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Saturday, September 11, 2010

The scholar of one candle

I have been thinking about readers of poetry, and a phrase by Wallace Stevens keeps occuring to me - "the scholar of one candle" in The Auroras of Autumn. Various writers have interpreted this as Stevens himself, the poet, and the reader...

.......He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

(Auroras of Autumn, section VI.)
The scholar, here most identifiable as Stevens/the poet, only has one candle, a meager source of light (truth), energy, force, beauty, transformation, power. As a late poem this naturally seems to reflect on Stevens' sense of approaching death as well as the power of nature (the aurora borealis) over the puny skill of individual humans. This isn't a summary of the poem, however - not only is it 10 sections long, but Stevens can skilfully compress ideas into powerful symbols that mean more than he states.

Nevertheless I have often come across this poem, and the short lines I have quoted above, discussed as key aspects of Stevens' work, and when thinking about the idea of "the reader of poetry" (in which I include myself, of course), as someone overwhelmed with a light that they also possess in part - someone who is afraid of, but recognises and loves, this light. For me the idea of a reader is not a distant, passive, objective function, but immediate, passionate, and active - the poem is not complete unless the text is read or listened to and responded to. The poem is not just words on a page or in the air, but the creator, creation and recipient interacting together.

This is not an original idea; I have found it in many guises, including in poets and poems. One of these is another Stevens poem, The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. The word scholar is used for the reader, who blurs into the book which blurs into the house and the world. The activity of reading becomes or makes a quiet, calm space in which everything, including the reader, is indistinguishable from everything else:

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
Reading this poem, I recognise that special space I have often felt when reading, especially poetry.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Representation and resistance

The September issue of Poetry is now out. There's an interesting article by Tony Hoagland comparing two types of poetry - designated by him as perspective and entanglement. Two kinds of poetic meaning, value systems, "tribes". Hoagland makes the important consideration that both of these functions are important, and then goes on to talk about the second, "entanglement", also called resistance, derangement, disorientation, as the most recent, and less well-known. An intimate struggle between the poem and the reader that resists the mind, and a way to talk about "collective dizziness" as a "fundamental symptom of modern life".

To me this construct of meaning is interesting in the opposite way I personally react to it. With communication overload, a hyperawareness of the subjectivities and imperfections of language and culture, the time-pressured and ephemeral conditions of our existence, is poetry to work with this by using fractured sentences, phrases, words, constructions? Undercut assumptions of narrative, meaning, hierachy, place? So many poems I've read have this uncertain play going on, either in the text itself as in many LANGUAGE-influenced poems, or in the concepts put together. I find it bewildering, exhausting, and not, in the end, useful to me - which puts me firmly in the first, more conservative tribe, of perspective, I assume. Especially with the concept of a poem as a made thing, an artifice, a work.

What I'm not sure of, and which haunts me as I read and reread this article, is the idea of a poem as an experience. When I write, I am trying to induce an experience of a certain kind in the reader (the reader being usually me but hopefully others too). The vertigo Hoagland talks about fits as an experience, but so does the blossoming of emotional recognition, surprise, elation, transcendance which many historical poems evoke in me (I'm thinking of a poem such as the lone and level sands of Ozymandias, for example, or more recently, Anthony Hecht's Peripeteia.)

So a poem must create an effect (or why read it), whether emotional, and/or intellectual. But must it represent the times? I.e. induce a state in the reader that is intended to replicate, maybe at an accelerated or focused way, conditions we already live in? Or could it, instead, create a slow place, a safe place, where those emotions, truths, and facts, that we often forget or miss in our hectic lives, can surface, and be considered? Where we can love at a depth not expressed in any other way, where we can remember death, or those quiet voices telling us we have forgotten to take a breath, change course, speak up, listen?

Hoagland's excerpts of Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist as an example of incorporating both "tribes" are interesting, however, and as I've never read the book, warrant some investigation.

I re-read my post, and wonder if these comments attempt to make a complex thing too simple. Probably. This is the sort of issue that should never be resolved, but considered, argued about, and struggled with, by anyone interested in reading or writing poetry.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Good books on poetry

Looking at my bookshelf, I have a number of books I'd highly recommend to anyone on writing or reading poetry, as well as a few books I don't own but can also recommend.

So here is the beginnings of a list of good books on poetry. These are listed in order of preference and will be expanded over time:

Shaw, Robert. (2007). Blank Verse : a guide to its history and use. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press
A detailed, ambitious focus solely on iambic pentameter since its origins in the sixteenth century, and particularly valuable for covering 20th and 21st century poets that have written in blank verse, such as Howard Nemerov and Rachel Hadas. Essential if you want to understand the form.

Fussell, Paul. (1979). Poetic Meter & Poetic Form. Revised Ed. McGraw-Hill.
Informative book on meter, and yes, form, that's well-written and actually shows how meter and form create meaning as well as the rest of the poem. A useful reference book for readers and every poet or would-be poet should have read this or a similar book.

Keats, John. (2001). Selected Letters 1817-1820. In Complete Poems and Selected letters of John Keats. New York: The Modern Library.
This edition is only one of many published. These letters show the development of Keats' poetic career, knowledge, maturity, and understanding of poetry itself. It's in these letters he discusses the famous concept of "Negative Capability".

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (2004). Letters to a Young Poet. Translation by Herter Norton, M.D. Revised Ed. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Again one of many publications. Letters written by Rilke to a would-be poet from 1903-1908. Rilke has a sensitive way of describing sensibility, and poetic and life choices, and is unabashedly emotional about it. If you feel jaded and too intellectual about your poetry, this could be an inspiring read.

Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to Read a Poem : and Fall in Love with Poetry. Houghton Miffler Harcourt.
In my mind I always add "..all over again." to the end of the title. Another wonderful book for fresh enthusiasm and reading poetry you might not otherwise read. Also informative. The first chapter can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Kowit, Steve. (2003). In the Palm of Your Hand : the Poet's Portable Workshop. Atlantic Books.
The cover calls this "lively", and it is. Kowit aims to reach both new and experienced poets, covering just about everything you could imagine in a small volume. Because it's a general guide I would suggest it to inexperienced poets first, readers second, and everyone else when they feel the need to do some general reading again.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Favourite poets

My biases will be obvious from this list of my favourite poets. I don't tend to read a lot of contemporary poetry.

My love of poetry began with a small brown book, with the cover text faded completely off and the spine starting to disintegrate. Inside this book I found selections from two Romantic poets who have formed my ideas of what poetry is and my tastes.

John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I've long lost this little book, but I now own the complete works of both poets, along with the selected letters of Keats, a useful poetics text. Favourite poems include Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, La Belle Dame sans Merci; Shelley's The Cloud, The Sensitive Plant, Ozymandias...and others that don't immediately come to mind.

Next Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens (I seem to group my poets in pairs). These two modernist poets offer the same thing, to me, from slightly different angles. Crane and Stevens both use an oblique, difficult kind of language to convey the idea or emotion they are writing about. Stevens tends to be more about the concept than Crane, who tends to go for the feeling. Favourite poems? Include Crane's Voyages, To Brooklyn Bridge (from The Bridge); Stevens' Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, The Idea of Order at Key West, and the famous Sunday Morning...

Other (minor) poetic mentions include Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman... and the only woman on my list, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh)...

More on this topic to come, however.

N.B. The title of this blog comes from Edgar Bowers' moving and skillful poem Autumn Shade.

"For there he is,
In a steel helmet, raging, fearing his death,
Carrying bread and water to a quiet,
Placing ten sounds together in one sound:
Confirming his election, or merely still,
Sleeping, or in a colloquy with the sun."

Reading poetry

Every poem is personal; every poet feels like they belong to you and no-one else. I know very little about famous poets' lives; have read very few biographies or even searched Wikipedia for many of them. But it doesn't matter. The poem is more important than the poet (numerous quotes could be inserted here). Reading something like Hart Crane's Voyages, for example.. "permit me voyage, love, into your hands", his last, major poem The Broken Tower, I don't have to think about Crane's love of his life, a sailor for whom the sex was casual, or his one heterosexual love Peggy, on the boat with him when he died. This aspect of the poem (it's background, conception and personal context for the poet) is interesting, sometimes useful even, if you want to know how the poem was intended to be read. But if you are just reading from your personal situation, which I would argue any emotional reading would be, you take the words and interpret them in the light of your own experience, and if they're good, they might alter how you see aspects of your own life or people in it.