Do Poems have Any Ideas?

I have come away from the residency feeling a little disheartened. I’ve gotten the impression that -- here – poetry is not about ideas. I rather thought it was. The poems that I like most communicate very big ideas; that does not mean the materials that generate the ideas are abstract concepts themselves, any more than Richard Serra’s sculptures are made of ‘ideas’ and not contorted steel. But the contorted steel communicates a very big Idea. Idea being an eidos, a form, the look of things in the world to the human perception; the look of human perception re-presented to it. There were great eras of ideas in poetry and literature in general: Rilke, Schiller, Goethe, Sartre just to name those at the tip of my tongue. These guys certainly attended to craft, but they wanted -- they say so in letters -- to express very, very big ideas in literature. Milton gave me ideas about love and God and pain; Wordsworth gave me ideas about souls and winds and travel and war. Graham and Carson pile up ideas about femininity, marriage, suffering, poetry.

These ideas -- these forms of life -- appear on the page from letters that make words (that conjure connotations) that make lines that also continue into or contain sentences (that have rhythm and music that set a mood) that make stanzas that generate images in my mind and the mind of other readers. The stanzas also produce characters and voices that may speak to me discursively -- i.e. communicate 'abstract' ideas -- but these are precisely voices and characters that speak in my mind, not mere abstraction. But through all this... just as, walking through an Ernesto Netto sculpture ... I received ideas. The art comes, Oppen says, when one feels the one thread ("One cannot come to feel he holds a thousand threads in his hand... this is the level of art") and that one thread is the form of many things, many aspects, many experiences.

I do not care for art that does not take its ideas seriously. Feeling ... well. You will feel something; but you can feel something looking at a bleeding rabbit or by putting your hand near a flame. Art builds a home for feeling to live in. Artifice is not the opposite of sentimentality; it is its human form.

We are here (as other writers are in other MFAs) to learn craft, sure; we are here to learn artifice, techniques, techne the knowledge of things that might be otherwise or not at all. But that does mean that from that craft won't come a thing which generates ideas. If you write of a helicopter descending like a mad fly in a bottle and also of single lives as a shipwrecks (as Oppen does), I will surmise some ideas about war and life and death. When I read a poem, I am willing to work away to learn those ideas; that might require studying the imagery and the syntax and the line breaks ... but also tracing the allusions and piecing together ideas in one section with ideas in another. Certainly, one can discuss ideas in a manner that is either literary critical or philosophical or historical (i.e. not in the manner of a working poet)... but I think one can also talk about ideas as an artist. That is, what kind of ideas grip me? what kind of ideas have I generated? That is, we should talk about in addition to what kind of scene, what kind of character an author has generated, what kind of ideas they have communicated.

No doubt this sounds like the ranting of a philosopher feeling unimportant or else someone who hasn't mastered her 'craft.' Certainly it is both. But I think some frustration is justified... and not just in regards to the program I am in now. It's quite a problem for artists in general, of many disciplines deal. But to take an example from this week, the well-known poet leading a discussion of Oppen's work wanted to talk about the tropes of "fate" and "being numerous"
in his poems but without discussing the ideas. She merely located the recurring themes in the text, marveled at them, made a few of her own comments about fate and was content to say that Oppen had read Heidegger. She resisted any discussion of what Oppen might really have said about singularity, perception, or death; she just wanted to discuss their presentation. I'm not advocating for literary analysis of the allusions to Heidegger or Husserl (both of which appear all through the Oppen) exciting as that might be ... but a discussion of Oppen's work that only describes imagery and syntax is like a description of a meal in terms of color and arrangement with nothing to say about taste and digestion!

Oppen's work -- like Goethe or Dickenson's or Carson's -- deserves to be respected precisely for its ability to communicate the ideas. Part of learning the craft of poetry must be learning how to communicate ideas therein ... which requires figuring out what a poet's ideas are and how they appear out of the syntax and voices ( and ought also, in my opinion, to include learning to think more carefully about these ideas, but perhaps that's leaning too far to the philosophical right or left.) To ignore that presentation in favor of asking either merely what the poem made you see or worse, made you feel is to oppose artifice not only to sentiment but to comprehension. Artifice allows sentiment to arise as it allows comprehension to arise. The great art of Bishop in "Crusoe in England" say, gives us the pain of Friday and Crusoe; it also gives us ideas about human finitude and friendship and intersubjectivity. That sounds like a shallow summary of Bishop and it is! Bishop's ideas are as complex as her presentation and I can't summarize them... they are poetic ideas, presented in poem. But that they appear as poetry does not prevent their ideality.

--
"One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands,

He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art"

- George Oppen. "Of Being Numerous," 1968.