A poem is always more than it appears to be.
When a poem is exactly what it appears to be, we have a
problem because the "poem" that is exactly what it appears to be
disappears into something else. Sometimes we call this something else
"meaning."
Readers often think this "exactly" is what they
want, what they hope for in a poem. They will say, disparagingly, "Why
can't she just say what she means?" – as if the poem were simply
meaning and the experience of reading a poem were simply like reading a
newspaper or listening to testimony in court, or as if the poet simply had a
"message" to convey.
This observation may strike us as odd because, after all,
isn't literature supposed to mean something? Isn't literature supposed
to be about something?
Well, yes, of course. But not exactly.
Puzzling. The poet,
for her part, wants an audience. She
wants to be read, as a first priority, and to do that she wants the poem
to be accessible. Then, a distant second, she may want to be
understood. These two ideas are not the
same.
What the contemporary poet wants is to make something with
words that we often today call an object, an art piece. That object by its very
nature is meaningful; but the poet
will often squirm when she is asked, "What did you mean when you
wrote this line or that image, or when you used a particular form?" What
the poet means, usually, is that the line or the particular image itself is the
point – rather than a consideration of a particular line or
image, rather than a condensation of that line or image, rather than
a simple symbolic explanation of the same.
Flannery O'Connor once remarked (see Mystery and Manners)
that if you can reduce a short story, her usual medium, to an explanation, the
story itself is unnecessary. The same
can be said of all art, and great art most of all resists reduction to
explanation. Her comment was suggesting here both "art as object" and
elusiveness as a test for goodness.
To demonstrate the inexact correlation between being read
and being understood, I note that among the giants of 20th Century
American poets, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and e.e.cummings are all examples
of highly regarded craftsmen whose work continues to defy explanation, although many have
made the effort. Readers of these poets commonly discover they cannot explain
exactly or precisely what they are reading or, certainly, what the poet intended.
Definitions and Admonitions
Poetry is the persistent human effort to voice the
ineffable, to approach the infinite, to clarify the a-rational urges
within, and to settle the disquieting instinct to exist and to make that fact
evident.
Poetry is about the mystery of transcendence.
What to do if you want to be a poet
or even just to find out what being a poet means:
Read poems.
Read more poems.
Reread poems.
Read poems that speak to you
poems you
can listen to
poems with
a voice.
Leave the poems alone and then come back to them.
Sit with them until their necessity needs no explanation.
Read poems that confound you, that confuse,
that leave
you at a loss.
Don't imagine that a poem is simply
the sum of
its parts – a good poem
is
always more. A poor poem
can be
considerably less.
Don't discard poems that lack
subjects
you are "interested in."
Read those poems. Reread those poems. Delight in them.
Resist the urge to explain, at least right away.
Let the poem breathe in,
breathe
out.
Run your fingers over its face as if, being blind,
you want
that intimacy of human contact.
Reading in this way will not make you a poet.
But it may bring you closer
and it will help you know why.
No comments:
Post a Comment