by Kay Ryan
9. INDIFFERENCE TO OUTCOME. There is no product (quite likely), and this is perfectly satisfactory. “If it does not then [turn into Gosky Patties], it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.” There were expectations, it was important to have expectations, but achieving them doesn’t matter a black pin. Isn’t this the burden of Cavafy’s “Ithaca” as much as “Gosky Patties”? Although I hate to bring in the word burden; the burden here is that there is no burden. I love this blessed release from the goal. I love the feeling of deflation, in general, that one enjoys in nonsense. Take this familiar rhyme:
Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen.
Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
I love the small thing that results from great circumstances. The pussycat goes the long way around to do something she could have done in the next room. When any child repeats this nonsense rhyme she most likely pays no attention to what she’s saying, but some interior overworked overdutiful overintentional windup machinery inside her is relaxed, and that is why this rhyme has lasted without anyone ever worrying about it.
10. FRUSTRATION OF ORDINARY EXPECTATIONS. We do not expect “recipes” to fail. Recipes don’t just wander off like cattle—or pigs. There will always be a transformation of the ingredients into something else. But that’s the fun here; the only transformation is that one is amused whereas one had not been amused. The same argument might be made for contemporary liberties with the sonnet, that their pleasure is somehow bound up with their wandering off from the form.
11. A WONDERFUL SENSE OF HELPLESSNESS. We can do certain (very exact) things to make Gosky Patties, but we have no control over whether or not they work. This of course is the exact delicate state required of poetry writing. We can urge parts (pins, cheese, etc.) together and then we have to hope that they will do their part, somehow becoming active in an enterprise that is beyond us.
12. THE OBJECT IS DELIGHT. Lear is first delighting himself and then his audience. And I would argue that the poet as well as the nonsense writer is delighted by his work, whatever the apparent extremity he may be describing in a poem. Could Hopkins, for example, have been anything but delighted/released by the phrase “time’s eunuch”? Somehow he created an atomic broth (cooked over despair) that twisted these unlikely word partners together into a supremely powerful and economical description of supreme powerlessness and waste. He is, in the moment of calling himself “time’s eunuch,” released from being “time’s eunuch.” I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he actually laughed. I don’t think it would be a rueful laugh, either; it would be joy.
III: MODIFY THE GLEE
I can’t go on any longer without reference to Emily Dickinson, whose work is so buoyed by nonsense that it fairly pops out of the water. When I was first thinking about this relationship between poetry and nonsense I opened my copy of Johnson’s edition of the Complete Poems to find an example in her work, and the book fell open to a remarkable demo poem that I hadn’t previously known. But the truth is, when you’re reading closely, almost any poem can be a great demo poem. Almost any random poem by a great poet can become your private key to their Enigma machine; although the Enigma machine keeps spitting out different daily codes, you will sense the same deep gizmo behind it. For example, everything in Frost has that same ominous something-that-drains-away-the-gold, once you’ve really seen it at work in “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
But here is Emily Dickinson’s “The Morning after Woe” (#364) :
The Morning after Woe—
’Tis frequently the Way—
Surpasses all that rose before—
For utter Jubilee—
As Nature did not care—
And piled her Blossoms on—
And further to parade a Joy
Her Victim stared upon—
The Birds declaim their Tunes—
Pronouncing every word
Like Hammers—Did they know they fell
Like Litanies of Lead—
On here and there—a creature—
They’d modify the Glee
To fit some Crucifixal Clef—
Some Key of Calvary—
Emily Dickinson is a natural in thinking about the cool, ungummifying effects of nonsense on poetry and the liberation nonsense introduces to the spirit. “The Morning after Woe” is a grief-giddy poem, dazzled with loss and filled with extreme invention.
The first two stanzas establish one of those big contrasts so characteristic of Emily Dickinson’s way of constructing a poem, how she rubs rough opposites together so that each side aggravates the other. In this poem the contrast is between the night of woe (probably someone’s death) and the tauntingly joyous morning after.
It’s the last two stanzas I want to get to. Emily Dickinson’s sensitivity this morning (if we agree to think of her as writing this on the morning after a death) is so extreme that the language is exaggerated and speeded up and cartoonlike. The mind is impatient with anything local. It has to find some sort of movers—like the little cast-metal car or boot of the Monopoly board—that can maneuver free of the clingy stuff of the actual unbearable morning. She finds birds. She describes the birds as “Pronouncing every word / Like Hammers.” See how fast she’s moving here from the aural to the physical. She barely slows down as she passes from the sound of birdsong to the still logically related sound of ringing hammers, to the strange shift in logic whereby she keeps the hammer idea, but moves from their sound to their terrible downward weight. The picture is comically impossible; if you think of the birdsong broadcast out (as of a sprinkler, say), it suddenly condenses, going south fast and hard, falling as “Litanies of Lead.” The transmutation from the immaterial sound to the aggressively material hammerheads shifts the poem to a cartoon scene where “here and there—a creature” is getting bonked on the head like Krazy Kat.
Now the game changes again. No more weight; back to abstraction. If the birds knew the painful effect their joyous song was having on the sufferers below, “They’d modify the Glee.” And it’s little wonder the word “glee” should come up here; it’s glee that’s cranking up this poem, delivering it now to another kind of invention dear to nonsense writers, the invented word, “Crucifixal,” nestled against an actual word: the birds would find some other way of singing, some Crucifixal Clef.” With that, Emily Dickinson has invented a whole new musical notation—a new pitch of suffering.
Well, no, not suffering. We are far beyond suffering here. We are in the grip of invention so free that invention invents further, so that the first great trope, nudged by the appetites of rhyme (“Glee”) effortlessly discovers its own restatement: “Some Key of Calvary.” This whole new notational Golgotha at which we arrive is a place discoverable only by language operating on language. The direction of this poem is one of increasing exaggeration and extremity, moving out and out—much as Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—to a condition of understanding which only the poem sustains. In Frost, we know a shivering gold, in Dickinson this painless pitch beyond hearing. I have to think they were both having a wonderful time.
Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions. What is it but nonsense that has taken the grave weight of Frost’s and Dickinson’s poems—the sensible, expressible weight of them: all that is new is soon lost; human grief finds no sympathy in nature—and has left them weightless? Because if these poems, or a Shakespeare sonnet or a Holy Sonnet by Donne, had not had their arguments undone somehow, they would indeed crash upon our heads like hammers.
All feelings must go through the chillifier for us to feel them in that aesthetically thrilling way that we do in poetry. Poetry’s feelings are not human feelings; we know the difference. There is some deep exchange of heat for cool that I’m trying to get at, something that I see ope
rating in nonsense and that I believe gives poetry much of its secret irresistibility and staying power (we are not exhausted by it and must always revisit it). In fact I am sure this mysterious exchange informs all the arts I’m drawn to. Today, again, I’ve found evidence of it in a New York Times article about a puppet theater version of Anne Frank’s diary (“Puppet Show With Dark Tale to Tell: Anne Frank’s,” January 25, 2006). The puppets are Barbie-sized “pose-able mannequins” that two actresses move around in “a giant cutaway dollhouse, an exact replica of the annex rooms where Anne and her family hid.” This unlikely production, which “sounds at first blush like someone’s idea of a bad joke,” succeeds. It is thought to succeed “because puppets, by their very woodenness, force the audience to fill in movements, expressions and interior lives.”
We swarm to a vacuum. We warm a vacuum. That’s nonsense; vacuums can’t conduct heat. That’s funny.
Derichment
Although I want to write about derichment, I recognize the danger: derichment is an idea—idea is too pale—that informs every part of my life. It is the story of my life, its occupation, its goal. To speak of it I must separate it from myself, unweave it from my genetic strands. Derichment is my secret; I will give away my secret.
On the other hand, experience has proven that it is almost impossible to give away secrets. Even when I write them down as clearly as I can, people seem to receive another secret, which is secret from me. I like that. And that’s not all: my own secrets can become secret from me again. Which is to say, having exposed them as best I can—in a poem, say—the secrets remain there, to be visited but not carried away. It is as though I had never whispered them, I am so little changed by what the poem knows. This already has to do with the wonderful processes of derichment, the incalculable mystery by which the world does not grow heavier through its own efforts.
Derichment is a stern faith, according to which it is insufficient to say that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing; the left hand must also not know what the left hand is doing. This, of course, is an ideal, and not fully attainable. Yet one must hold such banners aloft, stitched in gold upon a field of gold. For there are powerful enemy banners, banners reading Profit from Experience! And The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living!
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin again. The actual word derichment recently presented itself to my mind in reaction to the word enrichment. I have always bristled at the idea of enrichment. Children, it is often maintained, must be enriched; bread must be enriched. Weren’t they rich already? That is my big question: Weren’t they rich already? Wouldn’t you have to degrade them somehow in order to make them need enrichment?
But here is derichment in practice, not in theory.
Derichment: The Early Years
In my first year of college, my English teacher, Miss Foley, having confessed herself worn down by the dimness of the previous semester’s Intro to Lit students, told us that although Emily Dickinson was listed on the syllabus, she might skip her our semester, explaining that Dickinson’s poetry was very important to her and that she just couldn’t go through the brutalization again so soon. She said this quietly. Miss Foley was a forbidding and fascinatingly undemonstrative person. I remember her dry one-heh laugh, as though a small seed had stuck in the back of her throat. I also remember the strange Mondrianish business that occupied her hands during her otherwise gesture-free lectures: every few minutes she would look down and rearrange the two or three little stacks of books and papers on her desk, perhaps shifting them from corner to corner, perhaps turning one rectangle perpendicular to another—always unconsciously tidying up, already preparing to leave.
Preparing to leave! Miss Foley had a private life of the mind that she protected, and to which she was eager to return. She wasn’t entirely there for us. This absence was maddeningly attractive. In no time I had my hands on the college library’s copy of the exciting new Johnson edition of Emily Dickinson (Miss Foley had let this information slip).
Here we see the carrot method of instruction at its least impure. The student was not offered a carrot; at most we might attempt to purify ourselves to the point that we might be worthy of being in the same room with a carrot. This is one of the faces of derichment. There are others.
Elvis Presley
In the summer of 1969, as my then husband and I were driving up to the Canadian Rockies, Elvis Presley came on the radio, singing “Don’t Cry Daddy.” As I listened to the lyrics, the pines passing by the car windshield began to warp and blur through my tears. It didn’t matter a bit that the lines were predictable saccharine sentimental emotionally exploitative poshlost.
I understood with a great shock that the controlling part of me could not distinguish this Elvis-induced emotion from the emotion that attached to profound literature. I hated that. But on the other hand, it was new information—and information I could trust because I didn’t want it. This, for me, formative Elvis moment simultaneously demonstrates two major functions of derichment:
1. Hierarchies of sensibilities are a joke
2. Real news only travels through resistance
Sometime Later
When my mother, near the end of her life, inherited sixty thousand dollars from her San Francisco aunt, there were only a few things she could think of to want. She got a newer used car, moving up from a big cruiser of a 1960 Chevy to a more maneuverable later-model Dodge Dart. And she got a brand-new television with a screen modestly larger than her old one; in a mobile home you can’t back up far enough for a really big screen. Then I quit hearing about her getting anything else new. Pretty soon I asked her if she was treating herself to some of the luxuries she could now afford. She said, “Oh, I tried canned salmon, but to tell you the truth I like tuna just as much.”
I got such a kick out of that; such a stunted idea of luxury, I thought. I repeated that story for years to give an idea of my mother. There was also a companion story, about when we’d go to the Basque restaurant out on the same highway that the trailer park was on. The traditional Basque dinner had lots of courses, many more than my mother was used to. She enjoyed it all, the chilled red wine, the iceberg lettuce salad, the marinated tongue, the minestrone, the basket of French bread with butter pats, the family-style bowl of red beans, the bowl of French fries, eventually the main course of two pork chops or lamb chops or slices of prime rib, and then ice cream. At the end of dinner she could be counted on to say, “You know, I could have just filled up on the beans.”
There are several things here to enjoy, and to admire. First, tested by wealth, tested by variety, my mother’s pleasures remained her pleasures. It was not as though she was a shrunken-up person without the capacity for pleasure; she had liked things very well right along—things like tuna and beans. And when presented with other delicious choices, she still liked tuna and beans. It is pleasant to think of a person like that, who genuinely likes what she has. It is also pleasant for a person to be so predictable, to say the same thing over and over as she did. There are ways in which pleasures become deeper when they are repeated. This is bedrock derichment stuff.
The Grand Canyon
The human chest can tolerate quite a lot of canyon, but finally there is a quantity of canyon from which one must turn away, and surely that is the Grand Canyon. This explains why it is so overphotographed. When a person comes to the lip of what she cannot hope to embrace, she is likely to take a picture of it. This makes perfect sense. The picture will capture what she cannot, and therefore, in a magical way, the too-great will not be lost. We have many such methods of convincing ourselves that we have embraced things that in truth defy us. We have big libraries of photographs and videotapes that we hope are holding onto things until we can get back to them.
“Free, Quiet and Alone”
A great agent of derichment is enforced bed rest. Many of the distractions to which one is susceptible upon getting up do not visit the bed.
Although perhaps, upon further
reflection, it isn’t only the bed that advances derichment; perhaps if one remained anywhere without being able to shift, the same benefit would obtain. Consider, for example, the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s assistant bookkeeper’s desk, his torment, his liberation.
But it is Matisse’s bed that has presented itself to my mind. Matisse was apparently an ordinary boy. By twenty he had become a law clerk and showed exceptional promise for nothing other than remaining one. Then came the appendicitis operation. To amuse him during his long convalescence, Matisse’s mother gave him a paint set and a how-to-paint book. While painting, Matisse felt, as he had never felt before, “free, quiet and alone.”
The rest, of course, is histoire. But I wanted to underscore the importance of external limitation here. It is the vacuum created by being denied his usual occupations that allowed Matisse the discovery of his deepest self.
Through an act of gratuitous symmetry, Matisse’s great career ended with his again being restricted to bed and again finding liberation through limitation. With painting now denied him, he turned to scissors and colored paper to create the dazzling cutouts by which he changed the face of art once more.
It can be a good thing, then, to feel trapped, cut off, at your wit’s end, bored silly, left out, tricked, drained. We need to hear that gurgle when the straw probes futilely for more Coke. We need to be deriched.
I Go to AWP
A LIFETIME OF PREFERRING NOT TO
I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers’ conferences.
It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me. I have never taken a creative writing class, I have never taught a creative writing class, and I have never gone, and will never go, to anything like AWP, I have often said.