In the burnished light of winter
the different greens reveal themselves –
pulse of spruce, metallic sheen of pine
& the glow of the cedar’s golden green:
Bright neon of moss where the wind
has kicked the snow away.
________________________________________________

Hmm . . . looking at this now, I don’t like it as much as I did at first. Not crazy about those three uses of of in the middle part. And clearly, the poem is really just an excuse for the verb kicked, weakened, I see now, by has. (I had a hard time deciding between kicked & scuffed.) The problem is that the language doesn’t successfully embody the perception, which is that there are subtle differences between the kinds of green one sees in a winter landscape.

Here is what Joanie Mackowski, who judged the poetry contest, thought of the winning poem, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds”:

“Stretching its keen observations and minutely choreographed sentences over the advancing paw prints of its lines, “Lake Surface Full of Clouds” makes language ductile and makes the reader recall the animal and chemical pleasures of reading. This poem finds an atomic pulse: ‘thing & song// in their wild fullness full’.” The poem will appear in the Spring 2012 issue of ALR.

Afterthought: One thing about poetry being despised & abject in the US — it confers freedom.

I like Kimberly Johnson’s poem because it does with economy & grace one of the things that lyric poetry is especially good at: turning the world inside out for a moment, perceptually, sometimes morally. Lyric moments in longer works such as novels and movies can also do this. One of the people commenting at Slate mentions the movie Patton, which certainly has such moment; so does Apocalypse Now, which makes war look beautiful and exciting, only to then turn the world inside out on the viewer, turning the beauty back into horror. Johnson’s poem does something similar on a small scale.

The problem with the lyric form — and with this poem — is that an ending is required. I don’t think “Catapult” ends very satisfactorily, what with it’s gesture toward the sacred. The beautiful is not always sacred, though lyric poets often pretend it is. I think I would have put a period after “earth” and let it go at that.

My poetic autobiography is pretty mainstream. I have been sympathetic to the revolutions going on around me, but mostly I have followed the poetics developed at the beginning of the 20th century by the great Anglo-American modernists, though I have reached back, too, toward Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman, a couple of poets Pound & Eliot were suspicious of. So I will lay out my early attachments & my application to the Writers Workshop in order to study with Donald Justice, a poet who would say, late in life, that he regretted not having lived in a time when there was a period style. Don might have envied, I think, the way jazz players have a set of standard tunes they can play individual variations on and in the process work out both a group & individual style. He had studied musical composition as a young man & the only music I ever heard him play was Bach. Don Justice was very important to me and I was distressed to see how he was championed later by the reactionary “New Formalists,” who had to distort his great achievements in free verse in order to make him a hero of metrical verse.

Most of the touchstones of my own poetry were already in place by the time I left Iowa. Some — Donne’s lyrics, Auden, Berryman, James Wright, Williams, Roethke — I’d acquired before going to Iowa, but while studying there I picked up on Elizabeth Bishop (via my teacher Sandra McPherson), Robert Hass, Linda Gregg, Czeslaw Milosz, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Rilke. My appreciation of Dr. Williams was deepened by studying him with Don, the supposed paragon of formalism. No doubt there are many others, but those were & have remained the central figures of my own writing. I am only one teacher away from Bishop & Berryman, with whom my own teachers studied. The only significant influence I came by after leaving Iowa in 1980 is Hayden Carruth, who is now the titular spirit of my poetic house. The one remaining — & more recent influence on my poetry & on my thinking generally — has been several extended periods in Vietnam over the last decade & a half.

That’s where I came from, but what do I believe about poetry? I’ve already mentioned Negative Capability as both a moral and aesthetic pivot in my work. I believe in the reality of feeling & of the affects generally, including mood, reverie, and other states of intuitive knowledge. Surely we poets need not apologize for asserting a strong ontological claim for such states when modern cosmology posits multiple, perhaps infinitely multiple, universes; when string theory supposes the existence of half a dozen extra dimensions invisible to us because they are “rolled up” into the curved surfaces of Calabi-Yau manifolds; when tried & true quantum mechanics makes a strong claim for probability waves, or wave functions, which are not waves of anything or in anything, but finally as far as I can tell, waves in thought. So poets need not apologize for examining human affective states, from the calmest to the most agitated, from the most contented to the most anxious.

One thinks in this regard of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, “In the Waiting Room,” in which the poet looks back upon her seven-year-old self at the very moment that she, Elizabeth Bishop, realizes she is a self, “an Elizabeth,” as the poem says. One thinks of the child William Wordsworth have to grip a fence post or a stone in order to reassure himself of the existence of a world outside his thoughts; one thinks of Hartley Coleridge, son of the great Romantic poet & philosopher, who, aged four, when asked whether he had enjoyed a ride in a dog cart, replied that he might have enjoyed it more if he had not “always been thinking of his thoughts.” One thinks of William Blake noting that the balloon of the imagination needs the ballast provided by sacks of earth.

Eliot said that poetry “purifies the language of the tribe,” but surely this is High Modernist overreaching; at best, perhaps, poetry might remind those who are willing to be reminded of the importance of what the historical Buddha called “right speech.” And right speech is speech that pauses, halts, even stutters, on its way to judgment.  Stutterers are often flawless singers, I once wrote in a poem. I also wrote, in another poem, that “knowledge is loved information” & poetry surely is one way though of course not the only way of turning information — especially affective information — into knowledge.

I will expand on those ideas and read illustrative poems by some of the figures mentioned above, along with a dozen or so of my own poetry poems, several finished just this year after what I can only describe as a return to poetry, despite the fact that I never completely abandoned my muse, who I sometimes visualize as a skinny girl with a little bit of a drug problem.

The story involves a young woman kidnapped and used for sex by an anonymous man who keeps her locked in a garden shed behind his suburban house that he has converted into the self-contained Room of the novel’s title, which is in fact a very effective prison. The young woman is 19 when she is kidnapped and within a couple of years becomes pregnant and bears a son. The tricky and audacious thing about the novel is that it is told in the first-person point of view of this boy when he is five years old. There are plenty of novels in the voices of children, but five years old is pushing against the downward limit of verbal ability for a narrator; still, Donoghue manages the difficulties with a kind of intelligence and grace one wouldn’t think possible, given the narrative situation she has set up for herself.

The narrator’s name is Jack and he is surely a verbally gifted child, but not so gifted as to seem implausible even to a reader (such as me) skeptical of this particular technical choice. The story develops in such a way that Jack’s verbal gifts seem natural: he spends a great deal of time talking to his mother and reading his five books and they also play a game called Parrot in which they watch TV and then the mother hits the mute button, Jack’s task in this game being to parrot back the whole previous sentence he has just heard whether he understands the words or not. They then discuss the words and their meaning. This game is only mentioned once or twice, but in the huge silence that is their lives (the room is soundproofed) language takes on a nearly magical importance.

Because Jack has never seen the outside world except through television, he imagines that there is only one of each thing and that stories and TV are fantasies. He calls the bed Bed and the table Table, and so on for all the objects in Room. Each noun is a singular and proper noun. At night, when their captor — whom they call Old Nick — comes to rape his mother, Jack goes into a bed in the bottom of Wardrobe until Old Nick punches the numbers on the electronic lock and goes back to his house with its widescreen TV. The room is windowless except for a skylight high overhead and has chainlink fencing inside the walls, as Ma finds out long before she gives birth to Jack and acquires this name, also a proper and not a generic noun. The novel presents the reader with a space that is at once claustrophobic and entirely domestic. That claustrophobic environment begins to wear on the reader before long, but in one of the nifty technical sleights of hand Donoghue pulls off, the reader is also slowly let into Ma’s world through the device of having Jack report their conversations and actions.

Ma is clearly depressed and desperate but at the same time holding her sanity together for the sake of her son — and, too, with his innocent collaboration, Jack’s voice  coming to represent in the reader’s imagination both the limits and the power of radical innocence. He becomes her reason for survival and ultimately her mode of escape. Inevitably, about a third of the way into the narrative, Jack’s fascination but nevertheless limited voice begins to sound tedious, but just as that begins to happen the plot of the novel advances toward a plan for getting away from their captor. Ma had tried to get away a couple of times before Jack was born, once smashing Old Nick over the head with the toilet seat, but since his birth has put all her energy into protecting him, even to the extent of being “polite” to Old Nick. Because the simple plot of the first half of the novel relies on suspense, I’m not going to include any of the details in this review; I will note that I was taken in by a subtle red herring so that the actual method of escape surprised me.

The commentary I’ve read on Room understandably focuses on the central characters’ captivity, but nearly half the novel is devoted to what happens after their escape and I’d argue that this part of the narrative is the emotional and imaginative heart of the novel. It is the central function of literature to allow us to imagine what cannot be directly said. We might revise Wittgenstein’s dictum that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” to What we cannot speak about we must find a way to imagine. Literature — by which I mean language that aspires to the status of art — serves that necessity. To this end, what seemed at the beginning a technical liability in Room — a five-year-old’s point of view — turns out to be a strength: Jack is too young to philosophize or explain; Jack’s voice reports what happens to him and his mother and in doing so brings the reader into an imaginative connection with these characters and their situation that might otherwise be destroyed by sentimentality.

When I teach Lit and creative writing, I am often surprised by the vehemence with which some students defend specific examples of sentimentality and sentimentality itself as an appropriate expression of emotion, even after we have talked about the distortions of feeling it involves & the superficiality of emotion and psychological falsity that result from sentimental language. I have the sense that there is a connection between this defense of the sentimental and a parallel bit of unfocused belief — that only “direct experience” is completely real and that such experience is somehow unmediated by things like books or movies or songs, i.e., objects and processes of culture. The cultural, necessarily conceived narrowly, then becomes ontologically second rate. (Of course all experience is mediated by culture, but this is largely invisible.) As a consequence, the intellectual and emotional experiences we have as readers are demoted to entertainment and escapism, modes in which the sentimental is thought to be valid.

A novel like Room, though, demands to be read imaginatively, by which I mean that the reader takes his or her experiences inside the world of the novel as real, as ontologically equivalent to “direct experience.” There may be differences between one’s experience “out in the world” and experience “inside” the world of a novel, but they are phenomenological not ontological. It is much easier, of course, to relegate the imaginative to secondary status, for the imaginary makes rigorous demands upon the reader — demands that can be safely ignored only by treating the imagination as what Coleridge would call “fancy.” (Fantasy as a genre strikes me as the apotheosis of a broken and irresponsible conception of imagination.) A novel like Donoghue’s Room demands from the reader the same kind of attention demanded by friends, family, students, colleagues; that is, the reader who wishes to be a reader has an inescapable responsibility to the text that cannot be lightly put aside. A novel like Room reminds us that all texts are available to imaginative /theoretical reading, whether they are naive or self-conscious about their own demands upon imagination.