What Works?

I keep thinking about what works.  Always depends, of course, but there are some reliables: past reading + experience along with gentle questioning of how it feels, to begin with.  Recently I keep coming back to #132 in Complete Poems of E.D. (T.H. Johnson / Back Bay edition):  “I bring an unaccustomed wine / To lips long parching / Next to mine, / And summon them to drink; / Crackling with fever, they Essay….”  I find this trustworthy, affectively speaking.  And by the time we get to the last bit here my neurons are firing up, too.   

So as I’m reading, I’m implicitly asking Does this feel right? but also Does this contain or expand my intellectual universe?  Am I opened up and strengthened?  Or am I shut down and made even less significant than I already am?  When I get to Whitman’s assertions, I certainly feel the expanse:  “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man…” (Leaves [1855] in Whitman: Poetry & Prose, Library of America).  

I have to admit that I get a little suspicious and cautious about Whitman’s optimism and romanticism at times.  Feels like we could be set up for a fall, perhaps unnecessary fall.  Still, often the risk seems worth it.  “A learner with the simplest, a teacher of the thoughtfulest, / A novice beginning experient of myriad of seasons, / Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion, / Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia . . . . a wandering savage, / A farmer, mechanic, or artist . . . . a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker, / A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or priest. / I resist anything better than my own diversity, / And breathe the air and leave plenty after me….”  

-bbc

 

Loneliness in Jersey City

“Loneliness in Jersey City”

I’ve been reading “Loneliness in Jersey City” by Wallace Stevens and thinking about metaphor’s central place when committing acts of poetry. To enter the poem we must consider its unlikely opening equation: “The deer and the dachshund are one.” It’s odd, but far from dismissible, more than passing strange. The stanza continues with a syllogism that never quite resolves: “Well, the gods grow out of the weather. / The people grow out of the weather; / The gods grow out of the people. / Encore, encore, encore les dieux . . .” I imagine Stevens fit to be tied, at the end of his rope, so to speak, stacking the world into probabilities as he did during his day gig as v.p. of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Nothing adds up. No foothold presents itself. This is not whimsy, but hell for a guy who wrote in “Three Academic Pieces,” (a Harvard lecture,) of the magic that can happen when metaphor bridges “things of adequate dignity.” I feel Steven’s isolation emerging as the poem goes on to surrender its street scene: its darkened steeple and its all-night immigrant serenades.

I remember a creative writing worksheet from my high school days. It was designed to help young people avoid clichéd expressions. Instead of writing “busy as a bee,” it instructed, one should invent a level of business more like, “as busy as a mustard paddle at a picnic.” I, frankly, fear the poetry that grows out of such instruction.

                               - G.F.A.

                                                                                                                           

Words Work

'Words don't need to be dressed up.  Words do the work themselves.'  I thought this as I heard a speech recently where affect was used heavily in order to 'help' the words along.  But words usually don't need help -- it just depends what the words are. 

When all else fails, it's sometimes thought, insert pathos.  But following Aristotle, as I was taught him, pathos emerges as a result of logos rather than added on as another strategy.  (Same goes for ethos.)  Why sometimes do we think words need help?

Well, sometimes they do need help, but if we're in the word business then the first attention really should go to letting words and combinations of words do their work.  Perhaps from the weakness of some particular word combinations we're then tempted to play a 'pathos' card or cash in on 'ethos' as if these aren't already bound up in the 'logic' of our words.

And by logic here I don't mean syllogisms necessarily (nor even enthymemes) but whatever structure of words one strings together in such a way that works.  Part of 'what works' is how these words (in any given situation) relate to other words we know.  And part of what works is how these words relate to our experience -- what we feel and think.  

I think of Dickinson again.  She doesn't need my help in reading her -- e.g., as I read her aloud.  She's done (almost) all the work, and I mostly need to get out of the way so her work can do what it does.  Can we trust that the words will do their work?  -bbc