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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