At an absorbing informal meeting of a dozen people at a faculty/graduate-student reading group on poetry yesterday, we talked about a half dozen different topics that came up from our reading of two poems by the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and different translations of those poems by Langston Hughes and Achy Obejas, and also about an essay by English poet Dick Davis about how English poetry can be seen as a sequence of changes brought about by translation into English of poetry from outside England, from Chaucer to Ezra Pound (Davis does not specifically address American poetry in his essay). Our poet colleague Mary Kinzie wondered if the loss of pronounced word-endings in English after Chaucer’s time was an important reason why rhyme declined; I said that I thought that the decline of rhyme in English was a result of poets (in different periods) having narrowly defined rhyme as full rhyme rather than, as in some other languages and literary histories, regarding it as a broader range of kinds of phonetic repetitions, including many that are not full rhyme.

In other words, even though poets like to say that English is rhyme-poor compared to inflected languages with lots of frequently repeated word-endings, I was arguing that the abandonment of rhyme (several times, and most widespread during the twentieth century) was based on literary choice rather than on any linguistic limitations of the sounds of English. (And in fact, the poets of ancient Greek and Latin, which are very inflected languages, chose not to use rhyme, while later, medieval, poets writing in Latin did so.)

This may sound like an arcane discussion that is of little interest to readers of poetry, and yet it points to how our understanding of poetry itself is not “natural” but rather the result of historical choices, of the influence of poets and critics whose dominant opinions may have less to do with the truth value of what they say than with the particular advantage in their own historical moment of looking at poetry one way instead of another. So most readers of poetry and most American poets, might feel that rhyming is not “natural,” but the truth it that it is no less natural than not rhyming. Meanwhile readers who are less in touch with what twentieth-century poets have done–like listeners who have heard few works by twentieth-century composers–may yearn for poetry with rhyme simply because much the poetry they learned as schoolchildren was from the nineteenth century, when a lot of poetry rhymed, and when classical music conformed to a paradigm of harmony that was superseded by twentieth-century music (to various degrees, agreeable or not to one listener or another, depending on the composer).

It’s not hard to demonstrate that any particular poetic quality or element is not “natural” in the sense that it is inherent in poetry itself. Just as we all begin to learn from birth how to sort out which phonemes of our mother-tongue(s) we need to pay attention to, and begin to stop paying attention to the others and in fact eventually lose the ability to hear those others, so poets learn to pay attention to which elements and resources of poetry they need to pay attention to in order to write what is regarded in their historical moment and their culture as poetry (several sorts of poetry, usually), and stop paying attention to other elements and resources, and in fact may eventually lose the ability even to notice how those other ones work. Or at least may convince themselves that those other ones are of no great importance. And thus we gets “schools,” movements, exclusions, dominance, and so on. All of which in fact makes poetry richer overall as a practice of meaning-making, because the multiplicity of poetry frees poets of different persuasions to extend the capacities of poetry in different directions.

But no one should think that learning how to write a poem or read one is as “natural” as learning one’s mother tongue(s). This is so, even though there are poetic practices still in use that are amazingly old—as old as the earliest traces we can find of what poetry was, even long before there was writing. Any poetic practice that old, even if it is not “natural,” must be a response to an appetite in the human mind for certain things that language did then, and still does now. Language as a vehicle, a capacity, an appetite, for thought and feeling, I should say.

]]> http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?feed=rss2&p=525 0 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=431 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=431#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:42:23 +0000 Reginald Gibbons http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=431

Ed Roberson’s new book of poems, The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), opens with these lines:

I entered as a man enters

a labyrinth,      seeing

from hairline fracture to abyss

the magnified whisper

of memory      not finish its sentence

whole [...]

Roberson is the master of a hauntingly meditative rhythm of thought and perception, precisely scored (musically) by means of the poetic line. How can thought and perception be anything but meditative? you ask. What I am trying to articulate is my sense of an utterance that unwinds syntactically not in the order of the expected narrative structuring of a personal anecdote or of reference to a personal circumstance, but rather, in the form of the poet telling what he (or I should say his poetic alter ego, his poetic self, the self created in and by the poem) is thinking while simultaneous questioning and responding to his own thought.

Roberson’s interiority makes it possible for him to write “Somewhere I’m the disappointment in myself,” when he is in “A Bout Of” (the title) “One of those malarias of memory” (the first line). “Somewhere” seems somewhere else, still within him. “You’ve gained the language used for not speaking” (“A Small Residue”), he writes to himself–ruefully yet not without a hint of the achievement of this. He does not say that it is a language not used for thinking.

He has a gift of startling and just metaphors. To characterize the sudden access of an unexpected thought, he writes of a “Manic Tack” (which in the poem eventuates in manic talk):

When you flip the side of the sail

the wind is in     –I’ve heard you use

the word–     but the pop      that whack sound

it makes and the boat jumps forward

what is that?       –that’s how it feels

when      what one opinion says is a chemical

change in my brain and next thing

I know my clothes are all over

the room like angry whitecaps

my face near being a wave off

my head [...]

And he writes:

The shadow barcode of the tiger–

scanned through

the grasses

we are just now understanding

that we too register in

the deeper darkness–

turns up a receipt

statement of experience

somehow we know

has some due.

This poem makes several turns, bringing into articulation additional metaphors for what is finally a sense of existential, even if not political, freedom.

Roberson has produced acrobatic leaps and counter-leaps of thought, including a somewhat startling arrival, in some poems, at a bluntness about race in America. “The Depths of an Old Wrong” and “A Small Residue,” which I quoted above, are mostly about “what white folks will say” and what, in response, Roberson will … “sing.”

In other poems his compressed, sometimes halting, sometimes rushing syntax and thought reach inward from episode and image to the very edge of being, and of being alive; I’m thinking of the five short poems that follow the overall title of “Rush,” and also of the autobiographical sequence “’There are many stops along the way ‘.” Roberson’s sense of the ultimate justification for and of a life is at once a kind of doubt and an exhilarating doubleness of thought; he says one thing and his very own lines may both fulfill it and oppose it, in the way they move.

And all of that is in part one of this two-part book. Read into part two and you will find much more—a way of writing that seems to have gone around a corner from part one. Graceful, and no less a close study of the edge between life and death, but different in tone.

]]> http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?feed=rss2&p=431 0 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=493 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=493#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:39:01 +0000 Reginald Gibbons http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=493

Looking up from the work on my desk—the pleasing, illuminating but demanding scrutiny of draft translations by Spanish poet and translator Jordi Doce of some of my poems for a small bilingual edition to be published in Spain by Littera Libros—I see in the books around me so many extraneous attractions, distractions.  Projects as yet unfinished–that’s the connotation of the particular books nearest at hand, many from the university library. One in particular that I happen to find myself looking at (I would like to figure out what unconscious train of thought led me to look at it unaware, and then come to awareness that I was looking at it) makes me feel that it is an enormous privilege to be able to hold it in my own hands and make use of it.  It comes from very far away and long ago.

I hesitate even to name it, but really I shouldn’t worry that anyone who might read these words of mine would ever covet it, although surely it is rare. To me it seems far more precious than the money that would be required to replace it, if that were possible: Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-1918, Volume XIV: Eskimo Songs, subtitled Songs of the Copper Eskimos, by Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Southern Party—1913-16. Published in Ottawa by F. A. Acland, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, 1925. Yes, of course, already one thinks of it as the fruit of colonization within a country’s own borders–no matter how much one might be grateful for traces of the amazingly intrepid Copper Eskimos and, for that matter, the Euro-Canadians who trekked long and hard to get to Canadian Arctic in 1913!

And one knows that the collection of the songs must have been flawed, that at least some songs would never have been sung to them, and that others would only have been sung in a way that did not violate their special qualities, perhaps sacred or shamanistic, and that the relations between anthropologists and indigenous people must have been fraught with manipulation on both sides, power on one side, lack of it on the other. How accurate are the transcriptions and translations of the songs? And what particular preparations, circumstances, distractions, difficulties, of the Southern Party (on “the Arctic mainland and the adjacent islands”) might have made their findings more useful or less, to those who want, nearly a hundred years later, to ponder their document?  Producing this songbook, bigger in trim size than a hymnal and fully as thick, was a terribly complex project and must have required the most extraordinary meticulousness, patience, keenness, stamina, and seriousness, with its musical scores, charts presenting musical analysis, a beautiful hand-written transcription (in an alphabet evidently invented for a language with phonemes beyond those of English), of the verse running beneath the musical notes in each song.  And at the back, for each, there is an italicized transliteration of the verse and a translation into English.

I tracked this book down by following a lead in the work of Brian Swann, poet and long-time student and champion of Native American poetry.  Severed from the singers, from the time and world and life experience and cultural practices and thought of those singers, the songs are cryptic—and perhaps some of their mystery is the result of imperfect translation.   But I rather think that it comes from the prior fact that the anthropologists had little in their own lives that corresponded to that far northern world, experience, culture, thought, singing and perhaps–to use a phrase from classics–”song culture.”  Even what seems cryptic to us might have been well translated in some terms, but it came into a language and a culture that had no way to understand fully what it was encountering.  And I would think that the anthropologists themselves acknowledged that.

Sung by a girl from Prince Albert Sound, here is a song that begins with many repetitions of syllables that perhaps express at the least the presence and the emphatic effort of the singer: ye ye yai ye ya i ya ye yai ya and more. Such are the “prelude” and “refrain.” The verses are these:

1.1 Seeing that I was longing for it,

I gave it a name, this spirit.

1.2 Much blood pours from me [my nose] unexpectedly.

I gave it a name, seeing that I recognized it.

2.1 I have not finished it [my song] however.

Whither my little sister, my little Kaniraq [has she gone].

2.2 Much blood pours from me unexpectedly.

Whither my little sister–I have not finished it however.

There are ways of thinking about this, especially with the ways of reading poetry, that make it begin to signify obliquely and powerfully.  And Freud to one side, Jung to another, are looking on as we think.  As are scholars of oral culture and of ancient poetry in the west.

The collectors of the songs write in a footnote: “This is one of the songs that was taught by the Prince Albert sound Eskimos to the ******* [I cannot reproduce this word, which uses characters of a non-Roman alphabet invented to represent the indigenous] Eskimos during the summer of 1915. The words are said to have been taken from three separate songs.”

What, you may wonder, is my interest in this book? I admit that this celebration of it is for its own sake. But there is yet another project awaiting me in which I take up the search for a particular metaphor through a few disparate cultures, trying to think with that metaphor about writing.  Perhaps at some point I will report on what I was beginning to find when other duties intervened, many months ago, and other duties intervened upon those, and so on, preventing me from finishing my song.  Or rather, I seem to have invited my own self-preventing.  I think I felt it would take longer to think through this problem that I would be able to sustain my thinking.

Anyway, now I go back to translations that press me more urgently…

]]> http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?feed=rss2&p=493 0 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=476 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=476#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:28:08 +0000 Reginald Gibbons http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=476 Olivia Judson, who writes about science for the New York Times, mentions in her column today the possibility that some facial expressions can cause certain emotions (in addition to being expressions of those emotions):

A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

She goes on to write:

Of course, facial gestures aren’t the whole story of emotions; moreover, languages can potentially influence emotions in many other ways. Different languages have different music — sounds and rhythms — that could also have an emotional impact. The meanings of words may influence moods more than the gestures used to make them. And just as the words a language uses to describe colors affects how speakers of that language perceive those colors, different languages might allow speakers to process particular emotions differently; this, in turn, could feed into a culture, perhaps contributing to a general tendency towards gloom or laughter.

(Sources of the studies she reports can be found below her blog post, at http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/a-language-of-smiles/

Years ago when I was thinking of the person on whom I modeled the subject of my poem “Desterrado, late 1960s” (in Sparrow: New and Selected Poems), I wrote this phrase:  “the language-shaped curve of his mouth.”  I was thinking about how something seems different in the configuration of the face in persons who speak Spanish vs. French vs. German.   And I was wondering if this had to do with lifelong use of the facial muscles to produce certain phonemes (especially vowels) and not others.

The empirical data that Judson points to may be the beginning of another rethinking of the idea, so popular in literary studies for decades, that language is a perfectly arbitrary system of signs that contain no inherent meaning in themselves.  The linguist Roman Jakobson wrote in one of his essays that in the early 20th century there were empirical studies that established that certain consonantal phonemes were associated with two opposed ideas–specifically, the idea of what is hard, sharp, pointed, etc., vs. the idea of what is rounded, soft.  Every speaker of English probably has a sense of which consonants those are, and the experiments that Jakobson cited were conducted in several different European languages, so there was little question of the ideas being associated with existing words.

And in fact other recent studies have shown that a word that is gendered in opposite ways in two languages (say, German and French) produces opposite associations that are indeed related to whether it is grammatically gendered masculine or feminine.  Of course this would not be true of all nouns, but it does contradict persuasively what our language teachers told us when we learned that the language we were studying gendered nouns–which was that the grammatical gender had nothing to do with the thing itself.  Fair enough; but it can have something to do with the associations and connotations.

This is one of the ways the mind receives, decodes, and plays with language.  If it weren’t true that language were so complex, then it would not have occurred to Victorian people of very proper upbringing and manners to put skirts around the bottom of a grand piano so that no one would see the legs, because to see the legs would then connote seeing human legs, and those would turn into female legs, very lovely ones, and the audience would be morally corrupted by the design of the piano. (!)  The thing (that which is signified) can change the signifier just as much as the signifier controls our idea of the thing.

Poetry brings such associations and connotations into play, at least in “the back of the mind.”  (And in the front of the mind, too, in those who, like musicians, have not only trained the back but are also restlessly, inventively thinking with the front.)  I have long been annoyed by the argumentative tendency to want such matters to be decisively one way or another–words are perfectly arbitrary signs (dog, perro, cane, chien)?; words are all mystically related to what they mean?.  Nope.  Neither.  (Some) words have some relation to what they signify (mama, maman, mami, mom, mater, mae, mutter, moder; or point, punto, punkt, ikkaku, pontertek; or words for spike… and others).  That’s one of the things we work with when we write and keep our ears open for the sounds our words make.

My colleague in the English Department at Northwestern, Ivy Wilson, and I have been forming a study group in Poetry and Poetics, which has immersed us and a number of colleagues–scholars (in several departments) and poets–in the exciting prospect of being able to spend time, every so often, talking together about so many interesting texts, problems of writing, problems of reading, enthusiasms for all of that.  (See humanities.northwestern.edu/news/workshoppage3.html)

The poet and now novelist Angela Jackson gave a superb reading from her just-published Where I Must Go at Northwestern on Oct. 6, and on the following night gave another, with poet Carolyn Rodgers, at the South Side Community Arts Center.  (See this New York Times feature on Jackson–nytimes.com/2009/10/13/books/13jackson.html.  And for information about the novel, see nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/0-8101-5185-5/Default.aspx

Three writers from Eastern Europe visited the Northwestern campus on Oct. 15–Petra Hulova (Czech Republic), Ferenc Barnas (Hungary), and Drago Jancar (Slovenia).

Janet Burroway gave a commanding reading for the MA/MFA in Creative Writing (see http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/grad/cw/), along with a student, Adin Bookbinder, on Oct. 16.

At lunch on Monday Oct. 19 I met with Steve Young, the program director of the Poetry Foundation, and Steve Burns, the artistic director of the Chicago new music group, Fulcrumpoint (see www.fulcrumpoint.org).  The latter Steve is putting together the musicians (and rehearsals) for a performance of  the telling of the story of Oedipus and my reading of my translations of the five odes from the play, on Dec. 3 at the National Hellenic Museum (see “events” at poetryfoundation.org).

And yesterday (October 26) Raza Ali Hasan, Ibtisam Barakat, Fady Joudah, Kazim Ali, and Khaled Mattawa were at Northwestern all day to give readings and to discuss, in a very animated panel together, aspects of being an English-language poet in America, identified with Arabic-speaking and Muslim cultures (the idea of cultural identity was of course at the center of much of the discussion, which was about both self-chosen identities and those that others impose on one); and…

and all of this was immensely rich in artistic accomplishment, in sometimes heroic dedication to the art of writing, and in a dazzling variety of the situation of writers and writing.  So much to think about, to think with, to think.

And so many of us live at a pace that can bring us more experience in a day, and certainly in a week, than we could think through in a month or a year.

I can never catch up to all that, nor to what is coming in the next weeks and months.  I will try to catch up with my half-drafted posts to this site of my thinking in public, especially about poetry. 

I was out for a morning walk this past Saturday. The air was chilly, the lake was moving only slightly with very low swells blown in by light winds from the east, there were twenty or so sails moving across the water, far out and south, and also to the south, a dozen miles away, the Chicago skyline was standing dark and sharp-edged against the pale sky. Clouds were coming in from the west, and as I walked through the lakeside park at Northwestern University in Evanston, I realized I was getting the last of the brilliant but mild sunshine of the day. And I also realized that the tune in my head was from a high-school musical in which I had led a tiny band in a makeshift pit between the front row of seats and the high stage, banging away at a large, old upright piano (tuned for the performances), with only drums, a bass and a tenor sax. The show was Sandy Wilson’s “The Boy Friend,” a 1950s satire of 1920s musical shows–energetic, superficial, and fun to stage. And I asked myself—where in the world did that tune come from, as I am walking briskly along on this crisp, beautiful morning?

*

I tried retracing thoughts I had had already on this walk, working backward through the associations. And I saw that they made a kind of sideways sense.

*

I became aware of this possible process when years ago I read Christopher Bollas’s wonderful Cracking Up (1995). A fellow poet, Steve Berg, told me enthusiastically about this book. The subtitle is “The work of unconscious experience.” Bollas, a psychoanalyist who also has a PhD in American literature, and who has written many books, is keen to understand the freedom of the unconscious, and how in our unconscious, whether we are awake or asleep, many trains of thought are continuously being generated, developing, and then breaking apart and disappearing. This particular book has always seemed to me one of the most fruitful I have ever read in thinking about how the process of writing draws willy-nilly (and fortunately) on our unconscious trains of thought, unconscious feelings, unconscious memories of experience.

*

I mean the writing of fiction and poetry, drama and even the personal essay, although it is no doubt true that in even the most impersonal writing tasks there are flickers of unconscious choice to use this word and not that, to extend syntax this way and not that. What makes this interesting is the idea of freedom. We all know how deadening it can be when our choices, word by word, are made in a state of linguistic and cultural unfreedom—that is, when routine wording is what we put down, simply because that wording is easily available to us, is familiar to us, and in almost all the other writing we do, whatever it might be, we want readers to come with us without their having to work too hard. (A whole subject awaits us there, but I won’t go into it today.)

*

Bollas shows how and why a train of thought can be retraced, when we are lucky, from a thought or a decision which we feel to be unforeseen and spontaneous back through a whole train of ideas and feelings of which we have been only very slightly aware as we were thinking them. A kind of associational “logic” is revealed.

*

So all of a sudden I realize I am humming to myself the song, “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” (When I got back home I looked up that show online to find a list of song titles, and recognized–for I could never have remembered–which title went with the tune I was hearing from memories of forty-five years ago.)  And I began to try to go backward, to try to remember what else I had been thinking of. It went like this:

**

I remembered having been thinking, at an earlier point on the walking trail, of having performed at the piano very happily when I was sixteen, and so enthusiastically, I now remembered also, that my fingers had bled a little from how hard and for how long I had to keep hitting those keys in order to be heard in that auditorium, which was very big.

*

And I thought how I never enjoyed performing again, and I wondered if this was because my experience in competitions and in a concerto performance two years later had been simply awful. But why had I been thinking about that?

*

I then remembered having watched the first twenty minutes of a “Nova” program on Darwin earlier in the week. I couldn’t stay with it—it was a poor production, the acting was strained, the dialogue was hopelessly unconvincing as real talk between people, and… the flashback to Darwin’s romance with his wife, the devout Emma Wedgwood, was set in her family living room, where she was playing Chopin on the piano.   Beautifully, of course, because the playing had been dubbed into the soundtrack by a professional pianist.   And I, in a petty mood, had been annoyed that the young Victorian ladies portrayed in the movies always play the piano perfectly. But why on my walk had I thought of the Darwin movie?

*

And then I recalled the first moments after I got beyond the town street and onto the path leading into the Northwestern University park land, and how I started heading birdsong from a beach-side copse to the right (while on the left is a massive two-level concrete parking lot, but mostly empty on Saturday morning), and I thought about how often I advert, in my own mind although not in conversation, to evolution in general, as one of the great beauties of the universe (at least, when it is not nurturing new strains of virus and bacteria or wiping out “native” flora and fauna, and so on).

*

And why was I thinking about that? I had been completely unaware of these thoughts as a train of thought; I had not, after all, been thinking about what I was thinking—I had simply been thinking it, in the form of an occasional thought that surfaced for an instant and then was gone again while my conscious thinking was pretty much focused on the path, the lake horizon, the skyline downtown, the breeze, the sun, a women’s lacross scrimmage on the lakeside field, and so on.

*

Now I could see the under-sequence of thoughts as a very private version of what I try to do when I am at work on a poem—looking deeper into how the thought/feeling moves…   This is how I teach, sometimes, too– looking for the wobbly spots in a draft, the gaps or seemingly overly emphatic passages that, to me at least, imply that something important in the train of thought/feeling that the poet is trying to shape remains ungrasped, unexpressed, unrealized.  Flagging those moments, I make no attempt to guess what’s under the surface of the draft, since whatever it is that’s missing, if it is missing, only the poet herself/himself could find by using the draft as a trail of clues leading back…

*

Sometimes—the best times—this exercise opens up a space into which a new thought/feeling rises.

*

I don’t think I have any special talent for working back through a train of thought of which I was not aware. I manage to do it sometimes, and at most times not, and on most days I don’t even try.   But the surprising thing that comes to mind—that has already come to mind—fascinates me and seems to me intimately related not only to the ways in which dreams move (which was Freud’s interest) but also to the ways in which a poem gradually finds its shape as a sequence of ideas and feelings. One can’t move one’s whole creative process into the unconscious; one has to make artistic decisions that are more deliberate and more pondered than that; but one can’t escape—and one shouldn’t try to escape it, whether by distracting oneself from it, or by denying its existence—the unconscious dimensions of one’s writing.  One should use them, as I think all successful artists do.

]]> http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?feed=rss2&p=455 0 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=451 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=451#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:03:51 +0000 Reginald Gibbons http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=451

From the obituary of Yehuda Amichai (b. 5/3/24, d. 9/22/00) that was published in the New York Times:

Metaphor “is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel.”

“There’s an old Jewish saying, ‘If you meet the devil, take him with you into the synagogue.’  Try to take the evil of politics into yourself, to influence it imaginatively, to give it human shape.  This is my attitude toward politics.”

For him, all poetry was political.  “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making.  Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

*   *   *   *   *  *

Marina Tsvetaeva in 1926 in “The Poet on the Critic”:

“Who am I writing for?  Not for the millions, not for one person alive, and not for myself.  I write for the sake of the thing itself.  The thing writes itself through me.”

*   *   *   *   *

Thomas Mann to Erich Kahler, 3/18/31:

“Give the times their due and publish what you have written.  I understand your inhibitions, but we believe until almost at the end that the decisive word remains to be written, and yet we have always set down far more of the decisive words than we ourselves can possibly appreciate.”

*   *   *   *   *

Franz Kafka (as quoted, who knows how reliably, by Gustav Janouch in his Conversations with Kafka):
Wealth is “material insecurity.”

Kafka’s works are, in his own words, “evidence of solitude.”  Hence his sincere desire to destroy them.

On Georg Trakl: ” ‘He had too much imagination,’ said Kafka.  ‘So he could not endure the war [WW I], which arose above all from a monstrous lack of imagination.’ ”

“My complaints about the disorder in the office, and especially around myself, are only a trick, by which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of the outside world.  In reality, I only manage to live because of the disorder, from which I steal the last remnant of personal freedom.”

The Germans “do not wish to comprehend, understand, read.  They only wish to possess and rule; for that, understanding is usually a hindrance.”

” ‘Are they dancers?’ I stupidly inquired, with a glance at a well-disciplined chair of chorus girls.  ‘No, they’re soldiers,’ replied Kafka.  ‘A [musical] revue is a military parade in disguise.’ “

More of my introductory groundwork for the translation seminar I am teaching:

The acts of writing and translating are textual and contextual (and also intertextual, in that a translation exists only because of the existence of a prior text elsewhere.) Different approaches to translation arise because of the gaps–linguistic, literary, cultural and historical–between poet and translator.

Linguistic—not only because languages differ in what they can say, can’t say, and may or may not say (we’ll read an essay by Roman Jakobson on this subject), but also because idioms and idiomatic syntax in two different languages can be so different. Imagine a Chicago social club that includes “artist members”; how is this phrase different from “member artists”? What if in a particular phrase one language must specify the gender of a pronoun, and another cannot or need not use pronouns at all? Some languages specify or imply dimensions of time, experience, and action and agency that others do not communicate.

Literary—because any given literary work is composed in a context of artistic assumptions, constraints, permissions, and expectations that has been created by earlier works over time—or by particular audiences or even by dominant critics. And while in its language of origin a work might be very fresh in manner or statement, that same manner or statement might already be familiar in the target language, which makes it difficult for the translator to convey the original freshness. There is an opposite problem, too: what if a particular manner, familiar and even clichéd in the source language, is unfamiliar or even unprecedented in the target language? Should the translator bring this element into the target language as something very fresh? Or rather find an analogous cliché in the target language? (Does everything depend on figuring out the intentions of the source writer—even though artistic intentions are often nearly impossible to judge?) Should a translator make the translation seem completely idiomatic in the target language, as it it had been composed in the target language originally? Or rather translate so that the unfamiliar aspects of the source language and text will sound unidiomatic? (This might enlarge the possibilities of poetry in the target language.) (We will read essays by Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Walter Benjamin that take up this question.)

Or what if an impressive quality of the source text (which could have to do with style, with sound, with the movement of thought, etc.) is already known in the target language but is considered inappropriate or uninteresting or puerile or antiquated in the literary culture of that language? What if an earlier literary strategy or stance—such as High Modernist poetic devices like those of T. S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, and Mina Loy–is considered antiquated, outmoded, in the source language, but would have the effect of a literary revolution in the target language in the present day?

I remember vividly arriving at a literary party in Mexico City and seeing Octavio Paz speaking with a small group of young men (literary culture is more patriarchal in Mexico than in the U. S.). I approached and Paz—whom I knew a little and regarded as a very great writer—welcomed me to his circle of admirers. “I was just telling them,” he explained to me (in Spanish, of course), “that three of the most influential American poets in all of Latin America were from Illinois. Isn’t this true?” I was taken aback by the idea that the influence in Latin America of three poets from Illinois could have rivaled Walt Whitman’s. “Sandburg,” I said. “Yes,” he answered, smiling and waiting. “Masters,” I said. And Paz turned to his group and said to them, “There are poets all over Latin America who are rewriting in their own locales the Spoon River Anthology without even knowing that that is what they are doing.” Then, to me: “And the third?” I made a gesture of not knowing—because I didn’t know, and because I wanted to see his enjoyment when he triumphantly announced the missing name. “Vachel Lindsay!” he said. So—three poets no longer at all in vogue in American literary culture can still be revelatory innovators to poets elsewhere. Another very well-known case is that of Edgar Allen Poe—whom Baudelaire, Mallarmé,Valéry, and other French poets considered one of the greatest of poets, and who, to their great annoyance, has never been regarded as such by poets and critics of America.

On the other hand—what if the target language and literature make possible certain effects that are partly limited by the source language itself and its literary traditions? Can translation liberate meanings as often as it loses them? Samuel Beckett, who late in his life wrote a few poems in French and also made English translations of them, allowed or spurred himself in effect to rewrite them in English; in English he did some things that French cannot do (for both linguistic and literary reasons). In English, Beckett sounds very English-language, not only because the two languages are different but also because modern literature in English has its own permissions and constraints. Almost any two languages offer the writer (and translator) different linguistic openings and opportunities, as well as different literary-historical contexts that sometimes can be liberating rather than constraining.

Cultural and historical—because literary culture is a part of a larger culture shaped and infused by historical events and epochs; attitudes toward those events and textures of those epochs may be understandable elsewhere, but probably can never be mapped clearly across cultures, and may even be scarcely apprehended in the target language and culture. In the target culture and language, other, quite different historical events and textures of historical experience may dominate, along with other associations, connotations, ideas, and what I suppose we could call feeling-sets of particular groups within cultures—missing in the source culture and language—may dominate. (For example, American narcissism; the cultural centralism of Mexico City; patriarchal attitudes of varying intensity in different cultures; Native American spiritualism of nature; “face” in East Asia; “la bella figura” in Italy; and so on.) Hence this kind of gap between source text and possible translation. In China, poets were persecuted, decades ago, for writing poems about flowers; their gesture was considered by those who ruled as a coded and criminal criticism of the communist regime, which insisted that all writers depict idealized lives of workers—which insisted, that is, that poems make certain political gestures and not others. Even a literarily excellent translation of such poems into English cannot bring with it their political gesture, which is entirely implicit. For many decades, similar constraints oppressed writers in the Soviet Union, who were all too often silenced or murdered. (To say nothing of Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and many other regimes on this planet.)

And of course there is highly effective “soft” political pressure, too, on art. In the U.S.A., one of the most volatile and contradictory subjects in literature (and even more so in the media) is the political dimension of social class. Two great American poets who can now be found in anthologies but who were long excluded, and who remain excluded from many classrooms, are Thomas McGrath and Muriel Rukeyser. They must present interesting problems of context to translators abroad. We may not be disturbed, but we are not surprised, that contemporary media, seems constantly to encompass more and more lurid and sensational material the political implications of which can be suppressed in favor of gossip; yet those political implications exist. Meanwhile, certain subjects are excluded from broadcasts—subjects that evidently not only to not interest the desired market segments but which also offend moralistic and demagogic groups aligned with corporate interests and existing social privilege based on religion, race, and so on. A prominent recent example is the exclusion of photos, video, or print reporting or commentary on brutal events involving the actions of American soldiers actively at war; in this case, the exclusion is from the media with largest audiences, but fortunately our culture permits such events to be described in print venues utilized by small audiences (above all, books). Books are not so dangerous in a social context of electronic media. What, amidst all this, might be the translator’s goal in translating a work of the ancient world, or a work from an oral culture?

]]> http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?feed=rss2&p=439 0 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=411 http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=411#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:15:41 +0000 Reginald Gibbons http://writing-arts-blog.northwestern.edu/?p=411 Preparing for classes that started this past week at Northwestern (this university’s academic year is organized by quarters rather than semesters), I have been sorting out some preliminary thoughts about literary translation.  The course is both a seminar and a workshop in poetry translation.  Students will translate several short poems from different languages–each student making his or her own versions, but discussing the versions collaboratively.  We begin with a briefing on each poem by an informant–a scholar or a literary native speaker or even the author (in the past I brought the Russian poet Ilya Kutik into the classroom to tell us about a short poem of his own; this year I will have another author present for one of the poems).  Among the poems we work on, I always choose one that is from either an ancient or a non-European language (or both).  This year, because Chris Abani is teaching at Northwestern during the fall quarter, we are using a poem of his written in Igbo (one of the languages spoken in Nigeria).  We spend two weeks on each poem–one class for the briefing, and three more for discussing our versions.  Meanwhile the students read a number of essays in two books edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, Theories of Translation and The Craft of Translation, plus some other essays from one text or another, including pieces by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Yves Bonnefoy, Dick Davis, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, George Steiner, and others.  Students respond to these essays and to each other on the course Blackboard site, and at the end of the course students create individual portfolios that include a research paper on translation and  revised versions of the four poems.

Here’s the paragraph with which I begin my own brief essay on literary translation:

A common word in one language may signify or connote an idea or feeling that is differently conceived or felt or not so often encountered in another language—for example, the Brazilian Portuguese word “saudade” (a kind of nostalgic longing), or the frequent everyday metaphors of “illumination” or “light” in French, a semantic usage that seems to derive from the intellectual history of France in particular. There can be grammatical instances of this problem, too, such as the present perfect tense in English, which as a construction signifies something like “an action begun in the past and continued into the present moment” (“I have gone to that club many times,” “I have never eaten sushi”); this tense may be difficult to comprehend for someone whose native language does not make use of it (Spanish has the tense and the concept; Italian does not have the concept and it uses a similar conjugation—auxiliary verb plus past participle—to signify an action completed in the past (“I went there many times,” implying that “I do not go there any more,” or “I did not eat sushi” on a specific occasion). But are these the kinds of problems that literary translators spend most of their time on?

From this, I go on to the larger questions, the ones that really do engage the translator more deeply–about language, of course, but also about literature, culture, history.  I will post more from this little essay later.

Northwestern Reaffirms Commitment to University Press; TriQuarterly Magazine Goes Electronic

Northwestern University Press is renowned for its strength and commitment to publishing scholarly works in the humanities.

By Alan K. Cubbage

/**/ /**/ EVANSTON, Ill. — After an extensive review of Northwestern University Press, its academic publishing house, Northwestern has reaffirmed its commitment to publishing and disseminating scholarly writing. A nationwide search for a new director of the Press will be launched soon, said Sarah Pritchard, the Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian.

Northwestern University Press is renowned for its strength and commitment to publishing scholarly works in the humanities and the role it plays in supporting many of Northwestern’s academic areas. Last fall, the Press received a grant of more than $800,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support innovative efforts with the Program of African Studies and the Performance Studies and Theatre departments. One of the first major outcomes will be the launch next year of a new electronic journal, Islamic Africa, which will be produced in collaboration with the Program of African Studies and will draw on Northwestern’s established research strength in African studies.

The move to digital publishing will continue with the transition of TriQuarterly, the Press’s literary journal, to an online format next year. TriQuarterly already has an online blog, TriQuarterly To-Day.

TriQuarterly will be integrated into the Creative Writing program of the School of Continuing Studies. Such distinguished writers as Stuart Dybek, Aleksander Hemon, Alex Kotlowitz, Mary Kinzie and Ed Roberson teach in the program, which has gained increasing recognition in recent years. The acquisitions, editorial and design aspects of the journal will be carried out as part of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program with technical support provided by Northwestern University Information Technology staff. The journal will continue to solicit and publish offerings from external writers, and will be made freely available on the web.

“This move will align publishing efforts more closely with the University’s academic enterprise while at the same time expanding electronic dissemination and public access to the wonderful literature and essays that are published in TriQuarterly,” Pritchard said. “Scholarly publishing is increasingly moving to open access, allowing greater distribution of academic work. This reflects that trend and allows the journal editors to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities offered through online publishing.”

The search for a new director for Northwestern University Press will be launched this fall, Pritchard said. “We will be seeking an energetic leader from the academic publishing community with strong vision to guide us as we focus on the traditional strengths of the Press, implement new business models and expand digital strategies,” she said.

TriQuarterly Books will continue as an imprint of Northwestern University Press and the Press also will continue to distribute books from other academic and small presses.

“After a year of significant economic setbacks, the Press has undergone a careful review. The University has reaffirmed its commitment to the dissemination of scholarship as part of its academic mission,” Pritchard said. “The Press will be a more efficient operation and we will deepen our alliances with the University’s academic programs while moving forward with the delivery of content in a digital format. There undoubtedly will be challenges, but it also should be a time of exciting opportunities.”

Alan Cubbage is vice president for University Relations. Contact him at a-cubbage@northwestern.edu

Although there are counter-examples against what I am about to say, nevertheless there’s still use in the old thesis that poetry is a kind of language-use that especially “turns” language–by tropes, syntactic surprises or deviations from the expected word order, use of sound, use of particular kinds of words, etc., in such a way that what would have been suppressed or repressed or rejected or overlooked is actively brought into play, instead. There are lots of different kinds of “figures” that do these things—figures that we use all the time in everyday speech, but which we notice much more in poetry, for the reason that poetry is the space within which we are invited to use them more.  (Poetry, we might say, is the invitation to use language that is more “turned” for various reasons–to give a special kind of emphasis and power to what is said.)

Repetitions of sound, various uses of the line and stanza, a playing with the forms and roots of words to create repetitions and puns, and other devices are among the ways in which language in a poem says to the reader: “Hey! I’m a poem!” All these devices are, to put this simplistically, like the dogs in the old Far Side cartoon whose barking has been decoded, at last, by a mad scientist’s device that shows that every barking dog up and down a street is saying the same thing as the mad scientist passes by on foot while wearing his scientific headphones: “Hey!” “Hey!” “Hey!”  The great difference between poetic devices–tropes–and the cartoon dogs, though, is that “Hey!” is only the first of several things that each device is typically saying. (And in fact, those who own dogs–and cats–know that they too have real vocabularies, and say different things at different times.)

What is brought into play (extra, unanticipated meaning) makes one feel that the usual suppression or repression or prohibition or control of certain words, of the expression of certain ideas, thoughts, feelings, has been lessened or even defeated. What was not yet said, or not said often, is finally said—at least in part–even if only provisionally, for lack of our being able to say almost anything definitively. This is a mark of poetry.

So whether by means semantic, syntactic or structural, an effect of fresh saying (so the poet hopes, so the reader hopes) is created—often by means of an associative or intuitive process rather than a logical one (or, OK, a logical process: that too is possible, and usually is ornamented or made rhythmical, or both, in a way that logical argument is not usually expected to be). Perhaps a repeated sound links together a pair of lines or thoughts that are related in other ways, too; or binds together two lines otherwise so unrelated as to seem to fly apart (such rhyming of apparently disparate utterances began to be used conspicuously in the nineteenth century in European languages, but it was probably always there, in poetry; there’s also something like this, as I understand, in the ghazal in Urdu and other languages; and I have been told that such rhyming is not at all uncommon in Russian).  Thus something (extra meaning, the meaning with which the language has now been charged) is created and communicated at the same time that the feeling of avoiding the expected is conveyed.  (What’s usually expected is a suppression or repression or rejection or sheer play for the sake of getting the words right in a wrong way, so to speak. And who would want a surgeon to play with words in an ambiguous way while calling for an instrument, or an attorney, while in court, or a soldier, while at war?  Poetry isn’t everything; it’s just something inherent as a possibility in language, something that permits a movement of thought, feeling, spirit, that otherwise is not possible.

Play, emotional and intellectual power, pleasure, and freedom or liberation from the expected–these are four of the many aspects of what happens to or with language in poetry. One implication of these four would be that stricture or laboring (two different opposites of “play”); passivity, vagueness or weakness of expression (opposites of “power”); dullness, unpleasantness, clumsiness, lack of precision, and maybe even pain (opposites of “pleasure”); and constraint or manipulation of thought and feeling or a perceived threat against thinking or feeling (opposites of freedom and liberation) might characterize some (not all) non-poetic language. At least, these opposites reveal what is not so often found in good poetry. I don’t think this is a matter of taste, or of different aesthetics. In its own terms, according to its own customary practices, over the last 5,000 years and more, perhaps all or most good poetry embodies these values. In contemporary poetic practice in many cultures, anything at all can be named, signified, described, portrayed, evoked, or imitated. What I’m trying to get at is the manner in which poetry uses language, no matter what the words mean semantically or how they point to things referentially.

Now, I do not mean to imply that non-poetic language is necessarily unpleasant because it must lack these poetic aspects; in prose, too, in our time, everything is permitted. In a writer like Samuel Beckett the prose is thick with poetic devices.  It’s rather that the positives in my first list are what I think poetry makes possible to the greatest degree, in our language use.

Since language use, especially in poetry, is always leaving traces of choice, suppressed or repressed alternatives, etc., poetry always has always gotten to the slipperiness and contradictoriness of language before scholars and critics and literary theorists, and poetry in fact even invites them to do what they do when they analyze; and even invites them, I think, to chastise the poet or the poetry for not saying what they want to hear.

Poetry does not hide from clarity in obscurity, or hide from obscurity either; it just keeps proliferating meanings, even in its clearest, plainest statements, and it keeps proliferating structures of meaning, that make use of poetry’s possibilities of saying several things at once.  So poetry is always adding meaning to itself anyway–usually in a pleasurable way, for those who get pleasure from such language use–and poetry often identifies for the close reader even (or especially) what the author did not consciously know he or she was doing, however deliberately he or she did it unconsciously. (It’s important to realize that this revealed unconscious content is not only personal and psychological, but also social, cultural, political.) Also, poetry tends to use all the many functions of language, not only and not necessarily mainly the representative or referential function (“signifier” and “signified”).

So in addition to naming things, poetry reproduces, in varying degrees and proportions, other things we do with language that don’t depend entirely on the meanings of words: being with someone, showing others that one is present and who one is, controlling other people with words, pleading or praying to divinities, and more. Here’s one convenient sorting of these functions into seven categories (different analysts of language functions come up with different schemes), quoted from Catherine Garvey, Children’s Talk (1984):

The linguist Michael Halliday observed his young son during the period when his vocalizations were assuming consistent phonological form and when he began to exhibit clearly an intention to communicate by means of these forms. Halliday was able to distinguish seven different functions, or uses, of his son’s talk, which he took to be models of the child’s conception of what talk is for. The first notion to emerge is that of talk as instrumental, a means of satisfying wants or needs. Another function is regulatory: the child discovers that others seek to control him by talking and that he can also control the behavior of others. The child also senses that one can establish and maintain contact with others by talking; he recognizes the interactional function. The child also expresses his individuality in talking; he asserts himself and his own sense of agency, for talking is a field of action in which he can make choices and take some responsibility. Thus talking has a personal function, as well. The heuristic, or learning, function, is exemplified in the perennial questions “why?” and “what’s that?”; the child finds that he can use talk to learn about and describe his world. And talking serves the imaginative function of pretend, which may overlap with an aesthetic function (although Halliday does not dwell on this possibility) as the child realizes that he can create images and pleasurable effects by talking. Finally, the perhaps the latest use of talk to appear, is the representational function, or talking to inform. Adults, when they think about language, regard it as a means of expressing propositions or as a means of conveying information. They view this as the primary function of talk, but it is hardly the dominant use for the child.

Andrew Sullivan’s article in the October 2009 issue of The Atlantic is an open letter (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/bush-torture).  “Dear President Bush” calls for the former president to take responsibility for the torture he ordered–in the way that Ronald Reagan took personal responsibility for the corrupt “arms for hostages” deal with Iran–and thereby acknowledge publicly an ethical travesty that has corrupted the Constitution and the moral stature of this country.  In my view, the presidential decision to authorize torture (by using carefully calculated euphemisms) is ultimately one of the major causes of the breakdown in discourse on all kinds of political, cultural and religious issues, a breakdown that seems to have unleashed truly maddened hate speech and even vehement calls for violence.  The breakdown in both behavior and language has certainly disrupted, perhaps fatally, the business of making just laws and executing them “faithfully.”

And poetry?  There have been fascist poets, communist poets, poets in love with violence, poets who hated any sensible practice of justice and who allied themselves with horrific injustice.  The twentieth century was thick with them, but they are not mentioned in polite company.  Their names can still provoke outrage, though.  I met the great and humane Spanish poet Jorge Guillén a few times near the end of his life, and, with my friend Anthony L. Geist, I interviewed Guillén for what became the book Jorge Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet (1979).  The last time I saw Guillén, he–in great old age–and his somewhat younger wife had moved to an apartment in Málaga where they had a high view of the sea in all its ancientness and shades of color and light and its rhythmic self renewal.  I told him (this was in 1978 or 1980–I no longer remember) that a street  in Cádiz, where I had just been, had been named for the notorious Spanish fascist poet José María Pemán, who had been a mouthpiece for Francisco Franco and was then still as alive as Guillén himself.  And immediately I saw that a surprisingly youthful vigor of outrage could still shake Don Jorge, even in his physical frailty, forty years after the end of the disastrous Spanish Civil War.   One does not forget the brute violations of justice and of ethics, or the corrupt justifications, even of poets–who are often given a lot of slack, once they are safely dead and their behavior, if horrible, comes to seem, to some, merely colorful.

A boy about 13 years old at the so-called “Tea Bagger” demonstration in Washington D.C. was photographed holding a sign that said “The Only Cure for Obama Communism is a New Era of McCarthyism.”*   After the fiasco of American torture and all the comment justifying, excusing, denying and normalizing it, should we be surprised that the deliberate destruction of words themselves is the ready technique of those who cannot produce any moral or ethical or even rational argument for the crimes they excuse?  I do not think it can be said of poets, perhaps even violent ones, that they have ever been as effective in the destruction of the meanings of words as have lawyers.  Is it at all surprising that a call for a new McCarthyism would be circulated by exploiting children to carry it into the public realm?  One almost cannot bear to think of the hatred that children without defenses are absorbing every day and night from adults who greedily seek to indoctrinate them.

And meanwhile, poetry?  Since the late nineteenth century there has been a view among some poets that poetry’s social usefulness derives from the care that it takes with words–as opposed to the way words are manipulated in political discourse, ideological and religious disputes, and the legalese for taking extra money from customers of one kind or another.  There is something to this view in favor of poetry, since we can assume of so many good poets that their motive in writing is exploratory, meditative, curious, rather than mercenary, like advertising, which uses poetic techniques.  Poets are not usually trying to get people to buy something, in either sense of the word.  But talk radio, for instance, is a laboratory of the ways of selling deliberate, endlessly repetitive, and ultimately all too persuasive–to all too many people–attitudes and impulses that depend on the remaking of the meanings of words, the normalizing of hate speech, and demonizing by names.  Words so treated do change their meaning, do lose their truth value.  This is a dynamic and collective process and it spills over.  This is how language works.  Some words then lose the sense they had and can be used to mean something else.  Can euphemize something hateful.  Can demonize another human being, or a group.  Among those who listen with enthusiasm, and those who repeat that enthusiasm for their own reasons.  (TV ratings, mostly.)  Enthusiasts are thus knowingly helped to corrupt their own language.  And they are eager to be corrupted because of their fears and anxieties, their old habits of paranoid self-pity, racism and xenophobia.

But “purifying the language of the tribe” is not much of a cause for poetry to take up, now, especially since we are many tribes and we acknowledge, or should acknowledge, that purity of language is itself a dangerous illusion.  So instead of an illusory and dangerous purity, we might safeguard a place in ourselves simply for honesty of expression.  (Don’t ask me to define that; civility, and civilization, such as it is, requires as much faith as religion, sometimes.)  Even in poems that explore with exuberant freedom, not with an ideological or mercenary agenda, how much language can say beyond what we usually say with it, we should find that a moral (perhaps as distinguished from a narrative or imagistic or metaphorical) honesty is a virtue for poetry.  (Not that it’s enough of a virtue in itself.  Who wants to read poetry whose only virtue is some kind of honesty to the truth of lived experience?)  A kind of poetic analogy, at least in the sort of poems in which it would be useful, of prose clarity.

Somehow, though, since the early 1980s especially, many American poets have taken to the idea that poetry doesn’t need to mean almost anything in the usual sense of clarity.  This is a very disabling stance if poetry is to say much about the shaking we get from the moral and political turmoil around us.  And poetic opponents of those poets, in the ever evolving disputes regarding poetic language, have all too often merely tried to write as if language were almost entirely reliable–even though all around us it is clear that it is not, precisely because of the way it is used, and the way usage changes it.

Poetry is as old as human culture, older than can be measured.  It is still practiced–widely, richly, variously, both well and badly–today.  Why should that be the case?  Because, I believe, it responds to an appetite in us to be linguistic, an appetite not entirely satisfied by the exchange of information between and among us.  And for most of us, our sense of language is inextricable from the validity of our inner lives.  I find the immensely long survival of the practice of poetry a very cheering element in the very mixed human repertoire.  To me it speaks of our desire, at our best, to be with each other in linguistically rich, valuable ways rather than in linguistically corrupted ways.  It speaks of our instinct or learned best impulses not to be corrupted by the manipulation of language for political ends and monetary profit.

If my position seems muddled to someone who regards poetry as a pointless and stupid pursuit (there are surprisingly different people in this category), I would argue that that is only because it’s a very complex subject that can be approached from many directions, and along each approach one sees someone else coming from an opposite direction eager to disagree.  But as I am convinced that as the writing of prose has its heroes–in the modern world, from Montaigne to Orwell, and among us now, some perhaps as wise and eloquent as they—so I believe that poetry does, too.  Eloquence in the service of our best impulses and highest ethical values–language like Lincoln’s at his best, language that acknowledges the truth of our lived experience and the value of humane ideals–cannot be the achievement only of prose.  (Even of prose as compelling as Sullivan’s in his open letter to George W. Bush.)

It’s late.  I must send this into the webosphere.

*To see the photo of the boy, see http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2009/09/photos-current-state-of-republican.html

Monday, Sept. 14, 6 pm

Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington

Views of Chicago: A Conversation with Authors from GRANTA’s All-Chicago Issue

Audrey Niffenegger, author of the best-selling The Time Traveler’s Wife, now a major motion picture, and Aleksandar Hemon, MacArthur fellow and Nat’l Book Award Finalist for The Lazarus Project, as well as several of the 28 contributors to GRANTA magazine’s new Chicago issue, discuss how artists and writers from around the world represent Chicago in their work.  Audience members are invited to join the participants for a reception immediately following the discussion.

Tentative Music Concert:

Also – Tribute to Bo Diddley, covers of Bo Diddley songs

Location TBD

10pm

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 7 pm

Stop Smiling Store Front, 1371 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Granta Magazine and The Poetry Foundation present poetry night at the Stop Smiling Store Front.

Anne Winters, Reginald Gibbons, Diego Saenz will read their poems that have appeared in Granta Magazine and Poetry magazine, as well as David Trinidad, who will read a selection of James Schuyler poems. Reception following.

Wednesday, Sept. 16

Photographer Camilo Vergara  will discuss and show his photographs of Chicago’s public housing complexes, with . . . . . .

Time – tba

Place – tba

Thursday, Sept. 17, 6 pm

The Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St

Granta Magazine and the Chicago Public Library host a reading with:

Alex Kotlowitz, Maria Venegas, and Stuart Dybek , who will read from their pieces published in Granta Magazine’s Special Issue of Chicago. Reservations are not needed. For more information go to chicagopubliclibrary.org, or call (312) 747-4300

Friday, Sept. 18, 7 pm

Women and Children First

5233 N Clark St.

Sunday, Sept. 20, 6 pm

The Rainbow Club, 1150 N. Damen

Closing Event – Tribute to Nelson Algren

Speaker Art Shay, will show photos, and discuss the life of Nelson Algren in Chicago.

For additional information, please contact: Patrick Ryan at pryan@granta.com or 212.614.7978

Without a word, one of my friends, a tall, athletic man, a fellow graduate student, quickly strode and slid down the scree of the angled gravel face to the bottom, turned and stood facing us, and aiming his voice at us, began to chant from memory the opening lines of the Iliad in Greek.

His voice carried to us very clearly,  just as if we had been where he wanted us to imagine we were–in a (ruined) ancient Greek or Roman theater.  And the dusty gravel was for a moment as good as cut and polished (and fallen) marble, and the hot sun was Greek, and the scent of nearby laurel trees was, too, even though not one of us could understand the words he was saying. We knew, though, what he was doing.

The poem begins:

weld lines on drive wheels,

rust and mid-summer weeds,

the drag grader cattywompus,

its iron seat turned sideways,

a Case one-bottom pull-plow

green enamel dulled toward grey,

Farmall red gone to burnt orange

an Oliver horse drawn silky-plow,

black as a dutch oven, two-row

cultivator and spring-toothed

harrow, an angled, one-knife

sub-soiler and squat New Holland

bailer, all set out in the space

between empty storefronts

But these items are not for sale.  There are no buyers of such old, abandoned things belonging to a much lower-tech sort of mechanization that put its ingenuity and word-sense right out where one could see it.  All of this is:

unmarked, merely at rest here,

unlikely; as though collected

to some purpose and then

abandoned [...]

And more is named–another eleven lines of loving naming, as if of the word-beads with which one might pray over one among the various gone way of American life.  And where all this stuff is piled, there is little traffic, because nobody’s in town, of necessity they are out at the malls–where the parking lots are the size of small farms, the poem says.  The thinginess of words that derive from Anglo-Saxon is one of the many great pleasures of the English language, and making something of it is what many poets have done for centuries.  These are the words that go point most clearly to what was spoken of when farming, sailing, hunting, and warfare were what human beings did without benefit of any but the most primitive technology.  “Ax” and “arrow,” “fish” and “wagon,” “eat” and “plow” and “sleep” are our forms of very similar Anglo-Saxon words.  As are Anania’s “rust,” “drive,” “wheels,” and many other words; some, like “weld,” sound like they are, but aren’t.  Anania’s use of them, though, is very contemporary–he makes an elegy–rich in sound but spare in anecdote or narrative, for what we can no longer use.  The connective tissue of history itself, the verbs and events, the history in which these objects once were new and grew old with use, not abandonment, is only implied rather than narrated.

A poem useful for thinking about language, and the past, and the feeling of things that we have left in the past.  Like a particular word, the poem lies cattywompus–at an angle–to the hastening of the typical day, it slows one’s inner steps for a few moments, and then returns us to the path we were on…

Michael Anania

Farm Machinery in a Vacant Lot

weld lines on drive wheels,

rust and mid-summer weeds,

the drag grader cattywompus,

its iron seat turned sideways,

a Case one-bottom pull-plow

green enamel dulled toward grey,

Farmall red gone to burnt orange

an Oliver horse drawn silky-plow,

black as a dutch oven, two-row

cultivator and spring-toothed

harrow, an angled, one-knife

sub-soiler and squat New Holland

bailer, all set out in the space

between empty storefronts,

unmarked, merely at rest here,

unlikely; as though collected

to some purpose and then

abandoned, tooth cutters,

sprung and ratcheted lift handles,

reaper blades, lynch pins, spare parts,

shears and wheel bands scattered

among cordgrass and bottlebrush;

work is sketched our here in iron,

and forges steel, a hand at each blade,

knees and shoulders greased and bent,

the day-long clatter, jostled plow seat

spring on a single steel leaf, reins;

blackened with sweat and lather

traffic eases along

this main street, its commerce

long gone; nobody goes

to town anymore; they shop

at malls two or three

miles west, out where

the superhighways whine

all day and night like tree locusts;

beyond their farm-sized parking lots

cul de sacs multiply across

corn stubble and buffalo grass,

so many Fairviews, Hudson Heights,

Clear Creeks and Deer Runs…

Excerpt from poem copyright 2009 by Michael Anania

–Martin Luther King, Jr.

====================

“They came to a dry riverbed, paved with stones that were not flat and easily walkable but a torrent, a still torrent of stones between fields of corn and tobacco. [...]  When they could not walk anymore and the darkness would conceal them, they sat down on the white stones of the riverbed.”

–Alice Munro

====================

“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.”

–Miguel de Cervantes

====================

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

–Gabriel García Marquez, as translated by Gregory Rabassa

====================

Property is poverty–

I’ve foreclosed.

I own again

these walls thin

as the back

of my writing tablet.

And more:

all who live here–

card table to eat on,

broken bed–

sacrifice for less

than art.

–Lorine Neidecker

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/what-should-colleges-teach-part-2/

In his New York Times blog post for Sept. 1 (URL above), Stanley Fish has returned to the topic of teaching expository writing (see my brief post of August 25), this time to answer his critics—something he is very good at doing, since they have underestimated greatly his expertise and experience regarding this subject.  He sticks to his emphasis on “forms of thought”—such as a neither/nor sentence—and on how the form of such a sentence creates an abstract pattern of thought which, once learned, once internalized as an available pattern for one’s own thought, is infinitely useful for thinking about nearly anything.  And this argument is by implication very germane to the writing of fiction and poetry, too.

In these genres too there are forms of thought, both large and small, although not always in exactly the same sense—large-scale forms like the scene or the shape of a poem as a whole, and small-scale ones like statement and response in dialogue, or metaphor, or various uses of sounds of words.  Only some of these forms are as precise as the ones Fish mentions.  He writes, “A neither/nor sentence, or an even-though sentence or a nevertheless sentence, or a thousand other forms that can be studied and mastered — these do not clothe an antecedent content; they make it possible; they are not brought in to adorn a story; they are the story. In short — and I borrow this phrasing from my book editor Julia Cheiffetz — in learning how to write, it’s not the thought that counts.”

The “forms of thought” of poetry and fiction are just as enabling, just as much “the story,” as are the “forms of thought” of sentence-types.  When truly practiced, the way one might practice scales on a musical instrument (these too are, in their way, the first, most basic form of thought and feeling in music, and every other form of thought in tonal music is built on them)—when truly practiced, metaphor, metonymy, striking rather than expected word-pairs linked by sound (rhyme of one form or another), or forms of narrative sentences (paratactic, like Hemingway’s; complex and periodic, like Faulkner’s), or forms of marking movement in time (verb tenses)—all these forms of thought are available to the writer for use in addressing any and every subject, narrative, moment of interior life, and even the strangeness of language itself.  And what we call “style” is not a writer’s typical subject matter but rather a characteristic use of such forms of thought (although a typical subject matter might also be, on a much larger scale,a form of thought, when handled with a certain critical deliberateness, at the same time that it is the substance of expressive deliberateness, too).

And to think of drama is to realize that there are all kinds of forms of thought available there, too, which make possible certain thoughts and kinds of thought and feeling; the playwright must learn how to make use of them, how to exploit them, manage them, how to subvert rather than ignore them, no matter the subject or characters or dramatic mode of the play.

To say nothing about how Fish’s part two on this subject would make interesting reading, I would think, for any writer of creative nonfiction.

It’s all in the wrist, so to speak.  Which takes practice.

The epigram, the elegy, the sonnet, the epic, the isolated perception of the concrete world; the syllabic line, the stanza, the list; an invocation of the Muse or of God, the use of appropriated texts or subjects from historical sources,  intertwined narratives, the third-person omniscient point of view, diction as if of someone speaking—all of these and many more artistic devices, amount to forms of thought.  Writers call it “craft,” either with a strong sense of studying it the way one studies music, or looking down on it, with the rationale that learning such craft can never guarantee that anyone will write a memorable, or even a good, book.  Craft is not what writing is really about, they say.  They are right and they are wrong.   Those who really do learn such forms of thought often find they have more to say than they had dreamed of, now that they have learned ways of forming thoughts and feelings—or ways that invite thoughts and feelings to form.

The sentences at the head of this post are all both statements and forms of thought.

Several years ago I was going to meet the poet Sterling Plumpp at Blue Chicago on Clark St.  We had already known each other a long while, and I had interviewed him at great length (an excerpt of this interview appeared in a special section devoted to Plumpp’s work in the December 2005 issue of The Arkansas Review, along with appreciations by Duriel E. Harris, Jeffrey Renard Allen, and Michael Antonucci).  When I arrived at Blue Chicago the music was already at something close to excruciating volume–Willie Kent and his band.  They were at the other end of the narrow club, and as I made my way forward along the bar I looked for Sterling.  Only when I got to the front did I see him–sitting at the table that was closest to the band, and as they were rolling with raucous energy and high spirits, the speakers blasting on each side of them, there Sterling was, bent over some paper and writing, as if somewhere else entirely–somewhere quiet, sheltered from interruption and distraction.  I sat down next to him and shouted into his ear:  I understand now!  This is your Paris café!  He grinned broadly and nodded his head.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

See the video “Jimmie Lee Robinson and Sterling Plumpp on Maxwell Street”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZVyOiUypQs

And the video of Plumpp speaking at the Center for the Writing Arts conference in fall 2007, on the CWA home page (click on “VIDEOS”)

Sometime soon I hope to post the transcript of my complete interview with Plumpp on this site.  In it he recounts his early experience, his sense of poetry, music, greatness in both arts, and his purposes and interests as a teacher.

In today’s New York Times Stanley Fish takes up the subject of whether college and university courses that teach expository writing should–as they mostly do–bring that instruction to students under the banners of the sorts of topics that interest students already, and use the students’ interest in particular subjects as the pretext for instructing them on grammar, syntax, rhetoric, argument, evidence. Fish wonders justifiably whether most graduate students, who teach the great majority of such courses in the USA, are themselves good enough writers to be teaching writing to others.

Mostly, Fish is quarreling with the political biases of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, but he is also agreeing with their insistence that when writing is to be taught, it should be the sole focus of a writing course.  This point is evidently contained in a new report from the ACTE, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities. ”

These controversies are not going to be resolved any time soon.  I am pondering what they might say, indirectly, about creative writing courses, too, both undergraduate and graduate workshops.  The intense desire to write, or at least to be a writer, surpasses the capabilities of most students at both levels to write clearly, strongly, and eloquently.  I sometimes sense in my own classes that when I am taking apart a technical matter, demonstrating what it is and how it works, and doing so in a way that makes it learnable, some of my students may be only tolerating my curious arguments, and waiting for me to finish making my points so that our discussion can go back to elements of fiction or poetry or nonfiction prose that are fuzzier–the gender politics of a piece, the setting, the emotional trajectory of it.  All of which are too important for us not to ponder, too.  Yet I can’t help thinking that the ways in which it is hard to think through such fuzzier matters are for most of us based on what we already feel, and not on learning how to think or feel differently.  Whereas my experience is that going further and further, in each draft, toward handling with greatest deliberate effect the verb tenses, the word choice, the images, the syntax (especially), really is at the heart of what we become able to think and feel anew, or even for the first time, when we are writing.

Mt. Kitheronas, late August 2009 (Petros Giannakouris-AP)

I was startled to see on the front page of the Washington Post web site yesterday, among photos of the wildfires burning near Athens, one that shows a nighttime silhouette of fire along the ridgeline of Mount Kithairon, as it was called in ancient Greek.  Here’s the caption:

“A fire burns on the mount of Kitheronas about 70 kilometers, (45 miles) west of Athens on Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009. More than 90 wildfires have ignited since Saturday across Greece, and six major fires were burning late Sunday. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) (Petros Giannakouris – AP”

Greek poetry thought with many methods, devices, artistic strategies, most of which poetry still uses, but one of them that we can’t access in the same way was thinking with a landscape in which many different values had already been inscribed by both myths and history.

Among the villages that have burned in these recent fires is Marathon, site of the famous battle between Athenians and invading Persians in the year 490 BCE–from which, according to legend, a runner was dispatched all the way to Athens to announce the improbable victory of the Greeks over a much larger force of their enemies.  Another village that has burned is Plataea–also the site of a decisive military victory, after the Persians, about a decade later, invaded once again.

While the surviving poetry of the ancient Greeks makes much less of such events than does the work of ancient historians, Persians, by Aeschylus, the oldest surviving Athenian tragedy, made dramatic-poetic use of the relatively recent Greek victories over the hated and dangerous Persians by reversing perspectives and portraying not noble Athenian warriors and commanders but instead defeated and pitiable Persian royalty.  This got Aeschylus into some trouble in Athens.

The battle sites were names so saturated with historical significance that not only the name (like Shiloh, Bull Run) but also, in a comparatively compact cultural region, the landscape itself kept signifying, for a very long while.  On the other hand, Kithairon, like some other natural sites, signified ideas that had been collectively created and elaborated within Greek mythology that associated mountain heights with the divine, with the sheer and gigantic force of nature–the antithesis of culture, thus of cities, laws, art, and armies.  So in Euripides’ Bakkhai (Bacchae) the place and name of Mt. Kithairon are used poetically to suggest a powerful pole of human experience that associates human violence (such as catching wild animals with bare hands and tearing them apart and eating their flesh raw) with natural force that can overwhelm everyday human force; that revives within civilized, settled human beings seemingly mythical, pre-civilized values and behavior (such as women roaming together in wilderness and wearing loose clothes held together at the shoulder not by little cords but by little live snakes) and mythical plenty (such as an easy, natural abundance, requiring no work, of water and honey and milk).

All that, too, is burning on Mt. Kithairon.  But it will not be consumed by fires.

From the OED:

1. a. A game in which one player gives a word or line of verse to which each of the others has to find a rime.

1660 PEPYS Diary 20 May, From thence to the Hague again playing at Crambo in the waggon. 1711 ADDISON Spect. No. 63 6 A Cluster of Men and Women..diverting themselves at a Game of Crambo. 1712 STEELE Ibid. No. 504 1 Those who can play at Crambo, or cap Verses. 1721 BAILEY, Crambo, a Play in Rhiming, in which he that repeats a Word that was said before, forfeits something. 1837 Blackw. Mag. XLI. 289 A sort of Hellenic cramboHesiod singing one verse, and Homer filling up the meaning with another.

b. dumb crambo: a game in which one set of players have to guess a word agreed upon by the other set, after being told what word it rimes with, by acting in dumb show one word after another till they find it. (Sometimes transf. = dumb show.)

2. transf. Rime, riming: said in contempt.

3. A fashion in drinking. Obs. (Cf. CRAMBE 3, quot. 1630.)

4. = CRAMBE, repetition. Also attrib. Obs.

5. attrib. and Comb., as crambo-rime, -song; crambo-clink, -jingle = sense 2.

1762 LLOYD Odes, Oblivion ii. 9 Sacred to thee the crambo rhyme. 1785 BURNS Ep. to Lapraik viii, Amaist as soon as I could spell, I to the crambo-jingle fell. 1786 On Scotch Bard i, A’ ye wha live by crambo-clink. 1789 F. BURNEY Diary 19 Feb., A crambo song, on his own name. 1876 CLERK in D. Macleod Life N. Macleod I. iii. 33 He would improvise crambo rhymes.

Of course there is also the possibility to consider Jackson’s strangeness–which Rev. Al Sharpton, in his eulogy, deflected back onto Jackson’s critics and questioners, somewhat unfairly I think, given how strange Jackson truly was and is (he was!)–in relation to conceptual art itself. One of the first things I suggested to my class was that we might think of our sitting in that classroom as a conceptual art project and could legitimately claim our performances and experiences as such if we–or someone else–properly framed it as such. They grasped this pretty quickly, but held it lightly, because of course they had to do lots of reading, participate in class conversations, and write papers, and unlike participants in a conceptual project, they couldn’t just walk out and not expect some direct effect on their grade. (Though I also always take to heart Gertrude Stein’s [in]famous response to a test in William James’s class, so….) But what if we think about Michael Jackson’s life, in all its rich strangeness, as a conceptual project, endlessly unfolding (still, after his death–remember he is posthuman), one that he might have been aware of, perhaps not in the ways that conceptual practices have been developed sinceGeorge Brecht, Allen Kaprow, and others in the late 1950s, but more broadly in light of such proto-conceptual theorists and practioners, people who did argue for and in several cases transform their lives into works or art, or at least break down the barrier between them to a striking degree, likeWalter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage, and situate some of the at-times disturbing aspects–Wacko Jacko!–in light of this constellatory perspective? We can start, say, with that chimpanzee….

A third perspective I thought of, particularly after reading a gossipy piece in one of the British tabloids–The Sun? The Mirror?–which purported to out Jackson (he had several gay male longterm boyfriends/lovers, etc.), was of Jackson as a queericon. I’m thinking of queerness in its array of meanings, in regard to issues of orientation, identity, sexuality, gender–and I know I wasn’t the only person who thought that Jackson had remade himself at various points into Diana Ross (as Dorothy, with that fro), then, at least facially, into the young Elizabeth Taylor, and then, as one of the late 1990s mugshots appeared to suggest, and perhaps not purposefully, into something on the order of Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, among others–family, another way of reading that “strange” that Sharpton evoked, or “funny,” as people might say, meaning in relation to normalized social categories more generally, “queer” might be another way of thinking about him and how he moved through the world. More than anything, his ways of living challenged all sorts of norms of American and African American middle-class respectability, which led to considerable criticism (no, we didn’t always love him, well, not all of us, no matter what people are saying now.) I’m also thinking of the arguments advanced a few years ago by scholars like Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and, in a different way, by José Estéban Muñoz andTim Dean, regarding queer antisocialities and approaches to hetero and increasingly homonormativities. If we expand the notions of the queer family (as my mother said to me tonight about Joe Jackson, “those are not his biological grandchildren!”), wouldn’t his creative and ever-shifting family unit, as well as the paternity of and his behavior with his 3 children be less grist for some of the tut-tutting that has occurred? (Then there’s the gaggle of children he had living with and visiting him at Neverland and elsewhere, though I am not, however, talking about the pedophilic allegations.) What about his (re-)conceptualizations of home, which sometimes ranged to the highly inventive? And on and on. One thought I had was, would thinking about Michael through a queer lens be yet another step towards normalizing away the queerness that made MJ often so compelling, iconic and singular? How far should the normalizing power of queerly reorienting one’s perspective go, for him or anyone else?

http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/we-are-all-writers-now/?hp

The idea is floated that with so many people participating in blogs, twitter, and texting, everybody is writing… something.  And while saying so may seem trivial, I don’t think there is any doubt that for better or worse–to be judged sometime in the distant future–this daily writing (even if more is written than is read) now becomes one more element in the matrix of literacy within which even the most serious writing arises.  Will more people read more sorts of things because they have gotten so used to texting?   Will more people stop reading as much as they used to because texting adds one more activity to their days and nights, which are already so saturated with distractions?

I remember the first time–10 years ago?–an undergraduate student of mine turned in a story in the form of e-mail correspondence between two characters.  We are already living in the era of serial novels in the form of text messages (Japan).  I remember that someone once published a novel in which the writing was entirely limited to the use of personal license plate wit in the state of California.  How, even subtly, does this shift in how writing is used change what passes through the mind, what nudges the expectations, of at least some readers, when they are engaged in the apparently so routinized act of reading?  Expectations of reading shorter compositions?  Fewer expectations of writing not as a site of thought but rather as a way of communicating information?

And I wonder if new practices of writing will have any effect on literacy itself?  Will more people want to be (more) literate?  What opportunity for thinking about this is available in considering together (1) a text message from someone who has recently learned how to read and (2) the kinds of first compositions in The Journal of Ordinary Thought, the literary (perhaps that’s the right word) journal published by the Neighborhood Writing Alliance in Chicago.  (This magazine offers readers the brief writings of students for whom demonstrating their new literacy implies being taken more seriously as human beings.)  See:

http://www.jot.org/journal_of_ordinary_thought.php

What happens to argument, analysis, the exploration of mind itself?  That is, not only how literacy works, but also what it produces: poems, tax returns, on-line purchases, short stories, medical research articles, plays, love letters (”Great Love Texts of the World”?), inscriptions on gravestones, grocery lists, classified reports on torture…  And how does the huge gap in literacy and technology, from one part of the world to the next, open or close the possibilities of writing, reading, thought, and feeling?

OK.  Thnx 4 rdng.

(More, much much more, of what is incomprehensible to non-texters, of whom I must be one, since I do it so seldom, at: http://www.netlingo.com/acronyms.php)

Davie served in the British navy during World War II, and was deployed to northern Russia.  Today this remarkable passage especially strikes me:

What my Russian time should have taught me, what it did teach me,–though I forgot the lesson, and I forget it still, much of the time–is that the writer’s sole duty is to report what was, as it was; and that, in the interest of serving that overriding obligation, he must be prepared to be numbered among the criminals, the perverts, the barbarians, even the unfeeling administrators.  In his other capacities–and he should have them, for no creature is much more piteous than the writer who is writer and nothing else, writer all through–he is required, like any other citizen, to take sides; and to take his side not idly and inconsiderately, but with scruple and imagination.  But while he is a writer, and insofar as he is a writer, he cannot afford to take sides, but must stand above or apart from them all–not dispassionately indeed, but on the contrary with a quite feverish passion.  That passion is not a compulsion, as for their different discreditable reasons the critics and the general public want it to be.  If the writer’s passion were compulsive then he could not be held to account for any of his actions, whereas for the mere dignity of his calling he has to be, and will demand to be, held accountable.  It is an American not a British idiom that conveys my sense of this: for the writer, insofar as he is a writer, “lays it on the line.”  He relates things as he has found them to be, in the world and in himself; and he may be as aghast as any of his readers at what he finds himself saying, at what (in despite of his own most cherished wishes) he finds himself required, by the mere facts of the case, to record.  That is what I learned, not just from the Russian writers I read in translation, but from trying to take stock of my own Russian experiences even as I experienced them.  It is a simple lesson that I have never learned well enough.

This is the very standard by which some of Davie’s own most admired poets nevertheless fail, in greater or lesser part, by Davie’s estimation and by the estimation of others; yet it was a measure of Davie’s sometimes surprising generosity that he stood by some writers whom others abandoned because of the writer’s hateful attitudes.  (In the work or the life or both–such as the Cantos of Ezra Pound; Pound was one enthusiasm which Davie and I, across our many differences, shared).  Davie goes on after this passage to look at how one might want to disentangle, though, the Russian idea of the writer as teacher, as moralist, from the English and European idea of the writer as witness.  As Davie says of himself in his book, he has struggled against his own moralistic impulses.  How I would like to have with Davie the conversation that the passage above would provoke, today!

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

The language was freshened by being broken up and by its having been used to create a visual image of something so everyday (in some neighborhoods, anyway), humble, and insignificant that it really does not usually even register on our senses as a thing in itself to which we pay direct attention.  Yet to bring it to our attention, in the way that Williams does, changes our experience of perceiving, and even of using words.

Then writers, and many others, became more aware, after the midpoint of the twentieth century, that language was not only subject to routinizing, which dulls our thinking, feeling, and perceiving, but was also becoming more and more the tool of a deliberate routinizing of thought, feeling and perception by political regimes and by advertising, as media expanded enormously and began to saturate the mental environment.  Would a second remaking of poetry, especially, break language out of these new routines, especially those that had been created, and were and are constantly being renewed, specifically in order to make conformism (especially the conformism of illusory individualism) and consumerism seem “natural”?  (To say nothing of much darker ruts of idea and emotion, like xenophobia, racism, sexism–I grew up in a white zone of segregated Texas, a pretty long time ago, and these large prejudices were the unwitting ground and basis of everyday conversation among my schoolmates, and presumably their parents.)

In fact, there have been many instances of poetic attempts to free language from such associations–instances of different kinds, from poets with different approaches to poetry: organic form poets, surrealists, beat poets, Bolinas poets, Black Arts poets, worker poets, Nuyorican poets, “language” poets, and many more.  Why was there never a mass appetite for freshened language?  (Some of this poetry, in all these groups and others, was very good; some was, and is, as we should expect, sloppy, easy, trendy, bad.)  Maybe I should ask: Why was a genuine appreciation of freshened language not more genuinely widespread in our culture except in the form of a liking for certain clever advertisements?)

Might it be that with the passing of decades of ever more saturating media–which have resorted more and more to spectacle (fictional and real), violence (real and fictional), fear (real and artificial), and humor (satirical and stereotyping and ultimately only reinforcing received thought about what is “natural” and desirable)–we have grown more accustomed than we realize to living in a media echo chamber–so much so that being apart from it is what has come to seem unnatural?  Endlessly we adapt–like some small plant or water creature which over time adapts to the salinization of its wetlands and clings to existence as a species that is not aware of its own changes?

Most poetry, even some of the best, is readily understandable.  A large portion, including more of the best, is not so available to a reader unaccustomed to reading poems.  Bad poetry is often unconvincing and predictable even on its own terms of resistance to what it supposedly opposes or resists.  Given how many poetic groupings, movements, schools, etc., there have been and are now, we might well wonder if the impulse to create art in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for anything else–and especially cannot be mistaken for what it opposes–has not led poets to a proliferation of gestures of freshening either our accounts of (mostly) ourselves, or our language(s).  Mere gestures.

People’s resistance to assaults–existential, philosophical, political, moral, spiritual, ethical, practical–dissipates as a state of assault endures and people adapt, as to a siege in wartime, or die, at least linguistically.  Many talking political heads on television are dead, as are many of the elected politicians they mostly associate with or chase after or theatrically condemn.  Listening to such media-heads is a kind of linguistic torture, as well as a moral one.  Perhaps we all cannot perceive fully the insanity of such a state of being.  Every time a new change occurs, we must adapt to that, in order to survive, and even our own earlier resistance, the resistance of earlier generations, may be forgotten in both form and substance.  And we do adapt to the water that grows increasingly salty, at least for a while.

Do we watch video of demonstrators in the streets of Tehran with fear for them?  Excitement?  Does it not become entertainment of a particularly vicious kind, very quickly?

I used to think we were trapped, in the USA, in a general media narrative–despite infinite amounts of evidence to the contrary–of good fortune (spiced by the usual racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc.).  Even after 2001.  (The good-fortune mode of self-defining–largely unconscious, to be sure–contains a subset of self-pity, among some: “Why do they hate us?  Us!”))  The narrative of good fortune holds up our economy.  While for most human beings, after all, for most of the life of our species, the feast has been an exceptional experience associated with beliefs in supernatural powers and blessings, with rituals or worship in observance of those powers, for us the feast is a continuously played, fragmented, TV Mahabharata of Money.  It seems that without a myth of the feast as a continuing, 24/7 experience, American consumerism would collapse.  (How ironic that the economic power that feeds our feasting has at its core a narrative of famine; but that is changing.)

In response to all this–genuine horrors, the saturation of the media and of the contemporary ideals of consumerism by the false idea of a continuous feast, and the ease with which we fall into routines of thought because of routines of language, and on the other hand, the infinite resources of language and the extraordinary riches of world poetry–what does poetry do?

Teaching at the summer residency of the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College for the past week or so, I have been given the added pleasure of a festival of birdsong far richer than what I hear at home in Evanston, Illinois.  And while I very much wish I knew more about so many of the singers who remain invisible among the lush foliage of a wet summer in Swannanoa, North Carolina, singers whose voices I do not recognize, I am most thrilled by the very visible mockingbirds, the male divas of treetops, the New World nightingales, performers of amazing stamina who go on and on as they improvise imitative medleys of other birds and other sounds, and return again and again to some of their own characteristic sounds.  (They aren’t all “notes” in our sense, because the pitches are really complex clusters rather than single frequencies, and some of the words a mockingbird sings are bird-onomatopoeia.)  I can hear a mockingbird now, in the early morning, improvising jazzily as I write this in my dormitory room.

A mockingbird singing while in the mood to perform its territorial and mating display is one of the most spectacular of vocal performances.  From a high vantage point the male bird flies straight up–ten feet or as much as fifty–while singing.  It sings all the way up, and keeps singing as it tumbles flamboyantly back down, wings extended, as if falling helplessly–and returns precisely to the same perch.  And it does this again and again, flashing the white bars on its gray wings as, in order to demonstrate utter mastery, it mimics disastrous disability.

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), the Italian composer, included in his score for the lovely “Pines of Rome” a recording of a nightingale.  Never having heard a live performance by a nightingale, I can’t help wishing that Respighi had auditioned a talented mockingbird for the part, too, before making up his mind.

(The talent of individual birds does vary.  Where I grew up in East Texas, in a mostly very open stretch of land with few trees, there were plenty of mockingbirds, but they did not seem to be interested in singing, or very good at it, and mostly made a lot of imitative sounds of telephones, machine squeaks, whistles, and sirens, and inserted a lot of their own noisy buzzes–a kind of bird-tongued raspberry.  I wonder what it was that led them to sing so poorly, or failed to teach them to sing well.  There is, after all, song culture; and while human schools can be the worst in the whole warm-blooded world when they are located in poor or fanatic communities, condemning children to ignorance that is imposed on them by those who should nurture them instead, songbird communities, too, although more benign than our own, overall, apparently do better or worse jobs in teaching their young to sing.)

Although mockingbirds have been extending their geographical range northward for decades, I have not yet heard one in Evanston.  So I love to hear them in North Carolina.  By chance I was able to attend an unforgettable mid-afternoon display performance in Swannanoa several summers ago that was so varied and so long, while the bird was so acrobatic in mid-air, that I was sorry it had not been the culminating poetry reading in the series of them by faculty and students that was going on indoors 100 yards away each night.  After all, mockingbirds sing at night, too.  (And, I should add, that’s a song in a different mood.  According to ornithological sources, male mockingbirds who have not found a mate sing more than those who have, and only the lonely ones sing at night.)

I came out of a building and the performance was already in progress, I listened for half an hour, and then had to tear myself away from this spectacle and go to a workshop, so I don’t know how long the bird went on.  He was working from the peak of the roof of a building, as if to imply that however well we were all singing, he was on campus, too, and we couldn’t touch him.

I suppose that young birds instinctively take in some of what they hear their elders singing, and learn not only within their own families but also from competing singers.  And then at maturity the males must out-sing their competitors for territory and mates, and, like poets and fiction writers, are good at stealing.  Art not only imitates both art and nature, but is in some sense both nature and art.  But we have nothing to teach the mockingbird.  We have misnamed it, too, in English–better if we had called it the mimicbird…  unless it is mocking us with its virtuosity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html

The flute, a narrow, delicate instrument which in its undamaged form was about a foot long, may be as old as 40,000 years–the date that Gary Snyder has often used to suggest how long ago poetry itself, as song and prayer, was first composed and chanted, as a natural part of rituals that included sacred dance.

The purposes for which prehistoric Homo sapiens might have used poetry are easy to imagine in general but impossible to imagine in particular.  Words with special phonemic coloring and special rhythms, when uttered to propitiate a god, bless a child, curse an enemy, or sanctify a hunt, would have seemed just efficacious enough–given that some weather and harvests and hunts, some babies, come out well, and some enemies do falter and depart or are killed–to have seemed magically powerful.  As in all religions, to this day, the words that did not bring desired outcomes could be blamed for their failure on the person who chanted them, perhaps, or on stronger magic from elsewhere, or on an indifferent or angry god.

Our own propitiations, blessings, curses, and the like continue in all languages, but we don’t often think of our words in this way except when praying.  In fact, much more than prayer participates in such magical hopes; yet the hopes don’t need to be magical for the words to be effective, sometimes, since we are all, as human beings, tremendously responsive, and in fact vulnerable, to what is said to us and about us.  Not least because others may act on the basis of those words.

Which raises the question of how our own poetry and fiction, and other writings, too, draw on the genuine powers of language–which can be explained by linguistics, psychology, traditions of the arts, and (in our time and place), 40,000 years from somewhere, by money, too, and spectacular fantasies, and mistaken beliefs.

However that may be, what a beautiful little flute, and what a reverie one might awaken in oneself thinking about it.

A few recent events I’ve attended have included readings by Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who spoke at the university as part of the Program in African Studies‘ 60th anniversary; authors Thomas Glave and Dorothy Allison, who presented new work at Women & Children First bookstore; and anthropologist and leading scholar of Afro-Atlantic religions J. Lorand Matory, who spoke on his new book project as part of DePaul University’s African Diasporic studies series.

Tsitsi Dangarembga visited the university as part of the Program in African Studies’ yearlong celebration of its 60th anniversary. (I believe it’s the oldest in the United States.) I found myself delivering an impromptu introduction for Dangarembga, which was an honor to do as I’ve been a fan of her work for some time, and have repeatedly taught her first novel Nervous Conditions, which I imagine is probably one of the best known novels outside Africa by a late 20th century African woman writer. Dangarembga, whose name I pronounced correctly phonetically (though the accented syllable was wrong–I think she pronounced it Dahng-GAHRM-gah) read from that book, and its sequels, The Book of Not (Oxford: Ayebia Clark) and the third in the trilogy, Bira, which cumulatively explore the life trajectory of her protagonist, Tambudzai, as she grows up in pre- and post-revolutionary Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, whose current sad fortunes the world is quite familiar with. The excerpt from the third, not-yet-published book in the trilogy was particularly disturbing; in it, Tambudzai, whom society has molded into an utterly alienated quasi-person, not only witnesses, but cheers on a violent attack against a coquettish young woman who fails to show proper decorum, in behavior and clothing, at a bus station. Dangarembga talked about all three books, her filmmaking career (the university screened two of her films, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to catch), and the difficulties, especially economic, of life in Zimbabwe today. In response to one graduate student’s query, she discussed writing in English, which she feels most comfortable working in and which has allowed her to reach a wide audience, alongside Ngugi’s dictum to write in an African language, which in her case would be Shona. One of the problems for anyone writing in Shona, as opposed to English (the colonizers’ language, of course), or some other African languages like Yoruba or Gikuyu, is the lack of any mechanism of standardization for Shona. When I mentioned this to a Zimbabwean student at the university, he agreed, and said it was an issue under debate back home.

On a page of a small cheap notebook orphaned by his death, the American fiction writer William Goyen (1915-1983) wrote:

1. Writing is waiting (for)
2. Finding the Voice.
Hearing the Voice.  Story is told to me,  I tell it to you.
Otherwise I don’t write–or can’t write.

Within the writer, another speaks–and says what we may not have expected, or may not have even wished to say.  Or what we expected not to want to say.  You must write what nobody wants to hear, Grace Paley used to say to fellow writers.  One of the most important keys to the doors of writing is that one must find a way to free oneself to write, to have written, already, what one had not entirely wished to say beforehand.  In the writing practice of H駘鈩e Cixous, an unforeseen, unanticipated and apparently mistaken articulation is the unpredicted and invaluable entrance to imaginative freedom.  In what way?  In that we can sometimes see in such apparent accidents or supposed slips the same readiness of the unconscious, the intuition, that is, the full imagination, to bring to conscious awareness something that we are ready to perceive and to acknowledge and, as writers, to use.

In the American writer William Maxwell’s last novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), the author-narrator (Maxwell’s very explicit blurring of a distinction between the two is part of this novel’s strength) describes a moment in his boyhood when, after having moved from a small town in Illinois to Chicago, he saw, or thought he saw, to his surprise, in the crowded hallway of his new high school, a boy he had once known–to whom he did not speak as they passed each other, because the author-narrator’s pained knowledge of the other boy’s tragic childhood in that same small town inhibited him from offering a greeting.  Instead, as he feels it decades later, he snubbed the other boy.

The reader meditating on this passage may feel that the author-narrator snubs the other boy because by the other boy the author-narrator is unconsciously reminded of his own continuing grief over the death of his mother during his childhood.  To keep from feeling his own pain, he refuses to empathize with that of the other boy.  But artistically I find it more productive to think of this moment the other way around–because of living in the aftermath of his own grief, ever present but unacknowledged, the author-narrator is unable, among his welter of impressions in the school hallway, not to see a boy who is or who resembles someone he knew elsewhere.  He sees that boy because the two of them are in one way the same (their grief) even though they are also completely different.  In the emotional structure of the novel, the other boy is a metonym for the author-narrator’s own feelings.  The author-narrator already is unconsciously seeking a vision of the other boy, and finds it, or is called by it.

So it happens that unconsciously we call for certain texts to call us.  We are read, as we read, by those texts that enable us to read what we are now prepared to read but have not yet read (even if we have read it before).  And we are written, sometimes with the effect of falsifying ourselves, but at other times with the effect of liberating ourselves–by language, by other texts, by our own effort to produce an authentic widening of our experience–to articulate “a truth won from life against all odds, because a truth in and about a mode of experience to which the mind is normally closed,” as the English poet Donald Davie once put it.

This process is not merely self-reflexive, which would become self-oppressive and is in any case insufficient to consciousness; the process also brings to our awareness our unconscious understanding of words and the world, of self and of our past selves, and this allows us to change our understanding.

As I write, what follows my sense of myself is my sense of my not-self and of my after-self, as the impulse to write is followed by the writing–there, on the paper, on the desk, outside of me.

The productive effect of the writer’s differentiation from himself or herself, the writer’s self-alienation, I myself first understood in a social sense, when reading Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams.  These writers could not address in their writings the communities of those whose experience they shared and on whom they drew for the substance of their work, because those communities were cut off from–respectively–literacy, in the case of the American slaves, whose way of life Douglass had escaped; poetic innovation and mastery, to say nothing of highly unconventional metaphysical daring and God-doubting in the case of Dickinson’s backwater Amherst (and, as it turned out, sophisticated Boston as well); and again literacy, both literal and cultural, in the case of the immigrant families whom Williams treated as a physician, and about whom he wrote out of his intense responsiveness to their experience (see his poem “Complaint,” published in 1921, and his well-known story, “The Use of Force,” collected in 1950 but originally published earlier–and I do not forget his remarkable In the American Grain, but I have no space at present in which to try to put this thinking into relationship with Williams’s sense of how we Americans have been formed in a grain that is distinct from that of the European colonizers of this continent).  Douglass’s eloquent sentences include the famous juxtaposition of a symbol of the slave’s deprivation and suffering with a symbol of the literate man’s opportunity and obligation to write of the slave: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”   Dickinson’s poetico-theological challenges can still affright conventional belief.  None of these three wrote in order to please, yet each of them might well have wanted very much to please a community to which they could not write, a community of their own that would not understand what they were saying.

After I came to recognize the paradox of these writers’ having been separated from their own communities by their very purposes and practices of writing about, and on behalf of, but not to, and even against the grain of, those communities, I realized that Rimbaud’s formulation of poetic liberation, “je est un autre” ["I" is an other], might be not only a given or sought-for psychological state but equally a state socially produced in the writer, and in fact a valuable effect both psychological and social of the very act of writing.  (William Goyen used this famous motto of Rimbaud as one of the epigraphs to his novel The House of Breath [1950], where it has the effect of alerting the reader in advance to the multiplicity of selves who narrate the book, all of them also in some sense the author-narrator “Goyen.”)  The act and result of writing place something that was inside oneself outside oneself, since writing is not at all a wholly internal process, even when a poet composes in his mind before recording the poem, but an act that produces this something that then exists outside the writer.  “Writing” does not necessarily exist at all inside oneself beforehand.  Helene Cixous says, “This is how I write: as if the secret that is in me were before me” (Rootprints, 67).

Among other reasons, writing is disruptive because paradoxically it is a release from, yet also an intrusion on, the non-writing or preliterate part of ourselves.  Writing may solace many of those who write and read, but at times it also disturbs those who do, a disturbance that is itself an energy carrying the writer into the work.  Trauma again.  Perhaps writing often disturbs those who do not write and read, for whom the act of writing seems to be a falsification of the potential veracity of the living voice.  This belief is without foundation, but it is understandable.  I recall being insistently ordered to tell orally “in my own words” what was already in my own words but written down and lying unread on the table, when I stood before a draft board in Houston during the war in Viet Nam.  The three members of that draft board were disturbed not only by what I had written in order to make certain ethical claims, but also by the fact that I had written it.

I am reminded by this of a scene in Patrick White’s historical novel Voss (1957), in which he portrays doomed European early explorers of the Australian interior.  (But we are not doomed when exploring our own interior, even if we sometimes cannot help, complicated creatures that we are, sometimes feeling that our old selves are doomed, either because we cannot discover how to change them and escape being ruled by them, or because we do discover how.)  At a moment when the expedition led by Voss has passed the point of return, Patrick White’s explorers write letters that they think may be their last, they entrust the letters to their sole aboriginal guide, an old man whom they call by the name Dugald, and they send him back toward the now very distant white settlements to deliver them.  Wandering without haste, half-clothed in European garb that is a metonym for western culture, Dugald encounters a group of fellow aborigines.  They notice the flash of white in the pocket of his ragged European coat, and they want to see the letters:

One young woman, of flashing teeth, had come very close, and was tasting a fragment of sealing-wax.  She shrieked, and spat it out.

With great dignity and some sadness, Dugald broke the remaining seals, and shook out the papers until the black writing was exposed.  There were some who were disappointed to see but the pictures of fern roots.  A warrior hit the paper with his spear.  People were growing impatient and annoyed, as they waited for the old man to tell.

These papers contained the thoughts of which the whites wished to be rid, explained the traveller, by inspiration: the sad thoughts, the bad, the thoughts that were too heavy, or in any way hurtful.  These came out through the white man’s writing-stick, down upon the paper, and were sent away.

Away, away, the crowd began to menace and call.

The old man folded the papers.  With the solemnity of one who has interpreted a mystery, he tore them into little pieces.

How they fluttered.

The women were screaming, and escaping from the white man’s bad thoughts.

Some of the men were laughing.

Only Dugald was sad and still, as the pieces of paper fluttered round him and settled on the grass, like a mob of cockatoos.

In this little parable of oral culture versus writing culture, White portrays the exteriorizing of thought and feeling in the act of writing.  “Bad” thoughts come out in writing and are sent away; “good” ones do, too, we might add.  We western readers see that this is true, in a somewhat but not wholly mistaken way.

So because it is partly the unconscious content of individual psyche and shared language, personal feelings and learned attitudes that is there, “alienated” onto the page, one reads text not only with the eyes but, as White vividly illustrates, with one’s whole culture, one’s whole web of beliefs, even (and especially) with one’s tongue (in both senses).  The young woman tastes the sealing wax, which is the mark of the privacy of the written letter, the interiority of it, the authenticity of it.

As Cixous puts it, one reads with “the body.  The entrails.  Of the soul also” (Rootprints, 90).  (Neuroscientists like Anthony Damasio have established the great degree to which the body as well as the mind produces feeling and thinking, and consciousness itself; ancient writers beginning with Homer characterized all thinking and feeling as located in the body in ways that neuroscience, and post-Enlightenment thinkers like Cixous, now prove and theorize–not in order to negate reason, but in order to attend to the full capacity of reason.)  Cixous writes with the body, longhand; she cannot achieve her “interior voyage” with a machine; writing longhand, “it is as if I were writing on the inside of myself” (Rootprints, 105).   For her, one emblem of this act is Stendhal’s secret childhood writing on the inner waistband of his trousers (Rootprints, 103).

So from one’s own belly, from one’s emotional entrails, one foretells one’s own past feelings and thinking.  The written page is the waistband around one’s life.  One must work to foretell not only the distant past but also the very moment before writing the words one is now reading.  One reads with one’s entrails the entrails that, unlike those of a sheep or a cock, are one’s own and did not require one’s dying in order to be produced.  Or maybe this foretelling of one’s own past being (that is, this act of writing), did require one’s death.  Let’s remember Wordsworth’s poem!

Cixous says, “The relationship to death is fundamental.  It’s the cause.  We live, we start writing from death.”  (By “we” in this particular statement she means herself and Jacques Derrida, her close friend.)  “But: for me, death is past.  It has already taken place.  My own.  It was at the beginning” (Rootprints, 82).  In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous sends writers first of all to what she calls “The School of the Dead.”  If we want to write at all truthfully–

(I hope you will forgive me if I use the word “truth.”  The moment I say “truth” I expect people to ask: “What is truth?”  “Does truth exist?”  Let us imagine that it exists.  The word exists, therefore the feeling exists.) (Three Steps, 36)

–we must at least “try to unlie” (Three Steps, 36).  And “writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth” (Three Steps, 37).  But to try to tell it, we try to see and to write as if we were not ourselves.  We stand apart.  Apart from others: “Between the writer and his or her family the question is always one of departing while remaining present, of being absent while in full presence, of escaping, of abandon” (Three Steps, 21).  (Here’s another sort of “de-famili-arization”–which is not unrelated to the linguistic kind.)  Again I think of William Goyen, who seems to me to have been one of the greatest American practitioners of “ecriture feminine”; in an interview that he gave in 1982, the year before he died, to a French literary magazine, Masques, he said:

Despite their disapproval [meaning, of his parents], I applied myself to writing in order to liberate myself. [...]  I was close enough to my family, but also very alone.  I didn’t understand anything about the pursuits and interests of children my own age.  What they did didn’t appeal to me.  I was alone and remained alone, with one wish: to leave.  I would remain sitting in a corner for hours.  This would greatly annoy my friends.  It was always like this.  Next, I set myself to using anything that allowed me some form of escape (sex, pills, alcohol, etc.).  And now, regardless of where I find myself (at a concert, a restaurant . . .), I always sit where it will be possible for me to leave, because in my head, it is possible that I’ll be inclined to do just that. (Goyen, n.p.)

Perhaps this readiness to depart is a commonplace among writers of a certain temperament.  But if it is indeed an idea, a stance, a possibility, that the writer can use, it remains not very often used.  There is a broader sense of it in the French aphorism of Samuel Beckett that Goyen liked to quote–”L’artiste qui joue son etre est de nulle part. Il n’a pas de pays. Et il n’a pas de frere.” As Goyen himself paraphrased it: “The artist who uses his life completely, throws it full into the tide, is of no place.  And he has no country, he has no kin.”  And this, from a writer who was utterly grounded in, fascinated by, a captive of, local place–both culturally and linguistically–in his portrayal of small-town East Texas in the first half of the twentieth century.  The aphorism is not only about that; it is also about the second sort of standing apart existentially–from ourselves and others.

That is, from our own experience.  We go back to what we lived as if someone else had mowed that field.  The aphorism is about a moment when one can achieve a psychological, not a mortal, dying to oneself and to those whom one both loves and hates, or at least an absence from them, if one is to write a certain kind of truth about oneself and about others, about the world.  Cixous says: “Writing is first of all a departure.”  (But–this departure does not mean that the writer as a person must exist outside any human community.  Poetry and community–a topic for another time.)

Our being, as it was at an earlier time in life, especially childhood, can seem like another self who has died but whom we feel is somehow still alive; or is a self whose live presence we think we feel inside ourselves, even though we know that she or he is chronologically dead.  I think the first person who has left a record of such a feeling in poetry is William Wordsworth, in his early poem “There Was a Boy,” which he published originally in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800).  A few years later Wordsworth used this poem in a different way, including it with slight alterations in Book 5 of the second version of his long poem, The Prelude (1805).  The first published version reads as follows:

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye Cliffs
And Islands of Winander!  many a time,                         [Winander=lake Windermere]
At evening, when the stars had just begun                    ["earliest stars began" in 1815]
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake,
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Press’d closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.  And they would shout
Across the wat’ry vale and shout again,
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled, a wild scene
Of mirth and jocund din!  And, when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven receiv’d
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,
The vale where he was born: the Church-yard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school;
And there along that bank where I have pass’d
At evening, I believe, that near his grave
A full half-hour together have I stood,
Mute–for he died when he was ten years old.

We do not look to such a poem for rapid movement; in the blank verse of this poem and The Prelude, Wordsworth is rather slow-paced and relaxed in his delivery, despite the intensity of his feeling.  He writes without narrative urgency, as if he had all the time in the world, but he does sometimes achieve sudden and striking motion on a larger scale.  The moment he describes in this poem is most notable not for the accuracy of its detail or the vividness of its imagery, but for its presentation of a psychological movement.

And in fact Wordsworth’s goal in describing this moment was explained to us by his friend (for a while) Thomas de Quincey; it was to capture a kind of psychological phenomenon that Wordsworth may have noticed in advance of any other thinker.  In Wordsworth’s words, as reported by De Quincey: “I have remarked from my earliest days that if, under any circumstances, the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment any beautiful, any impressive visual object, or collection of objects, falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances.”

De Quincey reports that Wordsworth gave him two examples–the first, from a midnight walk in the Lake Country when Wordsworth knelt and put his ear to the ground to try to hear whether, beyond their sight, the wagon bringing mail might be approaching; he gave up and only then he noticed a bright star that “fell suddenly upon my eye, and penetrated my capacity of apprehension with a pathos and a sense of the infinite that would not have arrested me under other circumstances.”  The second example, Wordsworth drew from the poem I have quoted above.  Reading De Quincey we recover some of the freshness of what was apparently a new metaphor in Wordsworth’s lines, one that we no longer perceive as fresh; De Quincey (mis)quotes the poem and then comments upon it as follows.  When the boy stops listening for the owls,

then, at that instant, the scene actually before him, the visible scene, would enter unawares, “With all its solemn imagery.”  This complex scenery was–what?

Was carried far into his heart
With all its pomp, and that uncertain heav’n received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

This very expression, “far,” by which space and its infinities are attributed to the human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities of nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation.

I think it’s worth noting that Wordsworth feminizes the receptivity of the boy by making it analogous to the receptivity of the lake to the light of the stars; the lake is subtly feminine simply because it is a body of water (with many unconscious associations with the feminine established through centuries of art, literature, and thought).  The boy’s sudden perception, in the moment of release from his concentration on listening for owls, of the sound of water and of the scene around him, including the reflection of the stars in the still waters of the lake, ends with this latter image, and so does this main portion of the poem.

Turning then in another direction, Wordsworth intervenes in the first person to describe the boy’s birthplace and, surprisingly, his grave, noting that “he died when he was ten years old.”

In the version of this poem that Wordsworth used in this (the thirteen-book) version of The Prelude (5.389-422),  the last section is slightly different.  Wordsworth announces the boy’s death immediately after the image of the star-reflecting lake, and emphasizes this boy’s isolation from other children.

This boy was taken from his mates, and died
In childhood ere he was full ten years old.
Fair are the woods, and beauteous is the spot,
The vale where he was born.  The churchyard hangs
Upon a slope above the village school,
And there, along that bank, when I have passed
At evening, I believe that oftentimes
A full half-hour together I have stood
Mute, looking at the grave in which he lies.

We cannot help feeling that Wordsworth regards the dead boy as a spirit akin to his own, especially since the village school he mentions near the end was his own childhood school, and since in The Prelude he spends so much time recounting his own childhood responsiveness to nature–an education apart from and deeper than the education he received in schools.  So to me the most interesting thing about this poem is that in fact it was drafted by Wordsworth in an uncertain mixture of third- and first-person narration.

That is, it was himself as a boy whom Wordsworth originally presented in this poem, a boy who cleverly imitated the calls of owls and eagerly listened for their reply and into whom the natural scene penetrated, producing in him a kind of mystical experience of nature.  First-person lines in Wordsworth’s manuscript notebooks include line 13, “Responsive to my call with tremulous sobs”; line 17, “That pauses of deep silence mock’d my skill”; and line 22, “Would enter unawares into my mind.”  Wordsworth commented in later life, “Written in Germany, 1799.  This is an extract from the Poem on my own poetical education.”

That Wordsworth would recast his own experience in the third person does not seem as unusual as his way of seeing himself as either a now dead, half-imagined, half-real childhood companion of himself, or as himself, truly, as he once was, but now dead to himself.  Wordsworth the writer is another person, not the boy.  In fact, Wordsworth’s rewriting of line 3 for an edition in 1815 seems, in this light, to be an almost wistful suppressed (”unconscious” we would now say) echo of an idea now expunged from the poem, repressed–that he in his own childhood was one of the “earliest stars,” and can now only be seen from afar.

There’s another sign of Wordsworth’s attempt to grasp this uncanny feeling about himself, this uncanny aspect of our being, in the way that in the three different versions of this poem, the boy is given three different ages.  In the first version he is ten years old.  In the second version (1805) he is not yet a “full ten years old”–that is, he is nine.  In the last version of The Prelude, published in 1850, Wordsworth again changed the last stanza in several small ways, one of them being the age of the child.  Here he dies “ere he was full twelve years old”–that is, he is eleven.  If the story were based on some other boy, real or imagined, then tinkering with the age of the boy would seem superfluous; but we know that Wordsworth is thinking of himself here as another person, a child who is alien to himself the adult.  That is, Wordsworth seems to be groping for a sense of exactly when the psychic death of the boy occurred–and this would of course be a very difficult thing to pin down in anyone, perhaps above all in oneself.  In 1850, Wordsworth also deletes the woods and calls the churchyard “grassy”–as if to suggest a certain openness of the space around the grave of his child-self.   (And in this meditation in several sections, I have earlier meditated a little on the grass that is mowed, that is a “math.”)

By far the most interesting poem here is an imaginary composite that we ourselves can construct, in which we can see the daring of Wordsworth’s deep poetic logic.  In this composite poem, the poet describes his own experience in the first person, in lines 1-25, then sees himself as a dead boy whom he describes in the third person, in lines 26-32.  That is, Wordsworth uses poetry as the site of a psychological experiment, seeing his earlier self as an other, presenting the idea that the boy’s responsiveness to nature died, although the boy grew into a man who then sought for that responsiveness in himself again and again, perhaps willing within the poem what he could not experience in life.

The boy is dead; Wordsworth knows himself as that boy, still alive; or the boy is still alive in the man, yet Wordsworth knows that in some deep sense he is dead; his responsiveness to nature is now inaccessible to the man.  It would be 75 years later and in another language, the language par excellence of modern European rationality (Descartes) and yet of feeling, too (Rousseau), that the French poet Arthur Rimbaud completed this thought and explicitly stated that the self is multiple and implied that writing inherently, unavoidably alienates the writer from himself or herself in a way that may shock the self but is also very productive.

I think of Cyrus Colter telling how he wrote out James Joyce’s “The Dead” and works by Faulkner, to learn “how to write those sentences.”  He  meant this in a way that is completely literal yet brings with it a deep learning process.  And there are many other stories of this sort.  And as Brooks reminds us, the practice habits and sheer energy and stamina of most great musicians are legendary.  (But, out of philosophical habit, I would think, Brooks does not account, as he should, for why some musicians may practice eight hours a day and yet never become great.  Etc.)

I come from the other side at the artistic issue that is implied here–wanting, as I have mentioned in earlier posts, to raise to consciousness what intuition is already doing in my process of drafting and revising my work, so as to draw more deeply on what I know but aren’t aware I know–experientially, emotionally and intuitively.  By de-automatizing my “natural” habits of writing, I hope to draw more deeply on the truth and reality of my lived experience, rather than on what I have learned unconsciously, unwittingly, lifelong, to think of as my experience, simply because my culture–anyone’s culture–inevitably imposes this narrowness.  (Why does it do so?  Because our psychic mechanisms–for survival, first, and then for flourishing–keep us all most comfortable when we accept what passes for common knowledge, received opinion, the shared sense of the way things simply, inevitably, are.  Even many who have devoted themselves to rebellion or difference of one kind or another are subject to this mechanism, and may satisfy it by joining with others who rebel in similar ways.  We human beings must expend a lot of energy to see what reality is–outside us and within us–and to represent it, in one way or another, in writing.  And when we can write with some of that truth to experience, we find that in fact we are speaking to a deeper layer of shared knowledge than everyday consciousness.)

David Brooks’s summary of recent research and thinking suggests, from his direction, which is a more pragmatic one, that disrupting our automatic processes of artistic (and even sports) practice may not only give us the hard-won good results of our ability to “develop a deliberate, strenuous and boring practice routine,” but may also be related to our becoming aware of what we are thinking, feeling, writing, doing. And thus we are able to do it more deliberately. Able to think, as well as feel and react.  (To return to a point I made above, but in a different way: we do a lot of instinctive reacting, out of our impulse toward self-preservation; but self-preservation is not the key impulse in the actual practice of art, no matter how much any particular artist’s art-making may also help keep him or her alive.  Even physically.)

David Brooks’s Op-Ed piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html

Writing anything at all is a sweeping oversimplification of our inner life and of the complexities of the world outside us, yet it is also the making of an object.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau described thinking in this way: “[Ideas] comes when they please, not when it suits me.  Either they do not come at all, or they come in a swarm, overwhelming me with their strength and their numbers.  Ten volumes a day [of my journals] would not have been enough.  How could I have time to write them?”   The pell-mell helter-skelter of thought can never be grasped adequately by the conscious mind, much less represented in written form, not even in the most freely associative stream-of-consciousness fiction, because writing must reveal itself in the dimensions of time and language, while thought achieves many simultaneities and a rapid succession of thoughts and feelings that are not even fully articulated, much less organized in such a way as to be communicated to anyone else.

“We’re too unconsciously productive to ever be able to fully grasp ourselves,” as the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas puts it (my italics).  How still are the plans and projects and categories and analysis of the intellect, compared to the pitching and running of the whole mind!  Consciousness is one rider on all the racing horses of the unconscious; when we must analyze words and events and defend ourselves against the manipulation of our feelings by others, it is consciousness that guides us; and when we must seek in our own being that which really matters to us, it is the unconscious that holds the lamp.  Yet consciousness is often insufficient to these tasks.  Hence our need to learn, from parents, and the best teachers, and all mentors official and unofficial, how to analyze, how to reason, how to sort out what is real and true and how to make decisions in the midst of our reactions to rushing circumstances, conflicting loyalties, deliberate lying and spinning, and all kinds of crisis.

So our experience of writing is twofold–the hope of expressing something that will satisfy our impulse to speak what is true to and of ourselves and true to our experience of the world, and the hope of making something that will gratify our pleasure in shape and proportion, rhythm and sound, movement and pace.  (And perhaps, in some writers, pleasures, whether questionable or merely artful, of manipulating readers.)  When we as writers can trust not only reason but also an intuition that somehow is honest, then we can manage to hear as much as possible of what intuition is saying, since it has already spoken in our drafts.  Bollas writes that “the sense of intuition” leads us “to consciously authorize certain forms of investigation in thought which are not consciously logical but which may be unconsciously productive” (1994, 90).  What is the complex way of thinking that is writing fiction or poetry, if not precisely that?

The novelist Cyrus Colter (1910-2002) once told me a down-to earth version of all this.  Colter–whose family might have been the only blacks in the whole white country where Colter grew up in southern Indiana–moved to Chicago after college, put himself through law school by working as the night clerk at a YMCA on the South Side, practiced–as he said–any kind of law he could, and eventually achieved great professional distinction as a long-time member of the Illinois Commerce Commission.  Having been a tremendous reader of fiction all his life, he began to write when he was fifty.  He published his first book, the superb collection of short stories, The Beach Umbrella, at the age of sixty, and went on to write several novels, among which The Hippodrome is the most shocking and astonishing and A Chocolate Soldier is his masterwork of narration of the hard truths of race in America.

I first met him in 1984, when he was seventy-four years old.  His wife had died earlier that year, and the sorrow of that loss never left him afterward.  When I asked him, perhaps five years later, what his wife–who was, to judge from his descriptions of her, a more conventional person than he–had said about his books, he replied that he had never shown a new work to her until he had completed it, and then only with some trepidation.  Colter was tall, imperious, a talker with considerable momentum, so I was surprised at the caution with which he had gone to the now departed Imogene for her response to his writing.  Given the inescapably autobiographical dimension of everything we write–precisely in this sense of the unconscious that I am trying to describe, in that everything we write shows at some level what our obsessions and preoccupations are–I had been wondering how Colter had handled the sometimes ticklish problem of personal diplomacy between the writer and the members of his family.  He said that Imogene, having read the typescript, would return it to him and, if he had done what he hoped, she would say the one thing–he told me–that he most needed to hear, most needed to know, and which at the same time removed from her the burden of commenting in detail: “Cyrus,” she would say, “it’s you.”

That is to say that the novel, no matter what it described, conveyed (as she recognized, looking with her whole being, conscious and unconscious) his whole being (not only the lawyerly competence, propriety and combativeness by which others knew him, his affability or imperiousness with others, his literary ambitions).  He had the gift of knowing himself more fully than he might have been thought to know himself, even by close friends.  Without this, even with his late-blooming literary craft and his preparatory wide lifelong reading, his accomplishment would have been minor.  He used all of what he had.

While the lattermath harvest of grass is scanty, the aftermath of experience and feeling can be rich.  It is only afterward that we have enough to work with.  Wordsworth’s well-known phrase “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is accurate enough, if by “emotion” we understand every sort of feeling and thought, even–perhaps especially–the body’s sense of what it experiences: what it knows, what it remembers, beyond consciousness, and every such fleeting feeling and thought whether or not we have a name for it; and if by “recollected” we mean simply having been preserved within us in such a way as to remain available to us, in some form or other, whether we try to remember it and do, or it comes to consciousness without our trying to remember it at all, or it reveals itself to us only through an arduous and even traumatic process of self-inquiry; and by “in tranquillity” we mean at least sometime after the activity of body and mind that is experience itself.

But I must end with a reminder of the deep pleasure of writing.  It may not be the kind of pleasure that makes one smile.  It may be a pleasure that seems to satisfy us most when we are least on guard against our worst tendencies as writers (which vary, naturally enough, from writer to writer).  Pleasure it is, though.   Pleasure–however desperate, at moments, for reasons personal, psychological, artistic, or political–of catching hold of, or creating out of imagination, the language and the image for what we sense, see, know, and feel.

When I became the editor of TriQuarterly magazine in 1981, it was the example of Ted and Renée that was uppermost in my mind, and stayed very much in mind till I left the editorship in 1997.

My interview with Ted Weiss was less about the magazine, though, than about his own writing and his sense of poetry in general.  He was one of the greatest talkers about poetry I have even encountered, especially in the 1990s when he had the longest view of it, looking back at his own work and the work of his contemporaries.  Among his own poems (which can be found in his Selected Poems (Northwestern University Pres, 1995), I especially recommend:

“The Dance Called David” (and see the special issue of QRL from the 1980s on the figure at the center of this poem, the remarkable poet David Schubert, who burned himself out in one way or another and died young)

“The Last Day and the First”

“The Heir Apparent”

“The Last Letters”

“Things of the Past”

“The Polish Question”

“A Living Room”

“The Death of Fathers”

Here’s the link (you may have to cut and paste it in your browser):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200105/ai_n8945900

What is good writing?

First, a caveat: There are a few works that everyone agrees are good—such as the plays of Shakespeare. But it’s easy to find disagreement about most other literary efforts. For example, the 1980 Atlantic Monthly reviewer of Raymond Carver’s (now classic) story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, wrote: “There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”

So, what criteria should The Journal editors use? I’ve come up with some attributes of good writing. They’re not exhaustive. And you may disagree with them. I’ve also provided examples and definitions you can find on line. Just click twice on the URLs.

Good writing has fresh language. The words are not trite or cliched. If there’s repetition, it’s deliberate and artful—to make a point, for emphasis, to please the reader’s “ear.” There’s a mix of rhythms in the sentences—OK, except for Hemingway. Great writing also helps you see the world in a new way, by the writer’s perceptions.

Most successful pieces inform the reader how to read the piece. For example, an essay with a light beginning “tells” or signals the reader that the rest of the piece will follow suit. If the tone changes dramatically, the reader will be confused. If a piece begins realistically, the reader will expect the rest of the piece to be realistic (unless the author manages to ease the reader into the unreal).

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

PROSE:

1. Realistic stories, memoirs and travel pieces

Novelist John Gardner said that readers “recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language…” Good writing should be smooth and consistent and detailed enough so that the reader isn’t jerked out of her “dream” while reading it. For example, if a writer gets the reader used to reading about people sitting in a kitchen for two pages, and then the writer suddenly shifts the venue without a transition, the reader will probably be jerked out of the “dream.” That said, some writing works by juxtaposition and association, and the reader is expected to pause between segments.

In a realistic short story or memoir, the reader knows where the characters are in time and space, is given enough information so that she can imagine the setting.

Dialogue should sound natural, and the characters should sound at least slightly different from one another. Dialogue should reveal character, move the story forward and show relationships. It shouldn’t be expository. (“Remember the time we went to the beach?” “Oh yes, I remember–we went with my husband Joe and your husband Moe and your three children. It was before Moe left to join the circus.”)

Main characters should be round—as contradictory as the people you know well. Beware of stereotypes, unless you’re writing fables..

Action should emanate from character. Beginning writers often force action or revelation. In a good short story, every action should feel inevitable.

Language should be consistent. If a piece begins conversationally, then it should be conversational all the way through—unless there’s a specific reason for it to change. Again, if the diction changes abruptly for no good reason, the reader will wonder what’s going on.

A classic short story with a very close third-person narrator is Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss.” You can search for it at http://www.short-stories.co.uk/. Find classic American stories at: www.americanliterature.com/ss/ssindx.html..

Then there’s flash fiction or short-shorts. You can read about them here and scroll down for a list of anthologies: http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/flash.shtml. I’m partial to Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces, edited by Mark Mills, for reasons that will become obvious if you examine the table of contents. Another site: http://www.quickfiction.org/

Memoir usually consists of a story, plus reflection on the meaning of the event, or on the way the writer’s view of the event has changed.

There should be some shift, however subtle, from beginning to end. The shift could be in mood, circumstances, opinion. It could be a shift from isolation to community.

The best travel pieces provide vivid descriptions of people and places, while telling a story of an interior journey or awakening or change of perception. Here’s a fairly short, straight-forward but quirky travel piece: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E1D61439F931A25752C1A963958260.

2. Non-realistic prose

In a recent review-essay in the New York Review of Books, novelist Zadie Smith wrote about the tiredness of “lyrical Realism.” Of a new realistic novel she says, “It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083>

As an alternative, Smith writes about metafiction, mentioning Donald Barthelme. (Choose from many of his pieces here: <www.jessamyn.com/barth/>.) There are also fables, fantasy, science fiction, as well as work that’s mythic, surreal, absurd. Here’s Stacey Richter’s recent “The Land of Pain,” which is unrealistic but to my lights, truthful: <www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/archives/richter.pdf>. The problem with some fantasy and science fiction is that the characters and plots are generic. That’s why literary magazine editors sometimes ban them; it’s easier to condemn them all than to go through many bad submissions. But then they might miss a story by someone like Borges: <www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_links.html>

Here’s a short fable by Kafka: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4855051/A-Little-Fable.

3. Essays

Consummate essayist Phillip Lopate says that an essay shows the mind at work. Writers are expected to use exposition in an essay. The best essays are explorations and are not polemical. The essay can digress, as long as the digressions are interesting.

What is interesting? There’s the rub.

Here is an essay by Lopate, which is about what many memoir writers fail to do:

<www.philliplopate.com/reflection.html>. The essay-review is another form of the essay, where the writer explores a topic, using books for fodder. Here’s Lopate again, writing about another great nonfiction writer, Edmund Wilson: http://www.philliplopate.com/wilson.html

Then there’s the lyric essay, a term coined by the editors of The Seneca Review: <http://web.hws.edu/academics/community/senecareview/lyricessay.asp>. And there’s an online magazine that publishes all kinds of nonfictions under 750 words: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity. You’ll also find reviews, interviews and craft essays on the site.

POETRY

What is poetry? According to about.com, “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary.”

Poetry is condensed, compressed language. Line breaks should be deliberate and should enhance the poem. Every word needs to be the exact word. As W. H. Auden said, “Poetry is memorable speech.” As Janet Burroway writes in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, “Because poetry attempts to produce an emotional response through heightened evocation of the senses, imagery holds a central place among its techniques.” Also, poetry is the natural home for metaphor.

You can find a wealth of poems at www.poets.org, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. You can also search for literary movements from Acmeism to Slam to Victorian.

There is a hybrid, very similar to the lyric essay: the prose poem. Poets.org defines the prose poem thusly: “While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.” Read more about the prose poem here: <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787>.

I hope that reading some of these examples will get you thinking about what you can accomplish in your own writing. Remember, too, that most good writing is re-writing. Many writers will tell you that their first drafts are rough, undeveloped and unpublishable.

Zurita and Borzutzky, both in excellent voice in an auditorium that seemed perfect for the event and with a very good audience, read from the original and Borzutzky’s translation of Zurita’s Canto a su amor desparecido, alternating short passages in Spanish and English.  Both poet and translator read with an intensity, clarity and rhythm of exchange back and forth that created a remarkable third thing between them, a kind of dialogue of Spanish and English ways of saying, in addition to the dialogue between the precise words of Zurita’s Spanish original and the very good translation.

The poem itself is a surreal translation into both possible and also impossible imagery of unspeakable and nearly unsayable experiences of imprisonment, torture and murder, of powerlessness and sorrow and spiritual destruction, yet also of enduring and holding onto one’s humanity, during the brazen dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet was the army general who, with secret encouragement and backing from the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, had already been hounding the socialist president, Salvador Allende, and mounted a coup in 1973, attacking with tanks and troops the Presidential Palace, where Allende and his staff had small arms.  Allende committed suicide in the building.  Thousands of persons died and suffered in the days and months and years following, as Pinochet directed a campaign of extralegal imprisonment, torture and execution.

In this Song of the Disappeared Love Zurita finds a way to write a dirge about such overwhelming experiences of violence and injustice.  He mixes some words referring to such realities with others that make of the experience a surreal composite of the real and the unreal, the symbolic and the fantastic.

Poetry is a very insubstantial form of resistance to injustice.  It restores no independence of the judiciary; it is no defense against state thugs at the door and in the street; it can create no systems of defense of persons against a police state.  And poetry has no inherent value: or rather, it carries within itself inherently the potential for the subtlest values of the possibilities of language, and for speaking the truth of human experience in memorable ways.  But after all, the Confederate States of America had patriotic poets, as did Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain.  Yet as in samizdat circulation in Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, when poets write of humane values, when the very act of continuing to write and read poetry–as dictatorship enforces submission and generates hopelessness–is itself a preservation of something humane among darker human possibilities.  At such moments, poetry can serve as a deep restitution and preservation of honorable ideals and of language itself in the midst of the systematic destruction of these by dictatorship whether of the right or left.

I think that this kind of inspiring feat, from Zurita’s 1980s, is what moved the audience as Zurita, assisted by Borzutsky, gave voice to his poetry.

After the reading, Zurita answered questions from the audience, with Borzutzky serving as live translator back and forth for Zurita or the audience as questioners spoke in both Spanish and English.

Brief biographies of poet and translator had been provided on line by the sponsor of the event, The Guild Complex, a  literary center with small footprint and great perseverance (on whose board I have served since it was founded in 1989).  This event was part of an ongoing series of bilingual English/Spanish poetry readings in the Guild Complex series “Palabra Pura,” founded by Mike Puican.  And the welcome and introductions Friday night were given by Ellen Wadey, the Executive Director of the Guild Complex.  Here are the biographical notes:

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. In the early 80’s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, “The New Life,” over Manhattan and later (still during the reign of Pinochet) he bulldozed the phrase “Ni Pena Ni Miedo” (”Without Pain Or Fear”) into the Atacama Desert, where it can still be seen because children in the neighboring town bring shovels into the desert and turn over the sand in the letters. For fifteen years, Zurita worked on a trilogy which is considered one of the signal poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Ante-paradise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993. Raul Zurita is one of the most renowned contemporary Latin American poets, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. Translations of Purgatory and Anteparadise were published in the United States in the 80’s. Three new books, INRI, translated by William Rowe; Song of the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky; and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny; are forthcoming from, respectively, Merick Press, Action Books, and The University of California Press.  Zurita’s books of poems include, among others: El Sermon de la Montana; Areas Verdes; Purgatorio; Anteparadiso; El Paraiso Esta Vacio – Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, La Vida Nueva, In Memoriam

Daniel Borzutzky’s books include The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007), Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005), and the chapbooks One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press, 2007). Daniel’s family comes from Chile, and his translation work has focused on Chilean writers. He is the translator of, among other works, Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita (Forthcoming, Action Books); Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenún (Action Books, 2008); and One Year and other stories by Juan Emar, which was published as a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Daniel’s writings and translations have appeared in dozens of print and online journals. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the English Department at Wright College.

When we work as writers in a state of openness of imagination, when we are responsive enough to allow what we see, both outside and within ourselves, to evoke feeling in us, and when we seek to discover within ourselves–beyond anxiety, trauma, enthusiasm, intense feelings of other kinds, and the sheer bafflement of writing, itself–what we had not known we knew or felt, then we are able to use more of the guiding power of our own unconscious to encounter both the world and ourselves.  We are able to discover more than we could using only our conscious minds.  And when we work that way we also are able to create poetry and fiction that is more deliberately woven together, making choices that are more artistically deliberate and meaningful rather than somewhat haphazard or by writers’ rules of thumb.  The pleasures of weaving that we feel when we work are then felt by the good reader.

Anyway, to think that we are working without the active participation of our unconscious is folly–no one is able with only conscious intent to produce great writing.  There is too much to manage, especially in longer works, and every power of intuition is necessary if we are to succeed. Not only that, but the conscious mind is unable to block out unconscious content, so it is going into what we write whether we know it or not.  So the question becomes, How do I use my own individual intuition, my range of responsiveness, my unconscious choices?  And what can I achieve if I try to do this?

Here is one illustration of supreme emotional depth and supreme craft united in a paragraph of prose.  The English title of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu is a Shakespearean phrase, Remembrance of Things Past (from sonnet XXX).  But properly translated into English the title would have been something as straightforward as “in search of lost times.”  Lost times exist only in our psyche, and this recherche, this search, by the way, is also our re-searching as writers–that is, our moving over the field after the harvest, searching once more, this time not for what was already harvested but for what has come back again and for what was left behind.

At the beginning of Proust’s first volume, called in English Swann’s Way, the first episode is a very prolonged account, astonishing in many ways, of an evening in the narrator’s childhood when his habitual emotional need for, his dependance on, a goodnight kiss every night from his young, beautiful mother, was thwarted by the presence of a dinner guest, M. Swann.  Events and characters are described with extraordinary richness of detail and symbol and psychological insight, and the plot advances only very slowly, as the narrator recalls his strategems for getting that kiss, on that evening both remembered and imagined, despite the intrusive presence of the guest, despite his mother’s reluctance to indulge him, and despite his father’s intolerance for the boy’s life of feeling and his neediness.  The parents finally come upstairs–mother first, whom the boy ambushes with his pleas, followed by father, holding a candle.  And the boy bursts into tears.

This is the crucial, initiating moment of the whole three thousand pages of Proust’s multi-volume novel.  Something is established in this experience of thwarted hope and desire, and then in the sudden and unexpected rewarding of this hope and desire, that sets the course of the whole work. Helene Cixous, the French writer and thinker, points out that in this scene the rewarding of desire leads not to triumph but to an unanticipated feeling of loss, because in finally being awarded, by the father, the presence of his mother, the boy gets her only against her will, and thus he defeats the one person whose love he needed to receive without asking for it.  In the reflective passage that follows this scene, this contradiction in feeling is drawn out by the narrator, and Cixous has also drawn our attention to the culminating poetic figure here–the moment in which child, father and mother are configured in a tableau which establishes the tears of the child not only in that moment but for the rest of his life.  Clearly these pages of Proust are richly woven with the most complicated feelings in the characters, at all levels of their psyches.  I want to point to a little technical effect in the same passage.

I translate Proust’s sentences pretty literally, and not very idiomatically in English, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment (and perhaps readers with even a little French, having first scanned this translation, will be able to follow Proust’s original text, which I will put afterwards):

It has been a good many years since all that.  The stairway wall, where I saw the reflection of his candle come rising, does not exist, since long ago.  In me also a good number of things have been destroyed that I believed ought to last forever, and new things are built which gave birth to new pain and joy which I would not have been able to foresee, before, just as much as the old ones became difficult for me to understand.  It has been a good long time also since my father stopped being able to say to mother, “Go along with the little one.”  The possibility of those hours will never be reborn, for me.  But after a while, I begin again to perceive, if I give a good ear to them, the sobs which I had the strength to contain before my father and which did not burst forth except when I found myself alone with mother.  In reality they never did stop; it’s only because life hushes now all around me that I hear them again, like those convent bells that the noises of the town cover so well during the day that one believed them stopped, but which sound out again in the silence of the night.

Il y a bien des années de cela.  La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps.  En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.  Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: «Va avec le petit.»  La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi.  Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman.  En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.  (Du côté de chez Swann: Combray)

We see the emotional trauma behind this narrative moment.  My sense of this passage is the following: the adult narrator is struck by what he sees within himself, by his in-sight–as he looks within; or is within and looks around him, there.  At this moment of perceiving what he has already described, of extending the consciousness of narration to the consciousness of aftermath, he understands that like the silence of convent (not church!) bells that is only apparent, not real, because they are drowned out by daytime noise, the long-ago sobbing of his childhood, which he had unspoken permission to release only in the presence of his mother, never did stop. but has only been drowned out by the noise of later, adult life, by his own later history both inner and social.  This already mown field, we enter by night.  And by night the movement, the insight, the discoveries, the knowledge, of the unconscious is as vivid as the watchfulness of the conscious mind by day.  By night, literally–in that in dreams and in the transition from sleep to waking and waking to sleep the unconscious speaks most clearly to the conscious mind–and by night, metaphorically, in that, at whatever hour we write, when we draw on the unconscious we make a kind of night of the day.

*

The reason for my wanting to provide a more or less word-for-word translation of the French is to create a reiteration in English of the adjective “good,” which is the best I can do, to match the French adverb “bien,” which because of the necessities of English-language syntax I am having to translate colloquially and awkwardly.  I want to do this so that we can perceive in English not only that the narrator’s sobs are like the nighttime ringing of the convent bells (and vice versa),  but also that he himself as writer rings these bells in his sentences by using the word “bien” five times.  In the passages before and after this one, the word appears only once or twice over a few hundred words–that is, at a more expected frequency.  And I would have liked in the last sentence of the translation to have echoed the narrator’s last use of “bien” with the English “good,” although it would have required me to distort the syntax into something like “the convent bells are good-and-covered by the noises of the town.”  But we’ll leave the problems translation as a topic for some other occasion!

My describing an aspect of craft so unmistakable, which yet seems too subtle to have been deliberately calculated, is for the purpose of giving an example of the working of unconscious deliberateness.  I don’t assume that Proust inserted those repetitions of “bien” consciously, but that he did so with unconscious deliberateness.  Proust’s passage exemplifies a synthesizing power which, at least in his case, directs every aspect of craft toward the one goal of the emotional and rhetorical richness of the portrayal of one moment of feeling.

(Someone will object: How do you know Proust didn’t set up that ringing bell of the word “bien” deliberately.  My answer: Yes, it is most certainly deliberate; there is no other way to account for its aptness and meaningfulness–yet conscious deliberateness alone can never create all the effects one finds in such a paragraph, much less in a whole page, a whole chapter, a whole novel.  There is simply too much to do.  One can’t do it with conscious deliberateness any more than a musician can play a difficult work in the key of B while having to consciously remember that the B scale includes D-sharp.  Nor does the musician need to remember that.  That knowledge, along with knowledge of phrasing, dynamics, and so on–and like Proust’s knowledge of syntax, image, and so on–has been absorbed into the highly trained musicianship that is required of a serious musician–like Proust’s highly trained…  what?  We don’t seem to have a word for what, in the writer, corresponds to “musicianship.”)

Since I am not gifted with Proust’s extraordinary powers of concentration and synthesis, then one of my tasks is to discover how as a writer I can at least bring certain aspects of this unconscious deliberateness to consciousness, so that I can discover on the field of my own experience the hints and clues of my unconsciousness feeling.  So I can glean those hints and clues from what my unconscious has left on the pages of my draft, and let them seize my conscious attention.  Just as the mouse, which anyone else might never have even noticed, or if noticing, might never have pondered, becomes for John Clare the object that, once acknowledged, releases his feeling.

We do not write of childhood when we are children.  As writers, we always begin in aftermath.  The “math” in “aftermath” is an Old English word for mowing–that is, the aftermath is the second mowing, “a second crop of grass in the same season” (American Heritage Dictionary).  The Oxford English Dictionary records that in the 16th century, it was also called in dialect the “lattermath,” the later mowing.  We return to the harvest field, after the harvest, after labor, after experience, and there we find a second crop of grass in the same season.  This is the crop that we harvest.  And perhaps we also find a space haunted by all the human labor that was invested in plowing, planting, tending, and the first harvest.  [Keats' "To Autumn"--haunted by what he has excluded.]

In that the “math” in “aftermath” is also a kind of equation, we hear the mere chance of word history.  We always begin by searching for a kind of equation that will represent what happened during the harvest.  Therefore when we write poetry and fiction we are writing in a peculiarly compressed way–no matter how lengthy the work in progress, for the compression is not in length but in the mental process by which we move from image to image, from feeling to feeling, from scene to scene.

We do not explain everything.  We arrange symbols to say what can be said in no other way, and our arrangements of symbols are in turn larger symbols.

In another mood, “aftermath” has the connotation of something unpleasant.  Perhaps this came from the difference between the scantiness of the second harvest compared to the first.  The Oxford English Dictionary quotes this 1834 sentence by the Romantic poet Robert Southey: “No aftermath has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop.”  Our first harvest is living and thinking and feeling, according to our chances and our temperaments, while our second harvest, as writers, is something that we take from the field that grew back again, in part, a little while later–the field that tried to remember itself after the mowing men had passed swinging their scythes.  The first harvest is the sustenance, the living; the after-harvest, we weave into some shape, some little straw doll that stands for what happened, or what might have happened or what might happen.

In the aftermath, we remember some of what we saw, and we look around in search of  reminders–we don’t know what they will be–of what we have already forgotten that we saw.  This looking around can find its reward in unexpected places–perhaps in the street as we walk; perhaps in a book that we are reading; perhaps in our reverie or dreams.  We poke about.  In the language of the English poet John Clare, we “prog.”   His untitled poem set after haying time, now called “The Mouse’s Nest,” written sometime between 1832 and 1837, portrays a moment of looking for nothing in particular, but looking, while wandering through the already mown fields, and finding something:

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away                 [progged = prodded]
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats[.]
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood[.]
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked[,] and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay[.]
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun

[According to the OED, “craking” would mean making a harsh cry; some editors have “squeaking” and others “crawling”; Again, the OED says that cesspools = a dug pit for catching sediment for a stream, or refuse from waste water.[

He does not analyze what he finds, but follows his feeling into a new moment.  His feeling does not need any comment.  Whereas most of the time, as Dickinson writes, “‘Tis many a tiny Mill / Turns unperceived beneath our feet” (Johnson 1097; Franklin 1102), Clare’s tiny mouse has unfettered the whole world, in his spirit.

Reading Clare’s poem, which was written amidst the drastic social change and suffering caused by the private appropriation of public lands and the resulting displacement and impoverishment of poor laborers, I cannot help feeling that in the utter otherness of the mouse, he saw himself.  Like the mouse, he had many children to support by his physical labor, since he could not do so by his verses.  And perhaps he felt he himself was considered “odd and grotesque.”  Certainly he was pained in his awareness of being different from those among whom he lived–Clare was unlike other farm laborers in being a poet, and in being a farm laborer, he was very unlike other poets.  Of all the little things he sees while meandering through the field in a thoughtful mood, it is the peculiar overburdened mouse which in some way he in particular is predisposed to notice.  Noticing it–merely seeing it–he has accomplished the work that his imagination was ready to do, and this accomplishment makes him feel exalted.  The world appears to him in a different way.  He has been given, or rather he has given himself, an intensely awake moment simply because the vague and unconscious availability of his feeling, of his mind, has found that which it was available for–the symbol of his feeling, rather than the analysis of it or the naming of it.

Since we writers begin in aftermath, we might look carefully over the mown field for whatever we may happen to notice, and we might listen for any echo of what was said when the field was filled with men and women and children laboring.  We will see something, and hear something, even if what is there is mostly nothing and silence.  We listen for what others heard, and also for what was not heard by anyone–what we ourselves did not hear, or once heard and then could no longer hear until in the aftermath we listened once more.  And when suddenly we see our own mouse, and perceive it fully, we are taken by a feeling of exaltation because we gain access to another world inside the world.  Even muddy rain puddles then glitter in the sun.  Clare’s responsiveness to what he sees, this seeing of that to which he is responsive, this acknowledging of his own response, is who Clare is; and in finishing the poem, he has brought himself into the truth of his being.

Some ideas about writing: Traumas of revision

On April 25, 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor at The Atlantic Monthly whose opinion of a few of her poems she had solicited ten days earlier by mail.  Evidently he replied, for she says in this later letter:

Thank you for the surgery — it was not so painful as I supposed.  I bring you others [poems] –as you ask — though they might not differ –
While my thought is undressed — I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown     — they look alike, and numb.
You asked how old I was?  I made no verse — but one or two — until this winter — Sir –

This was not true, for she was not so recently born as a poet; she had written hundreds of poems; but we understand her caution in revealing herself to the editor.  The introspection required by writing can be nearly traumatic in itself for one who, like Dickinson, could write herself so deeply into the riddles of mind and into the complex disappointment and anxiety created by the distance between the human longing for certainties and the human fascination with paradox and uncertainty.  Then in addition come the traumas experienced when the writer is vulnerable to how a reader will regard a work, to how a reader will respond to it.  And then those of rewriting, revising, re-seeing.  Vertiginous uncertainties may open under the ground that had seemed already safely created by merely putting some words together that had the reassuring quality of being one’s own.  (Yet no words are only one’s own.)

The “surgery” for which she thanks Higginson would have been his suggestions for revision of her poems.  (As we know from the later history of his work, Higginson did appreciate her originality, but was sufficiently troubled by it, too, that he participated in rewriting it after her death in order to bring her rhymes, punctuation, and metaphors closer to what he thought of as literary norms.)

Dickinson writes of her thought, when she had put it into the signature form of her poems, as if it were dressed in a characteristic Gown.  And hasn’t every writer confronted the problem of trying to see his or her own work after it has been dressed in its gown, as if it were still undressed?  (And yet the Gown is the work.)   Dickinson continues:

I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none — and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid –

So even the motive for writing–she says–is fear.  That she suggests the fear of death is no random indication.  What was more pressing in the mid-1800s, in the religious and cultural backwater of Amherst, and in Dickinson herself, who from an early age had shown she was unable to confine her thought to orthodoxy, than struggling with the demand that the promised everlasting salvation required an everlasting submission and good religious manners.  In her own way, and at least till late in her life, Dickinson was far too skeptical for that, far too close an observer of nature and of human nature, and was also profoundly open to the most traumatic, yet exhilarating, metaphysical speculation.

She continues:

You inquire my books — for Poets — I have Keats — and Mr and Mrs Browning.  For prose — Mr. Ruskin — Sir Thomas Browne — and the Revelations.  I went to school — but in your manner of the phrase — had no education.  When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality — but venturing too near, himself — he never returned — Soon after, my Tutor, died — and for several years, my Lexicon — was my only companion — Then I found one more — but he was not contented I be his scholar — so he left the Land.
You ask of my Companions Hills — Sir — and the Sundown — and a Dog — large as myself, that my Father bought me — They are better then Beings — because they know — but do not tell — and the noise in the Pool, at Noon — excels my Piano.  I have a Brother and Sister — My Mother does not care for thought — and Father, too busy with his Briefs — to notice what we do — He buys me many Books — but begs me not to read them — because he fears they joggle the Mind.  They are religious — except me — and address an Eclipse, every morning — whom they call their “Father.”

She thus suggests that her work comes from a pondering of ultimate things, and she sketches the quietness of rural Amherst and suggests her sense of feeling alone in her family, of feeling that what she does as a writer is not something in which the members of her family share an interest; perhaps her family do not even approve.  Then she puts the question of greatest importance:

But I fear my story fatigues you — I would like to learn — Could you tell me how to grow — or is it unconveyed — like Melody — or Witchcraft?

Yet we can’t read this without disbelieving it.  The supreme poetic and philosophical confidence of her tentativeness, if I can put it that way, suggest in poem after poem that she needs no one to instruct her in the writing of poems.  Her modesty must, we think, be a guise and disguise.  She closes:

You speak of Mr Whitman — I never read his book — but was told that he was disgraceful –
I read Miss Prescott’s “Circumstances,” but it followed me, in the Dark — so I avoided her –
Two Editors of Journals came to my Father’s House, this winter — and asked me for my Mind — and when I asked them “Why,” they said I was penurious — and they, would use it for the World –
My size felt small — to me — I read your Chapters in the Atlantic — and experienced honor for you — I was sure you would not reject a confiding question –
Is this–Sir–what you asked me to tell you?
Your friend,
E — Dickinson

The range of a modern writer’s concerns, anxieties and hopes seems fully expressed in this letter–an entire book about modern and contemporary poetry could be written simply as a gloss to this letter.  (The book would include some thinking about how poets at their best contribute to a larger matrix of poetry whose other elements–such as Whitman–may not seem sympathetic; yet the matrix containing all is what continues to develop through time.)

Dickinson knew what sort of revision she herself must do, as opposed to what someone else might offer to do for her, on her own poems.  After all, this is the poet who wrote, probably in 1864, when the Civil War had shattered American expectations and traumatized American beliefs, both civic and religious:

Soto!  Explore thyself!
Therein thyself shalt find
The “Undiscovered Continent”–
No Settler had the Mind

(Johnson 832; Franklin 814)

I wonder–shouldn’t we sometimes regard revision as our attempt to overcome the trauma of feeling that is leading us to write, rather than only as a trauma in itself when on our words someone performs some “surgery”?  That is, we can open a space in our psyches not only for the presence, during revision of a poem or a work of fiction, long or short, of the trouble and troubled longing that may stir us to write in the first place, but also for that movement along the edge of language, the edge of feeling, beyond which we may hope or fear that we will see or hear what we never had heard or seen.  We’re not merely correcting or improving when we fiddle with the words, the lines, the sentences, the shape of a piece, but also, we hope, we’re getting ourselves to where an “unsummoned” something, as Dickinson herself puts it, can come into an opening (of feeling, of thought, of words) that we are in the process of making:

Shall I take thee, the Poet said
To the propounded word?
Be stationed with the Candidates
Till I have finer tried–

The Poet searched philology
And was about to ring
For the suspended Candidate
There came unsummoned in–
That portion of the Vision
The Word applied to fill
Not unto nomination
The Cherubim reveal–

(Johnson 1126; Franklin 1243)

(I notice how when Dickinson describes the experience of trying to find the word, the line, the metaphor, perhaps, that will turn the poem towards its discovery, she begins with philology–to a poet, not a dull matter of study but a dance with the whole history of language and of speaking– and ends with an emblem, although not at all a fearful or daunting one, from the realm of the divine: “cherubim,” and invokes these little angels in a very ambiguous way.  Was it cherubim who brought the word, as if such were Christian forms of Hermes?  Or was it not.  In her fascicles of poems, she puts what might be the favored word choice, the favored discovery, in this line or that, and with a tiny mark that serves as an asterisk she leads the eye down to another word or other words at the bottom of her small page–the “suspended Candidate,” which she does not seem to want to lose.)