Poetics
Here is the world.
It’s a cold place &
There’s not much
you can do with it–
a little shaping or
arranging around
the edges. Pattern
emerges through
accretion of detail.
Denote. Until light
clobbers you hard
in the face, a salt
wave stirred full
of sand & knocks
you off your feet
& nearly drowns
you in the actual.
The world is heavy
it turns out. Hard
with denotations.
You come up sput-
tering. At least I do.
I have continued to work on making collages over the last weeks, though not quite at the frantic rate at which I began. At the same time, I have returned to a pile of old drafts of poems I thought I was going to have to abandon. I filled the first signature of Carole’s book with collage pieces in which I was most interested in texture & in which I took a magpie approach to color — If it was bright & shiny, it went into the composition. I was trying not to be narrative or representational, using the materials as materials rather than as subject matter. In fact, I was trying to do “wrong” things that I would then have to correct. There’s an interview with Richard Diebenkorn somewhere (not that I compare myself to him!) in which he talks about having to correct the imperfections of an initial performance in his paintings & I find that my collages often consist of endless corrections. After filling all the pages of the first signature, I took a break of a few days during which time, accidentally, I began reading David Batchelor’s little book Chromophobia. Batchelor’s text is a tract against purity & in favor of color. He also makes the point that white can be both an absence of color & a color in itself. Perhaps paradoxically, I decided then to make some strictly black & white collages. (The thumbnails are above: click through for full-sized scans.)
I don’t consider my self a visual artist, though I have paid attention to modern & contemporary painting since I was fifteen & took classes in college, then spent several years trying to make paintings. I don’t have the technical skills to be anything but an amateur & of course there’s nothing wrong with that status. But the interesting thing is the way that doing these collages has loosened me up in my writing, allowing me to go back into some of the old work & see it in a new way, as well as sparking new work. Even specific techniques — juxtaposition, compositional balance (or imbalance) — seem partly transferable to my poems. Mostly, though, doing the visual work & approaching it, not casually, but loosely & openly, has allowed me to bring a more playful feel to my poems. Contributing to this has been James Longenbach’s book The Art of the Poetic Line, which has served to remind me of a set of techniques I had long ago absorbed & forgotten; it can be very useful to focus on technique rather than content, especially if content has been getting you down. After the black & white collages, I did some monochrome color pieces, red & blue. Just to see what would happen.
The Canada Geese are back on the river. We heard a pair go honking by a couple of mornings ago on the dog walk, then yesterday & today they have been landing on the river in increasing numbers. As I sit looking out the south window over the water, I can see four crows lumbering around in the maples along the riverbank, a bluejay on the deck railing, two mourning doves scratching for seeds in the crusty snow, & about seventy-five redwing blackbirds in the still-bare trees over by the little creek. I’ve put out more sunflower seed this year than ever before & have put it out more consistently, along with suet and thistle. My reward has been all this bird life to see me throuh a long, cold, gray spring. We still have high snow banks along the road, but we were able to take the longer dog walk this morning because enough snow has melted off the bridge that the sidewalk was clear enough to walk on, though still icy in patches.
I saw recently that Tom Sleigh’s new book of poems, Space Walk had won the Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry — the richest prize this side of a MacArthur — so I ordered the book immediately from Amazon, thinking that I too might be able to Make Big Money In Poetry. Actually, it’s an intelligent book — & I like intelligence in poetry more than most — but I am consistently puzzled by the lineation of the of the poems. Perhaps I am more sensitive to this than I might be otherwise because I had just read James Longenbach’s elegant little book on the poetic line when I picked up Space Walk. Longenbach makes note of three basic kinds of free verse poetic lines: end-stopped, parsing, & annotating. (The first sort is self-explanatory; Longenbach takes the second two terms from J.V. Cunningham & John Hollander respectively (Longenbach 48-50). Parsing lines follow the grammatical shape of the sentence, breaking the line at phrasal junctures, ends of clauses & so on; annotating lines, on the other hand, break across the expected junctures, creating tensions through double meaning, rhythmic expectations, & grammatical dislocation. Longenbach’s thesis is that most effective modern free verse poetry combines the three kinds of lines, each poet developing characteristic & recognizable habits of lineation. Longenbach gives us Williams’ “Spring and All” as an example of annotating lineatuion:
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished flooris full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressureat the faucet of
June that rights
the triangle of the airpulling at the
anemones in
Persephone’s cow pasture—
[. . . ]
contrasting this later WCW poem with “one of the many poems called ‘Pastoral’ that Williams wrote in the earlier years of his career:
The old man who goes about
Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
Is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
[. . . ]
Williams capitalizes the initial letters of the lines in this second example, in an attempt, I’d say, to make the line matter as a unit; eventually, he figures out how to do this & no longer needs the caps. Tom Sleigh doesn’t use initial caps, but his lines in “Blueprint” otherwise follow the pattern of Williams’ “Pastoral” above:
I had a blueprint
of history
in my head –it was a history of the martyrs
of love, the fools
of tyrants, the tyrants
themselves weeping
at the fate of their own soldiers –a sentimental blueprint,
lacing depth –
a ruled axis X and Y
whose illusions
were bearable . . .
then unbearable . . .
[. . . ]
And not just in this poem, but in poem after poem, even when the line is extended & contains syntactical breaks within it. “The Hole” opens with these four stanzas:
Out in the garden, the wind was like a dog
digging in the snow, digging with its nails
to make a bed to lie down in against the freezing air:and in my exhaustion, my stupefied numb thought
dug and dug its way down to where I knew
you were–though how could I believe it?Once, your irony and honesty refused
to let you say, “Oh yes, my son the genius!”
when I showed you a poem–saying with Groucho deadpan,as you handed me back the paper, the typed words
already a little smudged: “Hopkins is a good poet.”
[. . . ]
The poem, a complaint to the speaker’s mother, pits the parent’s ironic humor against the son’s desperation to be admired; the poem is an efficient emotional machine, as are many of Sleigh’s poems. The parsing line is most obvious in a poem , “Betrayal,” arangend on the page in imitation of WCW’s late triadic stanza, but visual appearance is the only similarity, each bit of syntax parsed & sitting by itself on the page. Sleigh’s poems lie flat on my ear, without a pulse behind them, which is to say they read like prose. Very good prose, often — accurate & affecting. My normal bias would be to see this as a fault, but it is clearly intentional & needs to be taken seriously as a poetic strategy. When listening to certain kinds of music, I find myself wondering whether there is any irony or playfulness in the fact that the musicians are playing exactly on the beat. Playing exactly on the beat can code for irony, after all; on the other hand, sometimes it is evidence of a dreadful lack of skill. The music of Sleigh’s poems is played exactly on the beat. I think the intention is probably to convey a kind of plain-spoken honesty — many of the poems work through the accretion of carefully observed specific details that collectively pack an emotional wallop — and the playfulness of an annotating line might be seen as diminishing such detailed sincerity. That’s my guess. But playfulness with syntax, within the framework of Sleigh’s poems, might be heartbreaking. The poems, through their locked-down lineation, forfeit heartbreak.
I found Griffiths’s work only after I’d been to Vietnam in the mid-1990s. Once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. A weirdly loving portrayal of the effects of savagery. I think the greatest art, regardless of the horror it portrays, is motivated by love.
