| May. 12th, 2008 @ 09:15 am Personal Poetics and Perceptual Filters |
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People consume what feeds needs. There's a theory of natural food that I can't attest to the truth of, or contest, but flies like this: your body will say eat until you get the nutrition. High carb, high sugar food rebounds you into more desire for more food because these tend to be low-nutrient food. If you eat high nutrition food, you body senses that and turns off or down the appetite and hunger. You don't need volume necessarily. You need roughage but that's another issue.
To bring to poetry, people seem to cleave poetry apart from communication. As if one could make good poetry without making good communication. Good communication is not the same as good oratory, clear, persuasive, leading, verbal, articulate. Communication is broader, and poetry is broader than these simple rules of on the table narrative with social aims.
Communication is as much as words to share physical postures, breathing rates, focus of attention, is to dump so much data that there is no way to pick thru one narrative thread. This overload can also be good communication. The brain stores all. Unconsciously we pick up on the emotional intent, the thick data.
Good communication narrowly defined as unambiguous purpose and connotations, Plain English, simple amount of data, is well intentioned but not complete.
To bring from food and communication to poetry, the crux of irritation (the crotch of irk from OE?) is this dividing into camps of what constitutes good poetry and good communication.
Good is always self-referential. i.e. good as defined according to the opinions and needs of the speaker. I know. It needn't be unpacked. Anything spoken is an opinion of the speaker. Yet.
The background binary absolutes lurk in there. Unqualified "bad" makes me antsy. Even tho I can train myself to say, there's something which absolutely missed the mark of my heart, so that I sputter of its vacuousness, or whatever. Or good rant how its bullseyed me. Still I want to bring myself back to the purpose of the poetry's creation. It is not a speech act in isolation to be tied to a measuring tape. It did something internal for the poet and is completed, if not with me, then maps to someone else's incomplete map to evoke completion.
I suppose I'm an infernal relativist, still fleeing by knee jerks my own history of fundamentalism and youthful absolutism.
Where I'm aiming to go with this is finding the underlying. What internal and external drives bring a poet to feel fulfilled by a poem? What itch is scratched for the reader who appreciates it? That would have to be answered by imagination and/or by projecting motivations.
My bias is that poetry is done a) psychologically to counterbalance inner and outer forces b) sociolinguistically c) to close an information gap.
First c) If everyone gets "it", "it" is not said. I suppose if one feels something is utterly critical and pivotal and exciting and those immediately around find it blase, one could use poetry to outlet the scale of fervor in a more satisfying way. Basically, if some angle is perceived not to get enough attention, poetry could be used to draw attention to this facet of life.
b) If something is perceived to be commonly understood, one doesn't tend to try to also reinforce the idea in poetry unless one is not speaking except to reinforce tribe, as phatic speech, as in-group reinforcement.
If one can freely say something (how and what one wants, to the level of elaboration and exploration one wants) in daily normal conversations, there would be no need to formalize into written verse, unless one wants to reiterate for wider dissemination. Then poetry is oratory, a different kind of speech act, a different kind of sharing. It is for broadcast not in order to think or provoke critical thought nor to record personal or general or natural history.
With this last aspect, a) we return to the idea of feeding on what nourishes, sating and comforting what itches. People write to comfort or excite themselves. To say this, overgeneralizes the practice of the world what I do but also is an observation. Those who are too emotional for their own comfort, write to wrestle control. Those who are tense, try to cultivate their own flow. Poets tend to be "into" self-development, self-discovery, not stasis.
You have to watch to know which direction a person is going. Self-agitating further, self-calming further or moving from agitated to calm or bored to agitated. Which requires observation and judgement and leaps from the opposite direction of faith into observing without deciding.
When overwhelmed with emotion and life, write to calm. When most anxious, write of trees, in simple closed forms, like haiku. The constraint adds balance of controllable finite measurable. It does not come from a mind that is calm and bored. A mind which is calm and bored and overly ordered seeks to balance itself in poetry that is random, chaotic, emotionally pushing.
Poetry is in effect a coping mechanism. Those are dangerous things to meddle with. Or perhaps holy.
If someone says to me, god healed my child, I do not reply, you poor deluded sap, there is no god and your child is not normal still. That would be cruel and ineffective, or worse, effective as kicking someone's cane away, crushing to that soul, and because to cause pain injures the person who causes, self-inflicting a wound at the same time.
We each have our own canes and our own infirmities and the parent of the child may as validly turn to me with as much pity and say to me you are the lost one who complicates life with torment preparing for hell torment when instead you could give up restlessness and meaningless thrash and trust in God.
Mutual pity gains for neither. Mutual disrespect and the idea that each has mutually exclusive worlds does not gain either. A sense of not passive compassion but to get into that which underlies the other and truly see the other is not the end of communication but the beginning.
From that idea of opposing world views, I take away the idea that to criticize another person's angle of poetry as too staid, or too chaotic is to criticize, not only the style, and choices of the poet, but to avert one's eyes from the other side of the drama mask, that which one can imply.
To say a kind a poetry is bad, is to not see the person and purpose for the poetry. Yes, we want to strive to make art and each is at a different stage in dexterity. But before the level or art or artistry there is communication. If I get or don't get the poetry, that is one thing but more important than receptivity, or having the hooks I need to catch what yarns were looped, is to be receptive to the person behind the words. What is the intent. What systems formed and informed the person that these words would convey what needed to be conveyed? What is behind and between the lines?
If there is a uniform mandate for peace, that does not speak of peace. That speaks of self-talk attempting to create peace. Silence speaks of noise as any binary makes its opposite exist.
Kelli related how Mary Oliver said
First question "How did you come into writing poetry? "
The answer was that her life wasn't perfect and "I needed another world than what I was living in...the world of nature, the world of poetry...
It reminds me of Normal Rockwell's statements on himself.
If there was sadness in this created world of mine, it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems. The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed [Rockwell’s wife Mary was suffering from clinical depression, and his mom alcoholic and a "slattern" Halpern relates]. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of life.
Rockwell is dismissed as saccharine or commercial and he recognized that he was doing a profitable performance to the machine of manufactured innocence that people wanted to consume. Why did they? Because they had too much innocence? Or too little? All is always a response. Mapping what responds to who gives a fuller understanding.
Rockwell's sanitized views were also a coping mechanism, a disavowal that is psychological protection.
To take that spin is to stand where it is raw. It is a disappointment really, just as everyone believes their family may have problems but out there, there is a family with no issues and one is deprived of that platonic ideal. To find more examples of "them too" is a sad thing and yet grounds one into a sense of community that allows one to not feel oneself so precious and separate but come to an adult place where others, even those you respect and those you think less than youself, if you get enough data, average out to be your equal. It is the diappointment of everyone putting on pants, one leg at a time. It breaks the illusion of tribe. It challenges one to have to care for more people when already one cares for too many. It forces the position of not trying to paternalism one another. It flattens the flatteries and hierarchies and dramas. But since we love our drama, the sand castles and kingdoms of territories begin again.
It is easier to think of places one should not or cannot go than to embrace complete freedom. One wants to be led to right or wrong and to be in the right, which by nature of binary forces the construction of someone in the wrong. It is a by-product of the structure of our monkey brain.
To play in the sandbox and move from sandbox to beach and back allows the reinforcement of the humbling idea that absolutes exist, relatively. Loyalties exist. Logics exist. And are local and informed by pattern and chaos. Underneath the teem, there are teams and there are real visceral reactions and there is fluff. Either may be taken seriously or lightly and to interpret either way is to be accurate because all things are in all things. This is humbling and sometimes to be humbled is counterproductive and breaks momentum to poor effect. Sometimes to be aware is to understand and sometimes one awareness blocks another essential thing.
Disavowal allows a distance of coping with one another. To be with one another at the point of source of need is intimate, unsustainably intense. The dance back to obscure in beauty or in cleverness, in polish, in folksy, is to give each other and ourselves a break from the real issues that underlie and underline the words.
To loop back to that book on Norman Rockwell by Richard Halpern,
"Repression therefore involves, for better or worse, a genuine renunciation. In disavowal, however, consciousness both retains and banishes something. It thereby allows itself to enjoy that forbidden thing on the sly while denying that it enjoys or knows it."
We don't need to fill in the drama when we make a poem of peace because the context of these times is what is being responded to. It is already in the context of daily pains and tumult. It is a counterpoint not an isolated point which denies its own background. Likewise, by extension, a poem that directly engages with "Political" does not deny there is a place by the weeping willow, even if it does not mention it. It does not deny the bird flight by neglecting or insisting on not referencing it. We naturally draw in what is not there. Or I do.
If one takes a pencil and draws the negative spaces of around a chair, a chair appears, not in detail, but in form. If one takes a text that never references women, their absence says something of the role and value. To one person that absent weight may be taken for granted as too blissful non-issue, to make note of, and another may fill in the gap with denigration and dismissal.
Rockwell’s era seems like a more innocent time than ours, however, this has a good deal to do with the innocence industry, which disseminated its products on a massive scale and spawned a subsulture that reacted against the prevailing, or felt itself to be rebelling by asserting the normalacy of subversion of its own existence.
What is the industry of manufactured themes, preselecting now? Of danger, of change, of flux, of differences, of news, in itself a overstatement of one aspect of reality as much as the prevailing good old days. Would not to speak of peace and nature pastoral be the shape of subersion now? It is a reaction against he contemporary with an attempt to grasp the timeless when being timely is heavily played. A standard is that we must be clever. We must not reiterate anything that came before. We must not be derivative, but instead exist in after a gap, like the Jetsons of poetry, rigorously new as the Flintstones, keeping the functions by new mechanisms to do the same things.
To follow a trend is to game, or game against. That can only last as amusement so long. One must respond not to what is external, in society or, in poetics, but to inner needs.
What is it that one wishes to balance? There is no gain or remuneration except what pleasure one gives oneself. The rewards are psychological.
If one is whittling away at pastoral or gesturing in cutting edge in any number of pointed knives directions, one ultimately serves oneself. What is it that one wants to say. If people who are around to receive the style of saying and support that, it would be heard in the time of speaking. If people are closed, by mismatch of psychological needs, or lack of parallel reading to understand a stylistic, then the poetry is self-talk exclusively. Which is also fine. Progress towards refinement may be harder since any refinement is towards one of the multiple models of what refined looks like, the perfect balanced amount of unpacking meaning into the consensual length of explicitness and control and length and density.
Without a community of consent or debate, one still has the fixed set of communications of what is recorded, but the not the social set of thick data of layers of years of debate of how that communication was understood. Still, one can not help but attempt to react, respond, cause action and pondering. It is the human condition. |
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