How metaphysics structures our understanding of poetry

On Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Lee Seong-Bak's INDETERMINATE INFLORESCENCE

I generally believe the purpose of language is to connect us to the actual: real events, real emotions, real images that a person can actually experience--what a philosopher would call "qualia". This isn't necessarily the most popular opinion amongst writers, especially literary writers, because it implies that something lies behind language. It seems too much, to some people, like metaphysical idealism, the feeling that there is some essence to reality--an essence we cannot capture with our senses, but which we can perceive using our reason. This perspective of mine is behind my criticism of the language in, for instance, Ocean Vuong's novel: his metaphors are unconnected to any underlying reality. You can put the words together, and the words have an emotional valence, but there is no meaning.

I recently came across a book on poetry, Lee Seong-Bok's Indetermine Inflorescence, that writes from more or less the opposite perspective. As he puts it:

Our world is a world made of language. If you go "beyond language" there is only more language, and even these very words are language. A poet is someone who makes naked contact with this language.

I don't agree with this perspective at all. The world is not made of language. It's made of atoms. The world is intensely physical. We perceive both the inner and outer world in a very direct sense. Our ability to make poetry comes about because of our essential similarity: we can use language to evoke certain feelings in other people, but the root of those feelings still lies in other peoples' physical, embodied experience.

But what this perspective has to recommend to it is that our experience of reading poetry isn't particularly embodied. I've been going back and reading some of my favorite poets: Mandelstam, Baudelaire, and Wordsworth. When I read:

Behold, within the leafy shade,
Those bright blue eggs together laid!
On me the chance-discovered sight
Gleamed like a vision of delight.
I started – seeming to espy
The home and sheltered bed,
The Sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by
My Father’s house, in wet or dry
My sister Emmeline and I
Together visited.

I don't read this and see a sparrow's nest in my head. I've never really taken a close look at a bird's nest so far as I know. What happens isn't a "seeing" at all, it's a hearing, and what I hear are certain traces left in the language by words: bed, shelterd, dwelling, chance-discovered sight, delight, nest.

Some words don't mean much to me. I have no particular associations with the "xparrow", and I don't particularly like the sound of the word--I also don't think the poem relies on the sort of bird. A sparrow's nest probably look's quite different from an eagle's nest, but that doesn't matter, because I am not seeing it at all.

And many poems rely only incidentally on the visual--they take place entirely within the realm of the conceptual, like, for instance, the first stanza of another Wordsworth poem:

There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,
Which to this day stands single, in the midst
Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore:
Not loth to furnish weapons for the bands
Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched
To Scotland’s heaths; or those that crossed the sea
And drew their sounding bows at Azincour,
Perhaps at earlier Crecy, or Poictiers.
Of vast circumference and gloom profound
This solitary Tree! a living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;

There is no visual here whatsoever. Just a very old and very wide tree. The notion of it being so old that it creates its own sadness, and even its own vale of death--that the tree trafficks in war and destruction, a la medieval wars, and yet is untouched by them. That is all a concept, created by words.

I suppose I could annex my sense of metaphysical idealism to the language: there are some preexisting resonances that Wordsworth is tapping into. He isn't merely creating these associations, just channeling them.

And that is, in fact, what Seong-Bok seems to say. For him, language is mystical, language is our repository of meaning. As he writes:

That a wealth of experience is essential to write poetry is a myth rooted in the mistaken belief that poetry exists within the poet. Neither is poetry in objects. When Wang Shouren tried to achieve a wider understanding of things through the investigation into the essence of bamboo, his efforts only left him heartsick. Poetry ultimately resides in language; thus language, corrupted as it is by the real world, is sacred. Poets and objects may be nothing more than the hosts poems pass through before sprouting the wings of language.

To me this is very similar to what I believe, which is that you don't create anything, you only recognize it. But I think Seong-bok's conception is fruitful because he looks most directly to what is at hand. When I write, I am always stymied by the impossibility of putting experience into words. But everything is already in words. The words are already there!

It's been very interesting to read poetry with an eye to what words the poet uses. And you realize that each poet has a diction that's only a subset of the entirety of the language. Each poet has words they return to over and over again. If you read Wordsworth, you'll see trees, midst, darkness, circle, light, plant, silent, wood, truth, wisdom, music.

But that's not the diction of Mandelstam (or at least the translator of the edition I read of his work): in Mandelstam you'll see sand, sea, sky, lots of axes, lots of dogs, lots of perfume and wine, lots of Orientalizing metaphor. Here's the first stanza of his poem "Feodosia" (named after a Black Sea poet). This version was translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin.

In the ring of high hills
you stampede down your slope like sheep,
pink and white stones glistening 
in the dry transparent air.
Piraate feluccas rock out at sea.
The poert burns with poppies--Turkish flags.
Reed masts. The wave's resilient crystal.
Little boats on ropes like hammocks.

The 'seeing' here is very simple. Lots of emphasis is put on the verbs. The adjectives are concrete, but not physical--he doesn't belabor the dryness or transparency of the air, what the air feels like is contained in the words.

Anyway, I write poetry as well, though I hesitate to admit it. I started about five years ago, because I had feelings that seemed too dark for any fiction journal--my perception was that poetry journals are more bold. I've been published in a few: Cherry Tree, Storm Cellar, the North American Review. But I think the only people who truly feel comfortable as poets are folx who sat in some gray eminence's class at the age of 22 and were told "you have a talent for this, you know." They're the ones who did poetry MFAs and workshops and developed that side of their identity in perhaps a somewhat-harmful way. Or as Baudelaire put it in "The Albatross” (trans. William Aggeler).

Often, to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarrassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
this traveller but lately so adroit –
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman’s range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.

Anyway, I write poetry. I do it because it's uncommercial, nobody reads the stuff, and there's absolutely no chance of ever being a success. Lately I've been fooling around, writing down lists of striking words, and it's been fun, another way into the "practice" (as poets like to put it). Lee Seong-Bok recommends that you write quickly, so the heart gets ahead of the brain, and I've been doing that as well--I focus on the words that I love, and try to put them together. There are a few maneuvers you learn by heart, and you learn to deploy them when you sense yourself getting stuck--maneuvers like using a word that rhymes with the one you intended to use, or moving the camera of your eye across the imagined room, noticing something different. Seong-Bok's book is, at its core, a catalogue of these maneuvers--a set of rather rote manipulations of language that the poet learns to employ to make the inspiration come more easily. For instance, he writes:

The slope of a poem is determined by conjunctions like "and" or "but." "And" is too slight and "but" is too steep. The right slope is, perhaps, "however". It's like the cogwheel that helps the belt shift easily.

I think every poet has experienced that sense that the poem isn't turning or moving enough. And if you don't have that movement, what he calls "slope", in the initial writing process, it's impossible to put it in later. So this is great advice--it's something you don't think about, what conjunction can I use, but once it gets pointed out, you start to notice the little linking words--how do poets get from one thought to another. It's just like the advice to focus on the words.

I haven't talked here about the musical element of the poem. It's something you can hear or you can't, but it's still difficult. Sometimes I think that I've gotten the rhythm, and when I reread the poem, it's absolutely grotesque, simply awkward--if the rhythm is too strong, then everything needs to fit very precisely, in a way that it rarely can when it comes to the written word, or the poem will seem very unskilled. It takes a lot of skill to let the rhythm subside and structure the poem's composition, without becoming too heavily apparent in the reading experience.

What's fun is to talk about poetry without discussing its use, in any sense, or making any case for it at all. Who cares if it's any good or if anyone reads it anymore? It's beautiful, and that's enough. This is my notice to myself to include more poetry talk!