Mlle. Le Renard

On judgment - for John

2009-07-13T10:37:00.003-04:00

My new adviser just gutted a poem of mine and gave me some wonderful advice. On a practical level -- on the level of judgment -- he was totally correct about what the poem needed. But on a theoretical level, I am puzzling about this advice as a general stance.

He told me to review the poem and to merely look – as a formalist would – for the strongest language and excise the rest. In one sense, I totally agree: that was what this poem needed. In another sense, I am not sure I agree at all (nor actually that he does, given his respect for Eliot’s Four Quartets... but more on that later). In a way, I think it could be the strongest thing my poems ever do if I actually manage to keep that “weak” language and reuse it.

To reuse that language would be to do a pastiche.

John’s thesis at MIT was on pastiche. He presented a renovation of a movie palace in Brooklyn to a group of Dwell-magazine reading (latent) modernists on the review board: Eisenman, MyStudio, a few others. At first they tore him to pieces: his work exploited ornament, doing-up the movie palace in more curlicues and glitter than was in the original. But then the board loved him… because, I think, they realized they were uncertain of the origin and justification for their own predilection for simplicity. Why should we have white walls and white dresses, to use the words of Mark Jarzombeck? Of course, John’s building was also sustainable, malleable etc., and included a few other neat tricks; but for the most part, it called attention to the ground of contemporary taste. (Wow, John!)

I think in contemporary poetry we have a similar predilection for simplicity and consistency. We prefer language that does the same thing throughout, that deploys itself smoothly and with a bang at the finish. What if a poem went, dribble, Bang! Bang! Dribble dribble. Pop. And the end was so unsatisfying that you needed to start again? I think that might be interesting, and that very few people would like it.

Our preference for poems that – like my advisers's own – take one tone is a matter of taste. Of judgment.

Where do we get our sense of taste? Why is the one better than the many? Western metaphysics prefers one god, one good, and apparently Western poetry prefers one tone. We know that the subject dissolved, that god was gutted and replaced with the multiplicity of the world, but when we see art, we still want to know who made it, who’s speaking. Even when we read Joyce – with his multiplicity of styles undermining our search for “The narrator” – we read Joyce and we know who he is. We give exams to graduate students and ask them to identify authorial styles. We assume that a style commits a work to an author, and in poetry, I think we still identify a style with a tone.

Next summer, I think I might like to give a class on judgment. When we judge, we move from the singular toward the universal. For Kant, a determinative judgment – ‘all cows are bovines,’ or ‘this cow is black’ – collects the particular under the general ; an aesthetic judgment makes a judgment about the universal from the particular: ‘this chocolate is yummy’ or ‘this painting made of chocolate is beautiful.’ What is the beautiful? It is this painting I just encountered. What is a poem? It is this thing I just read. For Aristotle, we acquire phronesis from childhood; practical knowledge is acquired by practice. With Kant plus Aristotle – as in Arendt and Nussbaum – we find that aesthetic judgment is acquired gradually, from childhood, in history, by encountering many particulars: particulars so neatly crafted as to point the way toward the universal… without ever arriving.

In my course, I would begin with close readings of poems. I would say nothing general first; nothing about what poetry is. (The first words of the class would be “let’s read this poem.”) Rather, we would look at how one moves from a particular poem – and gradually, through encounters with many poems, in many circumstances – toward a general knowing of what poetry is. And, roughly, I found that to be this disruption of the logical “is/is not” with the metaphoric “like.” (Most recently, I saw this in the Carol Anne Duffy poem presented in a class...but again, more on that later...)

Indeed, more on all of this later!

the inimitable George Oppen

2009-04-14T01:42:00.002-04:00

I have been worrying over my lazy, unpolitical, unworldly existence as a poet... occasionally philosophy seems justifiable. But poetry? What do we do for anyone but ourselves? We had dinner with someone who works for the Gates foundation on microloans and savings in Africa who'd just returned from Ethiopia. She may not buy organic vegetables, but her very vocation improves the world. And I... write.

So, here are some wise words from M. Oppen:

"So with artists. How pleasurable
to imagine that, if only they gave
up their art, the children would be
healed, would live."

- from "Some San Francisco Poems"

art instincts... against my instinct but intrigued

2009-04-03T15:47:00.002-04:00

Denis Dutton's Art Instinct has been getting a lot of attention and recently in the New York Time Book Review I am terrified that this book on "Darwinian aesthetics" shares too much with the horrific Neo-social Darwinism in recent issue of the Economist that I whined about here. But I'm also intrigued... this is just intersection of the sorts of issues that interest me: art, biology, evolution. How can we talk about Nature and not lose sight of human-sized meaning for us? I've been thinking a lot about why evolution and speciation rarely comes up in phenomenology. It seems it's time to start talking about it with the number of Cambridge, MA evolutionary biologists making the New York times magazine. But does phenomenology have anything to say? I think it does -- what exactly I'm working out in that dissertation thing-y -- but it doesn't seem to be saying much yet. But how to begin a conversation in the dominant language ? "Instinct" is in the title of this book and not in, at least my, phenomenological vocabulary. Again, I come back to the problem of translation between two cultures...

space tools: scripts for architectural historians of the future

2009-03-30T15:12:00.003-04:00

Last night, I joined J and another computational designer for dinner with some heads of the architectural software firm Rhino. (Yes, I was there just for the free food) J and his friend have been showing some Oregonian architects what's up with scripting in 3d and this was a dinner to celebrate their success. Now, personally I'm fascinated with how designers "think" in the digital design atmosphere. (I've written a little about it in an article that will be out next year) CAD is so Cartesian: the circuit of hand and eye is disrupted not just by a pencil but a bunch of algorithms, a pregiven geometry and a certain order in which designers can create form, volume, lighting and texture. (an order quite backwards to which they might work in the 'real' world: volume and texture come at the end for example)

So I've been mulling all this over and thinking that Rhino which uses a different geometry and nerbs modelling system is a good alternative to allow a little variety in the methods for making the built world. ... lest everything look like a textureless CAD fly-through. The CEO s of Rhino are pretty proud of their product... but surprisingly to me, they didn't seem to think much about the long-term implications for (and restrictions on!) design and the built world. They felt they were creating a neutral tool that just let architects do better what they'd always wanted to do. In no sense did they feel the tools prescribed design ... even when J pointed out that it was a little bit odd and awkward to think about volume after form.

I imagine art historians of the future looking back at the last 10 years of architectural design and excavating not tools, but scripts and codes. They'll be trying to figure out which version of Rhino or Grasshopper a designer might have access to in 2007 or 2013 in order to invent as they did. They'll be thinking about how space became something we understood in relation to the fly-through tool.

But it was a great lesson to me that Rhino developers didn't need to think about any of that to make the built-world altering tool they've created. Nor do they want to think about it in order to sell more or refine it. And they certainly aren't reading anything coming out of architectural theory ... yet again (pace my post yesterday), there seems to be a one-way sort of conversation between theory and practice, humanities and technology.

stuck between two cultures

2009-03-29T19:44:00.002-04:00

I enjoyed this essay on C.P Snow's two cultures because I'm feeling quite caught between those two cultures right now. Well, no, more precisely I'm definitely from one culture -- the literary, humanities one -- and desperately trying to understand how to talk about the other culture. I just spent the afternoon reading up on 1950s developmental theory. This followed a week or so of trying to understand some evolutionary theory from the same time period. That actually wasn't the hard part... these articles tend to be quite readable, flush with quotes from Shakespeare and allusion to Goethe and plain language expressions of the experiments the scientists had attempted on developing cells.

The hard part was trying to figure out how these views of half a century ago compare to current views. This entails me tracking down basic developmental biology terminology that any kid with a B.A. in biology would understand. I found these newer essays much more impenetrable. Dense with abbreviations for particular genes and chemistry, they required much more work to translate into the language of my culture.

This process also put into relief some of the unique grammar of my culture. What people who might read what I write (let's assume these people might exist!) would want to know is what are the implications of these? what do these microscopic events mean for a person at a macroscopic scale? I have to formulate my sentences in terms of why and for whom. The claims should be at a person-sized scale.

And what in the world would it mean to translate those claims back into the other culture? Could there possibly be a developmental biologist out there interested in that project? Or, by definition, is this a one-way conversation? This latter possibility worries me even more than how little I know about genetics... or perhaps those are two sides of the same coin.

no, writing isn't all that fun...

2009-03-19T15:23:00.002-04:00

Apparently Colm Toibin made a snarky comment about how he didn't take pleasure writing. The KR blog puts this in context I suppose I have to agree somewhat with Tobin... only he gets paid for his 'suffering.' So it can't be all that bad. But let me clarify... it's not that I "hate" writing. No, hardly. But it's certainly not "fun" (like, say, playing shuffleboard or going iceskating). At the least, the pleasure of writing isn't in the process but in the afterglow. A friend said that I "write like I sweat." On the surface, that's a pretty good metaphor; it implies that in order to write, I have to work myself up, work out, get through something and along the way, some writing will be sweated out. But that metaphor only gets to the initial moment of productivity, forgetting that once you've "sweated out" some images, ideas and phrases, you have to work them into actual art.

Even so, in terms of when it offers pleasure, I could say that writing a bit like going for a very long run, at least for me. (Now, I want to say first of all that the following is a completely over-used and abused metaphor... but I use it again, not under the impression that it's novel, but because it, like many cliches, has a bit of truth) The actual picking up my feet and putting them down, the getting in shape to go more than a mile or two... none of that is fun (at least for me). Likewise, actually suffering through revisions and worrying over word choice, that's not fun either. Most of the time it's nerve wracking! But the endorphins after the run and the endorphins after finishing a poem do feel pretty good. The place where this metaphor breaks down -- if it hasn't already -- is that it's not quite clear when one "finishes" a poem nor when or if the endorphins are certain. I enjoy running in and of itself; I don't need to win a race to feel good about running. (In fact, I kind of abhor races!) But with writing... I do kind of want the secondary satisfaction of publication. I do get a certain pleasure out of just finishing a poem: wow, it's there! look how pretty it is when I change the font to garamond! But often there's a secondary moment when that pleasure is taken away from me. I go back to the "finished" poem and find it's not at all complete. Or, that it's "complete" but awful. Or, that it's complete and half-way decent but no one will ever read it. It would be like believing you'd finished a 6 mile run -- and feeling as tired as if you had -- and then discovering that you'd only gone a 1.5 miles. Or finishing a race but forgetting a chip and finding that your score doesn't count.

need more quarks

2009-03-17T21:12:00.003-04:00

It's spring break and I am absolutely craving a nice pseudo sciencey, popular physics book. Any suggestions? I want something with long discussions about black holes, strings, and flavored quarks. I don't even want science fiction! Or... well, I want popular science that is not consciously fictitious; I certainly will never be able to distinguish it from a good yarn.

But why do I want this? Well, experientially, it's just very calming to read about all these Very Big Things and Very Small Things. John and I went for a nice desert hike last weekend in a Very Big canyon; I had been haunted by some problems all week, but in comparison to the desert, they were Quite Propotional. That was comforting. After looking at the Very Big difference between the mountains in the snowy pass and the valley desert, I felt my little moods swings were Quite Negligible.

It's important that these Very Big and Very Small things also be True things. (Even if I can't tell) This is key to their calming quality. I live with plenty of fictions, makings, imaginings... but these all remind me of the human sphere. Precisely what is required is a perspective on the human sphere and all its made things and tools for making.

My inner nerd has always been calmed by a good star-gazing trip. But from our overcast Pacific Northwestern vantage point, there are few stars to be seen. So I require a virtual tour of some constellations or their contents. I do prefer the macroscopic to the microscopic, I must say; so any suggestions for my reading list might take that into acccount. Any thoughts?

Tony Gilroy and the Birth of Tragedy

2009-03-13T15:28:00.005-04:00

I just enjoyed this classically New Yorker, long-winded-but-pleasant story about the screen writer of Bourne Identity, Tony Gilroy.Gilroy sounds like a brilliant and thoughtful writer. He's not just clever but quite up on what's needed by his era. A bit like Euripides, actually. But let me back that up....

First some clarifications: In the article, the author claims that Gilroy virtually invented or at least first truly exploited "the reversal" as a plot device. They write "The core of “Duplicity”[Gilroy's latest film] is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.” Well, I hate to break it to the article author or to Gilroy, but "the reversal" goes way back. Aristotle claimed it was one of the essential components of tragedy (along with a hero, a downfall, recognition and scenes of suffering). Many stories, not just Greek tragedies, have reversals: the audience thinks the character and her plot are heading in one direction, but oops! all is not as it seems. But in the end, the audience experiences some relief at watching the character suffer through these twists and turns.

Gilroy is know for increasingly complicated reversals. He feels that modern audience have become so savvy to possible plot twists -- making use of DVDs to replay and unravel them -- that it's harder to satisfy them. The authors suggest that the trend of Gilroy's method of making dramas more and more complex will continue. But is that the only solution? What about Euripides solution?

In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche noted that while the reversal method of effecting catharsis could work, sometimes plots were so complicated that the audiences wasn't getting the payoff . So Euripides introduced a figure who gave a prologue and told the audience ahead of time what would happen. That way, the audience could lose themselves in the pleasure of catharsis without needing to expend all that energy "figuring it out." Nietzsche found this decision of Euripides quite sly but also quite savvy in itself. (Notice that Nietzsche himself claims this is all philologically unjustified... so if there are any errors in this history, blame Nietzsche who doesn't mind anyway)

I suggest that film is moving in the direction of Euripides's plays. There's a limit to the complexity audiences can or are willing to take on. But, there seems to be no end to our pleasure in catharsis. So, rather than make plots more complicated, we have formulaic stories in which we enjoy for the effect and possibly for the novelty in aesthesis of the presentation of the standard plot (take Forgetting Sarah Marshall, as e.g.) Gilroy himself seems away of this with his basic rules about “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” But perhaps the solution to "not boring the audience" is not to make things more, but rather less complex plot-wise.

no guns, nope, not ever

2009-03-12T16:55:00.005-04:00

So, some of my friends were talking about going to a shooting range, something quite antithetical to me. I thought I would clarify to myself why.

One theory for why you might want to shoot a gun (aside from the theory that it's fun, which I find indefensible) is that it might be useful. This is not the case. I faced an intruder in the place where I was living who came to take what he wanted, and eventually he or someone like him did take these immaterial and important things. All I learned was, there is nothing I could do about it. No intruder, crazy or otherwise, will ever come to me and, like in the movies, give me a gun or leaving lying one there for me to pick up and use against him. My intruder didn't even need a gun to enforce his violence. Part of what brought the intruder, a Native American, to where I lived was a long history of violence by my group of people on another, and I don't want to be part of that pattern in history, however much I cannot escape history itself. What I ought to do is part of the people trying to change that pattern, not continue it, not ever.

In 1918 in India, the country was occupied. There was a small group Indians who fought back against the British militia occupiers. In retaliation, the British colonial general rounded up the protesters, men women and children and opened fire. About 1000 people died and several thousand more were wounded. The general passed a law saying that no one could help the wounded for two days. Ghandi heard of this but he did not encourage violence… even though, the Indians could probably have overtaken the British in a mass slaughter. The ratio at the time was 4,000 to 1, colonized to colonizer. If violence is not justified in this situation, then it is never justified.

I realize that this argument might seem abstract. And it's not all about bravery. I know that for myself, fear does not make me scream but choke. Perhaps you don't yet know whether you would be able shoot a gun if you were threatened. But I personally know that will never need to pick up a gun, because I will never be able to use it.

To continue on this theme, which as I write it out I realize is very important to me, I don't even like violence in film. The only violent movie that I have really liked recently was No Country for Old Men. I think this was ultimately because of the passivity of the victim in the penultimate scene. She realized that, on the one hand, the responsibility lay with the killer and that he could and would do what he intended. On the other hand, the film showed that chance and an invisible history -- nominally different but ultimately indistinguishable from choice-- brought this person to his action.

From what standpoint will you ever chance to reflect clearly enough to be justified in definitive violence?

david foster wallace and "something so simple, really..."

2009-03-05T21:04:00.003-05:00

Now, I don't really like to do a lot of reflecting on what I think Literature Ought To Be or how I think one should write. One should write. That's it. But I was really struck by a few things in a recent New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace. I don't even particularly like Wallace's work per se; honestly, I've always found Infinite Jest to angsty, male and empty to get through. It's something my male friends read and cite in the same breath as the Big Lebowski. I know that's unfair to both the authors and enjoys of all those concerned, and it only reflects my personal hang-ups. But in this article, I did like what Wallace says about writing and what his writing seemed to be in his life as it appeared through the article.

After leaving a drug rehab half-way house, Wallace changed his tune and his reading interests. He found that the sorts of things that AA taught -- take it one day at time, for e.g.-- actually meant something to him, something that a lot of contemporary literature with its tricks and games didn't: "As he later told Salon, "The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important."

Again, treading lightly into the territory of what writing ought to do or be in genearl or for me, I'll dare to make some claims. In terms of visual art, I am *tired* of post-modern pastiche with its cheeky, snarky self-reflective struggle. This is something John and I have talked about countless times. Where's beauty? Why not just make something beautiful, for people to judge as such, and leave it at that? Why be cruel?

But I usually leave those grumpy claims for visual art and haven't extended them to poetry. It's easier to make definitive judgments about an art you don't practice. But in a way... I think I am starting to feel the same for poetry. I like to read beautiful poetry. I like lyrics, I like one-offs that stand on one, two, maybe three pages at most. I like them to ring and to be recitable. I like Bishop, not Lowell. I've never had the attention span to read or enjoy the epic; I tried to struggle through Lowell's The Dolphin and a few other later books as I read his biography and collected letters with Bishop. But little he wrote -- except maybe the poem for Bishop -- touches me the way her work does. Take her "Armadillo" for instance. This sayes more to me of Lowell's mania that ten of his sonnets that I have to string together to find a story.

I realize that the connection to Wallace may seem thin. What could Infinite Jest or any of his other works, finished or not, have to do with Elizabeth Bishop's poetry? Perhaps nothing in the larger scope of literary criticism. But for me, they are connected in what they mean for my intention as an artist and for my right to predilections as a reader. In a sense, I'm the intellectual's intellectual, the ideal product of an extremely liberal arts education. You'd think I'd be eating up the most post-modern, reflective of literatures, say -- I don't know -- Calvino and Ashbury. But with all my reflective tools, with all my purported knowledge of what art can do, I still just want to enjoy beautiful things that risk cliche before they risk being uninventive. There is something to the AA statement, "take it one day at a time." It works, I remember it. There's something to using a rhyme. It sounds good.

Well, that's all for now. We'll see if this leads to any good or at least pleasing work on my part.

Sounds and sense

2008-12-26T19:40:00.004-05:00

In the December NY Review of Books, I enjoyed an article on two new books on Robert Frost, one a novel and one a biography. This of course sinks with my interest in maybe writing a biographical novel or biography, but also it called my attention to Frost in way that I hadn't considered before. I do love his work, but like an artist over-played on Starbucks' radio, I find it hard to appreciate the good bits hidden behind the over-popular pieces. I like what he says about sound in his prose reflections, for example, in this quote in that I'd like to find in its entirety to flesh out his position:
"I speak of imagination as having some part in the sound of poetry. It is everything in the sound of poetry; but not as inventor nor creator -- simply as summoner. Make no mistake about the tones of speech I mean. They are the same yesterday, today, and forever. There were before words were -- if anything was before anything else." (Collected Prose of Robert Frosted, cited in NY Review of Books, Dec 08)

To think of sound as summoning poetry is quite different that emphasizing the particular sonority or meter of a poem in reflection. Of course, it's all very useful to appreciate the meter in Hardy and to try to pound out a good anapest in your own work. But... I think this standarized, metrical / scansion model of understanding sound is only useful for criticism, not for creation. What Frost describes is how speech sounds evoke poems in the ear of the writer. With Frost's iamb's, the momentum of sound it quite strong. The iambs carrying that rocking feeling of walking, of the momentum of the walk carrying you in one direction until the next step is felt before it is thought. But you cannot see this meter as construction or appearing only in reflection; Frost had to hear that sense of sound, to get into it before thinking and then following into a poem. Hearing the "sound of sense" going before you as you write is like hearing a band playing in the other room and starting to write a melody to overlay while gradually sneaking up on them. The sound is much more than a meter: it's a sound-place, a complexity, open totality to explore. My old stand by, Merleau-Ponty, might call this the indirect voices of silence: the meaningful silence before and between speech. It's not an empty space or time but one which calls you toward speech.

Certainly, the sounds of Frost are ramifying all through American poetry. I certainly can't write without hearing a bit of "Whose house that is, I think I know..." already going before me

"this suffering business"

2008-12-20T17:47:00.002-05:00

In one of Bishop's letter's -- sent in a time just around her own alcoholic breakdown and Lowell's first manic episode -- she slips in the following comment between chatter about lobster pounds and Eliot's criticism:

"Sometimes I wish we could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I guess I think it is so irresistible & unavoidable there's no use talking about it, & that in itself has no value, anyway..." (E Bishop to R Lowell, Sept 8th, 1948)

of that which we cannot speak....

Biography, mania and mysticism

2008-12-16T19:19:00.001-05:00

Out of basically voyeuristic interest, I dug up a Robert Lowell biography at the university library today. Some of his person comes through in the letters to Bishop, but from the sketchy details of his mania and instability in the introduction, you get the impression that there must have been other sides of his character not represented. From the biography, that indeed seems to be the case. I read (quickly) the Hamilton 1982 biography which I found about as readable as a set of note cards – very choppy and full of too many long citations – but also detailed and informative (I’d like to see if there’s another better version?). Given my latent interest in mysticism, I was intrigued by the descriptions how in certain fits of mania, Lowell ‘renewed’ his Catholicism and became obsessed with prayer; the biographer says he “confused religion and sexuality" (158). Certainly that “symptom” would describe the behavior of certain mystics… the question is then whether they shared something psychologically with Lowell or whether Lowell perhaps read too much mysticism and unconsciously imitated them.

Having sated my biographical craving – in fact, I feel a bit abashed now, having actually been overwhelmed and terrified by Lowell’s character even at this distance – I’m going to turn back to the poetry now. I stumbled on a used copy of his complete works at Magus books, and read “Falling Asleep over the Aeneid” while standing up in the bookstore. That read certainly confirmed it was worth the purchase.

Letters

2008-12-13T17:31:00.004-05:00

"We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel." - E. Bishop

On this shockingly cold day for the Northwest, I've just begun reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After pouring over reviews of this collection the NY times book review, the New yorker, and the poetry book store, I felt I had to dig in. It both pleases me and makes me rabidly jealous. What a privilege to listen two great minds thinking and living with each other! I get to watch them magpie along, collecting bits from their daily life and travels and then flipping the visible side of the world over and turning it into poems. On the other hand, I envy them their special poet friend ... and also the permanence of letters ! I feel I have enjoyed some wonderful correspondence and exchange, but so much of it drifts away over the phone and the internet. I really wonder -- I realize this is an unoriginal reflection -- how this generation will be recorded. We've even seen that problem with the email of the president; because his correspondence must be public, he can't email... just another sign, that we really haven't found out how to keep a record of this transient medium.

Back to Bishop and Lowell. I realized while matching some of Bishop's poems to the ones mentioned in the correspondence that I haven't read much Lowell... I certainly had a copy of Life Studies once, but it seems to have drifted from my shelf. I think I like Bishop more anyway, but just for justice, I'm going to try to rustle up a copy of Lowell's work as I go through the letters so I can "watch them work."

But Bishop, Bishop... she is the writer's writer's writer, as Ashbery is cited as saying. Take that first line I've cited: the iceberg is the imaginary, the narratively drawn together life, that we prefer to the raw data of the world without us. But the iceberg is also the world without us: it's not the ship, the thing we've crafted and try to sail uselessly in a sea packed with brutal things like icebergs.

astrology , therapy, Husserl?

2008-12-08T00:38:00.002-05:00

Today I met an astrologer who knew Husserl. No, that's not a typo folks: I don't mean "astronomer." I was sitting at Peet's coffee and this man comes up to me -- after some chitchat about the Sunday market that made our coffee spot too busy -- and asks me what I'm working on . I say my dissertation; he says, "Oh, is it on Husserl?" I say - surprised - "No, but..." and this leads to a pretty cogent conversation about phenomenology.

And... somewhere along the way, he mentioned he was an astrologer. Despite his thoughtful, in depth thoughts on Husserl and Sartre, I struggled to maintain a charitable attitude. How could he both be a thinking person and an astrologer!? But I tried to keep my mind open, and he had some interesting things to say about how astrology was more like psycho-therapy than people thought. (He found it exhausting to listen to people's problems all day and respond to them. ) And then we talked just a little about how myth and astrology could have transformative, theraputic effects . Then... he started to talk about transmigration of the soul and he lost me a bit. Still, it was a healthy challenge to my latent scientism.

Plus, the kicker is that on Friday night at the company party, the very nice woman sitting to my left said, "Ah what do you do as a philosopher then? Is it like astrology?" = )

blake on mourning

2008-12-05T21:50:00.001-05:00

I love Blake. I bought a Dover Thrift edition just to have him near me. Here's a quote on mourning from "On Another's Sorrow"

"Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy maker is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy maker is not near.

O! He gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan."

I would think with my general outward cynicism, I would prefer the Songs of Experience, but instead I love the Songs of Innocence, the more nursery rhyme the better. I'm sure Auden would agree...

art-life-art-life, etc, etc.

2008-12-03T18:18:00.003-05:00

Last night I had a dream that I recognized a poem by E. Barett-Browning in a book that someone had disguised as Wordsworth (someone she parodies / contends with). I'm not sure what the dream was about, but I flipped open my copy of Aurora Leigh and found a passage that echoes what I was just reading in Merleau-Ponty. Browning writes:

"What form is best for poems? Let me think
Of forms less, and the external. Trust the spirit,
As sovran nature does, to make the form'
For otherwise we only imprison spirit,
And not embody. Inward evermore
To outward, -- so in life, and so in art,
Which still is life."

Basically... how should we write? Like we live. And vice versa. This is not a new idea... not even for a Romantic; what is beautiful but the good at which all things aim. Art should be like a living body, whole, unique, etc. Merleau-Ponty says, in turn, “the body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art” (PP 150). Any human action happens with the ambiguous unity of the art work: an action is individual, in relation to its situation “its meaning is not arbitrary and does not dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the world [like a poem] printed on some perishable page” (PP 150).

These prescriptions are pleasant... and maybe often, true. But they also feel insufficient. Certainly there can be bad art, better art, unsuccessful actions, better action, etc. So while the comparison is true, I wondered if it helped Browning at all in her writing ...

All I can think is that she chose, of all forms, the epic which requires a good amount of time to read. So her form, perhaps better than the lyric, reflects life and vice versa because both are temporal. As with reading Remembrance of Things Past, the sheer time it takes to read her book changes your relation to it.

Intruder

2008-12-02T18:34:00.003-05:00

Intruder. What a catchy title. Violation can be so seductive. What has been violated? Or whom? By whom ? Who's on the inside now? What was valuable or taken? I for one was hooked by this title of Jill Bialosky's new book. That said, I don't actually enjoy all of the poems -- she mentions The Poet one too many times for me -- but I do like the arc of the story that springs out from the title. I also particularly enjoyed, "An Essay in Two Voices." Here is a passage:

"Perhaps under the transforming powers
of imagination, there's evidence of a positive attitude toward you.
This is what Stendhal thinks of as the 'second crystallization'' ;
and it is at this stage, he believes, that love becomes fixed."

Alan Williamson alludes to the same passage from Stendal's Love in his poem "Love and the Soul." Williamson describes the fixation of love as like "the branch gathering crystals out of the cold water.” Here is the passage from Stendal’s Love to which they both allude:

At the mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals…. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. (Stendhal 19)

For Stendhal, this mental process of crystallization means that after falling in love, “a man in love sees every perfection in the object of his love” (Stendhal 45). In love, we are not blind, but we are misguided; like some sort of cognitively disabled Oliver Sacks patient, we have the strange habit of mis-attributing all virtue to one person. We see generosity in a neighbor, and we think ‘how much better that would look if my beloved did it’ and in a way, begin to believe s/he has done it. This sort of love leads to a “girl drowned” in the love of a man who lets her crystallize under the weight of too many qualities.

In Bialosky's poem, love sustained depends on imagination . The risk, as for Williamson and Stendhal, is not necessarily that love is not requited (though this is a possibility) but that it is imbalanced, substantiated by imagination not by the actual other person. How do we know the difference between empathy and imagination? Between caring blindness to faults and ignoring the real?

I'm going to stick with Bialosky's book through a few more readings because of this poem ... many of the poems share its method of building up and then pulling the rug out from under you. She crafts a gentle domestic setting with children, husbands, flowers and walks and then disrupts it (intrudes?). I get this sense that she's set up a still life on a table -- a table with normal, boring-pretty placesettings -- and then she's tilting the table, more and more until I'm uncomfortable and then concerned and then genuinely worried everything in the nice domestic scene is going to fall off and shatter.

pursuit

2008-12-01T14:14:00.002-05:00

I've been reading more philosophy than poetry, but since most of it has been written by Merleau-Ponty, it's still pretty beautiful writing. He says: we are each " a being which is in pursuit of itself outside" (PP 451). We are chasing after our own motivations that lead us away from our bodies toward other bodies, toward other things, toward actions, events. For M-P this is a sort of "realistic" statment: you simply are always already outside of yourself; you're made up of the stuff of the world, a hollow or fold in the world not fundamentally different (as for Sartre, Descartes).

I've begun to think of his work as a sort of virtue ethics, a praxis you must take up, not theorize. He concludes the Phenomenology of Perception with a quote from St. Exupery: "Your act is you." And yet as a practice his philosophy seems to differ quite strongly from other philosophies to which I am committed, namely yogic philosophy. In yoga, one wants to stop seeking ourselves "out there"; stop looking at another person's mat to see what you should be doing. But yogic philosophy seems to have little postivie to say about desire or motivation; we are to distinguish ourselves from them.

But for M-P, to be motivated does not mean that we are not free. I wonder if M-P is only describing a situtation rather than prescribing it?

What I've been reading

2008-11-18T19:08:00.002-05:00

I've been lazy about posting for the last month so I thought I'd just jump back in with a quicky. I took a trip to my favorite poetry book store today and got some new reading: Maureen McLane's Same Life. The text is sparse and cryptic -- starts with a fragment, makes allusion to sappho -- and it's made more compact by some ampersands and lack of capitalization ... but the content is rich, mystical, loving. I'm digging it.

(I also a copy of Field with some commentary and poems by lots of people I like) I also enjoyed reading the new poems in Linda Bierd's new collected work. Last week, I also enjoyed Jorie Graham's Sea Change... she's sort of a sure-fire fix.

Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn

2008-08-18T17:08:00.002-04:00

I found this to be a very thoughtful and even handed review by Simon Blackburn of Alan Sokal's latest book, Beyond the Hoax. Sokal mercilessly mocked a generation of postmodern scholars... and as anyone who's read in that area knows, some of the criticism is deserved. But not all. Blackburn does a very good job of explaining the awkward position that editors are in when facing an interdiscplinary article... and more importantly, a scientific article in a humanities discipline. So many philosophers, literary theorists, and even poets, as I noticed during the last series of WW lectures I attended, want to "interpret" or make use of the latest (or even, just the last 75 years) of developments in biology and physics. But... they just do get it. Well, they get *some* of it or they get the part the publishing scientist has put into words; but the humanities readers are not privy to the data or the technical pieces of the articles, and so they can't critique the foundations of radical claims about, for example, cognition or the relation of time and space. The Sokal hoax is not just an incident of a smart physicist showing up some poorly-educated lit crit-ers, but evidence of the difficulties communicating between the sciences and the humanities in general. Thanks, Blackburn for affirming that.

Tragedy, Logos, Mythos and Louise Gluck's "Lament"

2008-08-18T13:03:00.003-04:00

Louise Gluck the prepares the readers of her book, Ararat, to read arguments. She perhaps wishes she didn't have to write so many arguments or respond to them, asking in the opening poem, "Why should I tire myself, debating, arguing?" But the trouble is, she was "Born to a vocatoin / to bear witness / to the great mysteries" and she has realized that " these / are proofs, not / mysteries --." On that em dash, we enter the book, to read her proofs or... her readings of the proofs in nature. Throughout the book, Gluck is wishing for wholes, for neat, complete forms like circles; this "love of form is a love of endings." She wants things to be complete, including her arguments. She wants to start telling you about some problem, some situation, caused by nature -- her birth, for example -- and to complete the proposition with a definitive conclusion. But, nature resists endings. And our own nature, more than any other part of nature, resists being judged completely.

In "Lament," Gluck takes a look at her own nature. That is, she takes a look at her whole life, as it will be viewed after death. Or, more precisely, she attempts to take a look at that whole. She tells the reader firmly in the opening sentence that "Suddenly, after you die, those friends / who never agreed about anything / agree about your character." READ MORE... She says, definitively, This is how it will be when you die: everything will be visible and everyone agreed. The mourners will be "like a houseful of singers rehearsing / the same score." They will be the chorus, able finally at the end of your life, to pass judgment. They will be able to decide finally that "you were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life." As Aristotle tells us in his Ethics, we cannot know things things until after a life is complete: the goodness of a person's life depends on how it finishes, on the fortunes of his or her family, on the change that person's fortune after life. The goodness of a life is not visible to the one living that life or even to those living that life with her.

Of course, those who gather at Gluck's speaker's funeral are not just a chorus, "they're not performers; / real tears are shed." And, "[l]uckily, you're dead," says Gluck because otherwise this excessive display would overcome you with revulsion. And yet... at the same time, when all the mourners have settle down, have gone over your life, have had the coffee at the reception, you might, in the end, envy these people. They are, after all, alive and you, says the speaker, are dead (that is the premise of the poem). Meanwhile, "Your friends the living embrace one another / gossip a little." And you see that, counter to Aristotle, "this, this, is the meaning of / "a fortunate life": it means / to exist in the present."

To exist in the present. This is something you are not permitted after death. It's something quite hard to accomplish even while you're alive. This is the aim of much yogic philosophy: to be fully present. Yogis struggle for many years, not to struggle with life's projects. But... is that an inhuman aim? Heidegger would think so: to live authentically, is to live in the face of one'death. That is, to live toward and in light of, one's future, not to understand existence only in terms of presence. In Gluck's model,in contrast to Aristotle, fortune is indeterminant. Neither the first nor the third person perspective reveals fortune. The mourner judging a person like a chorus after the person's death can decide the quality of life; the person living a life can never know if she fully exists in the present.

Gluck opens the poem with a hypothesis, considers one traditional response (Aristotle's), then exposes details through phenomenological research (i.e. looking at the lived experience of the situation) and finally concludes with her own assessment. The poem presents an argument, a proof. But we can't understand this proof as simply fuzzy "poet's logic." Gluck is really making a counter argument. To the logos, the account, of Aristotle, she presents another account, another logos. The logos makes use of a bit of mythos (On this distinction, see John Sallis, Being and Logos). But the conclusion we reach at the end, was hard won through this account, not just lightly presented.

Gluck changes the nature of tragedy, even while playing on the classical Greek mode. We cannot witness the lives of others and, through pity and fear, excise emotions in order to learn and live a good live, together as a health polis. There are not good actions or bad actions or fated actions that can dame or redeem us. No, no. The tragedy is that we can only learn, looking on the lives of others, that it is good to be alive, that all there is, is to be present to that life, whatever its quality.

And of course... by imagining her own death, by asking us to imagine ours, Gluck pulls herself and her readers away from the very present she has exhorted us to appreciate. Ironically, only through the lesson learned by looking away from the present -- toward death -- are we reminded to attend to the present.

Now, I'm reading Gluck's "Lament" because I also like to make "arguments" in my poems. I can help it! I read arguments all day. Of course, as a good philosopher trained in the 'continental' / hermeneutic tradition, I am also always asking myself what an argument is in the first place, how it differs from a story, and what the nature of language is that it permits us (if it does) to distinguish those categories, arguments and stories. As a philosopher, writing poetry, I am often worried about making "fuzzy" arguments: the sorts of poetic "arguments" that skip a few step, that enjoy the ad hominem, that don't care about objections. And... of course, as a poet, that I will be ruining my poems with too many arguments! Even Plato tells us in the Phaedo, that a poet, if he is to be a poet, must tell stories, not arguments. But... Gluck is certainly making a sort of argument here. And she's certainly a poet. So I must conclude that either Plato was wrong, (he was badly translated), he means something different by "story" than I do, that he didn't mean the categories as exclusive (you could have stories and arguments), or that poetry has just generally become something different than it was for Plato. I usually resist the last argument as an easy out that assumes a too-flexible view of the human condition. But the other options still leave too much room for a full conclusion.

So... let's abandon that tactic and Plato altogether, and just say that if Gluck can do it, then it's possible. Arguments *in* poems. But... the way to do it, is by way of a story. This poem would most likely fail were it not to include the rhetorical exercise of imagining your own death and the image of the mourners living through the funeral. So... the lesson is, A little of both? Well, that's a recipe that could use a few more details and it certainly won't help me write a poem. But Gluck's work affirms the possibility of this combination. And... outside of its crafty tools and rhetoric, I appreciate the content of the argument she's made. Be present. That's pretty straight forward. Isn't it?

Why "me"???

2008-08-10T15:02:00.001-04:00

I was assigned to read “Andrea del Sarto,” because in Shapiro’s words, “there’s nothing but character” in this poem. But whose character? There are at least two important characters in the poem, represented directly and indirectly: the speaker and the addressee of the monologue. Both characters concern me: what are their characteristics and how does Browning manage to convey these qualities? The poem fits into steady blank verse, with some unobtrusive internal rhyme. These formal structures recede to foreground the quality of the speaker’s voice and thought.
The speaker is a painter, apparently the painter of the title, Andrea del Sarto. By his own account, he is a good painter and well-established. He does “no sketches first, no studies” before he paints; the many would-be artists around him struggle to accomplish what he easily dashes off: he does “what many dream of all their lives.” And yet, he does not relish his success or even find it honest. He thinks that those other, struggling artists “reach many a time a heaven” that is closed to him, even if his work itself is heavenly. But heaven is not something we can really reach anyway, del Sarto thinks. Heaven is an ideal, an aim, but unattainable: “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”
It’s hard for del Sarto to tell the difference between himself and his art.
READ MORE... During the autumn evening that frames the poem, del Sarto sees “alike my work and self.” And he sees that God controls all of this – the evening, the couple watching it, the art, the selves. But this deceptive God only gives the inhabitants of his world the appearance of freedom. They seem free, but God has fettered them. Del Sarto plays on the phrase, “to lead a life,” exclaiming that it is strange to look at “the life He makes us lead!” (my emphasis) God gives people the impression that they are in control, they are guiding their lives, but they are only walking ahead of him, attached by a chain he put on at birth. Like a perverse psychologist, God lets the speaker talk and talk, permitting him the impression that he controls the conversation. But a secret agenda and hidden rules and knowledge decide the situation and the very soul of the speaker.
Lucrezia, the character who is the addressee of the monologue and present at the speech, says nothing about del Sarto’s musing. She does not seem to think much about his work… or to think much at all, according to del Sarto. He tells her, “you don’t understand / Nor care to understand about my art.” She has smeared one of his paintings, “carelessly passing with … [her] robes afloat.” And the premise of the poem is that she’s asked him to paint something for a friend of a friend, to get a little money. After he promises to do so, he has to persuade her just to sit with him for the evening. She’ll also be his model for the promised paintings, so they’d better keep on good terms, even if the relationship is a bit unbalanced. Del Sarto wishes that with her pretty model’s face she had “but brought a mind!” He pithily remakes that “some women do so.” Not only that, he wishes that rather than asking him to pander his art for money, she’d said “God and the glory! Never care for gain.” But… these are only idle wishes in del Sarto’s mind; he’s not going to leave her and look for a more artistic, passionate partner. “God over-rules” everything and his fate is his fate. More to the point, “incentives come from the soul’s self; the rest avail not”: that is to say, del Sarto thinks his situation is his own fault. He has opportunities to rise through some great patrons, but he stuck with his Lucrezia. He admits that as a result, he might be a bit “underrated.” Musing on that, he dares to “fix” an arm in a painting by Raphael (or copied from a Raphael) that sits in his studio. Without glory, without praise from Raphael and Michaelangelo, the only criterion of assessment del Sarto has is money. If Lucrezia would consent to sit with him more often, he says he would work better, where “better” is equivalent to having more money: “I should work better, do you comprehend? I mean that I should earn more, give you more.” Despite all this – all his doubts about himself, his relationship – he concludes that “God is just.” He says – with purported resolve – “I regret little, I would change less still,” though only a few lines later, admitting that he let his parents die in poverty. After his long diatribe, all that Lucrezia does is get up to go out with her Cousin without del Sarto. Still, del Sarto finds ironically that in fact she loved him “quite enough … to-night.” Perhaps he’s had quite enough of her sort of love. In any case, he doesn’t stop her from going out.
I learn, through del Sarto, some details about Lucrezia’s responses to his work and via these details, something of del Sarto’s thoughts about himself. But always, always, the question in the back of my mind is, what does I learn of Robert Browning by reading this poem? Nothing? Enough? Should I learn something? Commentary on Browning takes up a substantial chunk of a stack in the university library. With all his masks of characters and dissociative relations between himself and his speakers, he’s a subject just begging for post-modern sort of commentary (and there is plenty). One comment I found helpful as a quick summary sort of position is that Browning “never thought of utterance as performed outside history in a Shelleyan lyric space” but that does mean that he was just trapped in “neurotic self-concealment behind his speakers.” Rather, Browning simply accepted that “consciousness, when properly conceived [and I infer, properly represented], will always generate a regress of frames that defer closure.” What a relief! I, we (poets), do not need to worry about representing consciousness completely! . Certainly then, I do not need to worry whether my consciousness will be communicated if no consciousness can be fully communicated. (I resist – with difficulty – digressing to a long, philosophical diatribe on the iffy-ness of any sort of “I” or unified consciousness, drawing support from everyone from Dennett, Hoffstrader, Fodor, Lacan, and Derrida.) Then why is there so much demand for me to say something personal on the page! The exclamation point in that sentence shouts in apostrophe to many of my readers and teachers, from parents to well-respected poets and philosophers. Do they make the same demand of authors of fiction? Does anyone put down Ulysses to demand of Joyce, Waves of Woolf or even Cavalier and Clay of Chabon, that he or she say more of herself? That is the “relief” the writer enjoys by using characters and plot: they speak for themselves (whichever selves, whosever they are, and whoever put them on the page). I can appreciate Browning’s work of this dramatic type in the same way as I appreciate good fiction. Like good fiction, this puts a big demand on the reader who must extrapolate from the specific characters represented, perhaps through a universal, toward a model that might apply to the reader’s own life. Rather than allowing the only particular to be the life or consciousness of a speaker identifiable with the poet, this fictional, dramatic type of poetry generates other particulars. These foil characters are somehow trustworthy in a way that a personal speaker might not be. Even when someone you don’t like as a person tells you a fairy tale or reads you a novel aloud, you can still enjoy the story. That is, if for some reason I start to feel like I dislike or feel distant from the speaker-character I associate with Sylvia Plath or Derek Walcott, it might be difficult to empathize with many poems. This one, albeit complex, “I” persists through many poems. In Walcott’s Midsummer, for example, there is no relief from the intense, 1:1 conversation with this insistent “I.” (And in the case of this book, I did at times want relief)
That said, of all Browning’s dramatic monologues – many of which could serve for study of his characters – I chose to write on “Andrea del Sarto” for personal reasons. I chose the poem not just for its tricks of formal method, but because of the topic and its relation to my personal life. This is a poem about a difficult relationship, about art – specifically visual art and living with a visual artist, topics close to home for me – and the relation between artists in general and their work, lives and partners in life. I – pause for ominous suspense after this pronoun – like this poem. I’ll probably write some poems modeled after it, or at least some poems around the same topics. The accumulation of selected topics and characters does allude to a curator, either Browning or myself. But the totality of that accumulation is precisely something I will never see in my own work, and something extraordinarily difficult to perceive even with all Browning’s work accompanied by years of criticism, sitting before me. But as a poet, writing via a foil character lets me, as I imagine it allowed Browning, to defer contemplation of that whole and concentrate on a few particulars.

Poems I love???

2008-08-06T19:04:00.003-04:00

What sort of poems do I love? What a question. It’s a question Alan Shapiro asked me when we started out this term. That is, what were some of the first poems I loved? The poems I read before I even knew the names of the authors or what poetry was “for.” I remember going to my room – either because I was sent there or because I went to sulk there – when I was between maybe seven and thirteen and reading two or three poems form one book of poems over and over. These were my mantra poem: to read until I calmed down. Then I might browse through the book or get out other books and read them. But these two or three poems were the key to crawling into my safe place, mentally and physically. I recovered that book from my parents house this summer and found the poem that was most essential to my “practice” of retreating: “High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee Jr. Magee won a small prize in poetry and published a few poems privately, but he was best known for this poem, “High Flight,” written while he was test-piloting a plane in World War II. He died shortly after Pearl Harbor. After Archibald Macleish selected the poem for a collection, it became well-known.

Of course, I knew none of this when I read the poem as a child. I read the poem because I had always wanted to be an astronaut: when I was five or six I told everyone I would be an astrophysicist; I dreamed of Space Camp; I read Stephen Hawking when I was eleven. Then I found out that astronauts must have perfect vision and be at least five feet four inches tall. After it was clear I would never attain even the requisite height on earth, I abandoned the career goal. I never bothered with physics in college and left off after a few advanced math classes. But the dream of me of being an astronaut – of seeing the whole thing – still haunted my vocational plans. Studying philosophy, writing poetry, seemed to be a way of short-circuiting the arduous scientific path toward that big picture knowledge.

Before I go any further, here's the poem:

I did not set out to investigate this poem because it acted via a particular pre-determined craft element. READ MORE... Rather, I want to study this poem to see which craft elements play a role in effecting the sort of poem I found (or find?) secretly and firmly to be paradigmatic of “Poem.” To that end, I will proceed from the outside in, scanning the poem from its most broad structures and conceits to find this hidden craft element. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to cut to the chase)

Magee’s poem is a fourteen-line, near-Shakespearean sonnet with an ABAB rhyme scheme, until the last five lines which proceed FEGFG. The rhymes are straight, perfect rhymes of one-syllable words. Alliteration and consonance of “s” sounds string together throughout the poem: for example, “slipped,” “surly,” “skies, “laughter-silver wings,” “Sunward,” all the way through to “silent… sanctity of space.” Coinciding with the dramatic action of the poem, “s” sounds build momentum as the pilot lifts off from earth and speeds into flight. And yet there is relief from this alliteration in the penultimate couplet, “Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.” At the moment in the poem, Magee's speaker has climbed “up, up the long delirious blue” ; acceleration has ceased: reader and speaker pause, in orbit, in empty, quiet space.

The lines are steady iambic pentameter, with a few exceptions in the first foot: line three varies the initial iamb with a trochee, “Sunward”; line five has a spoken stress on the initial “You” of “You have not dreamed of…”; similarly, line six, emphasize “High”; and line nine begins with a spondee, “Up, up.” These initial variations relax the sonnet into a slightly more colloquial tone. Both the topic and the discourse are so elevated that these gentle shifts in emphasize make the speaker and the content more accessible.

To address this issue of content, I want to consider first the plot or dramatic action of the poem and then the rhetorical tropes employed there in. The poem has a fairly simple plot: the speaker has “slipped the surly bonds” of gravity and headed up into the sky, past the clouds, where he has done many things “you have not dreamed of.” Up in the sky, he hovered, in some sort of “craft”-- I'll resist the temptation to dwell on poetic craft -- and then, he managed, up there in space to touch “the face of God.” Magee’s language fluctuates between semi-metaphors and periphrasis. For example, rather than directly saying that he has “escaped gravity” he says, periphrastically, that he has “slipped the surly bonds of earth.” In the atmosphere, he “joined the tumbling mirth” of clouds: that is, the clouds were, metaphorically, dancing around. He also chased the wind which was, metaphorically, “shouting … along.”

The most obvious criticism that I can imagine one might level at Magee’s poem is that it is abstract and sentimental. Let me take each of those accusations in turn. Magee’s poem is “abstract” in that it digresses through the periphrases mentioned above, and it includes adjectives whose content is difficult to pin down: for example, in the phrases “surly bonds,” “eager craft” and “delirious burning blue” and “easy grace.” As a reader, I know vaguely what he means to suggests, but my imagination depends on previous association of these words with elevated topics rather than an encounter with a new, specific image. Magee’s poem could be seen as “sentimental” in that he discusses perhaps clichéd topics – flying away from earth, dancing with the stars, and talking to God – and he reacts, as would be expected, with awe and joy.

But I love this poem! How can it be abstract and sentimental? (Or worse, if it is abstract and sentimental, why do I love it?) The success of Magee’s poem depends not on innovation in the sonnet form – as I hope I've shown, the rhymes, meter, and argument structure are standard – and not on the novel or bizarre language – again, we’ve seen that he uses clichéd adjectival phrases – but on its rhetorical tools and effect. Although I mentioned some instance of metaphor, as a whole, the poem performs as a metonymy. It is not the series of clichéd metaphors – joyful clouds and halls of air – that affect me as a reader. Rather, I am persuaded into the imaginary because the poem was written by a person literally up in the sky. (Magee wrote the poem at 30,000 feet, quite a height in the early twentieth century.) In my book, the poem appears above a photo of a Edward White, the first American to “float in space” and the facing page contains a picture of “Africa and Other Areas of the Earth, Seen from Apollo 17 Spacecraft.” (The poem was later quoted by Ronald Regan during the Challenger disaster)

Magee's poem results not from idle speculation, but observation. He does not aruge that some abstraction – say, the life of the mind— is, in simile, like floating in space or that it is, metaphorically, an adventure into the stratosphere. Magee is not wandering in the forest like Wordsworth, mulling over existence (personal and general) and history and offering comparisons or approximations. While Magee’s language might veer toward the abstract or sentimental, he conveys a quite concrete and specific experience to the reader. Magee says, “I am floating in space. I really am. That’s it.” And it just so happens that the next association over on the horizontal access of metonymic similarity, a la Jacoboson is “touching the face of God.” These two events are found together like shoes and slippers, a bed and a pillow, or a mother and love. It’s hard to disassociate a mother from love (whether the effect is to call up a lack of love, the pain of love, the loss of love, or an excess of love). Likewise, floating in orbit and watching the whole of the planet is, perhaps for our species, not dissociable from the notion of God (leaving that massive noun's definition in a secular suspense).

This poem appears in a collection titled, Imaginary Gardens, taken from a phrase in a Marianne Moor poem: “… nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of / the imagination’… and can present / for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (This poem is included in the collection) Moore means that the poet ought to create so accurately and precisely imaginary places that real and familiar things just appear in them. And the real work of the poet, the real poetry is with the real things, not in the “fiddle,” as she puts it, that generates them. Magee might fiddle around with language a bit, but he does get you to the real. He doesn’t make an imaginary garden; he only tells you where he’s sitting and that’s quite interesting enough.

Civilizations, Images, and the Subjunctive

2008-08-01T19:55:00.007-04:00

Today I'm reading Elizabeth Arnold's second book, Civilization. That's quite a hefty title to take on, but the book manages that sweep (most of the time). A set a poems about her father interspersed through the first half anchor the book. At first, every other poem treats some broader, less personal subject. By the end of the book which is divided into sections, we've left the intimate scenes of the father in a nursing home, for a wider lens that takes in everything from gravity, Europe in the Middle Ages, to the soul and Catal Hyuk. By the way, this is a really *beautiful* book, not just in content but as an object. It's put out by Flood Editions, and it has a black paper page in the front and back that ominously encase the poems.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been trying to figure out exactly what's going on in an "imagist poem" and whether or not people are or can be writing anything like that today. Arnold's book contains a few petite poems that cannot help but call to mind Pound's "At a station at the metro" or other classic imagist poems (which were originally influenced by Japanese haiku and French symbolism). READ MORE... Here's one example from the book:

" Solstice

We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires in December
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun! "

Because I've been taking a French class, I've been thinking a lot about the subjunctive. The French have to be more careful to differentiate between an opinion, a suggestion, a hypothesis, and a statement of fact. Of course, we use the subjunctive in English as well, but we use it less frequently and less precisely. You can make a suggestion that someone do something, and the tense doesn't necessarily differentiate it from the fact that the person *is* doing that thing. But more interestingly, we don't differentiate our opinions of events from statements of fact about those events.

It seems that a true Imagist poem could not have any subjunctive clauses. That is, the Imagist intends only to present what is... not to comment on it, or to suggests that the image might be otherwise than it is. Arnold's poem seems to negotiate just this subtlety, making subjunctive comments on images.

Of course, "Solstice" wouldn't literally require the subjunctive, even in translation. But it seems that the sense of the second sentences, "[I find it so pathetic / amazing / touching] that they tried to persuade the sun to come back." She hasn't just given us the Romans lighting fires, she's said what she thinks about this fact... and in French, that would entail the subjunctive. But her commentary takes us away from the image and into the mind of the poem's speaker who witnesses it. I wonder to myself, not just about the oddity of the persuasion of the sun, but about who "We" are that they were so erudite that they would sit around and chat about Roman solstice rituals. In another poem, "Daddy," she offers an image of her father diving, head first, hands behind him, and suggests "His whole being like that." This little phrase in a short, three line poem, again takes us from the image to a comment on the image. Moreover, in the context of the book, we cannot help but attend to the impact of this father's actions on the speakers of the poems... who are quite hard to disassociate from the author, Arnold.

So, though her petite poems give all the appearance of imagism, I would say they differ quite significantly, though in more or less obvious ways. (an image does not an imagist poem make) "Solstice" is much more subtle in its commentary than "Daddy" and others... and I prefer "Solstice" precisely because of the anonymity of the speaker. Many, many people might wonder about the persuasion of the sun; only Arnold wonders about that father. The pleasure of the imagist poems is that, as far as it is possible, it does let the speaker disappear. We can zoom out, we can enjoy that contemplating-the-universe feeling you have when watching the Discover Channel, Planet Earth, or the Life of Mammals. Or even the more human -- yet impersonal -- voyeurism of Benjamin's flanneur.

Merleau-Ponty speaks often -- and is equally often criticized for these comments about -- the "anonymous body." What he means by this is still unclear to me, but it's something like whatever we share that permits empathy, that permits collective behavior. It's whatever makes you human and not just you. The trouble (and the source of his well-deserved criticism) is that there might not be such a body, that not all bodies are the same, etc. And yet... I am persuaded by the potential of this notion. But we would have to let it mean not some literal physical construction, but a shared sensibility. In that case.. The best poetry (or, let's be clear: the poetry *I* enjoy) appeals to the anonymous body ... perhaps requires the anonymous body in order to be understood ... perhaps let's the anonymous body speak.

Would that make it the poetry of the indicative, not the subjunctive?