My friends at Wednesdays@One know that a poem, to me, is an artifact first and last, with language as its medium. But poetry is made of words strung together into more or less coherent thoughts and those words have definitions, connotations, shared usages . . . in other words, meanings. And when fashioned into grammar, poems are representational in the way that much painting and sculpture are representational.
What we write daily as poets is so thoroughly rooted in a representational view--anchored in what we think of as the "real" and the physical--that we hardly notice what we're up to. Which is that we make verbal artifacts--art, in other words.
We only come to sense this art production characteristic when we write/read something offbeat or non-grammatical or indeed nonsensical. Or out of "our ordinary." That's when the artifactual nature of poetry becomes more or less evident to us and the words float to the very surface of our reading consciousness, freed of their references and referents. And when we begin to experience the poem. Example:
To employ her
construction ball
Morning fed on the
light blue wood
of the mouth
cannot understand
feels deeply)
This is the opening stanza (or should we call it a paragraph?) of John Ashbery's famously opaque poem, "Europe" (The Tennis Court Oath, 1957). It introduces one of those poems that put a stake into the ground of Western poetry, marking a departure from the High Modernism of W.H. Auden with its rhetorical rigor and declamatory voice. The first five lines make a statement that is grammatically coherent, at least, though hardly accessible to your logical mind. In what way does morning "employ" a "construction ball"? And shouldn't that reference be "wrecking ball"? And since when does morning have gender? And how or what does morning "feed on"? If it is the "light blue wood of the mouth," well then, what is that? As the sixth line acknowledges, I cannot understand. I am not meant to for, along with the seventh line, I am supposed to feel deeply inside this opening set of images, creatively chaotic as they may be. Morning doesn't wreck things, it builds them with light, renewed activity, the pleasures of starting out anew. So, morning in Europe, beginning again.
Here is where these first lines of Ashbery's poem always deliver me, correctly or not: it is morning, I am eating my breakfast and watching the world come alive outside my kitchen window; she, whoever she has ever been to me, sits across the table from me; the table is made of wood painted a light blue; the colors are so "there" that I taste them in my mouth. This is not an "understanding" but a "feeling." Who knows what these lines "really" refer to, in Ashbery's experience or even in my own? They are more about what is evoked in each reading (yours, mine, mine ten years ago compared to mine just now) than what can be historically excavated from their mine of imagery.
Another more recent example:
For William
March and obsessing
the starch of middays walk
Fetal bone length
rummaging for teeth
To shed the conversation
that draws texas
Mothering the flux
the bend of anywhere's miscarriage
With thought of third drink
and a late december under my hip
I wanted you
latitude bellied against smooth
Intent over seamed
crease to mouth
A little sam
in the itch of it all
And I in a september dress
staining the reel
This lyric by Stefani Iryne appeared in New American Writing, Vol. 20 (2002). It fulfills certain conventions (i.e., expectations) for poems, such as the couplet form, a "positioning" title, lineation, movement toward a finality of sorts. It deploys figurative language (metaphors, appositive constructions, colloquialisms), sustains a middle-to-high register of voice. It is "about" something: William or the speaker's relationship to William. It is "occasional," that is, "for" William.
But the poem blocks my conventional reading not just from couplet to couplet, but line to line and, in most cases, phrase to phrase. Iryne fits together or juxtaposes grammatical elements that either make little or no grammatical sense to me or that convention doesn't prepare me for. The poem proceeds but hardly flows down its own ladder of language. Every rung is a different shape, size, width, stiffness, surface, yet different in the same way: every couplet is declarative, positive. When I read this poem, I am intensely aware that I am reading a poem, that is, an artifact of language, even while it gestures toward the conventionally representational: a lyric for William from "me," the speaker.
I come away from this poem not knowing William or the speaker, at least not autobiographically and historically. Not even knowing the "real" nature of their relationship (married, friends, mentor-mentee?). Knowledge of these "facts" is beside the point, which is the experience of the richness of the utterance itself, its ringing in my imagination, its openness. I read this poem as an evocative artifact.
Yet convention plays a role in this sensing of a poem's artifactual nature. Walt Whitman's poems shocked his first audiences with their long, muscular lines, lack of strict meter, directness of voice, overabundance of alliteration and so on. But today we wouldn't classify Whitman's poetry as ungrammatical or meaningless or, finally, unpoetic. His poems marked a departure, some say radical, from the poetic conventions of the day, and thus seemed non-representational (non-poetic) to many of Whitman's first readers.
Above in this essay, I described "Europa" as a famously opaque poem. That's how some reviewers and critics described it at first, and how someone steeped in the representational tradition in art, poetry included, might see this great poem. One critic, I recall, even faulted the poem as mere "word-splash." (I recounted this critique to the critic Helen Vendler, who was aware of it and who told me that Ashbery was a bit stung by the assessment.) But "opaque" isn't the best way to describe this poem, with its implied opposite "transparent," as if we are to see through a poem's parts--its words, syntax, line beginnings and endings, diction/word choices, rhythms, figures, voicings--to its real subject, as if it were an elegantly or curiously written expository essay.
What Ashbery did to change the direction of American poetry, and what poets like Stefani Iryne continue today, is to make the poem first about itself. And this makes the reading of a poem an aesthetic rather than a rhetorical experience. Reading a poem like this, you will not be invited to learn something about the poet's history or even the world through which the poet navigates--the represented world. You are invited into the world of the poem itself, in all its sensual and intellectual immediacy.
As we at W@1 forge ahead into a new year of writing and reading poems, I hope we can all keep this artifactual notion of what we're about firm in our imaginations.
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