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.

“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

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.

Self Within Self

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.)

Earlier self is other

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.

Sandi Wisenberg is the faculty adviser for The OLLI Journal, which is the annual literary magazine of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern. She wrote this at the request of the new editor. You can find more information about the Journal and read the latest issue at http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/olli/journal. She is the co-director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program at NU. Her third book is The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa Press, 2009), nonfiction that Bookslut called “damned funny” and “far more selfless than most illness memoirs.”

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.

On Friday evening, April 3, the Chilean poet Raúl ZURITA, with his translator Daniel Borzutzky, gave a reading in Chicago.

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.

In a pentameter line, Derek Walcott writes in “Midsummer XIV”: “There’s childhood, and there’s childhood’s aftermath.”

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.

This is the first of a series of posts that inaugurate the blog on writing, reading, learning and teaching at the Center for the Writing Arts.  Contributors will include faculty who teach writing at Northwestern, visitors to the university, former students, and others.  The subjects will include both creative and expository writing, writing in various disciplines of study, from science to music, and general comments on contemporary writing. My own particular focus in this series of posts will be on aspects of writing that lie below or beyond the level of the art and craft of poetry or fiction.

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 –

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