Month: February 2022

Hello everybody, first off, please take a moment to vote for the poem we most didn’t read, from those assigned so far—the one you really wanted to get to, but we never got to. That will be the basis of our discussion on Monday. You can vote here.

Emotional, affect-laden
Contextual (that is, it inhabits or implies a situation or a circumstance)
Embodied and/or voiced, with the mix of intention and accident that characterized all human activity
Rhythmic (in that sense of rhythm we encountered with Blasing and Abraham, rhythm as intentionalizing)
Intersubjective (voiced by characters, reflecting multiple vantages, responsive to social situations etc.)
Intentional (in its rhythm and other qualities, it inclines us to attribute interpretive intention to the performer, related to but distinguishable from the intention inscribed in the original text)

However: Sam urged us to think again about whether the mere “happening” of Siri’s voice shouldn’t be construed as a performance; aren’t their contexts in which we could receive it that was, e.g. as experimental art? Sydney gave us an interesting argument: that because each iteration of the Siri-reading must be different (because of different ambient coincidences, different hearers etc), we cannot simply treat it as neutral repetition.

Somewhere behind the discussion was Sayre’s basic distinction between the performance of x (e.g. a reading of a text) and performance itself, the happening, which need not have an original text behind it. Because we are concerned with performances of poetic texts, that first category—in which the performance is also an interpretation—is of greatest interest to us. But that idea of performance as “the eruption of the outside into the work” (Sayre 96) ought to stay with us. On that account, a performance is to be understood not in its fidelity to the text, but in its deviation; and the purest performance may have no text at all, only a set of conventions to disrupt.

OK: Othello! Zoe (in spite of not really being on deck today; thank you!) brought us into Othello’s great soliloquy of his adventurous career, and Cassy and others observed its rhetorical patterning—an instance of Othello commanding some of poetry’s formal powers to persuade an audience. A performance in the most traditional sense. Sydney asked us to think about Brabantio’s performed acquiescence to the Duke’s sanction of his daughter’s marriage—a passage where both he and the Duke break into rhymed couplets, another formal expression of poetic power that serves very different purposes for the two speakers, ritual consolidation for the Duke, bitter, satirical resignation for Brabantio. Avaneque had us listen to the ways in which metaphors travel across speakers in the play, especially animal metaphors; we wondered, are those sorts of interpretive patterns native to the play’s poetry, or might they be (or be made) dramatic, and if so how? Finally Jiwon pointed out the complexities of Desdemona’s performance of her own authority at the moment when she insists on accompanying Othello to Cyprus. Each instance could be read as a kind of contest between poetry (as an interpretable patterning that solicits rereading) and drama (as a real-time, narratively propulsive situation). Sometimes poetry seemed to get the better of drama, sometimes the reverse, but throughout the scene you can feel each reaching for the special resources of the other.

In my notes here and in class I have been freely interchanging “performance” and “drama”; maybe that’s a distinction we can sort out with Nathan Davis’s help next Wednesday. I have also tacitly been using a definition of poetry that is closest to what we call lyric, and that is a topic for the class after the break.

We finished with a swift reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Casabianca,” a poem that seemed to take Felicia Hemans’ imperialist tear-jerker and make it wonderfully complicated, difficult to speak and to read, hotly embarrassed, and private; a kind of counter-performative gesture, pulling the lyric back into the space of close reading, and perhaps into the head. A refusal of performance. Is it entirely successful, we might ask? Can we ever altogether escape performance?

It was great to start out with that sixfold account of the “syntax” of the photograph:

Vantage
Frame
Detail
Time
The Thing Itself
Light

So many of those aspects of the photograph make interesting categories for analyzing a poem. Vantage, for example, which Jeff Whetstone put to such good use thinking about the exercises, and which came back again with Crane’s “Bridge”—how extravagantly multiple that poem’s vantages are; is it at all like a succession of photographs? Or like a movie? Or is there something that outstrips the visual in the way it circles its object, changes its stance, and the register of its metaphors? (Surely the speaker is standing in a different place, or adopting a different bodily attitude, when the voice of the poem comes closer to prayer.) Close-up, distance shot, shot from underneath, from above, all of these positions have different rhetorical effects. The movement among them was also a transformation of mood, sometimes with a Keatsian, vertiginous speed, exaltation to despair and back again. It was especially instructive to put all that movement in the context of the large-scale shift in Walker Evans’ career from the heroism and dynamism of his Brooklyn Bridge, to the documentary turn of his later work, and his engagement with vernacular photography. One senses that Crane’s poem could never sit long enough to engage in one of those wary staring contests that Evans has with the sharecropping families he photographed in the 30s. What does it discover instead, about the lives of office workers, the “bedlamite,” the seagull, and (or) the poet?

(The freedom of a poem not to be located in point either of origin or reception is quite interesting to think about—perhaps it can get closer to the permissions of mental life than other media can? Though then again, it is confined, for the most part, to language…)

It is worth thinking too about the detail, in relation to Barthes’ punctum; what would count as a detail in a poem? What counts as its frame? That word cannot simply be identified with form—that is, the frame of the sonnet is not the aperture on the page opened by its fourteen lines, is it? What about questions of what gets into the poem, what gets left out? And time!—the photograph is a moment, though that moment (as de Duve suggested) can have a lot of time in it. Crane’s poem is what Bruno Latour (a wonderful historian of science) would call a “polytemporal object”: it contains so many times and kinds of time in it, including times of language, some of it sounding avant garde, other bits archaic. Can a photograph make itself polytemporal, in spite of its instantaneity, and if so, how?

There was some very interesting discussion of difficulty, too, in relation to Aishah’s photo (with the obscurity of its manikins) and also Cammie’s. What do perceptual difficulty (the difficulty of making something out, visually) and conceptual difficulty have to do with one another? We talked just a bit about why a poem or a picture might want to be difficult, why it might pose challenges (again, of perceptual recognition and of interpretation) to the viewer or reader. More to discuss there I hope.

Finally: “Photography loves everything.” I love that way of putting it, and it highlights a real difference from poetry. Every word in a poem is there because the poet put it there. (There are experimental exceptions, but they prove the rule.) A photograph can catch up all kinds of things that escaped the attention of the photographer, in the moment, but that mean everything to the viewer later. (Perhaps every true punctum is of that character.) The contrast between the two puts a fine point on questions about meaning and intention. It could never be right to say that “poetry loves everything”; it is so much more full of choice. And yet, as interpreters, we may feel free to make claims that would never have occurred to the poet. So what, exactly, is the status of those meanings—meanings which often count toward the poem’s difficulty, its resistance, what it won’t easily show to the reader and perhaps never showed to the writer?

It was delightful to talk about those cyanotypes, and a few useful distinctions emerged, especially between images that offered pictorial representations of the subject matter (when does a poem ask you to see what it sees?) and those that offered visual metaphors for the poem’s concepts. There was Nicole’s answer back to Stevens, filling up his empty room; John’s choice to figure the same poem’s careless, descriptively indifferent counting (“two or three hills”) with perceptual unclarity (those hazy hills at the bottom of his image). Cammie picked up Komunyakaa’s word “skein” and re-heard it as “skin,” making a surface of matted filigree that transformed the poem’s ideas of ornament. Many other wonderful examples.

We also approached the idea of vantage: interesting to ask, of each of those images, where it stands to look at what it looks at. And of course, what does that term of art, for image, become when we ask it of a poem? Where does a poem stand to look at what it looks at? Give that some thought as you read the Crane assigned for Monday and of course as you make your exercises. Keep in mind, too, that Barthes distinction between stadium and punctum.

It was a real revelation to me to read Lerner’s “The Voice” together; Selena got us started with questions about the analogy between poem and photograph. On the one hand, the (prose) poem’s relation to time seemed to be so various (Biblical time, the lifespans of generations, the timescales of injustice and of intimacy), the opposite of a snapshot. But those sayings—do they have something of the immediate, world-capturing power of a picture? I thought the line of discussion about the trustworthiness of image and of aphorism was really interesting. The poem really began to open for me, though, when Aveneque brought up that midrash on the lower left margin of the last page: “The ancient rabbis believed lice arose from dust, which is why you can kill them on the sabbath.” Suddenly the long history of the exceptions cultures have made to permit the killing of particular creatures, or people, was in play, the Ukrainian Jews or George Floyd; and connected to those uncanny photographs, by Barbara Bloom—the caterpillar out of place, on the screen door, on the lip of the glass. We could have worked our way even further into the poem’s strange tangle of sympathy and disgust, laws and sayings, history and fakery, tradition and violence…

…but it was good to spend at least a few minutes with Ferry, as he looked at Thomas Eakins’ photograph. Something strange was going on with the poem’s insistence on the photograph’s failure to understand its subject, and the subject’s failure to understand himself. Does the poem understand these failures? Is that all there is to understand? We ended, thanks to John’s question, with a problem of vantage. Is this a poem that inhabits what we have seen of a kind of Platonic skepticism about images, always three removes from the truth? Or is it a poem that dramatizes, that acts out that prejudice, and in so doing affords us an alternative vantage—letting the reader see something of the rivalry of word and image played out in front of us? (Which is to say, the poem may want to establish a vantage for the reader different from the vantage of the poem itself…?)

Brief remarks from this week,  since we were mostly busy with our cyanotypes. I do think it’s worth bearing in mind something that Accra said before he shepherded us into our improvised darkroom. To wit, a word on the page means what it means wherever it falls in that white field. Our attention gets to it when it gets to it, reading left to right and top to bottom. Whereas, an element of an image changes profoundly in meaning depending on where it is positioned within the frame. What are the strategies, he asked, by which a visual artist draws attention to a particular area of the image? What is their relation to the strategies of emphasis by which certain words, phrases, lines etc. might be made to stand out from others in a poem? And for that matter, are there effects of meaning in a poem that can be attributed to the arrangement of the words in space (as opposed to the notional time that it takes to read the text—does space, in a poem, translate into time with no remainder; forsake the eye in favor of the ear?).

We began with an exercise that I hope we can keep with us: simply looking at an urn (OK, a coffee cup) in the center of the room, and looking at our looking; then taking a moment to find a word or phrase that might somehow attach to the urn, or our experience of it. (But which?) The variety was telling: I remember glaze, dynamic, rain over a seascape (or something like that), reflection and also reflective. What a range! Words that capture visual effects, but also name a problem of how much seeing is seeing yourself (reflected in the glaze, or in what you say about it); words that seem to hold the object steady, but others (like dynamic) that acknowledge the time it takes to look at something that stands still, and the change that can happen to you, or to the object, in that time.

That experience gave us a preliminary reference for the claims of the theorists we had read. Lessing’s insistence on the difference between visual art and poetry as a difference between actions and bodies, extension in time and extension in space, the moment and the narrative, felt a little too simple—as important as the fantasy of a painting’s instantaneity may be. Lessing seemed to fit in Mitchell’s category of “ekphrastic fear,” the worry that language might lose its purity, its rationality, its detachment in confusing itself with images. Mitchell also gave is the idea of “ekphrastic indifference,” the simple confidence that word and image are never interchangeable; and “ekphrastic hope”: the idea that poetic language aspires to the composition of a picture, that they can expand each other’s powers; Horace’s ut pictura poesis, as the picture, so poetry.

We spent the rest of the class exploring Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a reckoning with these questions, by turns philosophical and appetitive in its address to the unanswering urn (unanswering, at least, until the very final lines). It is not a descriptive poem in the sense of adopting the vocabulary of the art of sculpture or painting, line or color or form; instead, it narrates a couple of episodes depicted on the urn’s surface (the ambiguous chase of the maidens by the gods, or mean—how much violence is suspended there?—and the sacrificial procession and the abandoned town). The speaker’s longing to sustain a desire before consummation, to sublimate his own poetry into a toneless song, to abstract from the fever and fret of this world—can an image spare us from disappointment, even from death, just by being still? And how could a poem ever sustain that poise? We pondered those last lines, their profundity, their banality; their circularity, closed off by a chiasmus, rounded like the O in “woe,” or like the mouth of an urn. The poem seemed to take its energy from the impossibility of its ambitions…

…which puts us all in an interesting position for Monday, as we try to close the circle, making an image of a line. Impossible project, or new liberty?

Let me just do a little retrospective taxonomizing—you’ll already recognize this as prominent among my intellectual habits (or compulsions). As we listened to the exercises, we heard a range of different approaches to the assignment.

TRANSLATIONS: which often began with the Matsui, taking his abstract code and translating it into another abstract code. John’s was an instance of this; it made the tease of pattern recognition (even, of a kind of musical storytelling) palpable, while still refusing to yield a story, or referential sense. It is always open to words and music to find these purely formal relationships, not as metaphors for one another, but as corresponding structures.

JUXTAPOSITIONS: here I mean a range of experiments from soundtracks to simultaneous recitation (like Sydney’s “Merry Christmas from Hegel” or Cammie’s version of the Matsui). There are two strains to the experience, and the challenge is to think them together, on the scale of their general meaning—to draw out the expressive potential of Matsui’s code, for example, by sounding it with Holst, or to imitate the kind of thinking Carson attributes to Hegel (allowing “meanings to tenderly mingle in speculation”) by hearing both the poem and Hegel’s own prose simultaneously.

SETTINGS: in which the music and words propose themselves as local metaphors for one another, as a line in Cassy’s setting my descend into “drowsy numbness,” or as the velocity of Sam’s recitation might increase to match an accelerating ring dance.

The three terms are situated along a spectrum of dissociation and identity. In the case of the translation, word (or code) and music are distinct, though one can be transformed into the other by a mediating algorithm (and therefore you can learn some things about the formal properties of the original by listening to the translation). Juxtapositions suggest that words and music can share associations and meanings, which can interact to prompt new interpretations. Settings move toward the idea that the words are music and the music is words, that musical devices can amplify or modify the meaning of words; that words and music are both rhetorical, in the sense that they can produce effects, especially emotional effects, in listeners.

The range of options is interesting for poets as they work with the sound properties of verse, and tease them toward escape into song (a flight from meaning) or into musica humana and its forms of life, be they communal song or (cf. Wallace Stevens) solitary singing.

One question came up—maybe from Dmitri?—that I want to keep track of, the way accidental effects arise from practical experiments (e.g. the tones generated by Cammie’s percussive use of the bow). We did a little speculating about how that can happen with language—when is language MATERIAL in a way that surprises us with effects we did not think we meant? (Aishah right at the start mentioned how her performance adapted in real time to itself—really interesting and also worth more thought.)

But at least as important as any of this—Dmitri brought us a rich sense of the practical, human-to-human potentials of music making, how we use music to move each other, how between us it is. I thought all the practical advice he had to give about the exercises was really wonderful, and also his detailed sense of how, in a particular context, a musical device can change the way we think and feel about a word. It was really interesting to hear him on how composers have to manage the complexity of text and setting, so that neither overwhelms the other. I wish we’d gotten to hear him on Morley—he has a wonderful reading of how the setting extends the power of that simple text. But I was above all delighted to have his take on the exercises and I wish we had time for even more.

What does music mean? Listening at the start, to birdsong, Charles Mingus, and plainchant, brought out a few possibilities.

• Music affects us by metonymy: we attach meanings to it according to where and when we hear it, what it is “next to” in experience. So birdsong sounds peaceful, pastoral, springlike; Mingus communal, sociable; plainchant, pious and serene.
• But it didn’t seem entirely satisfactory to trace all of music’s meanings to its social experience. Are there formal aspects of music (key, relative pitch, etc.) that are powerful metaphors, such that a minor key might mean sadness?
• And yet—it doesn’t feel quite right to say that a minor key is a metaphor for sadness, because it makes you feel sad so immediately, so directly; it would be hard to separate out the meaning, sadness, from feeling it. Maybe it is more a cause of sadness? Or maybe it simply is sadness, expressed outside the body? (Here we are in Schopenhauer’s territory.)

These questions arise from music’s basic identity as a non-representational art: it is much harder for music to be about something in particular, than it is for poetry or, as we will see, for drawing and painting and other visual representations. But poetry and music are so bound up with each other, and often, when we are thinking about poetry and music, we are thinking of that aspect of poetry that strains away from sense—as perhaps the repeated O O O at the end of Tracy K. Smith’s “Wade in the Water” seems to do.

John Hollander offered us a historical view of the distinction between musica mundana (or speulativa) and musica humana: between the pure, abstract, even mathematical beauty of music, the music of the spheres; and the social life of music as it plays in our lives on earth, as it moves our bodies and booms from our car stereos and so on. The distinction corresponds to the idea of music as structure, and music as rhetoric—as abstract form, and as something like persuasive talk, meant to communicate and move us.

The basic idea: how the analogy to music shows poetry pulled in two directions, out of sense, into pure form; and back into the world of matter and meaning among people.

In our discussion of “Wade in the Water,” the refrain “I love you” was full of this question—the ring song lifts up those repeated words until they are almost pure feeling (Sam suggested their coming around was a figure for an accelerating dance); but they had so much history to carry with them (as Aveneque pointed out, recalling how the spiritual was used on the underground railroad). The ending: “O Lord—O Lord—O Lord— / Is this love the trouble you promised?” It was not clear that Smith allowed us to separate the sound from its burden. (And “burden” is another word for “refrain.”)

Keats’ ode ends with a question, too: “Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” We read the poem for the turbulence of its mood. At moments, Keats (let’s call the speaker “Keats”) seemed able to participate (Aveneque’s word) in the nightingale’s song; at other moments, the song was distant, and made a painful contrast with “The weariness, the fever, and the fret” of the human world. He chases the bird ahead, so that he can follow; he discovers himself ecstatically to be “Already with thee!”; he sinks back into his bower, “To thy high requiem become a sod”—a clod of unresponsive earth. The poem courts music and music escapes it, though we can ask, what music was in the poem all along. (Already?)

For much of the class, we went metaphor-hunting in Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz.” I thought the picture of the whole poem that emerged was fascinating: how it moves through some relatively comfortable, conventionally structured figures (e.g. the simile of the storm in the first stanza, the extended legal metaphor of the third), toward the synesthetic uncanniness* of the fly, and that imponderable final line. It’s worth returning though to Cammie’s question, what about “when I died”—is that a metaphor, given that Dickinson (or her speaker) cannot be writing after her own death? What does she mean; what does that little clause stand for? Certainly it cannot be taken literally, and so you might say it is either a metaphor, or a fiction, or, of course, both. It certainly makes clear that a metaphor does not depend on anything like the straightforward grammar of “Juliet is the sun.” Pretty much any sentence that refuses literal interpretation may invite us to ask: does that mean more or other than it says? And if we find we can give an answer of that is-and-not-is form that Berger describes, we are in the territory of metaphor. Perhaps one could say something like: “when I died” is a way Dickinson has of figuring a state of altered consciousness, a lucid dream, or even a poem-writing trance. She is making a metaphor for those conditions. (How curious that death, about which we know so little, could be made to stand for something that we know better?)

That is all by way of saying, metaphor—more broadly, trope—is fundamental to what poetry is and does, and that it can happen almost anywhere we encounter interpretive difficulty. A text can provoke us to recognize it as a poem by its use of figurative language; recognizing a text as a poem can provoke us to consider its language figuratively. That circularity may be something like the poem’s boundary.

We asked, as we had to, about Dickinson’s fly itself, and I thought the three kinds of answers that we gave were really interesting.

• Sam, Cammie and others ventured explanations of the sort, the fly is x—tenors, in that I. A. Richards distinction, for which the fly was vehicle. (A last spark of vitality, a continuous process of life, etc.)
• John raised the question of whether the fly was just a fly—not a metaphor, but the refusal of metaphor, as though to say, here figuration reaches its limit, as it must in death.
• Pat wondered whether the fly wasn’t something in excess, or extra, or otherwise uncanny; within the x for y system of metaphors in the poem as a whole, a piece of grit, or a mote in the eye: a failure of metaphor, “interposed” between its parts.

Keeping those possibilities in view allows us to see the poem in its deep struggle with what it is to make the unknowable knowable, to find an equivalent in the language of the senses for what is beyond all sense.

We had too little time for Terence Hayes’ “American Sonnet”—but we started to get at the basic problem of its metaphors for confinement, as a bodily and as a political experience; and how he uses the chiasmus to build that cage (Inside me / As if / / As if / Inside me). A case of a rhetorical scheme, chiasmus, which does not mean anything definite in itself, being used by the poem to create an experience of compression and containment. We’ll have many more occasions as the semester proceeds to think about this general phenomenon, how a poem gives meaning to an aspect of its own structure, how it tropes a scheme. Hayes’ impossible question, at the end of the poem, is as confounding as Dickinson’s “I could not see to see.”

A final thought about epistemology: it seemed like a mere aside, to give a back of the envelope definition of ontology and epistemology at the beginning of class: ontology, the problem of being, and epistemology, the problem of knowing. But Allen Grossman’s remark that “the metaphor of metaphor is the fundamental situation of being conscious of something in the world” brought us back there at the end. What he means, I think, is that metaphor arises for us when our ordinary language, with its conventional names, doesn’t seem to touch the world; when the knowledge that conventional language supplies, fails. Metaphor is a leap across that gap, to try to touch the world again. Berger might say, to make a connection where we cannot see one.

*synesthetic uncanniness: i.e., the weird feeling that the senses are being mixed together, substituted for one another, as when the fly’s buzz is blue. (Is synesthesia a fundamental experience of metaphor?)