Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

Notice the epigraph from Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

“The Turnpike” By Daniel Tobin

…an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat…

You away, and me on the Peter Pan
heading home from my own required remove,
I’m drawn by the window’s broad reflection,
the traffic passing along it like a nerve—

an endless charge of cars inside the pane:
the voltage of the real; though as they go
sliding down its long, ethereal sheen
where the solid world softens into flow

they take on the ghostly substance of a dream
or, rather, what we picture dreams to be
since when we’re in them they are what we seem,
and cause us joy or pain as vividly

as the lives we think we live between the lines
that imprint us and we pass between.
Here, the world inverts.  Shades materialize
and cars speeding left expand a breach

that transports into doubles on the right,
and those in transit opposite condense
their mirror selves in a second teeming flight
as if our lightship bus could break such bonds

and matter shatter. Like all things physical
it’s a conjure of parts and energies,
a neverland of haunts inside the skull,
though saying so won’t prevent this child’s cries

from jolting with their needful disturbance,
or the aging woman across the aisle
from leaning in her slackened, palpable face—
comically, mildly—till the infant calms.

If, as scientists say, we are like hurled stones,
as bounded and bound, dear, by material,
and that our minds resolve into a mist
we thinly feel to be the actual,

then who’s to say the rock is not the air
it hurtles through, observed from deeper in,
not above. So you and I circuit there,
firing the inexhaustible engine.

In class, we touched a little upon ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that vividly describes art. One thing some people were wondering about was the “direction” of the problem, that is, why poets write about painters but painters don’t depict poems.

But William Carlos Williams actually provides us of an example of what a painter depicting a poem looks like. His friend Charles Demuth painted “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” based on Williams’s “The Great Figure.” Below is the poem, then the painting.

“The Great Figure”

One thing I always find challenging about Dickinson’s poetry is her affinity for the em dash. How exactly does the saturation of em dashes augment the meaning of a particular poem? Sometimes when I read I feel as if they aren’t particularly meaningful, just a stylistic tick. But this has to be wrong, considering she is probably one of the three most famous poets in American literary history. That is, the dashes have to be intentional, or at least add some meaning to the poem-right?

I haven’t done the work to confirm this, but a teacher once told me that the first editor of Dickinson’s poetry removed all of the em dashes. Try removing the dashes (in the anthology they kind of look more similar to en dashes, in fairness, but in the PoFo edition they look more like em dashes) from a poem like “Because I could not stop for Death” and see how it changes the experience of reading the poem. Pretty different, right? I think the caesuras in this particular poem create a really interesting tension. I mean, in some sense, to die is to stop–to stop loving, to stop living, to stop breathing. So you might think it makes sense that we stop along our now-centuries-dead narrator as we read. But the whole point of the poem is that she couldn’t stop for death, and yet the reader stops–and stops–and stops when reading the poem. A challenging and interesting choice, in my opinion.

(Also a good example, like Walt Whitman, of poets breaking “rules” and being remembered for doing so.)

“Where but to think is to be full of sorrow”: such a line from “Ode to a Nightingale” might give you pause, or just make you laugh. How can thinking itself, which is so essential to being a functional human being, make one “full of sorrow?”  But I don’t think the speaker’s view of life here is as crazy as it first appears. His view of life is not entirely different than the view of Theravada Buddhism, the oldest/most conservative “branch” of Buddhist theology. The First Noble Truth (basically the starting point of Buddhist theology), is frequently translated to “All life is suffering,” which is not so different than the speaker’s view of life in which is dominated by

(It’s worth noting that some translate the Pali dukkha to unsatisfactoriness or some variant instead of suffering, but you get the idea). Still, in the Buddhist tradition, impermanence and desire are generally responsible for our suffering, which are ideas that “Ode to a Nightingale” also clearly illustrates. But what about thinking? In general, we suffer because of our cognitive appraisal of events, and when we inhabit our thoughts. We think a sad thought; then we are sad. We think what a shitty day we are having because of a bad grade or something someone said; then we are having a shitty day (and so too with happy thoughts.) Theravada Buddhism has developed mindfulness meditation to deal with this, where you basically try and be aware of every thought that pops into your head. (Which sounds easy but is really really hard. But once you do it a lot you can start to observe how subtle thoughts inform your emotions in ways you never noticed or thought about before.)

This whole post has been sort of a tangent. But I thought it’s interesting to situate the speaker’s bleak view of life in the context of world traditions. And it’s interesting to consider how Keats concludes art is the best way to cope with suffering, whereas Buddhism argues it’s insight into the nature of reality and following the Eightfold Path (some rules which I’m not going to go into here.) Why I find this interesting is basically because whereas Theravada Buddhism argues for not letting thoughts determine your state of mind, in some ways what Keats is arguing for–art–is the apotheosis of human thought…how can you make a poem like “Ode to a Nightingale” or any other artistic masterpiece without thinking?  But then again, according to Keats, perhaps the whole point is for poetry to be like music–to be like a bird’s song–to be like the absence of thought.

What I really enjoyed about this poem is its use of minimalism. Think of an artist like Swift–the absurd and vivid caricatures he uses that find an intersection between the comic and grotesque, and now compare that to what Wordsworth is doing here. With Swift I almost feel as if I’m experiencing sensory overload; this poem insists on so much about life, death, and love with only two stanzas, eight lines, and few images. The last image, how the female persona in the poem (potentially Lucy, as Haley previously discussed), “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees” seems so poignant and real to me because of its use of such simple language. I mean, the last line, for instance, is a fragment that could pretty easily be composed by an elementary schooler. But the artfulness of how the clause is used–and its emotional gravitas in this sentence–is the mark of someone who really knows their craft. I also think the shift from more saturated figurative language in the beginning of the poem (e.g. “a slumber did my spirit seal”) to the language of  “With rocks, and stones, and trees” is really well done. One last point: the caesuras in the last line–the use of commas that make us slow down when reading aloud as if slowing to the finality of death–is also really artful.