Posts Tagged poetry criticism

As a young man, Derek Walcott trained to be a painter. It seems to me that he brings a painter’s eye to his poetry… and in an odd way even to his literary criticism. It is one of the things that make him unique in English Literature. The other is his childhood in the West Indies.

According to my usual note on the front cover, I first read Selected Poetry almost 20 years ago, in June 1993… a month after my first daughter was born. I was 33 and freelancing as an editor and writer.

Selected Poetry was not the first Walcott I had ever read, but it was the first volume of his poetry I had spent much time with. I still like to start my “study” of poets I am not fully acquainted with by reading volumes of their selected verse. It gives you a “big picture” understanding, like studying a map before you start your hike. For a poet as big as Walcott it is the perfect place to start.

In the almost 20 years since I first read this volume, I have read a lot of Walcott. He is one of the poets that I habitually look for on shelves in used bookstores. He is one that I have often recommended to others. He seems to me to be, with Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, one of the best non-American poets of the last half of the 20th Century.

A few notes about this particular volume. Derek Walcott Selected Poetry is according to the front notes,  No. 15 in the Caribbean Writers Series and was published by Heinemann Publishers originally in 1981. It was obviously meant for a classroom and includes many, many footnotes and a short introduction entitled “A Note to Teachers.” As I have written elsewhere, I seldom read footnotes for poems. I skipped these as well. I am still intrigued by the volume. A little googling shows this to be relatively difficult volume to find, even at ABE Books. It was not published for an American audience. How it got to a used bookstore in the North Country, I do not know.

As I have written often at MontanaWriter, when I read volumes of poetry I read with a pencil in my hand. I have a habit of not just highlighting lines and verses but also of circling in the table of contents poems I especially like. In Derek Walcott Selected Poems, I circled three poems:

• “The Harbour”
• “Adam’s Song”
• “Sea Canes”

Here are just a few of the many lines I highlighted:

“The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk,
do not consider the stillness through which they move.”
(cf. “The Harbour”)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

“But the grace we avoid, that gives us vision.
Discloses around corners and architecture whose
Sabbath logic we can take or refuse;
And leaves to the single soul its own decision….”
(cf. “To a Painter in England”)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

“Yet to find the true self is still arduous,
and for us, especially, the elation can be useless and empty
As this pale, blue ewer of the sky,
Loveliest in drought.”
(cf “Allegre”)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

“I made this in your honor, when
vows and affections failing,
your soul leapt like a heron, sailing
from salt, island grass

to another heaven.
(cf. “Another Life”)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

… and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what’s poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?”
(cf. “Forest of Europe”)

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

 

 

 _____

In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Poets end up writing a lot about poetry and poems because in the end they write about the things they know best and feel most passionately about. For the poet, naturally, there is nothing to feel more passionate about than poetry.

“Ars Poetica” is, of course, a staple of English Literature classrooms. It is often used to springboard a discussion about the purpose of poetry in specific and art in general. There is the usual nod to the irony of discussing the “meaning” of a poem about poetry having no meaning, but it is only that: a nod. The assumption in academia remains that no one could seriously believe such an assertion… at least no one who is not a poet.

On a cool April morning, MacLeish seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown–

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind–

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea–

A poem should not mean
But be.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

MacLeish repeats this line twice in the stanza-section. He also repeats the word moon in each line of the same stanza. Only the word poem occurs more times in the poem – six times for “poem” to  four times for “moon.” Repetition in poetry is for tone, sound, and emphasis. He is, of course, using it for all three purposes.

____

 In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Poetry is “taught” in most of our schools completely wrong. The emphasis is on discovering the “hidden meanings” of a poem. The result is that while most children love Dr. Seuss and rhymes most people reach adulthood believing that they do not like poetry at all. “I don’t understand it,” is the usual response when asked.

In “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins writes about this process as well as I have ever seen it written.  ”Introduction to Poetry” comes from Collins’ first volume of poems The Apple that Astonished Paris. On a beautiful, National-Poetry-Month morning it seems like the perfect poem.

Enjoy!

Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Most adults who say they “do not understand poetry” say that only because they had to sit in too many classrooms listening to poems being analyzed. Sadly, under-grad English majors are some of those who most often make the claim that they really don’t like poetry as much as fiction because they “do not understand” it.

If you are an English teacher, print this poem out and put it up somewhere in your classroom where you will always see it. And every time you are about to talk about poetry and/or a particular poem look at it… and remember: a poem is to be enjoyed. Not analyzed. Not dissected or un-packed. Enjoyed!

The only legitimate questions about a poem should be questions like:

• What are your favorite images/words/lines? Why?
• What kind of feelings and emotions came to you while reading the poem?
• What lines sound best when read out-loud?
• Did you enjoy the poem? Why or why not?
• Pick two lines and memorize them for tomorrow

That is enough for poetry. Enough to make poetry relevant and enjoyable and something to look forward to. Enough to make English majors be able to say, “I enjoy poetry!”

____

Winter Cattails (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Re-reading the February 7th MontanaWriter post and my poem “Crow Lesson,” I realized that the version of the poem I originally posted was not the one I had intended. It was an earlier version of the poem. After copying and pasting what I assumed to be the final version of “Crow Lessons” into WordPress, I had never really looked at it again. I edited the rest of the post and pressed the “Publish” button.

I have since corrected this mistake. But it has got me thinking that a post about how a poem is made… or rather “polished”… could potentially be interesting.

Where once I filled notebooks with my illegible scrawl, today I write almost exclusively on a computer. The only exception to this is the beginning of some poems.

Since ideas and lines for poems seem to come anytime and anywhere, I have learned to write these lines down whenever they come to me. And since I do not have an easy way to carry a notebook and pen with me during my day, I tend to dash these lines down onto any scrap of paper I can find… the back of some report, a post-it note, the corner of a napkin. I have tried to “write” them down on my iPhone but that has never worked.

The scrap of paper that gave birth to “Crow Lessons” is the back of a blue post-it note that I was using as a place-holder in a notebook at work, that I am still using there. In thick-lead pencil at an angle I had written these lines:

I have seen the crows coming across the field
and dropping into the grass

Over time and rewriting that line became:

I have seen crows coming across the fields
seen them drop into the grass

One of the consequences of the digital workshop is that there are no easy manuscript “trails” anymore. When I used to keep handwritten notebooks and journals, I could follow the progression of a work: word changes and strikethroughs spiraling  across pages and dates. But in this digital age, trails just disappear with a simple keystroke… false starts and rewrites so easily returned to the ether from which they had come. What I do have sometimes is multiple copies of works that have been saved at different times up to various cloud databases. In the case of “Crow Lessons” I see that I have slightly different versions saved in multiple places.

I imagine that the original line was changed quite early in the writing process for two reasons. First, the original line as written seems to me to be a “closed” one… difficult to keep going. This is a subjective thing I realize, but even now as I try to think of what could follow these lines I find myself entering a dead-end path. Second, the “seen” in line 2 echos that in line 1 and sets a structure and tone.

Re-writes of the middle of the poem are lost to me for all the digital reasons listed above. So let’s concentrate on the last line, the line that was posted originally at MontanaWriter as:

and I know the loneliness of being human

Looking through versions of the poem saved up to various cloud databases I see that the line was also at one time:

and I know the true-loneliness of being human

What made me decide in the end… for now anyway… to make it the current version:

and I have felt the true-grief of being human

Let’s begin with the movement from active to passive voice. Most of the poem, of course, is in the passive voice. Even the original lines. So a passive ending to the ultimate line seems a natural fit… but not a necessary one for a poem. In a poem, I believe anyway, you are free to take liberties with language, grammar, and form. An abrupt shift of line break, stanza break, and tense can emphasize something beneath the language. I do not in this case think it does.

Now let’s look at the movement from first “loneliness” to “true-loneliness” and to finally “true-grief.”

First of all, the hyphen of “true-loneliness” and “true-grief” mirror the hyphen of “black-edged” in the previous line/stanza. Whether this is a “legitimate” reason to make a change, I do not know. But it does lay in back of the change. And, what the hell, it was a good enough reason for me to think of it.

Second, the vowel sound of “true” is an assonance match for the vowel sound in “human”…just as “grief” becomes finally with vowel sound match to “being.” I like assonance for the same reason I like repetition, it helps provide an interior structure to free-verse poetry. It also provides a “musicality” that carries tone that runs beneath the words.

Finally, let’s look at the meaning differences between the words loneliness and grief. Both are part and parcel of the human condition yet the former seems to me more general while the latter seems an emotion occasioned by a specific event.

Obviously much of the artistic process happens on the sub-conconsious level. There is not “a reason” behind every word choice and tense choice any poet makes, no matter how poor or imperfect the poet. Ultimately there is a mystery to the creative process that makes it unintelligible to all, but especially those of us who struggle to create.

____

Robinson Jeffers’ brother was a well-known astronomer, his father a well-respected biblical scholar of the Calvinistic tradition, and Robinson himself was a great student of the classics. While these facts are not necessary to know to be able to read and enjoy “The Epic Stars,” I mention them anyway because anyone who spends time with Jeffers will soon recognize these themes. But for that, the same themes are in the poetry of many 20th Century poets.

There is one school of poetic criticism that assumes that to really understand, and hence “enjoy,” a poem it is necessary to know every outside-thing you can possibly know about a poet, their times, and the various themes contained-within and referenced-to in the poem you are studying. Regular readers of MontanaWriter know that I do not ascribe to such a view of poetry.

Enjoyment of any art does not depend on how much we know… what we know simply deepens our appreciation. The problem with the way poetry has been taught for generations is that it concentrates on what we know more than on what we enjoy. In the end, poetry is about enjoyment. Even political poetry.

I have always enjoyed Jeffers… and this poem in particular. On a cool November day it seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

The Epic Stars
The heroic stars spending themselves,
Coining their very flesh into bullets for the lost battle,
They must burn out at length like used candles;
And Mother Night will weep in her triumph, taking home her heroes.
There is the stuff for an epic poem–
This magnificent raid at the heart of darkness, this lost battle–
We don’t know enough, we’ll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

We don’t know enough, we’ll never know.
Oh happy Homer, taking the stars and the Gods for granted.

I cannot read these lines from Jeffers without thinking of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us.” I wonder if proto-Homer also looked back in longing at some more innocent age.

____

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

As I have said on a numerous occasions, I have been surprised to discover that the thing I have come to enjoy most about this experiment I call MontanaWriter has been when someone I do not personally know has been moved in some way by something I have written to contact me. Whether they like what I have written or dislike it does not matter. What excites me is to think that a stranger has taken the time to read and respond. A writer needs an audience after all.

Recently I received an email from a reader who had stumbled upon MontanaWriter and my review of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sigmund Freud Discovers the Sea Shell.” The gist of the email was that for all my talk about eliminating latinates from poetry I was “guilty” (her word) of using quite a number in both my poetry and in my poetry reviews.

She was particularly bothered by a term I “made up” (again, her words) in the Stevens’ review, textual duplexity. She said she googled the term and found only one other place it has ever been used, an article on Kierkegaard. “You insist that language needs to have shared meanings, yet you are apparently one of only two persons in the whole world to even pretend to know what ‘textual duplexity’ means. Are you using it ironically or hypocritically.”

My one word answer to that question would be: both. My three word response to the whole email would be: “guilty as charged.”

Duplex, according to online dictionaries has a number of meanings including:

1. having two principal elements or parts: double, two-fold
2. A house divided into two living units or residences, usually having separate entrances
3. allowing telecommunication in opposite directions simultaneously

The term textual duplexity is rooted in all the meanings of “duplex.” Language, indeed all human interaction, is always at least two-fold and is, by definition, always simultaneous two-way communication.

Words carry multiple meanings. Another (admittedly more poetical) way to say this is: many meanings “inhabit the house” of a single word.  In a poem, these houses – duplexes actually… dwellings of multiple meanings – form streets, and blocks, and neighborhoods, and communities of meanings. These meanings simultaneously interconnect with one another and with the writer and the reader of any poem… any work of art. The term textual duplexity then, seems to me to describe the process as well as any term I could come up with.

I sent an email back to the reader, explaining how I had come up with the term and thanking her for reading what I had read so carefully. I also let her know that I am quite open to any and all other terms or metaphors that could better describe how I imagine poetry to function.

I will keep the readers of MontanaWriter posted when, and if, I find a better term or metaphor. In the meantime, I am going to live with the hypocrisy of my latinates and continue to use the term “textual duplexity.”

_____

A reader recently sent me an email critical of my poetry reviews. She said she found MontanaWriter when she was doing a paper for school. She did a google search of a poem she was working on… and my review of that poem – she did not mention which – came up. She said she was writing to me to let me know that she was disappointed with my review because I did not “analyze” the poem per se, but rather talked about “everything but the poem.” Upon further investigation, she said, that was true of all my “reviews.” She said I should call them something else. She did not, however, offer any suggestions.

I have never been comfortable with poetry analysis in the same way that ultimately I have never been able to make peace with that peculiar discipline called “biblical criticism.” Though I suspect that there is much merit in both, most of the time what passes for literary or biblical criticism/inquiry is merely another self-congratulatory exercise in academic mental-masturbation that only succeeds in missing the point of whatever is being examined. To me, poetry… and the bible… matter too much for that kind of bullshit.

Having gotten that little rant off my chest, I will say that my emailer does have a good point. Looking back over my poetry reviews I see that I do go far afield in my “reviews,” as I go far afield in most of what I write here. It is, alas,  in my very nature to wander and to wonder about things.

In my defense, however, a quick internet search for a definition of the word review comes up with these two definitions, among many:  1. To look over, study, or examine again. 2. To consider retrospectively; look back on. Certainly my reviews fit that definition quite nicely since many are retrospective in nature… or more properly, “reminiscent.”  But in the end it hardly matters. My emailer was looking for and expecting to find poetry analysis and, of course, my reviews are anything but that.

St. Thomas Aquinas

The “poems” that make up the book of psalms were written long before the first century. Yet in the nature of great literature they hold truths that are as important and relevant today and they were when they were first heard.

In the time that Psalm 14 was first composed and sung, monotheism was a minority religion. Most  peoples of the world believed: in a set of gods particular to their culture/family; a democratic kind of holiness that said that you believe in your gods and I will believe in my gods and we will leave each other alone; or in no gods at all. While people claiming to adhere to monotheism in the 21st Century has increased “radically,” in point of fact, not much has changed.

The result of thinking that gods and religion really don’t matter are quite clear to the psalmist. For the psalmist, being rightly rooted in faith in the one true God leads naturally to peace, better life, and a better world. Just as obviously, being rooted into the wrong faith, or believing that faith does not matter, leads inevitably into violence, ignorance, and chaos.

St. Thomas Aquinas believed that if you had a thousand years, you could through reason convince any person of the existence of God and the truth of Christ. He believed, like the psalmist, that wisdom led back to the Creator because all reason and wisdom began there. Intellect and reason were inextricably mixed with the author of both.

Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the rest of the reformers held no such confidence in the power of reason. The Protestant battle cries of “faith alone”… “scripture alone”… express the duality of reason and faith that the Reformation ushered into the Western world. Reason is used to talk about faith in the Protestant world, it cannot by definition lead you there. Mohammad created the same dualism for Islam by making God so transcendent that ultimately you can only hint at aspects of God. Reason in that religion has a lesser place apparently than even the most radical Protestantism.

The faith vs. reason battle of the Reformation has become the religion vs. science battle of our time. Like the psalmist, we live in a time when most people believe in whatever god (small g) they are born into “worshiping” or they believe in none at all. For the psalmist it is all the same. It involves ultimately, fools missing the truth of the one, true God.

Religion matters profoundly. Thinking it does not is foolishness. But it also matters whether the chosen religion is “true” or not. The wrong religion is also dangerous, more dangerous even than no religion at all, perhaps. That was true thousands of years ago. How much more true is it in our own nuclear-loaded, inter-connected, small world?

Psalm 14

The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do
abominable deeds,
there is none that does good.

2 The LORD looks down from heaven
upon the children of men,
to see if there are any that act
wisely,
that seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are
all alike corrupt;
there is none that does good,
no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all
the evildoers
who eat up my people
as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the LORD?

5 There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the generation
of the righteous.
6 You would confound the plans
of the poor,
but the LORD is his refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel
would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores
the fortunes of his people,
Jacob shall rejoice, Israel shall be glad.

____

While it remains my contention that poetry is about feeling more than it is about meaning, I have been asked by a number of people to offer a little “help” in “reading” a few of my poems. Since I know that everyone who has asked me to do so can read quite well, I assume that what they are really asking for is help in understanding my poems.

For  the past few blogs entries I have been trying to provide exactly this kind of help by providing a basic “context” for individual poems.

At the most basic level, the first context for any poem is a clear emotive moment.  A poem’s ultimate form, direction, and movement comes from the interplay between that first instance of emotive clarity, the poet’s intellectual, theological, geographical, temporal, and emotional milieu, and the skill and workmanship of the individual poet. While emotions may be universal, and experiences common, the ability to give “living flesh” to those emotions and experiences is rare.

Whether my poems achieve this for others, I cannot ultimately judge. If a few words about the humble beginnings of a glimmered idea help you as a reader to make “meaning out of these murmurings”… I am happy to oblige.

_____