by Kay Ryan
Ideal Audience
Not scattered legions,
not a dozen from
a single region
for whom accent
matters, not a seven-
member coven,
not five shirttail
cousins; just
one free citizen—
maybe not alive
now even—who
will know with
exquisite gloom
that only we two
ever found this room.
I can’t tell you how much pure elation this gives me. I included it in an anthology called Joy, though in the end I think it’s a poem of almost irremediable loneliness. Almost irremediable. The connections one makes through poetry are not complete, but there is joy in that. Perhaps I should say and there is joy in that, because one of the things that art teaches is that we are connected in ways at once too deep to reach in any other way, and yet beyond the reach of art. This is, for some poets, so much a matter of sound. The music of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” which Ryan says is an utterly anti-Christian poem, seems to me to offer a solace that is more powerful (and certainly more durable) than any sermon I have heard. Ryan is exquisitely attentive to this solace, because she is exquisitely attentive to sound. For all her insistence on lightness, deftness, the “dissolution of weight,” she knows that great art demands a release into all that you do not understand but understand your very survival depends upon. She also knows the necessary deformities that great poetry emerges from, temporarily ameliorates, and, alas, exacerbates. “We truly see that the difficult Wallace Stevens we sense from the poems was not a pose or a reduction but a very brave and unrelenting articulation of his own impossibility.”
Impossibility. There’s that word again. The manhole cover still bobbing and belling above the flood.
What a triumph this book is, partly because it is more than a book. Ryan has forged—no other verb will do, for it has taken great patience and will—a style of art that is also a style of life. Such strong economy comes with limitations, of course, but the compensations are immense. It is a style capable of withstanding great pressure. It repels all manner of cant, gush, and less-than-exquisite gloom. Sometimes just a drop of it serves as a kind of existential smelling salts: “She gives us poems in shapes that might result in a chamber free of the heart’s gravity.” It’s not a fashionable notion. That limits liberate, that there can be in some forms of refusal the greatest freedom (another crucial word for Ryan’s aesthetic), that all life’s troubles and treasures might be—I think of Julian of Norwich suddenly seeing all of creation in a single hazelnut—a matter of syntax. Again and again you think to yourself: this lightness can’t be all there is. And it isn’t. It’s more that “all there is” is, for a moment, lightness. “Give me a lever and I could move the universe,” said Archimedes. Keen readers have known for years that Ryan’s poems are such levers. Now the world will learn it of her prose.
Christian Wiman
I
A Consideration of Poetry
I: POETRY IS FUNNY
I have always felt that much of the best poetry was funny. Who can read Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, “That’s too much nonsense,” but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry, it so often makes me want to laugh.
Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast-iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, occasionally producing a bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.
For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of every sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that the poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right.
I would like to offer as an illustration a poem that has always elicited from me one of those involuntary ha!s that jump out when you’ve witnessed a wonderful magic trick. You might say that isn’t funny; you might say you’d just been punched in a way that had exacted a ha! Maybe that ha! is the body’s natural response to perfection: a perfect trick (one has been utterly deceived) or a perfect poem (one has been utterly deceived).
In any case, here is the poem, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Where is the laughter? you ask. Well, don’t ask yet. For now please settle for a more generalized sense of amusement, of the high-toned T. S. Eliot variety (The Sacred Wood):
Poetry is a superior amusement. I do not mean an amusement for superior people. I call it an amusement, an amusement pour distraire les honnêtes gens, not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more false. If we think of the nature of amusement, then poetry is not amusing; but if we think of anything else that poetry may seem to be, we are led into far greater difficulties.
I love two things about Eliot’s definition. First, the bedrock, indefensible truth of it: that poetry is a superior amusement. Second, Eliot’s mess of an attempt to explain what he means. I am heartened in my own efforts when I see his bluster. I am reminded by him that though we cannot be exactly precise or complete, that is no reason not to make gigantic statements, for there is great enjoyment in gigantic statements.
But to return to Frost’s poem. I have chosen it because it’s about as funny as the Farmer’s Almanac. Had I chosen “The Windhover,” there would be the obvious near gibberish that comes from Hopkins’s supersaturated rhyming and his strange bulging liberties with sense, but Frost’s poem couldn’t be less gibberishy or less apparently nonsensical.
What could be more straightforward? The title is repeated as the last line—as though this little stack of an eight-line poem were a bitter sandwich with a filling compounded of evidence that nothing gold can stay. The gold that precedes green in new plants? Pfft! The way little new leaf clusters on trees look like flowers? Again, pfft! And notice that by the second couplet we have already moved away from the literal “gold” that exists briefly before the “first green” and are beginning our relentless slide into metaphorical gold—in the sense of something precious—with the flower’s superiority to the later leaf. Now things speed up geometrically, as “leaf subsides to leaf.” There is no doubt of Frost’s meaning here: the early, the delicate, the golden—all go down, buried under the grosser, heartier, darker, more leathery giant repulsive leaves of maturity and stink.
But that’s just in the natural world; how about humankind? Another pfft!: “So Eden sank to grief”—another ring of maturity and stink. Look at how Frost intensifies the sensation of falling (or being overcome) with his choice of verbs: first that unnerving “subsides” among the leaves, now full-out “sank” for man: something is always pulling the plug and draining the gold.
Well, so it goes for nature, and for humanity, but there’s still the planet; how about it? Pfft!: “So dawn goes down to day.” It is odd, this thought of dawn (a kind of gold) defeated by day. We usually say, “day breaks,” or “the sun comes up,” something to suggest a beginning, an opening, a rising and spreading. Not here; here day is a cor
rupter, a violence that drives dawn down. No trick in this poem: nothing gold can stay.
Except wait a minute! Has gold ever been more manifest than in this poem? Nothing makes us treasure something like feeling we’re right then losing it. This poem is all trick; Frost spreads before us (like a magician’s deck) the gold of the first green, the early flower, Eden, and dawn, one after another, snatches them away, and still the gold remains; it’s suspended within the poem shivering between being and being palmed.
And that’s poetry, this impossible pang, which seen another way is a tremendous bullying job to which we submitted before we knew it. We’re done for so fast we can’t stop to think, “Who SAYS leaf subsides—rather than advances—to leaf, or that dawn goes down—rather than expands—to day?” Too late; we’re stuck in Frost’s little house, shingled in with the overlapping arguments; nailed down with the tidy rhymed couplets. It’s the strangest thing; the poem is a trap—that is a release. It’s a small door to a room full of gold that we can have any time we go through the door, but that we can’t take away.
Ha!
At about nine months, a baby starts to laugh when something is suddenly taken away from her. One of a baby’s first games is peek-a-boo, where someone repeatedly disappears and reappears (the enjoyment of which is, incidentally, considered a key indicator of later language acquisition skills). Frost’s poem could be thought of as a kind of peek-a-boo. The rhythm of its repeated take-aways may go all the way back to our deep early enjoyment of loss, which we register with laughter.
If this strikes you as nonsense, it is. Something nonsensical in the heart of poetry is the very reason why one can’t call poetry “useful.” Sense is useful; you can apply things that make sense to other circumstances; you can take something away. But nonsense you can only revisit; its satisfactions exist in it, and not in applications. This is why Auden and others can say with such confidence that poetry makes nothing happen. That’s the relief of it. And the reason why nothing can substitute for it.
II: GOSKY PATTIES
Now would be a good time to think more about the elements of nonsense when it sails under its own colors. And where better to look for them than in a small nonsense recipe by Edward Lear:
TO MAKE GOSKY PATTIES
Take a Pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of currants, 3 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and six bushels of turnips, within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.
Then procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quires of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown water-proof linen.
When the paste is perfectly dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom. If he squeals, beat him again.
Visit the paste and beat the Pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.
If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.
—The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear
(Dover, 1951)
Many of the nonsense elements that animate Gosky Patties animate poetry as well:
1. AN INVENTED GOAL. Nobody, previously, wanted Gosky Patties made, just as no one wants a poem made. There is the occasional requirement of poets laureate to memorialize a bridge but that hardly counts. In general, one does not “find a need and fill it,” as Henry Ford urged inventors to do. There is no need which precedes either nonsense or a poem. The creator is entertaining him or herself.
2. COWBIRD TECHNIQUE. Just as the cowbird lays her eggs in another bird’s nest, nonsense is built inside the nest of some traditional form. It isn’t just shapeless. Here, in “Gosky Patties,” Lear takes over the recipe. Sometimes it’s a botany or an alphabet. Or, on a smaller scale, a nonsense word may be fitted into the nest of perfectly good sense. Take “Gosky Patties” here, or, in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “runcible spoons.” Nonsense’s habit of taking up residence in something formal creates a feeling of order and propriety. Similarly, the poet occupies some sort of form. This may be the traditional form the poem takes, a sonnet or a villanelle, or simply a rhyme scheme. Or it may be a type of poem—say an epithalamium. Or it may be something else, perhaps a definition, or a list, or a claim to explain something. (I myself like to write “how-something-works” poems.) These things lend order and propriety. Form gives us confidence that we are not wasting our time on shapeless nonsense. (That’s a joke of course; nonsense is always shaped. You can distinguish real nonsense from garbage because nonsense is shaped and tense.)
3. EXACTNESS. The nonsense writer is exact about things that only become important because he is exact about them: “Take a Pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg.” There is little slop here. Similarly, the exactness of a poem’s distinctions makes us feel that the distinctions matter. We suddenly care, for example, when Marianne Moore describes the shell of the paper nautilus in her poem by that name, with its “wasp-nest flaws / of white on white.” We just feel that something precise is something important.
4. INCONGRUITY. Nonsense revels in working incompatible elements “into a paste.” For example, “some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quires of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins.” The poet too feels that things which bear no outward relationship to one another must nonetheless be brought into proximity. Think of Marianne Moore’s connection of “mussels” to “injured fans” in “The Fish.” Or simply think of “injured fans”; that’s great enough.
5. A SENSE OF IMMINENCE. Lear’s instructions contain the faith that something is about to happen: “ascertain if … the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.” Things are on the verge of coming together—which is more exciting than things having actually come together, of course. A poem, for both the writer and reader, must have this same buildup, as to a sneeze. Nonsense is not directionless, any more than a poem is; both must have the feeling of going someplace. Nonsense, like poetry, is a kind of game, with rules or requirements. Neither is pointless, endless play, like that endless horsies whinnying and prancing thing girls do, or that strange martial arts sequence by which small boys advance through rooms. Play assumes that there is no end. Game (nonsense and poetry) assumes there is—if only for the sake of seeing it thwarted.
6. A HIGHLY PERSONAL IDEA OF CAUSE AND EFFECT. Lear insists that there is a relationship between the pig, the pig’s placement, the pig’s diet, the beating of the pig, and the paste, which may bring about Gosky Patties, although then again it may not. We must accept all this on faith for we know nothing about such things. We simply know that there is cause and effect in nonsense, as we know it in a poem—some interior machinery that must strike and tap and rotate in a particular sequence to get something to happen, beknownst only to the author. As readers, we like this. It’s nice not to be in charge of cause and effect all the time, as we feel we are in “real life.”
7. THE READER IS MADE INTO A CO-CONSPIRATOR. This is in contradiction to the previous point, which is not a problem. We are treated both peremptorily and as equals. It is assumed—wrongly, of course—that the reader shares the knowledge of what Gosky Patties would be if they were to become themselves. There is this sense of shared delicate sensibility between reader and author about this: the reader must use judgment equal to the author’s: “Visit the paste and beat the Pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties.” You’ll know what to do.
And so of course with poetry. We have the flattering feeling in reading a poem that we are somehow creating it. We’re sending it where it goes. And in a way this is absolutely true, since the poem is only reconstituted by our act of reading and understanding, the letters otherwise quite helpless on the page. One might
note, further, that in both the case of Lear’s nonsense and in a poem, the thing that is being asked of us, such as knowing when Gosky Patties are about to form, may be pure hokum. We may understand it as hokum, and remain exactly as willing to get on with the show. Perhaps more willing, since who wants more practical outcomes.
8. A PERFECT ABSENCE OF SENTIMENT. The pig’s feelings do not concern us. The pig is provided endless (primarily) tasty food (except the candle). The pig is at the same time beaten: “… beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a large broom… . Visit the paste and beat the Pig alternately for some days.” If the whole doesn’t turn into Gosky Patties, “the Pig may be let loose.” (We may ask, What might have become of the pig if the Gosky Patties had occurred? But we are given no hint … except in the terrible word, “Patties.”) If we had feelings about the pig, this would not be fun for us. I believe that feelings, attached feelings that is, are also dead weight in a poem. We mustn’t be feeling things for the poor tethered pigs in poems; poems are to liberate our feelings rather than to bind them. If a poem sticks you to it, it has failed. Consider the example of the death of Lesbia’s sparrow, as described by Catullus, that “has hopped solitarily / down that dark alleyway of no return.” Our sentiments are stuck neither to the bird nor to Lesbia’s grief over its death, but, through Catullus’s tone of mock gravity, are connected to something truly grave: that implacable force that “swallows up all beautiful things” (The Poems of Catullus, translated by Peter Whigam).