Keats on Winter

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines
When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise
Among immortals when a God gives sign,"

-Keats, Hyperion. A Fragment

Great Thoughts

I’ve just discovered Kay Ryan. Well, really, I’ve heard about her for years, picked up her books and rejected them a dozen times, and now, finally, I’m captivated and compelled by her precision and minimalism. I’m thinking about Ryan, along with Rae Armantrout and Heather McHugh, in preparation to review a few other new books. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of representation of women in literary journals, MFA program faculty and the like (for example, here in Slate). I think there’s some vague sense that women get MFAs because they have free time after (or when) they raise families and need to "express themselves" thus have only introverted and domestic, not Serious poems. This triumvirate of serious, funny and cerebral ladies should disabuse anyone of such presuppositions.

Today, I’m just thinking about Ryan, but the rest of the authors might come up in my public reviews. In Ryan’s more famous book, I entirely missed the poignancy and comic seriousness of the first, title poem “Say Uncle.” Now, I feel it and it hurts – like a strained lower back. It pulls you up in this truly painful way but with such suddenness and excess that you laugh at your own incapacity.

The poem that really got me, though, in my current disagreement with philosophy was this one:

Great Thoughts

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus,
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

Ryan sets up confusing and then counter-intuitive analogy. Why would one think that great thoughts do nourish as parents do children? Then, before explaining, she frames a second analogy: instead of like children, the thoughts are like the eucalyptus. What? The reader as yet has no idea what kind of great thoughts she means or what qualities they could share with that tree (scent? dusty greenness?). The next two lines resolve both apparent false analogies: great thoughts clear a space beneath themselves, perhaps poisoning the ground, perhaps taking its nutrients (I’m not quite sure how it works with eucalyptus: with black walnuts, it’s a poison.) So, well, gosh – the end of the poem tells me – it is awful here, next to great thoughts, if you aren’t having one, or worse, if you are trying to grow one, then, there’s no room. You must go to the fringe of the meadow and sow your seeds if you want any sunlight or soil.

That's where I'm headed, I hope.

Hyperion and Science Fiction

Because I have a lot of grading to do, I thought I’d read some Keats in order to fortify my soul before its drain. I have been thinking about Hyperion but I hadn’t yet reread it. In the poem, I find a wish for magic. That is a wish I understand. It’s the same desire that leads me to science fiction. Keat’s Saturn longs for the power to create another world, an alternative physics to the one he finds around him. Listen to him as he wakes under this gravity: “But cannot I create? / Cannot I form? / Cannot I fashion forth/ Another world, another universe, / To overbear and crumble this to naught?/ Where is another Chaos? Where?”

Saturn discovers what all adults who enjoyed childhoods full of fiction find: in this reality, radical creation is not possible. Fiction cultivates in us the expectation that life includes resolution and radical innovation: in stories – especially in fantastical stories – the heroine or hero can enjoy an adventure that include a changes in the very structure of space time. She lives forever (Tuck Everlasting), she can travel time (A Wrinkle in Time), she can change the form of her beloved (Beauty), she will meet a wizard who will deliver her intended loves (The Once and Future King). Such a childhood leaves a reader of fiction with a distinction sensation of Fall, l’ecarte: a separation not from grace but innovation: heaven is parted from thee, and the earth/ Knows thee not, thus afflicted for a God.” This earth does not recognize our secret self as the environment of Harriet the Spy ultimately acknowledged her potential and gave her super-natural powers. Keat’s Saturn expresses the love of ever reader and writer of fiction and poetry: the possible rather than the actual. Upon leaving the childhood of fiction, like Keat’s Saturn: “I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left/ My strong identity, my real self / Somwhere between the throne and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth.” My own “strong identity” formed when I read those books. To discover their ultimate impossibility is to be ever disappointed in “this spot of Earth.” Such disappointment can, of course, also provide great motivation to write, to make that world of possibility, so that “there shall be / Beautiful things made new, for the surprise / Of the sky-children.”

Poetry and Plot or Poems or Plot? On Nicholoson Baker's Anthologist (and a little bit about V LaValle's Big Machine)

"I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry -- interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing poetry it is a very different activity. Writing it, its as if the word 'poetry; is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable."
- Nicholoson Baker, The Anthologist

Baker's narrator in this novel-on-poetry offers all kinds of tidbits that the writer-within-you will most likely identify with. ( Here's a link to a charitable and mostly accurate review. ) I think you can be pretty sure (if you're a writer) that you'll identify because nothing he says is too controversial or too particular. He -- the character -- is a distillation of any number of neurotic literary personalities into one burbling stream of consciousness. It can be comforting to listen to some sounds from your internal monologue echoed in the rambling, in a nice get-out-of-cartesian-isolation sort of way.

I respect Baker because he does little things like print "writing poetry it is" instead of "writing poetry is." That little "it" colloquializes the speaker's phrases and also makes a little verbal phrase that sediments a whole room -- context along with the activity-- into "writing it." There you are, in a room, staring off or at a screen or paper, wedged between things, at some distance from a window, working on a particular project. Just "writing" is contextless, theoretical, conceptual.

That said, I am reading the Anthologist because I got bored with Fermata. Sure, I found it titillating and fanatically well-written (for narrative details like the above "it") but ultimately, I found it broke Aristotle's recommendation to privilege plot over character. Coming from a poet, this may be unexpected, but I like plot. (I also think the best poems have plots: little intralinear dramas.) I love V Woolf and W James not because of their characters per se but because the way the characters propel domestic microplots. And I almost always prefer a snappy William Gibson novel to anything concerned with what you might label "personal discovery."

I haven't finished the Baker, but I'm not holding my breath for a reversal and recognition. Quite by contrast, I adored the finale and creepy, disgusting, allusive whirlwind of Victor LaValle's Big Machine. After finishing it, I looked backwards to his earlier Ecstatic but it didn't grip me with the same perversity of plot twist. I am looking forward to what ever he does next.