This is the first of a three-part project which we'll pursue throughout the month.
I asked you to “don’t do something, just stand there” for last
week’s Wednesdays@One session for a reason.
Our next project, writing the contemplative[1]
poem, will draw upon your mindful engagement with an environment.
Your experience writing poems might lead you to ask, Isn’t
all (lyric) poetry contemplative? and you’d have an argument to make. By definition, poetry is contemplative. When we write it, we focus closely on some
idea or object or place or person, etc., and try to express a feeling (in
ourselves) or an essence (in the object of our contemplation) through that
verbal focusing. The difference comes, I
guess, in what we intend for that poem, how we want it to be “used” by a
reader. Do we want it to be read as a
little lecture on life? As a witness to
some societal wrong? As arts and entertainment? Or as mere text and sound? Or do we write it—and prefer to have it
read—as the result of deep thought about some idea or thing, without further
comment on the usefulness or beauty of that thinking?
A contemplative poem announces: I observe this. It’s for other
poems to say: I mean; or I believe; or I love; or I accuse; etc.
You can write several kinds of contemplative poem:
- One that explores your relationship to some idea or thing, observer to observed.
- One that seeks to define or describe the idea or thing, in its fully autonomous nature.
- One that discovers or arrives at a Truth (insight) through contemplation of some idea or thing.
A related project, which you might revisit on this blog, is the one we did on aesthetic distance.
A poem featured there, Wallace Stevens’ “Study of Two Pears,” is a good
example of the second variety of contemplative writing just mentioned. (See the entry for October, 2018.) If you re-read that poem, you’ll note nothing
about the speaker’s (much less Stevens’) person, taste, feeling, opinion and so
on. The poem is, as the title tells you,
a study of two pears. Here is an example
of the third kind of contemplative poem, albeit rendered in dramatic prose:
Hamlet. Let me see. [Takes the skull.] Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio—a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a
thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination is it! My gorge rises at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your
gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont
to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chop-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch think, to
this favor she must come—make her laugh at that.
─Hamlet,
Act V, Sc. 1.
Clouds
I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds —
a split second’s enough
for them to start becoming
something else.
Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.
Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.
What on earth could they bear
witness to?
They scatter whenever something
happens.
Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost
eternal.
Next to clouds,
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant,
flighty cousins.
Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply do not care
what they are up to
down there.
And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole
life
and mine, still incomplete.
They aren’t obliged to vanish when
we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while
sailing on.
No Swan So Fine
“No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers—at ease and tall. The king is dead.
Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.
Contemplation is reverie is spell is brown study is funk. But again, for our purposes, poetically, it manifests as a poem of the relationship between observer and observed, an essence of the thing itself, or as a Truth revealed.
William Carlos Williams was a master at writing the contemplative poem, the poem of pure observation. Here’s a much-anthologized example:
Fine Work with Pitch
and Copper
Now they are resting
in the fleckless light
separately and in unison
like the sacks
of sifted stone stacked
regularly by twos
about the flat roof
ready after lunch
to be opened and strewn
The copper in eight
foot strips has been
beaten lengthwise
down the center at right
angles and lies ready
to edge the coping
One still chewing
picks up a copper strip
and runs his eye along it
This poem is supremely descriptive in the way Williams was
well-known for: passionate observation.
It is deceptively straightforward, meaning that it reads without
apparent difficulty; yet the language is so spare and so exact and explicit
that you can imagine the minute choices made in its construction, image by
image, line by line. You can almost feel
them. For me, this poem is a perfect
example of the second type of contemplative approach: revealing the thingness
of the thing itself.
A contemplative poem may partake of one or all three of the
types I’ve defined (so broadly), but with some effort on your part, a poem might
showcase one of these types.
So let’s let this be our next project . . .
Write a poem of contemplation, utilizing your practical observation
techniques and skills, in which one of the three types is clearly
dominant. It will not be a political
poem, or a poem of memory, or a love poem; it will not address anyone directly;
it will not be didactic (will not teach a lesson). It will be observational, and contemplative.
Happy reveries!
[1]
Closely related to but not the same as the meditative poem, meditation being a
spiritual and a mental exercise (often involving self-examination), and
contemplation being more sensual, as in engaging in sense perception, or
processing “data.” I also don’t want to
confuse the issue with Thomas Merton’s assertion, in a 1947 essay in Commonweal, that “the contemplative life
is a life entirely occupied with God.”
For this project, let’s take contemplation in the more limited sense of
an artistic practice.
[2] “Accordion
Sections,” in Hummingbird Sleep: Poems,
2009-2011. Athens: U of Georgia
Press, 2013.
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