I WANT poetry to change me for the worse. I'm sick of being Joe Perfect all the time. The pressure is getting to me.
I WANT poetry to change me for the worse. I'm sick of being Joe Perfect all the time. The pressure is getting to me.
Hah, my condolences-- unless treated it sounds like it might be a terminal illness. I'd suggest starting off with a good dose of Nietzsche and following up with some Leonard Cohen: "Ring all the bells that still can ring/ forget your perfect offering/ there's a crack in everything/ that's how the light gets in."
On a more serious (?) note though-- do you really want that? I was trying to think of poetry/literature that actually did that and one of the authors who finally came to mind was de Sade (I'm afraid I'm playing rather fast and loose with the category of "poetry"-- perhaps someone more well-versed in poetry than I could come up with a more relevant example though, and one that's not quite as, well, repulsive?). In your quest to be changed for the worse, would you be willing to defend de Sade?
Well, I was jut kidding about the self-improvement. If you look at my earlier posts in this thread, I descried the tendency to discuss "what makes a good poem" by talking about oneself, instead of poetry.
It seems to me that poetry is a form of play -- playing with words and ideas. Robert Frost said that good poetry "begins in delight, and ends in wisdom". Many early forms of literature are even more evidently forms of play: riddles are one example (Tolkien, the scholar of ancient languages knew this when he had Bilbo and Gollum play the riddle game).
Humans use two basic forms of thinking: logic, and analogy. Philosophers reason their way to knowledge using logic; poets use analogy. So when Keats muses on the paintings on a Grecian urn, he concludes that "truth is beauty, beauty truth" not through logical argument, but, instead, using an aesthetic argument. His conclusion is playful and surprising, but persuasive. We WANT truth to be beautiful, and beauty to be truthful. It's a mythic, eternal truth, instead of a mundane and temporal one.
Not all poems are philosophical, like "Ode on a Grecian Urn", of course. Some might simply tell stories. But when we read "The Highwayman", we agree with Noyes that even if no such Highwayman ever lived, there is something both true and beautiful about the notion that
".... still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas.....
A highwayman comes riding....."
The poem has brought the Highwayman to life, like Frankenstein's monster.
Poetic truth is not historical, or scientific, or philosophical. It's a truth of the imagination, surprising, playful, and profound. Science and history evoke working truths -- they are "useful". Poetry evokes a different kind of truth: sacred instead of mundane; eternal instead of temporal; useless instead of useful.
I’d like to start off with— I think we’re on the same page about what criticism can/should be, or at least as much as possible given that I’m self-educated as far at literary critique goes, but I want to make sure. Critique, as you describe it in your house example, can be done as an admiration of pure architecture; as a litany of one’s subjective feelings of being dry/warm; or I would also suggest an in-between, as an admiration for the various things done that keep me warm and dry, which keeps alive the interplay between myself and the text. But that interplay has to be based in my description of the architecture to be accessible to others. The discussion can only continue if we fasten on different details or see the same detail in different ways and are willing to consider each others’ point of view while (re)considering our own. It sounds like you’re willing to entertain the third option so long as it doesn’t collapse into the second(?)
Given that understanding— I understand that you were kidding about self-improvement, but I still think it’s an interesting question, with reference both to my own subjectivity and the work’s “architecture”. If there’s a work that is deliberately constructed to pervert its readers, and it succeeds in doing so, could it be a “good” work? I’ll try to find some specific quotations for tomorrow if by chance this question piques any interest.
I loved your description of analogy and logic. It sounds like you have to accept the analogy, be open and generous to it, in a way that it can’t really control you unless you give it that power (because the linkage doesn’t exist unless you allow it to). With logic, it’s constantly dominating. I’d never thought of it that way before reading your post about “wanting” the analogy. I disagree with the idea of truth/beauty/eternity that this leads to though. As I said above, I don’t know too much about formal literary theory but it seems to me that play is fundamentally about change— inventing the new or transforming what exists— not “mythic eternal truths.” Playing with a child feels like having the rug constantly pulled out from under you because they can’t set things and stick to them, so everything is constantly in flux. Or, take your example of riddles, we’ll say the “thirty white horses on a red hill” one— part of the thrill of the riddle is that it shifts how we see teeth, it animates them, but that shift isn’t the last one to come about. Maybe one day the riddle could be riddled and there could be a different answer that also fits and simultaneously shifts how we see the original question. (I thought this might be what YesNo was leading up to with the “temporality” of the poem— that to continue to exist it must constantly create and recreate its meaning and its existence in different ways)
Perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. I fell in love with the first poem you referenced, “the River Merchant’s Wife”— I’d like to offer a reading of it to complement yours, and try to draw out my point about temporality at the same time. I’m not fond of Pound’s translation, so I’ll be focusing on doors/walls and separations/joinings within the Chinese poem, where there are a few more threads to draw on. (eastasiastudent.net/china/classical/li-bai-changgan-xing/)
The poem begins with the girl playing in front of the door as children, before time and her marking of it even begins (“in the beginning”). They begin with a door (們) that is open.
At 14 when she marries, her face is no longer “open” (開). She inclines her head to the dark wall, showing the wall also between them (doorless or with a closed door)
At 15 she begins to smile, embrace the pillar of fidelity, and then there’s a really ambiguous sentence about ascending a platform to keep watch on her husband? This is the only part that doesn’t have walls or doors— it has the pillar and platform instead. Doors cease to separate, cease to exist— she wants to combine ashes with his. To intertwine a life means to turn the door of the meeting into the platform, the foundation, of a life together.
At 16, he leaves before they can realize this new foundation. In front of the door are the footprints of his departure (the place where they met is the place they part); they one by one grow moss, erasing the signs of his departure and the signs of their separation. She could accept that things have changed and, the signs of his departure fading, she could forget about him and seek some eternal respite (like she did at 15) instead of the constant coming and going of mortal life.
Instead, as an older woman, she chooses to continue to intertwine her life with his. She embraces temporality and seeks to stretch their time together a little longer. She decides to finally exit the door in the last stanza and journey out into the world to meet him, in order to lengthen their time together by accompanying him for awhile, rather than seeking the eternity of their ashes mixed together. Her decision to continue intertwining their lives turns it into an action, though at best a finite one (he’ll leave again) and which must be renewed constantly in creation and future actions to continue to exist.
Even if this poem or this reading touches on some eternal truth, in the same way as the husband and wife's life together, it has to be created and recreated constantly to still exist. No truth remains eternally without work and creation on our part to bring it into this world.
Thanks for the Noyes citation— it was the first time I read him. Would love to talk about that poem as well but this is getting too long already.
The "presence" and "absence" come from reading the first part of Robert Sokolowski's "Introduction to Phenomenology". They are based on "intentionality" which is consciousness "of" something. That something may be considered present or absent both spatially and temporally. In this thread the something we are conscious of is a poem.Originally Posted by Kunikos
I don't think a "book of poems" contains poetry. It contains texts of poems which are projections of real poems so that they can be communicated to others. The real poem is not fully present even to someone reading it at the moment. The reader only gets the words they are aware of through reading at the moment. I would have to say the same thing about a video or audio "text" to be consistent. It also is a projection of some reality that goes through presence-absence aspects as the object of our consciousness.
What this does is makes subjectivity primary and focuses attention from a physical text to something immaterial which we probably don't think can exist but which I claim is what we are conscious of. The poem is absent until it is read when it become partially present. Compare this with a computer "reading" a digital projection of the poem by perhaps scanning it for viruses. The computer does not make the poem present while doing that. Since the computer has no subjectivity, it cannot be conscious of the poem whatever it might do to the data the poem has been projected into.
It is amazing what passes for poetry today. If you said it was a poem, I would give you the benefit of the doubt. In general for me, I put song lyrics in the poetry category by default. I might hesitate with "Bird is the Word" by the Trashmen, but that is certainly not prose either.
One divides texts naively into poetry and prose for some reason that has never made any sense to me. I don't mind calling all of them examples of language use and be done with it. However assuming poetry-prose is a good division, then because of the potential overlap (see "Bird is the Word"), there are four categories to consider: 1) poetry, 2) prose, 3) poetry and prose, and 4) neither poetry nor prose.
It doesn't matter to me which one the random sentence goes under. What matters is my subjective experience of the random sentence. Does it move me? Does it enlighten me? Do I understand something better? What matters is my subjectivity and my subjectivity is linked to your subjectivity since we communicate through language. It may well be linked to the subjectivity of other species through empathy.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
I'll grant that "eternal truths" sounds cheesy (as if they are somehow superior to "facts"). Nonetheless, logic is a system of non-contradiction. Logic can only show what is contradictory, not what is true. (Chesterton wrote, "you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.") Analogy approaches things differently. In fact, competing theories of language and how children learn the meaning of words are logical (structualism; a bird is +feathers, + warm blooded, - scales, etc.) or analogical (children identify animals as "birds" based on their similarity to some archetype -- a robin, perhaps). News is historical and factual. Poetry is separate from history and facts.
IN other words, logic is how we prove that two things cannot be both different and the same; analogy is how we look at two things as being both different and the same.
Nice analysis of "River Merchant's Wife". I don't know much about Pound; I just linked the poem because Yesno doesn't like Pound, and I wanted to torment him.
Thanks for the torment. Actually, on my back burner is a plan to translate some Tang poems using an anti-imagist approach to Chinese.
I agree with you about logic. The assumptions contain the truth (or falsehood) one has found. Logic then takes over to rationalize it.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-22-2016 at 11:53 AM.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
I would say, what does made a melody, a song or a music beautiful, then, that is the same thing that moves a poem.
Rhytm, ryme, verses, assonance, consonance, it is music, and music of poetry touches in the world of words (sorry for the last sentence).
I wish I could speak a better english, to be assertive or persuasive, but what remains to me is a hand full of simple words, and who knows... maybe that is the better way to describe it,
I may be wrong, I think that maybe speech and communication make poetry in it's initial form, and onomatopeas probably makes words, imitation then might create some words, and words thus are connected for the same reason for they are born..
so that they can echo between meaning and sound. Yet it seems a simple argument, isn't it?
But maybe poetry is not so complex in nature as it seems.
Last edited by Eugae; 03-31-2016 at 02:28 AM.
I think a poem or to convey is the author's example and most importantly make impressive reading. I often haunted by the poem right with my mood.
Would agree with this. From the experience of studying (academically and personally), reading and creating poetry, this seems most immediate.
BTW none of this gets you paid IRL, and there are no women here.
J
Good poems come from a spectrum that spans the entire width of literature, from children's poetry to tragic drama.
If we assume some abstraction makes so diverse a body of poems similar in some way we call good, what is it? What ties so diverse a body of work together that they all have in common one thing more highly than any other thing? What is that thing?
Word value. Generally, good poems are intensely worked plots of land, often small, with a high yield. By form, association, rhythm, pressure, echo, allusion, and any other device, the poet with her green thumb nurses her plot of ordinary words to a higher yield, producing extraordinary exhibits.
The words of good poems are examples of permanent arrangements of high word value which are worth keeping, or somehow get kept. They seem to have a permanent battery. These represent standards and watermarks of acheivement in obtaining high value out of few and ordinary words, in any particular category of that broad medium we care to accept as poetry.
Like Walt said in so many words: if it ain't got that sting, it won't mean a thing. We have to trust that the word arrangements of extraordinary green thumbs, because of their high word value and level of concealed energy, will be recognized by enough lovers of such arrangements not to die unheralded.
Last edited by desiresjab; 05-08-2016 at 08:39 AM.
What is "word value"? I agree with Walt: if it ain't got that sting, it don't mean a thing.
Can one objectify word value by checking off different "devices" that the poet uses such as form, association, rhythm, or is it something more subjective? I suspect it is something subjective implying that it cannot be completely objectified.
One test I use for myself when thinking about these concepts is to ask if a computer replaced the human reader or writer, what difference would it make? If a concept is completely objectified, then a computer could completely replace the human.
Last edited by YesNo; 05-08-2016 at 09:38 AM.
If you cannot figure out what word value is on your own, you should find something to talk about besides poetry. If you do not already know of a difference in word value between a newspapaer article and a poem of Yeats, what are you doing here? I am not going to semantically break down every term I use.
I think the question deserves a decent answer."Word value" suggests to me intuitively polysemy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysemy
I think the good poets have that capacity of hitting home, by using common words or common words in an unusual way or in unusual arrangements. And, of course there must be a strong significance behind the arrangment. Anyway, I think it is not just a rational concept. The magic of poetry is that you canīt just reduce it to a mathematical formula.
"A Child Said, What Is The Grass? - Poem by Walt Whitman
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
Walt Whitman"
After reading this poem I guess the meaning of the word grass will never be the same for a human. I think a highly sofisticated PC might perhaps register the different uses of the word. But he would never be able to appreciate them.
Last edited by Danik 2016; 05-08-2016 at 03:39 PM.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
I agree with that. I don't think a computer would be able to say if a poem was "good" or not.After reading this poem I guess the meaning of the word grass will never be the same for a human. I think a highly sofisticated PC might perhaps register the different uses of the word. But he would never be able to appreciate them.
Sometimes thinking about "words" or their objectification in "texts" I find myself forgetting the subjectivity or intentionality that makes a word real as a word rather than as a text.
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