The currency of trust

The conversation of poetry takes many forms. The following three types of conversation are metaphors that illustrate some of the trust dynamics at play in contemporary poetry. See if you recognize them–both the actual conversations, and the experience of the conversation, transposed onto the experience of reading certain poems.

The first is a conversation with that friend who is always at the effect of some terrible circumstance. They tell you, in detail, the latest mishap, and with such conviction that it would be difficult not to feel sorry for them–if you were naive enough not to realize, after mishap after mishap, and tale after tale, that with them, the drama will never end. But the more you try to inure yourself to their tales, the more dramatic they become. In the end, you can’t help but feel emotionally manipulated. Even if this person believes their own story, it is hard to trust them not to tug excessively hard, fast, and often at your heart strings.

The second kind of conversation is one among acquaintances, perhaps a group of smart freshmen undergraduates getting to know themselves and each other in uncertain new circumstances. Here wit is the currency of the conversation, a constant repartee. In this atmosphere of intellectual one-upsmanship, conversation is designed to hold the others at emotional arms’ length, never risking anything intimate unless it is couched in a sarcastic tone. Any sense of trust in what is being said is constantly subverted by clever, fast-paced ripostes. I have often left such gatherings with a deep sense of alienation.

Finally, there is the third conversation that takes place among old friends. The group has been through a lot together, has watched each member change over time, knows the good and bad, the essential humanity of each flawed person. The result of such combined familiarity and acceptance is that the conversation can go deep, both emotionally and intellectually, without feeling either manipulative or vacuously clever. Such moments are precious, and I have come away from these rare intimate gatherings, not only with a greater appreciation of old friends, but a renwed faith in humanity.

Since the Second World War, poetry in the postmodern age has veered between emotionally manipulative modes, and intellectually defensive modes of deconstruction. Neither builds much trust with the reader, since ultimately the intention behind either one is to aggrandize the author. Having become disillusioned to ideas of centrality and truth as institutional concepts, these two warring forms of narcissism have taken over much of contemporary poetry. Yet it is this third mode–a return to trust that involves embracing the greater truths of the human condition–that represents where I believe poetry can, and must, go.

If centrality were the thesis, and postmodern distrust the antithesis, in the dialectic now playing out, then the synthesis that our literature, and our world, so desperately needs is an integrative embrace of paradox. To restore our belief in humanity, we must first restore our literature–neither to a position of emotional manipulation nor to an alienating trickery–but to an affirming conversation that can abide contradiction, disillusionment, and doubt without becoming either cynical or sappy. This is the kind of poetry that rewards our trust, not with mere emotional or intellectual sensation, but by transforming our understanding of what it means to be alive.

For more on this topic, please see Post-Postmodernism and Hope.

Visual Cortex diagram courtesy Wikipedia

I have been questioning my preference for reading poetry on paper versus digital text for some time now, wondering what might underpin these instincts. It recently occurred to me that the difference in mental state I experience when reading a book versus surfing the web may actually have a basis in science. The advent of digital text has made a staggering amount of information available to us, and thereby altered forever how we learn. The further proliferation of digital text through the internet, and especially now with blogging and social networking, has made our ability to filter through words a survival skill. We must read faster than ever in the information age, skimming for nuggets of meaning or amusement.

Just how have we learned to read faster in the information age? Short of a research grant, an EEG machine, and plenty of literate volunteers, I have only a sample size of one, and my subjective methods of self-observation to guide me. But my theory is that we bias the visual processing centers of our brain, instead of the auditory centers, when surfing the web. This theory is supported by speed-reading courses that attempt to eliminate sub-vocalization and auditory processing to teach people to read faster. And yet, poetry has been an aural medium for centuries.

What are the implications for our poetics when readers stop listening to poetry in their head? Could this have a relationship to the advent of visual poetry, and language poetry, and to the false-starts of neo-formalism? Might the rise of free verse even go hand-in-hand with this explosion of the accessibility of written material? Surely, other factors, like the effects of the Second World War on postmodernism, play greatly into contemporary poetics. Yet this simple theory, with its potentially biological basis–that in an age glutted with words, we have stopped listening to their music–may have as much to say about contemporary poetry, and its decline from popular favor, as rock-n-roll has to say about the decline of classical music.

Furthermore, the volume of writing shows no signs of letting up. As Thomas Swick puts it in his essay, “Have Book, Will Travel”:

Tell a writer you write and depression sets in; tell a writer you read and gratitude blooms. Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or that hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead.

Indeed, it seems to be an art that is increasingly fading in our cultural memory–the art of listening–to ourselves, each other, the music of our language, and the wisdom of the dead. Perhaps my relationship to books is not anachronistic, or fetishistic; perhaps it is not the smell of the binder’s glue, the feel of the page, the pleasures of a good font in dark ink, or anything else about the book itself that I love so much as that poems served up in this format literally change my head space, making me quiet, attentive, and able to hear–really hear–what the poem is saying to me.

Obviously, people got questions wrong, individually and collectively. In fact, the collective wisdom didn’t end up being that much more reliable than a coin toss. But far more interesting, and unexpected, was the difference between the answers that poets and non-poets gave about which titles they thought were poetry, and which were prose.

According to comments I received from non-poets, they tended to follow the norm, whereas poets reported a tendency to want to “poeticize” every title in the poll–imagining how every entry in the poll might make a great tile for a fascinating book of poems. What intrigues me about this is the implied contrast between the reference point poets and non-poets hold for poetry.

Looking over the answers, I notice that often when a prose title was mistaken for poetry, the title had lofty words in it. My theory is that ideas like “Beauty” (Fast Beauty) and “Death” (People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead) tricked non-poets into believing these could be titles of poetry books. You see, most non-poets stop reading poetry after they leave school. So, their reference point tends to be poems from before the post-modern era, when poetry was encouraged and even expected to touch upon lofty ideas with lofty language. For the same reasons, the most un-lofty title in this poll, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, got voted prose, and so did The Anger Scale.

Contemporary poets, on the other hand, have heard it all–the most disarming, banal, and surreal titles deployed in efforts to shock, or shake up, our notion of language art. In an era deeply mistrustful of lofty ideas plainly expressed, poets have danced around deeper human concerns to an extent that must seem as absurd to the outside observer as trying to conceive of some of these titles as the titles of books full of eighteenth-century Romantic verse. More than pushing the envelope of our perceptions, it confounds us altogether.

And so, the paradox of contemporary poetry is that we crave the deeper human concerns, yet deeply mistrust lofty language. Those of us reading and writing contemporary poetry struggle to reconcile these strange parameters with an endless array of tactics, many of them borrowed from prose. But the result, to most educated non-poets, must seem utterly baffling when held up against the standards of centuries past.

I believe that the radical shift in our culture that came at the end of the Second World War, when post-modernism rose to power, can be seen in the responses to this simple poll. Imagine reading some of these titles to Whitman, Keats, or Blake, and explaining that these are the titles of books of poems. The sound of their bemused, bewildered, and ultimately uncomfortable laughter is a sound that haunts our age.

Care to help me out? You don’t have to know a thing about poetry to participate. For each title in bold, simply click “poetry” if you think it sounds like the title of a poetry book, or “prose” if you think it sounds like a prose book’s title.

Ready? Here we go.

Are the following book titles prose or poetry?

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The results you see after clicking an answer, above, are the tally of votes. Here are the answers as to which book is which:

Poetry

Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films by Wayne Koestenbaum
Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird edited by Anna Skucińska
The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh
The Myth of the Simple Machines by Laurel Snyder

Prose

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka
Fast Beauty by Rona Berg
How to Survive a Robot Uprising by Daniel H. Wilson
People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead by Gary Leon Hill
Pocket Guide to Emergency Bicycle Repair by Ron Cordes
The Essential Beginner’s Guide To Raising Swans by Andrew Gray (e-book)

How did you do? Any surprises about which books were which? Any surprises about the poll results, above?

Related Post:

The Death of Loftiness in Poetry (an analysis of this poll)

“Every evening / words /–not stars–light the sky. // No rest in life / like life itself.”

“I hear that the axe has flowered, / I hear that the place can’t be named, // I hear that the bread which looks at him / heals the hanged man, / the bread baked for him by his wife, // I hear that they call life / our only refuge.”

I find myself drawn to poets who survived The Second World War. This, in combination with frequently watching the remarkable BBC series Foyle’s War in the evening, as well as, on a more personal note, the recent passing of my wife’s uncle, Sven–a Marine who was at Normandy, and a man of whom I was fond–has got me thinking about the profound and continuing impact of WWII. Even as Czeslaw Milosz says that Communism was the only possible response to the atrocities of the Industrial Revolution, so, too, it occurs to me that Postmodernism may well be a kind of understandable, almost logical response to the atrocities of WWII.

Part of my thinking has been fueled by researching Seamus Heaney, including a number of essays in The Art Of Seamus Heaney wherein various critics attempt to place him, as an accessible, intelligent, lyric poet, within the context of the Twentieth century, and the decline of centrality, gentility, and structure. These abstract thoughts have gained specificity through reading selected works of Paul Celan and Umberto Saba. Both men, in the face of profoundly difficult personal circumstances, heightened their attention to language in their poems. Yet in the case of Celan, the attention presses ever more inward, into a symbolic and even cryptogrammic relationship to German; whereas with Saba, his Italian becomes more specific and spare in a way that promotes universal resonance.

Celan’s poems, which he called “messages in a bottle,” represent a disdain and almost fear of the explicit–the disdain of a learned man for superstition. Responding to Bertolt Brecht’s famous observation about the Twentieth century, Celan wrote in parody, “what times are these / when a conversation / is almost a crime / because it includes / so much made explicit?” (trans. Michael Hamburger). All poetry deals with the ineffable, with what happens beyond the explicit significance of language. In Celan’s case, however, there seems to be increasing deconstruction in the progression of his work, and with it a slipping grasp on what one might call faith in language and, perhaps, even faith in humanity and life itself.

With Umberto Saba, however, even in an early work such as “The Goat,” we see evidence of what Saba calls in his later poem, “Ulysses,” “a heavyhearted love of life” (trans. Stephen Sartarelli). His poetry also progresses toward an increasing attention to language, but at the same time is backed by a willingness to admit beauty and hope into his troubled life and work.

In considering the work of these two poets, both of whom suffered almost incomprehensible difficulty during the Holocaust, as well as obviously deep psychological conflicts, I see them manifesting different responses to the psychosocial crisis of Erikson’s final stage of development: integrity (the integration of one’s life experience and coming to terms with such experience) versus despair. Due to such profound external and internal circumstances, both men seem to have confronted the death instinct. In this, they face many of the same challenges throughout their life and work as someone facing the end of their life. In the case of Saba, he found a means to integrate his human experience through art. Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

I am drawn to these poets, who suffered greatly, because I am fascinated by how they did (or did not) find a means to reconciliation in their art. I also see the horrors of the Second World War in particular as a turning point, not only in the individual lives of those who suffered, but for Western society as a whole. Even as Saba and Celan’s belief in humanity must have been challenged individually, the events of this time, brought to light on a global scale by modern news media as never before, present this same challenge to Western society as a whole. We see it, therefore, reflected in art since that time–a coming to terms with atrocity and beauty, barbarism and refinement, nihilism and hope.

As Marvin Bell has told me on a number of occasions, there are many branches on the tree of poetry, and all of them valid. I agree. Yet to me, the trunk of the tree, perennially unchanged, is poetry that confronts the human condition directly. What, therefore, might post-Postmodernism look like? My belief is that it is time for a reconciliation and integration like that which Saba found in his poems. Our faith in humanity parallels our faith in language, and, most importantly, what might exist beyond language–a poetry that is at once accessible and difficult, personal and universal, both explicit and ineffable, specific and transcendent–encompassing this beautiful, poignant, “heavyhearted love of life.”