“Language use” (as distinguished from “language”) is a choice of some words and communicative elements and quite naturally a suppression of others–for reasons of clarity, or at least for the effectiveness or efficiency of the communication, no matter how much remains ambiguous, as it always does, in all of our talking and writing. In what we say and write, we give each other recognition, even amid hostile interaction, as belonging to the same language-using group, as sharing certain communicative codes of everyday life–street slang, beauty salon lexicons, business buzz words and office talk, football fan language, hip-hop rhymes, academic manners and terms of discourse, politically coded terms and tactics of talk, vocabularies of medicine and conventions of therapeutic speech, etc.

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.

To take in, every day, a little of the moral whirlwind that was set in motion by the events of September 11, 2001 and then by the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then given horrific velocity and force by the revelations of torture by Americans–this consumes a part of one’s vital and moral energy.  A part one feels one has to consume in order to stay human by not allowing oneself to flinch from the worst (–no, it is not the worst).  And to write about poetry, in the midst of all that, might seem to some as frivolous as writing about fashion, dieting, or celebrity love affairs, betrayals and plastic surgeries.  Of course I do not believe that poetry belongs in such a category, although I know that many people–those who would never discover, much less read, a comment like these I write–would file “poetry” under the heading “who needs it?”  I won’t rely on what is now almost the cliché of William Carlos Williams’s famous lines: “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”  (These words have been used by now to market all kinds of literary products, but I doubt they have ever been used to market a book of poems.)  On behalf of poetry, if I may, I would rather acknowledge the eloquence in the service of humanity of those who write with a prose acuity and clarity that poetry, with its usual compression, fast movement of thought, and intimacy, cannot achieve.

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

Granta celebrates the launch of Issue 108 with a series of events throughout Chicago

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

A long time ago, on a summer afternoon of hot sun in a blue sky, and cool pleasant shade in groves of trees, I was out for a walk with others in Northern California, on a path through woods and fields, hills and meadows, very near suburbs and towns, when we came to an excavation below us, down the side of the small hill we had topped.  At the level bottom, a dirt road was rutted where trucks had been taking away loads of the exposed gravel.  To us, looking down the gravel slope perhaps 80 feet, and able to see outward some distance because of our elevation, the place was perhaps no more than an unsurprising failed enterprise of some construction company not far away, and it somewhat spoiled our illusion of being away from settled places that afternoon.

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.

In the mail have come two elegantly proportioned sheets elegantly designed by artist Ed Colker, with his art on one and a photograph he took long ago on the other, each accompanying a text: “Two poems by Michael Anania as broadsides in honor of the poet’s 70th birthday” (Haybarn Press, August 2009).  Anania’s “Farm Machinery in a Vacant Lot” uses the kind of toothsome diction that can make poetry or prose move with especially pleasing syllables and sounds, fanciful connotations and rich etymological echoes.  Such words lie at a slight angle to the direction that words more vague or more relaxed want to take.

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

“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.”

–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.

Another response to something in the news:

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.

By an interesting train of cultural thought–produced, it would seem, by a suspicion of poetry or even a resentment of it, which at the same time allows for its power to intoxicate (that is, overwhelm other kinds of thinking)–three things are associated with each other in the definitions of a single word: (1) verbal word games based on poetry, (2) rhyming as in itself an act to be contemned as low and dimwitted–perhaps partly because it has the power to seduce–, (3) and drinking.

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.