Let us escape to the unreal (2.20.18)

For all its supposed authenticity, poetry is unreal, or surreal. Who talks like this? Who thinks this way? In a way, I guess, the authenticity of the poem is its distance from the real and the mundane and the necessary. Ah! But Billy Collins! Mary Oliver! Ginsberg! Frost! Plath! Bishop! Surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, surreal, and surreal. Because they express themselves poetically, in rhythm and figure. Maybe I'm making too much of the obvious, but that is poetry, heightened language, feeling, thought. Above the real. Meta-speak.

So when it comes time to write a surreal poem, to whom do we turn? Cocteau. Baudelaire. Rimbaud. Maybe Cassidy or Kerouac. Charles Simic. James Tate. The usual suspects. Yet that image of pressure the apple picker feels in the soles of his feet in the Frost poem is beyond the real, is it not?

The surreal, the hermetic, the gnomic, the fabulous and the absurd.  There is a long tradition of poetry that flies in the face of common sense, the ordinary, the linear kind of logic we get in, say, . . . I almost wrote Milton.  But if Paradise Lost isn’t of the absurd, then . . . 

Generally we associate this kind of poetry with children’s tales. Alice in Wonderland.  Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  But The Iliad is a form of the fabulous and the surreal and absurd.  So is A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  In the realm of lyric poetry, occasional poetry, even the so-called "public" poetry (the stuff they read at presidential inaugurations), there is considerable room for the fabulous: Marlowe? John Clare, Jorge Luis Borges, Laurie Anderson? Anne Carson? Take a look at Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" and tell me those fish swimming in a meadow are not the Surreal Image of the Era!

Not to be confused with the nonsensical, or “nonsense” poetry. The absurd, the surreal, the fabulous, make perfect sense, wonderful sense, but only within their own constructs of sense and logic. In these poems, a potato has eyes and a man can walk a bee on a leash and a whale can conceive of the world as nothing more than the tank of seawater in which it swims. A barber can unscrew his hand to wash it in a rice-paper bowl. 

Such poems, when you read them, make complete grammatical and story-telling sense. They have plots and characters and even lessons to teach. But they do so in NOT NORMAL ways . . . and this surprises us. Sometimes it can unsettle us.  Via arresting image, anachronism, leap of language, a mental violence. The surreal opens us up to the absurd landscapes in which we live but to which we have become blindly accustomed. A shopping mall? A courtroom? A suburb? A hardcover book? A telephone conversation? A sacrament? Not to mention your nightly dreamscape.

The poetry of the surreal, the absurd, helps us to access the old, radical, charmed worlds deep inside of us.  Here are some poems that fit the model, more or less, either in total in one or two arresting images/juxtapositions. Which is our project for the next Wednesdays@One . . . to get to that strange place by means of an arresting image or two, a juxtaposition of ordinaries into a new extraordinary. Following are some examples to get you started. 

Examples

(from) The Field of Rooms and Halls

─Richard Siken (2015)

1

A man found a door and hung it on the wall.

I think he thought in rectangles, each day’s bright panel pushed against the next, a calendar of light. He would paint them, all these days, and hang them out of order: an unreliable hotel where no one ever knew which rooms were his, which rooms he had actually been inside of. There were gaps, of course, and sometimes overlaps: days too small to fill their slots, days too large for the day to hold them. And days, no matter what their size, that leaked into the next. A leaky day is a dangerous thing. January and her thirty-two rooms.

2

I put my sadness in a box. The box went soft and wet and weak at the bottom. I called it Thursday. Today is Sunday. The town is empty.

I stood in the road looking forward and back, to see if it would change something. After awhile, I went back inside and tripped over the box.

Driving Around

─Charles Simic (2015)

And then there is our Main Street

That looks like

An abandoned movie set

Whose director

Ran out of money and ideas,

Firing at a moment’s notice

His entire filming crew,

And the pretty young actress

Dressed for the part

Standing with a pinched smile

In the dusty window

Of Miss Emma’s bridal shop.

Used Clothing Store

─Charles Simic (2005)

A large stock of past lives

To rummage through

For the one that fits you

Cleaned and newly pressed,

Yet frayed at the collar.

A dummy dressed in black

Is at the door to serve you.

His eyes won’t let you go.

His mustache looks drawn

With a tip of a dead cigar.

Towers of pants are tilting,

As you turn to flee,

Dean men’s hats are rolling

On the floor, hurrying

To escort you out the door.

Photo Veritable

─David Shapiro (1977)

Clouds cover the earth

Passengers leave but the

clouds remain. The passengers

would like to nestle and ride

in the cancerous breasts

of the sky. But the clouds

are willful and shout as 

they fly: “Dirigent, dirigent

dirigent and wealthy.” You will live

like a god and like it, too.

(from) Mozart in Prague: Thirteen Rondels

─Jaroslav Seifert (1985)

1.

I’d like to play a singing flute,

while these poems are rimed in place!

She wants nothing but a dance,

for her the words are brutal,

and the cold wind rants at the hooded

windows, the dark season’s forgotten face.

I’d like to play a singing flute,

while these poems are rimed in place!

I look for a grave. Fog covers the route.

Gates close behind me, a hand of grace.

No, not yet! Here I stay, my boots

halt as the dead whisper, white and chaste.

I’d like to play a singing flute!

My Felisberto

─James Tate (1997)

My felisberto is handsomer that your mergotroid,

although, admittedly, your mergotroid may be the wiser of the two.

Whereas your mergotroid never winces or quails,

My felisberto is a titan of inconsistencies.

For a night of wit and danger and temptation

my felisberto would be the obvious choice.

However, at dawn or dusk when serenity is desired

your mergotroid cannot be ignored.

Merely to sit near it in the garden

and watch the fabrications of the world swirl by,

the deep-sea’s bathymetry wash your eyes,

not to mention the little fawns of the forest

and their flip-flopping gymnastics, ah, for this

and so much more your mergotroid is infinitely perferable.

But there is a place for darkness and obscurity

without which life can sometimes seem too much,

too frivolous and too profound simultaneously,

and that is when my felisberto is needed,

is longed for and loved, and then the sun can rise again.

The bee and the hummingbird drink of the world,

and your mergotroid elaborates the silent concert

that is always and always about to begin.

A Button

─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)

              The best fairy tales of all are about us, how once we were small. I like most the one about how I swallowed an ivory button. My mother was crying.

From the End

─Zbigniew Herbert (1999)

              And then they set a huge table, and a magnificent wedding feast took place. That day the princess was even more beautiful than usual. Music played. Girls as lovely as moons danced below.

              Well, fine, but what happened before? Oh, let’s not even think about it. A black fortune-teller beats against the windows like a moth. Forty thieves lost their long knives and beards as they were fleeing, and the dragon—changed into a beetle—peacefully sleeps on an almond leaf.

The chaos of a question (2.14.18)

I’ve been thinking about Janet’s request (plea?) for examples of poems built from, or upon one or more questions.  We may be tilling fresh soil here, or at least a rarely tilled field.  Many contemporary poems—and I believe this is a legacy of Modernism—are declarative, assertive to the extreme that asking a question in a poem seems like it has gone the way of the exclamation point: out of fashion.  No self-respecting poet writing today asks too many questions. The poet's job is to provide answers!

Just leafing through a few books taken at random from my own shelves . . . Mark Strand, in his short, elegant book, Man and Camel, asks only five questions among the twenty-three poems incorporated there, one of which is a quote from the Cross in the poem "Poem after the Last Seven Words."  Brad Leithauser puts eleven questions somewhere in the twenty-three poems and seventy-one pages of The Mail From Anywhere, a few of which are tossed off, rhetorical.  John Ashbery is comparatively interrogative-crazy in Where Shall I Wander, asking four dozen questions (many of which are atmospheric, tonal, rhetorical, prosy, and experienced as if you're overhearing a conversation at the next table or someone mumbling into the hearth).  That's 48 discounting the un-punctuated title of the book.

In An Almost Pure Empty Walking, Tryfon Tolides (Penguin Books, 2006) posits fewer than a dozen questions, several of them toss-offs in dialog, until the poem "Questions for My Dead Aunt in the Village," which is a thorough-going Question Poem:

Is there a ring around the moon? Has the weather spoiled?

Have the trains begun? Did you stop gathering wood

as the mountains became dark and the sky opened up?

Have chimneys begun to breathe? Is the church quieter?

Is it cold there Sundays? Do the windows fog?

When it snows, will you still go? Will you sit by the fire?

Have you lifted and secured the latch? Do you hear

the dogs in the dark, as you lie under think wool blankets?

What of the yards, the houses, when spring comes?

Are the neighborhoods alive? Does anyone tell stories late

into the night? Were there mushrooms this year? Who went?

When a poem is made entirely of questions, all answers must be provisional, imagined, and provided by anyone who happens across them because there is no one to answer them for us. “The Tyger,” of course, is a famous example of questions asked but no answers provided.  In the case above, the aunt is not available in multiple ways: she is dead literally, and she is dead textually and therefore our desire for answers goes unfulfilled.  Which is the point of the poem, right?  We must accept that there can be no other answers than the ones we supply.  Meaning what? That the asking of a series of unanswerable questions in a poem is a supremely rhetorical move. How current that feels!  

The Tradition: ask and answer.

The Modern: don't ask.

Post-Modern: ask, don't expect (reliable) answers.

Examples

And when I dug deeper into my shelves, further back in time, for this project I found more poems that are built upon one or two or more crucial questions.  But more often, they are built on a rhetorical frame of question and answer: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's a good (if not entirely true) world in which to live where every question is given its answer.

The Girl I Call Alma

─ Linda Gregg (1975)

The girl I call Alma who is so white

is good, isn’t she? Even though she does not speak

you can tell by her distress that she is

just like the beach and the sea, isn’t she?

And she is disappearing, isn’t that good?

And the white curtains and the secret smile

Are just her way with lies, aren’t they?

And that we are not alone, ever.

And that everything is backward,

otherwise.

And that inside the no is the yes. Isn’t it?

Isn’t it? And that she is the god who perishes:

the food we eat, the body we fuck,

the looseness we throw out that gathers her.

Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me that we are one

and that it’s the others who scar me

not you.

Sonnet 18

─ William Shakespeare (ca. 1595-8?)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely, and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime, too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed.

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.

But they eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair though owest.

Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade

When, in eternal lines to time, thou growest.

So long as men do breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

How Do I Love Thee (Sonnet 43)

─ Elizabeth Barret Browning (ca. 1850)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

What Inn Is This (# 19)

─ Emily Dickinson (ca. 1859)

What Inn is this

Where for the night

Peculiar Traveller comes?

Who is the Landlord?

Where the maids?

Behold, what curious rooms!

No ruddy fires on the hearth ─

No brimming Tankards flow ─

Necromancer! Landlord!

Who are these below?

The poem as list (2.12.18)

One of the most approachable methods for practicing poetry is to make a list. If nothing else, a list encourages another line of language, or image, or other figure, so a writer can propel a poem down the page. The trick is knowing when to stop. Poets have practiced this trick since the beginning of figured language.

"Listing" is an ancient poetic strategy. Open a bible to just about any page and you will find a list of some sort. It's an essential component of the great oral epics. The Illiad is packed with lists, often of warrior lineage, and, in the form of litotes, of war-bragging.  The great sagas (Beowulf, the Nibelungenlied) certainly come to mind. In an oral poetry culture, listing is an aid to memory. More radically, it's one way the ancient mind works. Stylistically, listing emphasizes lyric and incantatory qualities you're not likely to find in more academic, literate composition (that is, in print culture). You won't find it so much among the Scholiasts, and not among the MFA Programs, where it's likely considered a sign of laziness.

Many nursery poems and songs depend on the lulling quality of a list or set of repetitions. "This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb . . ."

Listing, to be sure, can get monotonous. Tonally, a list can sound like pounding sand, or worse, the gavel. Making lists is something everybody does, but not every poet in a poem. Thus, our project for this week at Wednesdays@One, which was to write a "list poem."

The group didn't set out to create a modern saga, of course. Nor did we mean to rewrite the family pedigrees of the Bible.  Our goal wasn't necessarily to tap the spiritual or the mystical or the far-away-and-long-ago. Rather, it was to get some practice establishing rhythm in a poem through repetition . . . WITHOUT REDUCING THE POEM TO TEDIUM OR THE SUPERFICIAL (stuff to pick up at Whole Foods Market).

Everyone found out pretty quickly that making a poem out of a list isn't so easy after all. Doing so involves a delicate balancing of repeated sounds, beats and breaths. Everybody discovered that a good deal of restraint is called for, for a poem that is only a list isn't much of a poem.  But a list strategically inserted into a poem, or a poem strategically organized like a list, when done well, can be a very good poem.

Here are some of the examples we used as entry points to the project . . .

For Every Nail in the Bomb There Was an Act of Kindness

─Martin Ott, 2 River View, Winter 2018 issue

For every song rising above the gathered crowd

there was an edict of night.
For every house missing a door
there was a stranger who held the villains at bay.
For every banned book hidden from the rabble
there was a pyre extinguished by voices.           
For every drone zipping toward its foe
there was a message left for a loved one.
For every outburst of anger billowing to rend
there was a congregation holding on.

from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone

─ Galway Kinnell,  1990

When one has lived a long time alone,

one refrains from swatting the fly

and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike

the mosquito, though more than willing to slap

the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad

from the pit too deep for him to hop out of

and carries him to the grass, without minding

the toxic urine he slicks his body with,

and one envelops, in a towel, the swift

who fell down the chimney and knocks herself

against the window glass and releases her outside

and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,

when one has lived a long time alone.

Song of Myself (Section 42)

─ Walt Whitman, 1855

Ever the hard unsunk ground,

Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides,

Ever myself and my neighbors, refreshing, wicked, real,

Ever the old inexplicable query, ever that thorn’d thumb, that breath of itches and thirsts,

Ever the vexer’s hoot! hoot! till we find where the sly one hides and bring him forth,

Ever love, ever the sobbing liquid of life,

Ever the bandage under the chin, ever the trestles of death.

from Ash-Wednesday 

─ T.S. Eliot, 1930

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign.

. . . .

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.