On oranges and pipes . . . (1.21.22)

Our next project is such a strange one that I'm having trouble thinking of a good title for this post.  😁

Not to mention what to say about it that might help my Wednesdays@One colleagues make some headway with a poem.  But here goes . . .

The project

Write a poem using these lines:

There are no oranges in this poem.

There is no pipe in this painting.

You can separate the lines, if you like, and you can place them wherever you wish in the poem you write, at the beginning, at the end, in the middle.  Some caveats: do NOT use them as an epigraph, and do not change them otherwise.  Your poem is not "about" these lines, but rather an outgrowth of what you make of the lines' meaning.  Part of the idea of this project is for you to write a poem using language as is . . . what you make of that language will be something else, and entirely up to you!

The first line I came across in a critical essay by Linda Gregerson, "The Rhetorical Contract in the Erotic Poem," in Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, eds. David Baker and Ann Townsend.  (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2007).  Gregerson writes it in reference to her discussion of the various voices or presences in a poem--author, persona/speaker, hearer, reader--and how consciously and willingly all these presences interact in the poetic experience.  To say "there are no oranges in this poem" is to acknowledge that a poem might refer to and describe an orange, and the speaker, hearer and reader may agree to "act as though" the orange is real and factual when of course it is only an abstraction, a figure.  That "agreement" is the rhetorical contract the various parties make with one another in the poetic experience.

The second line, of course refers to the famous Magritte painting of a tobacco pipe, C'est ne pas une pipe.  I merely re-phrased the painting's title to align it with Gregerson's expression.  (Obviously, she was messing with Magritte when she wrote her line about oranges!)  Because I want you to use both lines in a poem of your own.

So, what do you make of these two statements?  First, think about what they actually say and how they say it.  As statements, they are straightforward and un-ironic, if a bit bizarre.  They are strange little statements of fact, or to be more precise, statements stated as facts.  But facts of what?  Think about this last question for a bit and I guarantee you, you'll be on your way to developing ideas for your poem.

Read in certain contexts, these two statements take on meanings that you ought to be able to make poetry out of.  What was Magritte up to when he painted a tobacco pipe and then gave it that title?  Was he saying something about the nature of art and reality?  About the relationship between what is and how it is represented?  Was he trying to make a point about culture and how we perceive art, how we talk about it, and what we consider "the real" to be?  Is his painting a reference to Plato's argument about Idea and Copy, the real and the image of the real and the image of the image of the real?  

In Plato, there is the general idea of "bed," something one lies upon, which is "real" because it is permanent and unchanging: the idea is timeless.  Then there is A bed made by a furniture maker, either from what she sees in her mind's eye (the idea, "bed") or from a set of instructions (which are another copy of the idea), and thus is one of potentially countless versions of the idea, "bed."  This version of "bed" you can lie in.  And there is a visual image [or a verbal description] of a bed made by a painter or photographer [or by a poet or a technical writer] that you can't sleep on but which means "bed" to you.  This version will vary by description, and by the language it is expressed in.  It is ephemeral in that sense.  The painting or the literary/technical description is thus at two removes from the "real" bed, the idea of it, and as I say, ephemeral, impermanent.  Put another way, there is only one IDEA, bed.  There are countless and various KINDS of bed that come and go: the physical and the even more ephemeral "composed" beds of our world. *

Okay, I am belaboring the point here.  Which is: an orange in a poem is not an orange, a pipe in a painting is not a pipe.  They are images of text and brush stroke.  And so what then?  Why should these versions of "bed" be important to us?  Try answering this last question and you'll also be well on your way to developing material for your poem!

It's possible that you'll come to the conclusion, as Aristotle did, that these "beds" at one and two removes from the idea of "bed" are just as real as the idea, and in fact are even more real BECAUSE they are changeful.  After all, life is change, is it not?  Life itself, yours, mine, is ephemeral and that is the reality we know.  So, who's to say my written description of a bed is any less real than the bed I sleep in or the idea of "bed" I have in my consciousness?  Or the orange?  Or the pipe?  Plato?  Magritte?  Linda Gregerson?  Pish!

I think I'll write a poem about what all this means.  You write one, too.

* Well, perhaps not "more" ephemeral in our writing and print culture.  Plenty of physical object beds have come and gone since the beds made famous by John Donne in his morning poems!