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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.

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.