Poetry about death

Whew! I've spent the last few months finishing my degree, but now can focus again on poetry, so.. up first, a subject I've been thinking - and writing - about.

How many poems are about the inevitability of death? Quite a lot.

Billy Collins said "there's one subject in lyric poetry, and that is you have this existence and at the end of it you're going to experience non-existence" (The Independent, 31 May 2003).

Well, that's a theme in many of the poems I've read, from Keats' mellifluous descriptions of life as "where men sit and hear each other groan" in Ode to a Nightingale, to Larkin's Aubade, where death stands "plain as a wardrobe, what we know and have always known".

Death can be longed for, fetishized - Anne Sexton's death baby, for example - or desired as certainty or absence of pain (Keats), or feared (Bowers in Autumn Shade). We don't actually know it since we only experience dying and cannot fully experience it through another's death.

I think of Stevens' Sunday Morning, a defence of atheism, arguing that "death is the mother of beauty", though in this schema Christianity is all about Jesus' sacrifice, death and morbidity, so to argue that this changeless immortal paradise - where ripe fruit never falls - is inadequate because we need death to appreciate life, or that beauty can only exist in relation to its end, seems contradictory...

Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn moves from appreciation of the urn's figures' stability to their static lifelessness, implying change is life, hence death is indispensable, even as he writes "beauty is truth, truth beauty". In Larkin's Aubade religion is a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die".

Stanley Kunitz said "there's always an element of the erotic about death" (The Wild Braid), and how many love poems are based on the changefulness of the adored person, or the speaker themselves, or love? So many of Shakespeare's sonnets are on this theme (such as sonnet 18, where poetry is the only way to freeze time - "thy eternal summer shall not fade".

A collection of poems about death and dying was published in the last few years in NZ (Moonlight, 2008, edited by poet Andrew Johnston), but this was more about grief, and more personal. I must say I've only flicked through it in the bookstore, so this is not a criticism.

The reason this theme has been on my mind is that I've been thinking about subject and purpose of poetry. What do we write and read about, and why? Poetry itself, an expression, a communication, an art. Do we write it to make ephemeral things more permanent? Interesting logic. Shakespeare and other famous poets may have their works live long after their death, but for most of us obscure people what we write might have a zenith as a poem or two in a local literary magazine, that if valued might be archived by a public library or national cultural archives. I know when I write a poem it sets down something, but the poem itself, the words on the paper, last as long as the paper is preserved or the digital file saved, which might not be for very long. You could argue, and I have, that this real poem is a shadow of the poem that the writer had in mind, and that 'Poem' is immortal, being an idea. What Shakespeare had in mind as he wrote that sonnet will never be known. All we have is the real poem. This 'Poem' is of value for the writer and the writer alone.

So we struggle against the death we know is coming, and whether religion comforts us or not (and increasingly in poetry it is not), poetry can be written as an attempt to deal with the experiences or emotions raised by this thought. Does the poet think this poem itself will cheat death? Keats used poesy to try to escape the thought of death in Ode to a Nightingale, but it didn't work, and that failure is the haunting end to the poem. "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music - do I wake, or sleep?"

Gelatinous sheen

Some thoughts on the texture of language...

Poetry needs its web, its texture, its spin of faintly disturbing sounds layered on associations and structures of meaning and emphasis.

Language poets use can be deceptively simple,

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas.

(Jane Kenyon, from "Back".)

richly discordant,

o brilliant kids, frisk with your dog
fondle your shells and sticks,
bleached by time and the elements,
but there is a line you must not cross,
nor ever trust beyond it
spry cordage of your body to caresses
too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

(Hart Crane, from "Voyages".)

smoothly triumphant,

I am the daughter of earth and of water
and the nurseling of the sky
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores
I change, but I never die

(P.B. Shelley, from "The Cloud".)

and varying degrees of rough:

they never liked you
they are dancing and stamping on you
Daddy daddy you bastard I'm through

(Sylvia Plath, from "Daddy".)

But this sheer sound of language, used most deliberately and self-consciously in poetry, moves us without always realising why. Like reading Proust, whose long sentences wind and unwind in your brain (especially if like me you need to acclimatise to the long sentences and dense pages), but the delicate whiff of a language used to imply nostalgia without overpowering us with it builds from the back of your throat to the tip of your tongue.
This approach is much more effective than if he had talked directly about the loss of times he can never experience again, or even understand, since what he is doing is acknowledging his memory is a fiction. For a long time I used to...

In a similar way swear words need to be used carefully. Repetition, expectation, nulls their effect and they just become another word. Sometimes you can use this to comic effect, playing on the word 'fuck' for instance, breaking past that initial shock and possibly offence, getting us to see the word and it's use in a different light. (I had a vague memory of a poem here, but I haven't been able to locate it.)

What good are the arts?

Learn a poem by heart, and you have it forever.

Comments on and quotes from John Carey's "What Good Are the Arts?", a 2005 book mentioned in my previous post.

What is a work of art?
Carey begins with a very interesting chapter how how we define a work of art and gives his own definition - that is "A work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person." Here his balloon-pricking is hilarious - what things cannot be works of art? Excrement, perhaps? Empty space? An unmade bed? Unfortunately not, according to the activities of artists and acceptance by museums and galleries.

My favourite story was Aaron Barschak, who was charged with criminal damage for splashing red paint on a work of art in an art gallery, the gallery walls and the artists in 2003. His defence was that he was creating his own artwork, just as the artists had done by using etchings by Goya, and that he "intended to enter his work for the Turner Prize".

Other interesting points - "high art" vs "low art" as "what I feel (in response to high art) is more important, special & interesting than what you feel (in response to low art)." But the point Carey hammers in all the way through the book is that we can't know what other people feel, only guess. Sometimes, in some ways, that guess is pretty good. But it's never complete because we can't literally feel what they feel, only what we imagine they might feel based on what we know about them. Relativity is all. Which makes his focus on literature in the second half of the book very interesting, though he admits it's a personal bias in just this way, to prefer one kind of art over another.

Debunking some pro-art arguments
Art as religion : "Artists, as Jacques Barzun has observed, are popularly credited with the divine powers formerly attributed to religious figures. They are expected to be 'demanding' and obscure, like ancient oracles. They are always 'ahead of their time' like Biblical prophets."

Art in the community, not imposed on them but part of all our lives. Art as a part of the usual tasks we do - decorating our homes, for example, tatooing, and other times when by making something special we are creating : "Arts research needs to change direction, to look outwards, and - following the example of Laski and Bourdieu - investigate the audience not the texts."

Literature & self-criticism
"Literature is not just the only art that can criticize itself, it is the only art, I would argue, that can criticize anything, because it is the only art capable of reasoning."

You could argue that self-criticism is present in an ironic installation piece taking the piss out of an artistic theory. Carey says : "Pieces of music can parody other pieces, and paintings can caricature paintings. But this does not amount to a total rejection of music or painting. Literature, however, can totally reject literature, and in this it shows itself more powerful and self-aware than any other art." And goes on to name a number of pieces in literature that reject writing and reading. That the coherent argument against something can only be present in literature (or words borrowed by opera and film). Music is empty of meaning, consisting of sensations that may or may not be interpreted similarly by different listeners.

Literature & indistinctness
The vital element in literature, indistinctness, which forces the reader to use their imagination and effectively create the story in their heads. As in Blake's Sick Rose:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

What or who is the worm, why is it invisible, and since a worm does not fly in the night, what does it mean? Carey argues that this indistinct imagery forces us to create the story for ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent. Most interesting here is that he traces the flowering of indistinctness in literature to Shakespeare.