I've been reading two books of poetry criticism and theory that converge on the subject of descriptive poetry, or description in a poem, its role, effect, affect and poetic function.
One is Edward Hirsch's new book of essays and criticism, The Heart of American Poetry (Library of America, 2022), which traces the history of poetry in this country from Anne Bradstreet to Joy Harjo. The other is a much older book, Poetry and Mysticism, by Colin Wilson and published in 1969 by City Lights Press.
I am reading at the moment Hirsch's piece on a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room." He says of her poetry, "Bishop observes everything with such minute and patient attention - objects, creatures, landscapes - that it all starts to seem more foreign and improbable." You might ask, why would any poet want to render the observable, presumably the daily observable, foreign and improbable? Isn't the poet's job to hold a mirror up to nature and to describe what she sees faithfully, that is, to capture its "reality," what it really looks like? And the answer to your question might lie in another question: What reality do you have in mind - that of the very first time you encountered a thing, or that of the thousandth time you've seen a thing, the thing you're "used to"?
I've written somewhere else in this blogspot how one day my father and I were driving somewhere along an interstate highway through a downpour. The car in front of us was ploughing through water standing on the pavement, nearly hydro-planing, and throwing out spectacular fantails of spray. "Now that's beautiful," he declared. "Why don't you write a about that?" He meant describe it. I bit my tongue, partly because I was not about to let a man with only a high school education (I was in a graduate writing program at the time) suggest subjects, themes, styles or technique to me. But also partly because I knew, inchoately, that a poet would write about his own experience seeing such a phenomenon, that his poem would be about his relationship to a thing of this world, as viewer. A good poet would not try to report what was already there. What would be the point, after all?
Wilson's book offers up a rationale for not being the reporter. His term for this mechanical "seeing" is "the robot": a state of mental efficiency that enables you to drive your car without thinking about the incredible number of functions, operations, and decisions that occur nearly simultaneously as you go along. The same robotic state of mind also enables a native English speaker to think in French, perhaps even to dream in that other language. Let me quote him:
When a human being learns anything difficult - to talk, to write, to calculate, to drive a car, to type, to speak a foreign language - he has to begin by concentrating on the details of what he wishes to learn. Even when he has learned a basic French vocabulary, he finds it difficult to read French, because he is still thinking in English, and he has to translate each word into English. But gradually, the 'remembering' process is passed on to a deeper level of his being [the sub-conscious], a kind of robot in his subconscious mind, and the robot can read French without having to translate it back into English. It is in every way more efficient than his conscious memory.
Wilson goes on to relate the story of the centipede who, when attempting to explain how it can manage all its hundred legs into forward motion, gets all twisted around itself and stumbles. We've all experienced this, including us writers of poetry, whenever we try to "explain" how we do what we do.
What does this have to do with the purpose of description in a poem, or with a "descriptive poem"? A passage from Wilson again takes us in a useful direction:
This is the great disadvantage of the robot: that it not only drives your car or talks French, but also takes the excitement out of skiing or listening to a symphony. The robot has taken over too many of our functions.
Like witnessing the very strange and foreign beauty of a raindrop fantail along a super-highway. Simply seeing it "as it is" is the functioning of the robot which sees and asserts that's beautiful. Which for the poet ought to lead to two important questions: what is that, and, what is beauty. Or, what am I actually seeing (as opposed to interpreting from my subconscious)?
Which brings me back to Elizabeth Bishop. She was known for taking the most mundane or uncomplicated of subjects - a blossom, a dentist's waiting room - and reclaiming them from our robot minds, our subconscious reception/processing of them, returning them to conscious objects, literally, objectifying them. And this act makes the mundane seem foreign, even improbable, the way they seemed the very first time we saw or heard or tasted or felt them, before we "got used" to them.
Bishop does this through what Hirsch calls "minute and patient" description. So does William Carlos Williams in poems like "Spring and All," which Hirsch also critiques in his book; as does Theodore Roethke in his two-part poem, "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)."
As we writers of poetry should try to do as well. Rather than try to describe a thing as it appears to our robot - in outline form, with its minutÓ• obscured, glossed over, blurred out - let us look more minutely and with greater patience. Why? Why should poetry do this rather than the other? One of the important functions of poetry, particularly in our homogenized, commodified and pre-packaged age, is to return us to our conscious selves, those selves that say to the world, "What is THAT," and that forces us to slow our pace, to feel and think what we are doing here or anywhere.
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