About a poem titled "White Poem" (7.29.20)

At today's Wednesdays@One salon (electronic), things didn't seem to go well when my poem, "White Poem," came up for reading and discussion.  I contributed to the not going well as much as anybody, so let me use my blog tonight to get more deeply into the discussion.  But first, the poem . . .

White Poem

A meta-poem is a poem about tis own poem-ness, about itself.

How you experience such a poem is a matter of conjecture.

According to one theory, you're having lunch at the counter

For whites only and one of them takes the empty stool next to you.

According to another theory, you shave in the mirror early

One morning after a night of terror, and it stares back at you.

You can probably experience this poem with less uncertainty,

As it appears to point to something other than itself.

But conjecture, as you can see, often takes a grain of salt,

Which you normally find in the shaker on the whites only counter.

You can sprinkle it onto the fried egg Delores just served up,

Or you can put it in your pocket and go out again tonight.

-------

I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago for our group's project on couplets and have labored over it since.  I hadn't intended for it to become what it became, became in part, anyway.  I set out to make a poem of couplets, nothing more, without regard to content or subject matter of any particular kind.  Content would flow from whatever thoughts, feelings and rhythms arose from making couplets--letting a first line be a guide to a second in each pairing, and one "coupleted" idea generate another.  The process led it where it led.  As the author, I could have interrupted this process at any point--something I sometimes do--turned the poem down another channel of thought and feeling, or stopped it altogether and begun again with a different intent, maybe even a different process (such as selecting the theme, then setting it to verse).

But I chose to stay with this process and this poem to see where it might lead me, feeling this was the more organic approach to let the poem develop as it "wanted," like a discovery engine.  And the engine took the poem, me, and my W@1 cohort partly to Jim Crow racism and how a white male writes a poem (that is, makes art) within that cruel history.

(Right there, have I used a qualifying term, the word cruel, as if I can identify with the many objects of Jim Crow cruelty?  Or have I tried to pre-empt at least in my own mind any objection that of course I cannot possibly identify?  That I cannot because I am a product of a privileged class of Americans, and necessarily blinded, always and ever blinded?)

And so this poem dwells on what it means to make art in a fraught world, what it means for a white male writer to make art in a world fraught with racism.  All the world is fraught, all possible worlds are fraught, fraughtness being one definition of "world," and the world is ever fraught.  Fraught by what are, in this time and place that is meaningful enough to build a poem from, race and racism.  The poem, rather than call out racism or cry out against it (Seriously, what am I going to write, racism is bad?), wants to break open if it can the assumptions that art can be created under the circumstances of racism, so-called white art at any rate, that a poet like I can write from his privileged and blinkered point of view of the subject, or should even attempt to, and whether the attempt is valuable to anyone.  At least I think this is where the poem goes, wants to say.

The first reaction today was that the poem pushes some boundaries and transgresses one in particular, with the phrase "one of them" in the fourth line.  I say "reaction" because, to be fair to all participating, all of our responses on a given Wednesday are reactive.  Our format doesn't give us time to dwell on a poem's various facets, features, fidelities, failures.  The critique of being over the line was positioned as the phrase's potential for offending people of color.  The leveler of the critique, I think, really meant that the phrase is privileged or worse, racist, and I wish those characterizations had come out, for honesty's sake.  This reader suggested that the phrase be changed to something like "a Black person."

In another certain kind of context, this critique would be spot on, and I would have immediately seen the error not just in thinking but in feeling.  There lies one of my objections to the critique (which, had I been myself more prepared to talk about the poem, I might have expressed more honestly and forthrightly).  To object to such a phrase, in and of itself, on race grounds is to commit a very un-nuanced reading of the poem in hand.  Worse yet, it is to import a context to the poem that clearly is not there.  This is a reading that surprised and disappointed me, given that many in our group are not just practiced writers of poetry who should understand the role of context in art, but also people with advanced degrees in the art form or at least in literature, who really should be expected to read for nuance, even if ultimately it's not there or has been left hanging.  There are reactions, and there are knee-jerk reactions.

(It's entirely possible that a lack of nuance or a faulty execution of it is one major fault of this poem, which is why I shared it with the group, to help determine whether the poem got to where I thought it had.)

For another objection, the phrase "a Black person" narrows the poem's scope to mere social comment--not necessarily a bad poetic objective, but not the one of this poem.  It would mean a different poem.  This poem almost studiously avoids social comment of that kind.  My objection came across a bit more strident than I intended at the time because I overreacted to a solution built on a misreading of the poem, a "downward" but not also an "upward" reading.  What's this mean?  I get to that below.

The poem, as I say above, wants to be about the conditionality or provisionality or contingency of "writing white" in a fraught world (thus the title).  "White" carries of course racial and political meaning in the context of this poem; but it also has some bearing on the very idea of art.  "Writing white" has artistic implications in the sense that such writing is ever (or thought ever to be) safe, unassailable, pre-emptive . . . but is empty.  If you write white, you write from privilege; and I argue--and I hope the poem argues--that if you are white, that is of privilege, you write white.  How can you not?  And therefore, how can you say anything about anything that is not infused with that whiteness?  Even when you write racism is bad, you write from privilege, and you write safely, unassailably, and pre-emptively.  But you write emptily.

Another critique in this discussion went something like this: Why do you take us back there?  The critique refers to the image of the whites only counter and the allusion to night-riders.  Those things, after all belong to another time.  To which I reply, Yes!  To a whites only time!  But those images and allusions do not belong to another racism.  They belong to the racism we still practice today, of the knee in the neck, the red-lined neighborhood, the token hire.  So why then doesn't the poem introduce those more current expressions of racism?  Why does it "take us back there"?  Because to me, these more "contemporary" expressions of racism are equivalent to saying racism is bad.  Why would I say or write something that rolls across every screen you own every hour of every day of every year?  The poem takes us back there because we never left.

But shouldn't I just say that, then, and let the poem be: we never stopped being a racist country.  Why don't I just say racism is bad, if that's what I really mean?  Well, that is not what I mean, and I hope not what the poem means.  That is what I have struggled to not make the poem mean!

Which leads me back to the loaded phrase "one of them."  To object to this phrase as if it were the only words of the line it appears in, indeed of the poem, is to load it with only the fraughtness of our current moment, familiar and disheartening as it is.  I understand, I think, the urge to load up on the fraught (in this case, racist) world--it's done every day everywhere.  But that's only reading down the poem.  The pronoun, "them," also looks back up the poem to another more present antecedent: the meta-poem of the opening line.  The connection being drawn here--and it occurred to me literally as I turned from the fist couplet to write the second and set the table for the rest of the poem--is between making art and living in the fraught world.  How does one do it?  How does one justify it?  How does one make it meaningful?  

And this is the meta condition of this poem, how it is about itself and about something else at the same time.  In one drafting session, I recognized the fraught possibilities of the very phrase "one of them," and considered revising it to something like "and it takes the empty stool next to you."  This change made the reference more explicit, easier to trace, more certain and less dependent (on context, on my reader's sensibility and historical knowledge), but does it improve the poem or your experience of it?  Maybe so, if what you're after is a White Poem, if that's where you feel comfortable.  I don't.

Re-imagining the ancients (7.27.20)

Contemporary American poets don't write about classical subjects that often.  After all, that's not American.  From time to time, a poet will issue a new translation of The Iliad (Robert Pinsky and Caroline Alexander, for instance), or the Aeneid (Robert Fagles, who was not a poet but a scholar) or even The Divine Comedy (John Ciardi).  But by and large, since at least W.C. Williams, we have stuck to American subjects and voices.

But that doesn't mean we can't take on antiquity, nor that we shouldn't.  

You'll be relieved to know that I'm not going to ask you to translate any of those pieces!  You can try that if you like.  But I do think we all might benefit from stepping back from our daily cares--our viruses and injustices and politics and economics--to explore the ancient world in a poem.  Or to be more precise, to engage with a classical personage. 

Here are some guidelines:

• No fictional characters, like Achilles or Athena.  Instead find yourself a figure with some historical record, however slight or compromised, someone we know lived.  And though you could engage with a fellow poet, you could also take on some other personage like Julius Caesar, or Averroes.  Imagine writing a poem in conversation with or about a moment in the life of Sinnecharib, the Abyssinian king (d. 681 BC), or perhaps even more intriguing, his wife, Naqi-a?   Was she queen, partner, spouse, all of these?
• The classical period only.  This means figures of ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, Alexandria, Peking, Japan, Mayan culture, even Saxons and Celts, Vikings and Visigoths, ancient Palestine.  You might have some interest in ancient Eskimos or Ethiopians, but make it "ancient," by which I mean, before Europe and the Ottoman Empire and colonialism.
• You can write a poem that is an address to this person, that seeks to explode some myth about the biography, that invents something about him or her, puts the ancient into a different context (even anachronistically, if you wish).  You should try to be faithful to something about the person, to recognize that he or she existed.  What I ask you to avoid is writing simple, straight biography: Xerxes lived here and did this, etc.  That's just googling.  Engage.

How about a poem to Ghengis Khan or Buddha or Sappho?  How about a poem in conversation with Aristophanes, Homer, Virgil?  Or maybe a poem of Xerxes, the Venerable Bede, John the Baptist, Pontius Pilot, Mary Magdalene, Ruth (was she real?).  Forget Plutarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer.  Nor does your subject have to be famous; just documented in some way, so that we know the person existed.

For instance, how much do we really know about Jesus?  This means, no poems about Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, but maybe a poem about Jesus the dissident?  On this particular subject, you might find Browning's poem "A Death in the Desert" instructive.  It's long, as Browning poems often are, especially the dramatic monologues, but this one speaks exactly to what this project addresses--trying to peel back the myths that surround some of our most cherished stories.

Tennyson wrote an almost good poem about Ulysses in his dotage.

Okay, your objective is hopeless.  You'll never reveal the real person.  You weren't there!  But that's not the point of the project.  The project is for you to engage with your subject differently than the party line.  I've included below some examples of poets engaging in more or less this way, just to get you started.  Some deal with recognizable public figures, some with obscure ones.  All speak imaginatively to or of their subjects.

The Cucumbers of Praxcilla of Sicyon

                                                                --Jack Gilbert

Coupla thoughts about couplets (7.3.20)

One poetic form we haven't discussed much is the couplet, that two-line wonder that Alexander Pope mastered like no other serious writer writing in the English language.  Couplets are simultaneously fluid and constricting, easy and hard to write.  How can this be?

For the difficulty/constraining part, how much can you really say in two lines, in Western Culture anyway?  As soon as you begin the first line, the need to resolve it looms there at the end of the second.  Talk about creative pressure!  It's no wonder that Pope, for one, extended the form into epic proportions.  Still, even in those long narrative works, like The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad, Pope had to satisfy the doublet format, but over and over while advancing a narrative.  And undoubtedly that's what couplets are meant to do, move a poem forward audibly and rhythmically, with pace.

Just as in a sonnet, a couplet contains a volta, or a turn.  It's just that it comes fast and frequent, leaving you little time or space to build a proposition or to illustrate the general point you plan to make after the turn.  This is why the couplet form is aphoristic (go back to our project on aphorism in the blog post for 9.26.18 for more background), tending toward structures of statement/observation, set-up/deliver, point/counterpoint and so on.  The couplet has long been associated with "wit," which over literary history has been defined as ingenuity, imagination, "genuis" (meaning uniqueness and essence, not brains), cleverness, quickness of mind.  Wit has long been associated with satire and irony.  In our time, wit has taken on "funny" as one of its main definitions.  Mostly though, throughout literary history wit has meant "aptness," or as Pope said, often thought but n'er so well express'd.  

And that's what the couplet goes after: apt expression.  What contributes to this, or rather, what's the vehicle for aptness in a traditional couplet?  The rhyme: a-a, b-b, c-c, d-d on through the alphabet if necessary.  The rhyming words set up and then resolve a situation or proposition, a problem.  They create an opening and then closure, and thereby create and satisfy expectation in rapid sequence.  You might say, the rhyming couplet runs on tension, tension being a staple of poetry, drama, fiction--all kinds of writing with emotional impact.

Modern and post-modern poetry still deploy the couplet.  Leaf through any lit mag or anthology of recent verse and you'll eventually come across the form.  I think it was much more in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s than it is today, but you can still find it being published.

The form varies from the Popian to the post-Modern:

A fool might once alone himself expose,

Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

This very quotable pair from Pope's early "An Essay on Criticism," makes the somewhat simple point that verse amplifies the voice, and the more complex point that writing bad verse, or writing bad thinking in verse, amplifies one's vices as well as one's voice.  What makes it quotable, of course, is the couplet's brevity, its quick setup and delivery, and its rhyme, and for Pope, the more exact the rhyme, the better.  Here are some more examples from Pope:

Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,

And rise to faults true critics dare not mend;

                                                             --An Essay on Criticism

I yearn for the stuffy dinner party sometime where I can lay that one on the table!

Men, some to business, some to pleasure take;

But every woman is at heart a rake;

No room here to go into the argument Pope is forwarding in these lines from "Epistle II: To a Lady," so suffice it to say he's comparing the sexes, and acknowledging that woman is the stronger, craftier, more purposeful and resolute of the two.

And this pair of lines, from the opening of "The Rape of the Lock," is one of my favorites for its delicacy of voice, almost too delicate by half:

Say what strange motive, Goddess, could compel

A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?

Compare that to the opening invocation of the Muse in The Iliad!  

But couplets haven't always been ne'r so well express'd as Pope wrote them and, like all the forms we've practiced here at W@1, the couplet has been thoroughly modernized and adapted not just to modern English, but our contemporary Western sensibilities.  Some of them, anyway.  And like all those forms, the more contemporary--you might say post-Modern--treatment of them is gestural at best, a kind of nod that only the initiated will understand.  Take a look at some "couplets" from C. K. Williams, for example, who spent most of his career extending couplets, tercets and quatrains into wide, un-metered lines that never fit the width of the books they appeared in, always needed to be wrapped under themselves like lengths of something or other packed into too-short boxes.  Take a look at this series of "couplets":

I always knew him as "Bobby the poet," though whether he ever was one or not,

someone who lives in words, making a world from their music, might be a question.

In those strange years of hippiedom and "people-power," saying you were an artist

made you one, but at least Bobby acted the way people think poets are supposed to.

He dressed plainly, but with flair, spoke little, yet listened with genuine attention,

and a kind of preoccupied, tremulous seriousness always seemed to absorb him.

This is the opening to Williams' poem "The Poet," collected in his book Repair.  It goes on for another 29 "stanzas," all of which are produced from lines almost identical in length--and every single couplet overflows the page by from one to three words, never more.  No couplet maintains what you might call a metrical beat, though rhythm abounds, the rhythm of daily, sometimes ruminative speech, for Williams' style usually swings from the conversational to the ruminative to the narrative of character analysis, and then deeply philosophical.  The lines can come off as flacid, intense, lyrical and flowing, transactional (as in a conversation), and even Frostian.  All within one or two series of couplets.  In other words, these lines are proto-prose.

Still, they are lines of poetry, formed into couplets or at least "doublets."  A return is entered at the end of each first and second line, with an extra return at the end of every second line.  This means decision.  The writer has chosen to put the return there, and then an extra space at even intervals, creating what looks like long, languid couplets.  (Some might describe the style as enervated or the effect as enervating.)  For a writer, this process establishes a kind of rhythm, subtle as it is, that may be intellectual or rhetorical more than metrical; it is evenly repetitive; and it therefore must create expectation, both for the writer and the reader.  Which is exactly what couplets do.

I found this sequence of two-liners in a poem by David Young, titled "The Accident" (I didn't have to look far or for very long among my bookshelves, either!):

The poem walks through a drizzle

wearing overalls. It loads

big Nouns in a pickup truck

climbs in the cab, guns the

motor and is off, knuckles white,

peering at silence        among trees

past smoking fields        blue meadows

over bridges of electric air

to unmarked crossings where the long 

trains of the past come through

with the momentum of all their stations

and the truck must be hit

exploding in every direction

while the poem somehow survives

in the circle of wreckage and rain

where the X has begun to spin.

Isn't this a wonderful little lyric?  You'll recall from conversations last year, maybe, that William Carlos Williams wrote often in three-line stanzas meant to capture American cadences of speech.  Well, here the cadence is in two lines.  Do we call them couplets?  Pope might not.  But again, as with C. K. Williams' poem above, the poet had to decide when to end one line and go to the next, and at some point decided to put in a second return after every second line.  This, along with the shortness of the lines, creates a forward-downward flow that pulls you through the poem, first to last, dropping you inside that image of an X spinning.  This decision process no doubt influenced his choice of words ending each line of the poem: will they each be concrete nouns, adverbs, verbs, or maybe he'll let an article ("the") carry the line over.  All writerly choices to be sifted, weighed and committed to.

The writing of couplets forces those choices in unique ways, for when you try this--and you will, soon--you'll experience a small sensation of open-close, open-close, open-close, perhaps like your heart beating, even if your thought or narrative carries you right past the couplet's end.  Sooner rather than later, this sensation will come to feel like an insistence--if things are going right--and then you'll be in it, a poem of couplets.