patrickkanouse.com Blog

How to Read a Poem

I’ve begun Terry Eagleton’s How to Read a Poem. Eagleton, generally considered a Marxist critic, has, in my experience, always been able to find the societal emphasis of poetry, language, and criticism. Chapter 1, “The Functions of Criticism,” is a minefield of interesting statements and thoughts. I’m going to quote a few of them below, but I inevitably rip them from the larger context of Eagleton’s thinking – and that is important in general but especially for him. Nonetheless, I risk that out-of-context flavor to offer, I hope, a few nuggets of tantalizing thoughts:

What threatens to scupper verbal sensitivity is the depthless, commodified, instantly legible world of advanced capitalism, with its unscrupulous way with signs, computerised communication and glossy packaging of ‘experience’. There is, to be a sure [sic], a theory that computers are actually a cunning way of trying to slow modern life down, as anyone who has tried to buy an air ticket or check into a hotel might testify.

…

What is in peril on our planet is not only the environment, the victims of disease and political oppression, and those rash enough to resist corporate power, but experience itself [emphasis in original].

…

What we consume now is not objects or events, but our experience of them. Just as we never need to leave our cars, so we never need to leave our own skulls. The experience is already out there, as ready-made as a pizza, as bluntly objective as a boulder, and all we need to do is receive it….What matters is not the place itself, but the act of consuming it….It is the act of having had the experience which matters, which removes us from teh reality twice over. What is important about the event is its aftermath….So the ‘experience’ dwindles to an empty signifier, as in the sentence ‘I am having the experience of boiling an egg’, where the words ‘having an experience’ could drop out with no detriment to the meaning.

…

Poetry is a kind of phenomenology of language – one in which the relation between the word and meaning (or signifier and signified) is tighter that it is in everyday speech. There are several different ways of saying ‘Take a seat’, but only one way of saying ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.’ Poetry is language in which the signified or meaning is the whole process of signification itself [emphasis in original]….Poetry is something which is done to us, not just said to us….More than almost any other discourse, [poetry] deals in the finer nuances of meaning….

If I had to sum up my thoughts about these quotes, their meaning, it is that poetry counteracts many of the negative trends of modern consumer capitalism. Eagleton is a bit more pessimistic than I am, but I would never argue that much of what surrounds us is trivial. I simply would suggest that sometimes the trivial is worthwhile in itself (and Eagleton may think the same, he just never says so). For me, poetry – art in general – is the frequently the act of replacing the frivolous with the serious – though that sounds wrong. By serious I mean the enduring, the essence of being human. What I consider frivolous is escapism, which has its place and I know I’ve enjoyed it (how many hours playing Civilization I, II, III, IV!!!?), but art deals with the very act of living and comprehending our lives.

We may live in times when poetry is less valued than previously (though this is debatable), but that does not take away the importance of poetry. In fact, I think poetry is more important than ever. Whether any one listens is another matter, though infinitely important.

The Rest Is Noise

I just finished Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise. Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, has written a compelling and thoroughly enjoyable tale. The subtitle is Listening to the 20th Century, which summarizes the ambitions of the book – though do note that the focus is on classical music (but Ross does speak penetratingly of blues, rock, and jazz). Schoenberg engendered a revolution in composition that is still part of the landscape today. Britten, Shostakovich, and other “tonal” composers were viewed with contempt and silence by the avant-garde of Boulez and Stockhausen. Ross places these theoretical battles in vivid relief. His coverage of that split and its echoes through the century are perceptively told, even for a non-music theoretician such as myself.

The chapters covering Copland and the influence of the WPA, American involvement in setting the serial battle lines in post-WWII Germany, and the genealogy of Minimalism are worth the entire book. Most interestingly I found that the WPA’s guidelines on what music should be supported in inter-war USA were shockingly similar to Stalinist and Nazi edicts of music theory. Ross states, “the difference, of course, is that FDR lacked the means, the will, or the desire to enforce them.”

Of further note is how Ross uses poetry and make frequent citations to Hart Crane, Akhmatova, and many others. The poets and their lines are weaved into the tale of 20th century music. Additionally, Ross makes frequent citations of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, which functions almost as a leitmotif (I would say it does, but I haven’t gone back and confirmed).

My only “picks” at the book are some repetitive material (particularly in regards to Morton Feldman). However, the relative unimportance and distraction that these pose are well below the value of the book as a whole.

Unified Theory? A Public Intellectual’s Efforts

Thank you Bill McManus for this link to the Telegraph about a surfer who has proposed a theory for the unification of everything (the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces and gravity).

Ken Burns and The War

I just recently finished watching Ken Burns’s The War. If ever I wanted to be a filmmaker, it is this type of film I would want to make. Hands down one of the best documentaries I have ever seen and a beautiful, awe-inspiring, amazing film. The War takes a different but useful and necessary viewpoint. Burns, and co-director Lynn Novick, realized that too tell the WWII story in a new and, therefore, compelling way, they need to to avoid a chronological history of the war. They still proceed chronologically, but they have found four American cities (Waterbury, CT; Mobile, AL; Sacramento, CA; and Luverne, MN) from which they found veterans and citizens to tell their experiences. You have children, young women, fighter pilots, marines, infantrymen, and reporters. The richness of the stories, their varied experiences, and their obvious and remaining emotions create a compelling and ongoing narrative that greatly enhances already known history. So many of the witnesses are wonderful that I find it hard to single out any specific one or few who I found compelling, but Quentin Aanenson, Glenn Frazier, Paul Fussell, and Daniel Inouye made regular appearances throughout the series. Much of the Pacific war is narrated using E.B. Sledge’s memoir, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, whose description of the horrors of combat in the Pacific are reminiscent to me of Shohei Ooka’s novel Fires on the Plain (a novel written by a Japanese soldier who experienced the combat in the Pacific).

This documentary is a landmark achievement. I highly recommend all to watch.

Evolution of a Poem, Part II

In my last post about the evolution of a poem, we ended with the poem in this state:

After the rain, the tinkle of water
From gutters and trees. Night and only sound.
The curtains breathe wispy
Threads as —–

But what of her, her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir, her voice that hushed
Swirls upon my heart? In these clusters
Of sounds, will everything that we have hushed

Blossom in the mouth and
Settle in translucent, shimmering red?

I clearly had not yet found how to end the fourth line of stanza one. This is a thought that has not yet come to fruition and impossible to describe how this worked, but I’ll try. I got into a mood or rhythm or something while writing “The curtains breathe wispy” and I followed it with “Threads as” and my pen wanted to keep going, but no words seemed right. So I wrestled with this and eventually decided not to delay anymore.

The first line, “After the rain, the tinkle of water,” went through one more try before settling on its current form of “After the rain, the elongated act.” Lines 2-3 of the first stanza went through a longer phase of development.

While I quickly landed on “madder lake curtains,” its surrounding text and my unsureness of using “madder lake curtains” remained uncertain for some time. Madder lake is a red dye (called alizarin) derived from the root of the madder plant. A lake “is a pigment manufactured by precipitating a dye with an inert binder, usually a metallic salt” (Wikipedia’s article on lake pigment – I learned initially of such things from Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color, a wonderful book). While I thought of using alizarin instead of madder lake, the first question is why not “red,” which is basically what madder lake is. I shied away from the use of “red,” because that simply did not seem specific or appealing. It was boring. I avoided “crimson,” because this is a word that will always seem poetically cliche to me; it seems overused. This is just my impression and may not be true, but “crimson” is for me in the same realm of “cerulean.” “Madder lake” will be an unfamiliar term to many, so it has a bit of mystery to it. More importantly to me, its terminology is itself evocative of the image I was hunting for: thin, see-through curtains billowing gently in a breeze, almost vaporous (hmm…maybe that word instead of “Translucent” in the “current” form of the poem).

So why not just say, “thin, see-through red curtains billowing gently in a breeze”? Well, there we land on the larger topic of “what is poetry?” I will not get into that now, but suffice it to say that one of the chief values I find in poetry is compression of meaning and evocative emotions. To me “translucent madder lake curtains” (or now, “vaporous madder lake curtains”?) succeeds more than “thin, see-through red curtains” or even “translucent alizarin curtains.”
To skip ahead in the process of the entire poem, the almost final version of stanza one was:

After the rain, the elongated act
Of something passed passing. Night’s bright sounds.
Translucent madder lake curtains float, sink
With the humid breeze from the cracked window.

A bit more thinking on this, and I dropped “Night’s bright sounds,” which felt tacked on and there only for meterical reasons (thus, transforming this poem from pentameter to free verse, though with a loose metrical construct). The big change, though, is the flip-flop of lines 3 and 4 to

The humid breeze through the cracked window
Translucent madder lake curtains echo.

Obviously, I did more than flip-flop the lines (I dropped the awkward “float, sink” and settled on the more aurally delightful “echo”). First, the inversion moves this out of a prose structure into a wholly poetic structure (we do not invert often enough, I think, these days as poets). Second, the mover of the curtains more squarely is the breeze, which before seemed a secondary, though necessary, agent for the curtains to move with. This seems more right to me, which is why I think “echo” works here. The curtains do not technically echo the breeze, but remove the physics (some may damn me here for such a thought), and the mind, the imagination gets it.

****

I’m hoping to see comet Holmes sometime soon.

Update to Monthly Poem

I have updated my “monthly” poem.

Teaching

My fabulous wife mentioned it on her blog, but I looks as if I may be teaching a technical writing course this coming spring at IUPUI (TCM 220), assuming enough students sign up to fill the class. I’m very much looking forward to it. I will be an adjunct instructor. Yeah!

Evolution of a Poem, Part 1

I want to undertake in the next couple or few posts something I am a bit hesitant to do, but which nonetheless I find an interesting exercise: I am going to write and show a bit of a poem from beginning to (near) completion. My hesitation is that I normally do not show anything but later drafts to prospective readers, but in this case, I’m going to begin from the very beginning. This poem is also still a work in process, but it is near “completion,” by which I mean I will be willing to set it aside for a long period of time with maybe only slight future tinkerings.

But first, let’s start with the current state of the poem, “After the Rain”:

After the rain, the elongated act
Of what is passed passing.
The humid breeze through the cracked window
Translucent madder lake curtains echo.

But what of her? Her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir. Her words betraying
All that remains hushed.
After the rain, every word rushes forth from its silence.

I’ll get into my thoughts about this current state later. For now, let’s look at the first lines I scribbled down:

What of her, her hand holding
Pinot noir, her voice that hushed
Swirls of my heart?

Now, earlier that day I was reading some of Vallejo’s poetry, and I stumbled across a phrase in one of his poems about a woman. I cannot rightly recall the details anymore, but I remember it struck me. I did not know what to do with it at that time, so I let it sit and eventually went to bed later that night.

We have two little yorkies, so we have a habit of getting up at around 5 in the morning or so when their bladders are full (and we return to the comforts of sleep post-relief). Anyways, these lines occurred to me. So I scribbled them down.

That night after work, eating, and reading, I sat down at my desk as usual to write. I usually have several things in the hopper at a time, but I felt like toying with this scribble, so I just let myself go to write whatever popped into my head. So I tried to visualize that image in the form of a question: “What of her, her hand holding/Pinot noir…?” This was the result:

After the rain, the tinkle of water
From gutters and trees. Night and only sound.
The curtains breathe wispy
Threads as —–

But what of her, her hand gloving
Crystalled pinot noir, her voice that hushed
Swirls upon my heart? In these clusters
Of sounds, will everything that we have hushed

Blossom in the mouth and
Settle in translucent, shimmering red?

Now, never fear, I am not going to share with you each and every version of the draft, but I have found that there are particularly “critical” moments when writing. I am oversimplifying, but they basically come down to 1) initial “inspiration,” 2) the first thought-through draft, and 3) a later full evaluation and potential overhaul of a poem. It is not this tidy, really, but so much of what we do and write are really approximations of reality, so I will let this stand with but a bit of commentary. “Inspiration” is a notoriously loaded term, but one that is nonetheless evocative of the reality. It may be a fleeting few lines the require a fuller response; it may be an image seen on TV, at the movies, in person, or in the mind; etc., etc. I believe I have commented on this in an earlier posting. The first thought-through draft is what you see almost immediately above. It is far from the current state, but some of that current state can be found here. It is also far from the inspiration – in this case, it is developed, however ineptly or inadequately.

My first thought-through draft (and, perhaps, many drafts to come) is not an attempt to settle on a final version of a poem. Rather, it is an exploration of the potential of a poem. Do note that I write many, many drafts of a poem. The act of writing, for me, is a way of thinking, of turning over, of examining a piece and testing its contours and its limits.

Two Quotes

Arnold Schoenberg, quoted from Gramophone:

I hope my pupils will commit themselves to searching! Because they will know that one searches for the sake of searching. That finding, which is indeed the goal, can easily put an end to striving.

Hermann Broch, final sentence from The Death of Virgil:

It was the word beyond speech.

Songs of Ourselves

I finished yesterday Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America by Joan Shelley Rubin. This was a fascinating read for me. The 10,000 foot summary is Rubin tells the history of poetry “publication” from the late 19th Century to just after WWII, with some exceptions to that timeline. I quoted publication, but Rubin makes it clear that the history of poetry publication is not only with book publishing or even journal publishing. While those do get cited often and their legacy is sizable, Rubin is more interested in how people used and related to poetry at home, in the school, and on other occasions. By necessity, much of this poetry is outside the context of a book or journal.

Another theme Rubin returns to again and again is the difference between “high art” poetry and popular poetry. While canons are framed and dismiss those poets who fail to meet whatever artistic criteria are applied, normal readers frequently do not make such distinctions. One of the more interesting chapters is actually the “Coda,” which spends much time on Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem project. She notes that Kipling, Longfellow, Edgar Guest, Edwin Markham, and Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” make frequent appearances alongside Eliot, Frost (though frequently “misread” with much less darkness than many “artistic” criticism finds in his work), Pound, and many others. She maps a terrain where readers respond to texts (often with specific contexts) and return to them again and again, where readers find relationships with poems that are often dismissed as poor art. Rubin’s goal is not to, necessarily, evaluate poetry as it is to describe its uses and contexts.

I am quite snobbish about poetry myself and am quick to dismiss any poem that fails to meet my artistic criteria. That nevertheless does not dismiss the many reasons readers of poetry read poems.

***

Rubin’s book describes many anthologies (anthologies for religious contexts, for homemakers, etc.), and because of that I recalled my first anthology that I remember, which is to say that I really pored over with attention and a desire to learn: The Mentor Book of Major American Poets (1962) edited by Oscar Williams and Edwin Honig. A mass market paperback, I still have. The poets in it are Edward Taylor, Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman, Poe, Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Stephen Crane, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Ransom, Millay, MacLeish, Cummings, Hart Crane, and Auden. Special notes in the copyright page indicate copyright issues regarding Eliot’s, Robinson Jeffers’, and Gene Derwood’s poems. This book is still the only place from the books I own where I can find Lindsay and Taylor. It is a well-worn book, though the binding is still intact, unlike my original mass market paperback of Eliot’s selected poems (long ago consigned to the trash, its pages falling out, sitting loosely in order with the cover creating the illusion of a whole book) and less worn than my mass market paperback of Auden’s selected poems.