Intimate Stranger

WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

1. A young person writes (could it be you, Reader?), asking what poetry is for. “What is it about?”

How must I answer the question? A verse of Czeslaw Milosz rises to the surface:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is always open,

there are no keys in the door

and invisible guests come in and out at will

Implicit in these lines is the argument that ‘one’ should try to remain one. I will counter that poetry is ‘about’ our multiplicity, our un-fixedness, our fluidity. About how we are modified by the ancestors and the ghosts, taken possession of by the invisible guests. Voices also need a house to sleep in.

But how to approach such a vast subject? Historically? Ideologically? Within its present permutations? Or perhaps, creatively? In the same way that a notion acquires meaning in the search for it, the reader will form the perception. I have no idea what you wish to hear. Besides, do you, as readers in the plural form also, have any cohesiveness? Can I say anything worthwhile to fit the listening where expectations and experiences diverge?

Let me try. This is what I’ll convey to her (to you):

First we must speak of the surroundings in which our exchanges take place, for all of us are subject to what may be called the ambient discourse, even if only in our angry rejection of the fuzziness of the lexicon. In this post-colonial world where we dwell, our cultural composition of many parts accentuates an excessive vagueness and nicey-niceness when we meet (for we all lean backward over our shadows in order to be ‘tolerant’ in respecting differences): perhaps that is why we have settled, publicly at least, for a corrupt, cliché-infested sociology-speak. Is it the ultimate expression of self-indulgence not to be ‘personal’? Or are we masking in this way our profound indifference to the other? The post-modernist discourse with its facile moral feel-good spin-off, has led to a wallowing in the troughs of the self. We think it is intellectually challenging to be fucking flies. (Thank God for the right to abort.)

Whoa, you say. Hold your horses and pigs before they trample our contract of decent intercourse at the trough! Who is this ‘we’ you’re passing, hoping that we won’t notice the unbuttoned flies?

I’ll tell you. For the purposes of my argument it is the public figure with the many mouths, the responsible and deeply concerned citizen who thinks he or she (still) has a contribution to make toward redrafting a better world, who may want to cling to stalwart concepts of economic and social justice, equal opportunities, decency, dignity and grace and elegance and humanism and responsibility as opposed to that ‘cutting-edge’ claptrap of a devalued vocabulary promoting lazy thinking and cynicism — and thus a morbid value system — in which we all have to live with awesome cool. You could say the ‘we’ is the rebellious multiple mouth with no correct mind-mindedness of its own. But it happens to be the me-we you addressed your question to.

Language, you see, is terribly important. It must be rectified incessantly. “All wisdom is rooted in learning to call things by the right name” (Confucius). Depriving people, however insidiously, of the possibility to use the fiery route between thought (or emotion) and expression, the mother tongue of texture and color, the unambiguously inhabited language which allows you to fight and fold the matter, perhaps even accede to the authentic echo of origin embedded in the word — is to draw them out onto the shallow terrain of hollow demagoguery, of convoluted qualifications and empty statements, of fly-fucking in other words, and ultimately to that alienation where the borrowed language of modernity becomes devalued.

2. “To idealize [here I’m quoting Martin Amis from a recent essay in The Guardian]: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting clichés. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed values of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”

Sounds admirably pure. But is the language of creativeness really all that different from the learned porridge we serve in the academy? Well, yes and no. No, as every creative linguistic expression should obviously always be an inventive effort at using the known or the understood to propose more applicable or transforming concepts. Yes, since poetry is a precise and tactile tongue, even though it can be called ‘universal’ because it always speaks poetry, irrespective of the language it inhabits or hides in. “Poetry is my mother tongue.” (Yang Liang)

Visual art is a language with its own alphabet. Music is a language replete with intent and with meaning and yet without words. These and other forms of artistic expression are the primary or original languages. They differ from our everyday working verbal tools — philosophy, science, theology, sociology and politics — in that they’re not dependent on a consensus of lexical or contextual meaning. The languages of creativeness certainly also mean (they may even make sense and sentences), but the meaning is carried by the totality of means at their disposal: color, texture, echo, absence, shape, etc. They are both non-elusive and endlessly allusive. More than that, these languages are bound to forge new meanings, to transform perception in the real sense of the term. Ideally they don’t carry meaning but become as many meanings as there are minds. A poem is not just a statement or a lining or limping up of words; it is also the actualization of metamorphosis in process. You may say it is thought on its way to the unthinkable.

So, my first answer is: poetry is for writing straight, skinning the words so that they may shine as primary manifestations. Or, as second first answer: poetry is for writing over because we have been crooked out of a close communication / communion with the world in us and the world outside us, and we have to cheat our way back to paradise.

3. You say you are a beginner. How lucky you are! You don’t say, but I take this to imply that you have already indulged in verse, or else you wouldn’t be asking me these questions.

I’ll let you in on the secret everybody knows: Writing poetry is one of the most general forms of crying and communication that we humans attempt! We all write poetry at some point. Why? I think it is because we instinctively reach out for more powerful and perhaps more sincere ways of trying to access the essential (at that moment) or the unsayable, through words that are more than mere concepts; this is when we use a sharpened awareness of sound and rhythm and texture and spacing, of silences and omissions. . In other words, we attempt to capture what is beyond or around the words and their meanings by chiming with the ‘non-verbal’ components of communication.

In Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels said: “I became obsessed by the palpable edge of sound. The moment when language at last surrenders to what it’s describing: the subtlest differentials of light or temperature or sorrow. I’m a Kabbalist only in that I believe in the power of incantation. A poem is as neural as love; the rut of rhythm that veers the mind. . This hunger for sound is almost as sharp as desire, as if one could honor every inch of flesh in words; and so, suspend time. A word is at home in desire. No station of the heart is more full of solitude than desire which keeps the world poised, poisoned with beauty, whose only permanence is loss.”

My attempted explanation, young lady, should be expanded: in the light of the above quote I further believe that we experience the need to merge or identify with primal movement in gestures and rituals shared by all of us since the very beginning of time. For, although creativeness breaks new ground, eroding or extending consciousness, it is also always recalling the underlying earth (ageless and timeless) of deep-sound, exorcism, incantation, the primeval gestures and movements outlining the ebb and flow of awareness. And although this may recall the original shared memory, essentially of our mortality, the manifestation will not only be ‘public’ but also, private and idiosyncratic.

Let me reiterate: Creativeness is both intensely individual (the lines of recognition and fashioning produced by one hand) and profoundly universal. ‘Universal’ by using a means of expression (in this instance writing) and, to an extent, a field of references shared generally. But universal, as well, because the major themes according to which we live our lives have been common to the species since the first dim glimmer of consciousness: death (or non-being), the urge to go beyond and thus the need to project (imagination, creating utopias), the desire to suspend decomposition by remembering (and remembering is a forgetting hand), the paranoia which comes with the fall between understanding and not understanding, building the face of presentable survival and then ‘facing’ the mirror of the other. It would appear that we need this recognition and affirmation of our shared rhythms of birth, growth, love and loneliness, maturing, fall, death and decay. Following the lines of the known will liberate the hand; sometimes, decay comes before death and the hand will be devoured by the maggots of words.

From this unfinishing business of passing from thought to dust will flow, I think, ethics and social responsibility (but also the urge to destroy), the sense of family, the pursuit of power. Power is the abuse of pain in the forlorn hope of extinguishing it. Even if we only do so vicariously by entering writing through reading. The first act of poetry is always a read: deciphering the stars, observing stick-like people shuffling over a horizon of shifting mirages in Africa, plunging into the dark heart of love. . And as we move, so we repeat. You will have noticed how one keeps on unearthing the bone of a favorite poem — surely because we want to recreate the instant, that identification with the original moment of feeling, and not because of the information encapsulated. The dog of time would have gnawed white the bare meaning of words. You will also know by now that the open process or proposition of a poem is only completed once it has been taken possession of and integrated by the reader. Each poem is unique and never finished. And there are as many poems as there are moments of reading, as many moments awakening the puckered mind of beginning. You are the dog, the poem the bone.

We are all beginners at the ‘useless’ pastime of planting the sun and later digging up the bone (which we will then venerate as an ancestral thigh), however long some of us may have been tilling the field pretending to put together the riddle of memory through the artifacts we found. Stanley Kunitz talks about the endlessness of beginning in a poem called “The Round,” and he’s now ninety-six years old and lately the poet laureate of his country. It just never stops. Also, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Of course, to be a beginner is neither simple nor easy. I’m saying it is important to approach the act (or the suspension) of writing poetry as if for the first time, with awe and wonder, experiencing the words as familiar foreigners in the house: it is about time to get to know them better before they rob or rape you. (Or if you permit them to do so, at least have some pleasure in return.) Partly because no poem is ever a final cure or even curse — it is but ‘marking’ time.

Neste papel

pode teu sal

virar cinza;

(“On this paper / your salt could / turn to ashes;”)

João Cabral de Melo Neto in Psychology of Composition

Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one’s own. .) If you ask what poetry is ‘about,’ it means that you have already started learning alliteration and assonance and allegory (being ‘other-speak,’ as it means in Greek). You will perhaps have become familiar with the female or feline or ferocious forms of ballads and ballades and blank verse and the blues, of cantos and chants and concrete poems, of eclogues and elegies and epics and epigrams. In due course, as you go along, you will find your feet: the iambs and the trochees and the dactyls and the anapests and the spondees. You will move through found poems, free verse, odes and rengas and villanelles and pantoums and rap, ghazals and haikus and limericks and lyrics and madrigals — by means of metaphor (the ‘vehicle of transport’) and image and line and strophe and quatrain and stanza and rhythm and rhyme (ah, of many positions and several genders, even terza rima if that’s your perversion). You may end up as a dark well reflecting the stars in sonnets and sestinas. . Don’t be trampled by horses at the watering trough! Death starts at the feet.

Please don’t take my fumbled mumbling for gospel and don’t be put off by my oblique approach: as a beginner I too am only now starting to understand why I set out on this journey.

4. What is poetry, you ask? Put differently — what are its ambitions? No, we may not know once and for all what it is, but we can trace some of its characteristics in the movements. For it is of the essence of poetry to do, not just to be. True enough, it may well be in the nature of any language to be, fixing our approximations of meaning and serving as communication, but there too it must perpetually become in order to raise our desires — to allude, slide away, open spaces by looking for ambivalence and cracks, and thereby engender the images which will arise from these.

The psychiatrist, D.W. Winnicott remarked somewhere: “Artists are continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found.”

I’d suggest that poetry is a world (the world inside and outside us) shaped by breath. It is the breath of dreaming drawn from a hunger for awareness — the awareness that tells you that to be awake is also the result of dreaming expressed in the internal vibration of rhythm.

Poetry is a love. Of what? Of the discovery and the celebration of words, things, feelings, ideas, undigested memories, insights, other people, yourself, other selves, mystery, sense, eternity, other eternities, nonsense, nothingness, the whales and the foam and the shadow of grass on the mountain, the bones of the dog buried in the garden. Of love itself. And it is an engagement with all of the above. It is a love-act.

Poetry is a love of that art of making which will take you away from self-indulgence — for even as you fashion it, it takes on a life of its own. And although it is the freest of entanglements, capable of containing whatever you wish to put in it (provided you can make it fit), it does have form and tradition. Indeed, when the poem starts working its form will emerge to take possession of the shape. (“The very age and shape of time is form.”) This you have to recognize. You should curtsy or touch the brim of your hat. The paradox is that you imagine you are emptying the self on the page, and what you get is a mirror in which the triteness or relative (un)importance of your emotions is weighed. One finds that an endless fascination with self and the caressing of one’s own loneliness will not take you very far down the road of becoming other. Staking out the self is a lonely business; you end up finding your shadow a noisy stalker scaring the self into a fearful blathering. Nothing is as banal and common and goat-like as the self. It is true though, that this mirror of inconsequentiality can also, through recognition, constitute identification with larger attitudes and convictions and expectations; it will reflect the shadows and smoke of history’s movements even as these darken your eyes.

Yeats said love comes from the energy to create and the energy to create comes from love.

Forgive me if I repeat myself. I have already said that poetry is the process of transfiguring words back into the original breath, the beat of the world. It goes without saying that words will always retain their intrinsic or agreed-upon characteristics — those that they evoke in sound and texture (the ‘heart’ is after all not an organ, but in its own way, as word, it beats with resonance, origin, sound and taste) — and then, when alert to the power of context, placed in a field of tension, modified by proximity and juxtaposition and in pattern with other words, tested by distancing. . they become the moments in a metamorphosis provoked by image and metaphor, “lucid objects of language”, to open on to a “third dimension” beyond the references of word-meaning.

I’m suggesting that poetry can be a discipline of consciousness. It may furthermore embody an ethic of being. It can. It ought to. It can be a life-long mirroring meditation on life. It can be a companion light as you go toward and into the darker spaces of death to join the nocturnal tribes.

Perhaps I was just giving way to anger and frustration when I tried to pit the languages of creativeness against those of academia. It is more likely a case of ‘horses for courses.’ Nevertheless, my ranting might inadvertently have highlighted the specificity and autonomy of the discourses of creativeness. In a well-known essay called “The Redress of Poetry,” Seamus Heaney wrote: “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W. B. Yeats’s terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a truism, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a. . context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and ‘silence-breaking’ writing of all kinds. (—) Poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life. Which is to say that its power as a mode of redress in the first sense — as agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices — is being appealed to constantly. But in discharging this function, poets are in danger of slighting another imperative, namely, to redress poetry, as poetry, to set it up as its own category, an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means. (—) Poetry, let us say, whether it belongs to an old political dispensation or aspires to express a new one, has to be a working model of inclusive consciousness.”

5. And what is poetry not? This too I have already said: it is not a way to power or riches or status or position. Not even at university. It is not an answer to loss and it cannot assuage the sorrows of the world. It will not bring down governments. It is not a blotting paper to life, sopping up the bloody ink to give back a fuzzy ‘truth’ all the more meaningful because now indistinct mirror writing. (Although, you should please keep in mind and in mouth the fact that what emanates as poetry is always inserted in the public domain. We have to live this duality. Italo Calvino wrote in a text called “Questionnaire, 1956”: “And I believe that the writer must keep open a discourse which in its implications cannot but be political as well. . Everything that forces us to give up a part of ourselves is negative.”)

I have learned (as a beginner) that one must read, read and read again. As well, that you must be reckless but patient. And if you want to be honest in your verse, if that is your thing, remember that honesty is to be open, unprejudiced and available — no matter if the digestion produces an enigmatic turd. Don’t let the dog in dogmatism and the Oedipal in the paranoid search for hidden meaning cloud your mind and stink up your nostrils. Freedom is a search, not a found fundamentalism. Beware of sloppiness, the dead word and the inflated simile. Protect yourself against easy sentiments (often no more than sentimentality), and especially from the blight of ‘correct’ moral and political postures. Don’t ever wave the flag: it is a shit-cloth meant for wiping the ass and polishing the easel; it is the rag in which you fold your dead flies. Eschew generally shared beliefs that are but ‘public opinion’ or ways to escape from the asperities of life and an intractable environment.

El Greco wrote as a note in the margin of someone else’s treatise: “Although it may seem that the masses have a vote in architecture and in music or rhetoric or painting, the fact is that this happens only when time and informed opinion have revealed the truth. And if once in a while popular taste is right, it is usually by accident and is not worth taking into account.”

Don’t be ‘nice.’ Don’t try to be clever. There is such a thing as creative intelligence, kneaded into the dough of your art. It has little to do with the acquired monkey cleverness of the person wanting to impress and please the powers that be. Wanting to be ‘relevant’ is piddling pomposity. Leave that to the politicians.

Please don’t imagine that poetry is a cool way of double-speak so as to hide meaning. Don’t make of the poem a cheap riddle. Don’t be a furrowed brow in quest of wisdom. Enough already! The poem is meaning. The poem is its own meaning. Poetic knowledge is born in the deep silence of phenomena not understood, thoughts unformulated and fate unknown of scientific knowledge. From that which cannot be explained comes poetry. (Or, by default, it will at least be the sextant allowing you to “keep watch over absent meaning,” as Maurice Blanchot said.)

(mirror note 1)

This is what I come across, leafing through Habitations of the Word of William H. Gass:

“Our oblivion has been seen to. . and unless we write as though the ear were our only page; unless upon the slopes of some reader’s understanding we send our thoughts to pasture like sheep let out to graze; unless we can jingle where we feed, sound ourselves and make our presence heard, unless. .

So hear me read me see me begin.

I begin. . don’t both of us begin? Yet as your eye sweeps over these lines — not like a wind, because not a limb bends or a letter trembles, but rather more simply — do you find me here in your lap like a robe? And even if this was an oration, and we were figures in front of one another. . holding up the same thought, it would still not be the first time I had uttered these sentences (though I seem to be making them up in the moment of speaking like fresh pies), for I was in another, distant, private place when I initially constructed them, and then I whispered them above the rattling of my typing. .; I tried to hear them above the indifferent whirring of their manufacture, as if my ear were yours, and held no such noise. . God knows what or where I am now — now as you read. Our oblivion has been seen to.”