Quote:
Originally posted by Richard Wakefield:
Curtis: I suspect that Heather McHugh's poetry, and especially her book "The Father of the Predicaments," is a contemporary example -- and one in which the poet is very likely deliberate in replicating these forms.
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Rereading just now McHugh's "After You Left," I'm seeing what you are saying, but I'm not sure of the degree to which that particular poem might be approaching the "endless spiral" type of system Morris meant. Every good poet is deliberate, of course; but I'm looking for structures that are not so obviously drawn into apparent (or even, glaring) analogies. The speaker in McHugh's poem, for instance, uses these lines while holding and observing a starfish in her hand (and having already bluntly stated the comparison of the starfish's five radials to fingers on a human hand):
...so maybe it was dead? It took
a while for me to look, after I claimed to see:
I turned the matter over, and beheld
its thousands of minute transparent
footlets, feelers, stems,
all waving to the quick, and then
the five large radials beginning
gradually to flail
in my slow sight
and then (in my thin air)
to drown....
and the double meaning of "I turned the matter over" creates for me a limit-cycle kind of analogy. In fact, the poem is built around analogies not bluntly stated in every case but bluntly drawn. Had the speaker merely stated that she "turned the body over," such an image would still resonate in collusion w/ the primary system without tugging that system so relentlessly into the limited/fixed analogy between its two poles of
considering the starfish and/or
considering the limitations of observation, reaction to indistinct reality. She is very good at what she does, however; I love the poem.
Morris mentioned the difficulting in understanding "strange attractors." I think the difficulty lies in the nature of the unfixed-point/the limitless-cycle nature of these attractors. This particular poem might create for me a feeling of nebulousness invested with meaning--some of its analogies are not as clearly drawn--so perhaps I'd spiral in conjunction with it in my attempt to grasp the meaning; but this would be the result of an injection of the auditor/reader into the system, and
how am I related to the poem, what does it mean to me? would thus become the "strange attractor," composed of the written (fixed) poem and my experiencing of the poem. (However, this stance of poet-to-poem doesn't necessarily approximate my actual stance-with-this-poem.) Had McHugh not so bluntly displayed the attractions, her method might have approached an unfixed/limitless structuring; but the overwhelming bluntness makes this reader fall into a fixed appreciation of the poem, in this case. Similarly: had she used the often used L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E method of being almost entirely indistinct, this vagueness itself would be a bluntness, obstructing my experience/controlling my experience.
Am I talking in circles, here?
I am thinking of pointillism, of a sort: The individual points of "strange-attracting" systems are distinct & separate, apparently unrelated until the system is viewed from a sufficient distance and the points are seen to draw the structure into what appears to be an endless, unrepeating spiral characteristic of a plotting of chaos. If these points are drawn as obvious disharmonies (graywyvern's "
spinach-pigs ," for instance) the disharmony itself is a fixed/limited relation/system. If these points are drawn as obvious harmonies, they're still fixed/limited because they are joined.
Perhaps the gradient shifts imperceptibly, however, and appears to be obvious harmony or disharmony up close. I first began cogently considering the idea of "strange attractors" before I knew the term, before stumbling upon Adalaide Morris' essay, when in seriousness I began to study Gary Keenan's style of writing about two years ago. Our first online meetings were combative--I accused him of writing obliquely on purpose, of assembling mishmash into meaningless/useless things he called "poems"--and although I suppose that he and I are still not in complete alignment, his technique has fascinated me for what it can do. Here's a poem he posted at Eratosphere in early November '01:
<u>Wrench</u> . The poem has a quality of
wrenching expressions, associations, etc., as its argumentative/imagistic structure, and would appear to resolve into a fixed state at the ending if not for these associations. Perhaps not all the devices in the poem, taken individually as a dots of pointillism, are "strange attractors;" but as a whole, can you tell me how every association which seems to be blunt in the speaker's voice associates with the conclusion? One of the features of a "strange-attracting" system, I propose, would necessarily be the attraction between disparate but not opposite points of that system; another would be the attraction between each of these points and the system as a whole. I criticized this poem elsewhere, telling Gary that at some point, a poem's method
becomes the meaning (it is so apparently disjointed; it's named "Wrench"); but now I'm thinking that each individual point in a "strangely attracted" system must be distinct, separate, fixed--as in the case of pointillism. So, a poem might contain individual fixed-point or limit-cycle systems but as a whole be "strangely attracting."
Curtis.
P.S. The problem I have with naming McHugh's poem "strangely attracting" is the fact that such a speaker would not phrase these associations so coyly (pointedly) during normal consideration/speech. Morris' essay on this subject has elsewhere the notion of
hysterics as being a psychological system which is chaotic like the weather or stock market prices; Gary's voices often come across as being "hysterical" in one way or another.
[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 07, 2002).]