poetry, "success," and the necessity of audiences

There is a fine balance between acknowledging that poetry is successful when it translates to the reader the images, emotions, and ideas that the artist intended and allowing the audience to overdetermine the work. This is one of my struggles, currently. One could call it workshop syndrome, I guess.
Idealistically, I would like to be able to disqualify the audience as they relate to the “success” of a work, but a poem cannot happen without a reader. Without readers, they are just all the leaves piling upon one another, building soil. Building soil? Well, yes perhaps, but out of what?
There is an instinct in me that acknowledges that all poems share some similarity in the event that they are. Similarities of events demand similarity of material; The world? The individual experience in the world? No, too much thinking has ruined those options for us. :) But perhaps the ways that language is able to articulate the world (even though ever-expanding) is expansive within boundaries. The medium defines, partially, the form of the work, and the way that it gathers itself is inherently particular to that medium; just as carbon can only bond in ways particular to it. But if you want to mention Heidegger's notion of Ort, then from what repository is all of this (poetry) gathered?
I think that I would like to claim that language is nearly a being, itself; that language not only determines what of our experience we can translate into it and therefore that it defines us, as well, but that it, through our employment of it, defines itself continuously, and processively. Like a soil builds itself from the leaves and the trees that were once soil.
I keep remembering the library where I went got my undergraduate degree: the low, squat building whose floors overlapped to house the million books. The halogens buzzing all day, all night, like some large animal breathing quietly in its sleep, and no one reading anything. But the rows of books, the lives in the words of those soundless books, had a presence, as though they arranged themselves in a corona of language, hovering.
The language was there, prescient, even without readers.

The Density

I would like to say
that we made love
as we listened to the news
in the shower.

That we touched
at least our hands
at the soap, on the knobs,
or grabbing for
the same towel, the obituaries
of the world spilling
the room even as the water failed
and we dressed ourselves.

She turned the radio
off and there was only
the rain on the windows,
against the walls and roof:

the ten thousand
small feet of the dead
of that day. There was
no space for our awkward,
human dancing.

Salvage Burning

This ridge, and the next one north,
all those south and those black ones

running east northeast. Opening
from the powercut up both sides

of the miles of crushed basalt roads,
torn plastic tarps hurriedly arranged

over the smoldering stacks.
In this rain, the black stumps shine

like shattered cannons
while limbs clatter in the wind.

Thin necks of smoke writhe up
from the weave of roots and useless

wood, their origins in those
beaded necklaces of flame

and I have the strange desire
to hold them in my mouth

like a nostalgia for a land
I hadn't known I missed.

Far below, trucks rip up
the surface of rain

silvering the highway, and I listen
to the way it calms itself,

accommodates the fists
of rain, sweeps on,

as the skeins of smoke
and cloud open on

a hundred deer, wading among
the ruined bulks and pyres,

their teeth scissoring the few shoots,
sword ferns rotting into winter reds.

Old thoughts on Poetics

A Poetics

“There is a time when we know what poetry is so well that we cannot define it in other words, even as we cannot define the taste of coffee, the color of red, or of yellow, the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, of the sunrise, of the sunset, of our love for our country. Those things are so deep in us that they can only be expressed with those common symbols that we share. So why should we need other words?”
-Jorge Luis Borges


1.16.2004

I believe in story. I believe in lyric, that we can sing. I believe that poetry is a conscious attempt at communication, rooted in the emotional turmoil of our lives, and in our search for the eternal, the spiritual. I believe that the intellectual aspect of poetry is in the ordering of those emotions and in the way we approach the page, the way that we order the page. A line is a unit of rhythm and a unit of meaning. I believe that form should free, and can, and does. I believe that writing is composing and that composing is as deep as worship in us. We divine through the mechanisms of language. Language is historical, it means only in its procession, but rooted in that procession is all of the knowledge and emotion of all of those who have created with it as it has evolved. Their knowledge and emotion forced its evolution. So I mean in a historical context, always capable of saying new, always refining what is, already.


2.2.2005

Poetry is the inflation of events (narrative/lyric) or realizations (lyric) with significance/meaning. This inflation, this jump to the fuller world, is what allows the art to happen. This is close, if not synonymous with mythmaking.
Because identification of speaker/voice with the poet is never complete, but also never completely separate, there is always an element of self-mythologizing; in the best poets, this is done consciously. For consciousness precedes art, necessarily (this is the craft/artistic-control element of art). But a leap of the conscious, into the unconscious, is the other necessary element of art.
The inclusion of the unconscious is what is responsible for the “revealing” tendencies of a work of art, while the work of the consciousness, the imposition of the artist’s direction (intent) or rhetorical lattice (form) on the work provides the “concealing” (I like “withholding” better) characteristics of a great work of art. The conflict of these tendencies, the tension between them, is what evokes the power present in a work of art.
I am currently finding the most effective means of making this leap through deep imagism, which a) challenges the writer metaphorically (involving the opportunity for craft, within the vigorous exercise of the unconscious), and b) challenges the reader imagistically (stimulating the most holistic response possible).

3.3.2005

I believe that poetry’s aim is to voice the obscured nature of what is in the world. As individuals of this ‘postmodern’ era, conscious of the way we order the world through our senses and the inherent limits of that ordering, we believe almost wholly in our separateness from the essence of this world which reveals itself to us only as it simultaneously conceals itself. The awareness of this separateness leaves the old gods distant and many of the old myths empty. When myths are employed, or adopted by any larger number of people than one, they become religion and religion becomes political, further separating participants from the world in which they live. And so the role of the poet, as I understand it, is to attempt to peel the layers of the world back for himself, through the struggle of language (which naturally conceals, or empties, even as it depicts), and to create or harness meaning from the revelatory moments he experiences. This is the creation of modern myth in poetry, the attempt at a faithful revision and depiction of what is for the individual, without society’s boundaries of ‘reality’ or ‘illusion’. We each, in our own worlds, exist in our own realities. The poems which spring from the poet’s pen, when truly original, are poems of the poet’s mythology (for what is myth but story, a truth, from a world that is not ours, but whose revelation is familiar?). And although the poems may be products of a distinct mythology, the truths transcribed in them parallel truths which we, as individuals, have experienced or realized ourselves, in degrees.

After the Trial

he wiped the back of his hand

across his lips and trembled
in the bone-bright rays of sun

that pillared the plaza.
The dust rose around him

as he walked forward, out
of town, remembering himself

as a child, lost in the rows
of broken-limbed apple trees,

fruit untouched and rotting
on the branches, abruptly

realizing that his mother
no longer searched for him, and

the orchard arranged the distances
of night ahead and behind him,

prying his feet from the line
he walked, and then displayed itself:

a multiplicity of blank, black paths,
while the stars, in their restless turning

turned away, all suffering
their ancient deaths at once,

and the wind, opening its mouth,
began pulling his flesh

from one end of night
toward another.

a beginning to an articulation of a system of geographic spirituality

I look for truth in the wild, the non-human, as though there is no way for me to find the real in the midst of the human. The poems are often identification of the inherency of landscape and also a way of bemoaning the distance of the sure, unconscious is-ness of the landscape and the non-human world. None of the other animals need reason, they are instinct, pure experience; while reason is our most powerful tool, the tool that enables this naked biped’s survival, it also has created a schism within the organism, so much so we have even determined a ‘self’. By distinction, we have defined and by definition, we have separated. The ‘self’ is now an object of constant question, as it is inconstant, processive, and subjective, and therefore less closely tied to the ultimate laws which so palpably govern the non-human universe. And so I look to landscape for meaning, by which I mean metaphor, which I understand as the ancestral commonality of things; how things resonate one another. In landscapes, I find an essence most powerfully and reliably revealed.

the past is what shines through white, blinding and empty

I wasn't going to write this evening, but I find myself translating myself, again, here, now: the nebulous images and emotions of my mind rising through the patterns of my ticking fingers. My memories and reason marking time, so to speak.

But this process of writing is an amazing distance from the process that takes place with pen or pencil and paper: sometimes, on the computer, entire sentences must take shape before my fingers begin their spasms across the keys, unlike when I have pen in hand and progress across the page pedantically. The physical translation (carrying across) through the different movements of the hands for the different methods of recording must have subtle, seismic effects within the brain, on the chemical and neurological processes that govern it, too, I would think. But it does not matter if I write on paper or on the computer, I self-edit too quickly, correcting my text immediately, amending spelling flaws and grammatical errors, substituting more apt phraseology for a group of words that could have limped along on its own just fine. There is little opportunity for me to produce a consistent flow of language. Even all my ellipses (that means these: "...") must be purposeful and fulfill the emotional tenor of the subject; they can't be appended haphazardly to the end (or middle) of a lazy statement. Perhaps this is the mark of a careful writer, a self-conscious thinker... or maybe just a linguistic tight-ass. (How was that for emotional tenor?)

Anyway, once transposed from thought to page/screen, the effects of the text on the psychology of the writer are immensely different, as well. Typed text elicits radically contradictory responses from me: I am simultaneously drawn to its seemingly polished, publishable appearance, as well as nervous and superstitious around my keyboard: it can all be washed white so quickly; one click, a key stroke: deleted: neverwas.


This concept of "neverwas" is far more engaging than a pseudo cog-sci investigation into the psychological effects of typing your shit out onto a computer, and so I'll pursue that (already I'm writing for an audience; or, to correct myself: still). Daily, we attempt to wrarp this language around our experiences and it falls off like an elephant's tutu from the hips of the tall man (I don't know where the circus simile came from). Sometimes a word snags and hesitates for a moment, catching on a shard of experience and the experience seems to give that word its appropriate form, its content, but inevitably, unless all the other coupling words hang equally, the whole sentence slides to the floor, and then, why not? Why not assume that everything that doesn't stand in its shroud of interpretive language, its wardrobe of translation, neverwas? That the past is what shines through our ineffective attempts at communication: white, blinding and empty. This idea of neverwas seems also much more direct than the use of the term "nothing" to describe an awareness of absence.

Today, Jay and I were on our way south to Oakridge, along Hwy. 58 to go riding and we passed the most immaculate scene: down a short, steep embankment, at the edge of an iridescent meadow lay a huge, white and black bull. It was massive; in death the length and girth of the animal was easily apparent, the weight of the animal was palpable in how it burdened the earth beneath it: the grasses around it seemed to bend down toward it, as water flows to the low points of the earth. The farmer stood beside it, appearing contemplative from the back, head in hand. At that moment, the butcher stepped from his refrigerated van and began his heavy walk toward the man and the bull. The butcher's smock was slightly yellow in the gray of the rain, and it parted twice: on either side of the two corsetting buttons above and below his belt. The butcher was a stereotype stomping through the world: an eight-ball of a man, his jowls extending into his shoulders, his shoulders descending into his chest, his chest drowning in his rising stomach. The butcher came forward with an impressive sense of inevitability; his hands swinging at his sides were hammers. He breathed heavily, the vapor coming from his mouth into the cold world in clouds. And then we were past the scene, our eyes wrapped in the fog lifting from the moss-softened limbs of the firs, the rain rebounding from the asphalt like jacks.

Easily, innocently, we could have missed that portentous moment when the butcher stepped from the van for his confrontation with the dead bull. A moment longer at the gas station, a minute faster on my way out the door. But for our synchronicity with the bull's life ending; the butcher's slow morning of bacon and coffee, his dour reception of the farmer's phone call from behind his sopping block, taking his time in the wiping those hands; the farmer's insistence and impatience, voice pleading into the yellow mouthpiece of the kitchen phone to salvage the meat, we would have missed that particular reality. And it, too, would belong to the realm of neverwas, that luminous fog of pre-possibility.

In fact, that scene in its completeness does belong in the realm of neverwas: I'm sure that as the butcher stepped down from his gleaming van, grimacing at the softness of the soil beneath his shoes, feeling himself sinking in a little, a magpie twittered in the oak that overhung the bull. And I can't sing like that.

This Interpreted World

Outside, the rain is filling the immensity of Night
with the darkness that defines it, --
and those silver fists turn, like the blackest angels, within themselves
and plunge down on us as their own terrible dreamings of the world.

But each morning we wake & must make ourselves within it,
within the fluxing distances of this torrential world:
we step among the silver blades of puddles, upon
this broken, sliding back of stone and earth, constantly before
the moons of other's eyes; the stars don't even shield themselves
during the day but go on as pupils of light within the film of blue.

Perhaps I think that I'll find comfort
in the one Pacific fir upon the clearcut hill day after day,
the mud-splotched horse, white
and aging, facing always the same way beside the butcher's shop,
that we can celebrate at least the grief
of memory within a distant violin's resisting draw, or even praise
the slick ruffle of the crow's thick feathers as he settles on
the shoulder of the hissing road and bends to eat.

For so I find myself:
feeding, in this constant rain, on the detritus
of this collapsing world, catching glimpses of
a face in midnight puddles that others say is mine
but I must always wait a moment
before I can recognize
the curl of mouth, the piece of silver
in the eyes, the rain falling through my face.