origin of the pieces

What's broken commands attention. Glass shatters and there is surprise, danger, sharp edges, and the scattered pieces reflect light in unexpected ways. A disturbance of wholeness and immediately we are provoked to wonder: what was it before it broke? The contemporary poem has been decisively shattered by various techniques such as fragmentation, juxtaposition, collage, ellipsis and manipulation of space on the page. Ashbery and Graham have been using these techniques for many years, as have a host of newer poets including D.A. Powell, Joshua Clover, Dan Beachy-Quick, Matthea Harvey, Karen Volkman, Andrew Zawacki, Noah Eli Gordon and many more—in fact, so many more that the trajectory of contemporary American poetry is decisively aimed toward non-linerarity and fragmentation (of idea or image, or both) and away from the (still) prevailing mode of narrative, confessional, lyric and meditative"I"-based poems. Of course, there have always been poetries operating apart from the I- driven narrative and lyric, and a healthy crosstalk has been going on among and between all current and past styles for many years, as, for example, between lyric-I, narrative, and Language Writing, or between poems and other types of writing such as essay, discourse, fiction, journalism and speech—everyday idiom or heightened rhetoric.

As with fragments from an archeological dig—pot shard, parchment piece, splinter of bone—we are provoked into imagining the whole from which they came. Engaging us in that imaginative act gives the broken poem interest, as well as intellectual or emotional traction, a handrail however shaky or newly constructed at every step. I was interested to see this described in another way in the article Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise . An excellent and visual example of provocative fragmenting is Mary Ruefelle's A Little White Shadow (Wave Books)—a small, lovely book that is itself an art object, each page seemingly smeared with white-out, allowing only glimpses of phrase, image, line, that tantalize into imagined sequences and narratives, a possible world, a back story now invisible but informing the surface.

The reading of shattered poems is inevitably accompanied by the question: what was it before it broke? Is there a hint of story to be reconstructed? An identifiable emotional center? A tradition, a form, an historical construct of any kind? Any sense of a wholeness that shadows a poem, whether it is only hinted at (the ongoing sense of prayer haunting DA Powell's Cocktails) or obvious (the sonnet form broken and reassembled by Volkman in Nomina) is, it seems to me, what gives the poem's brokenness its power.

Sensing the existence of an integrity behind even the most apparently broken poem, a reader uses that sense to navigate and cohere small islands of linearity, similarity or mood within the poem. How far apart the islands lie, how much of a leap from one to the next is required by the reader, and whether or not the reader senses a wholeness shadowing the display of dispararities has, I believe, a lot to do with the success of such a poem.

not mere rhetoric

What does it mean to be a poetry critic? Should a poetry critic also be a poet? Aren't all poets critics by necessity? After all, poets think about their work, how to best revise it, how it might work differently and so forth. Even when proceeding by pure experimentation, poets will figure out what they've done once they've done it. Many, if not most, poets are also teachers. How do they teach poetry without analyzing, comparing, discussing and evaluating, then articulating their thoughts to an audience? Some poets are also editors, requiring them to make judgments of work submitted to them. How is this done if not by thinking critically about poetry, seeing the poem as an aesthetic object and attempting to understand and articulate, if only to oneself, how and what it is doing?

At the Harriet Blog, DA Powell sees a separation between poet and critic while Reginald Shepherd argues for their natural, if not inescapable, coupling. I agree with Reginald. Books get reviewed, submissions accepted or rejected, and seminars and poetry workshops conducted all on the basis of thinking critically about poetry. There is hardly a way to be a poet and avoid teaching it, writing about it, talking about it, blogging about it, etc. Everyone's a critic as they say, and nowhere is this more obvious than in poetry. But isn't poetry criticism a separate field of knowledge? What constitutes poetry criticism as a discipline, where and how is it studied, and where does it fit in the field of poetry? What training should a poetry critic have? These questions are being provoked as I read the terrific Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism, a newly-published anthology of the writings of the New Critics edited by Garrick Davis. I am struck by the intellectual depth, rigor and commitment to poetry and truth these critics had.

After another, related, reading, "The Shakespeared Brain", an article by Phillip Davis, I did some research on rhetoric, its history and terminology. Useful in writing and also in criticism, the study of rhetoric seems to have gone the way of studying grammar. Perhaps the brain studies described by Davis will inspire more study of the way language usage affects thinking, and rhetoric will return as a hot new field of study. A few years ago I proposed an alternative course of study for an MFA in poetry that doesn't include writing a poetry "thesis" or taking workshops, but instead would be an MFA in Poetry Criticism—comprising the reading of and thinking critically about, poetry, with a minor focus on writing your own (and maybe a major focus on rhetoric!).

boredom as concept

Coming of age in the warhol-inspired, electric-kool-aid-acid-test, krapp's last tape, happenings, conceptual/ performance/installation art, open/visual/concrete poetry era, the discussion of "conceptual poetry" taking place on the poetry foundation blog in Kenneth Goldsmith's entries, seems very familiar, even retro, to me, but I know I must be careful not to conflate what happened then with what's happening now, however similar they may seem (how aggravating it is to hear "oh, that's nothing new"!). And besides, so what if the concept of "conceptual poetry" is not new? Maybe it's time to revisit it and enjoy it again. It's got some new elements, has expanded to include more "art-y" and "performance-y" bits (open poetry meets conceptual art) and has overall new energies and confident practitioneers which give it a nice new shiny look and feel. The problem for me is not that it's been done but that I didn't enjoy it the first time around. For one thing, the people who were "into it" were pretentious and full of inflated rhetoric and insubstantial ideas all wrapped up and presented as intellectual daring. I admit I sat through the whole of Warhol's film of a man sleeping* trying to be as avant-garde as my hippie friends, but even then, I had nagging doubts. Why wasn't I seeing a Bergman film, or some other cutting edge film like "Jules and Jim," or "8 1/2" -- something that had substance and meaning or joy and daring, something that I could enjoy and savor or at least not be bored by? Why deliberately subject myself to something boring, especially after the enforced boredom of a classroom? Raising these questions only got the response: "Ah-ha! That's how you're supposed to react. You're supposed to get bored and ask why you're bored. The boredom itself is the experience!." Well. I was already plenty bored, why ask for more? The only way to watch it, really, was to be stoned, the way we all read Ashbery then. Maybe that's the answer re: "conceptual poetry"—-Caution: Do Not Enter Without Drugs.

* Sleep is described thus: "Andy Warhol used a fixed camera position in his 1963 film titled Sleep. The film shows a complete night’s rest over eight hours. Much like the man in the movie, the viewer is tempted to drift off indecisively into unconsciousness. Like in a dream, you don’t have the forethought to know how long you will be in this altered state, and what awaits you after it ends."

an apple is what you do with it

While writing a review of Matthea Harvey's Modern Life, and pondering (again) the penchant of some contemporary poets for using words as playthings without respect for their meaning(s)--implied, contextual, inflected, literal or metaphorical--I noticed the most recent New Yorker article on Pound's influence ("The Pound Error") which included this:

"Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” was the formula of the movement that Pound invented, in 1912: Imagism. In the Imagist model, the writer is a sculptor. Technique consists of chipping away everything superfluous in order to reveal the essential form within. “It took you ninety-seven words to do it,” Pound is reported to have remarked to a young literary aspirant who had handed him a new poem. “I find it could have been managed in fifty-six."

The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on "the perfect word," l.e. mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name.

Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. "When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish," Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. [Italics mine] So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: "is" does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind."

As both editor and poet, Pound was especially aware of the power of a word. It reminds me that the expression "it's only words" (used, astoundingly, by Hillary Clinton—-another Clinton!—-in reference to Obama's speeches) is, or ought to be, anathema to any poet (or writer) claiming to be the real thing, yet we have had decades of poets who write in just that way—-with no respect for, or love of, words. (Curiously, Ron Silliman refers to my review of Harvey as "dissing" her book. In fact, I've probably paid closer attention to her actual poems than any other reviewer. Other reviewers talk mainly about the "project" she has engaged in, not the actual writing.)

Meanwhile, thanks to Ron Silliman's amazing list of links (where I now go for my poetry news fix, along with Poetry Daily News), I came across this, a discussion of how scientists are working on understanding how the brain decodes meaning:

"The meaning of an apple, for instance, is represented in brain areas responsible for tasting, for smelling, for chewing. An apple is what you do with it."

Pound would have been pleased by such a discovery, I think: the direct correspondance between word meaning and experience.

musing on the line

All this talk of ellipticism and parataxis has naturally led me to a deeper consideration of syntax and the poetic line in general. By a happy coincidence I discovered I had a copy of the newly-published (Graywolf) The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach, a fantastic articulation of many of the issues I’ve considered over the years, and many I have not. It's the first book I've read on craft that has real application to reading, appreciating and evaluating many of the contemporary—-dare I say "post-avant"—-poets. One of the many provocations the book provides is the idea of a line that is syntactically coherent but semantically incoherent and the thrill such tension can produce (for example, such as Ashbery can regularly produce). Longenbach's exploration of the line reminds me that overlooked in the critical assessment of elliptical poems is an examination of how the work of the line is enhanced or weakened by what's inside the line—-word choices, denotations and connotations. As Longenbach asks, how can a poem’s "syntactical eruption" be "exciting rather than merely confusing?"

I am also reading Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, a good collection to read in tandem with Longenbach.

unsweetened peonies

In a previous entry, Chad Parmenter's comment introduced the idea of a possible relationship between ellipticism and parataxis—something I started thinking about and now have followed a little further. While ellipsis and parataxis are different (but not opposite) types of grammatical constuction, it's true that many contemporary poems are characterized by paratactic constructions and that, therefore, the "space" left by the disconnected sentences, phrases or fragments is elliptical, that is, to be filled in by the reader. Generally, a heavily paratactic poem signals its modernity. The opposite of parataxis, hypotaxis, is more often seen in older poems. A poem by Jane Kenyon, for example, already seems dated due to its reliance on hypotactic constructions (among other things, including its predictable movement toward the epiphany):

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

The poem is immediately "updated" when parataxis replaces hypotaxis, fragments replace full sentences and juxtaposition is introduced:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance: I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine.

The moist air intensifies. Their scent.
The moon moves around the barn

to find out what it's coming from
in the darkening June evening.

I draw a blossom near, bend close, search it.
A woman searching a loved one's face.


Many older (or not so older) readers of contemporary poetry are put off by the contemporary poem's parataxis and resultant syntactical shifts, just as they find cinematic jumps unpleasant rather than exciting. Because a poem no longer has a recognizable stylistic façade, the reader may find it impossible to enter—where's the door? A poem's subject matter is less of a readability problem for some than the (defeated) expectation of familiar syntax.

Further updating occurs when Kenyon's poem is rearranged toward an "eastern" rather than "western" ending (these are terms I first heard from April Ossman at a Colrain conference). Briefly, the western ending is one that ends the poem with a swelling wave of music and a clash of cymbals; the eastern ending is a chime struck once that reverberates throughout the landscape. The original, western ending:

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

As experienced poets know, the extreme westernization of a poem's ending can often be alleviated by a simple swapping of stanzas:

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

So the poem ends with a whimper, not a bang, and has a more contemporary feel. Now, with a paratactical syntax, and relineation into couplets (another contemporary trend):

Peonies at Dusk

Outrageous flowers! Big as human
heads. Staggered by their own

luxuriance. I had to prop them up
with stakes, twine. The moist air

intensifies their scent. The moon moves
around the barn to find out what

it's coming from. In the darkening
June evening I draw a blossom near,

bend close. Search it. A woman
searching a loved one's face.

White peonies bloom, send out light.
The rest of the yard grows dim.

Now the debate over author intentionality, the meaning of meaning and all such like concerns begins--the concern of translators is also the concern of any reader of a literary text--how to balance the stylistic or "surface" with the intended (and unintended) authorial purpose(s). Many poets use surface manipulation to achieve terrific, often unexpected, results. The idea of poetic development, as it applies to some inner, psychological (or spiritual) evolution (and hard-won "truths") seems also a somewhat outmoded, heavily romanticised concept of the Poet. After all, Khalil Gibran (my favorite "poet" in high school!) or Rumi or good old Babba Ram Dass (sure wish he could be here now) and others of the high-minded supercharged spiritual school of poetry certainly have reached some heights (or depths) of inner development--but what have they got to show for it in re: to the actual writing? Obviously, no connection, and never has been one, between personal goodness, suffering, enlightenment and whatnot and great writing. I remember this conundrum well from my hippified youth--guru-worship vs. the drek of the guru's actual writing--swing low, sweet platitude.

The play's the thing

While Ellipticism has been applied to a poetic style or school, it seems to me that the idea of what's missing, and how that perpetrates the creative act (both in composition and interpretation), is everywhere. In a restaurant, overhearing only bits of a conversation and filling in the rest; in a face to face conversation where gesture and facial expression fill in the unspoken text, perhaps with contradictions to, or support for, the actual words spoken; at the movies, where cinematic jump cuts and flashbacks elide the linearity of a plot; or through background music that supports, denies, or introduces an entirely other world--all add another dimension to the spoken word. This is also true in drama (and maybe a better comparison than film, since dialogue in drama is of utmost importance) where playwrights get to use all the surrounding apparatus of dialogue (action, gesture, prop, music, costume,
scenery) to emphasize, confound, or subvert the spoken word. Having begun my writing life writing plays, not poems, I am always interested in the correspondences between and among these two forms, especially in re: to the idea of "meaning." In theater, the concept of the fourth wall is a great one to apply to the poem wherein the reader can “peer into” the world of the poem with the sense of overhearing something meant to be private. Just as in a play, where the audience is not overtly included (except occasionally, by design), but whose presence is crucial to the creator, a poem needs to be "looked at" in order to exist at all. For the playwright, as for the poet, the audience determines effect. When Arthur Miller built a small cabin in the woods in order to write in isolation the play that was hounding him (Death of a Salesman) he still had no idea that this play that had a hold on him would have a hold on an audience. On opening night, as he stood in the back of the theater and watched the curtain come down in complete silence, then stood for a moment as no one moved or spoke he thought: "It's a failure" until, as the story goes, someone remembered to applaud and "the whole house came down."

In a recent New Yorker article (Dec.23, 2007), John Lahr quotes Harold Pinter: "I think there’s a shared common ground [among people] all right, but that it’s more like quicksand." Pinter's plays, of course, depend on the elliptical moments, those pauses fraught with multiple meaning, looks and intonations, all the missing words among the characters and what's not said is most powerful. Perhaps such power is hard to achieve on the page--certainly the poetic "leap" that Bly proposed as existing and reproducible is one way to put the fraught back into the pause for a poet. Unfortunately, many contemporary poets have only the empty pause--much like the dreaded "dead air" on a radio program--to show for their elliptical efforts.

By the way, I wonder what ever happened to "verse drama"--is there anything in contemporary poetry that would fit that description? Maybe Gluck’s Meadowlands? I think the Poetry Foundation is trying to revive the form with an award for such.

Deeper into January

Along with the contemporary poem's romance with ellipsis and various indeterminacies comes a weird relativism; that is, a sense that the poem can be re-arranged in many different ways to achieve different, and sometimes better, results than the ones in the author's own version. This raises the question of inevitability--is the final, perhaps even published, poem the best poem it can be, or is it simply where the author stopped revising it? It also raises the issue of author intention: where is the border, if there is one, between the author's intended "meaning" and the reader's perceived "meaning?" Does the author's intention matter in the reading of a poem? Should it? Or (as I believe), should the poem trump the poet? Often the poem is better than the poet allows it to be, or enables it to be. Here is the original, relatively straightforward, poem:

In January

Ted Kooser

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.


Here is another version with no other changes but in line order:

In January

This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.

In this version, the poem starts inside the café and moves outward to the city as a whole. It hangs together because each line has a wholeness of its own but is not linked by necessity of narration to its immediately preceding or succeeding line. The gaps, or ellipsis, between and among lines, allows movement of them to other positions, and produces a different frisson. While the opening line of Kooser's original poem is superior to this opening—it is a more striking image, while this opening is simply good description—the ending of this version strikes me as better. The last line, while arguably too big (a "western" ending which I'll discuss in another entry), is less faux-epigrammatic (the "bigger the window" etc., echoes "the bigger they come, the harder they fall" and ending on that line calls attention to the clever, but empty, echo—empty because while the literal part of the line may be true, a bigger window trembles more in the wind, its epigrammatic echo has no real resonance in this poem). Also, compared with the author’s original version, this version seems more mysterious, less linear and, to my mind, more interesting in its progression for those reasons. It’s also a bit darker, less cozy, more about the menace outside, the unpredictable nature of weather, winter, and the bridge out of the city is not safe, is one that creaks. It is, in fact, ancient. This ending is not as pat as the ending in the author’s version.

Here is a third version:

In January

A great wind rushes under all of us.
The bigger the window, the more it trembles.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
This Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers
is lit, or so it seems to us:
only one cell in the frozen hive of night.

Many poems can be upended to good effect. This seems surprising, but if you think about it, poets write toward the epiphany, the big idea, the emotional high, and that very progress is itself a cliché no matter how well or originally it's written. That's because we expect the wind-up before the pitch in every kind of discourse, not just poetry. It's how the mind works and so we echo that working in writing. One way to lessen the predictability of this kind of writing is to "delay cognition" through a simple grammatical strategy like prolonging a clause, or not stating the agent/subject immediately. In this version of Kooser's poem, the big ending lines are first, so now the poem becomes an exploration of that mighty conclusion, something like the cinematic flashback, and the emotional center shifts from the menace outside, the indifference of nature, to the small but enduring grace of human company, giving the poem another kind of feeling, less dark. The line about the "one cell" now has a very different resonance as the poem moves toward, not away from it--and the "hive" speaks of human contact, the sense of huddling together in "one cell" more than alienation in the bigness of a winter night, an indifferent universe.

Looking at all three versions, it seems to me that the author's own version is the weakest of the lot, but could be improved greatly by cutting the line "the bigger the window" altogether, and re-arranging the lines once again:


In January

Only one cell in the frozen hive of night
is lit, or so it seems to us:
this Vietnamese café, with its oily light,
its odors whose colorful shapes are like flowers.
Laughter and talking, the tick of chopsticks.
A great wind rushes under all of us.
Beyond the glass, the wintry city
creaks like an ancient wooden bridge.


A poem is on a continuum of creation. The poet chooses when to stop. Sometimes the poet doesn't know best, but the poem does. The poet needs to listen to the poem.