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Music We Need: a Proposal for Poetics
For me, poetry first happened at church. Every year, since long before I was born, my family has attended an early morning Thanksgiving service at Fairfield Presbyterian Church in Mechanicsville, Virginia. The service starts at seven in the morning, and there are hymns, prayers, a short sermon on some variation of the importance of giving thanks and the pilgrims and Squanto and jokes about how much turkey we’ll eat. After the sermon, the entire congregation files over to the fellowship hall, where there waits a huge country breakfast, prepared by the Men’s Sunday School—the reason people come back every year. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that I began to realize the men probably orchestrated the whole breakfast part because it got them out of hearing a sermon so early in the morning on a holiday, but the meal is always a truly glorious affair; scrambled eggs, sausage, biscuits, grits, and fried apples on Styrofoam plates, milk, coffee, or juice in your cup, and always more for the asking.
Then, when everyone’s finished, and I’m eating my sister’s leftover sausage, and the grown-ups are drinking coffee and hoping for a nap before lunch, my Great-Uncle’s brother, Arthur, goes to the front and everyone quiets down as he reads aloud James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, When the Frost is on the Punkin. I know now that the poem is terribly sentimental and hardly qualifies as a great piece of writing, but those two minutes every year when Arthur Nuckles would read that poem are my single best memory of childhood. My belly was full, my cousins were in town, and this white-haired man with a beautiful, 1930s Richmond accent was reading the lines, “When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock, / And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock / And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens, / And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence.” It wasn’t the story I remembered, or loved. Rather, it was that mellow voice repeating those enchanting sounds, the rhythm and the cadence of those rhymed lines. I would drink in the pleasure of it, trying to freeze the music, the feeling, and hating when it was over. It was like a live performance of your favorite song by your favorite singer – a moment you could never recreate, regardless of how hard you tried. This year, when my fiancé went through the whole ritual with me for the first time, I was especially eager because she was going to hear “the poem,” and I found myself seized by the pleasure of it all over again.
II.
I wish to create a poetry that is read and enjoyed by the layman (and woman). Today, most contemporary poetry has lost contact with the mainstream culture of America. People still turn to poetry to make sense of their lives, but they more often switch on the radio dial rather than heading to the “Poetry” section of their bookseller. Some amongst the academic elite would like to argue that this rejection of current poetry is due to a general cultural demise that has deadened audience’s ears to the quality of the art that is being made. Not only does this argument demonstrate the academic snobbery that has much to do with the current situation; it also focuses on maintaining the status quo rather than dealing with the real disconnect that exists between contemporary poetry and the general public. As an art form, a large part of contemporary poetry has deserted its foundations of accessibility and pleasure in the last eighty or so years to insulate itself within the academic castle, and it is the consequential production of so much weak, self-absorbed and “difficult” poetry that has caused the larger culture to look elsewhere for its bards, its truth-tellers. It is past time to remember what makes poetry enjoyable and crucial as an art from, how it can succeed, and what good it can do.
III.
My argument for rejuvenation of poetry consists simply of three elements. First, poetry should be musical. It is the musical nature of its language and rhythms that sets poetry apart from all other forms of written speech. Many of us, including myself, learn to love poetry at a young age because of the pleasing music it creates. It is this physical pleasure that sustains poetry as an art form, which sticks it in the reader’s ear and mind. Novels depend on plot, and dramatization, but poetry depends upon the music of the line. We don’t all remember “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” simply because of its story, or because of the images it creates. It is the music of the words that carves its space in our crowded memories.
Secondly, poetry should be explicit. The annals of 20th century poetry that dwell in the abstract and the obscure are long, and are, to the average reader, too ambiguous to make sense of. We can marvel at a convoluted poem, or wonder at its complexity, but excepting the occasional Ph. D. student, we likely will never love it, unless it allows us a way into its intricacies. Much of academia has forgotten that poetry has at least as much to do with the senses as it does the intellect, that its concern is physical pleasure as well as metaphysical delight. Explicit should not imply that poems be simplistic, or readable on only one level. But it should mean poetry that is accessible on some level. As Stephen Dunn writes in his essay, Bringing the Strange Home, “Poets can say what they mean, if they are wise and skillful enough. And when poets resort to metaphorical or analogic language, their poems can still be as clear as Christ’s parables. That they might be more difficult, demand more of us, is of course understandable and fine. But the poet must not love difficulty.” Instead of using abstract and ineffable language to get only at the equally abstract and ineffable, effective poetry uses distinct and concrete language to reveal the intangible and hint at the mystery. The chaos of life takes no effort to recreate in poetry. But to make order of the chaos, to dance with the hurricane, to find the eye, and live to tell the tale—there is real work and risk.
Finally, poetry should be redemptive. In a time of cultural relativism and post-modern attitudes, there are some who would question the very possibility of redemption. But I would argue that the poet often redeems simply through his choice of subject matter—William Wordsworth redeemed the language of the common man by his decision to reject the prevailing culture of the time and write with words people actually used. For years, Phillip Levine has striven to redeem hard labor in the American consciousness. Langston Hughes did much the same with race. The poems in this thesis attempt to redeem so much of my childhood, and the lives of my parents and grandparents. Poetry has always been about the work of redemption, and the short, concentrated lyric often can heal more than any memoir or novel.
IV.
In Samuel Coleridge’s “sense of musical delight,” I found in poetry what initially seduced my young ears, and in many ways still what makes me love it. Some of my favorite poems depend almost entirely on sound, or the marriage of sounds with image. Seamus Heaney’s Clearances sequence, a series of sonnets written for his mother, and in particular, the fifth sonnet, are wonderful examples of this musical delight. In that fifth poem in the Clearances sequence, Heaney creates a specific image of a mother and son that develops through its rhymed sounds. The simple restrained order of these lines creates the power of the poem, which appears to be only about a mother and son taking in laundry off the line, and tells about the very heart of their relationship. The poem reads,V (Clearances)
The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
The sensuousness of the language of in this poem is what makes me love it, the surprising sounds, the slant-rhymes and full rhymes, the word “thwack” in the perfect place, the way the twelfth line reads “Coming close again by holding back” and indeed itself holds back, having only nine syllables, while the rest of the poem’s lines has ten. Seamus Heaney is a long way in prosodic complexity from James Whitcomb Riley, but I love his poem as a young man for the same reason I loved theirs as a boy—the music they make, and the physical pleasure it brings to hear them, and especially, speak them out loud.
The pleasure poetry creates is inherently primitive and physical, and that pleasure transcends all intellectual and historical divisions. Are the backwards baseball capped, baggy-jeaned teenagers who love hip-hop all that different than Native Americans at dance and chanting-rituals? They love Snoop Dog and Nelly for the same reason I love Seamus Heaney—the music of the line. When I stand in church and speak creeds and prayers along with hundreds of other parishioners, I sometimes close my eyes while I continue to speak, and I feel the wave of sound, the rise and fall of the stresses and intonations that we all know by heart carry me, and I ride the sound itself, the music we’re making together. This pleasure is not necessarily spiritual—or if it is, it does not have so much to do with the religion, but rather a bodily, physical gratification that connects to the spirit in ways that transcend any particular faith.
At a rock concert, the same phenomenon takes place—thousands of people who all know the words by heart start singing together as soon as they hear the first, familiar chords. Why do we do this? Is it more pleasing to hear our voices rather than the musician’s? Of course not. But there is a purely physical satisfaction in speaking and singing the words with your own mouth, forming the familiar stresses, shouting the intonations, delighting in the sounds you’re creating. When successful, the poet transforms this pleasure, this “sense of musical delight,” using the reader’s own larynx as the instrument to blow his tune, trapping him with the pleasure, ambushing him with delight.
V.
The second element of my thesis for poetry is telling a story that can be understood. At times it seems that simple, logical narratives in poetry have gone the way of the dinosaur in the age of M.F.A. programs and poetry-only journals. Some poets work so hard at outwitting the critics that they find themselves lost in verbal mazes of their own making. As William Carlos Williams famously put it, “no ideas but in things.” John Ashbery stands atop a heap of poets who have made their livings obscuring the plain. His poem, The Tennis Court Oath is a wonderful example of a kind of confusion and lofty allusions that for some have come lately into style. Quoted below are the first two stanzas of the poem.The Tennis Court Oath
What had you been thinking about
the face studiously bloodied
heaven blotted region
I go on loving you like water but
there is a terrible breath in the way all of this
You were not elected president, yet won the race
All the way through fog and drizzle
When you read it was sincere the coasts
stammered with unintentional villages the
horse strains fatigued I guess…the calls…
I worry
the water beetle head
why of course reflecting all
then you redid you were breathing
I thought going down to mail this
of the kettle you jabbered as easily in the yard
you come through but
are incomparable the lovely tent
mystery you don’t want surrounded the real
you dance
in the spring there was clouds
At best, this kind of poem is a clever display of fragments of stories and unqualified statements that appeals primarily to those that have the curiosity and volition to piece together, or create, meaning out of it. Or, more likely, this kind of poetry (and I could have chosen another from many different poems, by many different poets) is for those who can smugly wonder at the complexity of it all, elbowing each other to remind themselves that only they can truly appreciate this kind of literature. At its worst, poetry like Ashbery’s is so convoluted that it appears chaotic simply to be chaotic, and in the end, is just silly. While it intends to be subtle and understated, its obvious complexity in fact comes off as ostentatious and fussy. In any case, these are not lines that you recite to yourself as you do the dishes, or whisper to your lover. They don’t reflect, or instruct, the reality of anyone’s life. Ultimately, the pleasure they bring is limited and academic, if it all. Compare Ashbery’s fragmented and obscure lines with this short poem by Rita Dove, from her book, Thomas and Beulah.
Variation on Gaining a Son
That shy angle of his daughter’s head –
where did they all learn it?
And her soldier at tender attention,
waiting for the beloved to slide out
beneath the veil. Thomas knew
what he’d find there – a mocking smile, valiant
like that on the smooth face of the young sergeant
drilled neatly through the first minute of battle.
Women called it offering up a kiss.
He watched the bridegroom swallow.
For the first time Thomas felt like
calling him Son.
Dove’s poem is successful precisely because of the simple images and language she uses. By the end of the first stanza, we are placed in a specific context – the speaker is a father giving away his daughter at the wedding altar. In the second stanza, there is a strange conceit, likening the speaker’s daughter to a young sergeant who is killed at his first battle. This metaphor is explicit, and easily understandable, but is also surprisingly disarming. In the last stanza, the speaker sees his future son-in-law swallow while waiting to remove the veil from the bride’s face, and this small, involuntary action causes him to accept this man as his son for the first time. While this poem is simple, and clear in its message, it is a poem the reader can learn from, relate to, and understand.
Although the plotline of this poem can easily be paraphrased, what it is saying about the vulnerability of love and commitment could not be communicated as effectively with ten times the number of lines. Herein lies one power of poetry – to focus on the small, nearly mundane parts of human lives, and from them draw a surprising, transcendent beauty. This apparently transparent poem paradoxically mystifies far more deeply than the obviously fragmented one. Ashbery’s disordered non-narrative ultimately frustrates the reader, while Dove’s poem draws its readers in, and succeeds because of its accessibility.
VI.
The third essential element of poetry is redemption. At its best, poetry teaches us, instructs our lives, and reminds us of what it means to be human. In an age of self-help therapy and perpetual victim mentality, with modern psychology emphasizing our uniqueness more than ever before, with our lives more and more dominated by conversation via telephone or instant messaging or email, our need to be reminded of what it is that binds us together has widened into a canyon. And this is poetry’s place. With its compressed music and its accessible stories, poetry is uniquely able to speak to our humanity, to sing our loves and failures, to wear our common dreams. In her poem, The Photograph, Ellen Bryant Voigt tells a story of her mother and daughter, and manages to weave a tale that instructs as it unfolds.The Photograph
Black as a crow’s wing was what they said
about my mother’s hair. Even now,
back home, someone on the street
will stop me to recall my mother, how beautiful she was,
first among her sisters.
In the photograph, her hair
is a spill of ink below the white beret,
a swell of dark water. And her eyes as dark,
her chin lifted, that brusque defining posture
she had just begun in her defense.
Seventeen, on her own,
still a shadow in my father’s longing—nothing
the camera could record foretold
her restlessness, the years of shrill
unspecified despair, the clear reproach
of my life, just beginning.
The horseshoe hung in the neck of the tree sinks
deeper into heartwood every season.
Sometimes I hear the past
hum in my ear, its cruel perfected music,
as I turn from the stove
or stop to braid my daughter’s thick black hair.
This personal, very specific story about Voigt’s mother and daughter does much to redeem both their own lives, as well as the reader’s. Voigt’s mother is not perfect, she makes a “brusque defining posture / …in her defense,” and there is “her restlessness, the years of shrill / unspecified despair.” There also seems to be tension between Voigt and her mother’s memory. Her comment that “Even now, / back home, someone on the street / will stop me to recall my mother, how beautiful she was” can easily be construed as bitter or distant, and as Voigt says, there is also her “clear reproach / of my life.” However, the tension and disorder created in the first stanza of the poem are brought to redemption in the last one. With Voigt’s beautiful, and seemingly unqualified lyric, “The horseshoe hung in the neck of the tree sinks / deeper into heartwood every season,” she begins to widen the scope of the poem from her own small family to a larger, common humanity. When she tells us of the past, and its “cruel perfected music,” in the next sentence, we know she is not only speaking of her mother’s photograph, but about the past of each of us. Finally, in the last line, as Voigt returns the poem to her own family, as she “stop[s] to braid my daughter’s thick black hair.”
Voigt is taking an inherent risk here, as she unequivocally tells us of the horseshoe in the tree, and the past’s music. But the horseshoe hung in the tree is not her horseshoe, or her mother’s horseshoe; it is simply “the horseshoe.” And the past that hums its music in her ear is not her personal past, or her family’s past, but rather it is, “the past.” Yet by framing her global statement within the context of a personal story the reader can relate to, Voigt manages to instruct without offending. And this is what we, the readers, need. Culturally, and individually, we need to be told of the horseshoe and how it “sinks / deeper into heartwood.” We need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that the past is both “cruel” and “perfected.” We need to see that the daughter’s hair we braid is not so different from our mother’s or our own, and that all of this will repeat itself again, as it is doing now. And poetry can tell us this, shortly and simply, and with a hidden complexity to match that of our own lived experience.
Perhaps the ability to speak this kind of lyric truth is what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote, “folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the real beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects…they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.” Perhaps it is what Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of when he said “the poet is the person in whom these powers [of vision and expression] are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.” Poetic verse can aid us, perhaps more than any other art form, in making real sense out of our lives. In a poem that was published in Poetry in March 2001, Patrick Phillips tells a structurally simple, but emotionally complicated story.The Doe
What does it matter
what I was thinking
when I aimed at a quivering branch
and braced my whole body
for the kick of the Browning .410
All I could do was watch
the wet-velvet leg of something alive
sliding from the spattered white haunches
of the thing that lay dead on the snow.
All I could do was wait
when my father laid a hand on her belly,
unsnapped the strap
of the scabbard that hung from his belt,
then opened her pelt with a jerk:
a steaming blue hose spilling out,
a sopping pouch like a red-jelly fish
and a leathery knot that he worked
out of the ribs in his fist—
lifting his big hands from the carcass
and smearing his cheeks till they shined.
I felt the sticky stripe burn
when he touched my forehead,
his rough fingers making
what I knew, even then, was a sign:
of manhood, of forgiveness, I thought
until the wet fawn shivered
to life at our feet, and opened its eyes—
until I saw him thumb a green shell
into his rifle, then slide
the oily bolt home.
Phillips’ poem is another example of a sustained attempt at redemption. The relationship between the speaker and the father appears to be a typical one early on in the poem, a humdrum tale of a father teaching a son to hunt, and the son killing his first doe—nothing out of the ordinary here. Then, the story begins to be compelling. Suddenly there is the leg of the fawn sticking out of the doe’s body. The speaker waits while his father digs around in the doe’s belly, searching for something—the heart. Then the father begins to cover his face with the blood, finally marking the speaker’s forehead, “his rough fingers making / what I knew, even then, was a sign: / of manhood, of forgiveness, I thought.” We agree with the speaker, thinking the father is simply marking the son in forgiveness, much like a Lenten cross of ashes. But then the fawn “shivers” to life and the father rises, loads his rifle, and the young deer’s life is over almost before it begins. Suddenly the ambiguity of “I thought” comes back, and we realize that the bloody mark on the forehead of the boy is not about forgiveness, but a burning symbol of his guilt, a mark of Cain, not of Lent. Manhood, Phillips is telling us, is not a story about an innocent boy in some primitive blood ritual, it is about guilt and regret and responsibility, about clubbing your brother to death in a field, or causing the death of a new-born fawn, all sticky from the birthing, and wearing its mark ever after.
But even as Phillips disarms our expectations in a particularly surprising and gruesome way, he is redeeming—redeeming his father by writing of him, redeeming himself by speaking his story, and in the process, telling us a deep truth about the collective and individual guilt of the human (and seemingly in this case, specifically masculine) experience. This is not one of Aesop’s fables—there is no ultimate and obvious moral, but under layers of complexity, there is a stab at truth. Phillips has not handed us a roadmap to life, but a guidepost of sorts—assemble enough of them, and the constellation of guideposts will reward and inform our own quiet and confusing lives. This is the primary act of poetry, and the most lasting.
VII.
Poetry’s project is ongoing, and more essential than we may know. When I was last home, I noticed the hospice care handout the nurse gave my mother for her father, my grandfather, who was slowly dying of emphysema. One of its final printed instructions was “Never assume your loved one cannot hear you. Keep talking to them, even at the end. Their sense of hearing is the last to go.” There is something primal, something basic about sound. Our bodies are designed so that when all else is gone, our hearing remains. Why is this? Why is hearing language so necessary? Ultimately, it is the ability to sing and speak that makes us human, that sets us apart from the beasts of the field. Poetry is not the most ancient and primitive art form simply because it requires only a voice and an ear. It is woven into the way our bodies are made. When my great-grandmother went into a coma she would never wake from, I stayed late one night at the nursing home to read from the Bible my father had left there. He had been reading to her from the gospel of John and the Psalms, and so I did, too, holding her hand as I read. Once, while in the Psalms, I thought I felt her squeeze back. One second of pressure, and then it was gone. Did I imagine it? Perhaps. Or was her hearing still there? Was poetry, even the primitive tribal stuff found in the Psalms, still going about its work of beauty and redemption? Perhaps.
VIII.
This manuscript of poems is where the rubber of all my statements about poetry meets the proverbial road. The poems in this thesis are my own initial attempt at a poetics exercise that means to hold all three elements of my blueprint in tension. When he was about my own age, John Keats thought he had discovered the secret of poetry in tonal vowels sounds. I’ll make no such claim now, but I hope that my poetry contains something new and a little different. I remember Greg Orr saying once in class that the music and rhythms in poetry were as much an inherent talent as a learned one – you either heard the melody or you didn’t. If there is a ghost of a music in these poems, it’s a ghost I hope to give a skeleton and flesh and clothes over the years. I don’t want just to analyze and describe Heaney’s Clearances, I want to find the secret of replicating in my own way the music I hear there. I don’t want to just memorize Wright’s Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen, to just hear in my head his lines, “always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart.” I want to know how to write that rhythm and cadence myself. I know it’s not intellectual, but I listen to rap and hip-hop records when I write poems. There’s such a pleasure in those continued rhymes, in the repetition and variation of vowel tones and syllable stresses that I hope seeps into these poems as I listen to the music. I’ve found I can’t read poems just in my head anymore – I sit and speak them out loud in my room, or whisper them in the library and on the bus. My ears are learning to drink the pleasure of the sound of the spoken English language, and it is intoxicating.
IX.
These poems are also an experiment in explicitness. There’s no pretense at fragmentation here. Excepting the lyric Moses sequence, these poems are just about my life and my family’s lives. There is a sequence of love poems that is about nothing but the woman who will be my wife by the time you read this, and it is about nothing but her and our lived experience together. While the stories here are real, they are also, of course, something like a figment of my memory. I have lied, but usually it’s just because I can’t remember what really happened. One of my fellow thesis writers compared this manuscript to a novel in poetic form, and I hope that it is something like that. As Charles Wright opined in class last fall, “you never have to narrate, but you must always tell a story.” This is my story.
X.
These poems are also an attempt at redemption. I have no idea who said it, but somewhere in my notebook from last year, I have the scrawled line, “poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.” I want to remember. My father has spent the vast majority of his adult life working fifty or sixty hours a week, and my family has only now begun to inch over the poverty line. His willing and intentional sacrifice, his investment in the eternal at the expense of the present, his articulate and always-present hunger for the abundant life—forgetting all this would be impoverishment indeed. And while I will surely never forget the physical details of his life, where he worked and when, how early he got up and how late he went to bed, how will I ever remember the spiritual and emotional beauty and cost unless I write it here, unless I sing it back to myself and my brothers and sisters and my mother and my future children and even you? I hope I am not just recording the facts, but also remembering the complicated song of his life, how beautiful it is and how strong. The list of remembering of course does not begin or end with my father. My mother, my brother, my grandfathers and my grandmothers, my wife—who knows their songs as well as I? Who can sing them but for me? My life is no more inspiring or ugly than any other, but I hope that in the specificity of detail, my remembering will transcend the personal “epic,” and will become a story with hints of a meta narrative, that my love and despair will remind you of your own, and that through the mystery of language, the pleasure of writing and reading and speaking, we will remind each other of the gift of life, and how truly astonishing it is.
Joshua Anderson
May 2003
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