[Discussion] http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm

Fri, 2 Aug 2002 09:18:13 -0500

   http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm

If Only We Couldn't Understand Them 

How Contemporary American Poets are Denaturing the Poem, 
Part V 
By JOAN HOULIHAN 

Mule of Love

The following sources are cited in this article:

1, 2, and 3. Billy Collins, in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth on
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer 
4. Billy Collins, blurb from Mules of Love, 
BOA Editions, 2001 

5. Linda Pastan, blurb from Mules of Love, 
BOA Editions, 2001 

6. Jerome Kagan quoted in "Why Psychiatry has Failed" by Peter Watson. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The following poems are cited in this article:

For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday by Ellen Bass

Tulip Blossoms by Ellen Bass

The Era, stanzas 1-3, by Mary Jo Bang

Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse by Franz Wright 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
The following website is cited in this article:

The Courage to Heal Debunked  

I think accessible just means that the reader can walk into the poem without
difficulty. The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry.1

Because many contemporary poets have chosen the way of the mythical
trickster, taking the reader through gulleys and gorges thick with
word-midge and image-mist (Over here! No, over here!) or into briar patches
where the overlapping branches prickle with meaning just out of reach-and
leaving us there-or tempting us with an apparent meaning of the poem, only
to find that like touching a tar baby we are forever stuck onto it, our
subsequent efforts to struggle free only making us more stuck; we are
grateful, at least at first, for the Billy Collins poem. Enter here. Enjoy
the visit. Exit there. 

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who
keeps saying "what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?" And
that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers. 2

The other pleasures: all those pleasures aside from the one of discovering
meaning in a poem. What are those other pleasures? Presumably, these are the
elements of a poem-its imagery, metaphor, music, structure and so on.
There's wordplay. Syntactical twists. Line breaks. Humor, perhaps. A
storyline (but not one with a point-then it's fiction). Paradoxically,
without the net, however fine, of meaning, to hold these elements together,
to give them a shape and a raison d'etre, the poem is much less accessible.
Gertrude Stein, for example, meets all the critera for "other pleasures"
perfectly. So does much of John Ashbery. Without the hovering spirit of the
author's shaping intellect and intentionality we are back in the briar
patch. Enter anywhere. Wander around helplessly. Exit nowhere. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
This is not only accessible, it's like walking into a Denny's restaurant.
Familiar. Comfortable. Serving the same ol' stuff from the same ol' menu. 

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

On the other hand, the Billy Collins poem, though distinguished by its humor
(an unusual, and welcome, attribute of contemporary poetry), is also a Mary
Oliver poem, a Rita Dove poem, a David Lehman poem, and a Maya Angelou poem,
among many other contemporary poets, because it is a poem we can understand.
Immediately. We feel no drive to delve. It is not a poem we need to analyze.
There are no pesky layers of meaning. What you see is what you get. 

But the real question is what happens to the reader once he or she gets
inside the poem. 3

Mules of Love, a newly released book of poetry by Ellen Bass, is a book
chock full of accessible poems. It is also a book lauded by, among other
luminaries, Billy Collins: 

The sudden intimacy of these poems of Ellen Bass will hold you to the page.
She knows an awful lot and is ready to tell it all. her poems will quicken
the pulse, and as you read you will become anxious to discover more and
more, but she can only tell you so much, one good line at time, and that is
more than enough.4

"..and that is more than enough." An ambiguous phrase, but one that points
to Collins' previous statements about being satisfied with the "other
pleasures" of a poem. If we suspend our need to find meaning, perhaps we
will experience the "quickened pulse" the anxiety to "discover more and
more" of what Collins found in Ms. Bass' book. For example, in the poem
whose last line is used as the title of the book: 

For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday 
When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly. 

They pulled you from me like a cork
and all the love flowed out. I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore. 

You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars. 

I was sure that kind of love would be
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weaknesses, my sins. 

Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love. 

This is not only accessible, it's like walking into a Denny's restaurant.
Familiar. Comfortable. Serving the same ol' stuff from the same ol' menu.
With the meaning served first and out of the way, we look for the vaunted
other pleasures of this poem. The fresh language, the surprising syntax and
multi-level metaphor, the apt image. 

When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet...

Sweet. But no longer fresh. 

They pulled you from me like a cork
and all the love flowed out. 
Surprising but unintentionally comical (what is the sound of one baby
popping?). 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Fortunately, the sloppy thinking she exhibits in a poem will not destroy
people's lives through fraudulent, uncontrolled therapy the way The Courage
to Heal did. It will only cause uncontrolled yawning. 

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

...I adored you
with the squandering passion of spring
that shoots green from every pore. 
What's the first word that pops into your mind when I say "spring"? Green!
"adored?" Passion! Very good. 

You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars. 
Is it too much to ask that the speaker be dug out like something other than
a "well"? That she have a heart with something other than "deadwood" in it
to be "lit"? That she describe her love without using the words "earth" or
"stars"? 

How could I have known that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,

Another original simile. 

Massive the burden this flesh
must learn to bear, like mules of love. 
The final, resounding couplet. Problem: where is the referent for the simile
"like mules of love?" What, exactly, is like "mules of love?" The burden?
No, that can't be right. The burden is what the mules of love carry. So it
must be an implied comparison between the mules of love and the act of
learning to bear the massive burden; to wit: this burden I must bear (child
and duty) is one I must learn to bear as mules of love do or would do if
they were in my position; that is, having to carry something heavy (like
duty) but with love. (He ain't heavy, he's my baby mule.) 
"One good line at a time," Collins says. But if this be pleasure, in what
does torture lie? Not only is the signature line in this poem racked with
unintentional grammatical possibilities and irrelevancy of comparison (you
have to wonder who selected it as the book's title), but the poem itself is
full of amateurish gestures: overwriting, mixed metaphor, and trite
language. In fact, it sounds the same kind of alarm Ms. Bass' writing sounds
in her non-fiction bestseller, The Courage to Heal, a stew of pop-psych
cliches served up as original thinking with a big dollop of illogical
thinking on the side. Fortunately, the sloppy thinking she exhibits in a
poem will not destroy people's lives through fraudulent, uncontrolled
therapy the way The Courage to Heal did. It will only cause uncontrolled
yawning. 

But-we can understand it. The problem is we don't want to. At least not so
soon, not so easily, not without some kind of journey, some kind of new
insight, something. Anything. We want more than gas and a handful of
bromides for our trouble. 

Ellen Bass writes of ordinary life with a fierce and loving passion. Her
honesty, her insights, and her mastery of language, particularly metaphor,
make this book compelling reading. 5

Tempted by another goldplated blurb, we try again: 

Tulip Blossoms 
Tulip trees hang over the Kalihiwai River,
large lemon-yellow flowers dangling from both banks.
As my son and I glide in a rented kayak,
they fall to the celadon surface, floating
like blessings in a private ritual.
When I smooth one open, the flat crepe petals
fan out, revealing a center so red
it's almost black-redder
than blood, or port,
or the deepest bing cherries-hidden
in the core of the blossom, the rippled base.
"It looks like an asshole,"
my son observes softly, almost
to himself. And I am glad,
remembering the first time
I saw his dusky asterisk,
its perfect creased rays-
glad he can see the flower
in the most humble, darkest star. 

Mastery of language. Particularly metaphor. Redder than-of all things-blood!
And port! And cherries! His "dusky asterisk"? Again, the "other pleasures"
of this poem are chiefly absent-except for the son's one-liner, which
provides some (unintentional) comic relief. There are no original, striking
lines here (though the one-liner is at least memorable)-and, to cap it, it
means something: the difficulty/joy of motherhood (albeit as described by a
sentimental, rather amateurish writer). A meaning for which we didn't have
to work (and, unfortunately, it's exactly worth all the work we did). 
In some ways, such writing is worse than that which obfuscates and
fancy-dances in order to create a dazzling surface, a distraction from its
basic emptiness of content or intellect. The (too-obvious) meaning in a Bass
poem cannot compensate for the lack of a dazzling surface. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
A poem without meaning is fine-as long as the poem does something with
itself other than hanging around looking vacuous. 

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

A paradoxical equation begins to emerge: perhaps the more accessible the
poem, the fewer "other pleasures" the poem gives us. Meaning may be clear,
but, as we see in Ms. Bass' poems, it may be meaning that's obvious or
uninteresting. What is the purpose of accessibility if there is nothing
interesting or new to access? Better to have a sound and fury signifying
nothing, or not very much; a momentary play of language, something to admire
in a line. Perhaps the sounds and syntactical twists, the sheer pyrotechnics
of a Mary Jo Bang poem: 

The Era 
Of some reveller reeving through
the ringbolt of a mind,
merry wished and whistled now.

Pink promises fell like posies cranked robotic
from some well. Later he said, Look here,
earth is a low matter only, a pact

to grant and grovel for
parched by some latent bet
that was bound to go awry.
........................................... 

It may well be that the less meaning there is in the poem, the noisier it
gets. Many Dylan Thomas poems prove this principle. A poem without meaning
is fine-as long as the poem does something with itself other than hanging
around looking vacuous. However, while the pleasure of language itself is
better then diving into a poem and coming up with cliches, can't we expect
poetry to give us both pleasure and meaning? This is the real difficulty,
the challenge of poetry. Despite decades of talk therapy, even psychiatry
has discovered that: 

Despite the best efforts of poets, emotions are largely beyond words. 6

In fact, it seems that the more difficult it is to express an emotional
truth, or meaning if you will, the clearer, more accessible, more accurate,
the language needs to be. 

Franz Wright embodies this equation perfectly. The language of his poetry,
never "tricky" or "dazzling" is in the service of a difficult quest for
emotional truth and therefore needs to be absolutely clear, never
distracting: 

Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse 
And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally-

it is only 
the force we exert all our lives

to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,

as the horror of being excluded- ...
something like that, the Canadian wind

coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees. 

Here, a plain-spoken narrator, in simple declarative sentences, makes an
exact correlation between the articulated fear of death and its inarticulate
power as reflected in the landscape. The brilliant hinge stanza, stanza
four, leads us from a philosophical, "talking" meditation on death to a
non-verbal fear of it, the words "something like that.." casual in their
expression of futility lead us to death's embodiment in natural imagery. 

A brilliant and original language in the service of difficult emotional
truth, by defintition, renders the concept of accessibility null and void.
For example, Dylan Thomas' handful of great poems exhibit meaning and all
the other pleasures at once. This is also true of Hopkins and Stevens.
Sylvia Plath exemplifies the combination in most of her poems. In fact, it
is this combination-original language in the service of difficult meaning-
that is essential for greatness in poetry. 

Contrary to Collins' remarks then, it may be that the other pleasures of
poetry arise from difficulty itself. If a poem is to be more than
entertainment, if, in fact, it is to be great, then it must express
difficult truth, both originally and clearly. The challenge for a poet is to
put those other pleasures in the service of meaning. 