A poet must work

A few days ago, I heard a well-regarded poet reminisce about her troubling experience at her grandmother's funeral. Neither death nor grief was the trouble: it was the minister, who had "looked at me" while he claimed that "we do not grieve as others do."

This Pulitzer poet spoke in such a way that mimicked the structure and sense of her printed poems. She spoke, apparently, in blank verse. There were many ellipses and parentheses. There was a lot of meta-referential self-reflection. There was more irony than white space. This is an odd way to talk, for sure. Inverted commas were splattered all over the implicit script. One hopes for some self-effacing conversation about ideas: but in so much of the hyper-modern soliloquy that is au courant, self just cannot be gotten over.

The agnostic poetess was offended that the minister put down her sort of hopeless grief. I wanted to tell her that the minister was quoting a rather well-regarded verse from St. Paul (i.e., "do not grieve as others do who have no hope"). And I rather doubt the minister was looking right at her: these conclusions are drawn, usually, when looking over eternity's cliff, one feels himself in arrears.

She didn't hear me saying this from my side of the speaker. That is usually the problem with broadcast: things are said but not heard. It is also the problem with poetry today.

Poetry has been sidelined. Despite the panoply of awards and prizes and fellowships (including the Pulitzer), most people get along fine without poetry. This is probably due to the fact that poetry has sidelined itself. It has divorced itself from the fairy tale, to be sure: and despite a raft of indications that its language has devolved into Warholian childishness, it has eloped from childhood. It is full of fantasia and false, passion-toxified images: it is empty of fantasy.

The sidelining of poetry has been abetted by a rejection of work in language. I will list some concepts that have been renounced in most contemporary poetry: structure, decorum, tradition and myth, real symbol. Everything today is negotiable. There seems to be one axiom, and that is the hegemony of self-consciousness: everything else is arbitrary and absurd.

There are exceptions. Richard Wilbur is a structuralist par excellence, and we are lucky to have him alive. Geoffrey Hill requires so many readings, because a cursory reading rarely returns any sense: I've found that at the fifth go, an idea begins to glimmer (like magic).

Why this fretting about poetry? If one can get along without poetry, such as it is mostly, then why worry?

I do not think that one can get along without poetry, as it is meant to be. In his reveille essay, "On Fairy Stories" (which should be read by, let me see, everyone), J. R. R. Tolkien suggested that all good fairy tales point to (and participate in) the One Great Myth that is True. In the sense of his essay, all good poetry is fay – that is, the poem communicates a vision to the mind. If a poem is evil – and that it can be – then it is no different than a necromantic incantation, chanting nihilistic absurdities, destroying traces of the Word. If a poem is good, then light shines from behind every word … and every word participates in the Gospel. Words shine when they are ensconced in structure and meaning.

Mental illnesses come and go with the succession of the spirits of the age. Fear and anxiety were the chief pathologies of the twentieth century. That has passed. Now we are bobbing up and down, as flotsam, in an age of fractured thought. Memories are not organized. Stories are not remembered. The experiences of a day are not threaded onto the skein of meaning.

This is distressing, because – I think – poetry is the threading of meaning, and thus a little bit of poetry is necessary to the work of belief. And if you think that there is no work to belief, then you will never be able to read a poem.

Going on like this was not my first intention. I meant, at first, to get right to the business of this next quote. This paragraph is from David Jones – a quite difficult poet. I must confess that the only way I can make my way through his grand Anathemata is with a commentary in hand. We who work in the Spirit's ministry of Tradition to this age are poignantly mindful of the terrors that accrue from forgetting: Jones' words, here, betoken the work of bridge-making and remembrance:

I am in no sense a scholar, but an artist, and it is paramount for any artist that he should use whatever happens to be to hand. For artists depend on the immediate and the contactual and their apperception must have a 'now-ness' about it. But, in our present megalopolitan technocracy the artist must still remain a 'rememberer' (part of the official bardic function in earlier phases of society). But in the totally changed and rapidly changing circumstances of today this ancient function takes on a peculiar significance. For now the artist becomes, willy-nilly, a sort of Boethius, who has been nicknamed 'the Bridge', because he carried forward into an altogether metamorphosed world certain of the fading oracles which had sustained antiquity. My view is that all artists, whether they know it or not, whether they would repudiate the notion or not, are in fact 'showers forth' of things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or wilfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less, belong to man.
     So that when asked to what end does my work proceed I can do no more than answer in the most tentative and hesitant fashion imaginable, thus: Perhaps it is in the maintenance of some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge. – David Jones, in a statement to the Bollingen Foundation, 1959, cited in The Dying Gaul,  1978

Comments

[SubDn. Lucas]

Fr. Jonathan,

May I contact you off the blog?

-SubDn. Lucas

[Fr. Jonathan]

Sure, SubDcn Lucas. My email is janotec77@gmail.com.

[Mary Lowell]

Thinking of Caribou

Thinking of caribou,
Not the genus of subarctic deer,
But hierarchies of sound
Reigning over meaning.
Tundra, its kindred aural lord
Where live such things as deer
That wear their crowns for scratching ice
To satisfy themselves with moss
As well as ward off wolves.

So, some words
A poem of themselves
As mercury bead a moon.
Some single stop like pearl
Or multi-valve Algonquin
Sing without verb.

Thinking of the Micmac genius
of kaleboo that satisfies the ear
With stops and goes, even francofied,
Yet must contend with wolves
Demanding meat from music,
Scratching at its hooves
For meaning.