Sunday, August 26, 2018

What Am I? - Riddles and the poetry we make of them (8.26.18)

If you’re like me, you can’t help but be fascinated by a good riddle, but also be a little intimidated. Rare is the occasion when I figure out the answer to the question every good riddle asks: What (or Who) Am I?  Riddles traditionally express the most obvious things—like a good joke—in ways that you may not anticipate. And like a Marx Brothers joke, they don’t make it easy for you.  You may not get them right away, or ever. Getting them depends on a lot of shared cultural equipment. 

Riddles have been with us since the first utterances of the Greek and Roman oracles. In an oracle, the riddle is fate disguised: think Oedipus or Macbeth, or the traveler keeping an appointment in Samarra.  In this sense, riddles are about intelligence and recognition, or, to put it in more modern terms, unintended consequences.  Poems and riddles of the oracular kind are cousins.  They are speech acts that bear multiple, sometimes contrary meanings that are not necessarily obvious, and that therefore reward “close readings.” Most riddles that I’m familiar with, like jokes, and like poems, but unlike oracles, won’t kill you if you don’t get them.

Outside of these life and death riddles, there are commonplace or quotidian riddles, records of daily life.  There exist some 60-70 riddle poems which one scholar describes as “a series of thumbnail sketches of the daily realisms of Old English life. They are . . . a listing of the things with which man’s life was woven: the birds and animals of country life, man’s food and drink, the tools with which he worked, the armor and weapons with which he fought, his instruments of music.”[1]  The surviving examples read more like short lyric poems than riddles, possibly because they don’t translate so well into Modern English.  Here is an example:

Anchor

Oft I must strive  / with wind and wave,
Battle them both / when under the sea
I feel out the bottom / a foreign land.
In lying still / I am strong in the strife;
If I fail in that / they are stronger than I
And, wrenching me loose, / soon put me to rout.
They wish to capture / what I must keep.
I can master them both / if my grip holds out,
If the rocks bring succor / and lend support,
Strength in the struggle. / Ask me my name!

The translator provides the title to this riddle. An Anglo Saxon wouldn’t have needed or wanted it.  “Riddling” in the Eighth Century was not merely a game of literary hide and seek but also a specialized use of metaphor.  If you recall from our session on it, metaphor entails an implicitly stated comparison of one thing to another, that is, without using “like” or “as”: the sun drives his chariot from East to West.  In a riddle, one half of the comparison is concealed (and sometimes personified) or rendered inexplicit: I drive my chariot from East to West. And then the inevitable question: What Am I?

Give it a try.  Can you name the thing this riddle riddles?

My house is not quiet / I am not loud;
But for us God fashioned / our fate together.
I am the swifter, / at times the stronger,
My house more enduring, / longer to last.
At times I rest; / my dwelling still runs;
Within it I lodge / as long as I live.
Should we two be severed, / my death is sure.

Here’s the main thing about riddles, whether they are expressed lyrically or otherwise: something important is not named.  Think of all the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote in this vein, about the narrow fellow in the grass (snake) or the visitor in marl . . .

A Visitor in Marl
Who influences Flowers
Till they are orderly as Busts ─
And Elegant ─ as Glass ─

Who visits in the Night ─
And just before the Sun ─
Concludes his glistening interview ─
Caresses ─ and is gone ─

But whom his fingers touched ─
And where his feet have run ─
And whatsoever Mouth he kissed ─
Is as it had not been ─

Something else that’s peculiar to riddles and especially riddle poems: clues.  All riddles present clues such that, if you read them carefully enough, you’ll be able to answer the question, What Am I?  And you can because you are already more or less familiar with the clues presented by the writer. (Riddle poems are, in this sense, like little detective stories!)  The answer to the question What Am I? must be “discoverable” in the end; otherwise, the riddle is merely obscure, right?  The poem below is a famous example of what I’m talking about.  E. E. Cummings wrote it. The answer to What Am I? depends entirely upon your familiarity with—indeed, your deep understanding of—typographical culture.

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
E. E. Cummings, 1932, 1935

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint (o-
aThe) :l
eA
!p:
S                                                                                                          a
(r
rIvInG                                                  .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                                                                                        to
rea (be) rran (com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;


Now, you might think you get the answer to What Am I? in the last line of the poem, but that’s only one more clue.  So, tell me then: what’s the answer to What Am I? in this poem?

Finally, here’s a poem whose riddle boggles, until it doesn’t.  It’s by William Heyen.

Riddle

From Belsen, a crate of gold teeth,
from Dachau, a mountain of shoes,
from Auschwitz, a skin lampshade.
Who killed the Jews?

Not I, cries the typist,
not I, cries the engineer,
not I, cries Adolph Eichmann,
not I, cries Albert Speer.

My friend Fritz Nova lost his father
a petty official had to choose.
My friend Lou Abrahms lost his brother.
Who killed the Jews?

David Nova swallowed gas.
Hyman Abrahms was beaten and starved.
Some men signed their papers,
and some stood guard,

and some herded them in,
and some dropped the pellets,
and some spread the ashes,
and some hosed the walls,

and some planted the wheat,
and some poured the steel,
and some cleared the rails,
and some raised the cattle.

Some smelled the smoke,
some just heard the news.
Were they Germans? Were they Nazis?
Were they human? Who killed the Jews?

The stars will remember the gold,
the sun will remember the shoes,
the moon will remember the skin.
But who killed the Jews?


For next week, then, let’s see whether we can write poems that function as riddles, that is, in which some central idea or object is not named but is alluded to, its properties, uses or behavior described, and is hinted at in other ways.



[1] An Anthology of Old English Poetry, trans. Charles W. Kennedy. New York: Oxford U Press, 1960.  The riddles cited are from a collection called The Exeter Book.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Satire (8.22.18)

Satyre     

I’m using the old Elizabethan spelling of “satire,” as I first studied it seriously in a course in Elizabethan poetry and prose writing.[1] I suspect that most people go immediately to “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan Swift, when looking for examples of satire. No doubt this is because most people who’ve studied (i.e., been forced to study) satire as literature read that essay as part of some high school or college assignment on the subject. Teachers love to teach “A Modest Proposal” because that piece exhibits one particular kind or flavor of satire—irony—in such a way as they get to have some laughs at their students’ expense, much in the way Swift surely got some laughs out of the public reaction to his writing.

So irony is the Number One component of satire for most of us, for better or worse.  Here’s what I mean: Swift wrote the piece to draw attention to the mistreatment of the Irish by the English in 18th Century England, and in London’s ghettos in particular.  That phrase “to draw attention to” is the defining purpose of satire, by the way.  But he wanted to “speak” in a persona other than his own. Swift himself was of course outraged by the poverty, destitution, starvation, squalor and inhumane conditions in which the Irish lived under English rule. He was even more outraged—incensed, indeed—at the lack not only of compassion on the part of the English bourgeoisie, but their apparently willful ignorance of the plight of the Irish. Speaking directly, Swift might have stood on a soap box in some square and shouted at passersby.  But who listens to these crazy people?  No, to get his point across, he must appear not crazy but reasonable.  Thus, a modest, reasoned, carefully thought-through proposal to rid the Kingdom of street urchins and their filthy ways by . . . eating them.

Swift was attacked in some mainstream journals for seriously proposing such a solution to London’s mean and dirty streets in 1750.  Which is precisely why teachers of Freshman Comp and Lit Survey courses in America love teaching “A Modest Proposal”!  Jonathan Swift, the man of conscience, meant exactly the opposite of what the persona of “A Modest Proposal” proposed, and anybody who understood satire and irony would get that immediately. The point for us: Swift was not drawing attention to the plight of the Irish in London in the middle of the 18th Century. Rather, he drew attention to the willful ignorance of Londoners about what was then going on in their midst.  He was rubbing his fellow citizens’ noses in their own refusal to acknowledge suffering.

So you can begin to see why Swift chose satire for his vehicle instead of direct appeal. If his fellow citizens refused to see what was daily before them, they would not hear “mere facts.”[2]  They had to be drawn in first, fooled, so that the truth could be revealed to them—the “truth,” again, being not the plight of the Irish, but their own self-lying about it.  Satire was the perfect instrument for accomplishing this.

Satire, then, is a shadowy enterprise, unlike diatribe which is plein-aire and in your face.  Where jeremiad and mere scolding come at you head on, satire insinuates itself.  It draws you in, it implicates you first, so that you are invited to see yourself in it.  A fine recent example of a bit of satire in American politics: last spring, at a high school commencement in a decidedly red state, the Valedictorian delivered a speech to the assembled parents in which he quoted “Donald J. Trump”: “Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.” Thunderous applause. Then he corrected himself: actually, it was Barack Obama who said that. Total silence, even a boo.

Point made. In politics, the messenger’s ideology outweighs the message by far.  Or, put differently, in politics we don’t really hear the message, just our own ideology.

“A Modest Proposal” is satire in prose form. But, more to our interests, how does it look in poetry?  Here are two examples from Howard Nemerov (1920-91), a poet known for his satirical bent. 

Style

Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero’s fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his waking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
moreover, they are not deformed by style,
that fire that eats what it illuminates.



Ars Poetica
      Howard Nemerov

(apologies to Mr. MacLeish and Miss Moore, 
but the poet who inspired this one was a real toad 
with imaginary gardens in him)

Even before his book came out
We knew there wasn’t any doubt
That these was poems forevermore,
Such as the guy wrote the slogan for:
They wuz not mean, they wuz—
Big pear-shaped poems, ready to parse
In the next Creative Writing clarse.
Yeah, he sure fell flat on his ars
Poetica that time, palpable and mute
As an old globed fruit.

These two examples are what you might call gentle satire, the kind that only pokes fun. Like the Swift piece, they intend to draw attention to something, in this case, art and the practice of it—usually badly or falsely—and so are forms of cultural satire.  Also like the Swift piece, they have their share of irony: the voice of the poems may or may not be that of Nemerov himself, but authenticity of voice isn’t really the point. The point of these two poems is self-deprecation or, self-satire, if you will.  The poems are as bad as they claim their subjects to be.  Behind them, and behind the persona that speaks them, stands the poet himself—at a remove—commenting on art and culture, which of course include him and his own output.

Most often, when we think of satire, we think of political and religious satire.  These forms of satire can be more or less direct, sometimes verging on invective, diatribe, jeremiad, and all mean to shed a light on false assumptions, mindless belief, faulty reasoning, hypocrisy and so forth.[3]  In modern poetry, you can find satire in one form or another in the Eliot poems, like The Wasteland, and throughout Pound’s poetry, like “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” Some of it was “acid satire,” and anti-Semitic as well.[4]

W. H. Auden was a master at the satirical thrust, especially in short, epigrammatic forms:

A dead man
who never caused others to die
seldom rates a statue.
·
The last king
of a fallen dynasty
is seldom well spoken of.
·
Few even wish they could read
the lost annals
of a cudgeled people.
·
The tyrant’s device:
Whatever Is Possible
Is Necessary.
·
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love Liberty.
·
Patriots? Little boys,
obsessed by Bigness,
big Pricks, Big Money, Big Bangs.
·
Assembling
with ceremonial pomp,
the Imperial Diet

gravely debated
legislation
it had no power to reject.
·
Victorious over
the foreign tyrant,
the patriots retained

his emergency
police regulations,
devised to suppress them.
·
Meet the new boss,
Same as the old boss . . .[5]

You might begin to see, or in this case hear, the satirical tone: acerbic, acid, a bit comic, weary, knowing, ironic, but with serious undertone.  It is commentary in literary form, and in this sense it is Latin, because it means to entertain while educating.  In the hands of lesser poets (if I may say so, this means us), it can be acerbic and knowing and ironic, and even funny, but usually is not what I’d call “literary.” It often is merely clever,[6] as in this poem that I wrote last year . . .

Forty-five
—an inaugural poem—

Let us pause today to pray for President Tweet,
The hair, the hands, the ever excitable ego.
He has big shoes to fill with his little feet.

No difference foe or faux pas, just hit delete,
A thumb on the Trigger or on Twitter, oh
Let us pause today and pray for President Tweet.

The border wall?  A most ingenious REIT,
One you’ll invest in as well, and soon, amigo.
The shoes must be filled.  So what he has little feet?

SCOTUS has an opening.  Woohoo!  Sweet!
We’ll adjust the Founders’ Vision as we go,
But first, pause and pray for President Tweet.

O amber waves of grain and modified wheat!
Seriously, the ACA for a lumbago?
Time for the Big Boy shoes, bring on the feet.

We’re back!  So back!  We’re gonna rebuild the Fleet.
We’ll turn Cuba into Hotel Gitmo.
Today, let us pause to pray for President Tweet.
He has big shoes to fill with his little feet.




[1] Would have been Indiana University, some time around 1970, if you’re interested.
[2] Now doesn’t that sound familiar?!
[3] There’s a very good reason, historically, that satire is so prevalent in 18th Century Western writing, that century representing the height of the Enlightenment.
[4] Which should serve as a cautionary note that satire respects no particular frame of reference. Alex Jones can use it as well as any liberal pundit; Donald Trump used acid satire liberally during the 2016 campaign.  At some point, in more brutish hands, the satirical impulse turns into mere put-downs and ridicule, no?
[5] Okay, this one is cribbed from The Who.
[6] You can easily argue, of course, that the examples from Auden are just that.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Meter (8.8.18)

Consider this: the accentual signature of the metrical foot “iamb” is actually a “trochee”: an iamb is stressed as in “today,” but the word itself is stressed as in “soda,” metrically a trochee.

Margaret raised an interesting point during last week's Wednesdays@One: when writing poetry, we can sometimes become stuck in iambic meter, the da-DA da-DA da-DA da-Da of so much English and American poetry we read in school and that our elders taught us is the “language” and the “rhythm” of poetry.  Especially if the "we" we're talking about has limited experience with poetry.

A fellow I know (actually, I’ve heard quite a few writers say something like this) likes to announce that he’s “old school—it’s not poetry if it doesn’t rhyme.” But what he really thinks poetry is all about is iambic tetrameter.

What's that? Here’s a famous example:

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.

The whole poem beats exactly like these two lines. Each line is built upon a series of four iambs. An iamb is a metrical “foot” of two beats, the first unstressed and the second stressed. What’s more, each line contains exactly eight syllables. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is, precisely speaking, an instance of accentual-syllabic meter in poetry. This system of metrical prosody just means that both the number of syllables and the number and postition of accents are strictly observed in a line or a phrase.

English prosodists (specialists who professionally scan verse for meter and accent) have argued that the iamb is the defining beat of the language. “How far I’d go to argue this, who knows?” Many have said that iambic tetrameter or pentameter, despite their rising rhythm, tend to lull the ear. And in the hands, so to speak, of an unskilled poet, they can be relentless.

So why did Frost choose this meter for his poem? One answer might be that the rhythmical pattern is recognizable, in fact, recognizably homespun in a New England way: approachable, friendly, and positive, rising from beginning to end.  Another might be that Frost was selling some very deep art to a reading public that required a familiar vehicle, rather like the peanut butter pill pocket my wife uses to medicate our dog from time to time, or the Flintstones Vitamins you might have given your kids when they were little. “Stopping by Woods” is a poem deeply about the allure of death (or the end of struggle), and its pull on us, that “I give up” feeling we all have experienced. And if you stop to consider the language and images—deep woods, lonely path, silence, snow, darkness, cold, frozen prospect, stillness—it’s hard to miss the poem’s implication. That relentless da-DA, da-DA of every line only reinforces the lulling quality of the deep, dark, cold and snowy woods the poem’s speaker has stopped to contemplate. It’s all rather inviting!

But as I say, in the hands of an inexperienced writer, this subtle connection between a poem’s technical form and its psychology is often not even countenanced, let alone attempted. And so we sometimes wind up sounding like little Edwardian drummers when we ought to be listening to our own modern usages, breaths, rhythms, beats, and incorporating these into our poems.

I think all of us at W@1 do listen, more or less to the rhythms and cadences of our everyday speech. I can’t recall anyone’s serious efforts coming off in a strictly accentual-syllabic format.[†] In fact, I don’t believe anyone among us is really capable of—or interested in—writing strictly accentual-syllabic verse, much less in creating iambic tetrameters or pentameters. We all read more widely than the poetry of the accentual-syllabic, and so we all are exposed to more contemporary rhythms and beats. If you read living American poets, then you’re familiar with American phrasing and breaths and pace, you already understand what can be done with slang, commonplaces, compression, elision, ellipsis, caesura, silence, syncopated beats, clipped words, conversational tone, as well as you understand the older conventions of meter, syllable, accent, and so forth.

I’m guessing you, the writers in W@1, struggle not so much with iambs, dactyls, anapests and trochees as with, to speak less technically, beats, breaths, pacing, stress, and, if I may extend this idea, with how to deploy a beat or a breath or tone or speed of a phrase in any unit of meaning. Should it support the meaning or undermine it? Should it be blunt and visible or should it remain subtle? And how to know the difference? In a way, it’s the same problem we sometimes have in choosing outfits to wear: Should the shoes match the handbag or clash with it? Should my socks match my pants or my shirt? Should I wear a white belt? Does this tie go with my jacket? How much color coordination is too much?

These are all good problems to have. It will be fun to try writing a poem without using any iambs--our project for next week--but don’t expect too much success. Even though we all tend to write rhythmically rather than metrically, the occasional iamb will slip in. it will slip in because it is natural to spoken English.  Maybe the better challenge for this week will be to try to write a poem—or at least some lines—with iambs. At the very least, this will encourage us to pay attention to syllables, stress, and  . . . wait for it . . . sound.


[†] A number of poems I have shared with you have approached these stricter forms. I sometimes try to write this way as a means of practicing “the numbers,” but the results are invariably weak, in my opinion.

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Ways of looking: poems that see the world through multiple perspectives (8.1.18)

Something a poem can be that we don’t always appreciate is a lens on the wider world. It can be a way of looking at things, at ideas, that produces fresh images and associations. Because it is a poem, it needn’t be restricted by so-called realism or verisimilitude or even reality . . . and it needn’t evade reality or realism, either. It can look bizarrely at the world or it can look minutely at the world or it can be a lens through which we see the world “as it is” and/or “as it should be.” 

Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
─ Hamlet, Act III, sc. ii

A poem can be a two-way lens, something akin to a two-way mirror: it can provide focus on the thing it is trained upon as well as upon the hand (read: the mind, the worldview, the person/persona) training it.[1]  The point is, poems provide us means for looking at the world, and we are never more aware of this capability than when a poem attempts to look at the world from different perspectives or angles.

Here’s a famous example of ways of looking at the world . . .

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens, 1923

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
I was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
And indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

As I re-read this wonderful piece and then typed it out here, the thought occurred to me that “ways of looking” poems are essentially cubist.  That is, in a cubist rendering, the subject is represented not from a single viewpoint but from multiple viewpoints.  In painting, this can be done almost simultaneously, as in certain early 20th Century works by Picasso, Braque, Léger, even Cezanne. In literature, poetry included, this multi-viewpoint approach must unfold phrase by phrase or line by line, over a short space/breath, as in the poem quoted above, or over a longer narrative plan, as in Gertrude Stein’s cubist novel, Ida (1941):

So Ida settled down in Washington. This is what happened every day.
Ida woke up. After awhile she got up. Then she stood up. Then she ate something. After that she sat down.
That was Ida.
And Ida began her life in Washington. In a little while there were more of them there who sat down and stood up and leaned. Then they came in and went out. This made it useful to them and to Ida.

The above might also be characterized as “four ways of looking at Ida,” which is actually an excerpt of one chapter of an entire novel of the character, Ida, written in this fashion.

But back to poetry. Here is another famous, often anthologized poem that presents “ways of looking” at the world (of poetry and poetics):

Ars Poetica
Archibald MacLeish, 1926

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

A friend once remarked of this poem that it fails to “be,” utterly, in the way it argues a poem should be: not mean but be.  For it means much!  And so for many years, I’ve considered this poem in that same light, a failure.  But upon re-reading and typing it out here, it seems to me that MacLeish argues something more subtle.  As a statement of poetic art, he seems to argue that a poem “should be” certain things or ways, it “should not mean/But be,” but of course can never achieve the ideal of Should.  Poems, being made of words which bear all kinds of associations for all kinds of readers, can NEVER simply “be.” They must mean.

The French poets might have cornered the market on ways of looking.  Their poetry revels in multiple viewpoints, as this one does . . .

The Pleasures of a Door
Francis Ponge, 1942; trans. Lee Fahnestock, 1995

Kings never touch a door.

It is a joy unknown to them: pushing open whether rudely or kindly one of those great familiar panels, turning to put it back in place—holding a door in one’s embrace.

. . . The joy of grasping one of those tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob in its middle; the quick contact in which, with forward motion briefly arrested, the eye opens wide, and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.

With a friendly hand it is stayed a moment longer before giving it a decided shove and closing oneself in, a condition pleasantly confirmed by the click of the strong but well-oiled lock.

The above poem reminds me a little of the famous Duchamp painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, in its kinetic cubism: multiple perspectives of the act of opening and passing through a door.

           

For next Wednesday, let’s experiment with Ways of Looking—at a thing, an idea—rather in the mode of Wallace Stevens.  If you want to try something more cubist, as in the Ponge or Stein pieces, have at it! Feel free to let your imagination roam; don’t feel tied, necessarily, to making the sense of your poem immediately accessible.  In fact, don’t aim for a poem that unfolds in a single, cohesive argument or logic. The idea is to experiment with ways of looking, not ways of meaning. Use metaphor liberally, seeing a thing or an idea in terms of some other thing or idea, or rather, in a series of other things/ideas. 



[1] From at least the 16th Century there has been a corollary in painting: the fad of self-portraits made in arresting perspectives, such as convex mirrors. See Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524.