Month: April 2022

About the practice of the Order of the Third Bird, our business on Monday, I will say nothing more, but the curious can find a good deal of information here. I hope those of you who gave it a try will feel free to experiment further, with friends; and that valiant seniors who were deep in their theses and find themselves curious will not hesitate to let me know.

I also said that I would direct you to Wayne Koestenbaum’s instagram page, and here it is. It is a great introduction to his sensibility, or follow-up, after “The Writer’s Obligation.”

As for our last class, I learned a lot from the way we found ourselves talking about Eula Biss and Koestenbaum together, her essay circling around pain, his around pleasure. But I will confine my remarks to our discussion, at the end, of Brian Blanchfield’s “On the Locus Amoenus.” Aishah led us into his central question about the relationship between the poet and the poem. He has a disarming approach, his concern that some of his friends, who do not have much experience of poetry, are puzzled by how different his poems sound from the way he talks; different, not to say pretentious. Blanchfield seems to cherish the possibility of that separation, of the poet standing together with readers and looking, not at each other, but outward together, to where the poem points (or perhaps at the poem to which the poet points us; but at all events, not at the poet’s hand).

Cammie wondered skeptically, can we ever make that separation; Avaneque mused that the class had often considered poems in the context of another art, but not authorship or history. Aishah framed her remarks by talking about Terence Hayes, whose sonnets explore his own identity as a Black man. The problem has been a fundamental one for poetry as long as there has been poetry. If it tends toward the music or the spheres, or toward accurate visual mimesis (or abstraction), or toward the putative transparency of the camera, or the archetype of home—then perhaps it tends away from the personal, even away from history, and the Anderstrebren, that other-striving, that we have talked so much about is a striving to make the poem other to the poet. I hope we are able all of us to feel something of that longing, to get beyond ourselves, toward the limits of distance and time and perception. Such escape is a dream of art and has animated so many artists.

And yet—we also encountered so many poems that seemed intent on bringing us back into the world, on positioning their mirror at an angle that might allow us to see the poet’s face, or at least its facsimile. Who wants to leave the world as keenly as Keats? But the world he wanted to leave, “To cease upon a midnight with no pain,” was as particular as ours, and likewise his place in it. Our own moment, call it 2022, is wise in this historicism, this contextualization, and wary of abstractions from it, wary of how a universal beauty may forget the gendered pain and the queer pleasure that Biss and Koestenbaum give us, the histories and prophecies of race we heard from Hong and Smith. If, from my own perspective, I had to identify the challenge for your generation, as the inheritors of all these poems and the arbiters of their future, I would say it is to make sense of these contending impulses as a double truth of poetry. How do we think identity and abstraction together, honor and attend to both of those human drives? (For humans are and do them both!) And this question, of course, is alive across all of the arts. I hope I will get to hear, in time, what you make of it.

Architecture!—we started by listening to Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” which is a project in establishing an unmediated relation between room and sound—not sound (say, language) about the room, and not sound in the room, but the room as sound, the particular resonating frequencies of its space abstracted from the voice that activates them. Selena raised some deep questions about conceptual art, whether Lucier’s work could be considered music, alongside traditional projects of, say, writing canons; questions about poetry, music, and work resurfaced (we thought about those with photography). Those who admired the piece responded to the way it challenged the quality of our attention to the patterns of overtones, like standing inside a ringing bell, and how they made us alert to the space (abstracting from it? or perfectly concrete?). Also interesting, though we didn’t talk about it, is what happens to Lucier’s slight stutter, that trace of the recalcitrant body in his controlled language—is the stutter transcended? Effaced? The piece makes for a good way to start thinking about how a poem might engage particular spaces and space in general.

Bachelard let us think about the meanings of home, and the house, as a fundamental site of memory and an original site of safety. We paused to wonder about how this trope functions for anyone whose life did not begin in safety, or even in a home—but even if B. does not describe a universal experience, he may describe a universal fantasy. Quite interesting to think of the formal boundaries of a poem as figuring this basic experience of shelter. The verticality and the condensations of the house—how it stands up out of experience, organizes it, and also collocates meanings and memories—did sound a lot like accounts of what poetry is and does that we have encountered (see Deren and Jakobson on verticality, and Ezra Pound’s idea that poetry is distinguished from ordinary language by its density).

He also explores the analogy between the house and the body, which impressed us in reading Dickinson, another wonderfully oblique lyric that seemed to take the idea of the body as a house for the soul and disembody it—so that the “props” or scaffolding became the physical body, the house itself the soul affirmed. And yet, we wondered if the Christian language—the hints of sacrifice in the language of planks and nails—suggested that the soul’s forgetting of the body is a simple good, or an ingratitude. And then (or actually before, now I’m thinking about it) we thought about Stevens’ wonderful “Anecdote of the Jar,” and its exploration of the jar (is it a house? is it an urn, a poem?) as a kind of colonial architecture. Was it Sam who asked, what is going to happen to this jar/urn/poem—when it is placed in Tennessee, it subdues, even embarrasses the landscape; but what if the poem kept going? Wouldn’t the wilderness have its say, overtake the jar? In understanding the poem, it seems like this organic futurity, this indigenous resilience, is something that it is at pains not to know—but that is part of its meanings, precisely because those pains are taken.

Then Wednesday, Mitch McEwan! I though the meditation on openness was really really provocative—its many meanings, and in particular, how it ought not to be simply identified with modernist transparency (of the glass house variety). Lorde’s poem is worth a re-read, to wrestle with her provocation that the compression, the density of coal is a kind of openness. The instruction to open up a sheet of paper was ingenious and I loved seeing the result. Isn’t a piece of paper already just about the most open thing there is? But no. So many ways to open it (holes, doors, explosions, etc.). Mitch is thinking of the openness of the theater she is working on in Camden, and you could see how Lorde is provoking her to construe that accessibility and invitation in terms other than lots of glass and light—for those modernist tropes now have histories of privilege and exclusion that make them much less easy to enter than they pretend to be. So, what about poems and accessibility? Is a poem that is easy to read the most open? Or is there a greater openness in some forms of difficulty—openness to a wider readership, one that has not been cared for by the forms of openness most widely practiced? I loved ending with a practical exercise like this—do send along your exercises; who knows but they might be built, a poetics of architecture.

Some interesting metaphors emerged from the discussion of the exercises, I thought. How might a poem be lit, for example?—darkly or brightly (as conditions of understanding? of mood?), or differently across its length, a spotlight falling here, a shadow there. A number of exercises raised really interesting questions about vantage and perspective, for example in relation to Stevens’ “Of the Surface of Things,” in Avaneque’s rendering and others’ (John did that poem, too). I have not been attentive to the relation between first and third person in Stevens, but what Avaneque did—looking in on the room, then following the cloaked singer—made that question unavoidable, and rich. In a similar way, the straight-on vantage of the camera in Cammie’s “Diva.” If that is a version of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” now we have to do some thinking about the female singer in the poem—who makes her up, as it were (imagination, cosmetics), and whether she can see herself being seen; whether this is her show or the filmmaker’s or someone else’s. These films are interpretations of the poems and just as much, provokers of interpretation in juxtaposition with their originals.

It was interesting to read Lynne’s poems as though they were little films, or shaped by a filmmaker’s mind and eye. The simultaneous montage of 1962, for example. Did the veering from the hospital bed, to the University of Mississippi, to orbit, to the kitchen table, exploit a particular freedom of film to cut effortlessly from scene to scene and to juxtapose the simultaneous? Other poems seem to make use of techniques such as close-up and the distant, establishing shot. Do stanzas (which always have an architectural sense: stanza in Italian means “room”) also correspond to shots? And what is the equivalent of a shot in a poem—an image? A vantage? (Back to photography and our questions there of point of view.) We spent too little time with her films, but “Starfish Aorta Colossus” returned us to questions of the horizontal and the vertical raised last week by Maya Deren. The juxtaposition of images in the Regular 8 frames again and again posed questions of juxtaposition that were recalcitrant to any narrative construction—image and image and word and sound, connected by a syntax that the viewer must derive from the experience itself. (That is, with language, the syntax, the rules of combination, is pre-given; here we had to work that out for ourselves.)

These questions of verticality and horizontality were important to our discussion of some important definitions of poetry on Wednesday. I appreciate everyone’s willingness to spend a session in more rarefied theoretical air than usual. I won’t try to reproduce a detailed discussion, but it may be worth stepping back to identify the three kinds of definitions at stake. Jakobson’s is structural: poetry is poetry because of a formal property, its network of internal relations (the repetitions of rhythm, of rhyme, of sound, but also of image and idea). Fish’s is pragmatic: poetry is poetry because we say it is, and because we can interpret it, and derive meaning. Selena nicely captured the doubleness of our response to Fish’s position, disappointment that poetry might come down to that, delight that we interpreters might make almost anything into a poem by finding meaning, and beauty, there. We had an interesting discussion of whether these two approaches could be reconciled. One emphasizes the object (the structured poem), the other the subject (the interpreting reader), but we did see some possibility for conversation (Fish’s interpreter might apply Jakobson’s scheme, and Jakobson might understand the prominence of the poetic function to be a provocation to Fish’s reader). Finally we turned to Moten, and his claim that “black thought, which is to say black social life, remains a fruitful site for inhabiting and soliciting the human differential within the general ecology.” We wrestled with the difficulty of an essay that ends by declaring “This is blackness and poetry”—with its use of sound and other verbal patterns, what Jakobson would call the “poetic function” was much more prominent than in the other two. With Cammie’s help, though, we came to see some of the force of Moten’s characterization of art in general, and poetry in particular, not only as “improvisation’s continual breaking and making of the rule of art,” but as an expression of a “common social underground capacity for…representation.” That is, poetry, in its formal containedness (and no one expresses that better than Jakobson), aspires to define a boundary with social life, to stand outside it, as a distillation or a comment or a refuge or a transcendent alternative. But Moten insists that we understand that difference as never complete, never fully successful—we have to read for the community, the sociability, that comes before and after the poem and runs all the way through it, whether the poem embraces that company or tries to refuse it. That’s a deep question to pose to all the speakers and selves we encounter in lyric. It is a gift of Black thought, he teaches us, to pose it.