[nyctom]

Originally posted by Rhina P. Espaillat:
Well, but EVERY poem faces "an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome." It costs work and time to read, and the reader is "suspicious" to the extent that he wants to be compensated for both. H ewants your poem to give him enough--pleasure, to begin with, and then something more lasting, another kind of pleasure--to make his reading worth the trouble.

But it's not "purity" he's looking for. If the poem you;ve composed as a response to X painting or piece of music gives him that pleasure--both kinds--then it works for him, and he probably says, along with Nyctom (and with me, too!)
Let's hear it for the impure!

The point is, I think, that the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it, like a person or an event or a remark overheard. It doesn't matter where the poet finds his hooks, it's what he hangs on them that's important.

Rhina:

That's such a good statement I had to quote it in full. I am going to print it out and keep it above the computer.

I have a big spot in my heart for the impure: people and things and ideas. Life's such an interesting mess; why shouldn't art reflect that (and isn't that an interesting paradox right there? to reflect that mess in a crafted fashion...)?

Hope all is well with you and your husband.

Slainte--
Tom

[Joseph Bottum]

Originally posted by Rhina P. Espaillat:
Well, but EVERY poem faces "an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome."

Dear Rhina,

I'm not sure how I got trapped into defending the proposition that poems based on other arts are to be deplored, since I don't believe it. My point was merely that it's not necessarily stupid or a sign that those who think so must not have "big spots in their hearts," as Nyctom would have it. He sees the idea as a kind of moral failing of narrowheartedness, you see it as a kind of poetical failing, and I see it as, well, something intelligent poets and critics might reasonably hold, though I happen not to, probably because I'm not intelligent enough, or poet enough, or critic enough.

Of course every poem faces an initial suspicion from the reader, but the question here, Rhina, is whether poems based on other arts ought properly to face a harsher suspicion--whether they have to clear a higher bar. Some poetry does confront such higher bars, I think. Object poems do not seem in themselves impossible to me, but they face a much higher initial burden in my reading. And if I can say that about one kind of poetry, why not about another--about poems based on works of visual art, for instance?

As it happens, such poems don't face that higher bar, for me. But a defense of why they needn't isn't as simple as it looks. Let me give one example, Rhina. When you write, "the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it," you're making a philosophical assertion, both ontological and aesthetic, about the nature of those Xs, whether you intend that assertion or not. You're suggesting that a painting, a natural object, and a human action are all roughly the same sort of thing. They're all equivalent hooks.

Maybe so, but it's a pretty complex philosophical claim about the nature of reality. And one could reasonably join Plato in insisting that an apple isn't the same kind of thing as a painting of an apple, and when you write a poem about a painting of an apple, you've left the actual apple pretty far behind--too far behind, for those who want to reject poetry about painting.

Plato, of course, is going to ban the poets from the Republic, in part in response to the way they mediate reality. But there's a long line of platonistic poets writing prose essays of platonic defense of poetry--from Philip Sidney to Percy Shelley, just in English--and the platonic and neoplatonic poet is probably not going to agree with the view of reality implied by your description of how a poet works.

I've always thought Platonism was the wrong way to do aesthetics, but I'm loath to call its practitioners necessarily stupid or narrowhearted. If a smart guy and good poet like Housman wants to hold that poems about paintings face a higher initial suspicion than other poems, I'm all for letting him do it.

Jody



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 14, 2003).]

[Roger Slater]

I agree with what Rhina says about approaching all poems with suspicion, and I'm sure I do that all the time. But I seem to remember reading an exhortation by Roethke that readers should initially approach all poems with great respect and faith in the poet. (I can't find the exact quote). In other words, one should read all poems as if it were given that they are of the highest quality. If one approaches a poem with skepticism about its quality, it amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I try, but generally fail, to maintain this attitude when I read poems posted for critique.

I think, perhaps, that this is one of the biggest problems with poetry submissions to magazines. Magazines receive thousands of poems, 99% of which are simply horrible, so it's only natural that editors will approach each poem with the expectation that it, too, will be horrible. And, I think, this attitude probably leads the editors to overlook some pretty fine poems. That's plainly the advantage a "name" poet has, since the expectation is reversed and the editor begins the poem with the thought that it is probably pretty good, since Richard Wilbur and Rhina Espaillat and Billy Collins and Louise Gluck, etc., don't generally send out substandard work, and the editor will approach their work with the attention and high hopes that Roethke felt all poems deserve. (I'm not saying that their poems don't deserve to be published in the best places, or that they never receive rejections --hmm, maybe Wilbur never receives rejections?-- only that their best work is less likely to be overlooked than similar work from someone without the same track record).

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Roger, I wish you were the editor of every magazine I subscribe to, if you're making such generous assumptions! Alas, I must tell you right away that I'm swamped with rejection slips: evidently editors are the suspicious type. And maybe just as well: poems should be read as poems, period, not as poems from X or Y.

Jody, I'm with you completely about Housman! He may do anything he wants, and how I wish he were still around to do it, as then we would have more poems by a poet I love dearly.

No, my problem is not with any view of aesthetics at all, but with the notion that poems written in response to this-or-that are ABOUT this-or-that. I don't believe that: I think the poem is about its theme, and uses its subject--a very different thing in many cases--to get its foot in the reader's door. To change the metaphor, the bittersweet I keep yanking out in my garden creeps up all the shrubbery it can find, but it's not doing that for the sake of the shrubs, but for its own sake: it's not about the lilacs at all, but using the lilacs to be about the bittersweet.

Poems are equally opportunistic and stubborn. For the purposes of the poem, the painted scene is pretty much the same as the real bowl of fruit, or lost glove, or dead bird, or....I don't believe that the poem is any "farther" from its theme if the apple is a painted one as opposed to one in the bowl, because the "applehood" of the apple doesn't concern the poem in the first place.

But I certainly don't feel that any aesthetic view--or philosophical view of any kind, is "stupid" by its very nature, and thoroughly enjoy this kind of discussion! I don't think Nyctom was imputing stupidity to Housman's view, or hardness of heart, or narrowness--and certainly neither am I.

[Joseph Bottum]

Originally posted by Roger Slater:
I agree with what Rhina says about approaching all poems with suspicion, and I'm sure I do that all the time. But I seem to remember reading an exhortation by Roethke that readers should initially approach all poems with great respect and faith in the poet.

This is a fascinating topic that deserves its own discussion. There's some kind of initial inertia against a poem, of course. Reading isn't a natural reaction, but something we have to be trained to do, and so there's a sense in which the sheer physical act of reading a poem presents a burden that the poem has to be good enough to overcome.

But for anyone who likes reading poetry, this is a pretty low bar for a poem to have to clear. I've always thought that Coleridge's description of the willing suspension of disbelief we bring to stories meant something like the opposite of suspicion. Every story starts with the reader's good will--we will to suspend disbelief--and only a bad or badly told story breaks that mood.

Is there an equivalent for poems? Perhaps that's what Roethke means.

[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 15, 2003).]

[Tom Jardine]

This is a fun discussion.

But I must add a subtopic to Rhina's

"Alas, I must tell you right away that I'm swamped with rejection slips: "

Rhina,

Editors and writers work on inherently antithetical assumptions: writers want art, truth, beauty, etc, and editors want subscriptions. An art gallery does not exist for new achievement of art, galleries exist either to sell for profit or substantiate prior opinion.

I do not think that your poems are 'rejected,' the ones not taken are put aside so other writers can be printed and garner new subscribers.

Editors may have other ideas in their heads, as well, but I find it hard to apply the word 'rejected' to your work.

TJ

[Joseph Bottum]

Originally posted by Rhina P. Espaillat:
the "applehood" of the apple doesn't concern the poem in the first place.

Wow, Rhina, that's about as final a rejection of Platonism as it's possible to make. I think I maybe agree with it--as I said before, I think Platonism the wrong way to do aesthetics--but I'd duck when I presented your proposition to any of our high poets, from Spencer to Eliot, with cosmic ambitions for their poetry. I imagine they believed poems could and ought to reach toward the inwardness of things: the esse, the real nature, the appleness of the apple.



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 15, 2003).]

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Yes, of course, Jody, but I think the poem has its OWN apple in mind--its own fish to fry--not the apple, fish, nude Maja, and so forth, that is may use as a ruse to get into what it really has in mind. It's aiming for the "esse" of that real theme, not the esse of the red herring, the subject. Half the fun of reading poetry is peeling the one from the other, detecting the ruse the poet has used to get us into his clutches--but only after it's too late and we're already in said clutches, of course!--and enjoying the double perception of the ruse and the poet's real purpose.

So much about poetry is "double" like that, sometimes even self-contradictory, like the opposition that sometimes exists between light-hearted metrics and heavy-hearted content, simple vocabulary and complex thought, and so on. I love those. Ekphrasis allows for a lot of that duplicity: imagine, for example, a poem whose theme is a dark and revolting memory, but whose subject is an illustration from a Valentine card, or some other innocuous and probably saccharine piece of commercial art. Would the poet be after the "esse" of heart-shaped candy boxes, or something other?

[Chris Childers]

This is a fascinating discussion.

I suppose I would ask that if a poem's ostensible "subject" (read: "trigger") is not what the poem is "about," why do we need it? To take an extreme example, say I have a political opinion I would like to share, and say that one day I see a painting of an apple, the next I see a crack in the sidewalk, and the next an empty jelly jar, and use all three of these experiences as "jumping-off points" to expound my ideology in verse. Why do I need all these triggers? Why can't I just expound my ideology and have done with it, if there's nothing necessary in the trigger, if there's no reason it had to be this trigger and none other? And if there is a necessity, mustn't the very fact that the poem perceives it be a mediation, or illumination, of its reality?

We talk alot about the "leap" that poems make, to get from their topic to their subject. But how do we justify the poetic welding together of trigger object on the one hand and subject on the other if the two do not illuminate each other? Say we write a poem on Looove and our trigger is a Rodin statue. In my view the poem must, in saying something about the esse of love, say something about the esse of the Rodin statue as well, or we have no right to use it. Otherwise, why not pick a Donatello, or a Mozart symphony, or a blasted oak? I'm not really thinking of literary "tricks" here, like when we see Granny's knife hanging in her pantry and remember how chopping carrots that one day she lost her finger down the garbage dispose-all then bled to death on the kitchen floor, isn't death sad--but doesn't it seem from this alone that there's something inherently different between this sort of un-mediated, real-world trigger and a work of art? Is it that the knife-ness of the knife is a lot less interesting or important than the Rodin-ness of the Rodin? Or is it what Jody was saying from the beginning, that he has already illuminated reality, and that it is therefore not enough for us merely to illuminate the same reality, but to illuminate him? Or would we be shining a flashlight into the sun?

At any rate, I think wariness of ekphrasis quite justified, and I think this because it seems very easy for someone looking for something to write about just to go find a painting and write about it. You could pick one just as easily as another; there's nothing essential there driving you, no reason why it has to be this and nothing else, no necessity. Some poets may feel like they need at least one ekphrastic poem a book, just to keep their subject matter varied, or whatever. It's something that everybody does, some more than others, and seems that it could easily become a gimmick, when used by an undisciplined poet who thinks the painted apple is the same thing as the apple, sort of a waving of the arms and saying "Hey, look how refined I am, I appreciate art!" Of course, that Granny-haunted knife could become a gimmick too, or anything else, so I may be talking more about bad poetry than bad ekphrastic poetry; still, it seems to me the two are different, and have different dangers.

[H Roland Angus R]

If closeness to the esse of the apple was the main criterion for value, I wouldn't read a poem at all. I'd eat an apple.

Harry