Craggy Shores & A Lighthouse

Remember Aristotle's doctrine of the mean? Or Hegel's thesis, -thesis, -thesis? (sic) Instead of remembering them, I bet you're wondering, what good news could possibly follow? -- so I'll spread the gospel without delay.

I've read quite a few poems, enough to be bothered by them. Take your average poem published in The New Yorker: loose. Written in modes the not-so-distant cousins of 'so I was at work today when...', jazzed up with cosmopolitan virtues and references like nigiri toro. That's how they strike me. Now take your average poem from a reputable literary journal (pardon the dint of irresponsibly broad generalization: acknowledged): labored. Full of falsehoods -- some call it license but I prefer to call it ignorance -- and worse, full of shabby metaphysics. I mean shabby. And for the cherry on top, some of these poems are written in formal rhyme and meter which in all but the most capable hands makes them wilt.

So that's pretty harsh. If I were ever commissioned to express these opinions in an essay or interview, I'd have to clean them up a bit. But the core concern is there: So many poems seem lost to me, close to one or the other of two craggy shores, loose and labored. Barely disguised, flaccid, overly self-interested autobiography, or a whole lotta nuttin worked and reworked and reworked and worked to sound like a little sum'in. Sometimes and far too often, both, and not in the way Hegelstotle was getting at.

A quote comes to mind: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." (Said by none other than Paul Dirac, whose discoveries in quantum physics came so fast and cut so deep that many wondered -- some still wonder -- whether they were idiosyncratic inventions that just happened to correspond with reality. Some irony there.)

Every poet worth his pony should be haunted by that quote. Seems to me, few, so few, seem to be.

**Update**

Speak of the devil and the devil delivers: The February 19 & 26 issue of The New Yorker contained three poems and two of them brought me to tears. One brought tears of sadness, and the other tears of joy and sadness mixed -- wistfulness, like. Gorgeous, both. A birthday gift I didn't see coming, and my best. (Although that radio-controlled dragonfly was pretty cool...)

Sort Of A Mission Statement

A legitimate aim of poetry: the attempted communication of wisdom.

Having wisdom to attempt communicating does not imply that one is wise, as I use the terms. I could be content with the modified Socratic claim that no one is wise. I could add that being wise is but an ideal which animates humankind—a sun and center of our revolutions.

But didacticism is dead, it is said. Poems should be embodiments; they should show but not tell. Keep your wisdom to yourself. I'm big enough to breathe my own ideas and draw from them my own conclusions.

Well. I enjoy vignettes and sometimes whole stories. But life is already made of them. I want something made of it. Even good storytelling—effective prose with an eye on and ear to the panoply of events, cleverly edited—is still just that. That's not to denigrate. Call it a view of narrative modesty.

Let me backpedal. Let's suppose that some stories are more than stories in the modest sense (and perhaps their component images more than mere images, their narrative arcs and twists more than themselves, and so on). That is, suppose a story manages to make something of itself; somehow to establish its own relevance and I'm not left having to rescue it armed only with my affection. Insofar as someone has achieved this meta-narrative magic in a piece of narrative writing by deliberate craft, I cherish it. Cherishability is something I look for in a poem. (Don't mistake this. There are disturbing poems I cherish, and churlish ones, and ones close to coloring outside the lines of decipherability.)

But here is my complaint. 'Embodiment' is a term too easy to satisfy. What if a poet is no more than showing me, cleverly and with some fascination, some piece of his or her life, real or imagined? Maybe you balk: Isn't that enough? No, not for me. If it is for you, fabulous. But I'm looking for something else and not afraid to be writing for those looking for the same something else.

'Wisdom poetry' is a term I would never use in a context where I couldn't caveat and disclaim. But it is something I encounter too little of, and something whose very idea is too often dismissed as so much pedantry, as if to say: because there have been pedants, let's do everything unconsciously—where pedants have no air—and collect the surface lilies from the pond. OK, let's. But let's have other aims, too: let's not limit poetry to the vignette, the story and the unconscious accident/providential stroke.

Poetry could and should be Big Tent.

A Revelation About The Sonnets

Shakespeare's, that is. I'm no Shakespeare scholar -- in fact, a friend or two will attest, I'm a Shakespeare idiot in most respects -- but I did read his sonnets for a class (back when) and enjoyed some of them. Forgive the following if it is common knowledge.

So I was browsing the sonnets today (baser evils boredom's bred), and it dawned on me -- one of them eureka things -- that their main promise goes unfulfilled. The poet's Great Ink standing against Time's Decay, preserving a shade of (the boy's and/or dark lady's) beauty; a form of immortality that Damned Scythe can't take. That's the promise. But heck, I read and read looking for some penetrating descriptions of the boy's beauty (and whatever other of his components one might wish to preserve) and came up short. Just an occasional vague reference to his lips or legs, the usual horndog-cum-romantic metaphors.

So Shakespeare spends all this time pontificating on the nature of perseverance and preservation, without actually doing any. I want to know about the kid. Did he like to swim? Cute laugh? What were his thoughts on Aristotle? If his soul is too much to ask the Ink to hold, then for chrissakes at least describe his personality.

It's a good warning for me, since I go meta pretty often and forget the primary task. Pretty sure I've rung this bell before, but I'm trying to get better at balancing the act of speaking *to* the fabled reader (which overlaps with going meta, in my understanding) and speaking *about* my concerns.

Hey, so

does anyone read these solipsistic musings? I should admit, they're more journal entries than notices, updates, or shout-outs. Technically they are 'logs' but I wouldn't want to read the logs of say, pilots, so it's understandable that most people aren't all that interested in my thoughts on the process and motivations peculiar to writing poems. I suppose I could talk about something else. Well, I do talk about other things, but indirectly; poem-writing is the lens. So I suppose I could use another lens.

But this prose mood has come to dominate. I hesitate to say -- yikes -- this is the real me, because there are at least a couple other real mes. The me of my poems, for instance, takes more risks, is more concise (there's an understatement), and has different concerns. His are words for lost dogs. And for the newly faithless: He works in glowing remnants of lost certainties. His message isn't buck up! but rather bear down! and adjust your eyes to a glow dimmer than you wanted but brighter than you might have imagined. In pretty stark contrast (no?), this prose me has words for insomniacs and addicts of the discursive sentence and thought. These posts are perhaps the quixotic equivalents of late-night infomercials, all sell and sizzle, talking around and around and around the product. What do you mean this isn't sizzle? Why you ungrateful little--. Try reading the essays of Wallace Stevens. They could put a typewriter to sleep. (That said, they're loaded with insights, or near-insights, since in my view he never broke through the sugar ceiling of almost saying the unsayable. He came heart-arrestingly close, though. That's my take but I don't think I could argue for it because it's a feeling his writing instills in me. Some would disagree, I'm sure, and call me naive and claim that going any further than he did would be to write the clever kitsch of reified understanding. There, I've given a future critic a label for my poems.)

I'm in a sort of trance these days. Is that true? It feels true. In social situations I break from it. When I eat or spend time with Arman, I break from it. I percolate back up to my senses, which are perhaps stronger from any meditative muscle my tranciness has toned.

Feel free to post some comments. I welcome any and all. I mean, you're right, talking at walls and responding to imaginary voices is something I'm skilled in (see), but feedback from the living is nice, too.

Line Breaks

must be related to cats. Understanding aside, often they elude one's best efforts even to befriend them. Curious creatures, they.

A line break causes and solves problems. It interrupts the scan of a poem (if not the reading of it) but it may add something to the line interrupted: line-meaning. Thanks partly to the break (and partly to the words and punctuation that operate before it), the whole line gets to break from the rest of the poem and raise its own flag of meaning. The flag might be a discrete thought; a whisper of some unfinished thought, provocatively or otherwise purposefully unfinished; a resonance word or phrase (often the pivot of a thought or the turning point in a story); or a summary or encapsulation or focal point of what has been said or of what will be said. Line-meanings come packaged with many intentions, and their effects on one's attentions are more various still.

But let me make this more personal. Sometimes I wake, like I did this morning, with thoughts about how to change a set of line breaks in a poem I've already written (in this case, an old poem I hadn't thought much about since writing). I make the changes and save a new version. Potentially something gained; nothing lost. But then I smoke on the thought: It's strange how fragile a poem is. I'm more amenable to edits than a lot of would-be poets are, I bet, especially in the first hours after a poem's would-be birth and in the first couple days after that. But it's strange. I change a stanza's line breaks and the whole poem has a new light. Sometimes it's brighter and I get a little tickle in the stomach, and sometimes it's dimmer but I feel like I did the right thing. Switching metaphors, poems as I currently write them are balloons in their early stages of being blown: A little inhalation and the thing sags and wrinkles (sometimes interestingly); a little push of breath and it tightens and expands.

And since my relationship to poems as I currently write them is more that of discoverer than architect, there's a feedback in play when I change a few line breaks. Usually my unhappiness with some break -- it's too boring and too many near it are boring (boring breaks are inevitable -- if everything sings you get noise -- but too many and you can sap a poem's energy), or it's posturing more depth than it can deliver, or it's confusing and not a good confusing, and so on -- is what starts me down the road (that runs through sleep) to changing it. But once I do change it, the game is up for grabs. The words added to or taken from the following line make it necessary to re-think that line and its break. And the process repeats itself on down the poem (If I sound like a programmer checking his own code, that's because I am, in effect.). Then the wholes get their say: Each stanza and the full poem, in their new light, make me want to tinker with line breaks poem-wide all the more. Sometimes I resist but usually I don't.

I realize I'm making this sound more neurotic than it really is. O the navels I've gazed. It's a burden, yes, but most times it's also fun -- fine lines, I suppose, between compulsions and needs and between needs and pleasures.