Suggesting Meaning

I came across a poem online today, at Anti-, by Amit Majmudar. It's called "Money Shots" and begins with the following lines:

Money grows the way stars die, and stars die
the way hearts beat: white-dwarf systole, red-
giant diastole keeping the flow
of capital as capillaries lined with the same
porous silk as a day trader's pockets.

Of course, I don't read much current poetry, so I don't know exactly what's in fashion, but as someone who enjoys responding to literature, I thought I'd post a few remarks. I'll admit up front that this is a sort of reader-response sort of response, in the sense that I'll go through my impressions upon first reading the poem.

The poem begins with an intriguing simile that joins money and stars together in a temporal consideration. I found myself drawn in by this first comparison because it stretches the vast distance between an everyday earthly object (money) and the vast and almost unimaginable distances of space. Such a divergence of scale provokes a defamiliarizing response. But for me, a defamiliarizing response provokes a careful examination. I try to slow down and figure my way through it, and that's when things started to break down.

Majmudar attempts to elicit a feeling of growth and decay, a sense of cycles. And he succeeds on that level. But the comparison doesn't work as well when he shifts to the "flow / of capital." Money might "flow," but it seems a poor description to suggest that the violent explosion of a nova is a "flow." Furthermore, the "capillaries" through which this ejecta is said to flow don't really exist in a galactic system like blood vessels and capillaries. Also, the violence of the stellar reference is not fitting with with the "porous" sense in which money flows through the "day trader's pockets."

In short, this simile is merely suggestive. Similes cannot be exact, of course, or they would not be similes (they would be equivalences). But Majmudar does not seem to strive for a more complete comparison. He appears to want a glancing blow rather than a more traditional comparison. I don't think this is a result of a writer who is unwilling to take better care with metaphor and simile. Instead, it feels as if the thinner, less complete comparison is actually the desired strategy.

The next line provides an example: "Time is cyclic. Come again? Crime is cyclic." He plays with sound in substituting "crime" for "time." But he doesn't develop a contrasting view of time and crime; instead, the sound allows movement. One idea flows into the next, but in sound rather than in conceptual connection. This is enough to sustain the poem's movement.

Majmudar returns to the use of stars at the end of the first section: "these men in pinstripes are the stars, / the heartthrobs money loves, the actors who make / money's heart go boom-bust: lub-lub: nova." I appreciate the return to the heart/star comparison because it gestures toward a resolution, but he misses a full connection in the traditional sense. Are the men really the stars? The stars are supposed to be the hearts, but now they're the men? These (clearly shifty) men are best characterized by a heart metaphor? But they're so clearly distasteful. Does the money then really love the men, who are heartthrobs? I could see that the money loves the men, but the men now are stars, which are money. It's all so confusing. It seems that a lust rather than love metaphor would have worked better. And if money loves pinstriped men, why do they have porous pockets?

My point here is that the poem is bouyed more by the suggestion of meaning than it is by meaning. A series of glancing blows provides a kind of movement that perfect or locked metaphr does not. As long as the reader is held aloft by this movement, poetry like this can succeed. I'm not so sure that I'm one of those readers, however.

Wallace Stevens and What the Imagination is Allowed to Do

It's a stale and obvious fact that Wallace Stevens places great faith in what the imagination could accomplish. He feels that the imagination helps shape the facts of the world as we perceive them. (This concept is probably borrowed from Coleridge's careful description of two levels of imagination, the first being that which pulls sensory input together into the ideas needed to conceive of the world).

At any rate, Stevens's faith in the inherent power of the imagination allows him to construct surprising scenes in his poetry. The most well-known examples of this transformative power are probably in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which shows scene after scene of blackbirds in varying relations to the observer and the world. But I want to focus on the closing section of "Farewell to Florida," which transforms the men in the streets of Stevens's Hartford, Connecticut into the waves of the ocean.

My North is leafless and lies in wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

I choose this image not because it is the most staggering allowance afforded the imagination in Stevens's work, but because it raises an important question about the ethics of imaginative power. The poet's imaginative metaphor changes the men (in the abstract) into dark water that is "cloven" by the ship. We're aware that Stevens was an elitist, but this act of imagination allows him to tear through the men of the masses in the poetic act. The world doesn't seem to dictate to him as often as it maybe should. That's a value judgment, of course, but one that his poetry asks us to either affirm or reject.

Being In and Out of the World

I was looking over several unpublished poems and drafts by Elizabeth Bishop and was struck by a commonality that may shed light on her ideas about the self's interaction with the world. Her poems often describe interior scenes or people contained in dreamworlds who are confronted by the real world.

The poem "In a Room," begins with "There was a stain on the ceiling" and ends with "'But here I am in my room,' I awoke."

A poem titled "A Short, Slow Life" begins with the enclosing concept of "We lived in a pocket of Time," but ends with "Roughly his hand reached in, / and tumbled us out."

In a review of a collection of Emily Dickinson's letters, Bishop even singles out this line of Dickinson's for praise: "but so sure as 'this mortal' essays immortality, a crow from a neighboring farmyard dissipates the illusion, and I am here again."

We find this same sort of reintroduction of the self into the world in Bishop's published poems. Perhaps the most noteworthy example is "In the Waiting Room," with its abrubt end to ontological investigation in the final stanza, which begins "Then I was back in it." I'm struck by the way these poems enforce an ultimate end to meditation -- but not an end to dislocation. In other words, the emphatic reality of the world, its concreteness, is unarguable. But its appearance is not able to wipe away the uncertainties of the other experience. The reader's experience, like the speaker's, dwells on the unsettling contemplations contained within the poem. For Bishop, the entrance of the world is requisite for her poetry's accuracy, but it doesn't ground things as firmly as one might expect.

In another untitled and unpublished poem, she writes that "One day a sad view came to the window to look in, / little fields & fences & and trees, tilted, tan & gray. / Then it went away." The world seems to have an unsettling agency of its own. Reality does not come across as unbiased and uninterested. To be reinserted into reality after contemplation is not to have questions answered. I always look back to Walt Whitman's examination of philosophical contemplation and his insistence that actuality (especially the actuality of human contact) is enough to drive those questions away.

But the same isn't true in Bishop. "Little Exercise" is a good example of this. The world sends a storm "roaming the sky uneasily," but though Bishop describes its effects, she encourages us at the end to "Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed." In one sense, this is another example of Bishop depositing her character into the world, but in another, this worldly existence barely rouses him. We are "tied to a [...] root," but we nonetheless float in our own place. In "Cootchie," the sea is even "desperate, / will proffer wave after wave." So there's a continual struggle between the world created by human contemplation and the world that buffets us with its forces. We seem to exist in them simultaneously. And though modernists like Wallace Stevens might discuss the world as meditation (in the poem titled "The World as Meditation"...and all his other poems), Bishop would seem to inhabit the gap between meditation and the world.

Randall Jarrell and the Gap between Immanence and Transcendence

"A Country Life" by Randall Jarrell expresses concisely in one of its lines an overriding principle of Jarrell's work: "They are subdued to their own element." The poem examines the natural world in a location unfamiliar to the speaker. He wonders what the birds say when they speak. But he cannot ask the locals because he does not want to give himself away as an outsider.

This situation raises two crucial aspects of Jarrell's poetry. First, it broaches the subject of the physical world and its potential for human meaning. He describes the bird as a part of the concrete physical world, but also as an agent that might communicate something deeper:

The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."

The first of these lines is descriptive, conveying the world as it can be experienced by the senses. The second line introduces a relation to the world. The bird speaks of how the world is "directly" before us, or perhaps how he is responding to our presence "directly." In this second line, we understand the world not as a set of objects which may or may not be perceived, but a product of the act of perceiving. The gulf between these two lines, between the possibilities they raise, is the space within which Jarrell works.

The speaker reports that the local people, those who live within these elements, "know and they don't know." This is classic Jarrell. His work sometimes borders on confusion or senselessness because he so frequently proffers two contradictory contentions. But he's trying to get at the simultaneity of experience in and about the world. Another way of saying this is that he contemplates the distance between dumb immanence and communicative meaning. But asking those entrenched in the world to explain it "is dangerous":

Asked about it, who would not repent
Of all he ever did and never meant,
And think a life and its distresses,
Its random, clutched-for, homefelt blisses,
The circumstances of an accident?

For Jarrell, to ask for a definitive description of a mechanistic world is to threaten one with the recognition of the loss of free will. In this poem, immanence is antithetical to meaning. The importance of this point is emphasized when Jarrell raises the stakes in the final stanza, where death delivers the body to the clay. Death is a return to pure immanence; it is the inevitability of immanence.

But Jarrell insists on one of the other crucial aspects of his poetry: the continued dream of transcendence. He rarely argues for the possibility of transcendence, but he frequently examines our perpetual drive toward it. So even after the body is returned to the earth, a spiritual element remains:

After some words, the body is forsaken . . . .
The shadows lengthen, and a dreaming hope
Breathes, from the vague mound, Life;

This is a paradoxical turn, of course. While alive, the people could not explain the physical world because they would need to choose between immanence and transcendence, but after dying, they yearn for both. Jarrell suggests that we are caught between immanence and transcendence, and he, in fact, sees human existence as a breathless pause between the two. Only death seems to solve this dilemma, but at the cost of relinquishing both alternatives.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bishop, and Unbecoming

Jean-Paul Sartre makes a compelling argument about the nature of self-consciousness. In the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that "self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something" (16). In this way, Sartre suggests that self-consciousness is not something that occurs after consciousness itself. That is, one does not retain a power of consciousness that subsequently gets turned upon the self.

What makes this such an intriguing idea is how starkly it contrasts with so many other important ideas. Lacan's mirror stage comes immediately to mind, because the mirror stage relies explicitly on the idea that the subject conceives of himself after he is conscious. He must see the image in the mirror and begin to shape a notion of himself. Any theories which describe how the self constructs itself seems to be demolished by Sartre's argument.

But it is fascinating that poets such as Elizabeth Bishop spend so much energy questioning the self and its operations. It seems that Bishop and others unravel the co-existence of consciousness and self-consciousness, and are therefore engaged in a sort of Undoing of the self that Sartre envisions. If consciousness is the "dimension of transphenomenal being in the subject" (10), as Sartre claims, then the excessive questioning of the being that exists through multiple phenomena seems to undo the unity of that conception. Or maybe another way to say it is that the subsequent consciousness of a split self is co-existent with a split consciousness -- despite our potential to be unsplit.

I'm thinking of Bishop's "The Gentleman of Shalott" in particular. In this poem, she writes, "But he's resigned / to such economical design." Especially in her early poetry, she very persistently questions the viability of consciousness, which has an obvious effect on self-consciousness. She is almost a fabulist in how frequently she reshapes the external world -- not to impose a self-willed order upon it, but rather to de-solidify the external world. Our consciousness of the world then is somehow inauthentic because it topples the transphenomenal being described by Sartre.

Wallace Stevens on Death

Wallace Stevens' poem "Flyer's Fall" contemplates the persistence of belief in a culture marked by the loss of doctrinal faith. It is brief enough to quote in full:

This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space -

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.

It is worth noting that Stevens' image of death is about as pure as one can get. The flyer is in the air, otherwise untouched by the world. In this purity, the flyer thinks of his impending death as "noble." He is protected from whatever "dirty fates" lie in store for those of us who die less spectacularly.

But the second and third couplets are from the viewer's perspective, the one who remains and reflects on the flyer's passing. And it is this perspective that seems most difficult, more difficult perhaps than it is to die. He must situate the fact of death in a framework that makes sense, but in the absence of a received orthodoxy. Rather than a Christian heaven, there is only "Darkness, nothingness of human after-death." The compound word "after-death" is particularly provocative because it suggests that to name this state with its own word would be to sanctify it with systemic meaning. Here, it is merely the unconceived thing that comes after death.

But Stevens is interested in how the mind always works to create these narratives that explain the otherwise unexplainable. Even after attempting to ensure the un-theorization of life after death (by using the compound word "after-death"), Stevens gives us a physical place for the dead: "the deepnesses of space." He activates this place by giving it a powerful dynamic presence: "physical thunder." The dead are surrounded by a profound and spiritual activity.

But he is not arguing for a factual understanding of death that escapes Christian (or other) doctrines. He does not make truth claims for the dark emptiness. Instead, the poem is about the human impulse while alive to understand the unintelligible. The organizing power of the mind is an indefatigable, insurmountable desire within human beings: "We believe without belief, beyond belief." Even if we refuse the notions of the afterlife offered by the world's religions, the impulse to believe something, to organize knowledge, to create meaning, nevertheless persists.

Randall Jarrell and the Unreachable Home

Randall Jarrell's poem "A Ward in the States" is a haunting examination of the mind's inability to unify itself and place itself in a satisfactory relationship with the world. More specfically, the poem complicates the notion of "home" and what it means to be in the world.

It begins with images that contrasts inside and outside:

The ward is barred with moonlight,
The owl hoots from the snowy park.
The wind of the rimed, bare branches
Slips coldly into the dark

Warmed ward where the muttering soldiers
Toss, dreaming that they still sigh
For home, for home;

The light from outside enters the ward, but it is affected by the inside: it is "barred," parts of it are in shadow and therefore missing. Similarly, the inside is affected by the outside, as the cold from outside slips into the ward. Jarrell insists that this is a problematic boundary.

Jarrell builds on this problematic physical boundary by contructing an equally permeable boundary between past experience and the present situation. The soldiers, who are in "the States," are dreaming of the islands that "Are stretched interminably / Past their lives." These are the islands in the South Pacific during the Second World War from which the soldiers had returned. The past continues to infect/affect the present.

The persistence of the past is so thoroughgoing that it enters their sleep. Whatever events occurred on those islands, which remain nameless in the poem but were present in the cultural background from which this poem emerged, are left unspoken. The reader hears only their "sigh / For home."

The rich irony that the poem develops, however, is that the soldiers still sigh for home when they are home. They are "in the States," no longer on the islands. But home is not stable enough to endure experience. Seemingly, their "one wish" has been achieved, but they continue to desire it. Jarrell includes a significant line break to emphasize this impossibility: "Ah, one lies warm / With fever." The line initially seems to posit a warm and therefore comfortable sleep, but then he punctures this with the addition of "With fever." The soldiers are haunted by dreams.

Throughout the poem, it seems clear that a stable and comfortable state is impossible, and it seems meaningful that Jarrell has included "the States" in the title: these soldiers exist in a series of states that are invariably implicated in one another. The purity of a "state" of being cannot be achieved. Instead, their "Lips chatter their old sigh," once again confirming that their "one wish" of a stable home is impossible.

Jarrell ends the poem by carefully bookending the moonlight. It appeared at the beginning as the intrusion of the external world, and it ends the poem as the poet's retreat to the objective perspective that generalizes the individual struggles at the same time it diminishes those struggles. It's like when a movie pans away from the protagonist at the end to show a tree-lined street; the object world abides despite our struggles. This itself is an ironic and ambivalent twist in the sense that Jarrell's strategy in the poem was to suggest that physical space/location is in no sense ultimate -- at least from the perspective of the subject. Home as a physical location does not contain meaning within it.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Immutability of the World

I’ve been thinking more about Charles Altieri’s contention that postmodern poetry is primarily about the need to express one’s experience of the world. He presents a compelling case that postmodern poetry, despite its incredible variety, is essentially unified by its immanentism. This poetry presents the fact of experience rather than the attempt to shape it into some kind of ordered, symbolic world. He writes that this “aesthetic mode reflects qualities of the mind engaging the world rather than structuring it into created orders (Enlarging the Temple 24-25). This is an argument about what poetry is capable of, and more importantly, it’s an argument about what the mind can do.

I tend to see the modernist tendency to create order as a sort of an anxious, almost hyperventilating, need for order. That is, it is more of a desperate wish than a comfortable and committed belief. In fact, this haunted quality is one of the things that most draws me to the modernists. It feels so very human (despite the “extinction of personality” that Eliot and others often claimed for their work).

This leads Altieri to the fascinating insight concerning the ego: “For the postmoderns, on the other hand, the ego is not a thing or a place for storing and ordering experiences; the ego is not a force transcending the flux of experience but an intense force deepening one’s participation in experience” (43). But what about those for whom this sort of participation is deeply disturbing? If one recognizes that the world cannot be structured as a result of one’s own will, then the self is at the mercy of the world.

It seems to me that Elizabeth Bishop writes at this juncture, wherein one recognizes the compelling power of the world and the futility of desire. Bishop’s “Little Exercise” is a good example of the forces at play. The poem describes a Florida thunderstorm: “It is raining there. The boulevard / and its broken sidewalks with weeds in every crack / are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.” The actions of the world are undeniable; they are written upon it. The storm cannot be avoided.

The poem closes with the introduction of the human being into this destructive world: “Think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat / tied to a mangrove root or the pile of a bridge; / think of him as uninjured, barely disturbed.” The man is equally subject to the world. But there’s a bit of backtracking, in two senses. First, Bishop suggests that he is “barely disturbed.” Though he must submit to the actions of the world, he nevertheless exists as a counterpoint to it. Though it buffets him, he can tune it out.

Second, Bishop does not tell the story as an experience. It is not (to use Altieri’s useful term) a “disclosure.” Instead, each image is a hypothesis. The poem instructs one to “think of someone”; the someone is putative, not real. The entire action of the poem takes place in the mind, in one’s imagination. The power of the imagination is a stay against the world’s power to compel.

Finally, the structure of the poem is a product of the poet’s power over her material. Bishop’s ideas about form run completely counter to Charles Olson. She exerts her will, not over her material, but over her presentation of the material. Bishop rejects the postmodern effort to rely on the transmission of experience. Instead, she recognizes the immutability of the world at the same time she refuses direct participation in it.

Randall Jarrell and Basic Instinct

In his "Field and Forest," Randall Jarrell strips man of civilization in order to get down to the root of instinct. The agricultural field is a metaphor for the ego, while the forest stands in for the unconscious as the realm of instincts. Our egos, like the fields, "have a terrible monotony." Between the fields, however, are the dark forests.

What makes this poem a good representation of the "middle generation" is its ambivalence. Jarrell occupies a middle ground, and his poem takes pains to show that the farmer wishes to turn everything into farmland. The exploration of this wish, simultaneous with (and contradictory to) the wish to re-enter the forest, marks a significant difference from most postmodern poetry. This is particularly true of the "Deep Image" poets, who would have rushed headlong flaming into the ethereal forest, civilization be damned. (See my earlier post on Galway Kinnell's "The Bear").

Jarrell shows us an undressing of the self: "The farmer, naked, takes out his false teeth: / He doesn't eat now. Take off his spectacles: / He doesn't see now. Shuts his eyes." The physical body is taken apart, and Jarrell explores what might be left after such a dismantling. He takes an important step along the way, suggesting that the man is able to take off his cultural inheritance: "And after he has taken off the thoughts / It has taken him his life to learn, / He takes off, last of all, the world." It seems a bit naive, in light of contemporary theory, to believe that one can dispense with our own cultural constructedness. But it is important that Jarrell does this in the figure of the child. Though it was the old farmer who went off to sleep, it is the boy who enters the dream forest and encounters the fox.

I think Jarrell's point is that we long for the past, before the imposition of the reality principle. In this way, we are haunted by the civilizing process. Repression cannot be undone, but the dream of the pleasure principle inhabits us at our core.

The other interesting thing is that Jarrell suggests the world itself can be taken off. Again, departing from Altieri's notion that postmodern poets celebrate immanence, Jarrell describes a type of being that somehow escapes being-in-the-world. Once we have shed our physical selves and the objective world, all that's left is "A wish, / A blind wish; and yet the wish isn't blind, / What the wish wants to see, it sees." The blind wish, however, is not made explicit. Jarrell does not show us how it operates or to what end.

The poem ends with a stalemate typical for the "middle generation." There's a frozen quality to the face-off at the end, in which child and fox stare at one another. The farmer is ensconced within a dream, and the figurative child and fox are frozen and indistinguishable. I find the last line particularly illuminating, for though Jarrell dispensed with the world earlier in the poem, it ends with an enduring world: "The trees can't tell the two of them apart." Through the poem, we see the ego diminished by its breakdown, but we also see the "blind wish" ultimately broken by the trees which exist objectively regardless of this subjective struggle.

This static triangulation of ego, unconscious, and enduring object world seen in this and many other poems by Randall Jarrell. The same confrontation (which could also be termed self/desire/world) is found in particularly provocative ways in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Jarrell is more prone to substitute to the social world, broadly conceived, for the object world. (Robert Lowell substitutes the nuclear family in this position). There's a sense in all of their work that one cannot but be trapped in this matrix of forces, dissolved but undissolvable.

Randall Jarrell and Extremity of Self

Randall Jarrell is particularly interested in the intersection of the self and the social world. In "90 North," he takes the concept of one's interaction with the world to its logical extremity: the north pole. But rather than a sort of transcendence or ultimate selfhood, the speaker recognizes the inevitability of the physical world.

What intrigues me most about this recognition of physical reality is the spatial configuration of the self that results. When the speaker reaches the north pole, he does not reach a sort of undiluted self-consciousness; instead, he comes to realize that he cannot avoid the world: "Turn as I please, my step is to the south." He is necessarily mapped onto the world, no matter which way he turns.

To me, this perspective seems radically different than the modernist poets who came before Jarrell and the others of the "middle generation." Certainly the authority over the physical world that Ezra Pound asserts, or the power of the imagination in shaping the world advanced by Wallace Stevens, are far from the immanence intimated in Jarrell's poem. Perhaps William Carlos Williams at his most "objective" harbors some of the same ideas, but Williams seems to suggest different implications. In "Paterson," for example, the protagonist both moves through and *is* his world. This duality is empowering in Williams.

Jarrell's figuration is not as holistic. The energies of the self-in-the-world instead form a whirlpool: "all lines, all winds / End in this whirlpool I at last discover." The self is a whirling chaos and it doesn't seem to have any agency or be able to learn. It is at the mercy of the winds.

If it could be said that the self (the Freudian "ego") is challenged, however, it does not seem that the unconscious takes over. The poem isn't like a return of the repressed. Instead, the poem suggests that the loss of the self is more like being cast from the Garden of Eden, more like the devolution of humankind. He casts this struggle in terms of knowledge and ignorance. The fruit of the tree of knowledge in this case (the approach to the extremity of self) is not a stay against the chaos of the world. For the poem itself is figured as a night voyage, a dream of discovery, but ultimately an emptiness.

Immanence is a sort of nightmare rather than an example of a reassuring solidity in the world. The speaker is bereft of a meaning beyond the brute fact of the world. This notion of immanence is important to recognize because it runs counter to the sort of joyous immanence that Charles Altieri talks about in "postmodern" poets in his noteworthy study "Enlarging the Temple." The sort of positive experience, or at least the unburdening of such testimony, shown in the slightly later poets Altieri talks about, is not yet possible in the "middle generation."

Elizabeth Bishop, Isolation, and the Real World

It has been productive to begin reading Bishop's short stories because they help emphasize aspects of her poetry. Specifically, stories like "The Sea & Its Shore" and "In Prison" stress the importance of isolation that is slightly less apparent in the poetry. There's a strong resonance between "The Sea & Its Shore" and the late poem "The End of March."

I find this connection between early and late work important because it seems the critical perspective, initiated by Thomas Travisano in his "Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development," looks at so much of the middle and late work as a blossoming in which the "real world" makes an appearance. But I am struck by the similarities, the consistency of Bishop's vision. From Travisano's perspective, the early work is evidence of Bishop's interest in and fascination with enclosure. Bishop constructs self-imposed prisons in which characters are isolated and the world is only considered as an abstract thing. This abstraction is a form of escape. Travisano argues that Bishop's development leads her out of these enclosures in order to integrated the world. Aspects of her travels and real life are slowly integrated into her poetry and she more fully engages with the world.

I'm not so convinced. The late poem "The End of March" tells of a walk along a beach and the speaker's desire to "get as far as my proto-dream-house, / my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box / set up on pilings, shingled green." This "box" resembles the house in which the protagonist of "The Sea & Its Shore" lives. In both cases, the structure seems to offer only shelter, striping away all excesses and providing only an escape from the elements. In other words, it separates one from the world without recreating its own world. (There's probably a comment on American consumerism here, too, but I don't know where to take that yet). In both texts, the protagonist reads (or hopes to read) things that don't contain an avenue toward meaning; in the story they are scraps of paper and in the poem they are "boring books, / old, long, long books." The texts do not coordinate the facts of the world; there is no hope that one can discover some ultimate meaning from them.

The sense of enclosure that Travisano identifies in the early work is still present in the later work, and I believe appears throughout. The material of the world is definitely more present in some of the later poems, but the intent to block it all out or diffuse its variety still appears to be an important force in her work.

Theodore Roethke and Archetypes

Every now and again you find a poem that seems anachronistic or a very early precursor to a movement that takes shape later. Theodore Roethke's "Night Crow" is a good example: it seems so much like a Deep Image poem that it could be caught lurking in the Robert Bly section of the library:

When I saw that clumsy crow
Flap from a wasted tree,
A shape in the mind rose up:
Over the gulfs of dream
Flew a tremendous bird
Further and further away
Into a moonless black,
Deep in the brain, far back.

Roethke's poem examines a moment in which perception, cognition, and the attribution of meaning are all tangled up. The event itself, the crow lifting into flight, sparks a process in the imagination that seems to escape the conscious mind and burrow into the dark recesses of the unconscious: "A shape in the mind rose up." The poem relies on the associations of crows with doom and darkness. The vagueness of "a shape" fits with the collective unconscious in which crows are creatures of darkness. The ambiguity of movement is also operating on a very sophisticated level: the "tremendous bird" flies further away, and yet seems to be entering into the brain. Moving away and yet moving in. That situation describes the unconscious, which is somehow fundamental in terms of our drives, and yet it is the repressed, further away from the ego or our conscious selves. The speaker's experience allows sudden access to the unconscious rather than providing a careful and reflective consideration. This might be the sudden appearance of the Shadow, alien and yet familiar. The poem establishes threads of connection and spaces of distance at the same time, suggesting our complicated relation to the constructed self.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Weed of Desire

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Weed" is a great poem to read using Structuralist and New Critical methods. She builds two related and productive binary oppositions, one between death and life and the other between stillness and movement. The poem begins with that very Dickinsonian opening: "I dreamed that dead, and meditating, / I lay upon a grave, or bed." Later, the poem contrasts this deathly stillness with life and movement: "Suddenly there was a motion, / as startling, there, to every sense / as an explosion." The poem investigates what one does with this spurt of life after resigning one's self to death.

But it is important to recognize that the form this intercession takes is a weed, an unwanted growth. The speaker seems to favor the idleness of death to the life represented by the weed. In a Freudian sense, the weed seems to represent the drives, which are felt to be a substantial threat to the ego. The stable and "grave" ego is unsettled by the growing weed. The weed grows in the heart, which "began to change / (not beat) and then it split apart / and from it broke a flood of water." The weed is almost swept away by the flood that it creates. The speaker feels an innate (though chilly) fear of the weed and its potential destructiveness:

"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."

The speaker subtly understands her complicity with the weed's actions ("with my own thoughts?"), but recognizes how it works to disintegrate the heart. Rather than seeing unconscious desires as a "true" sort of heart, Bishop suggests that the ego's emotions are the Self's emotions; rather than being a secret heart, the weed is antithetical to the heart.

The perspective in this poem is in keeping with Bishop's tendency to emphasize and ensure the distance between the subject and his desire. Even in the breach, when the unconscious emerges in all its power, the poem is a tale of disintegration. The poem is paradoxically a creation myth and a narrative of psychological decay. While breaking free from stillness, the brittle heart is assured destruction.

Ezra Pound and Individuation

My latest realization has to do with Pound's hypostasizing of desire (rather than letting it flow, Deleuze and Guattari style). The poetic image is a freezing of desire, a metamorphosis of an active situation into an image of a beautiful natural object. I use "Alba," "Gentildonna," and even "In a Station of the Metro" to show how erotic situations of possible connection are frozen into images of wet leaves or petals. In other words, these "Imagistic" poems don't operate by laying one image over another; the second image is a consequence (or the result) of the first. The paradigmatic form of this metamorphosis is Ovid's telling of the Apollo and Daphne myth: Apollo, inflamed with desire, chases Daphne, who transforms into a tree. The tree is the unattainable; desire is hypostasized rather than spent.

The desire is repressed and read into the self. In fact, this is how individuation occurs. Freud's notion of the sexual-instincts and the ego-instincts is useful here. What Pound's speakers do not invest in (social) intercourse with others is invested into the self. These poems re-enact the separation from the mother, the individuation process. The mother must become a distinct and separate object (like a leaf or a petal -- still beautiful and desirable) in order for the child to become the subject. Pound's "Ortus" reveals this two-way individuation process: "How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation / To give her a name and her being!" To be distinct, the flows must stop; desire must be hypostasized. The poetic image is the metamorphosis into the tree, leaf, or petal -- but it occasions the poet's own birth. "Ortus" means "birth" or "springing out." The mother is conceived of as a separate being so that the poet can exist: "For you are no part, but a whole, / No portion, but a being."

The tragic part of this formulation is that this lost connection is always mourned. The poems, which represent individuation and hypostasis, are meant to connect with the reading audience. Pound is terribly concerned with the reader's reaction to the poem. The poem is a means toward reintegration, reconnection, (social) intercourse. And yet, they seem bound to fail because the flows required have been extracted, hypostasized in their images. Pound exhorts his poems: "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions" ("Further Instructions"), or "Ruffle the skirts of prudes, / speak of their knees and ankles" ("Salutation the Second"). Even the suggestively sexual poems like "The Encounter" and "The Garden" are descriptions of possible but unconsummated desire. In the form of always-merely-possible lovers, Pound re-enacts the tragic separation from the mother that simultaneously allows him his subjectivity. The final lines of "Of Jacopo del Sellaio" summarize this drama quite well:

And here's the thing that lasts the whole thing out:
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Ezra Pound and the Transformation of Genital Fluid

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility the idea that the brain is "only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve" (295). Instead of merely being a kooky idea, however, this is a kooky idea that fits well with my reading of Pound's poetry, and in particular fits with the Apollo complex I've been developing to characterize Pound's poetic and philosophical perspective.

It's important to note that Pound uses this idea as a springboard for his aesthetic and practical concerns. In particular, he argues that Gourmont's idea "would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images" (295). There is a direct link between male sexual desire and the creative impulse. While this seems to simply play into that tired old differentiation between men and women as "active" and "passive" principles, it is important to recognize the relation of this idea to Pound's notion of the image. It is not simply that "creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed" (301); it is also that the "spermatozoic particle" has "a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and a form-combining?" (301).

Pound exerts a certain pressure on the genital fluid to exceed its base beginnings in order to develop into ideas, form-combinings. So my earlier reading of
"Alba" can be developed further by suggesting that the seeming peacefulness of the poem's setting actually represents a dissolution of the self and a passing of the potential energy of the speaker's sperm. Because he is sexually spent, he is also spent of ideas.

Rebel Angels: New Formalism and Blandness

One pretty obvious problem with much New Formalism is the tendency to marry the worst feature of free-verse (i.e. vapid conversationalism) with the precision of formalism. Words empty of sentiment are so much more painful when you realized that someone wasted their time ensuring plodding meter and clunky rhymes. Perhaps it's too easy to peruse the anthology to find its weakest link, but anthologies should be the best of the best. So why does a poem like Tom Disch's "Bookmark" end up in this book. It begins:

Four years ago I started reading Proust.
Although I'm past the halfway point, I still
Have seven hundred pages of reduced
Type left before I reach the end. I will
Slog through. It can't get much more dull that what
Is happening now

Well, I would have to agree with this last point. Very dull indeed. Disch's reflections are not particularly stunning, so the high formalism and the low content mix into a strange and seemingly unintentional bathos. The poem almost parodies itself, but it's especially hard to take in light of the polemical preface that announces for New Formalism special access to "an entire realm of pleasure [that] was being denied to them" (xvi).

Strangely, one of the topics that New Formalists seem intent on exploring in their careful ways is sexuality. I say strangely because the ragged, breathless, and contingent process of free-verse seems more conducive to frank sexuality. (The agony of restrained desire, on the other hand, is more fitting for the strictures of formalism). And yet there it is. Charles Martin's "Satyr, Cunninglinguent: To Herman Melville" begins:

Twining her fingers through
His hair, fingertips drumming,
At last she brings him to
The sweet verge of her coming:

Her passion at its flood
Overwhelms all measure;
On articulation's bud,
Inarticulate with pleasure

About the only thing to appreciate in this poem is the next line: "She flops like a caught fish / Straining to be human." I appreciate it because it is at least an interesting and imaginative figure. For the most part, the poets collected in Rebel Angels avoid metaphor, personification, and symbolism. It's almost as if the labor of cementing everyday English into rhyme and meter is more than enough effort. But to return to Martin's fish...it is also, of course, a rancid simile for two obvious reasons. First, the blunt spondee "caught fish" serves to comically belittle the female orgasm. Just as important, however, it stinks as a simile. In my experience, caught fish struggle to return to the water. They've had enough of human air, thank you very much. It's this surprising lack of care and aesthetic concern that makes many of these poems ring hollow.

Ezra Pound and the Apollo Complex

Ezra Pound's "Heather" makes use of the figure of a familiar, a supernatural spirit in the form of an animal that is linked to a person:

The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames.

The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow-white leopard
Watches to follow our trace.

The male is represented by black and by flames, suggesting the burning of desire and the hunting of the sexual object. The female is twice described as white and is wary of the hunter.

This is a fairly typical scenario in that it relies on standard sexual roles, but there are a few things about this poem that make it worth discussing. First, it reflects the sort of "Apollo complex" identified in other works by Ezra Pound. I use the phrase Apollo complex to refer to a man's recognition of his own sexuality and the simultaneous recognition that he must control that desire in order to control himself. This tension is a fundamental aspect of male subjectivity. Again recalling the Apollo and Daphne myth, the girls "Unbend from the holly trees," suggesting that the spark of sexual desire is rekindled as the girls transform from tree back to human form.

There is also the suggestion that the girls' familiar, the white leopard, is in some sense the hunter: "And their snow-white leopard / Watches to follow our trace." The leopard follows the panther, and can be read as a sort of snare that catches the men -- just like Daphne, chased by Apollo, turns into a tree, but ends up encircling Apollo's head in the form of a wreath.

The concept of women ensnaring men is also found in Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme," in which women are depicted as a Sargasso Sea waylaying sailors. These are more than just unattractive portraits of women (although they are that); these poems are also condemnations of the drive to pleasure in men. Sex is a dissolution of self (as seen in "Alba"). For Pound, it is better to sublimate desire into forms of control.

Vernon Shetley and Poetic Difficulty

Vernon Shetley argues that poetry must become intellectually and personally challenging again. But part of this challenge is to chart a middle path between the opposite poles of a variety of continua of poetic practice. Or perhaps a better way of saying that is that there's a Golden Mean that exists between the too radical poetic ideals marking the twentieth century.

As one example Shetley discusses the difference between difficulty and directness, which, following Richard Poirier, he represents with T. S. Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, respectively. Adding layer after layer of mythical references distances one from the immediacy of real life, while blunt immediacy denies one the aesthetic experience that challenges readers.

Another useful example is the opposition between New Formalists and Language poets. In their extreme forms, the former avoids the inequities of the social status quo by trying to recover past modes, while the latter interrogates so vigorously that it squeezes the life out of things.

Justin Quinn and American Errancy

Justin Quinn's American Errancy begins with some of the same building blocks used in Rob Wilson's book (e.g. the sublime and American imperialism), but for Quinn these coalesce around the notion of errancy or antinomianism. He examines how the work of various poets relates to the direction of American social and political history. So, for example, T. S. Eliot is seen as an expatriate who escapes American waywardness by attempting to reclaim orthodoxy in English culture and religion; A. R. Ammons naturalizes ideology and isolates American life as universal; and Jorie Graham details the small, personal acts of life in order to investigate the lost promise of America.

Rob Wilson and the American Sublime

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that hyper-theoretical style that distances itself from making immediate sense. That isn't to say it doesn't make sense, but the reader who struggles mightily through the dense, jargon-laden, poorly-crafted prose is often not quite sure. And by "the reader," I mean me. And a good example comes quickly; here's the first sentence of the introduction:

"If there is strength in America's size and numbers, there is also a threat posed to the subject of that sublimity: "Hey you! I say to the H-bomb. / Miami Vice says to me" is the way Bob Perelman stages this struggle between the democratic ego and the forces of technology and information that now threaten to magnify, dwarf, and abolish it."

Prose this bad should never have been published. I'm driven crazy by the first use of the word "that." What does "that" refer to? Well, America's "size and numbers." And why does the author so boldly assume the reader is going to agree that America's size and numbers are sublime? It would seem the author's priority, as an academic writer, would be to support such an assumption rather than sneak it in. And to develop a complex argument by both refusing to state it and relying on a poetic snippet to (barely) exemplify it is inefficient and off-putting. All of the parts of the book I read utilized this same frustrating style. There's also a befuddling attempt on Wilson's part to employ the word sublime in some form or another in nearly every sentence.

If value must be found in the opening sentence, it is that it gestures toward Wilson's primary argument (if parsed very carefully). According to Wilson, the American sublime involves one's interaction with a vast landscape of nature and technology that gets internalized, creating a subject implicated in American power and ambition. Through the twentieth century, the form of the sublime changes strategies in its relationship with American power, ending with postmodernism, which challenges "the long-standing American sacralization of force" (10).

I'm honestly not certain what I make of this argument, as it often comes across as tautological. For example, one of Wilson's goals is "to provide a definition of the American sublime as a poetic genre that implicates the lyric ego in the production of America as a site of the sublime" (9). So the sublime produces the sublime? Um, okay.

Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is likely an idiosyncratic reading, but one I believe is made available by the text itself and Pound's critical statements.

Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.

The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.

***

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.

There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.

A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.

These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.

Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:

"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"

Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another, and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" ("Vorticism").

The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.

Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.

Ezra Pound and Coherence

In Canto 116, Ezra Pound admitts to the inevitable outcome of his poetic project:

But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Though this seems like a stark admission of failure, he has actually been admitting this failure all along. The poems in Lustra, for example, show the provisional nature of any poetic creation. While he has great faith in his "songs," he also admits that they are naive ("Salutation the Second") or ineffective ("Further Instructions"). Pound's blustery poetic voice and the fierce imperatives addressed to his poems can be countered by the anxiety and tentativeness available to closer readings.

Rather than writing direct poems with pictures of the world, Pound wrote many poems in which the poet addresses the poem. While definitely lacking a "picture," I believe they do present an image (i.e. an emotional tension between two perspectives, which usually has the outcome of endangering an unproblematized perception of the self). In effect, there's a sort of doubling going on in these poems. That is, the poet exists as a maker, but the made objects are spoken to as if they are themselves actors in the world. The poet is the creator god, but his creations bound through the world, interacting with it in various ways. The tension caused by these poems is effected through their ineffectiveness, as in "Further Instructions":

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bady end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that

I almost see you about me

Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

Pound recognizes an inevitable failure in poetic speech, but then he addresses his newest poems, speaking of his hopes for them. Poetry, from this perspective, is not just an iterative process, but a never-ending process. Like Lacan's chain of desire, Pound is always moving outward, searching. His songs are versions of the truth, examples of his passions, creations of himself that are always failures, but are the failures necessary for being.

In a way, his most emblematic poem is "Ortus," which means birth or a springing outward. Whether spoken to the poem, the reader, or the poet himself, the final stanza insists on the primacy of speech and artistic labor in bringing forth one's being:

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say "I"
When I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.

Albert Goldbarth and Spiritual Detritus

Albert Goldbarth is a prosy poet, given to creating small narratives full of vibrant and humorous detail. Rather than employing objects in nature, Goldbarth often includes the peculiar odds and ends of everyday contemporary American life. One of my favorite Goldbarth poems is "Sumerian Votive Figurines," which begins with a contemporary archaeologist's contemplation of the religious significance of ancient figurines and ends with the protagonist's trip past a lawn ornament shop. The descriptions of the ornaments are fantastic:

bulbous-bottomed hausfraus with their bloomers comically skewed,
globe-helmeted deep-sea divers with overspilling treasure chests,
a number of Iwo Jima flag-raisings, artichoke-derriered mermaids
and their trident-bearing paramours, guardian lions, borzois
. . . . . . . .
Okay then, pray for my people, he tells them.

What makes this poem work is the connection between ancient and modern, the recognition of continuity in our spiritual needs. The archaeologist's family troubles, especially, reveal the need to displace our concerns into another (even silly) figure to act as an intercessor between us in our earthly life and the prayers needed to see us through.

Suzanne Juhasz and Object Relations

Utilizing object relations psychoanalytic theory, Juhasz theorizes women's writing and reading as atempts to work through the primary relationship in life: the mother-daughter relationship. Desire, from this perspective, is not an essence of the biological body acting through or agains the world, but rather a result of the baby's subjective interaction with the caregiving mother. Literature, as written and read, enacts something like a psychoanalytic therapeutic session based on transference.

Jorie Graham and the Complication of Subjectivity

It's productive to read Jorie Graham's Swarm after reading Kristeva, for the concept of boundaries is pointedly interrogated in the series of poems with the title "Underneath." "Underneath (13)" suggests that existing explanatory systems fail:

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

While explanation is broken, it is still needed. What we have has been ossified as myths, like Freud's Oedipus complex. The difficulty becomes enacting a challenge without disestablishing the self. Like the abject, Graham's underneath is ejected from the body and forms a horror beside us, a doubling based on rejection. Graham brings us face to face with the form of this abjection:

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of the world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me

While the concept of the abject cannot be laid seemlessly over Graham's poem, the concern with surfaces as boundaries that contain the inexpressible hints at the void within the subject created by abjection. What remains after abjection is an ongoing epistemological struggle in which the one is two and the two are one. When Graham says "you are inside me as history," she insists on retaining the memory of the rejected detritus of being; she recognizes the corpse within us that is also the newborn separated from the mother. Existence is a matter of continually meeting the past and future corpse, the terminal ends of life that resist the efforts of the symbolic realm.

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is not an object opposite the ego, but it is that part of the subject rejected by the superego. It is the rejected part of being which exists alongside the subject. Kristeva grounds the abject in the pre-object phase of separation from the mother:

"Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10).

The abject is an instance of the failure of the symbolic to organize experience. The examples of the abject that Kristeva finds in twentieth century writers are related to an uncovering of a breakdown in the symbolic order, a passing away of stable meaning. She points out that Dostoyevsky's abject is found in both murder and suicide; for Proust it is in the proximity of the sounds of sex and death, the inevitability and uncleanliness of sexual intercourse. These are proximities of boundaries; these boundaries replicate the one between the self and other. Kristeva calls it "boundary-subjectivity," and credits twentieth century writers with the disruptions of narrative that reveal the abject. While Kristeva doesn't exactly celebrate the abject, she calls attention to its ability to reveal "the bankruptcy of the fathers" (172).

Harold Bloom and Poetic Influence

Harold Bloom constructs a complicated system of literary history based on poets and their anxieties in relation to their poetic influences. Bloom, employing Freudian concepts, describes a poet's relation to his influences as the struggle between father and son. He breaks down this struggle into six different possible dynamics: swerving, completing, purging, daemonizing, curtailing, and flooding. (Of course he gives suitably arcane names to these processes, which I have a hard time remembering, so I utilize some of his secondary terminology). In all of these processes, the later poet reacts to the power and authority of the earlier poet(s).

I suppose this theory of poetry is useful in keeping the critic focused on literary history rather than approaching a poet with a naive sense of that poet's originality, but I find in Bloom a more interesting underlying argument. Foundational to the primary notion of the oedipal struggle is the argument that poetry "takes as its obsessive theme the power of the mind over the universe of death" (34). He values the poet's struggle not just against his poetic forebears, but also the struggle for individuation, the attempt to establish the subject apart from nature's laws. So, for example, he praises William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" because it "awakens into failure, and into the creative mind's protest against time's tyranny" (9). I find this a persuasive argument not just because it's emotional implications can be discovered in so many poetic texts, but because it characterizes the process of individuation that compels a tentative and endangered subjectivity that remains open to the anxieties Bloom describes.

Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic practices. She attempts to carve out a middle path through the wildly disparate versions of postmodernism and its implications. Postmodernism is neither the revolutionary dissolution of metanarrative truths, nor is it a complicitous conservativism that serves consumer capitalism. It's primary feature, according to Hutcheon, is its ability to both establish and problematize truth. Postmodern works challenge the prevailing order while recognizing their own historical development from that order. So, for example, postmodernism's tendency to complicate the subject, or in fact dissolve the subject, never fully succeeds because the attempt dissolution requires an understanding of its cultural foundations. But these very foundations give rise to the problematized subject. Postmodern cultural texts, such as the historiographic metafiction upon which Hutcheon focuses, are always involved in what they contest. The primary tone of this involvement is ironic or parodic. If Hutcheon's "poetics" could be distilled into a single feature, it would be postmodernism's parodic treatment of a past from which it cannot escape but which it is determined to challenge.

Helen Vendler and Aesthetic Criticism

Helen Vendler advocates "aesthetic criticism," which she suggests is not primarily about determining meaning or declaring cultural value, but is rather about describing the artistic workings of a text. In other words, criticism should not just describe "what happens," but should also uncover "the music of what happens."

There's something immediately appealing about this bold argument made at a time when Theory was so insistent no such thing was truly possible, much less desirable. Vendler's is a call to get back to the text as a work of art and not just a puzzle or a political statement.

Unfortunately, this perspective is flawed. Yes, it is important to agree that literary texts are works of art; and, yes, the critic's task is largely comprised of exploring the operations of aesthetics; but the crucial and meaningful step in criticism is the contextualization of aesthetic principles in the cultural forces which give rise to aesthetics in the first place.

The biggest problem with Vendler's approach is that her social views determine her aesthetics, rather than the other way around. A good example occurs in her analysis of Adrienne Rich's two uses of the constellation Orion. Vendler approves of an earlier Rich poem ("Orion" from 1969) because it is "unsettled," but dislikes the later poem because it has "become more rash and violent" (383). And yet, looking at the poems, one sees that they both use Orion in a rather figurative way, once as a protector and once as a destroyer. I don't see that either view has any more or less aesthetic value. To decide which poem is more insightful, interesting, or powerful becomes a process of verifying its truth claims. Vendler has clearly done this (and declares for the former poem), but she does not elucidate the verification process, how the poem's art has led to the insight. In fact, she conceals her decision-making process under the guise of aesthetics. Committed writing become unartful, even if it is figurative and compelling, like the poem Vendler maligns:

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter
over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram
slashed with two cuts of steel

A night so clear that every constellation
stands out from an undifferentiated cloud
of stars, a kind of aura

All the figures up there look violent to me
as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

The Confessions of Sylvia Plath

The temptation to jump neck-deep into Sylvia Plath's biography is strong, primarily because her life was tragic and important, but also because her life appears in her poetry. But it is significant, also, that her poetry did so much more than "confess." In fact, the term "confessionalism" wrongly suggests some kind of straight talk that objectively reveals personal feelings about autobiographical events. Or I should say that the term applies to some less careful poets, but poets like Plath get short-changed by such a label. Her work is carefully crafted, laden with pointed symbolism, and set in a gruesome phantasia of dangers. This transcends mere talk. Take the following, from "Edge":

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Life is frozen into a cold and mythological approximation of life. The four heavily stressed syllables ("Each dead child coiled") emphasize the critical accoutrements of the perfected (i.e. dead) woman. But they are not just children; they enter they mythical by becoming serpents, suggesting the dangerous result of the promise of the tree of knowledge. Children are the notice of our mortality. As the poem describes, they live in symbiosis with the maternal body, at once a parasite and the petals of a rose. Plath is also a poet who uses nature as a figure for human experience, but not in a straightforward way. The garden stiffens in a process meant to signify death, but we also get the personification of odors that "bleed / From the sweet, deap throats of the night flower."

These are effective lines whether they are drawn back to Plath's biography or not. Their power comes not because they act as documentary, but because they harness our imagination and tempt it to follow the treacherous path, to contemplate death, to experience the full range of human emotion.

Poems about Albas

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturalistic picture that "Alba" and other Imagist poems do. Many of them are the poet's addresses to his poems, or songs. Here's a brief example:

"Ite"
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

The difficulty in approaching these poems lies in the fact that they don't seem like poems; they implore poems to do things, and as such do not work like poems themselves. I've been considering these poems in light of (my conception of) Pound's theory of poetic images. My conception, again, is that the poetic image is a conflation or tension between two things that leads to a productive and meaningful burst of insight.

I would argue that there's an aspect of the image even in "Ite." The surface reading seems pretty straightforward: the poet requires that his songs be held to the highest of standards. But underneath that reading is the understanding that perfection is never possible. There is a tension between moving and standing. The poems are told to "Seek ever" toward the possibility of stasis, the ability to stand in one place. The poet wants the poem to stand "in the hard Sophoclean light," as if that is the great achievement of being, but the poem is inevitably wounded in the glare of that light. As Ruthven points out in "A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae," Sophocles is invoked to refer to cutting through the dreaminess of the poetry of the 1890s. His essay "A Few Don'ts" encourages poets to eliminate unnecessary words, working toward greater concision. But the poem that seeks this light is ever wounded, suffering continual amputations toward perfection. Being, for the poem, is most fully realized by submitting to the ultimate concision that erases it from being. The tension of this paradox is the image.

Albas

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light on "the structure of desire" in Ezra Pound's early poetry and poetic theory. And now I have to do it...and soon.

My most significant problem is that Pound's theory and his practice don't overlap very well. After reading some of the theory ("Vorticism" and "A Retrospect"), I was convinced that Pound was not interested in -- or at least not only interested in -- a poetry of scientific precision and concision. To me it seemed clear that he saw the image as a productive sort of confusion of objects, a conflation of attributes. The tension or energy of these conflations cut through sentimentality, flaccid commentary, and our received ways of knowing.

This seemed fitting when I read H.D.'s "Oread" and the examples in Pound's critical work. Then I read the poetry, mostly from Lustra. Now I'm confused. At times, I run across examples of Pound practicing what he so fervently preached, but not very often. "Alba" is a great manifestation of his principles (as I see them):

As cool as the pale wet leaves

of lily-of-the-valley

She lay beside me in the dawn.

The most immediate contrast here is the simile that links the lover to physical coolness rather than the warmth of an embrace or of lying next to each other. The cognitive difficulty of this simile slowly disrupts our habituated notion of lovers and warmth. We recognize that the lovers lie together at the end of a night together. Warmth is lost; passion has concluded. The surface tension of coolness where we might expect warmth leads us to the underlying concept of this poem: a contrast of beginnings and endings. As an alba (i.e. a poem about the dawn), the poem celebrates the beginning of the day. But at the same time, it mourns the passing of night's passion. If one takes the beginning of day as a poetic figure for the beginning of life, then we live in a post-pleasure, postlapsarian world. This fits with the origin of lily-of-the-valley in Eve's tears after expulsion from Eden.

So far so good, but then there are so many poems in Lustra that simply don't work this way. Since it's getting late, I'll have to pick this up on another night.

Lucille Clifton and (Personal) History

Lucille Clifton often writes at the intersection of personal past and history, attempting to recover what is personal about even large-scale historical events. In particular, she is concerned with speaking for those who have not had a voice in shaping official history, as in "at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989":

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

She looks beyond the "inventory lists" that enumerate the property belonging to the plantation. Historical documents and historical narratives are windows into lived experience, often figured in terms of the body or its labor. For Clifton, the reading of these documents is not just a means to intellectually understand the past, but to physically hear and feel the past in order to help shape our lives in the present.

Two Alienations: Jean Baudrillard and Georg Lukacs

In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs performs a close reading of Marx's Capital in order to focus on the effects of commodities. Lukacs is primarily interested in how workers are alienated from their labor due to the fetishization of commodities in the capitalist system. Further, the alienation is read back into self-consciousness; the subject understands itself in terms of the commodity form.

Jean Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that human society has become a profusion of consumer objects which are part of a signifying system governed by consumption as a metonymical means toward happiness. The logic of consumption, however, tends to the needs of the order of production rather than the needs of human beings -- and does so primarily by inflating the subjective perception of these needs. The subject becomes a collection of desires walking through a shopping center of magical objects.

These analyses are valuable because they reveal the material basis of such concepts as "the self" and "desire." Taking Lukacs and Baudrillard into account forces readers to consider the role that literature plays in social and economic developments. I don't claim to have a well-developed way to do this, but I would suggest that an awareness of these perspectives can add depth and complexity to our interpretations of poetic texts. Let's use a short poem as an example. Here is "The Scour" by A. R. Ammons:

It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except against something.

Without the benefit of a social analysis, this becomes what it at first appears for so many critics: a poem about nature. One might actually group the possible readings of this poem into three types. First, the poem can be seen as an attempt to get at "the thing," a sensible object in nature. The natural world operates in peaceful and violent ways.

It's difficult to remain in this rarefied field of interpretations without jumping to the second level, which involves the individual subject in the instantiation of nature. This can happen in two ways. First, the poetic speaker can recount his experience of nature and reflect on the intersection of man and nature as two objects. Second, the object or event in the natural world can explain or refer to some aspect of the poetic speaker's (or poet's) personal history.

It's possible to read the Ammons poem from either of these first two levels, and in fact the poet may have meant for it to suggest possibilities on these levels. However, the poem is just as open to the third level: the social. The process of snow falling on a windy night might be a figure for a social process as much as it may stand in as a figure for a personal revelation. In this case, one's standard understanding of snow descending peacefully is disrupted in order to show that nature has different modes and can enact violence. In other words, instead of a 'natural mode' in nature, there is a set of fluctuating possibilities. Among these possibilities, the poet recognizes the potential for violence.

If the earth is taken as a figure for the subject, this means that there are a variety of processes leading to our definition by the falling snow. That is, the contours of our subjectivity are determined in part by the material relations covering us. Ammons' poem encourages the reader to consider not just the violent scouring of snow and wind, but also its innocuous counter-possibility: the inevitable and more natural-seeming slow covering by falling snowflakes.

Marjorie Perloff and the Other Tradition

Marjorie Perloff explores the non-symbolist mode of poetry in The Poetics of Indeterminacy. She speaks of a tradition that is non-representational, which defamiliarizes our strategies for making things cohere. Like the poetry she treats, however, it seems Perloff does not have an aggressively explanatory metanarrative for this tradition. Instead, she proceeds down an explanatory path for a while, and then, after confronting disruptions and discontinuities from the poetic text, she reverts to the concept of ultimate undecidability. When performing this reversion, she doesn not complain about the text, but uses it as a chance to extol its virtues; defamiliarity is valuable in itself.

I focused especially on her chapter dealing with John Ashbery. In it, Perloff writes that "Dozens of provocative and possible stories suggest themselves" (258). This is true, of course, and Perloff spends some time with some of these stories. But it isn't very long before these stories, with which we've travelled with Perloff, are tossed up into the air and we're told to admire how they create a "precise tonality of feeling" (260). A series of perhapses is given up for a tonality. After pointing out these bland but true observation like "we never come to know the larger story," Perloff quickly transitions away, as if to say 'Let's talk about something else': "Here it is illuminating to compare Ashbery to Beckett" (273). Okay, but what about getting to some conclusion? No: "In this context of absent causality, even familiar things become unfamiliar" (274).

Of course, any great conclusions are forestalled by the poetry to which Perloff insists on responding. Ashbery isn't going to give any conclusions, so why should I fault Perloff for failing to deliver one? Because I'm sick of being told that non-representational texts like Ashbery's (or postmodern texts in general) are about disrupting or defamiliarizing the meaning making process or denying the reader an easy overarching metanarrative. I'd rather read a critic's own story through an Ashbery poem -- even if it isn't (and cannot be) the one and only accurate reading. As long as it's interesting and it makes some commitment.

Deleuze and Guattari

I'll confess up front that I haven't read the whole of Anti-Oedipus, but I don't think Deleuze and Guattari would be upset. After all, my desiring-energy pursued its own schizo course in a series of conjunctive and disjunctive flows through the pages. I found much of interest, but I found much with which to disagree, as well. I was struck by comments like this: "desire produces reality [....] It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production" (30). This gives important reality to desire as a force in the world, rather than relegating it to a realm of psychological phantoms.

I also find myself agreeing with their conception of capitalism as a social form that "deterritorializes" desire. Unlike the social forms that precede it, capitalism requires flows of desire. But Deleuze and Guattari critique capitalism as a reterritorialization, as well. Psychoanalysis participates in this reterritorialization through the construction of individual egos (and superegos) that internalize prior forms of territorialization: "The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations" (308). Psychoanalysis, through the Oedipus complex, produces subjects based on the concept of lack. It's prohibitions create the desires it prohibits.

But in other ways, I sense a problem with this theorizing. I appreciate that Deleuze and Guattari insist that we must not get caught up in the historical garbage heap of mythical territorialities, but then what do we get caught up in? How do we come to value things? If "we are all handymen: each with his little machines" of desiring-energy, where do we point these machines? These may seem like quaint questions to those who like the idea of a schizo's walk, but too many important ideas get thrown out with the bathwater -- such as the idea of importance itself.

The biggest conceptual problem I have with the text is that Deleuze and Guattari posit a "free" desire when they talk about decoded flows, but what makes it suddenly free? How are its directions and obsessions determined? They write that "the schiz came into existence only by means of a desire without aim or cause" (378), but it's not clear how desire can be without aim or cause. They suggest that desire just is. Perversely, this is the same type of thinking used to argue that whatever is is right.

Charles Altieri and the Challenge to Affected Naturalness

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri investigates the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry (in the 1980s), which he suggests is made up of poems that affect a sort of naturalness and move toward a moment of visionary closure. (He gives a nod to Jonanthon Holden, who made a similar diagnosis earlier). Altieri argues, however, that the very rhetoric needed to achieve these ends undercuts them. He provides a model of reading that seeks to understand the pressures that lead to such rhetorical strategies rather than getting swept up in the desired effect of the strategies.

In a sense, Altieri asks for a metapoetic reader, one who considers the tensions that give rise to the poet's rhetorical performance. That is, the poem's content does not constitute its meaning; the story of the poem's creation does. The poetic speaker is not natural, but is, rather, the result of a collection of concerns within a dominant rhetorical framework.

This perspective explains why Altieri values John Ashbery's work, which according to Altieri establishes a self of "various desires and [...creates] a mobile field of lyric attachments" (19). But it seems to me that Ashbery is so diffuse regarding the subject that tension dissolves. The reader is left with only the play and not the results of the examination. After one of Ashbery's diffuse performances, the reader (and critic) is left to wonder what has been mobilized. What does the blur of these transitory attachments mean? How does a poem, like "Laughing Gravy" for example, become anything more than a blank?

"Laughing Gravy"
The crisis has just passed.
Uh oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I...

All these people coming in...
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence.

We cannot attach ourselves to the fate of the crisis because it goes unnamed. The "you" is generalized and is not more perplexing than the wolves, who are not given a relation to the speaker or the unidentified "you." In short, these attachments are too "mobile" to gain purchase on the reader. In a way, many of the discrete statements in Ashbery's work are like philosophical declarations or conclusions to arguments in which we can't participate and which deal with experiences and consequences that aren't provided.

John Ashbery and the Accumulation of Emptinesses

By pure, happy accident, I happened to be reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" on the same night I was trying to read the poems of John Ashbery. Coleridge argues that the imagination can be conceived of on two levels. The first level is related to perception. Human beings have some capacity to organize sense data as they perceive the world. For Coleridge, perception is a form of creativity. Secondary imagination is what poets utilize in reshaping perceptions into re-creations of the world. According to Coleridge, this secondary imagination "struggles to idealize and to unify." Coleridge distinguishes these two notions of the imagination from the term Fancy, which is used to refer to that faculty of the mind that begins with the material of memory, but is "emancipated from the order of time and space."

I think that many poets probably do operate through the secondary imagination. The form, import, and consequence of this integration are wildly divergent, of course, but the tendency is unity. One can turn to a poet like Ashbery, however, and ask whether he is trying to idealize or unify that which has been perceived. Most would agree that the answer is no, but I'm interested in the nature of this refusal. On the one hand, this could be seen as a typically postmodern complication of epistemology, but Ashbery's poetic concerns suggest otherwise.

He is not as interested in problematizing how we come to know objects as he is in exploring how we come to know emptiness. He reminds us in one of his most characteristic poems, "The Absence of a Noble Presence": "You've got to remember we don't see that much." What we see, however, is less than what we don't. We are surrounded by a vacuity. He rarely mentions specifics, as if they are unattainable or not meaningful in the ways we hope they are. The poem starts with:

If it was treason it was so well handled that it
Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

That makes us aware of certain moments,
That the end is not far off since it will occur
In the present and this is the present.

The first line repeats the pronoun "it" three times without naming its referent, but the word presumably refers to the "absence" of the title. If this ultimate absence is treacherous, it usually seems okay because the perception of nothingness is "unimaginable." In other words, perception tends to focus on things so the horror of emptiness might be averted. The poetic speaker insists instead that the absence is "ambrosia / In the alley under the stars." But it's too late for the reader: the concept of absence cannot be filled by the epinorthosis that tries to provide a sensation and a location. One must try to perceive absence. Ashbery seems to force the reader back to the first level of imagination: perception...with the added difficulty that the journey of his poems starts with an absence. Here are two recent examples:

"Meaningful Love" begins: "What the bad news was / became apparent too late / for us to do anything good about it." "Lost Footage" begins: "You said, 'Life's a hungry desert,' / or something like that. I couldn't hear."

But "The Absence of a Noble Presence" has a lesson for us: "And since this too is of our everydays / It matters only to the one you are next to." This recalls Whitman's poem "On the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," in which the great ontological and epistemological questions are, if not resolved, at least deflated by the touch of a lover's hand. Though Ashbery does not seem like an objectivist or an intersubjectivist (if there is such a term), his poems do suggest that absence or emptiness are merely states from which perceptions emerge. Another of his well-known poems, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," ends with the assertion that "The poem is you." And while there are no doubt many levels to this evocative phrase, on the most fundamental level, it suggests that something comes into being from the perception of nothingness.

Galway Kinnell, the Primal, and the Civilized

In "Lastness," the final poem of his sequence "The Book of Nightmares," Galway Kinnell calls a poem a "concert of one / divided among himself, / this earthward gesture / of the sky-diver." In these two metaphors, Kinnell enunciates a profound and carefully wrought idea of poetry. It becomes that harmonizing act that unifies the manifold and activates the condemned. While he accepts the concept of the divided subject, he ultimately recognizes the need for a gesture, the coordination of the body into some attempt at expressing a symbolic meaning. Though condemned to fall and ultimately to die, the skydiver clutches for the earth.

In many ways, these two metaphors exemplify my approach to reading poetry. I try to read the tensions of subjectivity and desire expressed in the poem -- even those poems that at first come off as unified reflections of a confident poetic speaker. In other words, how might the concert be understood as the presentation of divisions among the players? Of what do these divisions consist and how do they arise? And second, how are subjects instantiated by their gestures? That is, how do we become through our actions?

"Lastness" provides its own statement on these questions. The fifth section of the poem recapitulates Kinnell's perspective:

That Bach concert I went to so long ago --
the chandeliered room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die . . .
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist
puts the irreversible sorrow of his face
into the opened palm
of the wood, the music begins:

a shower of rosin,
the bow-hairs listening down all their length
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived
still crying,
still singing, from the sliced intestine
of cat.

The section begins with the height of civilization: the Bach concert, and yet it is made possible by the "sexual wail" of the bow across strings made from animal intestines. This is an example of Kinnell's oft-used strategy of mixing the primal and the civilized, suggesting that the latter should not be recognized as the expulsion of the former, but rather a special refinement of it. In fact, the trajectory of this section -- and much of Kinnell's work -- is backwards, stressing the recovery of the primal from within the civilized. While he often takes as his material the wild stuff of nature, he does not jettison civilization; he brings the two together into a tension that marks contemporary life.

More specifically, he continually returns to the question of poetry and expression -- even in his well-known poem "The Bear," which otherwise seems to be a narrative of a hunt, a possession, and a transformation:

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

In this final moment, the speaker of "The Bear" has not transformed into a bear but rather recognized the importance -- and difficulty -- of speaking the primal.

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).