Cracking Down Poetic Grounds
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“ There’s no history in the past. Nothing happens there anymore…
Fake sky gods take care of the plot. By the end, Pinocchio is a real boy.
”—Streets - Bob Perlman
These two lines from this poem really caught my eye. The first line sounds like an oxymoron since the history is the past, but I started to think more about this and it made more sense after I read the second line. I think the Pinocchio part was a funny reference because since fake gods are creating the story then by the end of it, any thing can happen.
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Ziegfeld Theatre, New York, New York.
It’s a famous historical theater of some kind. It was mentioned in “The Day Lady Died.”
I think O’Hara’s poem is intriguing because of how it subtly alludes to being about Billy Holiday’s passing. It is funny that he seemed to be zipping around the city throughout the poem and to have learned that in respect to Billy Holiday, she died from a drug overdose, it made a lot more sense to see what O’Hara may have been intending to do with his poem.
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Virgin Diaspora
For last week's poem, I used Bernadette Mayer's technique of picking random words and letting the words run my writing process. I was at Langson Library and randomly chose a book from their collection called St. James Guide to Black Artists. I flipped through the pages, closed my eyes, and put my finger on some part of the page to pick random words.
12 Words I collected: -Virgin -Missouri -art -caricatured -eschewing -traveled -became -masturbating -accommodations -long -interest -diaspora (My hands felt a bit filthy after picking some of these words and even more so after writing this poem out, but I'm hoping its a little more comical than it is inappropriate.)
The Virgin diaspora to Missouri
traveled long, eschewing masturbating became accommodations caricatured of Missouri. Eschewing Missouri's accommodations became art caricatured of a Virgin's missouri (misery). Masturbating became an art of interest for the Virgin. Missouri accommodations eschewing this interest, became caricatured interests the Virgin longed. The Virgin diaspora traveled long from Missouri, became the Virgin eschewing Missouri's accommodations. Masturbating became the Virgin's accommodations to eschew the missouri (misery) of Missouri. Long masturbating became an interest to eschew the long travels of the Virgin diaspora.
From an interest to an art,
masturbating became the caricature of the Virgin. -
“Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.”
Ted Berrigan’s poem for Frank O’Hara was quite interesting, his references such as the line in the title of my post kind of threw me off while I was reading it. It seemed to me like O’Hara’s poems serve as much of a memory for Frank as a picture would for anyone else. To me, the “people in the sky” represented his readers that are looking into his work to get a better glance at the man who wrote them.
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Going back through Jack Spicer’s poetry it was interesting to see his fascination with water in his writing. I think the element of water has a vast array of meanings and metaphors that a writer can refer to whether it be referring to water’s vastness, purity, etc.
I agree! I loved how he had a sort of common theme running through his poetry. I wonder what his personal take on the ocean was, where his fascination began.
I completely agree with that, and the way he uses the water/lake evokes so much mental imagery that varies from reader to reader and may even vary from what Spicer may have been imagining himself while he wrote his poems.
This is a really nice picture to display the beauty of water!
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Ave Maria
I found this to be the most interesting of Frank O’hara’s poems that we read. What stood out was the title “Ave Maria.” Immediately I thought of the prayer. It think this title suits the poem because he makes a plea for mothers to let their children enjoy and explore life.
Me too! It was just so upfront and easy, there wasn’t too much investigating and in depth analyzing to be able to understand this poem. When I first saw the title, I was imagining a prayer or even the hymn that one sings in church called Ave Maria, and so when I read it, there was definitely a huge contrast between what I was expecting to read and what I actually read. What I actually read was a lot more comical and entertaining than what I was expecting to be reading.
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“I believe that you
Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
The place where I again think of you, a new
Harmony of thoughts!”—To You - Kenneth Koch
I really liked this line, if I heard someone write that in a poem for me I would have instantly been swept away. Yeah I know, super corny but I dig it.
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“ …so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.
But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them.
”—Personism: A Manifesto by Frank O’hara
I really enjoyed the imagery and comparisons he made I also really liked his advice about avoiding being logical. O’hara writes as if he is speaking face to face with his readers and really challenges a poet’s need to get his readers to understand where he or she is coming from/gaining whatever lesson they want them to gain
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On What Planet - Kenneth Rexroth
I wasn’t too sure what White Egrets were in the line “White egrets stand in the blue marshes;” so I looked it up and it definitely helped add to the imagery of the poem!
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“One useful thing to remember is that words —however sensuously
they may evoke the world—are not the world. You may beautifully
describe a flower opening, but the flower you create in words is a virtual flower; it can’t be picked, or left to bloom by the roadside. From this obvious starting point, it follows that we can’t ever capture the world “out there” and set it down on the page. There’s always a gap between the word and the thing. We can’t ever, in language, recreate the totality of our experience —which may involve what we encounter through our senses, a complex of emotional responses, and what we think and remember and desire, all at the same time. We can’t know how something actually feels for another person; we can’t crawl inside their skin. Language itself becomes an analogy— what something is like rather than what something is.”—The Poet’s Companion.
This reminds me a lot of Plato’s arguments regarding mimesis: that there is only one ideal, and any attempt to copy that ideal concept is exactly that–a copy, something which is not quite as perfect as the original.(via clevercolumn)
I’ve heard the argument that words are not objects and therefore we cannot create objects with words and so on. It makes sense that no matter how detailed my descriptions are, I can never use those words to produce the exact thing I experience and make it appear in the reader’s mind. Descriptions don’t work like that.
But on the other hand, I also believe that saying that a flower made of words cannot be left by the roadside to grow, or that Language is inherently unable to create feelings and experiences you have never had is discrediting the power of language. Language is one of the most powerful tools we have ever created. I may not be able to transform you into myself so that you see what I see when I put my words together. As a prose fiction author, I may not be able to even give you the experience of being the person I see when I write those words. But, words can give you the feeling of being someone else and having experiences you have not had. Granted, such experiences will be less rich without background experience to fill in images and context, but that doesn’t make them non-existent.
Language is not only an analogy, or a symbol, it is much stronger than that. Language forms the basis for our thoughts and therefore our memories of real objects. (Is a memory of a flower less real than the physical flower you remember? But a memory is not a flower either.) Even if your descriptions cannot create a solid and specific flower, you can still create the idea of a flower. If you can create ideas and sensations well enough (which is what craft is all about) then the flower will be real enough to the mind that it takes no extra will to envision the flower living, growing, and dying beside the road just as if it were a true flower that had roots made of matter and not of words.
This sort of persistent reality and belief in things formed only of words is one of the strongest traits of all well-written fiction. It is useful also in poetry. It can be useful to remember that while language cannot, as our readings have asserted, recreate exact experiences in other people’s minds, they can create powerful and to some extent equally real experiences. Why else would anyone read travel fiction?
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Sorry if this is a long and unedited or proofread rant. I felt the need to get this off of my chest because it’s one of the things about writing that I care deeply about. Also, my craft is typically fiction prose and not poetry, so I possibly care about the persistent nature of characters more than is relevant to this class.
(via azranoxx)
What you are saying is about language is absolutely relevant to this class. There is some miscommunication happening between the quote, Julia’s comment, and your response, however, which I will try to unpack before I address your concerns.
The Poet’s Companion is a pedagogical text that simplifies certain problems in order to be helpful as a practical guide to writing (better) poetry. It is very good in what it is doing, but it is not necessarily attempting to make strong philosophical claims about how language works, how we experience the world, and the relationship between the two. If we go back to the text, we see that this passage is responding to the implicit objection to getting “fancy” with language: “Why isn’t a straightforward description enough?” The authors then do not really say what makes better poetry, but rather offer a series of helpful questions to try to open the readers mind to a variety of possibilities. Ultimately, all the options are provided with the intent of helping you better evoke an experience, or a range of experiences, in your writing. Their implicit argument: nonlinear, illogical, disjunctive writing may sometimes be the best way to evoke a particular experience with a particular flower, real or imagined.
They are claiming here that we can’t transfer our particular experience to a reader: this is common sense. They are also saying that language can be used to create a parallel sort of experience (and you have to understand that first premise, that language is not transparent, to take full advantage of its possibilities).
Plato is always fun to bring into a conversation about poetry. I’m glad he’s here. Although Plato is most famous for wanting to keep poets out of his republic, his views on poetry were rather complex (and vary from dialogue to dialogue). The main reason he didn’t want poets around is because they could, through the beauty of their language, create the illusion that they were saying true things. And he wasn’t wrong! We may say that we are working to get at the Truth, but our work is evaluated based on how well we create experiences with language that feel true in some transcendent way (a feeling one can rarely escape, even if one’s beliefs do not include the possibility of Platonic transcendence of physical reality).
This thing about truth sounds like what I was saying earlier about the advice in the Companion, but the connection is actually very superficial because Plato’s Ideas are not our objects: the physical world we experience, according to Plato, is already a circus of shadows, so that any artwork is twice removed (an imitation of an imitation). Poets who have been heavily influenced by Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and relevant heresies tend to think of the material world as fallen/illusory. For them, poetry is a portal. The poet has privileged access to the realm of Ideas and suggests this higher/more perfect reality through poetic language.The elusiveness of the material world can be more productively addressed with reference to the Lacanian Real—and there has and will continue to be much ink spilled in an attempt to figure out how to talk about our relationship with that (if it is possible at all). Crudely stated, the Real is what we are severed from by language and consciousness. When I see a flower, I think: “flower,” I think “wedding” or “funeral,” I think “sky blue” or “mustard.” To talk about creating a “real thing” in writing is moot because, as you point out, Stephanie, our experience is always mediated by language anyway. (To say that our thoughts are “based on” language is a little more controversial.)
All of which brings me to: I think your essential claim is right, and I don’t think that it is really at odds with anything we’ve read. I don’t know that one can take responsibility off the reader for struggling through authors’ attempts to evoke experiences that might be less familiar—provided the author has given the reader enough to work with (and to decide what “enough” means in this context is to choose one’s position on what constitutes good poetry). But, yes, the work of most literature is to try to create as real an experience as possible for the reader, to communicate, and one can succeed, at least to some degree, in doing that. Granted, communication is difficult, and some writers like to keep hitting the reader over the head with the theoretical impossibility of communicating anything precisely, and some do it interestingly and well, but if we all wrote like that, we’d drive ourselves crazy. (But there is a wide spectrum of poetry that manifests awareness of the potential failure of any communicate act without thematizing it.)
I’m going to add something to the mix—one of the “letters” Jack Spicer wrote to Lorca in his book After Lorca. The letters tend to deal with translation, but translating from language to language undoubtably has something in common with translating from personal experience to work of art.(via poemboat)
I completely agree, especially as it says “Language itself becomes an analogy - what something is like rather than what something is.”
I really found this striking because in my opinion, regardless of how carefully you word your description of an object or of an emotion or etc, and despite how intentional your structure of your description is, the words used and how it is said will never be able to actually and wholly describe what something is. All it can really accomplish is describing what something is similar to or resembles or is an essence of.
(via poemboat)
