Notes on the Idea of Organicism — Part II

Notes on Organicism in Literature

 
This post has been added to the Hatter's Cabinet site via its Best of the Poetry Daily Critique page
 

This second of my posts on organicism (the first preceding this one, here) is something of a patchwork quilt of notes, some short, some long, that attempt to take the information of Part I on the mechanistic and organic theories of artistic invention and expand them out from theory into praxis, and then also to show — if only in a beginning of such — how they are not artefacts of the history of ideas but observations and of the human psyche. There is no attempt here at presenting an organized, unified argument. Rather than lengthen the text by trying to tie it all together, I left this mostly as notes. There is only the barest ordering here. There is no attempt at continuity from one to the next.

As said in Part I, these posts were originally spawned by comments on FB about organicism. Those comments in part guide the subjects of these notes. Though, I did not intentionally structure the notes around the comments, nor are these notes solely guided by the comments: some moments were spurred by the writing of part I, and some I brought to the table myself.

---

 

Part I
Some Exploratory Notes

 

Section jump menu:
 
1. Note on Terminology
2. Organic and Inorganic "Design"
3. Organic "Unity"
4. The Organic Text and "Natural Laws"
5. Qualities of an Organic Text
6. Organicism from the Reader's Side
7. "How do you certify an organic text?"
8. How can the idea of the organic text be used as a critical tool?
9. Inorganic Literature

 

1. Note on Terminology

Within this commentary, when I am speaking outside of the context of Coleridge, I am going to shift the use of terminology and use inorganic as opposed to mechanical . Neither term is perfect: I believe the word mechanical is today too bound to the material idea of machine to fit well as the term of choice. Inorganic sets up the contrast to organic well, but it might be better if there was a word that did not use organic within it. Since Coleridge himself used inorganic, I am going to move mostly to that one, and give it a spin, as it were.

Notes on the Idea of Organicism — Part I: Coleridge

Notes on Organicism in Literature

— replaced the italics that was lost in translating to html 5/8/14
 
This post has been added to the Hatter's Cabinet site via its Best of the Poetry Daily Critique page
 

Right now, I am working on a number of interconnected explorations in the areas of prosody and meter, of Modernism and the aesthetic text, and of a groundwork on the subject of poetry/literature. As I work them through into words I will throw them up here part by part, without consideration as of now of generating a whole (or wholes). I figure two aims will be served: that they will this way be posted in small, digestible portions; and these posts could serve as an oven where they can bake while I work into the next parts.

The first couple – first in their appearance here but the last in their arrival to my desk – were spawned by a comment in a conversation on FB about organicism, which mostly could be summed up in a very simple question: "Ok, I get the idea of organicism in general, but what use does the idea have from a critical side or from the reader's side?" Which is actually a pretty good question. And, considering I throw the word (or its synonyms) around on this blog here and there, one that is probably worth addressing as a post.

So what I have done is broken it into two parts. This first part is a to-the-point explanation of what the idea of the organic text is, as it was generated by Coleridge in response to the then prevailing, mechanistic theory of invention. (Note that just because I say "then prevailing" does not mean it is not still prevailing, if in different terms. But that's another conversation.) Part II will be a loose collection of comments as regards the text. (It is still in progress. As I said, I've a number of projects going on at the same time.)

---

Part I
Coleridge's Theory of Organic Invention

 

The idea of organicism comes primarily from Coleridge, who was the first to develop a full, organic theory of invention. As concerns Coleridge, I am going to work out of M.H. Abrams's book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953, chapter VII). For those unfamiliar with that book, it is a seminal text on Romantic theory, and is about as safe a source of information on the subject as can be found.

"Congenital" by Amy McCann -- Verse Daily, March 12, 2014

from West Branch (Fall 2013)
poem found here
 

First lines:
Inside every heart
slumps the same
 

exploring structure

 

An interesting poem here, worth exploring.

And since I'm thinking structure, I have the sudden thought to stop and look at that sentence what I just typed. Not everyone may have thought about why that sentence uses a comma. The reason is because it is a list of adjectives: the poem is (1) here and (2) worth exploring. This may be pointing out the obvious but it is worth the pointing out so as to take it to the next step. A less sophisticated writer sees the need for the comma because of the rules of grammar -- or, more likely, an intuitive understanding that a comma is used in such sentences. But a more sophisticated writer does not look at the comma, but looks at the underlying relationship of words: it is a phrase that links two adjectival phrases to one noun. What is the difference? The first is technical mimicry; the second is seeing the medium.

But back to the poem.

Let's start with lines. The lines here read mostly as two beat accentual meter (two stresses per line, number of syllables irrelevant). That is, up until the last stanza which is three beats per line. Though, there are a couple of lines that do not quite work, as in the eighth stanza:

inflames the slack-winged birds, our half-mast tails slapping the base

The issue arises in that the natural reading of the second line is "BIRDS, our HALF-mast."

"Sleeping Women in Movies" by Janet McCann -- Verse Daily 2/12/2014

from The Crone at the Casino (Lamar University Press)
poem found here
 

First lines:
She is sprawled arms akimbo
Yawns and stretches luxuriously
 

exploring a poem (organic form and pop conventionality)

 

Simply, there are some interesting moments in the poem and in what the poem is working to do, and I want to explore.

 

There is between the first two lines a shift from the descriptive to the active, from a view of a still scene to a participating in action, and there is nothing to give the reader a clue as to the coming shift. To me it reads as a clumsiness, something which perhaps is very visible when the lines are brought together within a quote: "She is sprawled arms akimbo / Yawns and stretches luxuriously." What is happeing is the second line is clashing with the syntactic expectation created by the first line, which would read something like this: "She is sprawled arms akimbo / Yawning and stretching luxuriously." As such, it reads to me as an error in the poem.

It happens again at lines 4 and 5: "she is curled on a lush divan / Shrugs off the cat" (instead of "she is curled on a lush divan / Shrugging off the cat"). That it happens twice cues to me it is not a mistake but an attempt at something structural. Amd there is something worth saving in the play of introducing through the static "is" and then developing through motion. Can the felt clumsiness be cured by creating a structure that sets off the latter type of lines as different from the former? For example:

She is sprawled arms akimbo—       Yawns and stretches luxuriously       In black and white, tosses a satin pillow Or she is curled on a lush divan—       Shrugs off the cat       Reaches for her cell phone playing Bach

Stephen Fry on Grammar

 

grammar snobbery again (and the weirdest pocoyo ever)

This is worth sharing, with comment:

a-little-animation-of-a-Stephen-Fry-podcast

Two comments, actually.

First: do not take this as promoting a get-out-of-jail-free card as regards literature. Inherent to what is being said is the difference between being sloppy and being creative, between thinking "it's not so important" and thinking "what can I do with this?" The formers are inattentiveness to language: which is the exact opposite of aesthetic literature (especially poetic literature, which is supposed to all about attentiveness to language).

What you have to realize is that writing that is inattentive and writing that is created -- even if the both are equally full of idiom -- does not sound the same to a sophisticated reader. And a text that sounds unattended is not exactly putting up a strong argument to continue reading. A sophsiticated reader of poetry is not looking for words to read; they are looking for things made out of words. And there is a difference. An important one. The latter is a wholly different project.

Of course, everyone who has any care for language has their pecadillos. I myself go through stages where I can't watch ESPN or the news because I've had my full with the word impacted appearing in every third sentence. ("'Had an impact on!,' you tone-deaf idjits!" I scream at the television, throwing my coffee cake at the screen.) But such is the nature of language -- especially English -- that it is constantly in flux. Lovers of creativity give attention, and enjoy watching the change. (Wouldn't it have been interesting to actually see the Great Vowel shift happening? Ok, maybe not for all of you.)

"Never the Twain" by Partridge Boswell -- Verse Daily, 6/8/2013

from Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Press)
poem found here
 

First lines:
Perfect pearl suspended
           in the crosshairs of my apotheosis
 

text and form: an exploration of organic vs. conventional nature

— reformatted, with some editing 8/2/2014
 

Short one today, one that follows out of the three on contemporary poetic convention just previous.

Simple question: Does the form of this poem (i.e., arbitrarily broken lines in three-line, progressively indented stanzas) add to the poem, subtract from it, or accomplish nothing?

What I'm hoping for you to do is look at the poem, look at the line breaks, look at the lines, and decide if this form succeeds, or if this poem is a text forced into a structure that really doesn't fit the words. Do the words and form find organic unity, or is the structure merely a result of following contemporary poetic convention? You must notice also that there is almost no punctuation in the poem except for the period at the end. Yet both "Perfect" at the start and "You'll" near the bottom are capitalized; and "Memphis," near the middle, being at the start of a line, seems to signal a third place where a 'sentence' starts.

To get you going, let me point out a couple of moments in the poem that are problematic. (I say "problematic" in the sense that, if given the poem to edit, I would ask for justifications for these moments.) First, here:

your finger on something irresistible                         & not to be trusted in his johnnyroy elvisjerrylee swagger & Lansky's

Notice how that single word — "johnnyroyelvisjerrylee" — has been broken in two. Is there a reason why that had to happen?

Earlier:

not with the sun there             glaring you have to be-                         have under winged

My want here from Boswell would be: justify the hyphenated word when (1) there's no apparent restrictions on lines to force it, and (2) it leaves me constantly reading the next line as "hav" (as in "I have a box") not "heyv" (to use Dictionary.com's phonetic spellings). There's a second hyphenated word later, with "juxta-posed."

Another:

babelsong our safe house                         roof now googlable from space— remember that place? frozen

My issue: does not the line ending eliminate the need for the em-dash? (This one is half about form and half about punctuation, but the two are interrelated.)

Finally:

funambulist arc across             summer's final panel                         the only clue to loss her

Here, I wonder if the form is getting in the way of the reading of the last line in the stanza, the cluster of words on the line do not seem to gel, and I want to misread "loss" as "lose," especially in that "lose" rhymes with "clue."

As I said: they are problematic, and if put in a questioning duty I would ask for answers. But I put them here not as spot things to question, but as issues to be used to develop the question that involves the whole poem: does the form work for or against the poem? Is the form in natural engagement with the words of the poem, or are the words forced into an arbitrary structure? Or, what degree to either side?

 
•

Let me throw in one more question on form: do you find those indents to be workable, or too large?

 
•

Ok, one spot I absolutely do not like, just to bring it up. But I'll ask it as a question: Does the second line really work? Is this a moment of apotheosis? Does the moon being in the "crosshairs of my apotheosis" make sense in the context of the poem? Or is this just a pretty thing that you're not supposed to actually think about?

(Can something be "suspended in the crosshairs"? Or is that a problem created by the absense of punctuation, in that "suspended, in the crosshairs" makes more sense?)

By happenstance, the day after writing this, I came upon this usage of the word apotheosis while reading Moby Dick, in the paragraph closing the brief chapter on — the "six-inch grave" of — the helmsman Bulkington. For the coincidence, I put it here. But also to ask a question: should it be that some words can only be used in a context that itself speaks the word? and without that context, can the word only suffer bathetically?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better it is to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

(Chapter 23, pages 97-8 in the 1967 Norton edition.) —- added 6/9/2013

"Spook House" by Benjamin Myers -- Verse Daily, 5/12/2013

from: Lapse Americana
poem found here

 
first lines:
The first. I heard of Dante
was at the county fair when I was ten,
(Obviously, Verse Daily has shown us again their love for laxity.)

 

ideation, depth, and bombs

-- text added, 5/16/2013
-- reformatted to current style, and italicized text added up front, 9/23/13

---

Note: this post, and the comments that follow it, spawned a full-length essay on poetry culture posted to this blog: "#Poppoetry: The Unsurprising Culture of Poetry in the U.S." The essay can also be found on my website, here.

---

 

Another poem with a emotion bomb, here. It's probably obvious of what I am speaking: the single-lined, fifth stanza, "But there wasn't a war then." Though, unlike your most blatant bombs this bomb does have some ideational play within the rest of the poem. I still identify it as a bomb, however, because of the structure of the poem.

I'll start on why it is not a pure bomb (a line that has no or trivial ideational unity with the rest of the poem): the obvious presence of death throughout the poem: there is Dante's Inferno; there are the cars like gravestones in the sixth stanza; there is the suicide in the fifth; there is the drought and its dead grass; and there is the executioner; and, finally, the final lines:

as we watched our friends before us disappear around a dark curve.

So there is a fudge swirl of death throughout the poem. But, there is still that the war line is one line, a lone-lined stanza, sitting in the middle of the poem all by itself, very much heavily accentuated by the structure. So let's explore:

First, take out the line. Does the poem significantly change outside of giving it an historical moment? In all the references to death, there is only one that can be said to engage a pre-war historical moment: that of the final image of the disappearing cars in the dark of the ride the Inferno. As such, the entirety of the "war" energies lies only in those two moments. Because of that, such things as the suicide moment lose their potency.[FN] Indeed, if you keep the war idea fully in mind while re-reading, the suicide moment feels quite out of place, as though the poem has a split identity: is it a war poem? or is it a mild suicide poem? (I don't think it can tell.)

----------------------------- [FN] Indeed, if you take out the war line, is there anything else in the poem that engages the suicide moment? Is there anything about the drought that moves beyond basic scene setting? One could say the Inferno, but then really the drought just becomes a hell-like scene-setting: but still nothing more than scene-setting, since the Inferno idea is never taken anywhere. -----------------------------

Or is it that the poem is only supposed to be a poem generally about death? and all the death ideas are supposed to be equal in power? Which is a possibility, but it fails against the fact that the structural isolating of the war line gives it so much power that it nigh demands to be the ideational locus of the poem. (And I do see the structure of the poem as stating that everything is meant to flow out of and into the war line.)

But then there is the problem with the reference to the Inferno. There is the bookended references of the fair ride, and then at the end there is the reference to the multiple translations on the speaker's shelf and desk. That reference, actually, is never flushed out. In fact, it is so thin it makes me wonder if Myers has even read the Inferno, or, if he did, whether he understood what it was. Because, in truth, nothing in this poem flows out of the nature and ideas of Inferno. In fact, when I look at the end of the first stanza:

and booths with stacks of old-fashioned milk bottles: two dollars for three throws and you could win a mirror painted with the rebel flag or with a half-naked lady, or with a naked lady half-wrapped in the rebel flag. [. . .]

I am rather taken with how much energy and time that one little moment gets. It's not like it goes anywhere: what does a naked woman and a rebel flag have to do with war? Or death? But that one scene gets more energy even than the Infernos owned by the speaker. In fact, it gets far more effort and energy than the contents of Dante's Inferno: and you would think that if the poem intentionally moves to emphasizing that since the time of the primary scene the speaker has now collected multiple translations of the work, then the text of the Inferno would actually have influence on the poem.[FN]

----------------------------- [FN] And, in truth, the closing idea of the cars going into the dark of the ride -- in its metaphoric energies of death -- really could not be said to exist at all within the Inferno. -----------------------------

Finally, it should be noted that there is a problem with the line that exacerbates the bomb aspect. A conjuctive "but" works in the idea of "X, but Y." So here, Y is "there wasn't a war then." What is the X? What in the previous lines sets up a "but"? With what can the "war" idea interact with through a "but"? In fact, the immediately preceding stanza is the suicide and drought. So we have

suicide and drought . . . . . . BUT . . . . . there wasn't a war yet

That is not a negative, but a positive: there was suicide and drought, yes; but at least there wasn't the war. Not exactly the idea that is meant to be carried forward into the final scene. (Or into a book on a desk.) And however I try, I cannot get the "but" to work any other way.

Let's bring it together. Hopefully by now you can see that while there is effort within the poem to have ideas flow into and out of the "war" idea, the poem itself betrays and defeats that effort in a number of ways. As such, the war line becomes a bomb: the single line's ideational and emotional energy works in an attempt to make up for the poem's poetic and ideational failures. (And if the poem was not meant to flow through that one line, the structure of the poem brings that in turn to failure.)

The curious thing is what if the war line were taken out? Let me refer you to another poem: James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," which can be found here.[FN] It is a short little poem flooded to the fill with the ideas of ego and humility, in both their positive and negative aspects. And what is present in "Spook House" that is absent in "Autumn Begins"? The overt, anchoring statement. "Autumn Begins" is a powerhouse of ideational energy: precisely because it avoids explicative statements, and it weaves together, quite delicately, the ideas that are presented. Yes, it can be said that the "All the proud fathers" equates, in a way, to the war line in "Spook House." But the line is not isolated by the poem's structure (in fact, it is immediately brought into balance with the two following lines), and the line does not attempt to become a focus of the poem. The fathers, the wives, and the sons all play equal ideational roles; and, they all serve the ultimate goal of the unified poem.

----------------------------- [FN] I am going to here talk about "Autum Begins" through an assumed stance of it being a perfect poem. I leave it to you to question just how effective is the ideation of "Autumn Begins." Though, you have to admit, it is a damn good poem. -----------------------------

"Autumn Begins" is a great poem to intruduce the idea of depth. Depth in common parlance -- and by common I include MFA/workshop parlance -- refers to some emotional poingancy, or some socio-political statement, or some form a moral that lies beneath a text. In reality, at best, that nature of "depth" never achieves more than a second level signification (what Barthes talks about in Mythologies), or a pallid second level metaphoricity, or sentimental emotionalism. True depth, organic depth, aesthetic depth, is a depth that is best described as that ideational/emotional field created by the words of poem (or whatever work), that exists as an ideational field that does not lie in the surface of the words themselves.

And I am dissatisfied with that statement, but it will have to do for now. It's an idea difficult to paraphrase or make compact. But imagine if you will two forms of text, one each for the two modes of being/thinking/language, the aesthetic and the nomic. The latter functions as a plane: everything operates on the surface; and, if there is depth, that depth is merely a second plane lying on the first. The aesthetic, however, is better pictures as a sphere of finite surface area (the actual physical words on the page) with infinite radius (the ideational field of play created out of those words). Critical to this geometric metaphor is recognizing that the surface of a sphere has zero depth; and that the depth is not visible from above the surface.

Again, not really going very far right now, but I'm only beginning my presentation of this idea. So it is enough for now.

"Risk Management Memo: Small Enterprise" by Mary Biddinger -- Verse Daily, 5/9/2013

from Gulf Coast
poem found here

 

First lines:
You wanted to open a café called
Rimbaud’s Helicopter. I just kept telling

 

clothesline poetry and unity (with a bit about Surrealism)

— reformatted 9/30/15

This is a good example of a certain kind of poetry, what I have called and what I have heard called "clothesline poems": called such in that it is, essentially a list of phrases or sentences clipped to a clothesline. (Do not expect to find that word in any poetry dictionary or glossary: the term is wholly conversational.) And, as far as these kinds of poems go, it is cleanly written (except for the problem with the "Our entire city" line, which is either suddenly surreal or has an issue with its construction; and then the minor problem with the italicized "look loveable" – which I don't think works as well as it could as internal dialogue what with the "to.")

I would very much like to hear Ms. Biddinger defend this poem. In fact, this poem would make a launching point for a wonderful discussion on poetics and aesthetics, either in printed word or in person (though, if in person I believe it would take some mad projection screen skills).

This would be my framing question for such a debate: In the general, what makes this poem of merit? In the more specific, how does this poem function, and does it at all rise above the poetic level of somewhat arbitrary sentences strung along a clothesline?

So let's take a look. Structurally, the lines are arbitrary as regards the words (they are quite obviously broken for their length, and that alone), and the stanzas are also an arbitrary application of three line stanzas. (It is curious to me how the final line came in within tolerations.) The content of the poem is entirely made of grammatically normal sentences, at times related to each other in idea.

My critique of this poem is that it goes nowhere fast. There is no development of any nature – ideational, aural, structural, whatever. Reading it is like reading a laundry list, or like listening to my daughter tell me about her magazine cut-out, Christmas list: "I want this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this." There is no development; no one sentence has any more or less importance than any other sentence; and all the sentences pretty much have only one type of importance: "I exist." As such, by the time I get to the fifth stanza (and rarely with these poems do I get farther than about 15 lines) I don't care anymore. Why should I care when every burgeoning moment of development is thwarted, almost at its inception, by a subject change?

I am exaggerating a touch, so let's pause and actually look. The poem can actually be broken, fairly easily, into its constituent ideas. (I put it back into sentences, since the lines are purposeless. I number them for reference.)

1. You wanted to open a café called Rimbaud’s Helicopter.
2. I just kept telling myself to look loveable.
3. We watched Apocalypse Now in two sleeping bags zipped together incorrectly.
4. I confessed how I was making a bejeweled saddle for a racehorse I would never own. His name would be Look Loveable. He would think about killing all the other jockeys because I rode him so right.
5. And this was the only true benefit of being small.
6. In camp they buried me first, then poured the curdled cider into my hair. My mother joined in, but only in my imagination.
7. You wanted to give me an outrageous hickey and to drown yourself before turning twenty.
8. All my friends knew better than to try swimming in hayfields.
9. I met you at the gun house.
10. Somebody had put new curtains up, but nothing could take away the head-marks on the walls.
11. Our entire city became a place that turned its back on coffee, even marzipan ducklings.
12. There’s a reason everyone loves the same things. That reason will never be you.

(Since the last thing is the most recent, I want to here quickly point hout how the end lines of the poem an emotion bomb: which is usually an attempt to bring something emotionally profound (that said tongue-in-cheek) to an otherwise blasé poem. It's not a huge bomb, as far as bombs go; but the character of the lines is somewhat different than that of those preceding it.)

I split #5 from #4 even though it flows out of #4, because there is in #5 a strong sense of stand-alone-ness. (That is, while it flows out of #4, it tries to declares a new idea.) But, I would equally accept having it as part of #4. Similarly with #9 and #10, except that I think the tie between them is much thinner, and would argue against bringing them together. Similarly again, my argument with #4 and #5 could be used to separate #12 into two statements: but to me the energies speak more to their needing to be together.

Now, it is easy to come to the idea that the first three are tied together by setting, one established in #3. In fact, it could be argued that the whole of the poem occurs in the setting. Except for three points:

1. The sentence of #3 is in the same past time – and same past moment – as every other sentence. Verb-wise, time-wise, all the sentences are equal, and as such there is no real justification in picking out #3 as that establishing the narrative setting.
2. The same argument to have #3 be setting can be used to have #9 be setting. Since both are equal, and you can't have both, then are struck as scene setting moments.
3. Even if you do accept #3's setting as the establishing of a narrative scene, it is irrelevant to the reading of the poem: that scene does not engage with any other element in the poem to generate new ideational energies. You might as well have written "in the grotto of the centaur Charon" as a epigram under the title to set the scene: it would still be irrelevant to the ideation of any of the lines. Scene only functions as ideational energies with the other elements of the text feed and feed from those energies. But, here, there is no such energy created.

So there is no narrative flow connecting the sentences, and the ideational connectivity exists only in brief spurts. #11, to chose an easy one, can not be said to bring any development to #1-10. There is an idea there, but that idea is lost in the chaos. Perhaps a better phrase is: that idea falls limp among the clutter. There is no point to any sentence except to read it, be done with it, and move on to the next sentence.

So the, as regards the sentences, I must ask, is there really anything present poetics-wise other than the oddity of the words, the pseudo-surrealist play. (I say pseudo- there not in any negative sense.) For example, #three is a simple sentence – "We watched Apocalypse Now in two sleeping bags zipped together." – given a twist with "incorrectly." But that twist has no energetic play outside the moment of the singular sentence. So what poetic energies created by the twist, ends as soon as you get to the period.

Now, Surrealism is very much to the point her. And anyone who at all has studied poetry should be familiar with the experiments of Surrealism, experiments that would result in poetry with disjunctive lines, like these, the opening lines from Breton's "Blotter of Ash":

The birds will be bored If I'd forgotten something Ring the bell of those last schooldays in the sea What we'll call the pensive borage

The success of the Surrealist experiments is that they are demonstration of how abutting (nearly) any two ideas will create new energies that exist in neither of the ideas independently. (To give but two examples of how this idea is not "Surrealist" specifically, but more accurately that fundamental aspect of the aesthetic upon which Surrealism focused, this is the same idea behind EIsenstein's techniques in film, and the same idea that played (if in smaller degree) in Symbolist painting in the 19th century.) Such experiments were (and are) interesting – indeed, important – techniques, methods, and explorations within the worlds of the aesthetic and the poetic. But, that does not mean that these methods result in successful poetry. In fact, the argument over whether such poems were successful poems or merely demonstrations of technique was part of the split between Breton and Batailles: Batailles being the one that argued that a successful aesthetic object still required a sense of unity, still required that sense of the creator creating a microcosmos. (These are his ideas, but not his words). And, later in life, Breton would come around to accept such.

This is the idea of unity that gives success to what is, perhaps, Breton's most well-known poem: "Free Union."[FN] Yes, "Free Union" is a list poem, but it has two elements that pulls it out of a mere list of elements and into a unified, organic (if surrealistic surrealistic) poem: (1) it is about a single woman; and (2) every line conveys an aspect of the nature of the speaker's desire for that woman. While the descriptive element of the specific lines may seem to be random, they come together in that they are not, in the end, a list of metaphors for body parts, but in that they are about about the experience of the beauty of a particular female body, spoken through desire, if not also lust.

–––––––––––––––– [FN] I prefer the Zavatsky/Bogow translation, which begins "My woman with the forest-fire hair" – not that I am saying it is more representative a translation, rather that I think the result is aesthetically better. The translation is found the collection Earthlight, wholly translated by Zavatsky and Bogow. To note, some may argue it is really about a specific woman's body, and not about the actual woman as a whole being. I think that artificially shrinks the reading of the poem and artificially categorizes and restricts the nature of the idea of desire that energizes the poem. But that's a different discussion. ––––––––––––––––

Now, does "Risk Management," here, offer such a union? Or does it fail to escape the status of mere list? That is my primary question. And, my answer, is that it does not. Yes, these poems carry the same curiousness and interest as do the Surrealist experiments; but it is not a successful poem. In fact, it might as well be broken up in into twelve separate poems, as I have done above; even if under one grouping title. (But, then, that would make arbitrary line breaks and three line stanzas rather difficult, no?)

And this point would be where, in the imagined debate, I would turn to the other party.

Though, it should be recognized, there is a second question, which should not be confused with the above, through which one can find a different path to discussion. That is, is there some other way that this poem unifies and I am missing it? Or, what I would argue in response, is the poet saying that this form in itself is justification for the poem? To which I would respond: yes, it is justification for the poem. But, that is not saying terribly much. Which is what Batailles would have said to Breton: yes, surrealist experiments make for at times interesting results, and there is much to be learned about ideation and metaphoricity through those experiments, and you can justify the results as poems because what they demonstrate. But as poems, as created objects, they are in the end rather unsophisticated things, perhaps with a lot of bluster but not really going anywhere, because they lack the over all unity of being a thing created, of being a thing calculated.

"Brief Study of Parades" by Jill Osier -- Verse Daily, 4/25/2013

from Pleiades (Winter, 2013)
poem found here

 

First lines:
1) There must be lifting.
2) There must be so many kinds of shoes.

 

sufficiency of content, and the organic whole

— reformatted 9/30/15

This poem is actually from a couple of weeks back. I wanted to make a comment on it then, but could not quite pin down what it was I wanted to do. But it kept bugging me, and out of nowhere, yesterday, it came to me: I was trying to be too specific, and needed only ask the basic question. So I'm jumping back in time . . . .

This is the question: Is the content of this poem sufficient to the organic whole of the poem?

I am not answering to either side; and, actually, it is that debate that has been going on in my head these past days. And, in the end, the question here is as important as whatever answer you might come up with. So, in a way, the point of this post is really, "Take a moment and consider this question, 'Is the content of this poem sufficient to the organic whole of the poem?,'" and use this poem as your sample text.

Now, to consider: What I am questioning is the relationship between the content of the poem and the poem's unity and self-identity. "Sufficient" does not necessarily mean quality. A poem's content can be sufficient to its making, and still not quite be a successful (or terribly sophisticated) poem. However, being insufficient would definitely mean the poem is unable to achieve what is possible for it to achieve: which is, from the writing standpoint, what is important. Not everything you write can be as good as you want it to be: but you should still be questioning: "Is this as good as it can be?"

It is there that sophistication develops. Not in the writing of a poem, but in seeking how to write the poem as well as it can be written.

So consider this poem, and consider the question: Is the content sufficient to this poem? Is is weakened because there is not enough? Is it weakened because there is a superfluidity of content? Is it the right amount, but its presentation weakens it?

And stop there -- important point, that. In exploring, you are not allowed to change the form. The experiment of this poem is to write a poem with this form, this systemic idea. So when considering content, you are considering how content works within this form, this idea, this presentation.

So explore with this poem. It is a great poem for this particular question -- after all, I have been doing it on and off for a couple of weeks now. But, always recognize, you should also be exploring the question.

"Here Be Monsters" by Katherine Coles -- Verse Daily, 5/3/2013

from The Earth Is Not Flat
poem found here

 

First lines:
We could fall off one
Edge or another. Water

 

playing with wording and ideation

— reformatted 9/30/15

I am glad this one showed up because I was in the mood for something like this. Let's just explore wording: both to query the wording given, and to play around with alternatives.

Now, addressing the poem as a whole I should say I don't think it works. I don't think the two primary ideas are successfully brought together into organic unity: those ideas being the opening idea of a kind of mythical, mappa mundi-type edge of the world, and that of "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." (On their face they are about opposite to each other.) And even on the smaller scale, thought by thought, the poem doesn't meld. "unknown/ But fully imagined" never gels with "headed out to the other side": there is nothing between mediating the two ideas. Ideationally, I find the poem wholly out of control.

For example, in the first lines the poem says "we could." It is establishing a situation. It is scene-setting. And yet, can you follow the poem through to "at any point / We're headed out the other side" without conveniently forgetting that set scene? The poem begins by asserting the idea of "there is no beyond," but ends with the conclusion of there is always a beyond. Why begin, so assertively, with an "edge of the world" idea if you are going to move to its exact opposite: a world that never ends? The one does not inform the other the way it is presented.

My guess is really the intent was only to bring in the idea of the terra incognita, of "beyond here, we don't know," and the "edge of the world" slipped in. But even with the terra incognita idea it rather falls to the floor, mostly unrealized, by two-thirds through the poem. Which is too bad, because the idea of turning endless same-ness into a land of imagined monsters is an interesting idea.

And how does "Where surface will not hold / We must shatter" fit into anything that precedes it? What is so important in a surface that will not hold? I am guessing that what is being aimed at is where the unknown will not hold then the unknown must be shattered: except that still really has no union with the rest of the poem, especially a poem that seems to try to turn the unknown into an endless sameness: in such a realm there is nothing to shatter.

I might make more jots to that end here and there; but, I really want to play a little with words, so:

We could fall off one / Edge or another: Note that there is a difference between "one edge or another" and "one edge or the other": the latter only has two edges, which means the former has multiple edges. I am not sure how that idea of multiple edges fits in the poem. And then water "roils . . . as if it would throw itself over": if that means "over the edge" -- which, in context, it does seem to so -- then you have only one edge. She how clashes in ideas are being established?

Now, the idea comes to me "throw itself over" could be meant to mean something in the sense of "flipping itself over" -- which might be a little easier to make fit in context in that it is simply increasing the energies of "roil." But, the whole of those energies have no use in the rest of the poem. Especially, when, at the end, the poem is describing a sea of ice, and endless sameness. No roiling there. In fact, it's (again) the opposite: it is a world that is trying "to hold."

and glacier / Meets sea by pushing into / Erosion's demand and response.: I have absolutely no idea what that is supposed to mean, or even where that is trying to go. How did we get from a roiling sea to glaciatic erosion? I can come up with erosion's demand: which would be "erosion." But what is erosion's response?

Fissure / Could swallow a body whole / Then close on itself, sucking its tongue: See the failure to meld? We've moved from the edge of the world, to the sea (which could maybe be at the end of the world but is not described as such, and with "as if" pretty much pulls wholly away therefrom), to a glacier (very much not the edge of the world), and then to a fissure: which is off the sea, on land (so obviouslly we were not at the edge of the world, and is described as a whole, not just an edge, so there's both sides, and it's no longer the end of the world but merely a crack. And the sea's no where to be found.

But, let's play:

Fissures -- they'll swallow a body whole.

That sounds like a "got milk" commercial.

A fissure will swallow you whole, Suck you down and close tight. Fissures like to swallow you And suck upon your passing taste.

Eh. You know, I have a hard time doing something with "close in on itself" because it seems only to repeat "swallow." (After all, the difference between falling into something and being swallowed by something is the latter carries the sense of that something closing upon you.) And I have no idea what to do with "sucking it's tongue." I guess that's better than "with a num-num-num," but that's about it.

Feel / The earth's end old maps . . . . : This is my favorite part. There are fun words and ideas to play with here, but the execution is not that great. In part, it's contextual. For one thing, "earth" is not capitalized, so it's the end of the land -- which is a problem since we started off at sea. Now, knowing how sloppy Verse Daily is, it could very well be it was supposed to be "Earth." But even then, "tooth and claw" puts us back on land.

Now, perhaps someone by now is saying "it's on a boat approaching the land": which is probably what is meant. Except that that idea is not continuous in the poem. That idea is an "oooohhhh, I get what you were trying to do" idea. But, still, to the words:

[. . .] Feel The earth's end old maps Elaborate with what's unknown But fully imagined, voracious Tooth and claw White to the bone.

I see nothing gained in "feel." (Everything it has to offer already exists in that the lines are written and meant to be read.)

The Earth's end. Old maps elaborate with What's unknown and fully imagined --        The voracious,        The tooth, the claw, and white bones. Old maps elaborate at the Earth's end With the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

("white, white" because it's snow-world; and if we move the "end" down, the lines are smoother)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(let's complete the tercet:)

Old maps elaborate at the Earth's End with the weirdly imagined unknown -- Tooth, claw, and white, white bone.

(Yes, obviously it's not free verse anymore. But (1) you can have metered verse in the middle of free verse (if you don't know that, you need to seriously expand your reading); (2) why pass up on something aurally lovely when the opportunity arises?; and (3) it's far more interesting than prose-with-line breaks. Just answer me: how is it that all these poets out there are writing lines of poetry, yet so very few of them are writing lines? Yes, this poem uses line breaks a touch as grammar; but that's it. And that's not very much. Especially when you consider all that was missed out on.)

Just beyond the horizon . . . .: Another mess. The words just before are solid objects (tooth, claw, bone), so when the poem says "right over / There" the ideation is that of look at a thing right over there. (Well, duh.) Yet, immediately after, the entire idea shifts from the thing that is over there to "trouble trying to picture." Put it in a sentence:

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is the trouble trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

See how the sentence changes what it's about half way through? how "over there is the trouble" is a thing that is over there, but "the trouble trying" is an abstract concept of difficulty that occurs in a person's head? and how, because of it, the sentence -- and the lines in the poem -- makes no sense whatsoever?

Just beyond the horizon, right over there, is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture our progress straight and flat.

That makes much more sense. It still doesn't flow out of what preceded it, though. The sentence before was about the idea of a very tangible if very unknown world before them. Now, all of a sudden, the entire poem jumps tracks and tries to be about that it is difficult to picture "progress straight and flat." What at all does that have to do with "tooth and claw"? Not good. Not good at all. And, then, "is what causes the trouble with our trying to picture" is not exactly elevated language. So instead we have in our poem something more "poetic" that doesn't make much sense. No wonder the poem's a mess.

I also want to point out the issue with the missing comma after "There." The poem as a whole tries to establish a grammar where line ends can suffice as a comma (as with "At the wave's top[,] / The body hangs weightless"). Which is wholly legitimate. But you have to nail it: both in adhering to it, and in creating the energies at the line breaks that reinforce the usage. (On rereading, the reader should be naturally hearing those line breaks-as-commas.) Unfortunately, there are a couple places in this poem where the grammar weakens the system, as with the missing comma here. And the one missing in "It runs out[,] the body after all." And there is a general weakness in that the poem gives off the quality that the line breaks were mostly arbitrary, anyway, so let's continue.

"Right over there" sucks, so I'm killing it:

Not before the horizon, or at the horizon, But beyond it -- There lies the trouble Of picturing progress straight and flat.

Let's bring in an idea from the end of the poem:

Up to the horizon, difficulty        In the ice that strives to hold. Beyond, trouble        In picturing progress straight and flat.

Hopefully you see here yet another ideational clash: if, at the end of the poem, there's ice before them that they are breaking through, how is it difficult to imagine flat beyond the horizon? I could continue, but I think you get the point. The far-too-looseness of the poem's ideas gives even discussing it the risk of falling into absurdity. And the 'moral' at the last third of the poem does little help to resolve any of it. "As soon as we arrive at any point / We're headed out the other side." How is that not a simple description of movement? It's rather like a Dummies verson of one of Zeno's koans: "as soon as you get there, you're leaving." (The opposite of "wherever you go, there you are"?)

And, really, that is my point here. That you are able to not be tricked by the assumption "this is a published, therefore it is good," and are able to see for yourself what is going on in the poem. Which is, here, a lot of chaos. Because, believe me, when, say, Eliot published The Waste Land, he very much was hoping you would see for yoursel, and experience for yourself his efforts.

Anyway, really, I mostly wanted to play with the "Earth's edge" lines. They're the best bit this lump of strings has to offer.

"Two Poems" by Charles Simic -- Poetry Daily, 3/18/13; and "Ealuscerwen" by Edward Mayes -- Verse Daily, 3/18/13

Simic's two poems ("Fear" and "Note Slipped Under a Door") are from Selected Early Poems
and is found here

"Ealuscerwen" is from Crazyhorse (Fall, 2012)
and is found here

 

line breaks

— reformatted with editing, April 8, 2014
 

OK, I admit it, I am perhaps over attentive to line breaks. Except that, it seems to me most poets today are severely if not chronically under-attentive to line breaks — if attentive at all. In that vein, the poems offered today on the two sites (Poetry Daily and Verse Daily) make for an interesting contrast. So let me look at both.

Yes, the poems are different in style. I want to focus only on line breaks and poetic flow. Yes, Simic's poems are, perhaps hyper attentive to flow: but it is to an end, which we will see.

I should also say in effort to maintain transparency that I am not a terribly big fan of Charles Simic, though that is more a statement about taste than anything else. He is, simply, not a poet that floats my boat in the manner such that I would pull him off the shelf solely for pleasure's sake. (Though, I will sooner or later purchase and read his collected/selected. And, actually, I rather like "Fear," for the short little thing it is.)

 

Let's start with Simic's two poems.

"Fear" is a short, imagist poem. It uses one image, moving of leaves on a tree, to generate an idea: that of the self-energizing contagiousness of fear. What I love about the ideation of the poem is that the core idea generated by the image: that of fear being self-energizing (when caught as a contagion), is never directly expressed in the poem — ergo the imagist aspect. (Something people who study H.D., particularly Trilogy, very frequently forget.)

The structure of the poem also emphasizes that imagist flavor: the first stanza setting up the image, the second opening the image to reveal the idea being generated thereby. But let's look specifically at the lines.

First stanza: four lines of four stress, two stress, four stress, two. Stanza two: two five stress lines. No, it is not necessary that you as a reader notice that on the first reading. What is necessary is that you look for it, as you should be looking to every poem for structure in meter and rhyme. Why? Because once you see it, it should then modify how the poem sounds. This is the musicality of the poem, and it should not be missed, otherwise, you are missing a great part of the poem. Poetry is an aural art. To not look for aural structure is tantamount to playing sheet music with no attention whatsoever to the length of the notes.

Let me see if I can describe it. Even though the lines can be called accentual meter (though, to me it reads as though the lines were designed by sound, not by meter), it is sort-of-kind-of iambic, and four-beat lines have that certain sing-song quality that is utilized by ballad measure. (Popular music, after all, is primarily 4/4 measure, no?) Of course, the shortened, two-beat lines create a kind of staccato-esque emphasis: this made all the greater because of the structure of the lines and the line breaks. Each four-beat line (and the two-beat lines) stands naturally as a poetic phrase (the second slightly less so, but within the norm). The two-beat lines are modifiers of the idea in the 4-beat phrase. The end result is that the stanza's structure is not merely visual, nor is it merely aural, but it works with the reading of the poem to emphasize the ideation of the phrases in the poem.

Then you have a stanza break, and the more conversational sound of an iambic pentameter couplet (even with a soft rhyme). It creates an aural difference from the first stanza. It also gives nod to sonnet form, and the two line couplet that closes such in Shakespearean sonnets. In such, it also gives nod to the idea of the volta, which the two line couplet is meant to emphasize. Finally, in that the stanza is a well crafted unit, soft rhyme and all, it gives emphasis that it is there that the central ideation will be worked; in turn, giving aural echo to the ideational structure of the poem.

In sum, line structure, rhythm, rhyme, stanza forms, stanza breaks, the linear flow, and image and ideation, all work together to generate an organically whole poem, a poem with experiential depth and aesthetic pleasure. Even though the idea presented is relatively simple (it is, after all, only a twenty-syllable poem), I enjoy reading it, I get pleasure from reading it, again and again, to experience how it all comes together . . . . . which is not quite the right phrase, but it is difficult not to fall into phrases that beg the question of what it is that is being experienced. If I may risk it: it is the pleasure of experiencing a whole and vital poetic microcosmos.

"Note Slipped under a Door" is a list poem, and as such will from the start probably be not as tight as "Fear"; but, then, I don't think it tries to be. The experience here is more linear, the following of a list; there is not very much ideational development up and down the list, not very much development into unifying the list elements into a whole (outside of the flow of a non-random list). But, that's ok; that is not what it is trying to do. It is being its list-self, and should be accepted as such. (In fact, it works for me quite well.)

But let's look at stanzas and lines. Simply enough, notice how, again, every line is sufficient in itself, and in itself defines itself as a line. Also, every idea has its own stanza. There is no attempt or want to force the poem into a regularized stanza length. To say it again, there is no need in the poet to force regularized stanzas upon a poem that does not require or want it. There is no attempt to break the lines into lines of generally equal length. The decisions on lines and stanzas was generated from within the creating of the poem, not applied to the words as a kind of forced structure.

Which leads us to "Ealuscerwen."

(But, first, I can not help myself to point out "from a great purple distance." It's a simple idea, but wonderful. Do you get it, in that at a distance mountains, hills, whatevers, tend to move into purplish hues? It's a natural event. But, here, completely unexplained. And dammitall if poets and writers would strive figure out that you do not have to explain everything. Actually, you rarely have to — or should — explain anything. Poems are so much more fascinating when you do not. This event in its larger, prosaic forms it is called an "information dump" in creative writing circles. (Its origin lies, I believe, in science fiction/fantasy, where the need and want to explain are often greatly felt by the writer.) Information dumps are a no-no in prose. Likewise, and even more so, in poetry, where it occurs just as often, but on a smaller scale. But I've digressed. My point is, merely, what a great line, that.)

•
So, "Ealuscerwen." A quick look reveals no rhyme. Also, no meter or measured stress count. Also, no apparent relationship between semantics and lines. It is a sentence/paragraph organized text broken into relatively even lines and four-line stanzas. (Should I have pointed out how sentence/phrasing and line structure informed each other's creation in Simic's poems? Too late now.)

Here are the questions to be asked:

• Is there anything in the poem's text, semantics, flow, or ideation, that gives purpose to the presented structure?
• To say it a different way, as a reader, what attention can be seen, here, to have been given to the line breaks and stanzas outside of the application of some arbitrarily chosen visual structure?
• Is it not a natural assumption that, if a poem is broken into lines, then there should be some purpose behind those lines?
• What effects on the reading of the poem is created by the line and stanza breaks?
• Do the line and stanza breaks contribute to the reading and reception of the poem? Or do they hinder it?
• Can there be said to be any poetic (or organic, or aesthetic) unity generated with the structure, the text, the sound, the ideation, etc.?

Consider this idea: if you are not using line and stanza breaks to an end that will generate an even more pleasurable reading of the poem, are you "using" them at all?

The follow-up to that: if you are not using them, why the hell not?

Inattentiveness is the accusation. An arbitrary structure applied to sentences/paragraphs is not "writing" lines, it is applying lines. (In fact, to me it looks like the visually clumsy hyphenated breaking of "hellkind" was generated out of the want to control visual line length.) Such structuring is, in its purest labeling, nothing less than striking lines and stanzas out of the writing process completely. As I have said in previous posts, this is little more than writing prose and shrinking the width of the page.

And the thing is, there is a proven negative effect to such writing. When a person reads, they are not moving from letter to letter, word to word. The mind naturally looks forward and back in order to generate a sense of the semantic and grammatical structure of the text, which permits the mind to more accurately and fully read the text. If it were not so, people would not be able to read a text without first reading the whole of the paragraph and getting the long list of words and their structure half memorized. (In fact, in a book, when you are reading a line, you mind is also giving faint attention to the lines above and below.)

The more you contract the length of the line in prose, the more and more difficult it becomes to read out of the structure and phrasing of the sentences. So, by breaking this poem into short lines like this without giving any thought to the lines themselves (or to the syntactic and grammatical structures of the text), the only thing being accomplished is making the text difficult to read.

For example, if you restructure the poem into normal prose, you will find that there is a very natural paragraph break right before "What we missed" (the first line of the fourth stanza). That very natural pause – that reading affected and reading effecting pause (I think I got those vowels right) – is lost, entirely, in the application of this arbitrary line/stanza structure. The line breaks also create problems with the flow of the sentences in the second half of the poem: especially with the last, beginning with "And we," in the third to last stanza.

Also, the fact that there are line breaks present creates in the reader an expectation of pause at the end of the line: the mind naturally looks for structure and organization; presenting organization through line breaks tells the mind there is a reading-structure to be found there. When that structure is not found, in fact when that structure is working against the natural reading of the words (as it is, so much so, with that last sentence), only bad things can happen.

Really, to read this poem successfully, you have to do what I said above: read it a couple, three, four times until you have a loosely memorized idea of how the sentences work, and ignore everything visual.

Another question: what value, what purpose can be said to exist in a chosen line structure when alternative choices have no real effect on the poem? Is there any difference to the reading of the poem if I make the lines slightly shorter:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our terminus a quo for our Middle age was much later, and Ended with our terminus a quem, Later too. Time to take the hem Down again, we'll tell someone With the sharpest pair of scissors, Or take up the hem again we'll Ask someone with the quickest Stitch. Although we ourselves have Starched our crinoline collars, we've Never wanted to do anything more

or so that there are three lines per stanza, and the lines in each stanza decrease in length:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our terminus a quo for our middle age Was much later, and ended with our Terminus a quem, later too. Time to take The hem down again, we'll tell someone With the sharpest pair of scissors, or Take up the hem gain we'll ask someone With the quickest stitch. Although we Ourselves have starched our crin-

or if we do this little visual shape:

We weren't there that fall in Rome, 476. Our Terminus a quo for our Middle age was much later, And ended with our terminus a quem, later too. Time to take the hem down again, we'll tell Someone with the sharpest Pair of scissors, or take up the Hem again we'll ask someone with the quickest Stitch. Although we ourselves have starched our Crinoline collars, we've never Wanted to do anything more Exuberant than, let's say, the cancan. What we've

So the final question: if there is no apparent purpose to the chosen line and stanza structure, how are you not saying to your reader, "You know, poetically speaking, there isn't that much here; so, don't expect too much; you might even just want to move on to the next poem."?

 
•

(Final little note: the final little definitional paragraph is fun. Except for one point: at the very end, after the word canard, there is a colon. Seeing that, I immediately went back over it. "Did I miss other colons?" Not finding any, I ask, "Do I see places that would be a typo, where the Verse Daily people left out a colon?" And not finding any of that, either, I am then perplexed. "Why is that colon at the end of the line? Why wasn't that structure used throughout the list?" Well, perhaps that colon is the typo, and it should be a semi-colon (which is possible since they obviously typoed the italicizing of "our" in line 4). If so, what an unfortunate typo, because it throws the whole of the list into chaos.)

"Necessity Defense of Institutional Memory" by Camille Rankine -- Poetry Daily, 3/3/13

from Tin House (14.3)
poem found here
 

First lines:
So the free may remain free

     say the nightmare is
 

poetic structure, and poetic grammar

-- reformatted with some editing 1/26/2014
 

What I like, or find interesting, or say “good job!” to:

The use of spacing as a kind of punctuation.

They are well placed; there is not a one that is spurious or flippant in its use (which, as other poets seem to demonstrate, is harder than one might think). But they are not merely well placed: they are effectively used. Functioning even better than would commas, most likely because (1) the terseness of the statements (emphasized by the absence of a “that” after the “so”s), and (2) because of the visual lightness of the poem. This is related to:

The use of double line breaks as a kind of punctuation.

Before the indented lines, the double line break works in the manner of a comma, or a dash, or such. Coupled with the tab it creates a reading where it is not simply line, response, line, response; but, rather, isolates the lines to de-emphasize the line-response pairing, and give each part a bit more life of its own. (This also utilizes the lack of “that”s.) While the semantics (as guided by most of the pairings) is of line and response, the punctuating of the poem with space brings the lines more into juxtaposition rather than pairing. Note that this also means that it creates justapositions/pairings out of the indented lines and the non-indented lines that follow them, which might arguably be a weakness in the poem, disassembling, a bit, the ideational development. (I question whether that weakness could be cured, or if it is an understanding that can only be carried into the next poem-writing.)

The three-lined stanza (“so I may be replaced . . .”.

I tell you, I really really like how this stanza works. And you have to note how the effectiveness of this stanza is set up by the sparsity of the lines above it. The aural pauses created by the breaks and the gaps are perfect to the pacing of the poem, creating (in a musical sense) a kind of flourish, a momentary rise to fortissimo, though without making any more of the lines than they can bear.

The use . . . . no, not use, but presence of the colon.

It is the only formal punctuation in the poem. Many poets would leave it out, thinking that the rules of the poem are that there must be no punctuation. But the poem demands it, and you must listen to the poem. Why is it demanded? Because the colon is being used to announce a change in the reading of the poem: the lines are no longer soft line-response pairings. The colon announces the final statement, announces to reader to ignore what is the norm up to then, something different is happening. And, in that it is a colon, it naturally, in the normal nature of the colon, announces a concluding explanation or explication or expansion, often seen presented as a list, so you are ready to join together the final lines into a single statement. It is a small thing, but it is an excellent thing.

 

What I don’t like, or question, or say “what?!” to:

A weakness in the structure of the poem.

Because the line breaks create an equality between the margin-lined and indented lines, coupled with that the first pair does not readily cue to me the nature of line-response, I am choosing to read the poem as line-response. Which may not be the intent. Not every time I read the poem can I get the first pairing to work that way, and many times it wants to completely buck the idea of line-response. I think this is a weakness that should have been avoided at the beginning: if it is not meant to be line-response, then do not let it fall into such. And once a rhetoric is decided on, stick to it. Which leads to:

The lingering question of whether I am correct in reading it line-response.

Which should not exist. Once I figure out line-response (or whatever reading), the poem should be assuring me (even if subtly) that I am correct. The poem should, to wit, open up as a unified whole because of the decided approach. If it cannot do so, then either I have the wrong reading, or there is a problem with the poem. And, especially because of the first pairing, which I do not think works terribly well, I still, after however many readings, have doubts. Which leads to:

Abstractions.

The poem is too abstract. Let me restate that: because the poem is so abstract, there is only so far you can go with it. Depth, organic depth, the resonances of depth, are developed with ideation; and over-abstraction makes for shallow ideation. When it comes to it, the “preserved” in “so we are preserved” could mean many things, both positive and negative in nature. (The only way the poem is stabilized is by taking the most shallow, generic, conventional meaning of the word.) Walking away from the poem I find a very intriguing idea for the structuring of the poem, but one that was failed by the abstractions in this particular use of that formal idea. Abstractions are almost always laziness, and that is undeniable. Abstractions are but a loose paraphrasing of what should be being generated by fuller, more complex ideation. (Do not confuse sparsity with abstraction: the “so I may be replaced” lines are sparse, but far more concrete than the opening pairing.) Now, the challenge here: what would make this poem a true “Hey, wow” poem, would be if there could be such development without losing the general feel of the poem. Verbless phrases seems a potential path to explore.

And, for that thought, credit to the poem: something was attempted that speaks aesthetic creating, that creates and carries literary energy, that prompts in other writers the thought “that is an interesting idea . . . .”, whether or not this poem itself can be said to wholly succeed.

The title.

I hate it. I think she shot for something big and failed. Even at its most basic traits, I think it doesn’t fit the style of the poem. And, if that much explanation has to go into the title to make the poem work, it is a dead giveaway that either (1) the poem is too abstract and unanchored, and/or (2) the poem itself misses its intended mark, and the title is being put forward to aim the poem in the right direction (because it can't get there on its own). (I rather repeated myself, there, didn't I.)

Three Poems by Sarah Arvio -- Poetrty Daily, 2/27/13

from night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis (Alfred A. Knopf)
poem found here
 

First lines:
there are still the bad dreams I have to say
a dram in the thought of a bad bad night
 

poetry and the dream; technique and the poetic whole

— reformatted, minor editing 1/26/2014
— this post has been added to the "Best of the PDC" page on my Hatter's Cabinet site.
 

Now, if you haven't looked it up yet, the book from which these poems come is a collection of poems created from actual dreams, with accompanying notes as to how those dreams played out in psychoanalysis. As such, the poems within the book as a whole probably has a context that is not carried outside the book. As such, there is no reason not to permit that the poems do not work as well outside the book as they would within. (Same as often happens when a chapter is excerpted out of a novel.) In fact, and especially because of the nature of the book, I rather expect it to be so. (Possibly, even, dramatically so.)

Nonetheless, I believe these poems offer something of interest for discussion as they stand on their own, either singly or as a triplet. But before that, a comment on dreams and creative writing.

As a general rule, it is a false step, a very poor approach, to translate your dreams into stories or poems. While the dream may have -- and obviously will have -- unity in your head, where is is an extension of your unconscious, that unity rarely translates onto the page. The exceptions to this rule prove the rule, because in most every exception the writer has used the dream as material to the making of a work (as opposed to simply writing down the dream). (If I remember correctly, Yeats's "The Cap and Bells" is such a poem.) And notice here I am not in any way saying do not let your dreams be source material. In fact, I insist that a writer should be listening to their dreams for source material -- it is in your unconscious, after all, where true creating originates. What I am saying is do not simply transcribe a dream onto paper and expect it to work some dream-like, mysterious effect. That effect must be created by the writer; it won't simply be carried in as dream by the mere fact that it originated as a dream. (There is also the obverse of this: don't write stories or poems that are, in context, a dream. It rarely works, almost always is a bad idea from the get go. Do it to try it out if you want. But recognize it will probably be far more interesting to you than to any sophisticated reader.)

 

That said, what do we have here? Most obviously, they are not dream journal. They are worked poems. She is not transcribing: the events of the source dreams are, for the most part, but raw material to a creating of micrcosmoi. (Let's hold for the moment the question whether or not they are wholly successful in this creating.) Narrative, such as the dreams offer it, is not at the forefront of these poems. And it should be acknowledge that narrative is not a necessary constituent of a poem-as-microcosmos. It is but a tool, and raw material, to such creating. In fact, when narrative becomes the central point of a creative writing, it will lead you away from the aesthetic, not toward it. (Such is genre, after all.)

What, then, is the nature her creating? There is, of course, a degree of control over the lines: the Amazon blurb calls them "irregular sonnets." Though, in that they hold to sonnet form only in their being fourteen lines, and in the lines hovering around but in no way clinging to five accented syllables per line (I wouldn't even say they were iambic), I have trouble calling them sonnets of any manner. What makes a sonnet is less the count of fourteen lines and more what happens within those fourteen lines. But that quibble is with the blurb; there is, nonetheless, a formality to these poems. (Perhaps my quibble is with the need to call them anything? Why can't it simply be that she is playing with a form of her own?)

But the real energy of Ms. Arvio's poems -- and looking at the Amazon preview of her second book, Sono, it may be this is very much her style -- is in the play along the lines. There are three techniques, here. First, stringing out sounds, as with "a bad potion potent with impotence" in the first poem, and "in a quarrel a quarrel of squirrels / showing their teeth I feel queasy & sick" in the third. Second, there is stringing out ideas, as with "cat . . . wildcat . . . manxman . . . catpal . . . kittened" in the second poem, or the play with "heart," "hole," and "hell" in the first.

But, what for me is the dominating technique (or should I say over-arching, or over-guiding technique) is the syntactic stringing together of phrases, as with the first poem's first four lines. On this, it is not simply that she eschews punctuation. She crafts the lines so that not only is punctuation not needed, but is not wanted. (There is a huge distinction between leaving out commas and writing lines that do not want commas, something which so many poets do not seem to understand.) 

What is the result? Obviously, every poem has a running, non-stop flow to it, without pause, without break. Also, the continual presence of her techniques creates a kind of mesentery that pulls the various elements of each poem together into a unity: they are not best described as a running, linear flow of words. The words, the sounds, the ideas, all interconnect within each poem. They are, to use Joyce's word, a great word (and these poems do remind me of Joyce's own manner of play), wordspiderwebs, something which very much gives description to the organic nature of the aesthetic work.

What I am inartfully trying to get at is that these poems are not merely technique. Three comments on technique:

1. Technique is but a tool. I have seen many works (in literary and other media) that are built with attention to technique but to no purpose of a greater creating. This very often with artists playing with mixed media, as though they believe that the technique of mixing the media is sufficient to a successful work. (And while we're here, let's accept it, people: most of John Cage's works are experiments of technique: essentially, he was a creative explorer, constantly asking, "what happens when I do this?", but not equally concerned with the unity of the result. They are often wonderful, intriguing, thought provoking experiments; but, still experiments.) The idea that technique is not sufficient to itself to art is why it is said, in the plastic arts, that mere reproduction of life is the lowest form of art (so also as I say with mere narrative and reportage): such art is, in the end, nothing but technique. 
2. Nonetheless, there can also be true creativity in technique, in that without technique, without interesting technique, the poem (or whatever) will rather lack in life, and become extremely vulnerable in its making to banality or conventionality. This may be what distinguishes the accessible to the inaccessible composition: the more complex, the more irregular the technique, the less easy it will be for someone unsophisticated in the medium to enter the experience of the work. (Consider the difference in compositional technique between Brahms, who is very accessible, and Mahler, who is less so, and then Schnittke, who is far less yet again.)
3. Technique made a purpose unto itself falls into conventionality and genre. Genre works are readily accessible to their readers because their technique is readily recognized and understood, and rarely changes. (U.S. drama is ridden with technique substituted as art. As a quick example to that rather sweeping statement: listen to the music of Rent; listen to the music of Hair. The former is a direct descendant of the conventions that were created out of the techniques brought to play in the latter. I will admit I have only seen the film and perfmormed scenes/exceprts of the play: but to me it is apparent Rent is a remarkably un-creative, derivitive, generic play.)

The question always to be thrown at technique is, "ok, there is a technique; but what are you going to do with it?" Which is the question which must be cast upon these three poems. There is fascinating technique here, very playful, very experiential; and the poems are brought into a kind of unity with those techniques. But do they truly succeed as individual and whole poems? or, are they more what I call "five-finger exercises": works imperfect in that they are not unified, independent creations, but which still perform to a somewhat-worthy degree, usually as a demonstration of some technique or form of play? A more common word is to call them fragments rather than poems. 

(I pause to remind you we are artificially taking these poem as we find them, outside the context of the book as whole.)

In that they play with dream-like experience, are they of the nature of surrealist experiments: interesting, but (as Batailles would point out to Breton's consternation) incomplete and insufficient as true poetry (true literature)?

Art, that is, the aesthetic when it is concerned in the creating of art (including literature and music), is inextricably about medium. This is much of what lies behind the truism that an aesthetic painter paints (in the end and most honestly) for other painters, a writer writes for other writers: that is, for the people who would most be able to appreciate their creations out of whatever medium, those people who themselves have dedicated themselves to the study and exploration of that medium. A poet, a writer, is supposed to be a lover of words and language. If not, then they are not a literary person, they are a diarist, a documentarian, a reporter merely. So, when someone does things like the play you see in these three poems, true literary people get off on it. It goes to the jouissance of literature; it is the very pleasure of literature (see Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads if you don't believe Derrida, Barthes, et al), it is the experience of the aesthetic. More simply, it is the point of it all. But not only: there is also -- there is more greatly -- the making of the microsmoi that are works of the aesthetic, the enjoyment of that wholeness, of the being, as it were, of the work. More accurately, the engagement of the individual with that work.

Literature as an aethetic endeavor is the attempt to create a cosmos out of words. (I resist the want to say 'create something new' because, in aesthetic creation, every work is, by definition, something new, is its own microcosmos, is its own experience. Thus the distinction between the aesthetic and the generic/conventional/cultural: the aesthetic creates microcosmoi, the generic reproduces the set conventions of the nomoi.) It is in organic that creative works have the most to offer the reader.

Thus the question: are these poems successful poems, or are they fragments? Do we have, here, three successful microcosmoi? My answer to that question is no: I believe the true microcosmoi being attempted here is not the individual poems but the book as a whole: and, as I said, I am very interested to see if that whole is successful. But, irrespective of that question, these poems (and we'll permit the word) are fascinating, enjoyable experiences, carrying even with only this small number of them much to discuss about poetry and the aesthetic, as I hope I have demonstrated. So, while I may not accept them as successful wholes, I gladly accept them as successful explorations of the aesthetic.