C. G. Jung and the Unconscious

I put Jung on my reading list because I felt that I would need to confront his concept of archetypes in order to fully consider poetic images. I should have focused on his theoretical works rather than his biography. That being said, I gained some insights about the man behind concepts. In the early part of "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," one is immediately struck by how seriously Jung takes his dreams. Many of his anecdotes are preceded by dreams, and he understands his experiences through his interpretations of these dreams.

It's a bit off-putting at first. But later, he begins explaining his perspectives on the unconscious. He writes that "nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves" (300). He argues that a scientific perspective -- one which only recognizes as real only that which can be proven -- is dangerously myopic, in fact, "the disease of our time" (300). Scientific rationalism may work on the level of the intellect, but the emotions operate on a different level.

Regarding life after death, Jung insists that "we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence" (301). While many of us might be quick to condemn feelings that are generated by unsubstantiated beliefs, Jung suggests that these assumptions are important because they are experienced as important. Furthermore, Jung isn't content to simply accept these beliefs. He insists that we must dig underneath them, not to debunk them, but to understand them. He doesn't recommend blindly trusting the unconscious; instead we must work to make the unconscious conscious. He summarizes his argument thusly: "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being" (326).

John Berryman

John Berryman's "Dream Songs" give us much to appreciate with only the small price of a little also to bemoan. The formal regularity of his 18-line poems forces him to be concise. Like a sonnet, each burst of eighteen lines must suggest and explore a single problem, though Berryman usually withholds a resolution. Though he doesn't depart too severely from standard American speech, Berryman's effort to incorporate rhyme and meter encourages productive phrasings. Here's an example from #95:

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

The phrasing of "some time ago wrecked" preserves the rhyme, but it also emphasizes the damage by condemning it to the end of the line, broken over a full stop.

Thematically, Berryman often focuses on both the desires and the brittleness of the human body. While these interests sometimes manifest themselves in pure adolescence, they have compelling truth value, especially to those who stress the importance of "embodied knowledge." In Berryman, however, the body always seems to be in a state of disintegration. In #140, for example, "Henry is vanishing." Later in the poem "the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint." This fading occurs in conjunction with anxiety over sexual impotence. In fact, the poems are structured by the same physiological and psychological stresses that mark impotence. This is not to say that the poems themselves are ineffective, merely that their effectiveness lies in the exploration of desire that recognizes its inherent unattainability: "Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe, / although I have not been there" (from #248).

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is a fascinating read because it challenges the lyrical form to bear more narrative and documentary material than usual. In some ways this really succeeds, but in other ways it seems to fail. The more prosaic sections are very flat indeed. Here's a sample from "The Doctors":

-State your education, Doctor, if you will.
Don't be modest about it; just tell about it.

High school Chicago 1899
Univ. of Illinois 1903
M.A. 1905, thesis on respiration
P & S Chicago 1908
2 years' hospital training;

I could go on, but it's painful to type such drudgery. This material has documentary interest (if slightly), but poetry (as we've come to expect) should be more concise, more evocative, more verbally or symbolically layered, and just plain more poetic. Although these are expectations that can be challenged on certain grounds, I wouldn't challenge them if "The Doctors" was used as an example text. More artistry, please.

Thankfully, Rukeyser also has a fine lyric voice, as can be seen in this section of "Juanita Tinsley":

Even after the letters, there is work,
sweaters, the food, the shoes
and afternoon's quick dark

draws on the windowpane
my face, the shadowed hair,
the scattered papers fade.

Internal rhyme, assonance, and even metrical punctuations like the spondee "quick dark" all work together within a moving thematic mood. That "The Doctors" and "Juanita Tinsley" lie next to one another in the same poem is a marvel. I appreciate Rukeyser's social motive in taking on such powerful material to make an important social, cultural, and economic point, but the power of the poem sometimes falls short of the power of the material. Even William Carlos Williams's misguided use of documentary materials in "Paterson" is less unfortunate than Rukeyser's because his at least had the aesthetic value of making the reader wonder what it was doing there. That is, the reader's creative labor in reconciling the sharply juxtaposed material seems to me more valuable than piling on details in a largely unified work.

Delmore Schwartz and Life in the Middle

It's a bit surprising that Delmore Schwartz doesn't appear in either the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry or the Gioia/Mason/Schoerke anthology "Twentieth-Century American Poetry." I understand that his work was uneven and that he often reached for philosophical meaning that he failed to obtain, but there are some real successes, too. I enjoy "A Dream of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White and Brittle," a meditation on potentiality that sees the present as a fitful motion toward ripeness.

His work often investigates what it is to be in the middle of something, that is, to be between one choice and another, or one perspective and another. I believe he fails to achieve his aims in much of his work because he forgets that the key concept of this investigation is "being." He interrogates the concept of middle-ness, but leaves being behind. He pursues an abstraction rather than an instantiation. This, from "The First Morning of the Second World," is Schwartz at his worst:

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being.

This flow of abstractions misses any sense of living in love. Some of this could be accepted if we had been given an intersection of lives -- even the sight of someone else's toothbrush in your bathroom might help convince me that withness is ripeness.

But what I like about Schwartz is valuable, too. He has fun with language. He displays a tumbling, word-over-word ebullience that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, here's a dashing burst of metrical bounce, alliteration, and assonance from "The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year":

Who could believe then
In the green, glittering vividness of full-leafed summer?
Who will be able to believe, when winter again begins
After the autumn burns down again, and the day is ashen,
And all returns to winter and winter's ashes,
Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle and frozen

And there are occasions when he remembers how compelling details can be. My favorite poem of his is "During December's Death," in which the world of tragedy and dread, "in which the only light / Was the dread and white of the terrified animals' eyes," is balanced by a particularity like: "I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on roller skates / Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926." To be caught in the dialectic of hope and despair is so much more moving when one does it rather than considers it.

William Empson, New Criticism, and Dream-Worlds

There's no doubt much to say about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, but I want to hone in specifically on what he has to say about the English Romantic poets because I think it highlights a problem about criticism that I will have to solve if I ever hope to make sense of contemporary poetry. Before even getting into his description and exemplification of the first type of ambiguity, Empson takes the time to viciously (though humorously) dismiss the English Romantics. His primary complaint seems to be that these poets mine their childhood for private experiences and perspectives upon which they reflect as adults:

"Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."

The psychological material of childhood is not, for Empson, a suitable subject for poetry. And if the above quote isn't slighting enough, his specific charge against Wordsworth turns blistering: "Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the mountains as a totem or father-substitute." Ouch. Snarky. But I don't believe it's as damning as it seems. Empson unknowingly confesses his shortcoming when he continues his sharp criticism:

"One might expect, then, that [these poets] would not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even ambiguities with which the student of language, as such is concerned; that the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical" (emphasis added).

In essence, he admits that it is his critical perspective that fails to respond to the poem. He reveals that his contempt is based on the inapplicability of his tools for the job at hand.

But I think this is an unfortunate admission. I don't think that psychology and grammar necessarily oppose one another. The poetry of quality that uses the "tap-root" he describes still creates the ambiguities and ironies that New Critics love to uncover, but they happen at a different level.

I could probably only prove this point by mobilizing a full interpretation of the type I'm describing, but I don't have that kind of time. Instead, I'll suggest that a poem like Wordsworth's Prelude is not a direct route to the past; it is a speech act like an analysand's, full of its own grammar of desire and restriction.

Lorine Niedecker and the Condensery

The question one must confront in reading Lorine Niedecker is "What is produced through reduction?" For the reader, I think this often depends on the the extent to which a thread can be woven through the material that remains. The thread is obvious in sections like this from "Bombings":

I wrote another,
longer, starting

Homage
of love for, to
the young

but the pain's too much now,
for me to copy.

The reader is given a poetic speaker who speaks about the inability to speak at length. Though syntax is chopped up, the form mirrors the content and it can all be attributed to a unified speaker. In fact, the theme of the cost of poetry appears throughout her work. Here's another example from "Thure Kumlien": "To print poems / is as costly / as to drill for pure / water."

Like short ragged breaths, these concisions are a disrupted attempt to communicate the important bits of what the speaker believes important. What is left is overloaded with emotion, but strangely insufficient for communication. Or it might be more appropriate to say that communication itself has changed from a fully realized grammar to a series of staccato bursts, like a Morse code that must be reconstructed.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Tragedy of Desire

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun such reductive readings, but I'm having trouble avoiding it with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth." The narrative involves a sub-surface creature who periodically emerges from the depths, strives to a great height, and attempts to pierce the moon (which he believes "is a small hole at the top of the sky"); his only possession is one liquid tear. Without excessive effort, this narrative can be seen to resemble the sexual act.

If one accepts the poem as a sort of metaphor for sexual energy and desire, the first task is to probe the aspects that most challenge this reading to determine if they represent some new and interesting recognition about desire. The most intriguing intersection of the perplexing and the obvious is the idea that the Man-Moth fears rather than desires the moon; that is, the moon is simultaneously marked by both fear and desire. That the moon is taken as a hole in the sky "proves" that the sky is "quite useless for protection." In this sense, the poem emphasizes the fearful desire to prove one's own vulnerability.

But this is a great repressed desire which most of us do not recognize: "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions." Human beings overtly desire invincibility, and the ego is comprised of that desire. The Man-Moth, by contrast, appears as a sort of tragic outcast, but, like Oedipus, he is a figure that transgresses a fundamental restriction. In this case, his desire to prove his vulnerability reverses the gains provided by the individuation process: self-consciousness, autonomy, and power. The Man-Moth's desire represents the impossible reunion with the mother, a reintegration with the universe, the extinction of self.

But he is unlike Oedipus in that he ultimately fails to accomplish his attempted transgression. Bishop's poem dramatizes the Man-Moth's failure to escape individuation, suggesting that one of our great repressed desires is a drive to erase the self that cannot be satisfied. Freud's concept of the death drive seems particularly useful here. The Man-Moth's residence deep underground suggests that there may be an aspect of our psychological makeup that continually attempts to undo that which protects us as discrete beings.

e. e. cummings

The rap against e. e. cummings that he was formally inventive but not philosophically challenging is, I think, a fair one. His typographical techniques and formal innovations are entertaining, but not often insightful. He has a way of expressing positions we've always felt, but is less able to draw out new feelings or sufficiently complicate our positions. Here's a poem I've always enjoyed:

IN)
all those who got
athlete's mouth jumping
on&off bandwaggons
(MEMORIAM

The substitution of mouth for foot is nice, especially because it plays on the phrase "putting one's foot in one's mouth," but it simply reaffirms a commonplace position. There doesn't seem to be enough at stake to make this a poem of the first order.

When he does write something that draws out new insights, the process is too often disrupted by his formal innovations rather than supported by them. For example, poem VII from section two of "Is 5" is a good poem because the diction and lack of punctuation creates a productive tension between the serious subject matter and the mind that can't stop itself from running through it:

you know what i mean when
the first guy drops you know
everybody feels sick or
when they throw in a few gas
and the oh baby shrapnel
or my feet getting dim freezing or
up to your you know what in water or
with the bugs crawling right all up
all everywhere over you all me everyone

The terror is made more stark by the poetic speaker's recognition that the events don't need poetic diction to elevate their importance. The poem is a mad dash through a deadly environment. But I have yet to understand why the poem starts with:

lis
-ten

and ends with:

to
no

This doesn't seem to support the organic form of the poem and is more about cummings's whimsy than it is about careful construction. It is the benevolent distribution of this misplaced formal whimsy that makes me wish cummings had perhaps written less and treated with more care his choice of poetic subjects.