you: I am in full support of recall, imagination, and the occasional sharp-toothed and bitter accusation. It’s just that contemporary poems are so often, so utterly, chock full of the pretend personal that somewhere along the compositional line, or perhaps even before, the poem as art/artefact, and as peripheral playing field, has been lost. Though verse-looking pieces such as these may seem personal to their authors, and, perhaps, their authors’ loved ones, they leave me – and I would assume many other readers as well – behind the glass: full-frontal and not caring too darn much. These poems, then, make of themselves a means of telling what we can know – in its raw, factual state – rather than a means to suspect or intuit the consequences of what we do not know.
My bias for such mystery, however, by no means precludes autobiography within the confines of such an idealized poem. In fact, in most cases, something like autobiography must be present in order to ground the less-than-concrete. But I, as a reader, want to be allowed in there with the autobiographical – into a space built into the poem in which I may interact with it – as opposed to my being relegated to mere observer, to peeping-tom. The head-on, other-side-of-the-glass sort of peeping serves no purpose as far as I can see except to transmit literal information (the way your refrigerator manual might, step-by-step, tell you how and how often to vacuum your coils). And of course, the obvious (or not so obvious) exception, the thrill of voyeurism. I’m greedier than that. I want to be lured and compelled. And I want in. I need to see some movement from the corner of my eye and get curious, want to know what it might be, what fleeting, unnamable, shapeless-but-in-motion thing – acknowledged but uncertain – is skirting my certainties and may, for all I know, be lingering threateningly, or downright dangerously, at the edge of my vision, at the brink of my recognition, making up some unknowable bulk of the periphery of my, or the writer’s, precarious life. Now, that stuff out there has the potential to contain something that could directly and immediately affect life as I know it, or, at minimum, my perception of it. That’s what’s urgent. That’s what I find interesting.
The philosopher Suzanne Langer puts her slant on it this way:
A work of art … is more than an ‘arrangement’ of given things –….
even qualitative things. Something emerges … which was not
there before
The motion is the emergence. That place that wasn’t there before? That’s where I want to go.
Here Today – In Next Week Tomorrow!
The built-in space within the poem I spoke of is the field on which such mystery’s action may take place. And I find that one of the primary spacemakers of such energizing territory is time.
Tess Gallagher speaks of “deep time,” and the term seems marvelously apt. Muriel Rukeyser, when she wrote of a “multiple time sense” within a poem, was talking, I’m certain, of the same phenomenon. They’re both describing a sort of simultaneity in which all the poet’s considered “times” coexist – so that, despite our common perception, time is presented not as a merely linear, countable passage, is not unidirectional as we tend to assume, is, in fact, not directional at all, but is instead dimensional. Gallagher spoke of those “psychic spaces in the poem that expand the time dimension of the poetic structure,” and so, when she, in another place, says that “the photograph is the enemy of poetry,” she speaks exactly to both our points – the static photograph cannot address time in its expanded sense. The only time-motion that might occur because of such an isolated prompt – that photograph -- is in the space between a predisposed viewer and the artefact of the picture itself which can merely hold a concrete subject captive. The field of interplay is not of the photograph, not built into the print itself. It can’t be. The photo is a single micro-moment shot dead. The predisposed viewer may make connections, but it is not the photo or the static poem that embodies them; it is the viewer her- or himself. Those connections are not written into, or inherent in, the art/artefact. The photo is clean of dimension and is time-locked.
Eavan Boland in an essay in the Partisan Review stated beautifully that “[T]here is a foreground and a background. Or, to put it another way, a poem is an assembly of perspectives.” I propose that when those perspectives are spread across time, the good poem is possible. When they are not, the poem is likely to aspire to photograph-ness rather than poem-ness. The interplay of those perspectives can be the key that opens up the poem to deep time and, therefore, psychic space – my peripheral playing field.
Villages Skipped, Towns and Cities Jumped…!
That area past where you already know yourself to be, past what you – at the very least – are, is the resonance-making territory that lifts the poem off the page. What do you carry that others cannot see? What hovers about you? What is elliptical? Leap-frogs, if you will? With the right lens, the right field, the poem is much more than quantifiable or externally qualifiable information; it can be offset by the poem’s abstract subject which functions as a lens through which to re-view the traceable matter of the poem. Langer says, “The total result is much more than a literal statement….” You can’t explain your way there. The leap must be made in order to arrive.
In Stephen Dunn’s essay, “The Good, the Not So Good,” he places my concerns precisely.
The good poem allows us to believe we have a soul. In the presence
of a good poem we remember/discover the soul has an appetite,
and that that appetite is for emotional veracity and for the unsayable.
Note it’s the unsayable, not the unspeakable. The unspeakable falls within the purlieu of autobiography. Not the unspeakable to shock the reader, for the current market value of a rotten life, but the ineffable – that which resides in mystery, in uncertainty and reminds us “we have a soul.” In Dunn’s short prose works, Riffs and Reciprocities, he makes it even plainer: “It’s only about uninteresting things that we can be certain.” And “[c]ertainty is what we feel when we know a little less than enough.” Platitudinal? Perhaps. But correct, nonetheless, understandable, and marvelously useful in assessing a poem’s ambition. It is in the space made accessible by uncertainty that the energy of a good poem resides. It reverberates there; it moves. It demands my attention, and the answering is less important than my own cloud of unknowing in which my becoming takes place. Thomas Disch focuses on the same concept, but more brutally and more practically: “Nothing so sustains a poet as an irresolvable dilemma.” Irresolvable? My cup of proverbial poetry tea. And how to do this? How to open the poem up? Dunn gives us an answer.
The good poem ‘lets in’ the unruly, the difficult, the unformed – in a
sense, the unmanageable – and is able to make an environment for
them. The more the imagination can accommodate, the more chaos
the poet is equal to, obviously the richer the poem.
I do want the richer poem. I want unruliness within an identifiable environment. I want the poem that absolutely buzzes with that torque between the known and the unknown. Dunn again:
The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this
sense that it is mysterious.
And Langer:
A work of art is a composition of tensions and resolutions, balance
and unbalance, rhythmic coherence, a precarious yet continuous unity.
And the unity is the enclosure of the good poem, its environment. Order vs disorder. Ease vs uneasiness. There are ways to accomplish this: “…[R]efuse beauty, refuse paradise and ease…,” Jane Hirshfield insists. “Poems are excursions into belief and doubt….” I propose this qualification: the good ones make those excursions simultaneously – and the tensions thereof are the catalysts of thought and urgency and resonance.
In a nifty little book called Approaches to Writing, Paul Horgan, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, says
Much of our writing now seems to be propped up by a foundation
of earnest observation rather than by one of intuitive identity,
or all-enduring, communion with mankind.
To put it another way, let us say that we are living in the age
of case history.
Therein lies my point. A better poem, in its movement, transfers energy to the reader, and if, as Rukeyser believes, “human energy may be defined as consciousness, the capacity to make change in existing conditions,” then the case history lacks the essential energy for such an exchange. The case history is anecdote, is information, data of the autobiographical sort.
One of the prevalent confusions, and what seems often to be the source of flatness, claustrophobia, and exclusion in the poem, is an issue of truth – and what we mean when we use that word. Urgency, meaningfulness, and movement are seldom the by-products of truth-as-fact. “It happened.” “She really did that.” “But that’s how I felt.” All facts, no doubt. Yet confession itself is neither always noble nor is it necessarily art. Facts, or editorials on them, are not enough.
The poet’s dilemma is this: good art seldom has the same shape as life. We need to go past the seemingly true, past the factual or seemingly factual, beyond the narrative, if there is one, into poem-ness. Of course, it’s a frightening thing to do, and there’s the risk, I suppose, of real disruption in doing so, but until we understand the stakes we’ll continue to be trapped in photograph-ness, and, in all likelihood, we’ll leave the reader out of the action.
I recently returned to Ted Mooney’s 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, and, by chance, read the back cover: “His novel is about communication. The place is a world … where people who can’t talk to each other suffer from a disease called ‘information sickness’” – a world, say the poetry world, where the unsayable is replaced by information or even the unspeakable. Here I must call up Suzanne Langer’s “fundamental distinction between the informative and the evocative use of words” – the body-knowledge, the sensation of the work. Not reportage by any means, not even insight necessarily, but movement towards what might become insightful: realism wrought by uncertainty.
For many reasons, psychological and social, some writers believe that “risk-taking” involves the telling of secrets. That seems to me entirely too post facto, too static, too late. Real risk, I believe, lies in the task of discovering new secrets.
Thomas Disch describes poem-seeming verse this way: “[T]here are no formal challenges, no musicality, no effort to find the mot juste or the telling epithet. There is simply candor….” – a matter of engaging in factual autobiography versus a more spiritual or, at least, abstract affection of the reader. I like a poem that engages relations rather than relationships. A past, a present, and a presumed future. When the muse is the mere self in the spotlight, trouble hangs over our heads. When art takes the light and the self steps into the background, I figure something interesting is likely to happen. Resonance and consequence travel beyond the reported, beyond the enacted, beyond the tellable to something that speaks. Not resolution, but a stab at confrontation. The actions of the past are over; their repercussions are, in all likelihood, not. They’re still percussing.
A work of art … is neither a confessional nor a frozen tantrum;
it is a developed metaphor, a non-discursive symbol that
articulates what is verbally ineffable – the logic of consciousness
itself.
That’s Langer. It speaks to the photograph-ness I spoke of earlier. “The logic of consciousness itself” – that’s where we live despite our attempts to simplify, quantify, and to name. Heller:
…[T]he poet’s possession of his experience is different from
the possession of him by the experience. The poet’s view
is somewhat more spacious, large, aerial; his experience is seen
in a open context, its energy, its quality is felt.
In the poem that has achieved poem-ness, the speaker suspects more than she has told. In the poem that has achieved poem-ness, the poem has gotten bigger than the poet. That’s the constant warning: if the poem is merely as large as the poet, the poem has, in all likelihood, failed. The poem that makes room for the reader might be conceived as a poem, not only of inclusiveness, but of transcendence, or, perhaps even, a series of transcendences: it transcends the past, the now, and the poet her- or himself.
Somebody Else’s Horizons
In poet Jane Cooper’s foreward to Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, she states that Rukeyser “liked to say that poems are meeting-places….” Dunn puts it this way: “The personal is what matters…. And the expansion of what the personal means….” A fusion of concerns. Dana Gioia puts it under a colder light: “Good poetry … actively seeks [its readers’] imaginative and intellectual collaboration by assuming and exploiting a common frame of reference.” (215) Exploitation. It’s a word with a nasty connotation. Like manipulation. But the truth we must work with is this: good art is most often manipulation via exploitation. It is directive. Not didactic, but directive. Contrary to a frighteningly common belief that poetry can mean anything the reader wants it to, a good poem cannot. The good poet will have defined the arena and directed the reader’s attention and emotions -- manipulated the art via the common “frame
Let’s take a look at Dunn’s “The Sudden Light and the Trees.”
THE SUDDEN LIGHT AND THE TREES
Syracuse, 1969
My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog
and wife beater.
In bad dreams I killed him
and once, in the consequential light of day,
I called the Humane Society
about Blue, his dog. They took her away
and I readied myself, a baseball bat
inside my door.
At this point, we know the degree of this narrator’s involvement – and that his participation in this narrative was prompted by, according to his “facts,” justified fear. The baseball bat becomes an emblem of his fear. The word “fear” or its synonyms have not yet been used.
That night I heard his wife scream
and I couldn’t help it, that pathetic
relief; her again, not me.
We have moved from the autobiographical to, I believe, a startling confession. Something has opened up, has begun to resonate and it is enough for the reader to grab on to. The autobiographical then continues:
It would be years before I’d understand
why victims cling and forgive. I plugged in
the Sleep-Sound and it crashed
like the ocean all the way to sleep.
One afternoon I found him
on the stoop,
a pistol in his hand, waiting,
he said, for me.
The tension that was posited earlier has come to fruition. Because of our earlier purchase at the point of confession, our stakes are higher than they might have otherwise been. And then another surprise: we move from the image of a potentially powerful weapon to this:
A sparrow had gotten in
to our common basement.
Could he have permission
to shoot it? The bullets, he explained,
might go through the floor.
That small brown bird is an interesting and sudden deflation of our expectations and will remain so until fourteen lines later when the gun once again takes the foreground.
I said I’d catch it, wait, give me
a few minutes and, clear-eyed, brilliantly
afraid, I trapped it
with a pillow.
It’s an interesting story and a story that has opened itself up beyond its principals: the sparrow now has taken its place – and that place and its significance will grow.
I remember how it felt
When I got it in my hand, and how it burst
that hand open
when I took it outside, a strength
that must have come out of hopelessness
and the sudden light
and the trees.
Look who owns that verb “burst”! Look who owns that “hopelessness”! Suddenly – and in the same sentence as the narrator’s “remember,” “felt,” and “got,” the sparrow takes on the active, forceful role – and now, in that beautifully calculated shift, that fragile, menaced bird embodies all the narrator’s emotions to that point: his “clear-eyed brilliant” fear. The earlier, prevailing emotion is now finally named, creating a real tension with his earlier culpabilities. And the bird, right then, surprises us once more, but this time with its forcefulness: the sparrow “burst
Let’s go on to the poem’s end.
And I remember
the way he slapped the gun against
his open palm,
kept slapping it, and wouldn’t speak.
This poem by Stephen Dunn, despite its clear nod to autobiography in its date/placement line (again, factual or not), despite its simple and elegant form, despite its absolute specificity of narrative, speaks for the human in the larger sense. That final stanza is a real coup – the gun and that participle – as though the slapping continues in its arena of tense silence right up to the present telling. Time here, and its careful arrangement in this poem, has opened up more than just inclusion. It has made an imagistic impact that holds tight long after the reading of the poem has been completed.
Thomas Disch, one of my favorite critics, asks these crucial, albeit delightfully inflated, questions:
Do the figures of the tale engage in actions that have an import
beyond the bogs of Romance, beyond even the uplands of
domestic tragedy? That is, do their personal fates come to
have an emblematic reference to the larger patterns of history?
Oh, yes. Dunn’s do.
The “plot,” even in its anecdotal form, is startling – a point Dunn argues for both by example and, in his prose, elsewhere, articulation. And so much has been internalized via emblem – the baseball bat, the sparrow, the gun, as well as its menacing participle. But the bird’s usurpation of the verb “burst,” and the “slapping” of the biker’s gun are, as Langer gracefully puts it, “…outward showing
Oh, Bliss
I do ask a lot. I know that. But it’s my prerogative to seek the grail-poem. I want ambition, eloquence, music, accomplishment. I want what Langer wants: “… not statement but poesis.” I want the time to be deep time; I want the lines to be taut, meaningful units, not prose that’s been whacked into the shape of what a poem might look like; I want tension; I want meaning beyond information; and I want to be included in discovery. Time, torque, truth in its broader sense, and transcendence – too much to ask from a poem? I want to be able, as high school teacher Frank McNabb refers to it, to “read the lines, read between the lines, and read beyond the lines.” And I want the poem to pay off after such scrutiny.
Facts aren’t enough. In fact, I propose that facts, by themselves, are inevitably an impoverished commodity. Muir states it exquisitely: “Exact knowledge is only a fragment of the knowledge we need in order to live.” He says,
…(I)t is thought, the capacity for … thought, together with one’s
ideal intuition of what the art can be, which allows poetry on
occasion to emerge from our all too common private preoccu-
pations into those universal statements that … compose
the art’s final justification.
And Toad, says, “Oh my! Oh my!” Yes. That’s it. Oh my!
Works Consulted
Boland, Eavan. "In Perspective." Partisan Review #2, Spring 1993. 316.
Disch, Thomas M. The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters. New York: Picador, 1995.
Dunn, Stephen. Landscape at the End of the Century. New York: Norton, 1991.
---. Walking Light. New York: Norton, 1993.
---. "Reciprocities." Southern Review Winter 1997. 91-102.
Gallagher, Tess. A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1986.
Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter? St. Paul: Graywolf, 1992.
Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. New York: Dell, 1969.
Heller, Michael. "Poetry Without Credentials." The Ohio Review Number 28. 94-102.
Hirshfield, Jane. "Facing the Lion: The Way of Shadow and Light in Some Twentieth-Century Poems." Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft. Kurt Brown,ed. Boston: Beacon, 1996. 14-32.
Horgan, Paul. Approaches to Writing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1988.
Langer, Suzanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1953.
---. Problems of Art. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1957.
McNabb, Frank. "Teacher to Teacher: Approach and Reflection." Starting With Delight No. 1 (Spring 1993) Newsletter of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program: 3.
Mooney, Ted. Easy Travel To Other Planets. New York: Ballantine, 1983.
Muir, Edwin. The Estate of Poetry. St. Paul: Graywolf, 1993.
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1966.