More Herrick

I've rebought the Herrick Complete Poetry, a book I owned in high school and lost track of at some point. It contains more than a thousand poems, many of them very short, over the stretch more than 500 pages. Did I read the entire thing when I was 15?  It is very likely.

It is likely that I assimilated vast amounts of knowledge from this poetry, of conventions and tropes, genres and subgenres.  In the brevity and variety of the poems there is an encyclopedic quality:  foods, flowers, articles of clothing, rituals and folk beliefs, customs, political attitudes, mythological tropes, metrical forms. There are metaphysical conceits, but they aren't Donne-like.

The easy shifts from sacred to profane are most enjoyable, and from pagan myths to conventional Christian devotion.

Good / Bad

I've decided to structure my book on writing poems in two parts: good poetry and bad.

In the first part, I will talk about how to write poems that are good. My idea is that everyone agrees that a good poem has musicality, concrete images, etc... This is not true, but I think I ought to write about how to compose poems that everyone ought to say are "good." So much poetry fails simply because it doesn't do this.  I'm pretending there is a consensus here, of course, where there's not.  That is part of the fun.  

In the bad poetry section, I will tell you how to write bad poems. Not truly bad poems, but ones that have an oblique or contrary relationship to the aesthetic ideals of good poetry. There is a difference between poems that try to be good and simply fail, and those that have a savvy relationship to both good and bad aesthetics.

So a reader can decide to work with both / either.  

POEMS

I'm thinking I should write a guide to writing poems as well. I was going to do it once. I remember someone, an MFA Graduate, being outraged at the idea. You cannot have a textbook about writing poems. That seemed sacrilegious to him, somehow.  That's not why I abandoned the project, but I remember thinking, if it is sacrilegious to have a textbook, why is it also not sacrilegious to have an MFA program?  He refused to see my point, and got defensive: why was I attacking MFA programs, he wanted to know?

Of course, this would bring me back exactly to what I don't want to do in my other anti-textbook: tell them what good and bad poems are. I just get frustrated with other people's poems and want them to write better ones.  This almost always happens to me at poetry readings. I never say anything, of course, but I am thinking they should study with me and I would help them write better.

This is a curious delusion on my part.  I don't know quite how to abandon it, though I'm sure I should.  When I find poetry written the way it ought to be, I know that immediately too.    

On Not Understanding

On Not Understanding

You are unlikely to enjoy reading poetry, or doing anything else with it for that matter, if you feel you don’t understand it. The feeling of not understanding can make any reader feel less intelligent, threatening the ego in a way that blocks any possible pleasure. This occurs even to intelligent graduate students when they face the reading of difficult poems. (These students are especially vulnerable, in fact, since they have much at stake in proving themselves to be bright and capable.) In reality, everyone has difficulty reading difficult texts, and expert readers disagree quite a lot about the meaning of texts, even one that are not in this category. A seemingly simple lyric by Wordworth, for example, occasioned fierce debate about meaning and authorial intention that reverberated through academia for many years.  

One way out of this dilemma is to begin with easier poets, who write in contemporary language in accessible ways about their own personal experience. After that, it is easy to expand one’s horizons more gradually with more challenging material. Poetry is a supreme exercise of the human intelligence, so it seems limiting to confine yourself to things to which you can easily “relate.” The ultimate experience of reading is to leave one’s self behind and explore new horizons, and sometimes that will involve the reading of poems that do not give themselves up so readily.

Another approach is to simply not to care quite so much about understanding. When we think about understanding a poem, we are envisioning a situation of getting the answer right to the question: what is the meaning of this poem? There is some examination looming in your future, maybe, where you will have to come up with a convincing answer to this question. But if you are reading poetry for pleasure, you won’t have to ever answer this question. There is no professor who will grade you, and your answers (or lack or answers) matter to nobody except yourself. There can be no wrong or right answers, in this scenario, because there is no institutional framework defining the legitimacy of particular interpretations.   

In the larger scheme of things, any particular way of understanding any given text is going to be less permanent and meaningful than the text itself. In other words, Hamlet is going to be more durable than any particular way understanding of Hamlet. Even interpretations developed ten or fifteen years ago might already begin to look quaint, given the inevitable shifts in fashion in literary criticism. The ability to come with an interpretation that seems legitimate by the standards of contemporary academia, then, is not going to be a meaningful measure of “understanding,”outside of this academic framework. 

The ability to paraphrase—express in other words, not those of the poem itself—what the poem is supposedly saying, is a specialized academic skill that you will need to develop for a career in literary criticism, but it is not necessary otherwise. When you think about it, a paraphrase is simply another text, in prose, that will inevitably be less compelling than the poem—more abstract, with duller language. Its only advantage over the original text might be its clarity or directness. Yet is seems a sterile exercise to come up with bland paraphrases of extraordinary works of art. Conversations about art can rise above this insipid level, of course, but only if they avoid reducing the work of art to some cliché.      

You can also immerse yourself in difficult poem for long periods of time and not worry excessively about whether you understand them. What is needed is a quality of suspension, in which the mind does not seek to understand things prematurely or resolve all ambiguities. The English romantic poet John Keats called this “negative capability”:  “it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This suspension of certainty is necessary in a poet, according to Keats, but it is also necessary in a reader of poetry—insofar as poetry is the practice of deliberate ambiguity.

There is a paradox here, though: the indeterminacy of poetic meaning is not a form of vagueness in which “everything goes.” It derives, instead, from uses of language that are extraordinarily precise, almost in a mathematical sense. Students preoccupied about guessing at the meaning the professor wants them to extract from the poem might also think—in contradictory fashion—that the meaning of the poem is completely up for grabs, that any reader’s interpretion is as valid as that of any other’s. They are correct, ultimately, but not necessarily in the way they think. Negative capability does not imply the absence of precise perceptions, but rather the absence of irritatedly premature judgments. You must allow yourself to perceive the words on the page just as they are, hear the sounds and rhythms, feel the power of the words and images. Paraphrase often fails to be interesting or compelling because it isn’t relevant to anything specific in the particular case at hand.    

What is suspended by “negative capability, then, is not the full range of human affect, intelligence, and perception, but the spurious demand for easy or clear-cut interpretations. Imagine a petulant, literal-minded child talking to you like this: “So what is the meaning of this symbol? If you can’t tell me, then what are we doing reading this text?” This inner child often seems to be wanting something that will take the form of a translation of the poem into another sort of discourse, or an explanation that uses some other set of intellectual tools, derived from some other discipline, in order to account for the poem’s strange beauty. Perhaps El Greco had a defect of vision that caused him to paint his oddly elongated figures? Maybe the key to understanding Lorca or Tsaikovsky is their homosexuality?  Of course heterosexuality can never be the interpretative key that opens up an author’s work!  In the reductionist mentality, reduction only work in one direction.

Anxious gatekeeping

Analogous to nervous cluelessness is something we might call “anxious gatekeeping.”  This is desire to police the borders of poetry, or of “good poetry,” or to decide on the direction in which poetry has to go in the future. It is evident in the anxiety of not knowing what poets of the present or recent past will pass into the canon. (Not surprisingly, Harold Bloom, a proponent of theories of anxiety, is also the classical case of the anxious gatekeeper, eager to establish the eternal validity of his own judgments.) There are limits, of course, to what we can imagine calling poetry. But those are the limits of our own imagination, not of poetry itself, and we cannot know in advance where they might lie, and how they might shift for future generations. An eighteenth century poet like Alexander Pope would not have accepted most twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, and might have had problems even with Wordworth and Coleridge.  

We can follow Matthew Arnold, and insist on the value of touchstones, privileged examples of “the best of what has been thought and said,” without committing ourselves to Arnold’s own canon, or that of Pope, Bloom, or anyone else. In reality, nobody has the power to enforce any personal set of preferences, or impose them on others, except through the coercion of institutional power. The anxiety of gatekeeping is kept alive precisely because not even the gatekeepers can come to any agreement among themselves, let alone force their preferences on anyone else.     

The re-programming continues

As the re-programming continues, I've put in place another essential element.  I will work five days a week, for at least an hour, on my current project, Things To Do To Poems. It seems like not so much, to have 5 hours in a 40 hour week, to do your actual scholarship (if you can call this anti-textbook scholarship). But that 5 hours is the difference between doing it and not doing it.

part of the preface

When students only have read a few poems, in exclusively academic contexts, they often approach poetry with what the linguist Geoffrey Pullum (in a different context) has called “nervous cluelessness.” According to Pullum, educated native speakers of English are often so intimidated by misunderstood rules of prescriptive grammar in books like The Elements of Style that they longer trusts their own intuitions about their native language, ending up with “a vague unease instead of a sense of mastery” (Pullum). We hear of students uncertain about their ability to scan a line of poetry because they don’t know which syllables are accented—even though they can speak their native language with infallible accentuation (Ferris). Students who know they are not expert readers read tentatively—unsure, even, of their own basic ability to understand the literal sense of words on the page. They have learned in High School that the denotations of words will be misleading, that the real meaning of the poem is concealed behind a largely irrelevant façade of literal meaning. As a consequence they will sometimes ignore the plain sense completely, even if it is the shortest path to understanding the poem. Since poetry will form a very small part of their education, many students will suffer through a few weeks of poetry analysis before moving on to the more familiar terrain of the novel. Even some English and foreign language professors, with minimal training in poetry themselves, bequeath attitudes of nervous cluelessness to subsquent generations of students.