fearful of monsterhood;
kindly, perplexed, a fire
smouldering.
The son
took, from both monsters, feathers
of pure flame,
and from his mother,
alchemical gold,
and from his father,
the salt of earth:
a triple goodness.
If to be artist
is to be monster,
he too was monster. But from his self
uprose a new fountain,
of wisdom, of in-seeing, of wingéd justice
flying unswerving
into the heart.
He and compassion
were not master and servant,
servant and master,
but comrades in pilgrimage.
The first line presents the subject—flame-plumage-blossom-monster. The succeeding nine lines alternate between attributes and actions, and are enclosed by dashes which open in the middle of the first line. (The first line needed to be simple although interrupted by the dash which sets off the subsidiary clause, in order to link the monster firmly to her attributes.) The last line of the stanza goes back to the margin to complete the sentence: “a flamey monster/bore a son.” The second stanza begins with an indented line because the subject of it is uncertain; a question opens the stanza and the person is described as half man and half monster. So the placing of the whole stanza on the page is somewhat wavering. Stanza three, beginning “The son,” repeats the logic of stanza one, except that because it speaks of the son deriving characteristics from both parents—feathers of flame from both of them and also something magically transformational from the mother and something of basic human goodness from the father—the last line is centered: “a triple goodness.” Stanza four is all on the margin side because it follows syntactically directly from the first skeletal, or scaffold sentence:
A monster
bore a son.
If to be artist
is to be monster,
he too was monster.
But after the “But” statement there comes another indented passage—indented because it is descriptive, as the lines immediately preceding it are not. The last stanza starts with an indentation that is centered, because that centering on the page suggests (again, in a subliminal way, physiology conspiring with comprehension) a blending or meeting which is what the poem is talking about. The alternations of the concluding three lines echo those in stanzas one and three, but now I feel that this entire stanza should have been indented: that’s to say centered, with its existing indentations intact; and it was a failure of craft-logic to leave it at the margin.
There is another matter about which there is a vague consensus but for which few people seem to know a reason: what do initial capital letters do and why have they been abandoned by so many twentieth century poets? Well, they stop the flow very slightly from line to line, and if one is using the kind of careful and detailed scoring devices I’ve been illustrating then their sheer unnecessariness is a distraction. Some people, however, like them for the very reason that they do stop the flow a tiny bit—so they can be made to function. What about using lower case initials throughout? Personally I dislike this practice because it looks mannered and therefore distracts the attention—especially lower case I (i); and I don’t see any function in the absence of a capital letter to signal the beginning of a sentence—especially the very first sentence of a poem. But more important than whether you do or don’t use capitals is consistency within any given poem. If you are not consistent in your use of any device, the reader will not know if something is merely a typographical error or is meant to contribute—as everything, down to the last hyphen, should—to the life of the poem.
These seem the principle technical points about which large numbers of people are confused. But I’d like to throw in a concept that doesn’t have to do specifically with open forms—the idea of what I call tune-up. It involves diction. Obviously we all want to avoid clichés, except in dialogue or for irony; but sometimes even though we may be devoted to the search for maximum precision, we don’t constantly check over our words to see if our diction is tuned-up to the maximum energy level consistent with the individual poem. Of course, our whole feeling about some poems may be that their tone should be relaxed. But how often a subject’s inscape and our own experience of instress in confronting it (which then becomes an integral part of the poem’s inscape) could really be sounded out more vibrantly! The technical or craft skill of tuning up is not the same as the process of revision. Major revision is undertaken when structure—whether of sequence, storyline, plot, of rhythm and melody, or of basic diction—has major ailments. But tune-up is something you do when you feel the poem is complete and in good health. It’s sometimes a matter of dropping a few a’s or the’s or and’s to pull it all tighter—though beware you don’t take out some necessary bolt or screw! But sometimes, more creatively, it’s a matter of checking each word to see if, even though it has seemed precise, the correct word for the job, there is not—lurking in the wings of your mind’s stage—another exotic, surprising, unpredictable, but even more precise word. Startle yourself. Before you leave the well-wrought, honest poem to set off on its own adventures through the world, see if with one final flick of the wrist you can shower it with a few diamond talismans that will give it powers you yourself—we ourselves—lack (poor helpless human creatures that we poets are) except at the moment of parting from the poems we have brought forth into daylight out of caverns we don’t own but have at times been entrusted to guard and enter.
* * *
*See previous essay, “On the Function of the Line.”
A “Craft Lecture” presented at Centrum, a writing conference at Port Townsend, Washington, Summer 1979.
Genre and Gender v. Serving an Art
(1982)
THE TITLE “GENRE AND GENDER” suggests, and I suppose is meant to suggest, that genre may be determined by gender. That’s an idea I find extremely foreign to my own experience. I don’t believe I have ever made an aesthetic decision based on my gender. The genre a poem belongs to—lyric, narrative, meditative—is an aesthetic matter, a matter of the relation of form to content, like the decision to write not a poem but a story.
The content of a poem often reveals, or is naturally assumed to reveal, the sex of its author. Genre is determined by subject matter, and subject matter may on occasion emerge from experiences that are specifically male or female—but not more frequently than from such factors as a predominantly urban or predominantly rural life, from poverty or riches, from particular political convictions, or from individual temperamental or physical idiosyncracies. Clearly, many historical factors have affected what, how much, and how women write in various times and places, but none of these is essentially a matter of aesthetics. If in a particular period a woman is timid about her diction for fear of incurring hostility by using rough, harsh, or rude words, she is making a social (and psycholoigical) decision rather than an aesthetic one. A true artist of either sex must necessarily be, in relation to the art he or she serves, even if shy and afraid about other things, a person of courage and energy who will not succumb to that kind of cultural pressure.
Artists have a reputation for ruthlessness. I don’t think they are more ruthless as a class than any other; in fact I can think of many classes of person whose lack of empathic imagination makes them far more ruthless than a writer can be! But that reputation probably stems from the prime necessity, inherent in the vocation of the artist, of making aesthetic decisions even when they conflict with social expectations; of having, in other words, an intense awareness of artistic ethics. If a writer has that, his or her art will transcend gender. That is to say that if, for example, a woman poet writes poems on what her female body feels like to her, what it’s like to menstruate, to be sexually entered by a man, to carry and bear a child and breast-feed it, her subject matter derives directly from her gender; but it will
be the structure of the poem, its quality of images and diction, its details and its totality of sounds and rhythms, that determines whether or not it is a poem—a work of art. Her courage must be exercised not in relation to themes which once were considered impermissible (but are now almost demanded of her) but in refusing to let herself off any aesthetic hooks.
Without the sense of serving an art, of serving poetry and not utilizing it as a vehicle, like a bus, all the authenticity of content and all the best social intentions in the world, whether conciliatory or militant, lofty or practical, will not help. A poem, like any other work of art, must have the potential of becoming wholly anonymous through accidents of history and yet retaining its numinous, mysterious energy and autonomy, its music, its magic. That is what I mean by the transcendence of any inessential factor—including gender.
* * *
In 1982 I took part in a symposium at the MLA on “Genre and Gender in Poetry by Women.” American Poetry published my “statement” in its Fall 1983 issue (along with Ruth Stone’s and with specially written companion statements by Diane Wakoski and Shirley Kaufman).
“News That Stays News”
(1978)
THINKING ABOUT THE SIGNIFICANCE of periplum, that word Pound often uses—
periplum, not as land looks on a map
but as sea bord seen by men sailing
—I see its applicability to the experiencing of numinous works of art from the mobile vantage point of one’s own growth and change: the different angles and aspects of the work thus perceived, and the new alignments with its historical context, and also with the context of the perceiver’s personal history.
As a coastal city might come, at a certain moment of sailing past it, into the most perfect, harmonious, and dramatic alignment with the mountains behind it and the sweep of its bay, so a supreme moment may be reached in one’s own reception and appreciation of a novel, a poem, a string quartet. That does not mean all subsequent sightings of it will be a decline. The memory of that supreme vision will in some degree illuminate each subsequent look one takes.
There’s an analogy to the periplum concept in a movie camera’s slow panning across a scene. Indeed, one obtains a similar effect in a car or train, especially when viewing a downtown skyline from a bridge or elevated highway. But while these analogies may give to the reader who has never travelled by boat some physical sense of periplum’s literal meaning, their speed (in comparison to the slowness of a ship) does not allow for the kind of changes in the beholder that contribute to new perceptions. All the accrued life-experience which accompanies one on return visits to works of art is only sketchily symbolized even in the metaphoric description of time and change provided by the image of watching the coastal towers and mountains realign to the eye as the observer—perhaps going through changes of mood the while—moves past them in a half-becalmed sailboat from dawn to dusk, a whole long day, and finds them next morning still visible beyond the wake, as if floating between sky and sea.
A friend said to me, as we talked about the experience of discovering, in a supposedly familiar work, fresh and unexpected meanings, “So then one is reading a new book?” But no: if the work truly has the living complexity I term “numinous,” it is rather that by one’s own development, by moving along the road of one’s own life, one becomes able to see a new aspect of the book. The newly seen aspect, facet, layer, was there all the time; it is our recognition of it that is new.
Sometimes an artist’s technical consciousness directly, deliberately, contributes to the multi-aspected nature of a work; for example, in Henry James one finds, as well as projective references (back-and-forth cross references), certain “scenes”—in James’s particular sense of pivotal, revealing moments—which work by means of the participation of the reader, who has previously been given enough knowledge of the characters to realize what must be passing through their minds at the moment of the “scene” itself. But there are works of a much simpler design which also provide different consecutive experiences to the reader, listener, or viewer who returns to them periodically, bringing new modifications of need or ability. The degree to which the originating artist was conscious of the manifold import of a work does not determine its actual multifariousness: the great work of art is always greater than the consciousness of its author.
Returning from that statement to the periplum metaphor, one may say, then, that although the architect of the city may have attempted to plan how it would look from all points of the compass as well as from among its streets and squares, he or she could not have foreseen every effect of light, of weather, or of exactly how, in time, certain trees would grow tall, hiding certain buildings, and others would fall, and small new ones be planted. Nor could the architect guess which surrounding hills would become bare from erosion, while others were terraced into new fields, or covered over with villas in a style wholly different from the style of the city; and even less predictable was the city’s appearance to the eyes of strangers from distant places, who one day would look across the water from their passing ship and see the towers pass behind one another and emerge, and again pass and emerge, now in a mountain’s shadow and now catching the light of the rising sun, as if dancing a pavane.
All this the architect cannot know. But if the city is beautiful and alive in its own logic (the logic of what the architect could know) then each perceived arrangement, each revelation of further correspondence between the parts of the city, and between the whole city and its site, is implicit in that logic.
Horses with Wings
(1984)
PEGASUS, A HORSE WITH wings: he flashes into sight of the inner eye with a silvery grace no poet ever possessed. And he is not a poet, not a poem. But to reflect upon him may tell us something new about both; or, more likely, will tell us something old but not recently remembered. For attributes, totems, symbolic images, not only possess their own identities but express something essential of the person or class of persons to which they are attached. And Pegasus is persistently linked to the idea of poetic inspiration.
Hawthorne’s 19th century vision exquisitely saw him thus:
Nearer and nearer came the aerial wonder, flying in great circles, as you may have seen a dove when about to alight. Downward came Pegasus, in those wide, sweeping circles, which grew narrower, and narrower still, as he gradually approached the earth. The higher the view of him, the more beautiful he was, and the more marvelous the sweep of his silvery wings. At last, with so light a pressure as hardly to bend the grass about the fountain, or imprint a hoof-tramp in the sand of its margin, he alighted, and, stooping his wild head, began to drink. He drew in the water, with long and pleasant sighs, and tranquil pauses of enjoyment …” Then, “Being long after sunset, it was now twilight on the mountain-top, and dusky evening over all the country round about. But Pegasus flew so high that he overtook the departed day, and was bathed in the upper radiance of the sun. Ascending higher and higher, he looked like a bright speck….*
But scholarship reminds us that he was not all compact of grace and charm. His antecedents are unpromising—dark and violent—for one whose legend has come down to us as principally benevolent.
What analogies in the activity of poem-making or the nature of poets and poetry may be illumined by his myth? What do his own origins tell us?
HIS PARENTAGE
The father: Poseidon, god of the sea, above all represents the undifferentiated power of the unconscious—a source of life but also of terror. The individual who, admiring poetry, language, Nature, attempts to make verses but is not impelled by some trace at least of that power produces only mediocrity. Just as Poseidon is associated with tempestuous seas rather than with glassy calm, so poems rise up in the poet from intensity of experience, even though they may evoke things calm, delicate, or still, and even though composition, more often than not, takes place when emotion is re-collected, its fragmented elements regathered by the imagination at a later, and externally tranquil, time.
/> Poseidon causes earthquakes, though it might seem that ocean, however stormy, is a remote source for inland cataclysms. Just so may poetry cause personal and social effects distant from it in time or place, setting in motion a chain of events beyond the poet’s will or knowledge, although perhaps consonant with his or her hopes. It is in this propensity that Poseidon the earthshaker calls to mind Shelley’s “legislators” who in our own time are figured forth in a Bertolt Brecht, a Pablo Neruda, a Yannis Ritsos, or a Nazim Hikmet, and also in poets whose work affects the values and vision of their time less explicitly.
Poseidon as an embodiment of fecundity bespeaks the ramifications of such distant effects, wave upon wave into the distant horizon; and here his benign aspect appears, for in rocking, shaking, and opening out the static, passive, and finally receptive earth and making springs both hot and cold to jet from its caves, he causes it to bring forth nourishing plants. Thus does poetry rock and shake and open the mind and senses, moistening their aridity and enabling humans to bring forth their spiritual fruits.
The mother: Medusa. We may say Poseidon, god of the unconscious depths, is a powerful but morally neutral, dual, or ambiguous force; but what are we to make of Medusa? Is there any good to be known of her? Is there any trace of her in graceful Pegasus?
First we must note that Pegasus has an equine heritage on both sides of his family. The primordial force of water—at once nourishing and destructive, symbolic of impetuous desire—is associated very anciently with the horse of night and shadows, galloping out of the entrails of earth and the abyss of ocean. Similarly, Medusa’s legends most anciently seem to place her as a manifestation of the Earth Mother’s terrible and devouring aspects, taking on dragon forms and various other animal guises, including that of a mare. (Demeter herself, often depicted as horse-headed, and not unrelated to the Furies, and bore—to none other than Poseidon—the horse Arion, two of whose feet were human and who could speak like a man.) Medusa, then, although it is said that she was for a time, before Poseidon ravished her, a beautiful maiden—embodies the nightmare, the cauchemar.
New and Selected Essays Page 10