What does meaning mean? (7.31.22)

I was washing the dishes yesterday morning after breakfast (yes, we do them by hand around my house, it's a Zen thing) when this thought struck me.

At Wednesdays@One each week, we talk about what somebody's poem means. People weigh in with their versions of a poem's meaning, a debate ensues once in awhile, and we can get vigorous in our defenses, downright dogged in our points of view.

And that's what meaning comes down to in a poem, after all, a point of view. When we read a poem, each of us brings a personal history--our beloved bedeviled baggage--to what we engage with on the page and from the tongue.  That personal history is informed by so much experience beyond the technical, the academic, and the intellectual.

You can argue that anyone's meaning is still valid meaning is just relativism.  If everybody's "right" about the meaning of a poem, then . . . what does the poem mean?

Well, that's the wrong question to begin any discussion of meaning with, isn't it? The question you want to start with is what do we mean by "meaning?"  And whenever you read a poem, no matter whether you're reading it for the first or the eleventh time, before you start you ought to ask yourself, "What do I mean by 'meaning'?"

Is meaning something you find outside of a poem, like some kind of parallel universe of value and understanding?  Most people think so because most of us were taught from the first poems we encountered that there are poems and there is what poems mean, explanations that can be rendered alongside the text of a poem in other words.  Every essay your teachers ever asked you to write about a poem, right up through your doctoral dissertation, turns on this notion that meaning is what can be paraphrased out of the text itself.

That, of course, leaves the question, what is the text of a poem, then?  What's it there for?  

And if a poem "has meaning" which can be paraphrased, then my paraphrase should be as valid as the next reader's, right?  Even if that reader happens to be Northrop Frye or Susan Sontag.  Meaning is point of view.  Points of view may be more or less informed and professional, but they are all valid.

We're back to relativism.

Is meaning a cultural understanding?  That is, if you grow up in the West, in America, in the Middle West, in a small town, in a neighborhood where doors are never locked and church bells ring on Sunday morning and Friday nights are for football and fish fries . . . etc . . . is a certain set of value standards--what counts and what doesn't--instilled in you?  And if you never leave that place, never "broaden your horizon," . . .

Emphasis here on your truth.  We're back to point of view and relativism.  Of course, your truth can take on the trappings of The Truth when you find yourself gravitating toward other readers who've grown up in the West, in America, etc.  But this is just relativism as power--a particular point of view that's ascendant. 

And so the title of this posting, What does meaning mean?

In my experience, meaning means nothing at all.  Poems don't mean because they are art, and therefore self-referential.  Meaning is the red herring your teachers relied on in order to have something "intelligent" to say about a poem, it's a feint for your inability to "understand" a poem.  Which is why modern literary pedagogy is so fascistic, a game of power relations between those in the know (teachers and other experts) and those not (students and lay readers).

A poem can't be paraphrased.  By paraphrasing a poem, all you do is to make a new and lesser draft of the text as you found it.

So then, how does one talk about a poem, in one's own mind or with other readers? If we can't talk about what a poem means, then what do we talk about? How a poem is constructed?  How it operates?  How a poem makes you feel? Whether a poem is sincere art?  Good art?  Accomplished art?  Whether a poem is hip, with it, cool, au currant?  

We run into this problem every week at Wednesdays@One.  The first thing anybody has to say about a poem that's just been read to us by its author and then by another in the group, usually verges on no-talk.  No-talk is saying something about a poem without really saying anything at all.  "I like it!"  "This poem so so classically YOU!"  "I don't understand this poem but it's beautiful!"  

What I try to do each week when we discuss a poem is to steer us out of the no-talk and into the relativism of personal point of view.  I want to know not what the poem means but what it means to each of my W@1 colleagues.  It may be the old teacher in me, but each week with each poem I want to learn again what a reader reads in a poem and why that reader reads it, that is, the experiences and thinking and feeling that brought that reader round to what he or she has just said about the poem.  In this way, I hope to open my fellow readers' eyes and ears to two things: 1) what other things the poem can mean to them, and 2) the value of each of those meaningful options in relation to each other and to each reader's experience.

What is meaning?  Nothing.  What does a poem mean?  Nothing.  What can a poem mean?  Nothing.  Nothing, that is, until we talk about it.  A poem is itself and that is all it is, as any work of art is just and only what it is.  The rest is just point of view to be shared and considered.

And man, were those dishes done!

On critters and other poetical transferences (7.25.22)

This is a follow-up to yesterday's posting on conceits and what makes them so powerful in a poem. Elio Soldi, one of our W@1 writers, shared a poem last week with these lines in it:

I have a mind and it tickles my toes

when I am distracted by life as advertised,

a critter making strident noises

when I start being properly occupied.

It's the fairly complex critter metaphor that interested me at the time, that spurred this week's project on conceits.  Likening the mind to a critter?  Genius!  But why?

A conceit is what the critics call a "trope of transference."  It brings together two very unlike things or ideas into an expression or an image.  The attributes of one thing become applied to, transferred into, the attributes of the other, thus creating a third thing or idea.  The more foreign the two things or ideas are in relation to each other, the more powerful that third thing or idea.  Theoretically.  In this case, mind and critter.  

The more you think about critters and critterdom, what you know and feel about these, the better this metaphor becomes.

So, what do you think of when you think of critters?  Wild animals.  But not lions and tigers and elephants and whales, and not butterflies and bees either.  A critter is much closer to home.  A critter is dull and crawly; if it bites, it won't kill you and eat you, and it would prefer not to come near you at all.  A critter is no happier to be in your living room than you are to have it there.  We don't confer upon them our grander human values, like king of the beasts, plough of the ocean, trumpeter, etc.  It's all animal and all wild.  

It's also undifferentiated.  One critter is pretty much like any other.  

So, when a writer likens his own mind to a critter, all sorts of transference take place.  And the less he does so in the form of a direct comparison, more as an implication, the more powerful the transference.

Would this transference have worked had Elio deployed "steel trap" instead of "critter"?  Of course not! Well, maybe if he'd been the first writer to make that connection, as somebody surely was. But the expression lost that power to surprise somewhere in the misty past, after the millionth use of it.  He'd have just copied a cliché that has lost all its ability to surprise, to arrest, to expand our associative horizons.  No, the transference requires a fresh set of terms.

Here's another transference at work, from a short poem by Bennett Myers, also shared at last week's W@1.

Vagrant

Held in Jerusalem Rikers

No shekels for bail or fine

Waiting list for a cross

Charge

Impersonating God

We all know about Jesus and the crucifixion.  And we're all (too) familiar with Rikers Island, the bureaucracy of waiting lists, and the crime of appearing to be who you aren't.  One a story with mythical elements; one a common piece of reportage, from your local police blotter.  You wouldn't normally think to put the two together, they seem so alien to each other, but this poet does.  Transference ensues.

Just to repeat myself, that transference works partly because the terms of the comparison are so alien to each other.  But also because the comparison is not made explicit by the poet.  Nowhere does the poem say "Jesus is like a common criminal in a holding cell on Rikers Island, charged with impersonating somebody else for profit."  Part of what makes a good conceit work is that you, reader, have to complete the transference by yourself.

The conceit (7.24.22)

For reference, scroll down to "Conceits and extended metaphors" in the June 20, 2018 post of this blog.

Let's circle back to the conceit, that tough intellectual and emotional nut you need a tool or two to open up whenever you find one in a poem.  And again, we'll try a project--to write a conceit.  Only this time, let's not worry about extending or developing it through an entire poem, but just concentrate on coming up with one good, inventive, innovative, unusual application in a line or even just a phrase.  We'll turn that phrase on the lathe of our imagination and verbal dexterity, and see (or smell, or hear, or feel, or taste) what comes of it.  Read on to the end of this blog post for the project in detail.

What is a conceit?  Rule of thumb: a conceit is always an equivalence, usually implied, between two unlike things:

• a bed of roses
• a bed of nails
• a crown of thorns
• a sea of trouble
• grab bag of ideas

Conceits belong to the same class of figurative language as simile, metaphor, and analogy.  But they are a special case: conceits aim to link (to yoke) two essentially unlike things that you would not ordinarily put together to form a new whole.  What's more, a conceit aims for surprise (as opposed to mere cleverness); it is intellectually stimulating; it demands that you unpack it.  A conceit opens up new frontiers in meaning, and in this sense, a good conceit is expansive, never restrictive.  The metaphors listed above fall short of "conceit"; the relationships between their two parts are too transparent, and they are shopworn (clichés).

There is a certain "violence" and complexity to a conceit.  In a metaphor, which is the broader category for "conceit," the attributes of a known thing or idea (like "bed" above) are applied to another but fundamentally different known thing or idea (above: "roses," "nails").  I say above that a conceit is an "equivalence," but this is not really accurate.  Nor is a conceit, or any metaphor, for that matter, a comparison of two unlike things or ideas.  A metaphor is a "transference" from one thing to another, or better yet, an identification of one thing/idea as another.

Metaphors can be fairly "transactional" and simple, as the examples above are: bed/rose, crown/thorn, sea/trouble, bag/idea.  Or they can be more complex, much more.  Here's an example, which comes from my copy of A Glossary of Literary Terms, by M.H. Abrams:

                    Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer;

                    Drinker of horizon's fluid line.

The lines come from a poem by Stephen Spender, a Modernist poet who, like T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, A.R. Ammons and others, borrowed from the great practitioners of the conceit, the Metaphysical Poets.  Let's unpack it.

                    [The] Eye [is a] gazelle [is] delicate [and a] wanderer; 

                    [It is a] Drinker of horizon [is a] line [is] fluid.

Spender identifies the idea of an eye with a gazelle (speed, grace, nimbleness) which is in turn identified as a creature that never rests, has no particular destination (i.e., it wanders).  That's all one thought.  Then the semi-colon, making way for a second complex of ideas: the eye drinks (as a gazelle might from a stream or pond) the horizon (as a gazelle might, scanning for danger). And of course there is the further complication or complexity of relationship between the attributes of line (fixedness) and fluidity, which is the feature we are meant to attribute to "horizon" which is "drunk" by the eye.

Not that we would normally unpack the metaphor to this degree, nor should we, normally.  Not consciously, at least.  What our subconscious minds do is another matter, and precisely the point of the "difficult" metaphor.  What we read in or into or out of the two Spender lines is considerably more expansive than what the actual words describe.  That's the associative power of metaphor and poetic language in general.

Spender's metaphor is "taut," "difficult," "packed," "yoked by violence together."  It approaches the special case of metaphor that we call conceit: it's a complex of images that appeals to our intellect and to our emotions (what we feel when we feel freedom, danger, safety, beauty, flight, struggle).

Now let's look at a very famous conceit that "yokes" together the idea of two lovers and the two parts of a cartographer's compass:

        A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

        As virtuous men pass mildly away,

        And whisper to their souls to go,

        Whilst some of their sad friends do say

        The breath goes now, and some say, No;

        So let us melt, and make no noise,

        No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,

        'Twere profanation of our joys

        To tell the laity our love.

        Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,

        Men reckon what it did and meant;

        But trepidation of the spheres,

        Though greater far, is innocent.

        Dull sublunary lovers' love

        (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

        Absence, because it doth remove

        Those things which elemented it.

        But we by a love so much refined

        That ourselves know not what it is,

        Inter-assured of the mind,

        Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

        Our two souls therefore, which are one,

        Though I must go, endure not yet

        A breach, but an expansion,

        Like gold to airy thinness beat.

        If they be two, they are two so

        As stiff twin compasses are two;

        Thy soul, the fixed foot , makes no show

        To move, but doth, if th' other do.

        And though it is the center sit,

        Yet when the other far doth roam,

        It leans and hearkens after it,

        And grows erect, as that comes home.

        Such wilt thou be to me, who must

        Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

        Thy firmness makes my circle just,

        And makes me end where I begun.

This is John Donne's wonderful poem exhorting his wife not to fret as he prepares to travel from England to the Continent in 1612 (she was pregnant at the time, and suffered a still-birth while he was away).  If you consider the last two lines, you might wonder who Donne is really trying to comfort!

This poem is of course packed with tightly woven metaphors: the relatively simple metaphors of tear/flood and sigh/tempest near the beginning of the poem, which were clichés even in Donne's time; the more complex metaphoric pairing of the privacy of the marriage bed as a kind of priesthood and the workaday world (drawing Donne away) as a kind of uninitiated "laity."  The more implied the connection between the two parts of each metaphor, the more complex/taut/tensioned the life of it in your mind when you read it.  (And of course, the more difficult to parse out.)

But the main metaphor of the poem is the idea of two lovers as the fixed and movable feet of a cartographer's compass.  Donne expresses this relationship initially in the form of a simile, thankfully, for isn't this poem complicated enough already?  In fact, what makes the metaphor so "conceitful" is this insistence on surface clarity in which he spells out the relationship: this is like that.  And there's a reason for this "transparent" approach: Donne means to sustain the identification lovers/compass in every detail over the final three stanzas of the poem.  That's a lot of real estate over which to pack an image!  He needs to make clear as possible, in detail, the connections between parting, traveling, waiting at home, returning and the operation of a highly technical drawing tool; otherwise, the poem might become clever and precious, and sentimental, but will never become art.  And the beauty of the poem is in how tight these connections are, not in how heart-felt the message.

What makes this lovers/compass relationship a conceit are two things: 1) the arresting linkage of human love and technology; and 2) the point by point specificity of the identification--love works in every instance in the poem just as the tool operates.  You have to pay attention, or you'll miss the power, the poetry, of the poem.  The more you read the poem, the more expansive it becomes in your own experience of love and technology, the ways of the bed and of the world.

So.  On to our project.

For this Wednesday, write a poem in which you develop at least one complex metaphor or conceit-like construction.  Don't worry about extending it beyond a line or even just a phrase, though you're welcome to give that the old Metaphysical try if you like.  But make it fresh, arresting, expansive, that is, likely to send us as your readers into our own lockup of experience and worldview for ways to "take your meaning."

This is not a license for cuteness, sentimentality (as opposed to sentiment), cleverness, jokiness, mere weirdness and cliché.  It's a request for innovation, the unexpected, the strange-at-first-sight-but-actually-new-and-startling.  As for cliché, just look at the metaphors at the very top of this post.  Not a bed of roses, please; but maybe a pillow of noise?  Not a mind like a steel trap, but a mind that is a critter.

The fun of this project will be to come up with associations between unlike things that you would'n't ordinarily put together in the same thought, wouldn't normally relate to one another.  The trick, though, will be to make the relationship meaningful, to make it expand in your reader's consciousness either by going against expectations or by opening up to the unexpected (Well!  I sure didn't see that coming!).

Okay?  Okay.  Get busy.

 

 

 

Speaking poems in new voices (6.17.22)

Next week, we're returning to a project we tried pre-pandemic: reading poems aloud with new voices. (See my blog post for 11.21.18: Reading Poems Aloud)  I've noted lately how all of us at Wednesdays@One, me included, read aloud in virtually the same voice, week in and week out.  Let me first describe what I've been hearing.  Please, do not think that I am criticizing voice tones that you may recognize as your own--each of our reading voices is distinct, unique, and personal, and to be valued for all that.  

There is the relatively toneless voice, in all its glorious monotony.  It's often also a clipped speech pattern, speeding across a phrase or a line, rarely pausing for breath, not even at a convenient spot, like a comma or, sometimes, even a period!

There is the stentorian voice, often the toneless voice's opposite.  It treats every syllable as either a hill or a valley to be climbed or descended.  A period often gets more beats in rest than it deserves, and line endings are invitations to pause, take a breath, and gather the lips and the tongue before plunging forward.

Some voices come haltingly, move slowly through a line, stumble over a piece of innovative syntax or an unfamiliar set of syllables, back up, try again, and pause where no pause should occur.

And some voices drive through a poem in erroneous abandon, supplying words that are not there, deleting words that are, correcting others, mispronouncing still others.

There are even some voices (mine can be one of them from time to time) that bring more drama to the show than is really there, that treat every line like it's being declaimed by Richard Burbage, Sir Richard Burton, Dame Judith Anderson: you get my point.  This voice treads the boards.

Well, my friends.  For our next project, I want each of us to spend time with a single poem that is not our own (I will send you the poem).  I want us to get to know this poem inside and out:

• Its content
• Its form and structure
• Its line endings and enjambments
• Its repetitive sounds
• Its stressed and non-stressed syllables
• Its juxtaposed consonants and vowels, labials, glottal stops, aspirants, dentals and nasals
• And its possible meanings and how these are reinforced by the sounds of the spoken words

A case in point.  Years ago I worked with my poetry-jazz band on the great "To be or not to be" soliloquy.  I practiced it endlessly in private in my home studio, emphasizing different phrases and lines, lifting my voice here, dropping it to a whisper there, bring it to full stops at important stages of the passage, letting it flow forward in other stages.  Then I tried it with my band, individually at first, then as a group.  Working with the drummer was especially revealing, as you might imagine.  I learned so much about this "tone poem" as we developed (I won't say perfected) the version we would eventually bring to the stage.  I learned how its content actually sorts itself into major sections, like fields of thought within the soliloquy, beyond what my college lecture courses told me about how the piece organizes meaning.  I learned how some lines are meant to move fast, others ponderously.  Musical direction got to be an important consideration: piano, mezzo, forte, crescendo, diminuendo, adagio, andante, allegro, etc.  There seemed to be no end to the possibilities for voicing this great piece of dramatic poetry.

Now, you likely won't have a drummer to work with for this project, much less a band (much less an interpretive jazz band!), nor will you have the time to put into it that I put into Hamlet's monologue.  The good thing is that you won't need that.  What you will need, however, is a week spent in the company of a good poem, a quiet and, if you must have it, private place to read the poem aloud.  Not just once before the session we'll have on June 29, but many times until then.  

Read it to yourself as much as you like in silence, just to get in your mind's ear the flow, pitch, and pacing of the language.  Read it enough to parse out the possible meanings of various phrases, lines, word orders, stanzas, and their relations to one another.  (Try not to over interpret what you are reading, to read "into" the poem what can't be supported poetically, logically rhetorically or any other way.)  

Then try reading it aloud in your normal reading voice, that is, the way you usually approach a poem when you read it aloud.  Next, try something different tonally, sonically, rhythmically, and in terms of pace.  Try speeding through it once or twice if you're a notoriously slow reader, or plodding through it if you normally read a a faster clip.  Try this (it often works wonders for me in practice): read as much of the poem in a single breath as you can.  

Do these exercises until you begin to see the poem differently.  I guarantee you that this will happen.  You'll start to see and hear relationships between parts of the poem that weren't evident when you first read it.  You'll begin to see pitch-ups and pitch-downs, clatter-y phrases and "ponder parts."  

This is all to the good because it will make you more aware of your own voice as you write your next poem, and of your fellow writers' voices as you read or listen to their poems.

The Refrain (6.10.22)

To my friends at Wednesdays@One: this week's project is to write poems that have refrains in them.  The point of this project is to get you thinking about the refrain as a poetic and rhetorical device, how it works in a poem, its thematic, syntactical and grammatical relationship to other parts of a poem, and the rhythmic and musical effects it creates.  But first the guidelines for the project:

Write a poem that uses a refrain.  A poem, I say, and not a song lyric.  Aim for a refrain that contributes to the poem in a specific way:

• That emphasizes a theme, by reinforcing it or by undermining or questioning it, for example, something like a point-counterpoint structure
• That creates a lyrical movement in the poem, for example, by providing a recurring sound, accent (stressed or unstressed)
• That establishes an image, visual or aural, to which the poem returns periodically

What do I mean when I say a poem and not a song lyric?  Well, that's part of the project, to figure out the difference.  All I can do here is to suggest differences that you can be on the lookout for.  Here are some lyrics with refrains that work in different ways:

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charact'ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;

When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love!--then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

-----

Got a new pair of shoes today

Down at the shelter

I got a brand new pair of shoes today

Down at the shelter

Thank that man who left those shoes today

Down at the shelter

Black shoes, black shoes all scuffed and gray

Down at the shelter

With the soles worn through and the laces frayed

Down at the shelter

Find that man and thank him anyway

Down at the shelter

Lace up those shoes and make my getaway

Down at the shelter

Tie a knot in those shoes, brother, we can't stay

Down at the shelter

Leave like that man who left those shoes today

Down at the shelter

The first is the famous sonnet by Keats, "When I Have Fears."  It uses what you might call a poetic refrain, a syntactical and thematic pattern that recurs at regular intervals: When I have . . ., When I behold . . ., And when I feel . . .  Then . . .  This kind of refrain is rhetorical as much as it is poetic, for it creates the outline of a piece of logic supporting an argument in an if-then structure.  The force of the "then" part depends on the repetition of the "when" part three times over.  In Keats' poem, the refrain functions as a means of postponing the outcome, the poem's main message, until the proper conditions for receiving the message have been created.  

Not the kind of refrain you expected?  Then look closely at the second lyric, which is in fact a bluesy song lyric.  The refrain is exact and frequent.  You might say it functions like a drum beat.  And you'd be right.  Because it's main function in the song is to sustain a rhythm.  But the fact that it is made from a phrase (as opposed to a hum or a la-la-la), makes it more than a rhythmical element.  It also creates meaning.  And it isn't just "frequent," either.  This refrain is repetitive.  It comes at the same point--alternating with the lines of the verse--without variation all the way through to the end of the song.  It is so rigidly the same and repetitive that it creates almost a separate space in the lyric, one that's carved out for its particular pacing, rhythm, syntax, and set of stressed/unstressed syllables.  Again, it's a drum beat.

Prayers of Steel

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

This poem is by Carl Sandburg.  It's meant to be "an American poem" in its references to steel, girders, skyscraper, hammers, crowbars - - that is, a poem of work and working people.  As the title says, it's a prayer, and in its prayerness it works by repetition of words and sounds that create an incantatory rhythm.  In this poem, as in the Keats poem above, the refrain-like quality happens at the front of each line: Lay-Beat-Let, Lay-Beat-Drive-Take-Let.  You'll note plenty of sonic harmony in this poem, though no rhyming.  There is alliteration, falling rhythm, repeated words, but no obvious end-rhyme.

Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry--the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

You can see for yourself all the repetitions of this poem.  They create a refrain-like pulse from line to line and stanza to stanza that rings in your ear, no matter whether you read it out loud or in silence (though I recommend trying it out loud!).  Wallace Stevens was known as a poet of colors.  Turn to almost any poem in his collected works and you'll find color to spare.  In this poem, the word itself plays a refrain-like role: repetition of the color of leaves, peacocks, hemlock, fire, bush.  It's also busy with sound: cries loud and sweeping.  The effect is totally lyrical, incantatory even.  And rhyme?  There is lots of it in this poem, just not so much at the end of a line.  The rhyming quality of this poem might best be described as swirling.  Its refrain-like language creates an effect as you read--you start to anticipate where the poem is going, at least sonically.  So much of Stevens' poetry is about the effect it has as you read.  It's a poetry of the moment in all its immediacy.

Let's look at another kind of refrain, for comparison.  

Eldorado

  Gaily bedight,

  A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,

  Had journeyed long,

  Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.

  But he grew old--

  This knight so bold--

And o'er his heart a shadow

  Fell as he found

  No spot of ground

That looked like Eldorado.

  And, as his strength

  Failed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow--

  "Shadow," said he,

  "Where can it be--

This land of Eldorado?"

  "Over the mountains

  Of the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

  Ride, boldly ride,"

  The shadow replied,--

"If you seek for Eldorado!"

You'll probably recognize this one as an Edgar Allen Poe poem.  And you can see again the lines, phrases and words serving as refrains.  What makes this one different is that it's a narrative poem (i.e., tells a story), so the recurring images and phrases tend to relate differently to different parts of the story as it unfolds.  Each stanza ends like any poem with a traditional refrain, but in this case the refrain serves to move the action of the poem forward.  Tennyson did the same thing with his famous poem, "The Lady of Shallot."  The old Scots song, "Barbara Allen," does much the same thing.  Poe does something else here that reinforces the refrain structure: he indents the first, second, fourth and fifth lines of each stanza, without variation.  This creates a visual refrain.

So, to sum up.  Although I am interpreting "refrain" broadly here as anything that repeats, I think you can see how closely repeated phrases, words, lines and so on can create a rhythm in a poem, as well as opportunities to make and develop meaning.  I hope you see that poems with refrains don't have to rhyme, necessarily, but they SHOULD create expectation, just as the refrain of a popular song signals a return to some familiar sonic place. 

As you write your poem, try to "foresee" the expectations you're creating in your reader's mind, where the reader starts to anticipate where the poem is going and where it's going to end up.  Use that anticipation either to satisfy, please, surprise, arrest or otherwise exercise some effect on your reader.  You want your reader to feel the beat, yes, but you also want your reader to derive some meaning and feeling from the experience.

Memoria poetry (5.31.22)

What happened in Uvalde?  Sadly, only those teachers, kids, and police know; and what happened inside that school room only a teacher and the kids in that class at that hour know.  The rest is for speculation.

Which brings me to my topic: poetry in memory of, or in acknowledgement of.  There is all kind of it, isn't there?  Think of The Iliad as a memorial to the great Greek-Trojan war.  Think of Sigfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooks writing about trench warfare in 1917.  Think of Whitman before that writing about a Union Army hospital camp and three dead soldiers under tarps.  Or more recently, Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet," about his experience serving in the first US-Iraq War.  These poems aren't exactly "in memory of," but more about the horrors and heroics of war.  But they might still be classified as a type of what I have in mind.  

Another type, more closely aligned with what I've been thinking about, you read in some of W.H. Auden's poetry in 1939 and 1940, as the German Army rolled through Western Europe.  You know, his "low, dishonest decade" and his "New Year Letter (1940)."  

Obviously, where I'm going here is poetry written in memory of a catastrophe or a "tragedy" or an otherwise horrific event that all of a nation or even the world experience together.  Like what happened in Uvalde and before that in Buffalo and before that  . . . and so on and so forth.

(I should sit down soon and write a poem about angry boys with powerful guns and title it "And So On And So Forth."  But the point of this piece is why.  Why would I do that?)

Like clockwork, like Inevitability itself, my own writing cohort has produced several poems now in reaction to the events in Uvalde.  Not so much on the events in Buffalo or any of the other deadly forays around the U.S. in the past five months.  But that's another story, maybe.

Like clockwork, it seems, Amanda Gorman produces a poem in reaction to the event in Uvalde.  It gets front page, above-the-fold placement in the New York Times on May 28.

Why do we do this?  What is this that we do?  For whom do we write these poems?  What are we, readers, to do with these poems?

I really don't know.  But lately they all strike me about as deeply as my Congressman's thoughts and prayers.

So, what happened in that school room and in that grocery market and in that church and in that nail salon (and so on and so forth) that any of us could possibly think we might address through a poem dashed off the day after?  We. Were. Not. There.  So shut up already.

Some "events" demand that: just shut up.  Give your horror which is my horror too time to simmer, to work its way out of your sub- and into your conscious mind.  No songs, no prayers, no poems.

Though of course, I have to write a full-on blog entry just to make that point.

The Letters of Thom Gunn (5.31.22)

"I can hardly imagine a life more to my taste than mine."

Thom Gunn wrote this in a letter to a friend.  It's collected in The Letters of Thom Gunn, reviewed this weekend in The New York Times.  Of course, the life to which he refers is one of sex, drugs and rock & roll, lived for 30+ years in San Francisco's Haight district . . . so you can imagine what killed him finally in 2004.

Why his collected (selected, actually) letters are coming out only now, I can't say and neither does the reviewer.  Maybe it had something to do with his second tier status among the Great Poets, or maybe he left instructions to keep it under wraps until most of his correspondents had passed away, too.

Anyway.

I never had much feeling for his poetry, so never paid much attention to it.  I recall a book the reviewer mentions, a combo of his and Ted Hughes' poems.  And I do have a series of Penguin Paperback collections of 60s era British poetry in my library (way down there on the bottom shelf where I almost never go anymore), in which Gunn is one of the featured writers.  Maybe that series is why I never read much of his work.  It's all Brits trying on American styles and voices and subjects.  Or so I think I thought at the time.  And not miming them too well for all that.

Anyway.

Seems like of all those writers, Gunn was the one who worked hardest to become American, and American poet.  He moved to San Francisco, after all, and stayed.