Is it really that difficult? Writing poetry is a word game. Words and phrases prompt images. The poet plays with the anticipated reactions. The better the choice of word, the better the image. The better the thought behind the word choice, the better the poem.
That's a fair summary Ron. I'm interested in elaborating on that process, on the thinking and the imagery, with the aim of eventually being able to talk about what makes one choice better than another one.
From a pragmatic standpoint, when a poet is composing a poem isn't he or she more interested in conveying a sensation, emotion, what have you, in a way that is memorable and, in some degree, entertaining? Using the analogy of a composer...when writing a piece of music the composer is most interested in how it sounds; is it poignant where it needs to be, dramatic where it needs to be, is it interesting and memorable and can you hum the tune? In the same way the poet is trying to make something that we can remember and take with us...a line, a stanza, maybe even the whole poem?
Not trying to be dismissive (since I really like the idea of poetry as "...an activity of consciousness" idea) but I guess what I'm wondering is how knowing any of this is going to improve my poetry (which could definitely use the help) or any one else's?
I do look forward to reading the next installment.
From a pragmatic standpoint, probably not that useful, except to understand that, in trying to produce a desired effect when writing (conveying an emotion or sensation, or making something sound memorable) one should have a good grasp of the figures of language that are capable of producing them.
I used to post specific examples of figurative language on Instagram and X, with some useful commentary. I might get back into doing that on Substack, but currently I'm interested in the less practical, more philosophical groundings of poetry and poetic language.
If, as you write, "Poetic language is a kind of language closer to the true nature of language," can I assume that there is "language" that is far--very far indeed--from the "true nature of language." "Mere communication" (a term you use) perhaps? "Taxi!" "Fuck off, Blanche." "I'll have a Whopper." You distinguish between "mere communication" and "meaning," with "meaning" being achieved (overachieved, in my opinion) when the raw data of the senses are put through the meat grinder of the "imagination" to produce--voila!--a poem, a literary production. Just to be an asshole, I instead assert that that bugaboo "meaning" isn't achieved (again, overachieved) through the use of tropes, but is blurred (in the case of bad poems) and totally eliminated (in the case of good poems) by their use. You quote humorless windbag jargonslinger Harold Bloom ("I had memorized all of Hart Crane by the age of five"). Both you and Harry need to remember what Our Great God of the Metaphor Wallace Stevens said a poem should do: Make the world a little hard to see. Also, don't we need less Metaphysics (whatever that is), not more?
Peter, you are the whetstone upon which I sharpen my ideas! No need to apologize for playing the asshole.
We need a rediscovery of metaphysics. We are all materialists, but materialism is far from the whole picture of reality. A purely scientific materialist worldview can make nothing of consciousness, for one.
My discussion of language comes from Chomsky's claim that the characteristic use of language is not for talking, but for thinking. There's a clip of him discussing this in the previous post. He says that nearly 100% of language use is internal. Of course language is still useful for speaking, but the idea that it evolved specifically for the purposes of communicating information to others is misleading. The examples that you give, "Taxi!" "Fuck off, Blanche," or "I'll have a Whopper," are expressions which could easily be conveyed non-verbally, through phatic gestures. I raise my hand to hail a taxi, or I give Blanche a nasty look, or I nod my head and point in the direction of that picture of a Whopper to the guy working at BK. The use of language certainly helps facilitate your desired ends, but it's a very different thing from saying that the function of language in those cases is for communicating information in any meaningful sense.
Consider how much of our everyday communication is like this. You chat up a coworker, or a stranger you meet in line. You may be trying to establish or reestablish a relationship, to "see how things stand" between you, although what you say may be quite meaningless.
It's a very different thing from the experience we have when we read a poem or a book and feel that we've understood something deeply. Chomsky's point is that language is better suited at doing that for us.
But I agree with you about the way we can confuse meaning just as easily as we can gain it by reading bad works. I think bad poetry is bad partly because it mucks up the imagination with the wrong intuitions, the wrong associations, the wrong metaphors, etc. It reeks of a false consciousness, a faulty conception of a thing.
What we're really talking about here is consciousness, which good ol' Bloom says "is to poetry what marble is to sculpture." A good poem, through its strangeness, its originality, enlarges our consciousness. This is what I believe Stevens meant by "making the world a little hard to see." That enlarging is a strange experience, which does, at first, increase the difficulty of understanding. But it does lay the groundwork for it.
You say "we"--perhaps the most basic difference between us is the confidence with which you use collective pronouns--need to rediscover "metaphysics," and you then contrast metaphysics with "a purely scientific materialist worldview." We have very different ideas about what is meant by "metaphysics." You seem to see it as being motivated by an effort to understand. I see it as arising out of a need to explain. I sort of agree with you when you say we are all materialists, but I would modify it to: We are all Material. You say a PSMW (favorite new acronym) can make nothing of consciousness. Who the hell can? I leave those investigations to the likes of Cassie Fielding.
Chomsky says the characteristic use of language is thinking, not talking, and that 100% of language use is internal. "Use" is the word he uses. Ask yourself what he means by that the next time you order a pizza. And "characteristic" is a characteristically slippery word, isn't it? "To use a word is to enter a funhouse, a hall of mirrors." I just made that up, and since I can't attribute it to an Esteemed Material Being Who Has Stature (e.g., Voltaire or WC Fields), it has no meaning, it fizzles. "Language is primarily a social and commercial tool." There, did it again. Great fun!
Sure, I could just slap Blanche, but she would slap me back, and besides, it feels good to say "Fuck off." Perhaps it's not efficient, and perhaps I'm going against "evolution." Great fun, though (unless you're Blanche). In your quest for an all-encompassing Metaphysics, you fail to account for what I see as an enormous capacity (as when one can eat 1,000 cannolis in two minutes) for Perversity and--my leitmotif here--Fun. (Nome doesn't seem like he's much fun, although I haven't seen the episode of Sesame Street where he makes an appearance.)
Personal Question: Do I muck up my imagination with wrong intuitions, wrong associations, wrong metaphors? Well, buddy, if I do, I do it deliberately. So there!
And you quote old genius Harry ("I had memorized all of Hart Crane by the time I was five years old"). Consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture? Yeah, completely unnecessary. What WC (!) meant is that you take the world as you find it, which is impossible to see, and make it only a little hard to see. Or in the lingo of Mr. C (Charboneau, not Chomsky), it's a metaphor for squinting. Fun!
Characteristic use is perhaps a better term than function, which is usually how we discuss language. What is the function of language? Well this is slippery, as Chomsky points out in the video. What is the 'function' of the bones in our bodies? Are they structural, for keeping us upright? Are they for storing calcium? The function of a thing may be multipurposed, although any one function may not describe the origin of a thing's development. Characteristic use is much more pragmatic for this. What do we use it for? Well it seems like we use it more, overwhelmingly, for internal thinking, than for speech. Language actually seems ill-suited for speaking, as anyone knows who's been in a conversation that goes nowhere.
Now when we talk about thinking, we're immediately in the realm of metaphysics. It is a world to which material science is only now just catching up. We don't even have good words for the things that go on at this level of consciousness. What is a thought? What is thinking? It's sort of like the way we speak language, but not really. It's also filled with images (although they're not images in a strict sense) and impressions, memories, that have forms which evaporate when we try to bring them to the surface.
What you end up having recourse to, in such a realm, is figuration. You figured a few ways of thinking about 'characteristic' and 'use' with your metaphors. You're pretty good at it, because you're a poet. Wallace Stevens was incredibly good at it too. His poetry is all about this interior, imagined world, and how impossible its task is to describe reality.
"The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard."
His poetry is acutely aware of this problem, although because of this, he is so good at figuring it for us. He is perhaps the supreme poet of the imagination as such. The Romantics were poets of the imagination, although they preferred to figure it through myth and allegory.
You quote the WS poem. My take: A madwoman has wandered out of an Edward Munch painting, and now finds herself pacing, during her one-hour daily "exercise," the beach attached to the Key West Home for the Hysterically Solipsistic. (And why, oh why, does Mr. Metaphorical Smarty Pants write "we" instead of "she" in the final line you quote?) Nobody who's not a dolt ever "employs" a metaphor or searches for some form of "figuration" to objectify a sense or thought or emotion (choose your word, they're equally awful). To a reader (particularly a reader who is an educator with a bent toward "poetic theory," as you are) explaining the "effect" or "strategy" of a certain poem, it is perhaps useful to think in these terms. However, It is a crude way of looking at how the imagination augments and (sometimes) transforms reality. Can you give me a single instance of Robert Frost or Marianne Moore "employing" (a verb perfectly suited to the use of metaphors and butterfly nets) a metaphor?
I think your idea of language--and poetry, which you see as the exemplary use of it--is restrictive. There is an idea to be communicated. There is language by which the idea can be communicated. Because the idea is a complex (or at least a faceted) one and language is slippery, at best, the poet's tools of the trade must be called upon, to communicate the idea. Maybe, sometimes, this is what happens. Just as likely, the poet finds words--a set of words, patterns, a single one that sits up and begs a bone--that please him, and then creates the thoughts, the atmosphere, the environment, most amenable to those words. A lie may work just as well as the truth. That's why the idea of truth is irrelevant to "poetry." There is no true or false. There are only settings, more or less effective.
"Violence to sentences" is my definition of "Poetry" (I love coming up with definitions!). There must be a strong verb, given or implied, and if implied, it must be stupendously strong (few poets can manage this). Poetry is a spatial art form, having its affinity as much with sculpture and advertising copy (with which it share a lot), as with other forms of literature.
Curious thing. The books on the "Poetry" shelf tend to be thinner, having fewer pages, than books elsewhere in the bookstore. Would you not expect, then, that with fewer pages, the pages would be covered in type? But no--fewer pages and fewer words on each page. Hard to think about what poetry is without considering emptiness, white space, loneliness, margins, perversity, laziness.
Is it really that difficult? Writing poetry is a word game. Words and phrases prompt images. The poet plays with the anticipated reactions. The better the choice of word, the better the image. The better the thought behind the word choice, the better the poem.
That's a fair summary Ron. I'm interested in elaborating on that process, on the thinking and the imagery, with the aim of eventually being able to talk about what makes one choice better than another one.
That will be fun and informative. That seems to me to be the challenge and the reward of writing and reading poetry.
Maybe a look at Wilbur's The Beautiful Changes would make for an interesting connection to that final Bloom quotation.
Thanks J. I’m familiar with Wilbur. I will check that one out.
From a pragmatic standpoint, when a poet is composing a poem isn't he or she more interested in conveying a sensation, emotion, what have you, in a way that is memorable and, in some degree, entertaining? Using the analogy of a composer...when writing a piece of music the composer is most interested in how it sounds; is it poignant where it needs to be, dramatic where it needs to be, is it interesting and memorable and can you hum the tune? In the same way the poet is trying to make something that we can remember and take with us...a line, a stanza, maybe even the whole poem?
Not trying to be dismissive (since I really like the idea of poetry as "...an activity of consciousness" idea) but I guess what I'm wondering is how knowing any of this is going to improve my poetry (which could definitely use the help) or any one else's?
I do look forward to reading the next installment.
From a pragmatic standpoint, probably not that useful, except to understand that, in trying to produce a desired effect when writing (conveying an emotion or sensation, or making something sound memorable) one should have a good grasp of the figures of language that are capable of producing them.
I used to post specific examples of figurative language on Instagram and X, with some useful commentary. I might get back into doing that on Substack, but currently I'm interested in the less practical, more philosophical groundings of poetry and poetic language.
Well, it sure is interesting. I'm very interested in the mind-body problem, and much of your essay resonated that particular interest I have.
Thanks for the reply.
If, as you write, "Poetic language is a kind of language closer to the true nature of language," can I assume that there is "language" that is far--very far indeed--from the "true nature of language." "Mere communication" (a term you use) perhaps? "Taxi!" "Fuck off, Blanche." "I'll have a Whopper." You distinguish between "mere communication" and "meaning," with "meaning" being achieved (overachieved, in my opinion) when the raw data of the senses are put through the meat grinder of the "imagination" to produce--voila!--a poem, a literary production. Just to be an asshole, I instead assert that that bugaboo "meaning" isn't achieved (again, overachieved) through the use of tropes, but is blurred (in the case of bad poems) and totally eliminated (in the case of good poems) by their use. You quote humorless windbag jargonslinger Harold Bloom ("I had memorized all of Hart Crane by the age of five"). Both you and Harry need to remember what Our Great God of the Metaphor Wallace Stevens said a poem should do: Make the world a little hard to see. Also, don't we need less Metaphysics (whatever that is), not more?
Peter, you are the whetstone upon which I sharpen my ideas! No need to apologize for playing the asshole.
We need a rediscovery of metaphysics. We are all materialists, but materialism is far from the whole picture of reality. A purely scientific materialist worldview can make nothing of consciousness, for one.
My discussion of language comes from Chomsky's claim that the characteristic use of language is not for talking, but for thinking. There's a clip of him discussing this in the previous post. He says that nearly 100% of language use is internal. Of course language is still useful for speaking, but the idea that it evolved specifically for the purposes of communicating information to others is misleading. The examples that you give, "Taxi!" "Fuck off, Blanche," or "I'll have a Whopper," are expressions which could easily be conveyed non-verbally, through phatic gestures. I raise my hand to hail a taxi, or I give Blanche a nasty look, or I nod my head and point in the direction of that picture of a Whopper to the guy working at BK. The use of language certainly helps facilitate your desired ends, but it's a very different thing from saying that the function of language in those cases is for communicating information in any meaningful sense.
Consider how much of our everyday communication is like this. You chat up a coworker, or a stranger you meet in line. You may be trying to establish or reestablish a relationship, to "see how things stand" between you, although what you say may be quite meaningless.
It's a very different thing from the experience we have when we read a poem or a book and feel that we've understood something deeply. Chomsky's point is that language is better suited at doing that for us.
But I agree with you about the way we can confuse meaning just as easily as we can gain it by reading bad works. I think bad poetry is bad partly because it mucks up the imagination with the wrong intuitions, the wrong associations, the wrong metaphors, etc. It reeks of a false consciousness, a faulty conception of a thing.
What we're really talking about here is consciousness, which good ol' Bloom says "is to poetry what marble is to sculpture." A good poem, through its strangeness, its originality, enlarges our consciousness. This is what I believe Stevens meant by "making the world a little hard to see." That enlarging is a strange experience, which does, at first, increase the difficulty of understanding. But it does lay the groundwork for it.
Get your knife out. Whetstone coming at you.
You say "we"--perhaps the most basic difference between us is the confidence with which you use collective pronouns--need to rediscover "metaphysics," and you then contrast metaphysics with "a purely scientific materialist worldview." We have very different ideas about what is meant by "metaphysics." You seem to see it as being motivated by an effort to understand. I see it as arising out of a need to explain. I sort of agree with you when you say we are all materialists, but I would modify it to: We are all Material. You say a PSMW (favorite new acronym) can make nothing of consciousness. Who the hell can? I leave those investigations to the likes of Cassie Fielding.
Chomsky says the characteristic use of language is thinking, not talking, and that 100% of language use is internal. "Use" is the word he uses. Ask yourself what he means by that the next time you order a pizza. And "characteristic" is a characteristically slippery word, isn't it? "To use a word is to enter a funhouse, a hall of mirrors." I just made that up, and since I can't attribute it to an Esteemed Material Being Who Has Stature (e.g., Voltaire or WC Fields), it has no meaning, it fizzles. "Language is primarily a social and commercial tool." There, did it again. Great fun!
Sure, I could just slap Blanche, but she would slap me back, and besides, it feels good to say "Fuck off." Perhaps it's not efficient, and perhaps I'm going against "evolution." Great fun, though (unless you're Blanche). In your quest for an all-encompassing Metaphysics, you fail to account for what I see as an enormous capacity (as when one can eat 1,000 cannolis in two minutes) for Perversity and--my leitmotif here--Fun. (Nome doesn't seem like he's much fun, although I haven't seen the episode of Sesame Street where he makes an appearance.)
Personal Question: Do I muck up my imagination with wrong intuitions, wrong associations, wrong metaphors? Well, buddy, if I do, I do it deliberately. So there!
And you quote old genius Harry ("I had memorized all of Hart Crane by the time I was five years old"). Consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture? Yeah, completely unnecessary. What WC (!) meant is that you take the world as you find it, which is impossible to see, and make it only a little hard to see. Or in the lingo of Mr. C (Charboneau, not Chomsky), it's a metaphor for squinting. Fun!
Characteristic use is perhaps a better term than function, which is usually how we discuss language. What is the function of language? Well this is slippery, as Chomsky points out in the video. What is the 'function' of the bones in our bodies? Are they structural, for keeping us upright? Are they for storing calcium? The function of a thing may be multipurposed, although any one function may not describe the origin of a thing's development. Characteristic use is much more pragmatic for this. What do we use it for? Well it seems like we use it more, overwhelmingly, for internal thinking, than for speech. Language actually seems ill-suited for speaking, as anyone knows who's been in a conversation that goes nowhere.
Now when we talk about thinking, we're immediately in the realm of metaphysics. It is a world to which material science is only now just catching up. We don't even have good words for the things that go on at this level of consciousness. What is a thought? What is thinking? It's sort of like the way we speak language, but not really. It's also filled with images (although they're not images in a strict sense) and impressions, memories, that have forms which evaporate when we try to bring them to the surface.
What you end up having recourse to, in such a realm, is figuration. You figured a few ways of thinking about 'characteristic' and 'use' with your metaphors. You're pretty good at it, because you're a poet. Wallace Stevens was incredibly good at it too. His poetry is all about this interior, imagined world, and how impossible its task is to describe reality.
"The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard."
His poetry is acutely aware of this problem, although because of this, he is so good at figuring it for us. He is perhaps the supreme poet of the imagination as such. The Romantics were poets of the imagination, although they preferred to figure it through myth and allegory.
You quote the WS poem. My take: A madwoman has wandered out of an Edward Munch painting, and now finds herself pacing, during her one-hour daily "exercise," the beach attached to the Key West Home for the Hysterically Solipsistic. (And why, oh why, does Mr. Metaphorical Smarty Pants write "we" instead of "she" in the final line you quote?) Nobody who's not a dolt ever "employs" a metaphor or searches for some form of "figuration" to objectify a sense or thought or emotion (choose your word, they're equally awful). To a reader (particularly a reader who is an educator with a bent toward "poetic theory," as you are) explaining the "effect" or "strategy" of a certain poem, it is perhaps useful to think in these terms. However, It is a crude way of looking at how the imagination augments and (sometimes) transforms reality. Can you give me a single instance of Robert Frost or Marianne Moore "employing" (a verb perfectly suited to the use of metaphors and butterfly nets) a metaphor?
I think your idea of language--and poetry, which you see as the exemplary use of it--is restrictive. There is an idea to be communicated. There is language by which the idea can be communicated. Because the idea is a complex (or at least a faceted) one and language is slippery, at best, the poet's tools of the trade must be called upon, to communicate the idea. Maybe, sometimes, this is what happens. Just as likely, the poet finds words--a set of words, patterns, a single one that sits up and begs a bone--that please him, and then creates the thoughts, the atmosphere, the environment, most amenable to those words. A lie may work just as well as the truth. That's why the idea of truth is irrelevant to "poetry." There is no true or false. There are only settings, more or less effective.
"Violence to sentences" is my definition of "Poetry" (I love coming up with definitions!). There must be a strong verb, given or implied, and if implied, it must be stupendously strong (few poets can manage this). Poetry is a spatial art form, having its affinity as much with sculpture and advertising copy (with which it share a lot), as with other forms of literature.
Curious thing. The books on the "Poetry" shelf tend to be thinner, having fewer pages, than books elsewhere in the bookstore. Would you not expect, then, that with fewer pages, the pages would be covered in type? But no--fewer pages and fewer words on each page. Hard to think about what poetry is without considering emptiness, white space, loneliness, margins, perversity, laziness.