Some interesting metaphors emerged from the discussion of the exercises, I thought. How might a poem be lit, for example?\u2014darkly 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\u2019 \u201cOf the Surface of Things,\u201d in Avaneque\u2019s rendering and others\u2019 (John did that poem, too). I have not been attentive to the relation between first and third person in Stevens, but what Avaneque did\u2014looking in on the room, then following the cloaked singer\u2014made that question unavoidable, and rich. In a similar way, the straight-on vantage of the camera in Cammie\u2019s \u201cDiva.\u201d If that is a version of \u201cThe Idea of Order at Key West,\u201d now we have to do some thinking about the female singer in the poem\u2014who makes her up, as it were (imagination, cosmetics), and whether she can see herself being seen; whether this is her show or the filmmaker\u2019s or someone else\u2019s. These films are interpretations of the poems and just as much, provokers of interpretation in juxtaposition with their originals.<\/p>\n
It was interesting to read Lynne\u2019s poems as though they were little films, or shaped by a filmmaker\u2019s 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 \u201croom\u201d) also correspond to shots? And what is the equivalent of a shot in a poem\u2014an image? A vantage? (Back to photography and our questions there of point of view.) We spent too little time with her films, but \u201cStarfish Aorta Colossus\u201d 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\u2014image 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.)<\/p>\n
These questions of verticality and horizontality were important to our discussion of some important definitions of poetry on Wednesday. I appreciate everyone\u2019s willingness to spend a session in more rarefied theoretical air than usual. I won\u2019t try to reproduce a detailed discussion, but it may be worth stepping back to identify the three kinds of definitions at stake. Jakobson\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s interpreter might apply Jakobson\u2019s scheme, and Jakobson might understand the prominence of the poetic function to be a provocation to Fish\u2019s reader). Finally we turned to Moten, and his claim that \u201cblack thought, which is to say black social life, remains a fruitful site for inhabiting and soliciting the human differential within the general ecology.\u201d We wrestled with the difficulty of an essay that ends by declaring \u201cThis is blackness and poetry\u201d\u2014with its use of sound and other verbal patterns, what Jakobson would call the \u201cpoetic function\u201d was much more prominent than in the other two. With Cammie\u2019s help, though, we came to see some of the force of Moten\u2019s characterization of art in general, and poetry in particular, not only as \u201cimprovisation\u2019s continual breaking and making of the rule of art,\u201d but as an expression of a \u201ccommon social underground capacity for\u2026representation.\u201d 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\u2014we 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some interesting metaphors emerged from the discussion of the exercises, I thought. How might a poem be lit, for example?\u2014darkly 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 … <\/p>\n