I am reading Rosanna Warren’s book, Departures, and liking it a great deal, and, since I find her poems especially keen on using the entire spectrum of poetic concreteness between representational abstraction and non-representational abstraction. I’ll use her “Portrait: Marriage” as a grounding for what I am trying to get at here as we continue .

Prior to the modernist “revolution” (it was more of an evolution with certain revolutionary slants) poets used a rich and heavily Greek/Latin-influenced sense of occasion and rhetoric to formulate their poems. There were the small lyrics, and the very free madrigals and airs but even these were homages to the small lyrical poems of the Greeks and Romans. Here are some of the more common rhetorical devices.

1. Apostrophic address: speaking directly to the dead, to roses, to nation states, to states of feeling–more or less orating to that which was not likely to orate back.

Go lovely rose! (Waller)
Oh rose, thou art sick!” (Blake)
Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour (Wordsworth)
Death, be not proud… (Donne)

2. Pagan allusions, and often apostrophic address to various pagan deities, nymphs, dryads, etc, etc. This was a “conceit”–not a true worship of these gods (at least we are told so). Even devout Christians such as Milton freely wallowed in such allusions. In a sense, it gave the poet and the reader a short hand idea of what he or she should be feeling as well as mirroring the glory of Greek and Roman poetry and taking some of its reflected light.

3. Set forms such as Carpe Diem (seize the day), “when I am dead”poems, poems forbidding mourning, poems that pose the transience of human life against the “immortality”of the poet’s verse, the pastoral poetry in which sheep and herders, and flowers are all having a fine time, the blazon which itemizes the lover’s virtues, the anti-blazon that itemizes the lover’s faults, etc, etc. In addition to this there were the Odes, The Elegies, all modeled on Odes and elegies by Horace and Virigil, and so on and so forth.

Most of these poems used set themes (the brevity of youth, the inevitability of death) and then played splendid variations on the usual tropes. Two forms of poem used by the first generation Romantics gave us an evolution away from public sentiment–or public sensibility played out as private anguish–and introduced what might be deemed “real” anguish: the meditative lyric as devised by and , and the small introspective lyrics (or anecdotal narrative) as exemplified by Coleridge grew bored with the meditative lyric and started writing his more fantastical poems which, via Poe’s love of the abnormal and the macabre, influenced French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the symbolists, and, then, of course, the first generation modernists who were reacting against another branch of Romanticism as exemplified by Tennyson and his followers.

In a sense the modernist got their own tradition brought back to them via the French, and the fantastical elements of this tradition–the love of the primal, the violent, the abnormal–is, in its mode as a derangement of the senses, part of the later surrealist, dadaist, cubust branch of modern poetics: heavy on odd and disjointed images, devoid of rhetoric, and forever searching for some sense of language that appeals through the intuition and the senses rather than through rational thought and feeling. If we take the exotic elements out of this equation, and replace them with camp, pop art, and comic routines, we arrive at much of what I call that poetry which leans towards the non-representational abstract: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, New York school, and all their various offshoots.

If we follow the Wordsworthian path of simplicity, conversational sincerity, and candor, and yoke it to the heavy influence of Japanese and Chinese poems on the imagists (they loved such poems because they seemed cleansed of rhetoric) we get the sort of lucid, feeling based, thought based, ontology driven representational abstraction that one finds in the poems of normative free verse writers–those who build a poem by allowing the sensual details, and incidents to imply a greater meaning or ontology.

There are few “pure strains” of these branches. Poets often take a little from each, and, poem for poem, might lead their concrete details toward the representational or non-representational ends of abstraction. Some poets disguised as surrealists are highly emotive (Neruda, Vallejo). Others who wouldn’t spit on an image even approachig surrealism, are highly detached. What I am saying here is that the concreteness of contemporary poetry relies far more on subjective, supposedly “original” form and imagery, and far less on agreed upon themes and tropes. The rhetorical devices still exist and show up in contemporary poems, but they are more about an inner process removed from a public voice, and tend to brood, to meditate, to narrate an event, the lesson or meaning of which is implied rather than overtly stated. So let’s see what Rosanna Warren does here in Portrait: Marriage:

Through the dark feathering of Spruce boughs and crosshatch
of naked lower branches, through
splatters of beechlight and beyond the shuddered patch
of sky trapped in the pond’s net of depth and shade,
you flicker into view then subside,

into mingled inks and umbers, like the paper birch
reflected: shaft of brilliance probing
the pond’s amnesia: whole: fractured at a touch:
that’s how I’ve seen you over the years,
light robing, and disrobing,
an image upon shaken waters:

That’s how I’ve held you, as one embraces and loses
the muscled slide of water in mid-
stroke, cold, hauling forward to new darkness as
it passes.

That’s all one compound, complex sentence, held together by colons, and semi colons. The voice of the poem seems to be claiming that even though this is her spouse, he remains, in some vital way, elusive, in and out–like the flickering, and filigree, and dapple and light of the garden, and of the pond. Warren is considered somewhat of neo-formalist, and the chore she has set for herself here is to get a great deal of supporting concrete images into two remarkably constructed sentences. The next sentence begins an evolution away from the first, as would happen at the volta (turn ) of a sonnet. I think she owes something to The ending of the first sentence reflects a ghost of that older and more famous poem with its use of the word “cold” (but I digress). Suffice it to say, in this poem, Warren exemplifies the strategy of the contemporary concrete toward representational abstraction; she uses images to imply a meaning: even a spouse, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, remains a mystery, and contingent, and provisional–an only now of leaf loam, a contingent and provisional reality within the abstract “fixed” form of marriage.

We might abstract her poem as “Even a husband of many years, even the most intimate of relationships, is a provisional reality, and depends on moment by moment attention to detail.”

We might try poetic abstraction and get clever and put it all into a neat couplet:

Like holding water is my hold on you:
my husband, ever changing, ever true.

Or we might go for a haiku sort of thing:

Through the branches of a garden,
suddenly, my husband of thirty years:
this utterly strange creature, of light of shade.

So I think we have a ball park idea of the complex spectrum of concrete imagery towards either representational or non-representational abstraction. We are always towards an abstraction, one way or the other, but the use of detail, how we emphasize or mute, or play with an image is at the heart of contemporary poetics. A beginner must learn that contemporary poetry–no matter what the school–does not directly state its maxims, and when it does, it does so with a great deal more supporting evidence since nothing can be agreed upon. We do not share the same frames of reference, and we have spent a hundred years raising subjective consciousness to a sort of God. At the same time, we have the cult of science with its own rhetoric of empirical and “objective” fact pitted against the old rhetoric of proverbial and idiomatic thought and feeling. Both our sense of the objective and subjective have changed, and the borders between them are as elusive, as provisional as Rosanna Warren’s spouse.

In a word, Jason Schneiderman is a poet of the helix. In his new book, Striking Surface, he turns and returns a fine Merino wool finer. By refrains; bits of anaphora; tonally and topically, he returns to his concerns in cycle after cycle, rending or revising earlier understandings, and leading new ones up new twists. Scattered throughout the book’s three sections are cycles that include “The Children’s Crusade,” “Stalinism,” “Ars Poetica,” “Physics,” “Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha,” and “Hyacinthus.”

The middle section of the book is entirely a cycle: an unforgettable family of elegies that address his mother’s death with tenderness and probity, in a casual voice talking through grief without flinching and without sentimentality. From “Elegy I (Work)”: “Whatever dead is, you are, and how you must hate that, / busy fixer of problems, busy stitcher of crafts.” Soon we learn the role crafts played before death—how they were a kind of tacit conversation between father, mother, and son—and the roles they assume, still unfinished, in the afterdeath. Here, in “Elegy IV (Tallis)”:

I don’t tell Dad that you never finished cross-stitching
the tallis piece because you were punishing him.
You wouldn’t tell him, so why should I? I finished
the curtains you were planning, though I didn’t line them.

Picking up the thread, in the next elegy:

I wish I could see the dead as completed instead
of stopped, that some monument in my head
would be erected to you, instead of these scraps
of uncatalogued memory.

And again, in “Elegy VI (Metaphors for Grief)”:

____________________________I’d think,
why finish this if Mom won’t see it, or why
go to work if my mother is dead? She had never
been the axis my world turned on, but suddenly
everything seemed to revolve around her. No.
Not an axis. A skewer. A spit.

Throughout the book, we encounter a philosophical version of transubstantiation that an object or subject undergoes when it has been taken from us or is otherwise no longer in reach. In “Elegy V (The Community of Mourners),” Schneiderman calls it “a trap”: “Mourning’s a trap, / isn’t it? A way to pretend that what you lost / was better than what you had,” a delicious riddle that obviates our thinking those two things (people) are the same, with the bereft feeling that they are not. It’s a trap revisited in the last section of “Susan Kohner (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life),” which begins, “Death tricks you twice. First about yourself, / and then about others,” and ends:

Does Sarah Jane owe her dead mother
more than she owed her live mother?

Of course not—but she can’t deny her dead
mother what she denied her live one.

Having gathered impressions of her sense of humor, her quietly persistent love, and her humiliating, de facto last rites before the surgery that would be her death, we feel we know this woman—this arch, in its stone and filigree—just in time for the keystone eighth elegy, which—in its omnivorousness (including a nod to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who returns from being buried in an earlier elegy); in its valences and ambivalence through which an earnest love reflects—seems to accomplish something of Shakespearian ambition (“That in black ink my love may still shine bright”), even as a stand-alone poem:

Elegy VIII (Missing You)

I thought I’d find you here, that I’d finish these poems
and you would stand out as clear as the day. As bright
as the moon. I hate those poets who tell you that
they love, but never make clear whom they love.
My mother’s eyes are nothing like the sun. How do I
miss my mother? Let me count the ways. So where
are you? I couldn’t believe you let yourself
be filmed for the video they showed at your tribute,
and I wanted to tell everyone, That’s only her voice
when she’s nervous. That’s only her face when she
has to be on display and she doesn’t like it. But at least
you were there. Everyone knows you can’t write
your way out of grief. Everyone knows that grief
never turns into anything but grief, and OK, I can grieve
you forever. But I wanted you here, in the middle
of my book. Not a complaint about what I lost
or what it feels like to lose it. But you. Your smile.
Your denim dress.

Schneiderman addresses another, closer-to-literal kind of transubstantiation in “Adorable Wounds.” An epigraph from Hopkins invites us to “approach Christ in a new way” and cast ourselves “into His sacred broken Heart and his five adorable Wounds” (a fitting bit of pronoun play between a man and his apotheosis). Longinus of Caesarea already having stuck his spear into the body of the crucified Christ, pre-poem, the poem’s speaker asks:

Is it blasphemy
to be the nail,
the spear? To want
to be the nail,
the spear?

These fives lines—in their deceptively simple revision and reiteration of that deceptively simple question—ask as much of us as any nineteen syllables I know. “A simple truth miscall’d simplicity,” as Shakespeare might have said and did, in Sonnet 66. Substituting “question” for “truth,” we have a working description of Schneiderman’s quest to understand.

In all three sections of Striking Surface, understanding is key and a key to the poems. From “Ars Poetica II”:

I’m trying to say:
Forgiving is the end of love.

The end of hate.
The end of strong emotion.

A poem should be
an understanding.

A forgiving.
But not the end of love or hate.

The poem comes to doubt itself directly (“Maybe this / isn’t a poem”), before ending up at a new understanding:

If understanding
was the wrong thing,

I asked
for the wrong thing.

It was what I wanted
when I asked.

Besides the candor of these lines, what makes them feel natural and accessible is their role in a dialogue into which the poem is structured. The poem’s speaker addresses the world-as-poem and world-as-parted-intimate simultaneously, a parted intimate who responds:

Look at all the sense you keep

trying to make.

You should know better.

That’s why I did what you think

I need to be forgiven for.

Another theme these poems thread and rethread is the nature of identity—in theology and philosophy, called the problem of haecceity (essential “thisness”). Schneiderman pinpoints the requisite subtleties with a weaver’s needle. In his death-by-flower poems (“Hyacinthus I” and “II”), he turns a wry eye upon the notion that Apollo had preserved anything of Hyacinthus in his eponymous flower, ending the first poem with, “Who are we fooling? // I’m just plain dead,” and the second with:

Who wants
to be a flower?

Better that weeds
should mark my grave

than the stars
should hold my face.

This frames the issue in a smart(ing?) little star-rimmed face. In “Echo (Narcissus)”—a sort of third wheel or three-way for the “death by flower” pair—the Narcissus myth is restored to its context of male-male love, and (as always in these poems, with a twist) it speaks for an Echo who learns to say “No.”

In “Probability,” the problem of haecceity comes more clearly into relief:

________The statistical probability of being a dinosaur
at the moment that the meteor hit is impossible to calculate,
because you would have to know whether any given dinosaur
was as likely to be any other given dinosaur, or whether
any living thing is as likely to be any other living thing—
but no matter what, the chance was tiny. No matter how you do
the math, every single dinosaur was statistically safe from
meteors. But then again, here we are, you and me, as human
and furless as we might have hoped, tiny teeth, opposable
thumbs, and all the birds locked out of our safe, insured
houses.

Here we see another large-looming theme, really a component of the problem of haecceity. If something is essentially ‘this’—an exact and unique something—then it can’t be exchanged for something very much similar, or even something identical in all its properties (Leibniz argued: if two things are identical in all their properties, those two things are really one thing). But look!—Schneiderman’s poems ask between (and within) the lines—at how exchangeable and reversible we and our circumstances are. By a fluke, we’re the ones insured, for the moment. The oscine dinosaur descendents are in the garden singing… for the moment.

In “Sailor at Nostrand and Bedford,” the non-uniqueness of exchangeable things is again brushed against. Here, from the poem’s second section:

There was a sailor, once.

What we wanted

was the same,

and each other

was the last place

we’d looked.

And in “The Book of the Boy,” the issue is fully foregrounded, pleading loudly:

____________“Why was I made?”
and the answer comes: “Because we
wanted you,” which puzzles the boy.

“But there was no me to want,” the boy
protests, and the answer comes: “Well,
we wanted something like you.” And the boy asks

“Would any small person have done?”
and the answer comes: “Any small person
we made. It was critical that we be the ones

who made it.” The boy hesitates.
The answers are getting angry. At last:
“So I was interchangeable? Then?

Before I was made?”

The poem ends exasperated and without resolution. Hiding in dreams, “maybe / by morning, he’ll be someone / specific and loved and necessary.”

Near the end of the book, in the four-part poem, “Notes on Detention” (in effect the title poem: in the second part we learn that there are six striking surfaces on the human hand, and the strongest striking surface is the elbow, according to the latest interrogation manual), we once again snag this braided issue of identity. We encounter a mine-detonating robot that has done its work so dutifully that it’s lost all but one of its legs, and is continuing to scrape along on its last before an army colonel “declared the test inhumane and stopped it. / The robot’s inventor was surprised, as this / is what the robot had been designed to do.” Then comes the crux:

________Perhaps the robot stepped
through the same door into humanity
that every victim steps out of. Perhaps
we should find that door.

In the next, the book’s penultimate poem, “The person you cannot love,” we’ve reached the end of probing the issue until, in the final poem, we’re asked to bury it in a bed of flowers that Schneiderman’s husband tends. “I Love You and All You Have Made,” wraps up the triple helix of identity—transubstantiation, exchangeability, haecceity—into a convincing and moving three-line finale: “Some days, I flatter myself to think / that I’m one of your flowers. Some days, / I flatter myself to think I’m not.”

Viewing this book through one (or three related) of its themes, much that recommends it has been passed over: its several senses of humor; its pop-culturings sprinkled handsomely throughout; its rabbinical backstories; its children’s crusades; and its wise and wide-eyed meditation on war—“Billboard Reading: War Is Over / Billboard Reading: (If You Want It)”—that puts Prometheus in dialogue with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Aztecs, and the 1952 film, High Noon, to name a few. Nor have I mentioned my favorite poem in the book, “The Numbers Wait with God for Humans to Invent Them,” which involves Two’s being kissed, Four’s hair being tussled, imaginary numbers “who screamed at night / the things they knew,” and—almost free of charge, almost subliminally—a parable about the freedom that is division.

Fearless and affectionate, Striking Surface is a book of lyric poems that neither emphasize narrative nor shy away from it. The story, when it comes to a poem, seems to come across a music already being played; an understanding already being groped; an Ariadne’s thread already followed halfway back. Schneiderman’s are exuberances on dark topics, trimmed to their essentials, and plangent (rung up and down turns of thought and feeling) in what remains.

Mary Karr and Christopher Robinson discuss Heather McHugh’s poem “I Knew I’d Sing.”

Last week we made the exciting announcement that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes  podcast was making itself a home at THEthe. In anticipation of the coming podcast, we are reposting the old episodes from the .

Today we’re reposting , which features an interview with Joseph Spece.

Joseph Spece, Part 1

Joseph Spece, Part 2

Note: The interview takes place at JC’s apt., so here and there you may hear mention of a picture of the Winged Victory in the living room or various trinkets on a counter in his bedroom.

Today we’re featuring two poets who I have an incredible amount of admiration and who I am very excited to share with you today.

I did want to write a brief observation about what I believe both these poems–different as they are–share in common: both are built around a relational core of emotions; both poems climax with the impossibility of speech. Both poems, however, do it in very different ways: Colie through image, Maya through syntax. My observations follow the poems (and below that are author bios).

The Paper One
By Colie Hoffman

It helps to understand there were two realities
and words were in the paper one.
The other was made of clouds
and sometimes whatever animals
or feelings clouds made with their shapes.

The cloud world had giant one-way windows.
You couldn’t see inside and it was very, very dark out.
Your own face sent
out a search party for you.
The limitations of our brains and other body parts
kept rapping on the glass as we danced.
I could never tell which was you
and which was me
and if that simple touch
was some girl’s thighs
or the wings of a moth.

The paper world had words available
but none were the right ones. Later at the bonfire
people threw all the words in
and soon the entire world burned down.

Afterward we kept
talking but one of us kept glancing
at something over
the other person’s head.
You said it was to watch
for predators. I said what’s “predators.”
You made a cloud with your index finger
in the shape of a person whose language had words
for every complicated feeling.
I made the shape of that person’s insides
and internal organs
and started an electrical storm
that would never stop.

Lament
By Maya Funaro

-for EY

Now I’ve heard for the last time.
It doesn’t snow today but October has laid its hands upon my shoulders.
We’re swaying now side to side as if we’re waiting something out.

But I have heard and we are no longer waiting.
It is October and you are gone.
In the air there is a long slow sigh.

In the air a surety dances like smoke.
I can be certain you are gone.
Still my knowing you pulls at me and turns a corner.

In October a life tries to fill itself out,
Searching pigment for even the loneliest spaces.
And death seeps in, a persistent stain,

Overflow of time outside of time.
An aberration, death speaks of saturation.
For this reason there is never enough.

For this reason you come to be all light and all shadow.
I’ve caught your laughter like a headcold.
All day and into the next

Grace tracks me down, looks me in the eye
While awkwardness takes my hand like an old friend and looks away.
What I’m trying to name here I can’t say plainly enough or with enough severity.

Colie’s poem enters into emotion through the backdoor. It’s a bit like wandering into an enormous and sparkling ballroom during an elegant affair, but only after having woven through a maze of underground hallways, each stretch full of doors opening to various rooms containing strange sights. Amazingly, Colie never loses control of the poetic “camera.” Somehow, almost suddenly, what has seemed to be a continual shell game of emotional deferral takes us straight to the heart of the matter, and we are amazed at the path we’ve taken (at least I always am), surprised to find that this whole time she’s actually been preparing us (in the strangest way possible) for a moment of open emotion. Colie’s poems are worth going through again and again, not because they “yield something new” every time (though that’s probably true), but because the poem works every time, the way a great guitar solo never gets old.

There are two things about Maya’s poem that I find worth noting. The first is that Maya’s poem, unlike Colie’s, does not defer any emotion. Beginning writers are told, “show, don’t tell.” And this is true to some extent with Maya: she knows how to imply emotion via objects and such. But Maya also tells a lot. Even the lines that “show” seem to tell (the emotion awkwardness, for example, is cleverly personified–it both shows and tells). The very climax of the poem is a direct statement of the theme of the poem: “What I’m trying to name here I can’t say plainly enough or with enough severity.” It takes a certain craft to openly discuss emotion without being labeled maudlin, especially in an age such as ours that has replaced vigilance of mawkishness with a cynicism of emotion in general.

The second thing to notice about Maya is her lines. Many poets “do” long lines, but I often find myself feeling that such lines wear out their welcome. As a poet, I’m inherently lazy and easily frustrated when I am forced to read across a whole page! Not so with Maya’s poem. There’s some metrical dark matter that sustains it far beyond where my poetic instinct tells me lines should go. It’s magic. I find myself continually amazed that Maya’s lines don’t run out of gas before turning the corner. Indeed, I think there’s a relationship between these two things I’ve noted. You may see that there is an almost direct relationship between the length of the line and the “telling” of emotional content. The longest lines are the ones that seem to carry the most emotional weight (some might disagree with me about that, but I think I’m right anyway!). I can’t imagine Maya cutting the last line of the poem up into 3 lines. Somehow, that would be mawkish. Instead it comes out in a great rush, like an arrow that has been shot into us. I do not know if Maya’s long lines work because of the content, or if the content works because of the long lines. The ghosts of form and content haunt each other mutually, I suspect.

Both Colie and Maya have found a way to enter into emotion that are worth learning from. This, among many other reasons, is why I share them with you.

___________________________

Colie Hoffman is a copyeditor by day and poet by night living in New York’s Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in Blood Orange Review, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora,and elsewhere. Thanks to a grant from the M Literary Residency, she is currently working on her first book at Sangam House in Bangalore, India.

Maya Funaro was born and raised in South Jersey, and currently makes her home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Her chapbook Setting in Motion was released in 2009 by Fox Point Press. Her poems have appeared in Ekleksographia and Ology.

“Not freed / but caught up in what thinking tries to conceal:” that is what spending time with Timothy Donnelly’s poetry feels like, “where to know / is to feel knowledge dissolving. . .” (“Chapter For Breathing Air Among the Waters”).

Essentially metaphysical, the poems of , are fueled and refueled by self-critical dueling, a curiosity about being, and a skepticism of being’s significance. The speaker’s craft is self-referential but never heavy-handed. The book is also driven by an inexhaustible love for language; many of these poems are expertly wrought love letters to language itself.

It is particularly refreshing to encounter Donnelly’s poems amid the ongoing financial spiral, with politicians posturing at troubleshooting and the generally frustrating vapidity (not to mention downright falseness) flying around like debris in the wind. Though these poems are not overtly political, there is an undercurrent of social and political commentary. Donnelly observes, “the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten / comes to boss the world around it . . . .” Readers may come to different interpretations of what precisely Donnelly is referring to, but I don’t think Donnelly would oppose connections to the current political and financial quagmires.  Unlike most of the ad copy and corporate verbiage, which Donnelly satirically appropriates and alchemizes for reintegration into his own creations, Donnelly’s poetry can be taken to heart. He speaks like a parent who is not afraid to tell a child the hard truths he’s garnered from living: that most things are unstable (especially knowledge), that the significance of our existence is debatable, and that “nothing might feel good for a time” (“The New Hymns”).

These poems shine in the cold light of acknowledgment of things few people openly admit. In the first poem of the collection, “The New Intelligence,” Donnelly acknowledges that practicality does exert an influential hand in what happens, despite our romantic (or naïve) desire for it to be otherwise. The speaker and a loved one

observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,
a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent
movements some sentence might explain if we had time

or strength for sentences.

Donnelly acknowledges that if you are involved with living, you are probably weary. But his willingness to admit exhaustion, disenchantment, and uncertainty is coupled with tenderness. He does not merely point out where existence and the world fall short of our expectations; he also exhibits love for other people and the things that make up the world around us. These expressions of love escape preciousness every time because they are unmasked and unabashed. The speaker takes pride in how vulnerable he feels when in the presence of the person he loves:

I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality

keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling
a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness
on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway.

Yet for as much as these poems traipse amidst the clouds with an inquisitive and intellectual demeanor, they are also firmly rooted in the adult world, on the ground, anchored there by various responsibilities. I do not think it is an accident that the third poem in a book of forty-nine poems is a cheeky yet serious apostrophe “To His Debt.” Donnelly asks, like an indentured servant out of a Monty Python skit, grimacing through a smile, “What wealth / could ever offer loyalty like yours”? Somehow, perhaps paradoxically, Donnelly manages to depict that endless impediment to freedom with a Stevensian lexicon and aplomb:

My phantom, my crevasse—my emphatically
unfunny hippopotamus, you take my last red cent

and drag it down into the muck of you, my
sassafras, my Timbuktu. . .

Donnelly faces a thing that many people might deny—debt is uncomfortable, it makes it harder to breathe, it prevents us from hamming up our characteristically American idealism. He tells it like it is instead of looking away: “there you are, supernaturally / redoubling over my shoulder like the living / wage I never make, but whose image I will always / cling to. . . .”

Donnelly frequently turns his knack for facing reality on himself. His is a Blake-ian eye that sees outward, and inward too—at times with hyperbolic self-scrutiny, as in “Clair De Lune,” or with poignant projection, as in “To His Own Device.” In the latter poem the speaker addresses a specter, a shadow-self, “an antic of the mind”:

What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest
for origin and purpose. . . .

—At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands,
turned down a dock I remembered and wept.
I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept.

The speaker acknowledges, while weeping beside a personification of his craft, that “being itself had made things fall apart this way.” Donnelly exhibits a constitution that can stomach such an observation and keep going, despite the fact that our very existence and the course of events mar the world. He sees that “the air nearest earth / …had been ruined by what happens” (“Chapter For Being Transformed Into A Sparrow”).

–

These poems do not limit themselves to the abstract. Some poems are lush with things—”sea-thistle, pinecones, a crate of tangerines” (“The New Hymns”). Others meditate explicitly on the production of commodities; “The Rumored Existence of Other People” interweaves litanies of things with the poignancy that comes from investing things with meaning:

A silver line, a souvenir, a sieve of relation
meaning to release something lovingly means always
remaining tied to it. . .

. . .The more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me
obvious. Also touching. Whoever built that warehouse

across the way built it thinking someone would one day
look at it in wonder. Also sorrow. To keep an endless
store of that feeling. To make, to provide it. . .

Occasionally, these poems do settle down for the night into a blissful, if brief, quotidian moment—”a present too lived-in to cherish” (“Chivas Regal”). From the speaker’s location in the bathtub, we hear his humble thought said aloud to the steam-filled room: “In this life I’ll almost certainly / not be acquainted with / much luxury. . .” (“His Theogony”). The speaker indulges in these spare pauses as if exhausted by previous sessions (and resting for future ones) battling a kind of Minotaur amid labyrinthine syntax. Though instead of half-man, half-bull, this hybrid monster is half-self, half-metaphysical conundrum; and the speaker’s sword is his mind. See him winding through maze-like syntax, pursuing a grasp on the idea of knowledge, in part four of the excellent “Chapter For Being Transformed Into A Sparrow,”

In the shade of the need to know, to know that what was once
remains, grows the knowledge that what was

was almost certainly not that, not merely,
not once. There is a way through all this—

After the speaker questions everything, including experience itself, he concludes with a reversal of previous perception: “what was / was almost certainly not that.” At times Donnelly plays with reflections of words so successfully (giving off optical and aural illusions) that language seems to unlock just for him. A lesser writer, or a mere dabbler in wordplay might get lost in the maze of language and never find a path to meaning. But Donnelly’s prismatic configurations of words masterfully reveal meaning every time. He writes, “After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering / the worth of what was lost, the cost of which was nothing.”

The more time I spend with these poems, the greater my impulse is to treat them like impressionist paintings— stepping closer, observing the layered brush strokes, then stepping back and observing the whole, then stepping closer again. . . But, reading these poems aloud and carefully listening to the words seems to reveal even more than just looking. I hear that the words are not illusory, nor is their meaning. The lines, if you listen to them, speak directly to you. Who of us has not swam out farther than we should have, trying to remember “the worth of what was lost”?

A poem can be utterly concrete in all its details, yet abstract as to its meaning. This abstraction has better words to define it: vague, illusive, non-cognitive, gibberish, wide open to interpretation, etc. I’m sorry they used the word abstract to name such a poem, since, elsewhere, abstraction means to deal with the principle of the thing rather than the thing. Example: “man is prone to evil” rather than “Freddy is prone to evil.”

Here’s an example of a form called an “abstract” poem. Personally, I’d prefer “non-representational poem” to the extent that the poem is made out of words which may not refer to any idea, emotion, or agreed upon meaning outside the sequence of words. This is by Roy Campbell, supposedly the foremost practitioner of the “abstract poem”:

Of seven hues in white elision,
the radii of your silver gyre,
are the seven swords of vision
that spoked the prophet’s flaming tyre;

We have seven hues, a silver gyre, seven swords of vision, and a prophet’s flaming tyre. Beats me as to what Campbell means, but almost all lyrical poems contain such moments of high gibberish:

The mustard scansion of the eyes (Hart Crane)

This might be called ecstatic speech except that many language poets keep the totality of abstraction, and skip the lyricism:

With Eye Brows Thick As Tacitus
Lars Olson

We dined on sacrifage. Remember the trouncing sun?
and how Melissa’s cape flew off towards infamy?
Wasn’t that nice? The live long day wore
wretched and vociferous gloves
while that distended cousin of Gwen had to
find another ruse for frolicking about
doffing her Pavlovian grin.
Let’s face it, the dance cards of longing
are marked for death, but semblances
of scalloped bawds still pock the surly afternoon
and bring us news of kith and kin
with eye brows thick as Tacitus.

This passage is not exactly abstract. It sounds like the ghost of someone recalling some odd get together. We could paraphrase the poem (at least this section) as a memory poem, but, again, just barely. In a sense, it is borrowing “remember when” and making it odd. The gist of the poem is not regularly forthcoming. The language may be informal, even chatty (“Wasn’t that nice?”) but its effect is abstracted in the sense of not being representational of any standard meaning or expectation. This is the sort of abstraction that language poetry and surrealism often employs. It is one of the tricks in the bag of postmodernism. It is a different order of abstraction than what we commonly mean. So let’s break abstraction down.

Abstraction of meaning, running from high gibberish to a sort of dadaist literalism that makes the meaning absurd or, at the least, makes meaning highly provisional. It is the chief operating device of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, of certain New York school techniques, and of what might be deemed a sort of emotionally detached surrealism. It often comes with many and usually random concrete images. It is often comical, having, at its best, the great childish virtues of Magritte’s paintings. It is a good defense against paraphrase, maudlin sentiment, or commitment to anything overt. It often sounds highly precocious if not intelligent. It does not hedge its bets. It makes no bets. It is all hedges. Here’s the problem: if the person wielding the technique does not understand vamps, and tropes, and little tricks of distorting cliché, then it might all dissolve into a sort of verbal vomit.

Now for the more common idea of abstraction: expressing a principle or idea without being specific in terms of sensual details, or in which the sensual details serve the merely utilitarian purpose of embodying a principle.

Abstract: Man is a moral creature. And sin makes man less than man.

The poetic abstract (using a vivid or concrete image in the service of an idea): Man is an oak, and sin an axe.

Narrative concrete: Jim was a good guy, always did whatever he could to help you out, but then that bitch, Tara came along and ruined him. Now he’s a bum. Just goes to show you how one bad mistake can ruin your life.

Proverbial version of the poetic abstract: “By Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”

Abstraction in poetry before the modernists:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is, but always to be, blest. (Pope)

Hope is a thing with feathers (Dickinson)

In either case, concrete sensual detail is there, but barely. We have the human breast, but it is figurative, rather than concrete or specific. We have hope defined by an extended metaphor and embodiment as a bird–but barely. This is poetry as wisdom: its images, though often beautiful, are always at the service of a principle, a truth, and very often, a sort of maxim. You might call this representational abstraction, and the first abstraction we mentioned non-representational abstraction. The concrete is really never absolutely there. The abstract, if it be truly abstract, isn’t there at all. You can’t “see” a season. You can look out a window, see the snow, feel the cold wind, and conclude it is “winter” but “winter” is a general principle embodied in snow and cold wind. You can also abstract by going too far into details without context. If you describe a daisy by painstakingly denoting all its parts–I mean, in every seen-detail–and you do not extend that detailing to an overall picture, chances are the reader won’t know you are talking about a daisy: detail without context is abstract. Context is the necessary abstraction of recognizing the details of a daisy as a daisy. Thus, against all the prevailing wisdom and preference of teachers, I would not tell beginning writers to avoid abstraction. I would tell them to play with the concrete towards representational abstraction or non-representational abstraction. In effect, either toward an “ontology” (the being /meaning implied by the details) or away from that ontology (if it is too pat, too obvious–for example: a grey sky equals sadness). Beginners must learn to employ the full spectrum of concrete details towards representational or non-representational abstraction. Painters know this.

We need two posts to cover this business of the concrete and the abstract. For now, here’s your homework: Read In what ways does this poem use details to bring home its abstraction? After reading this, read Both poems are about dying elderly people. In a sense, Williams’ poem is far less poetic in its diction and imagery, but the grandmother, even though she is dying, comes off as a wonderful old coot and lively woman, whereas we know nothing of Dylan’s father at the end. Read these poems, then look at one of yours and see if you lean more towards one or the other. If you lean more towards the Dylan Thomas, re-write the poem to go more toward the Williams, and vice versa. Good luck.

Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning:

“Today a ladybug flew through the window.  I was reading”

“Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway….”

“I woke this morning to the sound of a little voice”

“Sometime around 11 p.m. the you I was thinking of”

“Today I read about the factory”

“This morning I rode my gray metal bike”

“Today I have the feeling that no matter”

“Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport”

Of course, that recurring intention of today gets predictable after a while, but Zapruder uses it to compose poems that sound like what the love child of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara by way of San Francisco rather than New York might sound like:  surreal, funny, dry, cynical and clever.  Like Ashbery, Zapruder makes maps of language, usually in one stanza, that speak directly to our virtual age in the somewhat disarming way many people have learned to speak to it:  with a quiet awe and a kind of increasing distraction.  Zapruder gives us a world made of incidents and images meant to enlarge living into a kind of sweet cartoon while making it feel close:  that short distance drawn between the experience and the effect of the experience:

This morning I made extra coffee
for the beloved and covered
the cup with a saucer.  Skelton
I thought, and stay

very still, whatever it was
will soon pass by and be gone.

Or a world that outlines the failure of memory:

Everything I know about birds
is I can’t remember plus
two of the four mourning
also known as rain
doves, the young ones
born in my back yard
just this April

The mind is constantly moving here, even when it is trying to be still (sorting out the past, dealing with his grief—exquisitely documented in the title poem—or revealing any saving grace the natural world has to offer).  Life is no bigger than one’s own autobiography and there’s an objectivity when one applies the pressure to its meaning.  Thoughts are things:

I like the word pocket.  It sounds a little safely
dangerous.  Like knowing you once
bought a headlamp in case the lights go out
in a catastrophe

Zapruder reports on life as it is being lived, being chased, being failed at.  His past—in the poems where the past mostly only intersects with the present (though these poems never really follow a strict memory narrative tract)—is something that memory sifts and turns vague and general, even when it’s punctuated with subjects of clarity: children and violence, for example:

… I played
Santa in the Christmas play
which made sense.
One day Luis stabbed
another kid with a pencil
in the throat, he was also fine.
Another day i went to visit
a friendly girl and ran
straight through the plate glass
window in her apartment building
lobby and out the door
and home, my parents
never knew, I was as I would
now say unscathed.

And at the end:

I think once a parent dies
the absence in the mind
where new impressions would
have gone is clear, a kind
of space or vacuum related memories
pour into, which is good

In addition to beginning in today (which runs against Rilke’s dictum that poems should start on the turn), many poems in Come On All You Ghosts follow a speaker who is a reader as much as he is a writer and whose obsession with books is so complete that it makes living in the world seem like an interruption to reading:

Today a ladybug flew through my window.  I was reading
about a snowy plumage of the Willow Ptarmigan
and the song of the Nashville Warbler.  I was reading
the history of weather, how they agreed at last
to disagree on cloud categories.  I was reading a chronicle
of boredom that called itself The Great Loneliness
and caused a war

Perhaps Zapruder is making up the books as a way to document the imaginative mind, and it’s with that sense of invention and desire for having to know what what’s in a book that isn’t in the world that runs under all the poems sub texturally:  a kind of poetry which is a study in fixation, certainly, but also an expression of the willingness to change course, ideas, direction.  One senses Zapruder has only been thinking of his subjects only for as long as it takes him to write the poem: they’re happening, as opposed to happened and naturally they’re almost always in the present tense, beginning small with the speaker reading a book or looking at something move and ending up bigger than they were which is, in its organic way, everything one can hope for in poetry: the great and, in Zapruder’s style, always surprising enlargement of the world so we can see it.

Why did I – why do we – get into this profession? It’s hard to remember. Maybe they want us to forget.  But how could I?  Late nights with Dostoevsky, The Tempest at the Globe, Gravity’s Rainbow pre-dawn on the Metro.  In a word, love. Or perhaps another, vocation.

A few weeks ago I was asked by a professor in the English department to participate in a roundtable with undergraduates to discuss graduate school. How to apply?  What’s it like? After discussions of the logistical details, the professor asked if any of the panelists had any last words of wisdom. Her husband, also a tenure-track professor in English, replied simply, “Don’t go.”  That is, “Don’t go – unless you must.”  This sums up my experience with the all too maddening – and now sadly disillusioning – English PhD program.

“Don’t go.”  The job market is toast. I actually took a class titled Introduction to the Profession of Letters this semester.  I think it should have been called The Way It Used to Be.  We learned about publishing books, peer reviewing, academic freedom, politicization.  Important issues, no doubt. But you can see where I’m going with this – they don’t want us to know that we aren’t going to get the glitzy job that we dreamed of getting when we signed up for this.  No – adjuncting, living year-to-year, teaching four classes a semester for peanuts – this is our real future. Had we known, would we have come?  It looks bleak.

“Dont go.”  I love literature, but to say that I still do might surprise a lot of people in my position.  This gig seems to want more than anything to suck any romantic notions out of reading.  This is a profession, after all, that requires the utmost in objectivity, discipline, and taste.  Of course however they don’t mention an aptitude for backstabbing, brown-nosing, elitism and downright mean-spiritedness, tricks of the trade for the “successful.”   I’ve seen departmental politics hault the progress of a graduate student firsthand.  It looks bleak.

“Unless you must.”  Thankfully, a silver lining.  Namely, the spirit that guided me into this program in the first place. Sure, jobs are scarce, and life in an academic department is not too dissimilar from a corporate office, and the pressure to say something “smart” so that our papers will get published and we can lord our intelligence over friends, students, and, of course, interviewers, remains.  But it will break me only if I allow it.  My spiritual food still nourishes me. I still read the books that I like, and not because I think I should like them.  I can’t leave home without something to read.  I write sentences in my head, walking to work, riding my bike.  Less than a week removed from the final gauntlet of papers, I am recovering this spirit. And with a year to go before my comprehensive exam, I have no obligation but to take in as much American lit as I can.  I promise to do so on my terms, and politics, pressure, elitism, resumes, jobs, titles, and whatever other inferiority complexes that grad school wants to provide as a requisite, can go to the devil.

We’re pleased to announce that Ben Pease’s Scattered Rhymes podcast is going to become the official podcast of THEthe!

Scattered Rhymes is a long-form interview podcast in which poets discuss and read their work. Ben Pease has been doing the podcast for several years now and has created a back log of work that THEthe will be reposting over the next month or so in anticipation of Scattered Rhymes’ next installment. From that point on, we hope to make Scattered Rhymes a monthly endeavor. The latest episode will be posted and featured on THEthe and later archived at the .

The first featured poet from the Scattered Rhymes podcast is Gail Mazur.

Gail Mazur Interview, Part 1

Gail Mazur Interview, Part 2

Listen to Joe Weil’s album of original poetry and music, recorded with the help of .

I met Joe Salerno in 1987 while featuring at a church in Morristown, New Jersey. As I recall, there was snow that night, and ice and I almost killed a fellow poet, Charlie Mosler when he went to get into my car, and, being a relatively new driver, I took off a little prematurely and turned him into an ugly version of Peggy Fleming. I was featuring with Steward Ross, a veteran of the New Jersey poetry scene. Joe, Stewart, and Charley are all dead now. It does not seem strange. Of the three only Charlie got to live into his sixties. Successful and well lauded poets live as long as borscht belt comedians; having your ass kissed on a fairly constant basis tends to increase life expectancy. However, the rank and files, the grunters, the ones who make it possible for poetry to exist anywhere outside of New York City often seem to enjoy a life expectancy equivalent to the male population of bullet ridden ghettos.

None of them smoked. Steward did like his ganja and his drink and never tired of missing his days as a hippie in San Francisco, but Joe was a vegetarian, and Charley a man who insisted on sleeping ten hours a day, and, as I recall, he lectured me on my fondness for disco fries and double cheeseburgers.

At any rate, they’re dead, and so is the wonderful poet and human being, Enid Dame, and the equally kind and gracious Yictove. These may be poets you’ll know, but I doubt it. They were all a regular or, at least frequent part of my poetry scene. I hung out in diners with them, argued and conversed late into the night. All of them were older than me, Joe by ten years, and Charley by a good 20, but there is no age where a mind is lonely for fellow travelers. We could have all been Trekkie or model airplane enthusiasts. I would like to think poetry is more than a hobby for nut jobs. Still, any hobby that creates years of friendship and the sense of communion with both the living and the dead more than justifies its absurdities.

I have told endless stories about Joe to my students. I have given out at least a hundred copies of his book. I am sick of my stories. I feel they are only the grooves I have worn in the road of my futility, attempting to peal out of my grief. I hate that he is not alive. On the day of my wedding, I wanted him to be there–he and my mother, and I wept like an idiot in the bathroom. He was a friend who could be more happy for your good fortune than you yourself. I remember when I featured with Allen Ginsberg, he showed up with his sons at my house, followed me to Camden. When Ginsberg needed a lift to West Paterson to see his step mother, Joe let his sons take the wheel of his car, and he rode with me, a sleepy Ginsberg, and my friend Deborah LaVeglia. He was much happier about the day than I was. It was May, 1995. Joe already had a slight pain in his back. By November of that year, he was dead of lung cancer– age forty-seven.

I always felt privileged that someone as talented as Joe wanted to be my friend. I couldn’t fathom it, but decided to receive the gift gladly. Besides his talent, I had no idea how accomplished he was. He had won the Hopwood award at Michigan, and his competition was Gregory Orr, and Jane Kenyon. I never knew until he died. Joe did not brag. He did not feel the need to puff himself up. His attention to other poets was beyond the often considerable selfishness of this “Art.” As Donald Hall wrote in the postlude to Joe’s book:

Joe Salerno’s devotion to poetry–to the art, not to himself as a practitioner– set a standard for everybody… if any cynicism or professionalism had stuck to me, Joe rubbed it away by his clear and radiant passion for the art itself.

Tonight I will introduce a poet at the official University reading for faculty members. She is a fine poet and does much for the program here. It will be a pleasure to introduce her, but, afterwards, my wife and I will not be sitting at a diner, chatting it up. Charlie will not be talking in 50s jazz lingo, and scolding me for my bad eating habits. Joe will not be there to remember whole lines of other people’s work. It will be professional, and pleasant (if a little stiff), but the camp fire of what is most human, most vital, most important will be missing. I try to tell my students that professionalism can be murderous. It can not offer what poetry truly has to give. It can succeed at the level of men, but it can not fail at the level of the truly profound and meaningful pact we make with love, beyond, and perhaps, because of our futility. I tell them certain forms of failure are Godly, and never to be mistaken for that poor, rather boring mechanism we call success. This is what Joe pointed out in his great poem “Poetry is the Art of Not Succeeding.”

I will end with a different poem of Joe’s because today the weather is horrible, and I feel gutted and lonely and I miss Joe as well as many others. We were good friends for only eight years. He’s been dead almost twice as long as I knew him. My mother has been dead twice as long as I knew her, but you do not ‘Unknow” those you love. Moving forward is for self-help books and motor boats I have always been on the side of Lot’s wife, and of Orpheus. All things vanish before our eyes, and we have no recourse but to defy that edict of what passes away and to break our gaze against the stones.

The Invention of Immortality
Joe Salerno

I had just turned
to go , when you called me
back into your room
The lamp a velvety glow
beside the bed.
“I love you,” you said
to me, the words
strangely stark and serious
in their familiar
setting. And leaning
over you, your small face
at four and a half
just blossoming into boyishness,
you reached up and
drew me down with such a
frightening hug
into your pillow, whispering,
“Even when I’m dead
I’ll love you.”

I’m happy to announce that we are rebooting our Poem of the Week feature here at THEthe. Every Thursday, THEthe will post a poem by an author that an editor has solicited. Every month, one of our contributors takes a turn at being the editor. Hopefully this will guarantee a nice diversity of tastes and styles. We hope that you enjoy this feature in the future as much as we think we’ll enjoy posting it.

I (Micah) will take the reins for the remaining Thursdays of November. The inaugural poem of our relaunch is by Rosanne Wasserman. Enjoy!

Limits

Ow, why are walls so hard?
Somebody’s mom could walk through them:
Not every dream sequence needs dwarves,
Though I get giants, like that Trevor Winkfieldian
Unfolding himself from a pillow in Louisville,
Half of a scissors-pair, wearing a boot,
Human face inside handle-loop.

We questioned him like an oracle:
“What’s going to happen next?”
But he just stared and said, “There is no future.”

Later I figured, “After all,
He’d just pulled himself out of a pillow,”
Rationalizing, and wondered
If his wings were wet, in folds—
But he was pretty much nothing but
Cold gray steel. What else could
Happen to something like him, anyway?

But the busted hardware drawer
Won’t do for an oracle.
He had a point.

Just one point, yes, but sharp enough,
Even in that Doc Marten’s.
He was right, for the half he spoke for.
He was a knife now, but Atropos used
Whole scissors: past and future
Meet, then there is no present. His other
Half’s no dream. Wake carefully.

_____________

Rosanne Wasserman’s poems have appeared widely in print and on the Web; both John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons chose her work for the Best American Poetry series. Her books include The Lacemakers, No Archive on Earth, and Other Selves, as well as Place du Carousel and Psyche and Amor, collaborations with Eugene Richie.

Entering a new language is entering a new world. But what does it mean to be “in” a world? The word “in” originally had no spatial connotations. To say that someone was “in” something meant that they existed “in anger” or “in love.” Love and anger are not places, but modes of being. But this means that you can say these statements another way: to be “in anger” is to be angrily and “in love” is to be lovingly. To be “in a world” means to be worldly.

When you enter a new language, you enter a new mode of being. This is true not simply of English, Chinese, Farsi, etc. but also of the language games of technologies, skills, and other modes of thought. As long as there is a new vocabulary, it is a new language game, and anywhere there are new rules is a new world. Entering a new language is not simply acquiring a new means of communication, but, as Micah Towery said, learning a new way of thinking. I would go even further: to enter a new language is to enter a new way of being.

As Okakura Kakuzo said in The Book of Tea, “All translation is treason.” This is very true, but I would modify this: all we have is translation. All we have is treason. Every conversation is predicated on our essential being-guilty. To put it another way, discourse only proceeds when we remain open to the possibility of miscommunicating our ideas. Closedness is the greatest enemy to communication and to healthy relationships. If there is ever such a thing as Original Sin, it is most obvious in language – the mere birth of language brings about contradictory concepts. Language unites and separates. All discourse, though, requires concerted effort. The word “relationship” is overused, and there is nothing inherently good in having a relation to anything – relations can be good or bad, as my wife’s in-laws consistently prove.

Every action (and word) has a limitless number of consequences, most of which cannot be predicted. Because of the unpredictability of spontaneous conversation, the only way to sustain dialogue is forgiving the unintended consequences of the Other’s words (and our own).  Forgiveness is therefore the very life of conversation and the heart of discourse. Without a constant flow of forgiveness even disagreement is impossible.

Forgiveness frees the victim and the victimizer from the crime. The victim is freed from the inhibition of the grudge, and the criminal is freed from the bondage of her sin. Engaging a new language is one of trial and error, but also always forgiveness of errors.

So, while we are all guilty of treason and are thus all guilty, we are all also in need of forgiveness. Whatever truth may be, it is always expressed in a historically-bound vocabulary and cannot be abstracted from our historical situation. But what makes up our vocabulary? Whatever  conditions affected our species, our countries, our families, and finally ourselves. Since none of these conditions are ever identical, no vocabulary is identical and thus no world is identical. Translation is treason, but treason is our own means of being in the world.

If we believe metaphors can build civilizations, and if we agree that power is the right to decide which metaphors will be beliieved and instituted as truths, which ones will generate class, or race, or who is worthy, and who is debased, then we get at the heart of why Surrealism was, initially, a political movement whose strategy of disassociation and derangement was an attempt to take metaphors away from the power structures of state, of reason, of class, filter them through the subconscious, and re-empower them free of capitalist oppression. The trouble was, surrealism could do the same thing to Stalinism, or communism, and its process of dismantling agreed-upon authority got many a dadaist and surrealist killed. Later, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry would also begin with a political agenda of destroying the concept of property–deconstructing the authority of the speaker and freeing the auditor to invest or not invest in the process of utterance. But, for our purpose, we are going to look at this shift in metaphor as a change in “willful ignorance.”

All metaphors are, eventually, false, inaccurate, distortians of reality. Reality itself is a distortion. Frost–the conservative–said as much. Yet, by giving metaphors their due and refining them, we can create a sense of order, priority, and narrative that helps us negotiate the complexities of life. The problem arises when we impose that order through our political and religious systems. All metaphors when tested, fall apart, and, once we do not accept them at “face” value, all metaphors begin to seem absurd. Surrealism, dadaism, cubism, absurdism, language poetry, and, to an extent, the New York School of poets, and all the gradations in between, are a choice to emphasize the instability, silliness, and shiftiness of metaphor, while hyping its “process.” Thus, the atrophy of agreed upon meanings leads to the hypertrophy of a “process” of meanings.

Of course, my problem with that is, being idiots of system, we then make everything mere process, mere trope, mere parody, mere mark and counter mark, and we become immured in the qualifications and in the glamour of process, and power again rears its head and wears the terrible mask of the sociopathic trickster, the one who is willfully ignorant that his ongoing deconstructions of the linear, the sensical, the emotive, are, in themselves, a rigid construction– no matter how ongoing. All one might succeed in doing is creating flux and process as ultimate oppression. But let’s put that aside. I believe that a person who still believes in co-herence, and “meaning” and emotional truth can use some of the techniques of those who do not believe in any of those values toward good results. I also believe that a post-modernist does not have to abandon agreed upon meanings, or emotion, or tenderness, but can translate them into his process of deconstruction, derangement of the senses, and absurdist metaphor. We can have our cake and eat it, too, just as long as the cake we have and the cake we eat are not the same.

So this brings me to an excerpt from Breton’s poem “Knot of Mirrors.” The title is, well, knotty. How can you have a knot of mirror? It is nonsensical is it not? Oh, but how can you have a “rosy fingered dawn?” Taken out of its agreed upon acceptance as describing both the color and emotion of seeing the dawn, it is just as absurd and false as Breton’s knot of mirrors. But it is not being so willfully false. Let’s proceed:

The lovely open and shut windows
hanging on the lips of day.

Does day have lips? Not any day I have seen. But does a ship’s prow plough the field of the sea? Nope. This is called personification. If day has a face, then it can have lips, and windows can hang from them. Let us proceed:

The lovely shirt clad windows
The lovely windows with fiery hair in the black night.

So the windows are given human qualities. They may even, once personified, stand in for the whole of a person– a sort of strange synecdoche, or metonymy, but the metaphors here are being freely mixed and confused. The window wears a shirt, or it has fiery hair in the black night. Now we can conjecture that perhaps people are standing in the windows, and the windows are standing in for those people who are standing at the windows, and thus the lovely windows hang from the lips of day. It is complicated, yet no less or more absurd than conventional metaphor. It is not “Agreed” upon. It seems to be generated from a personal and private consciousness (or unconscious), which we may observe but not share in. This quality promotes the sense of voyeurism much modern art is comprised of: we are watching a verbal performance we do not wilfully pretend is a mirror held up to nature, and we either enjoy the process of this performance or grow indignant and insist it make sense in the way we are used to things making sense. We are in a dream world and our agreements with it may be only sympathetic rather than actual, but this is true of all verbal constructs. Modernism and Post-modernism do not hide the strings of the puppet show. Sometimes, there are no puppets and only strings. There is a dream world. During the day someone might mention to you that their lover bought a new car, and that night, you might dream a Ferrari rides up to your window, and, somehow, that Ferrari is also your own lover– disguised as a Ferrari. Or it is both a Ferrari and your lover?

Anyway, the point is, once we agree all metaphors break down, that they are distortions that allow us to enter a schema of distortions, we need not be so dismissive of certain surreal images. They are not rational. Old, pre-modernist metaphor is not rational either, but it depends on the agreed upon conceit of rationality upon the metaphor. Phrases that make total sense are truly, when scrutinized in this manner, absurd. If I tell you: “I am facing facts,” you know what I mean and accept, unless you decide not to. If not, you say, where are these “facts” you face? I can see a wall, or a statue, or me, and you can “face” these (again metonymy and synecdoche) but you can not “face” the facts. And “face” is, itself, figurative, a part for the whole.

So our problem with surrealism or language poetry is not one of nonsense, but of nonsense that seems outside the normative boundaries of our usual comparisons, and assumptions.