As You Like It - Orlando

When a lover is in madly in love, a lover turns to poetry to give their passions voice. There is something about poetry that draws out the romantic in many of us, and love is a fit topic for the flights and fancies of poetry. Though why do we turn to poetry? Poetry is the pinnacle of language use. It is the toughest, most compressed, most demanding form of language, and a great poem will perfectly capture our thought, emotion, and passion in a concise, precise, and graceful way. When we hear such craftsmanship, our hearts swoon, and we stop everything to hear what is being said - because it truly matters. This type of love poetry is difficult to come by, but it is truly moving when one does.

This type of expression is one of the lessons that Orlando must learn and come to terms with.  In Act I Scene II, after Orlando bests Charles the wrestler, he his approached by the Rosalind and Celia. Both women show their affections for the strapping young man, and pleasantries are exchanged. Orlando, however, is dumbfounded in this brief exchange, and when we should speak he finds he cannot:

     Can I not say 'I thank you'? My better parts
     Are all thrown down; and that which here stands up
     Is but a quintain, a mere lifeless block.

Even though Orlando chastises himself here, and finds he is not as eloquent as he wishes, he is not without poetry. His language is still in pentameter (which is appropriate because he is still at court and experiencing a moment of love), and his language is a  mixture of iambs, anapests, and spondees. Moreover, he speaks in metaphor as he compares his good qualities to fallen posts and his speechlessness to a lifeless block. We see a surprised Orlando who is a novice in the manners and habits of love and courtship. Orlando experiences what many of us feel when faced with a powerful emotion we don't quite understand, nor know how to express, and that speechlessness is the first sign of someone in love. While Orlando doesn't have love language yet at his disposal, all the building blocks (pentameter, variation, metaphor, strong emotion that needs to be shared, and speechlessness) are at his (and Rosalind's) disposal.

Whether it is love or poetry, any novice is going to make mistakes before they get better. A lot of them. Orlando is no exception. In Act III, Scene II, after Orlando has experienced the beauty and otherworldliness of the forest of Arden for a time, he hangs love poems to Rosalind on trees.This is a sweet gesture by a young man who is overcome with strong emotions and is compelled to share that with the whole forest. The problem is, well, his poems are not very good:

     'From the east to western Inde,
      No jewel is like Rosalinde.
      Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
      Through all the world bears Rosalinde.
      All the pictures fairest lin'd
      Are but black to Rosalinde.
      Let no face be kept in mind
      But the fair of Rosalinde.'

The West Indies...Orlando's idea of beauty?

In disbelief, Rosalind reads this aloud to Touchstone and Corin, and clearly enunciates the awful rhyme on her name between "wind" and "lin'd". End rhyme is the most striking feature of this poem, and it feels very deliberate, as if one is trying too hard. Now, that can be ok, but here the rhymes are so obvious, ring so loudly, and place so much unnecessary weight on the words, that this rhyming becomes far too simple, tedious, and artless (which Touchstone picks up on and pokes fun at). The similes and metaphors Orlando uses too are obvious. Rosalind is as beautiful as the West Indies
, she is like a bird in the air, and pretty pictures don't compare to Rosalind's beauty in reality - not much unique to say there. This poem, too, has a "false gallop" as Touchstone says: it is written in a trochees, not iambs, a meter unsuited for such a grand topic as love.

Though, hope is not lost. While Orlando shows raw ability that requires cultivation, maybe poetry just isn't his thing, perhaps he and his love are better suited for prose:

     Rosalind. I might ask you for your commission; but- I do take thee,
     Orlando, for my husband. There's a girl goes before the priest;
     and, certainly, a woman's thought runs before her actions.
     Orlando. So do all thoughts; they are wing'd.
     Rosalind. Now tell me how long you would have her, after you have possess'd her.
     Orlando. For ever and a day.  
     Rosalind. Say 'a day' without the 'ever.'

 
At this point, one act later, Rosalind has increased her instruction, and her tutelage is working. Orlando has one reply that is witty, metaphoric, concise, and downplays gender stereotypes, and one reply that is sappy, overwrought, and cliche. His prose seems in better shape than some of his poetry, and his prose even has elements of poetry, but it is clear that his love-language isn't perfect yet. It will take work, but Orlando can refine his language, his passion, and his intellect to create some subtle, artful phrasings that will please the Rosalind he is learning to woo.

The essential question for Orlando is not whether to use poetry or prose for love language, but rather how and when to use poetry. Poetry that is too obvious can by cloying, yet poetry that is too prosy can be unsatisfying. Balance is needed between many elem
ents, and Orlando learns to be aware of his audience and the context of his speech, and, eventually, his language use becomes more mature and sophisticated. As in many things in life, timing is crucial, and if we aren't prepared to act appropriately when the time is right, we could miss out on something altogether wonderful. Thankfully for us, Orlando has had a great tutor and can take advantage of his new found eloquence. 

As You Like It - Rosalind

Since I am directing a summer production of As You Like It, Shakespeares's languagae is currently in my mind. Not only is this play wonderful, its poetry is often overlooked in favor of the tragedies or some of the "problem plays." So the next few posts will be dedicated to this astounding, joyous, and transformative play.

In the first scene of Act IV, long after Orland has agreed to be instructed by Rosalind/Ganymede, she cajoles him by offrering him numerous examples of mythological models of love that have died "for love", and concludes with: "But these are all lies: men have died from time to / time and worms have eaten them, but not for love." In an odd way Rosalind seems to be saying two things at once. On one level, we hear Rosalind's point, and her logic is sound: it is a romantic idea to die for love, and romantics wrongly hold up heroic figures as models. She advocates for a more "realistic" or "down-to-Earth" model of love, and attempts to correct Orlando's high-flown ideals. Though, on the stress-pattern level (which are in bold), we see a different message. If we read only the bold words (these all men died time and worms eat but love), we still get the stark realism that Rosalind urges, yet the difference is that love is set off by the conjunction, opening the possibility that love is more lasting than time or worms.

This split message makes sense at this point. Since Rosalind has split her identity between her feminine role and her male role as Ganymede, she is obviously struggling to contain her roles and her affections for Orlando, and Shakespeare dramatizes this conflict on the sonic level. Orlando too hears Ganymede, but is unconvinced as his response is confident and a bit coy:  "I would not have my Rosalind of this mind, / for, I protest, her frown might kill me."  Orlando is often regarding as a tad dim, but, if nothing else, he has an impeccable ear. Due to Rosalind's conflicted message, Orlando finds a moment to assert his perspective and equalize himself against the loquacious, stage-managing, Rosalind.

So for a time Rosalind is forced to concede to his idealism, as her next lines reveal:

     By this hand, it will not kill a fly. But come, now
     I will be your Rosalind in a more coming-on
     disposition, and ask me what you will. I will grant
     it.

Orlando has backed Rosalind into a corner, and the only way out is to make a promise to him, and shake on it. Word and action are united in this moment, and we are brought to a hard stop with the period in the middle of the line. This stop acccentuates the flirtatiousness and intimacy through a moment of silence, and offers Rosalind an opportunity to expose her more feminine role. Rosalind's excitement here coupled with the the realization that Orlando will stick to his opinions, even if they are idealistic: Orlando is a true romantic and hopes to have that type of love in his life. This brief moment of exposure and contact energizes Rosalind, makes her feel powerful, capable, and in control of herself and the situtaion. It also speaks to her own desires to have type of love that is heroic and is worth dying for with another person.

Typically, Rosalind is seen as instructing the uncultivated Orlando. But in this moment, I think the opposite is true. Through Orlando's gentle assertivness, Rosalind learns she too is capable of being assertive (which will come in very handy in the entanglement with Phebe and Silvius). Rosalind too learns about her own thoughts and feelings regarding love, attraction, and her own limits. Her lines could be seen as a test to see what Orlando believes and how strongly he believes it. Once Rosalind discovers Orlando's desires, she discovers that she too desires the heroic love she downplayed earlier, and is willing to risk exposure (on many levels) to acheive that type of love.

The heroic "patterns of love" might be lies in some ways, but they are still remembered. Their love was so great, that these people were transformed from mere individuals into myth. So this may be a lesson for all of us: those who are willinging to risk much (life, property, money, identity, etc.)  for the sake of love, have the chance for love transform their lives into something worth being remembered.

Joan Murray's Rhythmic Elegance

I was browsing recent NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) recipients, and came across Joan Murray, who received the award in 2011. I have had the distinct pleasure of hearing her read her work twice at my institution, Herkimer County Community College. In both cases I remember Joan reading her work with flair, tenderness, and grace. It was obvious the words on the page were not simply words for her, though I would assume that to be the case for any serious writer, but what really struck me about her work are its rythmic qualities. Murray's work occupies an interesting middle ground between formal verse and free verse, between lyric and narrative, a place where varieties of rhythmic drive build intensity.

Take for instance "Her Head," the opening poem in Looking for the Parade:

Near Ekuvukeni
in Natal, South Africa,
a woman carries water on her head.
After a year of drought,
when one child in three is at risk of death,
she returns from a distant well,
carrying water on her head.

The pumpkins are gone,
the tomatoes withered,
yet the woman carries water on her head.
The cattle kraals are empty,
the goats gaunt—
no milk now for children,
but she is carrying water on her head.

The engineers have reversed the river:
those with power can keep their power,
but one woman is carrying water on her head.
In the homelands, where the dusty crowds
watch the empty roads for water trucks,
one woman trusts herself with treasure,
and carries the water on her head.

The sun does not dissuade her,
not the dried earth that blows against her,
as she carries the water on her head.
In a huge and dirty pail,
with an idle handle,
resting on a narrow can,
this woman is carrying water on her head.

This woman, who girds her neck
with safety pins, this one
who carries water on her head,
trusts her own head to bring to her people
what they need now
between life and death:
She is carrying them water on her head.

Variety is the key to this poem. Well aware of the content and drama of the poem, Murray fits an appropriate rhythm to each moment, stanza, and line to create a very human utterance. There are stacatto lines that catch our ears (like the first two), only to be smoothed out with the refrain-like "a woman carries water on her head." While others are adamant, admiring, awestruck, and coy among other things.This strategy is a way to render surprise palpably, and enacts what good poems do: bring us on a journey of discovery.

The first three lines of the second stanza, while similarly constructed to the first three lines of the first, offer us a different tone, one that is more wistful at first, but adamant later: "The pumpkins are gone, / the tomatoes withered, / yet the woman carries water on her head." In the first two lines, the stressed syllables (in bold) are outnumbered by the unstressed as Murray alternates between iambs and anapests to create that wistful, rocking lull, while the third line reutrns us to the confident refrain, and sense of regularity. Other lines stack stresses together to bring the voice to an emotional apex and give a sense of heightened drama: "The sun does not dissaude her." While other lines invert rhythmic patters to serve as bridges for a longer more regular line: "what they need now / between life and death: / She is carrying them water on her head."

Select use of alliteration also contributes to the flow, regularity, and humaness of the poem. Consider the shock value of "The cattle kraals are empty. / the goats gaunt" both of which marry sound and image, or the sneer of "The engineers have reversed the river." Such moments of sonic regularity provide stabilty for a peom that plays with unstable metrics. Punctuating irregular free verse lines with regular sounds like these allows the tension to between order and chaos to be exploited for dramatic effect. Sounds here are not just part of the elegance of the poem, but are also representative of the content of the poem. Seasonal crops, the cyclic nature of the land, the conflict between society and technology, and even the woman are all expressions of the tension created by sound. Murray is wise to find such moments of tension and use them to her advantage, and by doing so this makes the woman not merely a woman anymore, but art.  

In a lesser poem, the varieties of rhythm here would sound jangly, cacaphonous, or unordered, but Murray masterfully balanaces stress, syllable, sound, and line to create the modulating rhythm and tone of the poem. With such attention to craft, Murray reminds us that content is crucial, but the motion the poem is what allows that content to transcend the page, as if to say, "The joy of reading a poem is always in the journey."

Sounds good to me. 

Fido says, "Flarf Flarf Flarf!"

For some reason, literary movements are inordinately complicated to pin down. Back when "modernism" was in its infancy, circa 1920, there was a distinct sense of a something new, something fresh. Williams Carlos Williams was writing intense, precise wildly-enjambed lyrics about everyday people and things. Wallace Stevens had not published Harmonium yet, but was writing the poems that would go in that collection. Gertrude Stein was chillin' in Paris sipping espresso with Picasso, and doing her thing. H.D. and Marianne Moore were conducting their own experiments with language.Then Eliot, along with "il miglior fabbro" Pound, comes along and devastates the poetic world with "The Waste Land," in 1922. Well, now the literary world took more notice of what was happening, and felt compelled to label this movement. The word of choice - Modernism. Given the incredibly diverse range of of poets listed here, how can any group label be anything but imprecise and lame? Though, to our benefit, much wonderful work has been done by some brilliant critics, and we now have a clearer understanding of the whole poetic landscape, its experiments, its prerogatives, and its scope.

Though I wonder if the same will happen with what is being deemed "Post-Modern" poetry. This movement does share some of same difficulties for categorizing as its predecessor (variety, methodology, technique, etc.), but I wonder if it has the same value. A new anthology entitled Post-Modern American Poetry has recently emerged from the folks at Norton, and is edited by Paul Hoover. This book has caught the attention of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Peter Monaghan has written a pretty decent article about the book and its contents.

Hoover admits that much of post-modern poetry is silly and derivative, but there are some poems that pose several interesting questions for traditionally held notions like "author." For instance Kenneth Goldsmith's "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" contains nothing he has written himself, or Craig Dworkin who has become more of a "conceptual" poet. As a literary movement, this is understandable. After WWI Dada emerged to question notions about art, politics, and life. Then the Surrealists emerged from them, and they began they inquiries through many, ahem, interesting means. Then Absurdist literature emerged and posed more challenges. All these movements, like this post-modern stuff, share the quality of defining themselves through opposition. Dada was anti-art. Surreal is anti-rationality. Absurdism is anti-meaning (in some ways). Post-modern poetry is anti-tradition.

Now I'm not against these movements or their anti- nature. Their interrogation and critique are crucial to the fecundity of art, ideas, and our views on life. The best of the post-modern poetry is really quite stunning, and does pose some serious questions about citation, quotation, pastiche and collage (here are two short poems from Goldsmith's The Day for a taste). Or consider the first few lines from "Head Citations," again by Goldsmith:

          1. This is the dawning of the age of malaria.
          2. Another one fights the dust.
          3. Eyeing little girls with padded pants.
          4. Teenage spacemen we're all spacemen.
          5. A gay pair of guys put up a parking lot.
          5.1. It tastes very nice, food of the parking lot.
          6. One thing I can tell you is you got to eat cheese.
          7. She was a gay stripper.
          8. Fly like a negro to the sea.
          9. Hey you, get off of my cow. 

This is absolutely side-splitting. Clever wit and a fine ear are on display here as we pick up vestiges of misheard, misappropriated, or parodied popular songs. We are awed by the ingenuity and attention, and are impressed by the sheer volume of these witticisms (Goldsmith chugs along for 800 lines). The sense of arrangement here is also keen, as Goldsmith mixes hilarity with a sense of infection or outbreak. Though, we must wonder why so much sampling is used, what's its effect is, and why must we endure it for 800 lines.

Part of the answer is that Goldsmith is reworking the relationship between poet and audience. The pleasure of reading this is discovering what he has sampled and has reworked. We take part in the game, and feel a certain way when we solve the puzzle. We experience the speaker's associative imagination, which is akin to the "automatic writing" of the surrealists. The speaker's mind shifts from The Who, to The Counting Crows, to The Beatles, to the Steve Miller Band, then to The Rolling Stones, and this is all very entertaining, but any sense of connection between them is avoided. Fierce juxtaposition, not fluidity, is the rule.

There is a rather illuminating discussion about flarf, poetry, and Sharon Mesmer's poem "I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I'm in Love with Harry Whittington" on the Poetry Foundation website, and it is very much worth the twenty-nine minutes.They sketch many of the dominant trends and ideas surrounding flarf, and somehow flarf manages to be "anti-poetic" and "super-poetic" at the same time. Well how can this be?

It is undeniable that flarf would not exist with the internet, is certainly an expression of our hyper-connected society, and is very intellectual in many ways, though it seems their methodology is what is truly new, creative, or has never been done before, not necessarily their devil-may-care attitudes, subversive politics, or nothing is taboo content. They have created various methods to manufacture poetry, such as typing a word or phrase into Google and then copying all the associated searches. or reshuffling words from a website. They claim to have a unique movement of thought that is jarring, tangential, and often goes off in odd directions that challenges our biases on beauty, quality, and other standards.

If there is anything I'm against it is the lack of grace, beauty, sensitivity, and tonality. Much of flarf is like this, as much "modern" poetry was gibberish, but also like the moderns, the very best of flarf is surprising, intelligent, and funny. 

The Virtues of Poetry

Recenly, I've finished a good book of criticism by James Longenbach entitled The Virtues of Poetry. This book is a series of interconnected essays that discuss quite a range of poets, and tackle some of the less cited poetic virtues. Normally one would think that "truth," or "beauty," or something else equally subjective, but Longenbach surprises of with more objective virtues like compression, dilation, shyness, excess, and others. Indeed Longenbach discusses the virtues of the art form, and, if nothing else, gives us an excellent primer into what makes peotry powerful, fascinating, and transformative.

Don't get me wrong, these essays are not fluff pieces. They are incredibly illuminating. One of the most interesting, and compelling, points is an argument against reading parts out of context, or not considering the whole context of the poem when reading its parts, and for au understanding to the whole experience of the poem. This is most clear in the essay "Writing Badly," where he says, "the effect of a particular aesthetic gesture is never predictably good or bad in itself; its success depends on the relationship to other effects" (54). So questions of value are, for Longenbach, only relevant and crucial when contemplating the whole design. We cannot, and should not, decide if an effect is "good writing" without first understanding the whole work. Then we determine what the purpose of a particular section may be, and if that purpose tightens the weave of the work, then it is valuable. His comparisons to music also help his example. A G-major chord repeated five successive times in an opus Beethoven by itself is not good music. But when understood in context of the whole work, it suddenly becomes an emotional linchpin between two longer sections. Such is the case with poetry. 

Another virtue of the book is how Longenbach puts us in touch with the elements of writing in English. The closing chapter "All Changed," deals with tenses of English and their accompanying modes. Several times in the book meter and tone are discussed, as is placement of predicates. Longenbach continually reminds us that poems are all "formal mechanisms, forged from the limited resources of the language" (84). How those resources are
extracted, whether they are used, manipulated, or broken completely, is a crucial part in deciding what makes a poem. And we would do well to remember that poems are not a mystical experience, but crafted human imagination.

The Virtues of Poetry truly is an excellent book. It is clear, concise, witty, and entertaining. In fact there is nothing negative I can say about it at all. Though, this book isn't, for me, as life changing as is his earlier work, The Art of the Poetic Line. Anyone who is interested in an incredible work on how that aspect of poetry works should absolutely pick up a copy of this book. You will learn much about the craft of poetry. Longenbach is also a masterful critic. His work on Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Stevens is required reading for anyone interested in those authors. Stone Cottage and The Plain Sense of Things have helped crystallize critical attitudes towards these authors, but have also made their work incredibly clear. Not an easy thing to achieve.

Though with all this talk of virtues of poetry, I wonder if there are other virtues unique to poetry. Many qualities that immediately spring to mind, like intimacy or immediacy, aren't strictly unique to poetry. There are plenty of paintings, films, and songs that share those qualities. Or if we are seeking a complete expression of the imagination, that can apply to any art. If there is anything that makes poetry distinct, it is the attention to how the human voice is constructed, and how a voice shapes and reveals personality. Maybe that isn't exactly a virtue, but it sure is power.

Xu Bing's Construction-Site Language

If you're not familiar with the art of Xu Bing yet, you should be. I have had the great fortune to experience Xu Bing: Phoenix at the MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), and it was absolutely thrilling. Now there is art that I enjoy because I find it beautiful, art that I love because it moves me, and art that flat-out confuses me. Somehow Phoenix has escaped all these, and has become something I find rare these days: art that excites me.  Being in the presence of these two giant phoenixes filled me with awe, with wonder, with curiosity, and, best of all, with inspiration. Phoenix is much more than an installation. It is a complex work that deals with the social and cultural world of China, as well as the unleashed human imagination. While not strictly poetry, Xu Bing's work is immensely poetic.

Feng and Huang soaring.

Phoenix consists of two 12-ton birds that are suspended mid-air in a football field sized building. The male, Feng, reaches 90 feet in length, and the female, Huang, reaches 100 feet. Each bird is made from materials Xu Bing harvested from various urban construction sites around China. According to the MASS MoCA page, these phoenixes, "bear witness to the complex interconnection between labor, history, commercial development, and the rapid accumulation of wealth in today's China." Hard hats, girders, shovel heads, small bucket-loader scoops, amongst many other minutiae, are transformed altogether, giving these birds shape, depth, texture, contour, and life. Even the remnants of the daily lives of construction workers were used to birth these mythic birds.

The social and cultural implications of these birds I'll leave to all of you, as I am simply not equipped with enough knowledge of China to tease them all out, but, trust me, there is much to think about. My primary interest here is the poetic imagination, vision, and resourcefulness used to create these incarnations of rebirth. When you first experience these birds, you immediately feel their grandeur, their sheer size. As overwhelming as that might be, it is not intimidating but, rather exhibit an infectious joy, wit, and playfulness. These birds are celebrations of human imagination.

Close up of crest and bill.

Some of the most difficult parts of creating a bird from construction materials, I imagine, would be its softer parts: hued plumage, differing feathers, various textures. Though for Xu Bing this isn't an issue. For instance, look at the crest of the phoenix on the left: hard hats and the remnants of a fan are arranged in such a precise manner so to resemble light, bouncy, plumes. Part of a the genius of this piece is how obviously correct his choices are. Naturally it would be hard hats on top of the head. But a fan? Well it might got hot under all those hard hats, might as well have some ventilation to cool off! Or consider the feathers. Using shovel heads is a stroke of genius. The round heads and shafts capture the scalloped look of layered feathers perfectly. One of the most mudane, back-breaking tools has taken flight, is utterly transformed, is lifted out of our mortal world and into the immortal mythic.

The language of feathers.

Before I get too far astray, language truly is at the center of Xu Bing's art and imagination. As a calligrapher, he is well aware that  shape and beauty vital to a language, and that words and characters are not solely signifiers of meaning, but vessels of art. Though Persistence/Transformation: Text as Image in the Art of Xu Bing, published in 2006 by the Princeton University Press, makes it clear that Xu Bing concieves language as raw material, as an object that can, and should, be manipulated. This idea is similar to the work of Gertrude Stein, and, in some ways, William Carlos Williams. Consider "Susie Asado," by Gertrude Stein:

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

       Susie Asado.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

       Susie Asado.

Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.

A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.

When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.

This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.

Incy is short for incubus.

A pot. A pot is a beginning of a rare bit of trees. Trees tremble, the old vats are in bobbles, bobbles which shade and shove and render clean, render clean must.   

       Drink pups.   

Drink pups drink pups lease a sash hold, see it shine and a bobolink has pins. It shows a nail.

What is a nail. A nail is unison.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

 
Even if meaning is elusive here, we get the impression that these words mean something more, and are not simply words. As with any poem, this poem relies on sound to establish meaning, setting, and context. At the outset, "Sweet tea," is a drink, but is also a pun for "sweety." We realize that the speaker has affections for a woman named Susie Asado.  This idea is compounded with the next line, and we learn that Susie Asado is a "told tray sure," a "told treasure." The speaker is obviously not shy with her affections, but is rather deliberately cagey. The poem proceeds in this manner, and it become more erotic as it progresses. Words like "jelly," "tremble," "bobbles," and "nail" are not only pithy, evocative langauge, but are also erotically charged moments. Stein has found a way to convey sexual desire in witty, playful, and repetitious language. This breakthrough would not have been possible if Stein didn not see words as tools that are to be used in new ways.

What Stein does so well take everyday langauge, words that we persumably know well and have used, and breaks it so that it may be remade. She Stein reminds us that words have meanings, but sometimes we need to forget those meanings in order to understand the world in a new way. Suddenly langauge we are accustomed to is made strange to us, has become fresh, and we are awakened to new possibilities for f language, new configurations, and new modes of expression.  

This idea does correlate with Phoenix. If we see langauge as raw material, and words as tools used by people, then Phoenix is the physical embodiment of poetry. Shovels, hard hats, fans, canisters, scoops, and wires are all created by people, and people use them in interesting ways. It is the same with language. We create language everyday and use it in interesting ways. So what's the difference between a shovel and an adjective? Or a noun? What's the difference between a frame of steel and conjuctions? Not too much I'd say. 

Their vast differences aside, both Stein and Xu Bing are incredbily resourcful in how they use their materials. They have access to the same materials that you and I have, but their poetic vision enables them to startle and entertain us.  They have created pieces that are strange and beautiful, and do what all great art does: makes the world strange to us, opens our percpetions, and then brings us back to reality with a fresh pair of eyes. 

"Telescope," by Louise Glück

As in many of Louise Glück’s poems, the action of the poem resides in the pulse of the speaker’s thought, their turns of phrase, and conclusive logic. We are privy to a mind in the process of understanding the relationship between interior and exterior worlds, and, as if by magic, this singular voice suddenly becomes familiar, becomes our own. “Telescope,” from Averno, is no exception. The poem’s insistence on and preoccupation with “you” gives the poem a familiarity and startling sense of immediacy. The second person is used a total of twelve times in the poem. In the first stanza alone it occurs five times (four times in the first two lines), and gradually trickles to once per stanza. The initial flurry in the opening lines establishes the reader’s participation in the fictional setting through ownership and intimacy, and by the time we encounter the crisp image of the night sky at the end of the first stanza, we are seduced into the poem.

            The logic of the first stanza is continued in the next two stanzas, though its effect is compressed and intensified through compelling word placement. Each “you” occurs at the beginning of the line, is the beginning of a sentence, and is accompanied by an active verb, making each utterance forceful. The use of the second person is more decisive and discriminatory here, more confident that “you” truly are in a place where “human life has no meaning” than the speculative first stanza suggests. By placing “you” at the beginning of the line, subjective experience is emphasized, which heightens the drama of the poem, and we are carried to the rhetorical climax of “their immensity.” The stars and “you” have been unified for a moment through sight, though only the “you” is changed.

Confronted with what seems unfathomable, the poem turns again, this time towards the individual. The second person opens up, becomes more inclusive, pluralized, and now functions in a revelatory way. We are surprised to find we are “in the world again,” are calmed that we “realize afterward,” and are made wiser when we “see again.” Through a sophisticated use of the second person, Glück has taken us from an intense, nighttime reverie, back to earth, where we are compelled to rediscover our earthly reality and our relationship to it.  

While the second person pulls us into the poem, the way the lines are broken help shape our experience. Since the poem is not organized in a metrical or syllabic way, what occurs at the end of each line becomes crucial. Here is the first stanza:

There is a moment after you move your eye away

when you forget where you are

because you’ve been living, it seems,

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

One sentence is broken into four lines, yet each line has a “natural” voice. Slight pauses at the end of the first and second lines establish a wistful tone that we immediately recognize and connect with. Each line is also a complete syntactic unit that is easily heard, understood, and broken at a normative turn of syntax. There are no wild dislocations to jar or shock the reader, just the placidness that comes with a quiet, introspective experience.  

            That is not to say there isn’t still surprise. There are several moments when a line break surprises, the first being between lines three and four, where the added weight of the comma builds anticipation into a longer pause. The moment our eyes reach the end of the line we are caught in suspense, because where we’ve “been living” hasn’t been resolved yet, and we expect a poetic answer. When we discover it is “somewhere else,” it is the sheer simplicity of the answer that surprises, because the poem primed our expectations with the line break. Yet our expectation is eventually satisfied with the off-hand “silence of the night sky,” and we are rewarded with a precise (though not exact) image of our location.

            While many of the line breaks in this poem have a hard ending, usually from punctuation or syntax, there are moments when the breaks are more fluid:

            You realize afterward

            not that the image is false

            but the relation is false.  

In this moment of realization the speaker’s words, yearning for an answer, speed through the first line and into the next, pushing us along until we come to an abrupt stop with “false.” Faced with the first part of this hard truth, there is a pause before beginning the final line of the stanza. By the end of the last line, we achieve a sense of resolution that comes with realization. Yet, we have experienced two realizations over the span of a single break. We are compelled to unify them because so much emphasis is placed on the conjunction at the beginning of the last line, but we need to be conscious that even these two ideas, though related, like you and stars, are separate.

Even though the second person and line breaks have provided motion, interest, and a process for discovery, the poem’s conclusion is often regarded as lonely or depressing, and quiets us with the acceptance of a hard truth. It is easy to see why this effect is often perceived: we are, after all, on a cold hill when we take apart our telescope, and the focus of our realization is falsity. The final line break in the poem emphasizes the distance between “away” and “each,” and finally, we are struck by what seems to be an insurmountable distance with the final line.  Compared to the relative proximity of the stars and the escapism they provide, the cold hill doesn’t seem to be quite as interesting or provide any necessary reprieve from the pressures of earth.

However, the mood of the poem is not as cold as that. To be sure, I wouldn’t say the poem is a feel-good, heart-warming expression of joy, but it has a realism that toes the line of pessimism yet doesn’t quite cross it. If this poem is one person understanding the world, as much lyric poetry is, we can view this poem as a crucial moment in understanding that complexity: sometimes there is a need to reexamine our preexisting notions, to recognize them as false so that we may move forward in a new direction. In this case, the metaphor isn’t false, but isn’t exactly helpful. While the metaphor is beautiful, and is a partially true expression of life, viewing the stars and participating in their inhuman life doesn’t translate to an earthly life, even if that life has been reduced to the “things” in the final line. Coming to terms with all of this is understandably difficult. Yet defining the world in negative terms offers only a partial answer. The poem opens the possibility to define the world in the affirmative, to find a more accurate “relation,” but also the possibility for another poem. Maybe one that gets it right.

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