Ce n’est-pas une pipe
. . .
Last session, I brought up a new term, "aesthetic
distance." If by now you have searched
the net for anything on this idea, you likely have come to the Wikipedia
entry. To the extent that a work of art
of any kind is referential or representational, it establishes a “fictional
reality” that we connect with when we experience it. This fictional reality tends to override our
sense of what we’re actually doing (e.g., engaging with an artifact).
We can put this into theater terms, namely the “fourth wall”
of a stage or movie screen. There is a
kind of “fourth wall” in a poem that we can think of as its “meaning” or the
outside world to which a poem refers. Sometimes,
we skim over the fact that we are reading a poem—highly ordered language,
verbal iconography—because we are caught up in what the poem’s words point
to. We often do the same thing when
looking at a painting. We see the
images: trees or the reclining nude or the field of wheat or the face. We “look past” the paints and pigments, the
brush strokes, the compositional field, the frame, the canvas or paper, and so
on. We see a painting of a pipe and see
. . . a pipe. We are in the “fictional
reality” created there.
Indeed, writers and readers of poetry—and I am willing to bet
that almost every one of us involved in W@1--approach a poem as something other
than a verbal artifact or construct. We
interpret it. We read its meaning. The words are not really “there” for us.
Let’s say you write in longhand a heartfelt, passionate,
beautiful letter to your best friend.
Let’s say you then type it out on your laptop. Then let’s say you randomly put in a return
after every few words or phrases to create the effect of lines. Have you written a poem or a letter to your
best friend?
Does this question imply a false dichotomy?
Let’s say you next fuss with which words begin and end the
lines, and capitalize the first letter of the first word of each line. Have you now made a more poetic poem?
Let’s go farther and say that you deliberately mess with
syntax, then throw in a wide empty space, begin a line half-way across the
page, then eliminate punctuation (or throw it in wherever). Let’s say you substitute a dash where a word
might be expected, or insert two dashes in a row. You are now in company with Emily Dickinson
and E.E. Cummings.
Have you written a letter or a poem? Maybe both!
One thing you have done, to be sure, is to adjust the aesthetic distance
your reader will experience to what you have written: I am reading about my
friend’s day at the beach . . . or . . . I am reading art.
As far as our week’s project is concerned, “aesthetic
distance” is that capacity we have for contemplating any object—a sunset, a
mushroom cloud, a pear, one’s face in the mirror, a dance, a melody, an aroma,
a severed hand, a murder, a birth, a howl, a painting, a gait—for itself, in
and of itself. We can contemplate from
near at hand or from far away. Either
works, so long as we strive to capture the thing’s thingness.
For this project, then, I recommend the following process:
Step 1: select a
simple object.[1]
Step 2: study the
object, writing down what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. Consider such things as color, shape, volume,
relationship to its surroundings, light and shadow, and so on.
Step 3: shape any
details you have noted into a description; for example, describe the object top
to bottom, surface to depth, larger feature to smaller, brighter color to duller
color. Let the object determine how you
proceed.
Step 4: condense
what you develop in Step 3, create lines and any new word order that you feel
captures the “essence” or the thingness of the object.
And here are some examples either of a treatment of an
object as an aesthetic thing, a thing of beauty in itself, and of poems that
similarly insist on reminding you that they are artifacts of language
themselves rather than rhythmical essays or letters to the world.
Study of Two Pears
─Wallace Stevens
I
Opusculum paedagogum.[2]
The pears are not viols,
nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
II
They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.
III
They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
tapering toward the top.
IV
In the way they are modelled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
From the stem.
V
The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.
VI
The shadows of the pears
Are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
As the observer wills.
The
Wild Anemone
─James Laughlin
I’ll call it the daring
flower its softness its
pallor so little suggesting
the strength with which
it fights the wind its
petals so delicate it
seems a touch would wither
them yet they’ll outlast a
three-day storm and will
outlast I think (and now
I speak to her) the tempests
that a foolish heart invents
to plague itself because
it hardly dares to love
the wild anemone
the daring flower.
The Lark
─Mary Oliver
And I have seen,
at dawn,
the lark
spin out of the long grass
and into the pink air—
its wings,
which are neither wide
nor overstrong,
fluttering—
the pectorals
ploughing and flashing
for nothing but altitude—
and the song
bursting
all the while
from the red throat.
And then he descends,
and is sorry.
His little head hangs,
and he pants for breath
for a few moments
among the hoops of the grass,
which are crisp and dry,
where most of his living is done—
and then something summons him again
and up he goes,
his shoulders working,
his whole body almost collapsing and floating
to the edges of the world.
We are reconciled, I think,
to too much.
Better to be a bird, like this one—
an ornament of the eternal.
As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
“Squander the day, but save the soul,”
I heard him say.
The Pot of
Flowers
─William Carlos Williams
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn
petals aslant darkened with mauve
red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats
petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above
the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot’s rim
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gray with rough moss.
What Is a
Poem?
─Ruth Stone
Such slight changes in air pressure,
tongue and palate,
and the differences in teeth.
Transparent words.
Why do I want to say ochre,
or what is green-yellow?
The sisters of those leaves on the ground
still lisp on the branches.
Why do I want to imitate them?
Having come this far
with a handful of alphabet,
I am forced,
with these few blocks,
to invent the universe.
[1] I
would avoid anything that already has content, like a painting or some iconic
image. If you can treat a painting as a painted object and without becoming
distracted by its content, then go for it.
[2]
Opusculum means “a little work” and paedagogum means “slave (accompanying small
children).” My Latin is worse than
rudimentary, so I have no idea about this opening line, other than that it
creates aesthetic distance pretty effectively.
For me, the line is pure sound.
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