Antipodes

Apparently, from Greeks to at least the 16th century, there was a real concern over whether there were antipodes, i.e. people on the other side of the globe with their feet turned toward ours. The church worried whether that postulation implied a division in the human race; Augustine concluded it must therefore be nonsense. In "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward," John Donne wonders if, from God's point of view, he could "behold that endless height which is / Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, / Humbled below us?"

From the OED:
antipodes, n. pl.

1. Those who dwell directly opposite to each other on the globe, so that the soles of their feet are as it were planted against each other; esp. those who occupy this position in regard to us. Obs.
2. fig. Those who in any way resemble the dwellers on the opposite side of the globe. Obs.
3. Places on the surfaces of the earth directly opposite to each other, or the place which is directly opposite to another; esp. the region directly opposite to our own.
4. a. transf. The exact opposite of a person or thing. (In this sense the sing. antipode is still used.)

The antipodes seem to be our opposites, but not malicious; they're not our evil counterpart, just our significant other. A bit like today's 'dark matter.' (Antipodes sounds about as scientific as 'dark matter' does any way... ) Maybe these antipodes are just our shadows.

Asheville Shindig

Today we bounced the baby on down town for the Shindig on the green. It's a bunch of casual blue grass sessions -- real hill billies with guitars, washtubs, banjos and dulcimers -- around the edge of a park with a mainstage band and square dancing. Every Saturday and quite an event.

Robert Pinksky "Keyboard"

"A disembodied piano. The headphones allow
The one who touches the keys a solitude
Inside his music; shout and he may not turn:

Image of the soul that thinks to turn from the world."

- Robert Pinksky from "Keyboard"

Lyric

"The best teacher I ever had told us a lyric poem can only say one of three things. It can say 'Oh, the beauty of it' or 'Oh, the pity of it,' or it can say, 'Oh.' "
- William Meridith.

Ontology and Address...I, You, Ich, Du, Sie, Vous, Tu...

We speak often of the problem of the “I” in lyric poetry, but what of the “You”? Literary critics struggle with whether to assume that the “I” who speaks is the poet or a character or a narrator, but perhaps the first question ought to be, “to whom is this ‘I’ speaking?” To start with the “I” rather than the “you” implies a certain ethical and ontological stance that may not be appropriate to all lyric nor even to all speech.




George Herbert’s devotional poems, such as "Jordan (1)" would be incomprehensible without considering the “You” that the poems address. This “you” is generally either God or a fellow Christian (or both simultaneously), or a potential convert or wayward Christian. This you, especially when it indicates God, is a powerful force. The poem is not a circle radiating from a central “I” but an ellipse, defined by its two poles.

While I do not intend to address God in my poems, I do often use direct address and dialogue. I am struggling with the role of the “I” in poems – whether I want one to write with this pronoun at all, or if so, with what relation to have to the pronoun -- but I had not considered the opposing “you.” This, perhaps, says more about my character than that of anyone’s poems.

But why do we assume the I is equivalent to the poet? I'd be open to the possibility that other people consider the "you" first, but a number of grad and undergrad literature courses suggest that most people make that fatal intentional fallacy. Does our tendency to make the intentional fallacy suggest something about our original relationship to the world? Or, perhaps, conversely, we cannot help but feel addressed by the poem... implicitly called to by an other behind the page.

Herbert's poems do not call directly the reader: they speak to God. The reader, for the most part, simply listens in on conversations between the poet and God. “Jordan (1)” begins with a series of questions; these are not rhetorical questions posed to the open air but questions put to God and Christians who read poetry. The poem asks: “Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair / become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?” Insofar as he addresses other Christians, Herbert less asks these questions than he implies their response: poetry’s proper role is to display beautiful truths not pretty fictions. Insofar as he speaks to God, Herbert appears to genuinely inquire into poetry’s potential for presenting sacred subjects; perhaps poetry, as artifice, can only remain several removes from the truth. He refers to the "painted chair" and alludes to the infamous Platonic defamation of the poets; but like Plato, he duplicitly presents this "argument" in poetry, undercutting our trust the explicit statement.

Because the poem actually puts the question to God, this is not idle speculation; as a Christian minister, Herbert could expect an answer of sorts. The answer might not come in sonnet reply, but as addressed to God, his poem takes on the power of prayer. This element of “craft” is performative: Herbert performs prayer in poetry. His craft choices addresses the problem of craft: should poetry craftily generate more false images of “enchanted groves” and “purling streams” or should it speak directly (to God) and avoid artifice?

Of course, the poem itself appears within a sturdy form: iambic pentameter with alternating end rhyme. Apparently, this aspect of craft is appropriate or necessary for communicating even with God. When a poet writes in images, it causes all to “be vail’d” and “he that reades, divines, catching the sense at two removes.” God, of course, created the original world; poem that addresses God in images would be periphrastic. Herbert even begs that he not be punished “with losse of rime” because he would use his rhymes to say “My God, My King.” In “Jordan (2)” Herbert regrets when his writing was “curling with metaphors a plain intention, decking the sense, as if it were to sell.” I will not have the space to fully consider the second poem, but it is important to note that, though it does not commence with questions and directly invoke an addressee, the poem still implicitly presents itself to God, as framed by the first poem.

Identifying the addressee of the poem as God implicitly suggests that the speaker of the poem is the poet. If this poem truly performs prayer, then it must be prayed by a living soul, not a fictional or artificial narrator. Confession not only celebrates God, but confesses one’s own sins; to create a ‘narrator’ dissociable from the poet would prevent the poem from fulfilling this second function. If the poem addressed someone else – say, a mother or a lover – we could possible envision a scenario in which the narrator has an identity distinct from the poet. For example, as Linda Gregerson points out in “Rhetorical Contract in the Erotic Poem,” the famous Marvell poem “To His Coy Mistress” appears to directly address the lady beloved, but in fact the title offsets the addresser and addressee as his coy mistress. The title casts the poem in an ironic light; someone is saying this to his lover, but it isn’t necessarily the poet. To do the same to an address to God, would be to mock the entire framework of the confessional poem; the poem would no longer be confessional nor could it perform the act of prayer. We must assume sincerity in address in the Herbert poem; the craft element must be taken as intentional in order for the poem to have its intended effect.

Geroge Herbert - "Jordan (1)"

Jordan (1)

Who says that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passes, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring:
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King

Randal Jarell from "The Lost World"

"... In my
Talk with the word, in which it tells me what I know
And I tell it, "I know--" how strange that I
Know nothing, and yet it tells me what I know! --
I appreciate the animals, who stand by
Purring. Or else they sit and pant. It's so --
So agreeable. If only people purred and panted!"

- Randal Jarell, from "The Lost World"

Addendum to "Do Poems Have Any Ideas"

Today Heather McHugh said, "the heart's reasons are the minds love." And Paul Valerie said, "The world of sound is not like the world of colors: there is no sun of the world of noises." Thus, "art is about something the way a cat is about the house" (Alan Grossman). Hmm.

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.

View from poetry boot camp

Today I heard a fabulous talk on James Wright's Two Citizens. Apparently the book was panned because it diverged from his earlier imagistic work and turned to focus on colloquial language. Alan Williamson did a close reading of "Ohio Valley Swains" that opens "The grandaddy longlegs did twilight / And light" moves from lyric to close with "and if I ever see you again, so help me in the sight of God, / I'll kill you." I think it's a perfect narrative poem. Williamson, citing Kristeva, described Wright's technique as "pre-position" in which he inserts certain phrases or allusions earlier into the poetic sequence than the narrative sequence. In Kristeva's view, this indicates the "pleasure principle" (showing what's important to *me*) winning out over the "reality principle" (accurately giving an account for the other/reader). Now, in either poems or conversation, I am thinking about whether the pleasure or reality principle is winning (for me or for my interlocutor).

In another talk on "Daring, Drama, and Melodrama" given by Baker, he cited a poem by Linda Gregerson that really blew me away with its epic, almost cosmic ennui. Gregerson is someone I would like to read more closely. He also read an amazing poem by Auden that manages to avoid sentimentality while rhyming and concluding with the following lines :

"Much can be said for social savoir-fare,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear."

Mythos vs. Logos

Some Differences Between Poets and Philosophers:

- Poets are performers and persnickety. Philosophers are mostly ex-nerds or averages joes (mostly joes, also mind you, not janes where as poetry departments are heavy on the ladies) who like to use dinner to argue. Poets either don't speak much at all or are extrordinarily cool and prefer to use dinner to drink and to gossip rather than pontificate.

- Poets think they are in some way "ordinary people"... they're writing about what's really happening, what's really out there, for what people really care; philosophers argue about why what they do is applicable or underpins what's going on "out there" but rarely simply accept that they are doing what "regular people" are doing

-Poets and writers really don't care about argument! They occasionally think they do of course, but it's nothing like philosophy. Seth Bernadette can find all the argument in the action he wants, but something really happened when mythos and logos diverged...

- Poets mine the current events, encylcopedias, and art exhibits for images and tropes to link in intuitive associations where philosophers look for evidence, trends, and historically contextualized trivia that they can place neatly in a stable niches of a well-constructed historical or analytical account.

- Poets read other poets and allude to philosophers to make things sound cosmically significant. Philosophers read other philosophers and allude to poets to make things sound humanly significant.

Serious, seriously

Today I attended poetry boot camp day 3. I am seriously questioning my intentions/expections in coming here. It's been a long time since I've taken poetry "seriously" or been held accountable for my writing as serious. It's terrifying! This place is like poetry boot camp: 9 am to 9 pm with only breaks to eat dinner and for the occasional softball game which they also take seriously. My adviser, David Baker, is a pretty intense guy, an NEA / Guggenheim winner to boot, and our conferences feel more like therapy sessions than poetry workshops; he says things like "Well, what makes you that way?" and "Why, are you afraid?" And then just gives you this soccer-coach-beside-the-bench stare. Which causes me to gulp and reassess in a bad moment or to cough up something unexpectedly true and honest in good moments. I'm nervous and excited to see what the semester brings. I have in the back of my mind a very long poem sequence I'd like to try.

I've realized what a philosopher I've become and also how much I miss writing. I don't talk the talk here; at a philosophy conference / conversation, I know enough to know what I ought to know (but usually don't) and thus when to keep quiet or when it's reasonable to ask a question ... here, people are mentioning names right and left that I don't understand so I don't even know when I can pipe in without sounding ridiculous. On the other hand, it's rather nice to feel like a beginning student again and not responsible for knowing, if not everything, at least a little something!

This even I heard an amazing poet recite *her own* 30 minute poem aloud ... it was somehow about the flood in New Orleans and it blew me away. I can barely recite Emily Dickenson...

Accessibility, Cliche and Carrion

Today I heard a wonderful Aztec poem. It's anonymous, so I think it's safe to write it in completely below:
"The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.
The true artist: draws out all from his heart,
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;
arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,
works without care, defrauds people, is a theif."

The lecturer said that for "carrion" we might read "post-modern." Ouch, but right on.

I also heard a fascinating lecture by Bruce Haxton on cliche. I'm currently muddling over the difference between cliche, dead metaphor and live metaphor. Haxton argued that cliche, though not perhaps the aim of poetry, works quite effectively occasionally and then because it can rely on a commonality between reader and writer. A completely novel metaphor has fewer such commonalities to moblize for its effect. A dead metaphor -- "the leg of a chair" or "the brook ran around the hill" -- seems to assume complete commonality of meaning between reader and writer: for both, "leg" and "run" transfer meaning (i.e. perform metaphorically) but in a complete way. In a novel metaphor, such as Yeat's "their throats were the throats of birds," the reader must perform many more (in fact, an infinite, incompletable series) of transformations on the terms to find the common meaning. A cliche seems to be somewhere in between these two ends.

Finally, I got really angry at a lecture on metaphor itself. The lecture was given by a well-known poet who presented a sort of big-picture historical (i.e. Neanderthals on) account of language development in relation to myth and metaphor. He concluded by appealing to Chompskian linguistics as evidence that language is hard-wired... and then somehow that myth was also hard-wired. (I am no expert in Chompsky, but I'm pretty sure he specifically separates cultural and linguistic practices. I tried to mention the Piruhua controversy, but he would have none of that) He also claimed that Kantian dualism was just like the left-brain right-brain split (which caused me to tear up some near-by paper), and that MRI scans can "without a doubt" prove that you are lying. (see a New Yorker article that pans exactly that assertion) It's not just the New Yorker but lots of conscientious cognitive scientists who'd admit that MRIs, while very cool, are not the final word on intentionality.

Although I had a personal distaste for the lecture because he was a stodgy old white man, I also had fear for the audience. This group of poets and writers took his word as gospel! The humanities bowed before the idol of the MRI. Instead of the poets and shamans having powers, it's the techies. Far from advocating a return to shamanism, I wish more humanities people (including myself!) were better educated to be able to assess these assertions without blindly sliding into scienticism. Perhaps a bit of scientism is a healthy for the humanities that can suffer equally from Romanticism, but it all has the air of mysticism... Yeats bought into automatic writing and they're looking at MRI scans, the latest phlogiston.

In any case, I certainly won't have to deal with that lecturer's brand of scientism any more because I offended him enough to ward of future conversations...

Now to bed and up early for more poetry boot camp...