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The Poetic Blending Machine 2: Thoughts on a Poem by Ko Un (with Ideas from Mark Turner)

In a recent issue of Poetry Magazine, I came across a translation (by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock) of a poem by Korean poet Ko Un.  It caught my eye because, in a few brief lines, the poem created a whole, mysterious imaginative world.

EAR

Someone's coming
from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone's going there now.
The two are sure to meet.

One way to read this poem is as a reflection on birth and death.  A sort of balance is envisioned; one person leaves the world, another one comes (or perhaps returns).  What interests me most, though, is that moment when the poet imagines both persons meeting.

Where is it, I ask myself, that this meeting occurs?  I suppose it is a kind of Bardo state, a liminal space visible to the poet when things are murky (like on a rainy night) in the ordinary world.  But as mysterious as this imaginative space may be, it insists itself upon the speaker's consciousness, hissing into his awareness.

The Riddle of the Two Buddhist Monks

The alternate world that the poem creates is the result of a blending of two states that normally don't occur in a single space: coming/going or birth/death.  By blending these opposites, a third state is created -- one that transcends both.  (Note: "Conceptual blending" has been covered earlier on this blog, here).

This all reminded me of a riddle I came across recently in a book by Mark Turner, a literary scholar who draws on coginitive science, entitled The Origin of Ideas.

The riddle, said to originate with Arthur Koestler, goes like this:

"A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at sunset, meditates at the top overnight until, at dawn, he begins to walk back to the foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset.  Make no assumptions about his starting or stopping or about his pace during the trips.  Riddle: is there a place on the path that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two trips?"

The answer is yes, but what interests Turner is how our minds go about finding it.  He shows us that one way to do so is to compress the two trips and envision, in the mind's eye, not one, but two Buddhist monks (though they are the same person) -- each traveling a different direction (up or down the mountain path).  Then, through our imaginative visualization we see for ourselves that...

"...no matter how the two monks move, so long as they start at dawn, end at dusk, and traverse the path without leaving it, the monks must always cross, or meet, somewhere, at least once, and that meeting point will be the location that the monk occupies at the same hour of the day on the two successive days.  We do not know what point it will be, but we know that there must be at least one such point."

To solve such a riddle, Turner points out, we suspend time and space as well as the way we normally think of personhood.  For we blend two days and two directions into one moment in one location -- and clone a single person into two.  Like in the Ko Un poem, we create an alternate world where coming and going meet, except this time it's the same person who meets himself coming and going.

The theme of Turner's book is that this sort of conceptual blending (of which poetry provides the richest examples), is something we all do everyday to solve mundane problems, or even (or especially?) to help us come to terms with existential riddles.  In the case of Koestler's riddle, such imaginative blending enables us to solve a thought problem without having to resort to a laborious mathematical proof.

And when it comes to a poem like "Ear", the "blend" offers a way to think about what's normally unthinkable: the infinite.  Through creating a space outside of life and death, the speaker -- and we readers -- get a handle (at least for a moment) on the incomprehensible.

The revolutionary writer, Lautreamont, once insisted that "poetry must be made by all."

What fascinates a fan of poetry like myself is that the notion of conceptual blending suggests that Lautreamont was right, but in a way he couldn't have anticipated.  For according to writers like Mark Turner, eveyone, of necessity, uses their own, innate metaphor-making and, and in this sense, poetic abilities everyday, to create blends that aid in navigating and reconstructing the many clashing worlds we all inhabit.

In other words, it takes a hell of a lot of imagination to get through the day.  Any day.  Thoughts?

Philip Whalen Talks to the Animals in "The Turn"

Recently, I came across a Philip Whalen poem that offered an amusing example of interspecies communication.  Check it out:

The Turn

Walking along Elm Road
Handful of nasturtiums, butter, some kind of bread
75¢ the loaf no advertising included
Bread and air and a price tag wrapped in plastic
The dogs come out as usual to roar at me
I find myself screeching wildly in reply
Fed up with suppressing my rage and fear
I bellow and roar
The dogs are scared and their people scandalized
"What are you trying to do?  HAY!  What are you trying to do?"
I had nothing to tell them; I was talking to their dogs.

One of the charms of this poem, for me, is its ordinariness, even banality.  Who hasn't, out of sheer frustration with being barked at (by angry dogs or other beings), lost it, and barked back?  I know I have, though, unlike Whalen, the last time I remember barking at a dog (a Doberman in my case), I don't think I was able to silence him.

But paradoxically, it's the very unexceptional quality of the event narrated here that makes it unusual.  For there's a rich, imaginative tradition, spanning culture high and low, that paints the talent for "talking to animals" as a mysterious, nearly superhuman power.

In fact, in psychic/new age jargon, this talent has got a name --"zoolingualism" -- and it's a power possessed by everyone from Tarzan, Dr. Dolittle and St. Francis, to horse whisperers, like the one Scarlett Johansson once portrayed.  Or like the shaman, in Elizabeth Bishop's great poem, "The Riverman," which begins:

I got up in the night
for the Dolphin spoke to me.
He grunted beneath my window,
hid by the river mist,
but I glimpsed him -- a man like myself.

When it comes to the mythologies surrounding poets and the act of writing poetry, the tradition of zoolingualism becomes (excuse the pun) even more pronounced.  Orpheus, the archetypal poet, could understand the language of birds.  And his song tamed even the fiercest beasts, as celebrated in this medieval mosaic (in which you'll notice a few wild dogs).

Whalen himself, for that matter, wasn't averse to this more mythic type of interspecies communication.   Here's his poem "Never Apologize; Never Explain":

A pair of strange new birds in the maple tree
Peer through the windows
Mother and father visiting me:
                    "You are unmarried,
                    No child begot
                    Now we are birds, now you've
                        forgotten us
                    Although in dreams we visit you
                        in human shape"

They speak Homer's language
Sing like Aeschylus

The life of a poet:  less than 2/3rds of a second.

The Language of Barking

What's especially interesting, though, when it comes to a poem like "The Turn," is that the down-to-earth way it portrays such communications suggests how the sounds we emit as natural, rather than supernatural, beings actually can resemble the language of dogs, or other (nonhuman) species.  Alva Noe, a philosopher grounded in cognitive science, comments:

"One of the very many false ideas about language is that its primary function is to express information or communicate thoughts.  Speech has many functions, but surely a large part of it is more like the grooming behavior of chimpanzees or the shepherding behavior of dogs than it is like reasoned discourse among parliamentarians.  We bark so that our kids get out the door in time to get on their bus and so that they feel safe and loved...The bulk of what we do and say each day is more like the grunts and signals baseball players use to indicate who'll catch the pop fly than it is like genuine conversation."

All of which is to say that language involves the performance of acts as much as it does the transmission of ideas.  The dogs bark to chase Whalen away.  He barks back to stand his ground.  You could say at this moment -- one animal communicating with other animals -- he's "one with nature," as a Romantic might put it.  But this doesn't mean, in the poem's realist version of this idea, that man and beast are necessarily going to get along.

Then again, to complicate matters a bit more, perhaps the language the dogs and the poet speak here has nothing to do whatsoever with anything the least bit "natural."  For aren't the dogs stand-ins for their owners, speaking a social message for which they've been trained, one that can simply be translated as "no trespassing"?

And by answering the dogs, rather than their owners, perhaps the poet implies that such social aggression, unleashed on whoever's in the mere vicinity of a private property, doesn't deserve a civil reply.  Thoughts?
                       

The Poetic Blending Machine: Thoughts on Joanna Fuhrman, Rene Magritte and Emily Dickinson

Recently I've had the pleasure of reading a manuscript of poems by Joanna Fuhrman titled The Year of Yellow Butterflies (forthcoming this Spring, from Hanging Loose Press).   At the center of this jazzy collection is a sequence of prose poems (by the same name) that drew my mind into them, with a kind of magnetic charge. 

Each poem starts with the phrase "It was the year..."  What follows are often surreal, sometimes allegorical, takes on our culture's obsession with trends, satirizing our strange customs or jarring them out of their conventionality by infusing a healthy dose of wonder.  "It was the year Goth, rockabilly manicurists applied mini-wigs to women's nails," one poem begins; another, "It was the year hipsters started using coffins as coffee tables..."; and another: "It was the year us geezers wore digital masks."

One of the ways this sequence achieves its poetically satiric effects is by fusing realities you usually think of as opposed, such as business and poetry ("It was the year no one could tell the difference between a poem and a resume..."), to natural and mechanical ("They'd hook you up in a gizmo that looked like a cross between a beauty salon chair dryer and a futuristic orange squid").  The following poem from the sequence is a particularly good example such fusion:

"It was the year everyone decorated the outside of their houses to look like the inside, and the inside to look like the outside.

You liked to wear a jumpsuit with an x-ray of a skeleton silk-screened on it.  I liked to wear an earring shaped like a decaying liver.

Once I crashed into a friend's wall because I thought it was the sky.

We placed our teacups on a tree trunk ottoman and rested our heads on waterfall pillows.  You were wearing an ocean on your mouth, and I was dressed like the sun."

This poem (which contains an echo of Kenneth Koch's "You Were Wearing") not only offers satire and humor, but, as I mentioned earlier, a charge of wonder.  This is the result, I think, of what cognitively-oriented literary critics would term its "conceptual blending."  In it, you find that images of the "natural" and the "cultural", as well as the "inside" and "outside" become integrated, like one of those reversible jackets they used to sell.

Such blending made me think of a painter like Magritte.  In a work like "The Memoirs of a Saint," for example, what's usually outside (the sky) is contained inside a stage curtain.  As in the Fuhrman poem, natural and cultural images are blended into each other -- in this case, in a sort of playful riff off the idea that "the whole world is a stage."  (Or, is staged.)

I came across an even more pertinent example of all this in an essay about Emily Dickinson's famous poem beginning "I dwell in Possibility -/a fairer House than Prose", by cognitive lit scholar Margaret H. Freeman.

You might remember that in this poem, Dickinson offers a metaphorical argument as to why poetry is richer than prose.  Here's part of her description of the "house of poetry":

Of chambers as the Cedars --
Impregnable of eye --
And for an everlasting
Roof
The Gambrels [Gabels] of the sky --

As Freeman points out, the suggestion of poetry's expansive possibilities as a genre is communicated here by the blending of the semantic concepts such as the "inside" (rooms of a house), with those of the "outside."  In contrast to the conventional abode of prose, poetry's "house" is one whose roof is the very sky itself.

What's especially valuable about Freeman's essay is that it suggests how such blending offers a way to think about the act of writing poetry as a form of cultural politics.  By drawing attention to a more integrated way of perceiving things, poems throw light on the impoverished quality of our normal, day-to-day existence.  Along these lines, she quotes poet John Burnside, who defines surrealist Paul Eluard's autremonde as:

"that nonfactual truth of being: the missed world, and by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines and is fully alive outside the bounds of socially-engineered expectations -- not some rational process (or not as the term is usually understood) but by a kind of radical illumination, a re-attunement to the continuum of objects and weather and other lives we inhabit."

Such a comment clarifies for me what I find so appealing about the satiric qualities of writing like Fuhrman's.  It doesn't just poke fun at the everyday, reified banality we are all party to in our world of total commerce.

It also offers a glimpse of what we're missing: a cooler, richer reality just outside of our conventional boundaries.

Artifice as a Path to Authenticity: Thoughts on Chuck Close, Charles Bernstein and Video Realism

Continuing to think about our habit of reading into facial expressions (see last post), brought to mind an experience I had once viewing an exhibit of visual art.

I was at MOMA a few years back, checking out the Chuck Close retrospective.  In the room that housed his early works from the 60s, I came across the giant, photorealistic portraits for which he is well known.

I had an odd experience viewing these huge "heads" together in one place.  Close has made it clear that his portraits are paintings of photographs -- not studies from "real life."  Because of this fact, you'd think you were several steps away from attributing psychological presence to these works.  In fact, I'm told that if you view them up close, you can actually see the grid of tiny boxes through which they're created; it's as if you're looking at a mosaic made of hundreds of tiles, each with a miniature abstract painting inside.

Yet, oddly, the paintings also seemed to carry symbolic messages.  In the portrait of Philip Glass, for example, the swirling patterns of Glass's hair and skin rhymed, for me, with the epic, circular movement of his music.  It seemed as if his face were some sort of medieval emblem, in which the spirit of his inner creativity manifested in the flesh.

What I found striking was how this inner spirit fought its way through the artificial quality that Close foregrounds.  It was as if a certain presence would not be denied -- even if the artist telegraphed this was a simulation of a simulation; even if you knew the painting's effect was the result of Close's own "smoke and mirrors."

It was almost as if the artificial aspect of the work was precisely what made it more absorbing.

Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"

An especially lucid analysis of the phenomena I've just described is found in a piece I alluded to in the last post: Charles Bernstein's essay-in-verse titled "Artifice of Absorption."  Toward its end, Bernstein describes the experience of watching Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

In this play, the character "Krapp" listens to autobiographical diary entries he made via tape recordings during earlier periods of his life.  But just as he, and we, as audience, begin to be absorbed in these accounts, Krapp reminds himself and us of their artifice.  He frequently switches off the tape, interupting the narrative flow, fast forwarding at times, stopping at others to make sarcastic comments on his own youthful naivete.

But our heightened awareness of the mechanical device through which Krapp's "heartfelt" confessions are communicated, rather than make us more distanced, draws us in.  Bernstein comments:

"Indeed, the very jagged moments when the tape is
abruptly turned off -- moments in which the 
listener's absorption may seem to be
ruptured -- only serve to heighten the dramatic power
of the play.  Beckett's incisively spliced
dislocations have a spellbinding
theatrical effect..."

The emotional content of the performance seems more real, then, precisely because the work refuses to become "absorbed" in the "vain hopes" of the stories the character once told himself.  It's as if a higher degree of honesty -- and hence authenticity -- results from the very acknowledgement of the ephemeral quality of the stories Krapp tells himself.

And the presence of a tape machine in the play underlines the fact that even our most basic sense of our lives and identities is unavoidably mediated -- that an immaculate perception of ourselves is impossible.

Video Realism

Both Close and Beckett come from the realm of high art, but I've also seen forms of popular culture that achieve "realism effects" by doing something similar.

Recently I watched an indie horror film titled Alien Abduction (about so-called true events involving disappearances and "strange lights" that occurred in the Brown Mountains of North Carolina).

 

The story, of course, was far-fetched.  But what made it gripping, nonetheless, was the technique through which it was told.  As we watch this tale of alien abduction involving a small family, we are constantly reminded, by its shaky, hand-held quality (and occasional blackouts) that we are watching a homemade video (in this case, one filmed by an autistic boy).  The camera, in fact, is as much a character in the movie as the people.

As such, the movie is the latest in a low-budget genre that began with the Blair Witch Project, in which outlandish tales gain a degree of realism by seeming to be filmed by "real" people on poor quality equipment.

All of which leads me to wonder whether if, today, in order to achieve a "suspension of disbelief," it helps to have a recording device somewhere nearby.  Thoughts?

Also of Interest:
My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, is now available from Small Press Distribution.  Click here.

Review of The Cheapskates by David Lehman,  click here, and another by Michael Lally (with my poem on Chuck Close),  click here.

Sneak Preview: Here's a Sample from Jerome Sala's new Poetry Book: The Cheapskates

My new book of poems, The Cheapskates, from Lunar Chandelier Press, will be out soon (see below for a sample).  There's a book launch party, April 13th at 6PM at the Bowery Poetry Club.  The book will be available there at a special discount.  Come one come all!  Details:

Book Launch Party for
The Cheapskates by Jerome Sala

April 13, 6PM

With Readings by
Jerome Sala
and Guests:
Bob Holman
Vincent Katz
Elaine Equi

Kimberly Lyons, publisher
of Lunar Chandelier Press, will host.

at The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(between Bleeker & Houston)

Special Discount on the new Book

FREE

Advance Praise for The Cheapskates:

Wayne Koestenbaum writes:  "Jerome Sala's cheeky, splashy poetry seems never seems to be in a bad mood: he sails through profound political and historical issues with a tone of insouciance that -- like an erudite carnival barker's -- successfully lures us into the tent.  Indeed, The Cheapskates has a Cecil B. DeMille fullness, each of its sideshows masterfully spacious within close quarters.  I hear in Sala's voice the lovable sound of a storyteller-trickster who wants to beguile listeners into a reverie with no strings attached.

Joanna Fuhrman writes: "Jerome Sala's brilliant and hilarious poetry perfectly distills how it feels to live at the sparkling, flashy, hollow heart of late capitalism.  His poems make ideas rattle and zing.  This isn't 'neo' anythin', it's actually new."

Sample from The Cheapskates

Here are the first three poems in the book:

LATER, CLIFF

when I was a mouse
in a cartoon
chased by a cat

I said, "later, cliff"
as I ran into midair

but the cat followed me out
into the mighty void

of
(I thought)

escape

and we stayed there
above the infinite drop

feet and paws pedaling
long and short noses gasping
tails whipping into the great cool
nothingness

perpetual popular machines

until
we
looked
down

--------------------

WHO WILL BE AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MANNEQUIN?

in the commercial
men and women audition
to become mannequins
for a chain of stores
that sells casual party clothes

it's easier to work in the "Service Industry"
with a perpetual smile, hands frozen
in a greeting that broadcasts happiness
with professional grace

once people begged to be awakened from their roles
now they must prove
that they can sell in their sleep

there's an elegance to their somnambulism
a courage and a confidence:
that it's possible to achieve warmth with a blank stare

one that never bumps into the wall
of a customer's personality

one that reflects all interpersonal affection
back onto the clothes at hand

---------------------------------

REALITY EVERYTHING

The great thing about everything becoming public
is that this means nothing is.
You are traceable like a cigarette at night,
but no one is there to enforce the no smoking sign.
The lights are on, but no one's on the phone.
Those peaceful scenes after the plague
has annihilated the small town,
and no one's left in the restaurant or department store,
have all come true -- and yet no one's dead,
the market is more crowded than ever,
the street packed with stalled traffic,
the sky dark from flocks of planes,
punks in the overpopulated corners, the gangways,
under the street lamps, still sniffing glue --
but no one's there to get high --
all gone somewhere far away
leaving their lives behind
to go on living without them.

The Cheapskates will soon be available through Small Press Distribution (SPD) and Amazon.  Better yet, come to the party on April 13th, and get a signed, discounted copy.



 

A New Brand of Poetry: Apple's iPad Air Commercial

Can you market unmarketability?  A commercial that's been running everywhere lately caught my interest by doing just that.  It's the new iPad Air spot, that sells its product by associating it with a genre that's normally equated with box office poison: poetry.  Check it out:

 

The voice-over you hear is Robin Williams.  As Rob Walter on the Yahoo.tech blog points out, this entire sermon about the glories of poetry is lifted right out of the movie The Dead Poets Society. He also notes that this isn't the first time Whitman has been used to sell product; Levi's did it in 2009 (covered by this blog here).

But to a poetry fan like myself, such precedent doesn't make this choice any less odd.  Poetry is generally the most hated of all art forms.  It seems almost once a month that some generally uniformed expert holds forth about its irrelevancy.  When it's not accused of being unreadable, it's written off as merely corny.

So why invoke this outre form of communication to sell one of the world's hippest new reading (among other things) devices?  The rationale for such a strategy can be deduced by comparison with a competitive spot: the one for Kindle Fire's HDX that takes an aggressive swipe at the iPad Air:

 

Two ways to sell.  The Kindle Fire is portrayed as a rational choice.  It's lighter, claims it has a sharper picture, and most of all, it's at least $100 cheaper than its competitor.  But the iPad Air promises you something more, if less tangible.  Instead of  just a tool, it offers you the prospect of a more creative life -- one in which you can make a difference.

All of which brings to mind a comment the critic Slavoj Zizek made recently about the current state of consumer culture: "today we buy commodities neither for their utility nor as status symbols.  We buy them to get the experience they provide; we consume them to make our lives meaningful."

You could argue, of course, that the visual lyricism of the iPad commercial really is about specific, rational benefits: it tells you, in so many direct and indirect images, that the Air can be used as much for creating content as it is for consuming it.

But, despite their generally superior operating systems,  Apple products  have always been about more than mere functionality.  

Since its famous 1984 spot, when Apple promised that its computers could help you escape the thought control of conformity, the brand has offered magical experiences rather than merely cool things.  What this translates to here is the idea that there are some things the money you save on a Kindle Fire just can't buy.

That's why the reference to poetry fits. Whatever value one sees in it simply doesn't translate into cash.  Do even the most famous poets get rich on what they write?

Poetry, in fact, is so against the common sense economic mind that when it is taken at all seriously in popular culture, it often leads to dire consequences.  Think about what happens in The Dead Poets Society film.  Robin Williams' ("Keating" in the movie) poetry recitations are meant to waken "the boys" from their utilitarian slumbers, i.e., to show them there's more to learning (and life) than becoming a lawyer, doctor or executive.

Those who take this message to heart, though, meet with bad ends.  One boy, hopped up on Romantic poetry, chases the girl of his dreams into jock turf.  Of course, he promptly gets his ass kicked.  Another, inspired by poems to disobey his dad's wishes (to become a doctor) ends up shooting himself.  Williams' himself, as a result of such rantings, is fired from his teaching gig.

But with the iPad Air's mini movie, of course, such qualms need never arise.  Because the commercial takes such anti-economic tendencies and marries them to a brand people love to buy -- one they believe in almost like a religion.  The spot offers you a safe way to spend your money on a commodity that promises to take you above and beyond the boring world of money.

As such, you could say it's in love with the idea of poetry, rather than poetry itself.  Perhaps, then, the commercial invents a new brand of poetry -- or, to be more exact: the idea of poetry as a brand in and of itself.

The Unreal Thing: Thoughts on the Perfect Polly Infomercial (with Help from Alexander Pope, David Trinidad and John Dewey)

In the insomniac wasteland of late night TV, the infomercials are often the most entertaining programs. Recently, I caught one with a mix of humor and science fiction worthy of a Philip K. Dick. It's for a pet named "Perfect Polly":
 

What's amusing about this little film is, of course, the cheesy, low-tech feel you get with so many infomercials.  And then there's the choice of soundtrack: the William Tell Overture (the same theme that began the classic Lone Ranger TV show).

But what I enjoyed most was the sci-fi quality I mentioned.  Doesn't Perfect Polly bring to mind all those Twilight Zone episodes where people get emotionally attached to some type of robot surrogate? 

And despite its comical quality, doesn't this gadget fascinate by the way it subverts the natural with the artificial?  After all, what's perfect about Polly is the fact that this plastic bird is an improvement over a real parakeet.  No feeding, cleaning or bird shit to deal with!

Perhaps Aristotle was right when he insisted that it's part of our nature to be drawn to acts of imitation.  Maybe that's why Perfect Polly got me thinking about "high culture" takes on the relation of the artificial to the real.

Recently I've been reading Windsor Forest, a beautiful long poem by Alexander Pope.  As he muses about the "green retreats" of this idyllic place, the poem's forest seems anything but natural.  Along with its flora and fauna, it houses allegories of British history, moral lessons and a variety of mythological stories.

One of my favorite moments in the poem is a passage where Pope acknowledges that the forest he so loves has been created, not only by nature, but by the descriptions of poets:

I hear soft music die along the grove;
Led by the sound, I roam from shade to shade,
By god-like Poets venerable made:
Here his first lays majestic Denham sung;
There the last numbers flow'd from Cowley's tongue.

Despite the fact that Pope's appreciation of these woods has been aided by his favorite poets, this in no way detracts from the richness of his experience.  In fact, it's probably a mistake to draw a line between nature and culture in this poem.  The poets he speaks of, as natural beings, are merely doing their job in giving voice to the forest.  This is why he wonders, with their passing, whether the beauty of the woods will still be appreciated:

Since fate relentless stop'd their heav'nly voice,
No more the forests ring, or groves rejoice;
Who now shall charm the shades, where Cowley strung
His living harp, and lofty Denham sung?

To return to our own, media-saturated, time, it's safe to say that our culture today so informs our thoughts about natural beauty, that it's doubtful you can have one without the other.  That's one takeaway I get from the following conceptual lyric poem, constructed entirely out of movie titles, by David Trinidad:

Nature Poem

Till the Clouds Roll By
A Patch of Blue

How Green Was My Valley
Splendor in the Grass

The Petrified Forest
The River of No Return

Lilies of the Field
The Bad Seed

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Autumn Leaves

Lost Horizon
Gone with the Wind 

Early in the 20th century, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey already acknowledged the constructed quality of our experience, remarking that "the sense we now have for essential characteristics of persons and objects is very largely the result of art" [in its widest sense].

With Dewey, as with Pope, this feature of or lives can enrich our perceptions. However, often, he argued, the opposite occurred.  Rather than add to our experience, this fact of contemporary life detracted from it -- because what we perceived was not richness, but the iron cliches of tradition. This was one way Dewey accounted for the stale, boring quality produced by so many scenes of modern life.

In fact, he felt one task of his philosophy was the act of "intellectual disrobing" -- to help people recogize how much of their experience was framed by cliches.  And though he admitted that we could never totally free ourselves of "the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place", he hoped to make possible a sort of "cultivated naivete."

I wonder if the knowing irony with which we process much of contemporary life might not function as a kind of "intellectual disrobing", in that it's a way for us to acknowledge how prefabricated much of what we experience is.  Might irony itself help us see things in a fresh way?

Not sure.  But I have to admit that once I brush aside all the cheesy qualities of Perfect Polly, there's something about the bird that's seems kind of cool. 

The Natural Confidence of Frank O'Hara (with ideas from John Dewey and Jackson Pollock)

Re-reading Frank O'Hara recently, I came across these grand lines that open part three of his "Ode to Willem de Kooning"(1957):

"Dawn must always recur
                                      to blot out the stars and the terrible systems
of belief"

Living in our age of rampant obscurantism, one can only hope O'Hara was right.  But reading these lines, I couldn't help but wonder what enabled him to speak so boldly -- almost Homerically -- in the first place.  And the mood doesn't let up.  "Dawn, which dries out the web so the wind can blow it,/spider web and all, away", it continues.  And then: 

"Dawn,
           erasing blindness from an eye inflamed,
                                                                         reaching for its
morning cigarette in Promethean inflection
                                                                 after the blames
and desperate conclusions of the dark..."

Was this optimism a reflection of a booming economy, not to mention the cultural renaissance of the New York art scene of the 50s?  One can only speculate.  But a look at the lines themselves reveals another source of their faith.

O'Hara places his bets on the idea that art movements rhyme with nature's rhythms: just as the dawn inevitably follows the night, so cultural enlightenment is sure to overcome the reactionary darkness.

Portraying culture as a sort of natural force is not an unfamiliar gesture on his part.  Who can forget the end of his great poem "On the Film Industry in Crisis": "Roll on, wheels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on!"

In any case, the use of such metaphors brought to mind a book I've been slowly working my way through lately, John Dewey's classic Art as Experience.

Like O'Hara, Dewey often ignores the borders between culture and nature (along with any other barrier that would separate the arts from common experience).  "The true antithesis of nature is not art," he writes, "but  arbitrary conceit, fantasy and stereotyped convention."

Dewey insists that both the sciences and the arts, in fact, art motivated in part by our response to natural rhythms.  Scientific and cultural evolution, in his mind, are both spurred by our increasing knowledge of nature and the changes this causes in our experience.  As he puts it:

"The history of the progress of natural science is the record of the operations that refine and render more comprehensive our grasp of the gross and limited rhythms that first engaged the attention of archaic man...Today the rhythms which physical science celebrates are obvious only to thought, not to perception in immediate experience...Yet a common interest in rhythm is still the tie which holds science and art in kinship."

The invisible (to the unaided eye/senses) rhythms Dewey has in mind here (in 1934) are of the cellular and atomic level.  And you could argue that in the arts, Modernism provides some rough analogies -- whether authors explore the molecular roots of language, as in Stein, or the interior, heretofore invisible spaces of the unconscious.

But closer to O'Hara's time, this all made me think of the art movement his poem is praising here, Abstract Expressionism.  In Art as Experience, Dewey argues that "significant advances in technique occur...in connection with efforts to solve problems that are not technical, but that grow out of the needs for new modes of experience." 

The Naturalism of Jackson Pollock

O'Hara's poem is addressed to de Kooning, but with Dewey's ideas in mind, it also made me think of Jackson Pollock.  You could argue that Pollock's drip technique arose in part from the need to discover, at a time of nuclear gloom, the sublime qualities of the immediate moment.  But on a more direct level, you might also say that it expressed a desire to experience the act of painting in a less conventional, i.e., more natural way.




In this light, a work like Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm" might be seen as a reinvented naturalism for the bomb era, where the work offers itself to the viewer as a sort of seismograph of the artist's interior impulses during the act of creation itself.  The painting even looks a little like the tendril-like structure of a group of the brain's synaptic cells:




But such a concern for discovering rhythms of psychic space (the terrain of thought itself) makes me think that despite the countless ways that naturalism is rediscovered in each era, there's an element that's almost classical about its pursuit.  Didn't Aristotle (the original naturalist) insist that the highest pleasure of human nature was mental -- i.e., intellectual contemplation?

Or as O'Hara puts it in his poem "Heroic Sculpture" (1958):

We join the animals
not when we fuck
                or shit
not when tear falls

but when
             staring into light
             we think
                                        

Being Joseph Ceravolo: Thoughts about the Poem "Great Plains" (from Collected Poems)

The other morning my wife, the poet Elaine Equi, read me "Great Plains" from the newly published Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo:

Great Plains

What, no one here?  No one
around here?  No buffalo?
Like sleeping on the toilet bowl...
Drifting toward love...

The dogs are out this morning
jumping on top of each other
Is there a real release with them?

But, no one here.
There's no buffalo, only dogs,
this morning, where dawn
and a wild wild bird fly away.

She wanted to know my thoughts about this poem, and immediately I offered my surface impressions.

Recalling cold mornings in Chicago where I grew up -- and in fact remembering dogs, if not screwing, at least growling at each other in the icy street -- I placed the poem in winter (although there's nothing in it to indicate a season).  Perhaps the white of the toilet bowl made me think of snow (and the fact that it was cold outside).

I also knew that Ceravolo lived in New Jersey, but was part of the New York poetry scene from the 60s through the 80s.  So I sensed a touch of loneliness in it, as if Ceravolo, comparing NYC to Jersey, felt it to be rather desolate, with a touch a natural wildness to it.

I injected "wildness" into my reading because of the title and the mention of buffalo, but also because of something my Jersey friends have told me about the state: that just 100 miles outside NYC, you can still see bears and coyote (though they may have been pulling my Midwestern leg).

But what interests me, in retrospect, about this unremarkable 30 second interpretation was the paradoxical feeling state that came with it.  Even though my reading of the poem was really about me -- assembled more from my personal memories and associations than anything Ceravolo had in mind -- I identified with him. 

In fact, I felt I was actually inside his mind -- looking out through his eyes, seeing what he saw on that morning.  And therein laid the enjoyment I derived from this poem: the experience of seeing things from the perspective of a poet I admired.  (Perhaps a bit of his magic would rub off on me...)

And as I mentioned, all this happened in less than half a minute; my imagined projection into the poet's mind was automatic, instinctual -- I could not not do this.

This reaction brought to mind two books I've been reading that offer interpretations of literature informed by cognitive psychology.  The first (covered in a previous post) is by Lisa Zunshine, titled Getting Inside Your Head.  Zunshine argues that one of the pleasures literature offers is precisely this feeling that we're really seeing into the minds of others -- observing people's thoughts with a clarity we aren't granted in everyday life.

The second, a book about Shakespeare's Sonnets by Brian Boyd, connects this impulse to what he sees as the raison d'etre of the poetic lyric.  As a form, lyric poetry makes us feel not only that we're reading a mind, but doing so in a particularly intimate way.  It does this in part because, unlike other genres, it is not hampered by the necessity of telling a story.  Stripped of narrative conventions, lyric poems seem to reveal bare thought itself.

Both of these writers argue that our desire to read minds is an evolved trait.  As social and political animals, our survival depends upon accurately guessing the intentions of others.  So when we're offered an insider's view, it delights us.

Being John Malkovich

The drive to dissolve the barrier between our mind and another's can, of course, get rather obsessive, as the many parodies of fan culture suggest.

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about my experience of this poem, the now classic flick Being John Malkovich aired again on cable.

In it, you may recall, a character discovers a secret portal that allows him to get inside the mind of the actor and experience life as he does.  Soon, like a good entrepreneur, he merchandises the portal -- selling tickets to trips inside the Malkovich mindscape.

But even this invasion of privacy isn't enough.  Eventually, like a malevolent spirit, he takes over not only the mind, but the life of Malkovich, making him abandon his acting career and become a puppeteer.  All of which I take as an allegory of how in popular culture, keeping fans happy can pressure a celebrity to begin living out their projections.

Of course, poets today don't get famous enough to have to worry about such problems; we can fall into and out of identification with our favorite writers without harming anyone.

When it comes to mind reading, the contemporary lyric gives all parties a free ride.  No wonder, despite periodic claims of its obsolescence, it persists!  Thoughts?
 

Shadow Patrol: Thoughts on the NYC Sandy Blackout, Plus a Poem by Elaine Equi

Like millions of other people in the NYC area,  Elaine (my wife) and I spent most of last week in the cold dark, without light or heat.  We did have cold running water, and the toilets flushed, so we were luckier than many.

We live downtown, and by  Wednesday we learned that there were pockets of power up by 26th and 6th.  So to get out of the apartment, we'd trek up each evening about twenty blocks in the dark to find a restaurant.

The journey from our apartment to the land of light was other-worldly.  It brought to mind images I've encountered over the years about the afterlife.  You might think the pitch black streets would be empty, but they were loaded with other pilgrims scrounging around like us for food, warmth and whatever household supplies they were lucky enough to discover in the rare store that was open. 

Many of us carried flashlights in our hands to guide our way; some wore them on their foreheads like miners.  Others strolled without light at all, as if they had night vision.

Walking these streets made you feel like you were part of an army of shadows -- one of the shades of the classical underworld.  And the military reference is more than just an analogy.  As we strolled back and forth to our destination, we'd periodically notice the men and women of the National Guard walking along side us in camouflage attire, gently laughing and joking into the night.

But of all the shades we encountered, I found one group particularly striking.  At one corner I saw, moving through the small circumference of my flashlight, a family -- mother, father and two young children -- holding hands.  Briefly they appeared in my view and then the four of them dissolved back into the darkness together, like a string of cutout dolls that had momentarily come to life.

I'm not sure why I found this sight so touching.  All I know is that it brought to mind other images that have stayed with me over the years.  One is the last scene from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, where the Angel of Death leads his own "family" over the hill into the next world.

Another is found in Ray Bradbury's  "There Will Come Soft Rains."  Toward the end of this short story, after the bomb has annihilated its suburban landscape, all that's left of the middle-class family the tale is based around are their ashy shades on the sidewalk (while eerily, their robotic appliances go on performing their tasks, speaking to their nonexistent masters).

All of which is to say that I was able to appreciate the poetry of the blackout, which for me had something to do with the sublime, dark beauty of a brief trip through the underworld.

And I was able to look at our nightly stroll this way, of course, because, though the aftermath of the storm left us cold, uncomfortable and somewhat anxious, we didn't feel we were in immediate danger.  Others still enduring the effects of the hurricane are no doubt too threatened by its devastation to appreciate its aesthetics.

My wife, the poet Elaine Equi, also saw beauty in the darkness.  Her response was the following poem, in which she muses about how the blackout offered relief from the constant bombardment of sales messages:

Darkness Adds Beauty

To whatever
               face or object
                               comes forward.

The nineteenth century is full
                of haloed humble beings
                                 flashing the sign of their presence.

In the twentieth century, only mystics
                like Walter Benjamin would notice
                                and lament the loss of darkness

in a world overpopulated with things.
               I remember one winter long ago
                               I saw an entire nativity scene

on the roof of a department store:
                wise men, angels, sheep
                                lit up and peering down

into our small cold car,
                reminding us to rejoice, and to buy,
                                and to rejoice in our buying.

                                                                                  -- Elaine Equi

Anyone like to share their own thoughts on, or response to, Hurricane Sandy?