Month: March 2022

It was interesting to find that our ideas about film were of two kinds: the narrative expectations of the genres of film, and its language of formal composition (zooms and pans, closeups and panoramas, framing and tracking, and so on). Those narrative questions bring us back to Todorov and to questions of narrative generally. The formal questions point us toward the sorts of metaphors that Aynsley activated for us in dance: what would a poetic montage be? A close-up, a pan? And so on. Questions for experiment in your exercises this weekend!

There was a division of another kind as we looked at the symposium on film and poetry. Maya Deren’s statement that poetry is a framework of expectation—that we should know what kind of thing we’re looking at, poetry or not, or we risk confusion, disappointment etc.—proved controversial. Pat was sympathetic. If you judge a work according to the wrong criteria, you can miss its value. Cassy was wary. If our expectations are so fixed, what room is left for creative experiment? Cassy’s example, the red coat in Schindler’s List, showed a way through the dilemma. It was (adopting Deren’s language) a vertical intervention in a basically horizontal narrative. That is, it was not part of the diegesis, not part of the plot, the film’s mimesis of reality. It was instead a symbolic gesture, one that concentrated meaning in a moment of time and a particular space in the frame, meaning drawn from elsewhere in the film and outside it (the symbolic associations of the color red; the other appearances of the coat, which are not narratively contiguous; and so on). The effectiveness of the image seems to depend on the fact that the audience is encouraged to expect a basically horizontal narrative, and is startled, affected, pressed to interpret by the vertical event. Filmmakers are not bound by these expectations but use them to expressive effect. The example gave us a useful account of the relation of horizontal and vertical generally, too—not least the idea that while the succession of events can be explained by narrative consequence, the density of a vertical image, or figure, stops us with the question, what does this mean?

(This is something of what Skhlovsky is after when he writes, “Prose and poetry differ from each other not in rhythm, or not only in rhythm, but in the prevalence of formal technical aspects (in poetic cinema) over semantic ones, with formal elements replacing semantics and providing compositional solutions. Plotless cinema is ‘poetic’ cinema.”)

There was a really interesting discussion of Carson’s “H & A Screenplay” too. Selena had us think about the strange effect of dialogue without attributed speakers, and Nicole helped us think about the way in which that ambiguity presses us toward interpretation, makes the dialogue and its roles hard to take for granted—who is speaking in a given moment; who is speaking when any of us speaks? Sam asked us to reflect on what it means that senses and experiences that seem to be outside of the power of film to capture are repeatedly invoked (e.g., smell). Why would Carson choose the screenplay as a genre, only to defy its conventions? There was a curious suggestion—was it Sam, or maybe Mairead?—that there was something pure about a screenplay that was so unbeholden to the pragmatics of making a movie. And also impure, insofar as it reached for other senses, even other arts, and posed interpretive challenges extremely difficult to reproduce on film (how would you preserve the ambiguity of the speakers?). We wondered at the end what this might have to do with ideas about purity in the poem at large, Heloise’s love (how lips work), Abelard’s philosophy and his God.

A few notes on yesterday, with Aynsley Vandenbroucke—I hope it felt as good to everybody as it did to me, to get under the desks, spin around the perimeter, twist sidewise in the pedagogical chair, and so on. Just loosening up the body and relaxing, for a spell, the border (often strictly controlled) between moving and thinking.

You may have noticed, as we went along, that Aynsley was giving names to a variety of different qualities of movement, and proposing them as terms that could transfer to reading (or writing) poetry. (“Transfer”: that is a direct translation of the Greek “metaphor,” which means to carry across.) Her vocabulary was borrowed from her interest in Laban notation, a system for transcribing dance that originated in Germany in the early twentieth century and is still widely taught today. She talked about the center of the body (does a poem have a center of gravity?), about pace, and also a set of oppositions that define the Laban attitude to dynamic movement:

Space: Direct / Indirect
Weight: Strong / Light
Time: Sudden / Sustained
Flow: Bound / Free

Those are all very suggestive words for reading a poem: is its movement, for example, bound or free? The trick, as a literary critic, is then to be able to say in poetry’s native vocabulary what “bound-ness” consists in and how it is expressed. (By short, end-stopped lines, for example? By tight argument?—already I am using a metaphor there, “tight,” and what do I mean by that? By a concentration of heavy stresses?) But you might never have thought of that boundedness if you had not tried to imagine the poem as moving, or even (as we did) tried to move (to) it, dance (to) it.

The various performances of the Howe poem were amazing. There was a lot of attention to form, and properly so—it is an intricate artifact, fascinating in its shape, withholding in its language, which is cut up and turned around and variously collaged. I felt increasingly alive to its passages of concision and confusion as the four performances proceeded. It would be very interesting to do the same thing with, for example, the Alexander Pope passage on the day’s handout—how would we dance his measured, witty arguments? At all events I thought the last discussion about “reading” was really interesting. Not quite the right word, mused Avaneque—but why not? And what word should we use?

I thought that the discussion of gesture on Wednesday was really provocative—it contributed to a surprising (to me) line of thinking about self-consciousness that has been running these last few sessions. Flusser tells us that a gesture is “a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation” (2); the gesture is not just a reflex reaction, or a rote action, but a significant movement, one that requires interpretation. He goes on to argue that a gesture always has an aesthetic quality, and that it can be evaluated both morally and aesthetically. It might, that is, be morally honest (you really mean it) but not aesthetically honest (it is contrived, pretentious, etc.). The idea that all of our gestures are by definition aesthetic—it’s a little harrowing, but a little true, too; that the gesture is in a sense the smallest unit of art in the everyday, the first step into dance, or even into poetry. We might keep after the question, what is a gesture in language?

Another recurring question had to do with intention; Sam H (who prodded us a few weeks ago to think about whether Siri’s reading is a performance after all) asked whether a dance performed automatically, from sheer muscle memory, could count as a gesture in Flusser’s sense. That question of where we as interpreters of poetry stand with respect to the problem of intention—the poet’s, the poem’s, our own—is a puzzle that has been refracted for us through various media now (especially photography, especially what de Duve would call the snapshot). Is intention projected into the poem by the maker? Is it abstracted from the poem by the reader? How can the two have to do with each other? Another question we might carry into Monday. Let us observe at the very least that a poem—precisely because it can be said to mean so much—poses special problems for the concept.

We had a good discussion of Dickinson’s “I cannot dance upon my toes,” and what kind of ballet knowledge it has (knowledge of? knowledge how?). The question of whether Dickinson can dance seems, as Sam L suggested, to have something to do with whether and how we credit her verse with a kind of dance, with somehow enacting the motion it describes. We wondered about whether we dance in reading it, as a matter of the visual imagery it invokes or even the somatic sympathies it engenders (i.e., do you read of a pirouette with your back, your hips?). Terence Hayes’ sonnet raised the strange question of how you “hold” your face or even yourself as you dance. That strange self-estrangement—holding yourself, carrying yourself?—seemed to have something to do with the way dance promises to unite you with your body. What if it separates you instead? What a great ending though—as though asking the reader to dance.

Kirstin Valdez Quade presented us with some of the most ostentatiously formal poetry we have read this term, the sestina—a provocative way to engage questions of storytelling, since the recirculating words of the sestina form would seem always to be standing in the way of narrative progress. That push-pull was apparent in the three exercises that we looked at: Aisha’s use of the form to prompt and to figure memory of a failed relationship; Sam’s abandonment of narrative in favor of something revolving the words in thought (and in play); Mairead’s use of the opening of an orange as a way to keep a complex internal/external conversation in time. Different ways of troping the sestina’s scheme, you might say: as memory, as obsession, as playful variation, etc.

(Avaneque has a response to Sam’s sestina, if I remember rightly, that is worth bearing in mind: even if the poem refuses, as best it can, to tell a story, might we nonetheless experience our encounter with it as a story?)

The discussion of the Bishop got us into deep questions about how the poem handles time, both its past and its future and the now of the tea-making. How do the history of the family, and the future of the daughter, relate to the ordinary house-rhythms with which the poem is so preoccupied? (Cammie made an interesting comparison to the attention in some Asian-American literature to the rituals of the kitchen especially; we glimpsed that in Chin’s blues.) Is there a story behind this sestina? Kristin wondered if a short story treating the same scene could withhold as much narrative as Bishop’s poem does—and you might even think of Bishop using the form precisely to withhold narrative. Nonetheless, we guessed. (I wonder if the story isn’t of the mother’s death and the father, in his grief, unable to care for the child, who lives with the grandmother now.) And Kristin raised the question of whether there isn’t also a different kind of story across the stanzas of the sestina, one that opens up, at the moment when the almanac “hovers birdlike,” registers of magic and animism that we hadn’t known were there—is that an event in a story, when it happens? What kind of story?

One more thought that reaches back to last week, and our second week, for that matter, that may be relevant here. We have talked about narrative, via Todorov, as succession and transformation. Todorov thinks about transformation as being a basically narrative event, one thing happening, and then something else happening that is an inversion or a canceling or a doubling or some other significant variation on the first. I would like to propose (and I’ll talk about this in class too I think) that the transformation can also be figurative, or metaphorical. Take “Oh the Wind and the Rain” as an example. That old song begins with the girl being pushed into the brook and drowning. That event is transformed when she is pulled out, but only partly, because she is still dead. The real event of the poem is when the fiddler comes by and makes her hair and bones into an instrument. It’s not exactly a narrative resolution, though. It requires reading as a metaphor to experience it as closure: that through art, she is returned to language, to speech and song. So that the metaphor of this body-violin becomes the figurative transformation the narrative requires for its completion.

Is that a turn toward poetry, when a story achieves closure with a metaphor, rather than with a literal event? We might also think about the extraordinary image at the end of Haas’s “A Story of the Body,” that bowl of petals and bees. Is that the way the story ends? Does it, in order to end, have to become a kind of poem?

I began with a little sermon on the project of definition, as we continue to puzzle out what poetry is in relation to its friends and rivals among the arts. I identified a few basic definitional projects: essentialism (all poems are poems because they share a common essence), family resemblance (poems participate in an overlapping network of shared characteristics), pragmatism (poetry is what we say it is—the word “poem” takes its meaning from how we use it), historicism (we must look to the particulars of use at the moment, and in the place, that concerns us; a variant of pragmatism), subjectivism (poems are poems because of the special effect that they have on us, a variant or at least a cousin of essentialism). I want to keep thinking the relations we pursue this spring, the field of differences, in relation to these definitional possibilities. Also to hold open the question of how the project of defining poetry might be a model for some urgent projects of definition, including contemporary discussions of gender and race; is our basic project an intersectional one?

I then hustled through a summary of ideas we had considered about music, visual art, photography, and performance/drama. We ended up lingering over drama, because John raised some of the discomforts that come with paying attention to life as a performance. We thought about how art in general, and poetry in particular, might offer us shelter from such embarrassments, a free space for the sort of unlimited attention that would be withering if we applied it to another person. The poem is not ashamed under out gaze; therefore we need not be ashamed in gazing, nor interpreting. Which is not to say that a poem cannot be about such interpersonal discomfitures!—and there was an interesting analogy (from Cassy I think and others) to the ways in which drama can forward or occlude its own artifice, advertise its self-consciousness. Does such self-consciousness bring with it questions of shame and of care? What about when a poem owns its identity as a poem?

The discussion of Frye on lyric grew very interestingly out of these questions, I thought. Given the arc of the conversation, his account of the inwardness of poetry, between babble and doodle, seemed like a powerful but also vulnerable idealization. What happens when that private poem enters the public world—as it always does? Which poems deflect that publicity, that sociability? Which poems acknowledge it? This will be worth continuing to think about as we turn to dance.

Wednesday, we were on to narrative!—and I thought we did a great job with the three poems that John, Aisha, and Fizzah brought us to, Dickinson, Hong, and O’Hara respectively. It emerged that they were all poems about death, which I had not planned; but death would be, um, a big question for narrative, so it was just as well. Each was in its way evasive of the satisfying structures of succession and transformation that Todorov proposes. It wasn’t clear, as Dickinson moved toward the grave, whether she was passing the sun, or the sun passing her; Hong’s “Our Jim” was a story (as Aisha told it) in which things kept not happening; O’Hara’s day is a loose bag of details until something happens that makes it clear that the only time that matters is the time that stands still. We’ll get to keep thinking about this uneasy argument between lyric and narrative next time.

I found myself thinking afterwards about a couple of questions that came up along the way. First, Mairead’s observation about the status of the script. Saul Williams’ performance had a wonderfully complicated relation to his scroll—it brought a combination of Old Testament and legal authority (all the whereas’s etc.), but was also almost comically long, and the more urgent the monologue became, the less he referred to it; casting it aside was a definitive gesture, as though to let improvisation or inspiration or even possession (by what?) take over. Drama, of course, usually declares its independence from the script even before the play starts. A poem has a friendlier, ongoing relation to writing, though there may be some ambition to independence there too, not as performance, but as memory. The idea of holding the whole poem in the mind. It’s interesting to think of those two vectors—out into the audience, inward into memory—affect the way we receive drama and poetry, and as always, when they want to change places. (When a poem calls for performance, when a drama turns inward.)

We talked with Nathan about that basic problem of performance happening in time, and poetry encouraging us to stop, go back, interpret its complexity in ways that are too dense and recursive for real-time performance. (We might do well to think of these as two kinds of reading/hearing, rather than as a judgment on their objects.) There was an interesting discussion of how we respond to complexity and confusion in both: in drama, by receiving it as confusion (cf. Othello’s “Not to comply with heat” etc.), and in poetry, by slowing down, going back, attempting to understand. Nathan’s attention to the dramatic craft of Romeo and Juliet was fascinating. First, his sense of the motives and affects that propelled a couple of key speeches (Romeo’s discovery of Juliet, such a strange joy elevating his diction), and Friar Lawrence (fearful of a judgment against him, filling up the play with his self-defense). The way that the tragic turn is held back, held back by Romeo’s enthusiasm—as Nathan gave it to us, that was a case of a playwright’s know-how, organizing the materials of poetry (especially Romeo’s use of metaphor) to soften the audience for the blow of his suicide. There is craft knowledge in poetry, of course, as there is in drama. (Meter is one example of it.) But I thought it was fascinating to set that urgent, in-time calculation of how to make the audience feel, against the slowed-down analysis of tropes and patterns of tropes (as in Cassy’s shrewd observations about the role of sight and hearing). Shakespeare seems able both to pry them apart, and to make them work together; to bring poetry into a play as something alien, as an alternative to the action, and to weave it into the flux of psychological and social forces that won’t stop, so long as the play hold the stage, for anyone.

This one has to go in the conditional, on account of our interrupted class—I would have been so interested to hear where some of our other rearrangements of “The Idea of Order at Key West” took us. I thought the two we did talk about made for a very interesting pairing, Cassy and Selena drawing out the language of sound in reconstructed lines that Stevens might have written; Sam and John abstracting from the poems thematics into a kind of diagram of the relation between the female singer and the sea. Two large opportunities in criticism opened up: the first, a sympathetic participation in the poem’s language, paraphrasing it in its idiom; the second, an act of radical translation, disjoining phrases from the texture of the verse, shaping them into an argument in a very different idiom (here, something like a diagram). If we had continued, I would have taken us through another couple of exercises, rendering the poem as dialogue (in the manner of this week’s exercise) and as a picture/diagram (which Sam and John already approached in their collage). The general idea was to draw on our repertoire of adjacent arts to see what we could discover about “The Idea of Order,” especially its structure, which I think can be variously illuminated by 1) dis- and reassembly, 2) “casting” (or separating out its voices, its dynamic of self-response), and 3) visual representation, of several possible kinds, including diagrams of structure, pictorial representation of scene, etc.