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.
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