....I added this contrary reading of the Bishop poem (quoted previously) to one of my comment boxes:
Another thing about the poem: it can be read (or heard) not as comedy, but something sadder. The "quarrel with oneself" that is poetry - the solipsistic quest to answer one's own questions - BECAUSE it's in the "same tone of voice" - turns into a sort of vortex.
Consider the final couplet, then : if we imagine that "a name" here implies a real name, of a real lover, perhaps - then the consequence of the poetic process is a reduction of the (absent) person to a mere name, a word, indistinguishable from all its other (verbal) connotations.
The poem wavers undecideably between two diametrically opposed implications.
(& maybe EB is singin' the blues here : testifying to the downside of "shyness" as a literary strategy. Being ironic about her own manner. Pure speculation on my part.)
Showing posts with label close readings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label close readings. Show all posts
4.07.2006
There's been so much plog-flak about David Orr's Bishop review.
I think part of it comes from a misreading of Orr's argument (he is, after all, a lawyer during the day).
Here's Orr's opening paragraph:
"You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, "a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever." The publication of "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box," which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life."
These are indeed big claims. But note that Orr goes on to define this sea-change - which Bishop allegedly has produced - in Bishopian terms. In other words, the review (like a poem, or a good tractate) "does what it says". Bishop's changed our world? She's changed my world. I'll show you how - in the very way I write this essay.
Orr hedges & qualifies the claims of the first paragraph throughout the rest of the review. The change-of-scale engineered by Bishop is one toward modesty and exactitude. It may not be noticed, proclaimed, or even noticeable. It's hidden, refined, buried, shaped - like the poems themselves. Yet the egocentric circus-wizards of 20th-century poetic melodrama are no longer holding sway.
(Re-reading the review, I was struck by the prevalence of the crystallography analogy, which I've often noted in Mandelstam. "Poets, envy the crystallographers!" and "Poetry : beneath its modest exterior lies an interior of terrifying density.")
Jonathan quotes this poem as a kind of evidence for his frustration with Orr's "invisible sea-change" argument:
This is a poem about poetry. Note the overlapping rhyme scheme, as if the 2nd stanza were folded over the first : and the break in the rhyme in the 2nd stanza's 3rd line : & how this break echoes the logic of the line itself. That is, the "uninnocent" aesthetic echoing of an advancing poetic "conversation" has an inertial impetus of its own - the way conversations have an uncontrollable waywardness. And the poet partly resists this loss of control : "half-meaning to", she breaks the rhyme scheme.
As the 2nd stanza's rhyming inexorably advances, however, the poet (or lover, or lunatic) continues to lose control, to go toward chaos (no choice - no sense)... until, magically, a poem resolves itself : represented in this poem by the sudden turn of the final couplet, the "marriage" of the end-rhyme, and, additionally, the mirroring of that rhyme in its meaning. The name and all its others & otherness (its connotations) merge : "name" achieves "same" - union, coherence, synthesis (overturning the previous broken rhyme).
This is like a miniature plot reversal in a comedy.
Again, look at what the 1st stanza is saying : the hidden tumult in the heart begins to answer its own questions in the "same tone of voice", and "No one could tell the difference". This is exactly what the poem does, by moving to the 2nd stanza in an echoing rhyme scheme ("same tone of voice" - "no difference"). It's as if this hidden reflexivity - this mirroring process of art, which is interior, which no one notices - propels the poet toward a dramatic crisis, which only the counter-turn of the closing reversal can resolve.
All hidden, disguised, modest - a crystal hidden in a gray stone.
The poem opens with an echo of Yeats (the "tumult in the heart" : poetry as a quarrel with ourselves) and closes with an echo of Shakespeare (the resolution in the "name"):
Addendum : Orr is not so much focusing on Bishop's effect on the shifting prestige rankings within poetry criticism, or within poetry subculture itself : he's talking, more radically, about an effect on the scale of culture-at-large.
That is, Bishop's style - of modesty, restraint, irony, precision - represents a foregrounding or magnification of certain qualities peculiar to poetry per se, as an art form amidst other arts and human activities. Her work embodies - crystallizes - these specific attributes.
And it is the subterranean, occulted impact of such "pure poetry" - as exemplified in the poem I just unpacked - which Orr is identifying and "magnifying" in turn.
I think part of it comes from a misreading of Orr's argument (he is, after all, a lawyer during the day).
Here's Orr's opening paragraph:
"You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, an expatriate and essentially an orphan — none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, "a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever." The publication of "Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box," which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life."
These are indeed big claims. But note that Orr goes on to define this sea-change - which Bishop allegedly has produced - in Bishopian terms. In other words, the review (like a poem, or a good tractate) "does what it says". Bishop's changed our world? She's changed my world. I'll show you how - in the very way I write this essay.
Orr hedges & qualifies the claims of the first paragraph throughout the rest of the review. The change-of-scale engineered by Bishop is one toward modesty and exactitude. It may not be noticed, proclaimed, or even noticeable. It's hidden, refined, buried, shaped - like the poems themselves. Yet the egocentric circus-wizards of 20th-century poetic melodrama are no longer holding sway.
(Re-reading the review, I was struck by the prevalence of the crystallography analogy, which I've often noted in Mandelstam. "Poets, envy the crystallographers!" and "Poetry : beneath its modest exterior lies an interior of terrifying density.")
Jonathan quotes this poem as a kind of evidence for his frustration with Orr's "invisible sea-change" argument:
CONVERSATION
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes to answer
in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.
Uninnocent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses,
only half-meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;
until a name
and all its connotations are the same.
This is a poem about poetry. Note the overlapping rhyme scheme, as if the 2nd stanza were folded over the first : and the break in the rhyme in the 2nd stanza's 3rd line : & how this break echoes the logic of the line itself. That is, the "uninnocent" aesthetic echoing of an advancing poetic "conversation" has an inertial impetus of its own - the way conversations have an uncontrollable waywardness. And the poet partly resists this loss of control : "half-meaning to", she breaks the rhyme scheme.
As the 2nd stanza's rhyming inexorably advances, however, the poet (or lover, or lunatic) continues to lose control, to go toward chaos (no choice - no sense)... until, magically, a poem resolves itself : represented in this poem by the sudden turn of the final couplet, the "marriage" of the end-rhyme, and, additionally, the mirroring of that rhyme in its meaning. The name and all its others & otherness (its connotations) merge : "name" achieves "same" - union, coherence, synthesis (overturning the previous broken rhyme).
This is like a miniature plot reversal in a comedy.
Again, look at what the 1st stanza is saying : the hidden tumult in the heart begins to answer its own questions in the "same tone of voice", and "No one could tell the difference". This is exactly what the poem does, by moving to the 2nd stanza in an echoing rhyme scheme ("same tone of voice" - "no difference"). It's as if this hidden reflexivity - this mirroring process of art, which is interior, which no one notices - propels the poet toward a dramatic crisis, which only the counter-turn of the closing reversal can resolve.
All hidden, disguised, modest - a crystal hidden in a gray stone.
The poem opens with an echo of Yeats (the "tumult in the heart" : poetry as a quarrel with ourselves) and closes with an echo of Shakespeare (the resolution in the "name"):
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5.1.7-17.)
Addendum : Orr is not so much focusing on Bishop's effect on the shifting prestige rankings within poetry criticism, or within poetry subculture itself : he's talking, more radically, about an effect on the scale of culture-at-large.
That is, Bishop's style - of modesty, restraint, irony, precision - represents a foregrounding or magnification of certain qualities peculiar to poetry per se, as an art form amidst other arts and human activities. Her work embodies - crystallizes - these specific attributes.
And it is the subterranean, occulted impact of such "pure poetry" - as exemplified in the poem I just unpacked - which Orr is identifying and "magnifying" in turn.
10.06.2005
Sorry for the long-windedness yesterday. Looks now like a hodge-podge proto-essay, which somebody else will write if I don't get crackin'.
& the "list of paradigms" is not very gripping, much less complete. I'm going back to RS Crane's book Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.
As I was taking my shower this morning, was thinking that the real focus of interest for me here, what woke me up at 3 a.m. the other day, was this :
By going back to Aristotle, the Chicago people found a way to re-frame a formalist criticism (ie. one that focused on what & how the poem does what it does - as opposed to thematic or other kinds of readings). Instead of reifying the poem in isolation - a la New Criticism - this framework creates a holistic sense of poetic form : not only text, but performance; not only an internally-balanced aesthetic object of beauty, but a dramatic shape, which has specific techniques for creating particular rhetorical effects and evoking particular responses in its audience (emotional, interpretive).
Not only text, but living expression - an offshoot of the living poet & his or her dramatis personae. (Goes back to places in this blog's archive where I thought about the difference between prose fiction & poetry.)
This is not really new : Horace developed a practical criticism which analyzed the poem's rhetoric. But Aristotle seems more fully-rounded : he can distinguish these rhetorical effects, yet in symbiosis with the analysis of the poem as a formal shape, a kind of verbal sculpture.
What I'm thinking is that a framework which includes both text & performance - both objective shape, and its effects, its resonance - could be generated as kind of a general platform for developing a new critical vocabulary to apply to contemporary work.
When you look less to the model of New Critical "close reading" of the internal texture of the diction, and more to the meanings and effects projected in the dramatic action which is the poem, you might find a more capacious fit between meaning & expression, style & its effects.
With some such framework, you might be able to talk about the seemingly odd & baroque expressive techniques of contemporary poets, in a way which shows their affinities, differences, inheritances from past poetries.
& it might give poets more confidence in the motivations which impel them to offer their artistic activities as some kind of contribution to society at large. If poems are art works - not texts to be "processed" into their ideological paraphrases; not exercises in some dys-Platonic scriptorium, but forms which absorb text, in order to unite writing with dramatic presence - we might have a new sense of the symbiotic relationship between style & theme, between diction & Aristotle's trio of powers (ethos, pathos, logos).
& the "list of paradigms" is not very gripping, much less complete. I'm going back to RS Crane's book Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry.
As I was taking my shower this morning, was thinking that the real focus of interest for me here, what woke me up at 3 a.m. the other day, was this :
By going back to Aristotle, the Chicago people found a way to re-frame a formalist criticism (ie. one that focused on what & how the poem does what it does - as opposed to thematic or other kinds of readings). Instead of reifying the poem in isolation - a la New Criticism - this framework creates a holistic sense of poetic form : not only text, but performance; not only an internally-balanced aesthetic object of beauty, but a dramatic shape, which has specific techniques for creating particular rhetorical effects and evoking particular responses in its audience (emotional, interpretive).
Not only text, but living expression - an offshoot of the living poet & his or her dramatis personae. (Goes back to places in this blog's archive where I thought about the difference between prose fiction & poetry.)
This is not really new : Horace developed a practical criticism which analyzed the poem's rhetoric. But Aristotle seems more fully-rounded : he can distinguish these rhetorical effects, yet in symbiosis with the analysis of the poem as a formal shape, a kind of verbal sculpture.
What I'm thinking is that a framework which includes both text & performance - both objective shape, and its effects, its resonance - could be generated as kind of a general platform for developing a new critical vocabulary to apply to contemporary work.
When you look less to the model of New Critical "close reading" of the internal texture of the diction, and more to the meanings and effects projected in the dramatic action which is the poem, you might find a more capacious fit between meaning & expression, style & its effects.
With some such framework, you might be able to talk about the seemingly odd & baroque expressive techniques of contemporary poets, in a way which shows their affinities, differences, inheritances from past poetries.
& it might give poets more confidence in the motivations which impel them to offer their artistic activities as some kind of contribution to society at large. If poems are art works - not texts to be "processed" into their ideological paraphrases; not exercises in some dys-Platonic scriptorium, but forms which absorb text, in order to unite writing with dramatic presence - we might have a new sense of the symbiotic relationship between style & theme, between diction & Aristotle's trio of powers (ethos, pathos, logos).
3.12.2004
I have to admit, also, that
is not simple. it gets at the horror at the heart of power politics - whether Elizabethan (heads on poles on London Bridge) or American (Saddam, Noriega, & collateral).
I guess the sadness saddens me. That a poet would have to imagine a lizard as the metaphorical vehicle of shared humanity. The estrangement.
Shakespeare did the same, though, in the dark tragedies. Only Shakespeare didn't couch it all in fey faux-simplicitie (he had other kinds of camouflage).
. . .as if the
random pain of lizard heads
on sticks were prettier to eat
is not simple. it gets at the horror at the heart of power politics - whether Elizabethan (heads on poles on London Bridge) or American (Saddam, Noriega, & collateral).
I guess the sadness saddens me. That a poet would have to imagine a lizard as the metaphorical vehicle of shared humanity. The estrangement.
Shakespeare did the same, though, in the dark tragedies. Only Shakespeare didn't couch it all in fey faux-simplicitie (he had other kinds of camouflage).
On the other hand, one can admire & love the strange elegiac feeling of "Swamp Formalism", and imagine Lisa Jarnot actually responding with rueful self-disgust to the "poetic" improvisatory talent (like her own, the unacknowledged legislator) of Rumsfeld-in-action (at the news conferences). (I think the feeling is similar in "Land of Lincoln"; maybe I'm fooling myself.)
What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)
What bothers me is the dumbing-down of speech into a special idiom. All poetry is a special idiom, but if it's too obvious, you show your hand - ie. it becomes rhetoric. (Ron Silliman's pretentious syllable-counting only underlines - unintentionally - the artificiality, the mannerism, of the technique.) Incantantory, neo-romantic, poetical. . . & overly rhetorical. (Gabe Gudding - who believes that poetry is rhetoric - would disagree.)
So what occurs to me, thinking about "Swamp Formalism"?
The reiterations ("as if. . .") - a Whitman technique, drawn originally from Biblical Psalms & prophetic books.
The concept of Donald Rumsfeld as a proponent of "swamp formalism" - the general idea of repressive/oppressive/repressed Order or (patriarchal - "men") Establishment, evolving into this Darwinian epitome (Rumsfeld) the "poet" of War news conferences. (Along with a glancing jab at all the "forms" of glaciated & crystallized & neo-conservative traditionalist or reactionary Poetry.)
This concept, combined with the neo-Romantic/Beat stance of Poet as apolitical Dreamer or anti-Establishment Rousseauiste innocent (Blakean-Ginsbergian) - which requires an identification with all things - including Rumsfeld : hence the (somewhat convenient, & perhaps hypocritical) ambiguity of the Odyssean-Edenic scenario. (ie. the speaker can imagine Rumsfeld only as a primitive lizard-aggressor - but the act of imagining is, at the same time, an ethical act, an expression of empathy - & thus a recognition of "common humanity": sinful, mortal - the "main dust").
This is fine. But my main thought, here in the main dust, is as follows:
That in a democratic culture, there is, in the poetry world anyway, a kind of unintentionally comic coincidentia oppositorum. Rebel pop avant-garde New American poetics becomes as mandarin-effete (an exact mirror-image) as the high-culture traditionalist poetry that it once rebelled against. How so? Just as with the arch-aestheticism & art-for-art's-sake of the Symbolists & Pre-Raphaelites 125 years ago, there is now an autonomous, pseudo- or semi-professional poetry culture, which requires a special dialect (a special poetic diction) of political-spiritual-social opposition. Within this subculture, it is not necessary anymore to come to terms with ethical, political, or philosophical dilemmas - to work them out, logically and rhetorically - by means of a lingua franca et jocundissima or vulgar tonggue. In other words, one need not "reason" with the public, or with the enemy : neo-post-romantic-postmodernism merely requires that the poet find a rhetorical "subjective correlative" - a Blakean baby-riff.
The reiterations ("as if. . .") - a Whitman technique, drawn originally from Biblical Psalms & prophetic books.
The concept of Donald Rumsfeld as a proponent of "swamp formalism" - the general idea of repressive/oppressive/repressed Order or (patriarchal - "men") Establishment, evolving into this Darwinian epitome (Rumsfeld) the "poet" of War news conferences. (Along with a glancing jab at all the "forms" of glaciated & crystallized & neo-conservative traditionalist or reactionary Poetry.)
This concept, combined with the neo-Romantic/Beat stance of Poet as apolitical Dreamer or anti-Establishment Rousseauiste innocent (Blakean-Ginsbergian) - which requires an identification with all things - including Rumsfeld : hence the (somewhat convenient, & perhaps hypocritical) ambiguity of the Odyssean-Edenic scenario. (ie. the speaker can imagine Rumsfeld only as a primitive lizard-aggressor - but the act of imagining is, at the same time, an ethical act, an expression of empathy - & thus a recognition of "common humanity": sinful, mortal - the "main dust").
This is fine. But my main thought, here in the main dust, is as follows:
That in a democratic culture, there is, in the poetry world anyway, a kind of unintentionally comic coincidentia oppositorum. Rebel pop avant-garde New American poetics becomes as mandarin-effete (an exact mirror-image) as the high-culture traditionalist poetry that it once rebelled against. How so? Just as with the arch-aestheticism & art-for-art's-sake of the Symbolists & Pre-Raphaelites 125 years ago, there is now an autonomous, pseudo- or semi-professional poetry culture, which requires a special dialect (a special poetic diction) of political-spiritual-social opposition. Within this subculture, it is not necessary anymore to come to terms with ethical, political, or philosophical dilemmas - to work them out, logically and rhetorically - by means of a lingua franca et jocundissima or vulgar tonggue. In other words, one need not "reason" with the public, or with the enemy : neo-post-romantic-postmodernism merely requires that the poet find a rhetorical "subjective correlative" - a Blakean baby-riff.
7.11.2003
Nice to read all the comments on Lowell's "Skunk Hour", especially Kasey's extended.
I would just interpose that the line "I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell" don't seem so awful to me. I think it has to be read in context. The whole poem, from the opening-line "Nautilus Island", is wrapped around "ill" and "ell" sounds. This is a situation in which the larger structural context moderates the surface exaggeration of the line. It occurs in the poem's pivotal, "crisis" stanza, followed shortly by "I myself am hell". After which, the lines that follow about the skunks (with their "swills", "pail" & "tail") come as a kind of bleak-comic relief, the return of nature after the melodramatic ill-nature of the speaker's despair.
I would just interpose that the line "I hear / my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell" don't seem so awful to me. I think it has to be read in context. The whole poem, from the opening-line "Nautilus Island", is wrapped around "ill" and "ell" sounds. This is a situation in which the larger structural context moderates the surface exaggeration of the line. It occurs in the poem's pivotal, "crisis" stanza, followed shortly by "I myself am hell". After which, the lines that follow about the skunks (with their "swills", "pail" & "tail") come as a kind of bleak-comic relief, the return of nature after the melodramatic ill-nature of the speaker's despair.
6.11.2003
audblog audio postMy amateur translation, published in Nedge #4 (translation issue). When I was working on this I was reading a biography of Peter the Great. The image of "someone rotates around" brought to mind the mutiny of the Streltsy, Muscovite elite soldiers who rebelled against Peter in favor of his sister, and who were executed by hanging outside her (home confinement) bay windows. I learned later that the "three peaks" referred to the three swirls, or widow's peaks (rather unusual) in ES's own hair - which she relates to contemplative Trinitarian "eyes" in the top of her head, a cupola (Byzantine architecture, curve of eyes & eyebrows very prominent in Mandelstam's oeuvre). cf. earlier blog notes on circumference, microcosm, "Shakespeare's Head".
5.02.2003
I don't think Ron Silliman quite understands the H.D. poem, though I'm glad he pointed to it.
He overstates & overrates both the fury & the personal.
I see the poem as a balance, a conjunction of opposing forces. The poet is contemplating the contrast between the furious moralism of the Greeks (this woman betrayed her Greek husband for a Trojan & "caused" the 10-yr war) - a kind of ugly moralism - & the physical beauty of Helen - a kind of amoral beauty. These opposites form a tragic "bind", which the Greeks would like to resolve by putting her in the grave, and which Helen defies by her continuing presence - IN THE POEM ITSELF. By becoming a container of the beautiful, the poem then takes on a contemporary resonance, a kind of implicit attack on American philistine moralism. So it circles around on its pivot of balanced opposites.
Ron recognizes what he calls the "controlled" fury here - but (oddly for a Language poet!) he turns it into an occasion for speculating on the emotions & biography of the poet. I don't think that's the issue - I don't think H.D. is expressing her "fury" - she's expressing a tragic sense of life - & the agon - the "bind" - which motivates the uncanny charisma, the fascination, of works of art. Yes, of course we can always extrapolate personal aspects - but I think too often they are over-emphasized. Critics run to explain WHAT H.D. must have been furious about - something in her personal life, some social injustice - & by rationalizing the poem they only continue the philistine process of dismissing, marginalizing, & missing its IRRATIONAL (or supra-rational or inexplicable) beauty.
He overstates & overrates both the fury & the personal.
I see the poem as a balance, a conjunction of opposing forces. The poet is contemplating the contrast between the furious moralism of the Greeks (this woman betrayed her Greek husband for a Trojan & "caused" the 10-yr war) - a kind of ugly moralism - & the physical beauty of Helen - a kind of amoral beauty. These opposites form a tragic "bind", which the Greeks would like to resolve by putting her in the grave, and which Helen defies by her continuing presence - IN THE POEM ITSELF. By becoming a container of the beautiful, the poem then takes on a contemporary resonance, a kind of implicit attack on American philistine moralism. So it circles around on its pivot of balanced opposites.
Ron recognizes what he calls the "controlled" fury here - but (oddly for a Language poet!) he turns it into an occasion for speculating on the emotions & biography of the poet. I don't think that's the issue - I don't think H.D. is expressing her "fury" - she's expressing a tragic sense of life - & the agon - the "bind" - which motivates the uncanny charisma, the fascination, of works of art. Yes, of course we can always extrapolate personal aspects - but I think too often they are over-emphasized. Critics run to explain WHAT H.D. must have been furious about - something in her personal life, some social injustice - & by rationalizing the poem they only continue the philistine process of dismissing, marginalizing, & missing its IRRATIONAL (or supra-rational or inexplicable) beauty.
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