Sokal Hoax and friendly Simon Blackburn

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"

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"???

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???

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

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?

Imagism, Dramatic Monologues ... Presentation, Representation

Las week at Elliot Bay books,I found a cute little book of Imagist poetry in the used section. It was just small enough to fit in my purse making it an excellent purchase. Imagism was a short but extremely influential movement that begin around 1910 and continued (officially) until 1920. Some of the canonical, founding imagists were H.D., Amy Lowell, Flint, Eliot, W.C. Williams, D.H. Lawrence and even Ford Maddox Ford and James Joyce. But through W.C. Williams, Eliot and Pound, imagism carried well past 1920 and influenced a significant part of modern and contemporary poetry (including George Oppen whom I adore and want to study further). The book includes a rather well-written introduction that cites a few key tenants of the Imagists. One of these, codified by F.S. Flint, was "To use no word that does no contribute to the presentation." This little comment caught me. As a philosopher, of course I can't help but stumble on the word "presentation." The Imagists intend this to mean, "the image." But it's not quite clear what "presentation" includes: the sense or reference of the language, the rhythm or texture of the language, or -- more importantly to me at the moment -- a sense of who's speaking. That is to say, does this "presentation" include the re-presentation of the image that the poet wishes to convey? It seems that the Imagists, at least as expressed by Flint and conveyed by the author of the lovely little introduction, thought that their goals was to convey a pure presentation of an image... precisely avoiding drawing attention to the *re*presentation of that image. They do not want to call attention to the speaker or the texture of that language.

Beyond the philosophical concerns that might be considered here (Husserl's notion of intentional fulfillment, for e.g.), I have practical concerns as a poet. READ MORE... It seems that writing in a post, post-modern era, one cannot but help attend to the quality of the representation of an image or cognitive presentation (if it was ever possible not to attend to that and make good art, you now must at least notice when you are ignoring it.) Consider still-life painting, for example. Still lives call attention not to the existence or qualities of fruit or flowers per se, but to the *painting* of fruit and flowers... to how well a painter can re-present them.

In a poem, what is this equivalent of representation? Certainly, it includes the rhythm and texture of the particular words used to represent(or present for the first time) an image. (poets make pets of pretty words, etc.: whether you write, "I haven't seen the ocean but I know what a wave is," or "I never saw the sea,... but I know what a wave must be") But it also includes the speaker of the poem. That is, part of attending to "representation" is attending to how a reader or listener will understand not only what image is being conveyed, but who's conveying it. Not, "was the author G.M. Hopkins or Mos Def" but what is the nature of the implied narrator? Is the speaker the character Medusa or is the speaker the character who speaks in "J.Alfred Prufrock"?

So, for an extreme contrast (perhaps!) to Imagism, consider Robert Browning's, "My Last Duchess." This poems begins innocuously enough,

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive"

But as it continues, we learn that this speaker isn't just a lonely widow admiring a portrait. He has some rather bitter feelings toward not only its subject (who has some flushed spots on her cheeks in the picture) but the painter of the portrait, Fra Pandolf:

"... I said
Fra Pandolf by design ... [because]
... Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say, 'Her mantle laps
Over my Lady's wrist too much,' or 'Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flus that dies along her throat;' such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and case enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart ... how shall I say? ... to soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sire, 'twas all one!.."

So... now we know that the Duchess was (according to the speaker) a bit of slut with no standards. And the speaker is quite irritated with her and her painter. But moreover, the speaker himself is a bit coy and insulting. He implies her character in a back-handed sort of way. By the end of the poem, we also learn something about the person to whom he's speaking : the immediate audience for the speech about the Duchess is the relative or servant a count with a daughter that the Duke is planning to now marry.

We certainly can infer all sorts of possibilities about the character of the speaker and his former wife. But as a poet, the real question for me is, what if anything, do we learn about Robert Browning? Is that important? It doesn't really feel very important as I read the poem: I'm only concerned with learning about the characters in the poem, as they are developed, just as I would be with the characters of a novel. Whether I'm reading the Waves or Cavalier and Clay, I'm worrying very little about what the characters tell me about either Virginia Woolf or Michael Chabon. I learn something about life by learning about the characters these authors have represented. (And I learn not only through what is said but how it is said, i.e. both through presentation and representation) But always a speaker or an implied narrator intervenes between myself and the author. I simply don't care too much whether Woolf's book reveals her personal hopes and desires. Certainly in the Browning, there is some indirect revelation but I don't think you can ever follow that indirection back to the person Mr. Robert Browning.

Yet in the confessional/ post-confessional era of poetry, there is a strong demand (from my readers anyway) to know about me. i.e. why aren't my poems more personal? Why don't they express my feelings? I'm sure there are many reasons for the failure of many of my poems.. but in theory --had I written a good poem -- why should the poem tell you anything about me?

But, I suppose if it isn't going to tell you anything about me, then perhaps it needs to tell you something about some other characters. And so perhaps the lesson from all this is that I need to work harder on creating strong characters. (Although even there I resist... why isn't an expression of consciousness or representation of qualities of the world sufficient? But I'll defer that for later...)

Bittersweet

The theme of the residency this term, from the first to the last was "bittersweet": happy in the sad, pleasure in pain,If it makes you happy why are you so sad,etc? Why can't poets write happy poems? Because usually joy makes you forget to write. Lolita is high contrast -- ecstacy, pain, rape, communion -- but painted in what at first appears to be grey, but on closer inspection, a fine hash of black and white. But not every text is sad: Let's not ignore Christopher Smart and his eternal "Jubliate Agneau"... but he was mad; is it only with madness that joy is urgent enough to express?

I am memorizing this Herbert poem. Notice the activity of God, and the passivity or receptivity of the man... or for the irreligious, for 'God and man,' substitute the 'beloved and the lover.'

Bittersweet
- G. Herbert

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou does love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
and all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

I'm back! (In Asheville)

Hello, infrequent but welcome visitors to Mlle. Le Renard. I'm back... and ready to attempt blogging. A year later after some pesky doctoral exams, I'm back in Asheville at the Warren Wilson residency where I'm getting ready to write some poems. I had a fabulous time as a fellow at the Kenyon Review workshop where I worked with the fabulous David Baker who taught me all about formal conceits that I either never learned or forgot. This term I'm working with cheerful but intimidating Alan Shapiro.

This morning kicked off with a great lecture on the development of the manuscripts of Seamus Heaney's "North" in the book of the same name. We looked at how he took an image-based poem, told from the first person into an epic poem that include second person address. Wow. I'm full of images of Ireland and these filtered through the room.

I'm working on some biblical mis-interpretation poems right now, perverse Protestant midrash as I think of them. I find the biblical to be more my "mythology" than the Greek or Latin cast of characters. ... we'll see where this goes with Mr. Shapiro.

And now off to the annual Shindig on the Green in Asheville!

Word and Helen Adams

I watched a documentary on spoken word poetry in the '60s and 70s . My favorite was Helen Adams. Wow. A crazy old Scottish lady who sang a ballad of a Long Island junky riding the train. Damn. She said that in the traditional ballad, poets would write down verses that were spontaneously made up in the pub after the poet sang the part that everyone knew.

In this lecture that I've been listening to, she reads from Through the Looking Glass and talks about music of poetry. And then she just sings in a nice scottish-y way.

The other best part of the movie was Allan Ginsburg. He's like a tweedy economic professor doing karaoke.

Read Robert Hass

I've been devouring Robert Hass's latest book Time and Materials. Wow. The first poem might be the best two line poem I have ever read.

My Mystical Turn

So I’ve taken the plunge: the last few weeks I’ve been reading mystical poetry. From Celan and Hopkins, I went to the Song of Songs and medieval women and then the Indian Gavitagavinda and then Kabir and Rumi … some of this was inspired by a class, most from conversation, most of that with my dissertation adviser. I’ve just indulged. (My Daniel Dennett-toting cognitive science friends would box my ears if they knew!) I hadn’t even realized I was refraining until I gave in! Reading Rumi is simply luxurious. I’ve held myself away from most of this for some of the translation reasons I mentioned with Celan… and also because of the fear that mysticism is just a code word for laziness or worse, sentimentality. Sentimentality is a fate worse than death for a poet, in my book (death just makes poets martyrs, anyway). And laziness… well, perhaps that’s not what one thinks.

I was reading the diaries of the young Simone de Beauvoire who, I discovered, was quite in love with Merleau-Ponty (the subject of my erstwhile dissertation). She claims– much to my surprise, informed by his lush writing on embodiment – that he is naïve, Catholic and obsessed with abstract metaphysics. (He was only twenty or twenty-five at the time, and it is my thought that he was in love with her too and stylized himself in response to her rejection) She said of speaking to him, “I say, ‘skepticism.’ He says, ‘laziness.’ My skepticism has its excuses. Yes, but one must not need to be excused.” (July, 1927)

So… I have been skeptical. But one must not need excuses. This is just such ridiculously good poetry! Kabir … “ the musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.” Rumi… “close the language-door and open the love window; the moon cannot come in the door, the moon must come in the window.” And “loves comes with a knife, not some shy question … The sun rises, but which way does night go? I have no more words. Let the / soul speak with the silent articulation of the face.” READ MORE

I have also been reading Hopkins. And I wrote about him. But I read him in the context of these fellows … A trope that persists through all of theses mystics is madness and intoxication by desire. This sounds so universal & vague as to be trite … but Rumi is not trite. Bertrand Russell – analytic of analytics – confessed that he had two great fears: loneliness and madness. The worse of it was, the one caused the other: the less mad he was, the more rational he was … and thus the more lonely. The less lonely he was , the more intimate he was… the more mad he was. I love this… and mostly because it’s crotchety old Russell who said it! (though, he did have 4 wives, the last when he was nearly 80 yr old!)

So, I have lots of new work this week. I don’t know if it’s all good or at all good, but I have been writing tons.

All these “I” pronouns in my work make me nervous…. I am worried that I wouldn’t like my work if I picked it up. What is the work about except me?? I wish I had the same poem(s) without an I. I worry that I’ve let this “I” slip in at certain encouragement but without my own approval… on the other hand, it’s been so freeing. Much like reading the mystics. It feels like more aural/oral poetry than poetry on the page. I’m just writing the way I think when I walk.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with Brendan Kennelly. He’s a pretty darn well known Irish poet who happens to have a chair at our strongly Irish Catholic School. He’s rather old and his only job is just to stay around campus and write. My adviser - an Irish philosopher—and I were having coffee last week and we ran into Kennelly and I was introduced. Later in the week, I was walking around campus and crossed his path and he said, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” And I said, “Yes, it ‘tis.” And then I re-introduced myself and we had a nice chat. Then he “spoke” me a poem... he insists that he only speaks poems, he doesn’t write them. The poem was about a loaf of bread he remembers watching his mother make. The poem was told from the point of view of the bread, and it began, “Someone cut my head off in a field…” And ended with the bread being torn and consumed by the mother. Wow. (wow with an explicative and raised eyebrows!) He just recited this to me sitting on a bench on campus. He asked me about my work … and my work is … on the computer? I couldn’t recite anything! (and summarizing poetry is worse than not writing it) So I changed the subject.

This past week he gave a public address... in which he spoke his own poems and the work of maybe 5 or 10 other authors from the last 50 years of Irish poetry. All from memory, not one note for an hour. He is a rhapsode in the strongest meaning of the term.

So for the past week, I’ve been trying to memorize little things. Some Rumi. Some of my own. So that, at the least, if I run into Mr. Kennelly again, I can recite something for him. The summer, before the WW retreat, I memorized the first 15 or so sections of George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” That was a great exercise. It’s really hard for me… I am such a visual person. When I used to play the violin, even though I supposedly learned through the Suzuki method, I actually just memorized the look of the sheet music and watched it. I worry that I don’t have enough music to be a poet … shouldn’t I think like that?

I do write often while I walk. Mr. Kennelly and I talked about that too… about Coleridge and Wordsworth and then, locally, Emerson and Thoreau. He said Coleridge and Wordsworth walked twenty or thirty miles a day. I think actually some of my better poems are one that I write that way : these peripatetic poems end up only being as long as what I can manage to memorize on my walk and write down upon return. My walks are limited by modernity and my busy schedule and the poems are thus limited by those factors plus my weak aural memory. But … maybe those are good strictures to hold to. Could Oppen himself ever have memorized all of “Of Being Numerous”? Could Shakespeare recite all of Hamlet? Maybe he could have, actually…

So.. to summarize ;) I have been, of late, concerned with the aurality/orality of poetry and poetry as unconstrained, mystical speculation. This is quite a far cry from my concerns a year ago, or even six months ago

Ein Drohnen, Paul Celan

Ein Drohnen: es is
die Wahrheit selbst
unter die Menschen
getreten,
mitten ins
Metapherngestoerber.

P. Celan

John Koethe

“ … Nineteen
Was nothing special and I wouldn’t want it back,
Yet sometimes when I think about the years to come

I see almost as many as the ones since then.
I feel a vague and incoherent fear, a fear
Of waking from time’s dream into an even stranger place,
As different from today as now is from nineteen,

Without a sense of where I am or where I’d been before –
Which is always here, in my imagination.”

- John Koethe, from “The Maquiladoras”

Paul Celan and the Museum of Bad Art

We went to the Museum of Bad Art this weekend in Dedham, MA. A really fun trip … I recommend it, though you should be cognizant of the fact that you are going to have to drive a good 45 minutes at the least from somewhere to see ... well, BAD art. But the commentaries are what make it .

So, it was a *fun* trip and you shouldn’t think I was moping about this the museum. But, while I was looking at some of the bad art, namely this one, I was thinking about what makes people make precisely this kind of bad art. I mean ... the poor guy obviously just wanted to pain Loneliness. What first year art student doesn't try to paint Loneliness, in some way or another? (Or another Bad Art favorite topic such as People Making Love, or just Love or Passion.) Now, I'm not saying they necessarily set out to paint the noun with the capital letter... but they end up with an image like this, whether in sculpture, painting, or photography. All this abstract art and all this talk about it... and really all that 98% of us want to painting are images of people, happy or sad. And.... in a way, there's nothing really wrong with the topic they've picked; the execution alone sometime does qualify them as bad art . Discussing the execution doesn't explain whether or not the impulse toward these images itself is misplaced.
READ MORE
I heard an interesting lecture on cliche this summer by poet/classicist Brooks Haxton. Haxton argued essentially that cliches work... that half of Shakespeare's sonnets are cliches. He was being polemical, but his point was that audiences enjoy cliches, or at least the content of them. For one, we like repetition, we like familiar territory. For another, the things of cliches are the things, for the most part, that matter ... life, death, love, loneliness, joy, heartbreak, etc. But it isn't just the content that we want to hear repeated ... we like the form to be similar too. A truly great poem manages to give you all that with some subtle permutation so that you hardly realize it was familiar until you feel the pleasure afterward.

Which brings me to Paul Celan. I have been reading Celan this week, for the first time seriously. I've read single poems and read about him many times -- it's hard to be an continental philosophy program and avoid the name -- but I've never delved into him. I decided it was time to tackle him. I bought two translations with German and English text beside eachother and settled in this morning.

Well, needless to say, this was quite a way to being a Sunday. I was overwhelmed. I tried reading the German out-loud, then reading the English silently and going back to the German so I could fit sound with sense. Many of the images in the early poems particularly, came from this 'cliche' set of topics and even imagery; he speaks of water and flowers and circles and blood and milk ... and of course death. But the presentation is so peculiar that these most familiar images are strange and disconcerting; "poplar" and "poppy" become morbid and threatening instead of pastoral and cheerful.

Tom Sleigh once said to me, “John Ashberry is the greatest living poet. You should read him. But you should never try to write like him.” I would say something similar about Celan, except that he would be German and dead. He’s too good; he’s archetypical. You can read this for years and acquire a taste for its strangeness. But you should never, ever try to write like Celan.

At the same time ... Celan writes about what all poets want to write about. How can we not take him as a mentor, as a guide? How can him be great if he is not a model to follow? Many Kantian phrases about genius and beauty come to mind, but I am dismissing them because they only circumscribe the question rather than answer it... novelty intrigues but repetition pleases. A rose is a rose is a rose. And it is pretty...

Prose of the World

"Men have been talking for a long time on earth, and yet three-quarters of what they say goes unnoticed. A rose, it is raining, it is time, man is mortal."
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

Anglophilia

Hello from England. I am in Sussex for a philosophy conference. It's so unexpectedly beautiful here! The campus is a bit of a 1965 modernist mess a la StonyBrook or SUNY Buffalo (and for the same reason --a late 60s move to create self-contained rural campuses. Interesting the same thing happened in Beligum at Leuvain also). The surrounding area, however, is just lovely. (I'll post some photos when I get back) I've realized / remembered what an Anglophile I am ... I really grew up fantasizing about this country, be it King Arthur or Wuthering Heights. (Oddly, I'm just reading Anne Carson's book where she writes about her one fascinating with the Brontes, Glass Irony and God) But mostly it was the former ... those King Arthur stories. I read literally ALL of the books in the local library when I was growing up; I was *especially* into the Lancelot/Guenevere/Arthur myth. (Rather like the Harry Potter triumvirate, I'm just realizing!) This is a bit embarrassing to reveal -- more embarrassing if you knew the content of those fantasies! -- READ MORE .. but basically from age 10 to 12 I was fairly certain in an unarticulated way (thank god it remained so) that it would ultimately be revealed that I *Was* Guenevere in some former or future life. Lord know what this has done to my psyche permanently -- my overly psychoanalytic shrink would have a field day if she knew -- but the myth really was beautiful (And complicated .. you've got the Merlin and Moran Le Fay back stories, Sir Gawain ... the list goes on. Sigh :).

God, I really wish I could live here! I don't say that about many places ... in fact, I can't really remember saying about anywhere. I mean, Tuscany is beautiful, Paris is exciting, Germany is cozy and I've contemplated spending time in all those places. But I can actually imagine moving to the UK and being an ex-pat permanently.

It's partly the language-thing (easier to imagine being an ex-pat when ordering dinner isnt' stressful), but it's really more than that.... I really have mythologized the place until it's sort of already part of my psyche, like a place you grow up in, or miss, I feel a bit of Seinsucht and all that. I've only actually been to London before and I know this is a bit precipitous -- it only being a four day stay and all! -- but I really don't think I've reacted this way to a place before. (I'm going to apply to another conference here, hoping to come back!)

It's as if the England that I imagined and researched around those stories became the setting for *all* my dream life, whether or not it related to the myth. Perhaps other people have another place that functions this way -- maybe Italy, maybe a summer holiday place, a particular garden near your house, maybe Iceland, I don't know -- and I can think of others for myself, but none as strong as England. England was my archetype of mythological space.

I'm not saying I find England to actually meet my idealized version of it -- although I did take a mostly romantically perfect walk in the countryside today! -- but rather, whether or not its current conditions meet my expectations, it already *is* my dream world. It's particularly the physical landscape itself ... the shape of the hills, the proportions and layout of the villages and countryside. They share something with the hills of Southern Ohio where I was raised, but with a bit of cultivation, compartmentalization. Certainly this has been amplified as fantasy in *every* American's imagination by Romantic reproductions, be they paintings or gardens by Fredrick Law Olmstead, but because of my particular (by no means singular) attachment to those King Arthur stories, the exponent of archetype has been raised by another power.

Well... I'm going to go back to sighing out my window to see if Lancelot is on his way while I get over my jet lag.

Carl Phillips, "Sea Glass"

"The body is not an allegory -- it
can't help that it looks like one, any more than
it can avoid not being able to stay."

- Carl Phillips, from "Sea Glass"

Why isn't Poetry a Graphic Art?

While I was reading about how Emily Dickinson collected her fascicles, for initially unrelated reasons, I pulled out a book on visual poetry from the 1920s. (also called concrete poetry) This interests me because I worked as a graphic designer for a while, and I was always considered about fonts and page layouts. Poets talk a lot about line breaks and “the poem on the page,” etc. but rarely to do they really venture off into true graphic design technique. I know there *is* visual poetry out there -- there's always some experimental or web journal publishing it -- but it's still not mainstream after a few hundred years (even George Herbert and Mallarme were trying it). Why is that? What’s this line between the poem on the page and the graphic art work? I get the impression it seems somehow dishonest to cloth your words in anything but Times New Roman… but that's like saying it doesn’t matter how you dress but dressing all black for every party, or saying your hair cut doesn’t matter and shaving your head. That certainly makes a statement! I think the difference between Dickinson’s physical presentation (even if it was self-presentation) of her work and my own is fairly profound.

I think poet’s are a bit afraid to talk about that… there would be too much to deal with . But I think we need to acknowledge that the unwritten rules of the game are that you write with Times New Roman at twelve points; it’s like not acknowledging in the sixteenth century that iambic pentameter was standard. I’m certainly not against having standards, any more than I’m against an other formal frameworks. The Times New Roman standard gives a certain graphic grammar to bump up against. At some point, someone had to come to the full realization that iambic pentameter was the standard and then he could take full advantage of the possibility of diverging from it.
But can the same thing happen with the graphic presentation of the poem on the page? Historically, we’ve moved from poetry as completely orally/aurally transmitted to poetry as an art whose printed component factors significantly in its assessment. But I do not think that we’ve fully made the paradigm shift. Perhaps this is only now possibly as typographic software allows the poet to experiment in private (as poets like to do) with the potential formal variations. I imagine that there are poets – Olga Broumas comes to mind – that poetry is primarily an oral art and thus the visual and physical dimensions of its presentation will always remain secondary. I would argue that it’s already become a printed art; as much as the news went from being the material of the town crier to the material of the printed page to the stuff on the digital screen, poetry can cross media. Poetry is, of course, one of the older arts, and conservative in its way; perhaps it’s just not ready to make the changes. Perhaps… Olga’s right and it won’t ever be on the page any more than Beethovan or Miles Davis is in the sheet music. But couldn’t graphic presentation be just a better tool to help the reader hear more clearly in her mind’s ear?

"Open the Door..." Emily Dickinson

When here nephew died, Emily Dickinson wrote,
" ' Open the Door, open the Door, they are waiting for me,' was Gilbert's sweet command in delirium. Who were waiting for him, all we possess we would give to know -- Anguish at last opened it, and he ran to the little Grave at his Grandparents' feet -- All this and more, though is there more? More than Love and Death? Then tell me is name!"

When Dickinson wrote poems, she wrote them on regular paper and collected stacks of these papers. She never published anything publicly but after a few years she would polish her poems for her self. She'd recopy them onto nice stationary, stack up a few sheets, punch holes in the edges and bind them together with string (these groupings are now called fascicles). She destroyed all the earlier drafts of the poems and put the fascicles on her shelf. Her handwriting wasn't very good; it was pretty but hard to read, a bit long and scrawly. It seems she really never intended anyone to read poems.

I don't think publication or popularity necessarily reflects the quality of a poem or poet, but I can't imagine what writing is if publication -- in the simple sense of making public -- is not the aim. What is this thing that Dickinson was doing if it was completely private? R Kearney always says that literature is someone says something to someone... and hermeneutics deals with each of those "some--"s. But to whom was Dickinson speaking except for a couple friends in letters? To herself? To God? When George Herbert writes confessional poems to God, he was so religious in a strict Christian sense that he actually believed he was speaking to an invisible being who could hear the words, whether or however this being responded.

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.