I've put all the prior Airy Poetics posts in chronological order and linked to them on the right side of the blog, up top, under "About the Scoplaw Blog."
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Difficulty v. Dumbing Down in light of True Consciousness
So – the obvious tension in the toy above is this: if you deal with challenging/difficult subjects that may advance True Consciousness, might you actually be displaying False Consciousness by going too far afield into esoterica? Or to look at it the other way, how can you write accessible poetry *without* drawing on the common literary tradition and thus reinforcing False Consciousness. Framed that way, it seems like the choice is between Language poetry (good politics, hard to understand/read, elitist) and Kooser (who is completely folksy, and easy to get, but who’s poetry is largely fine with the underlying false consciousness.)
I don’t want to pick on Ted, for he seems to be a guy who I’d trust with my wallet, but his poetry tends to often rely on certain “folksy” understandings of how things are. It’s not really significantly challenging the social/political structure which leads “the status quo” even if it may disapprove of certain results of the status quo. If you skim back up to my political thumbnail, Kooser’s poems seem the type that would (rightly) decry overt instances of racism, but not question why he lives in a largely white state, or why those jobs are flowing out of the heartland, or why his lonely protags own their middle class homes. There are also deeper issues of clichéd psychology so forth, which I’d like to explore (next post, I loosely promise) in the field of actual poems.
I just want to be clear that I’m not proscribing a narrow set of political choices that constitute “True Consciousness” – for there are many areas within it where reasonable people can differ after examining and understanding the issues. Nor am I saying that anyone who wrote prior to 1970 can’t evidence “True Consciousness” because, for example, they didn’t have a post-Feminist consciousness (or access to that vocabulary.) Nor do I want to suggest that TC is something that is best done by turning completely away from the topical and embracing “Timeless” themes, which are to some extent expected and don’t really push the ball forward in any way.
True Consciousness is best seen as a relative thing – it’s not like we’ve got everything figured out at this moment. But because of that relativity, TC is difficult to model. A good thumbnail of True Consciousness would be “open eyed poetry” not poetry which “willfully sees.” I’m not really sorry I can’t approach it more closely than that – some things are best left open and relative.
Incidentally, this is why new poetry is always necessary, not because we need to put “old wine in new bottles” but because our understandings about things change over time, even though the set of human emotions remains constant across cultures and times.
I don’t think that there’s a mutual exclusivity between accessibly displaying true consciousness within a poem, and having that true consciousness be challenging and provoking. Take, for example, Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo – we can say that the poem is about a moment where a speaker encounters a broken statue but realizes the aesthetic power that lies within the broken form, and that this aesthetic power makes him think about his own life, his own attempts at making things, or valuing things that appear to be “whole” and not “defaced” and that in the face of this power, he concludes he must change (consciously) how he sees and values things. It’s a wonderful moment, deeply humanistic, best experienced by reading the poem itself. It’s “deep” in an authentic way, it’s complex in that multiple readings reveal new tensions and nuances, and it’s accessible in that one does not need specialized training to understand what is going on or what the poet is “trying to say.” In terms of true consciousness, we can say that the poem confines itself to one speaker apprehending a cultural legacy – and that the kind of thinking/perception evidenced by the poem’s speaker is on some level fundamentally honest, and is not distorted by certain kinds of false consciousnesses. I hate to keep saying “more later,” but more later.
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Tweaking the Toy
Lyco pointed out that the analytical toy I’d constructed would be better served (as a general analytical device) with additional categories, if I didn’t want to put up the ven diagrams (we’d really need several). I thought instead I’d throw in a few more quick categories: this is a slightly better way (as opposed to the school based approach) to look at what people are writing, not what they’re purporting to be.
Caveats: Not culturally relative (X may have been “true consciousness” in his day and age); Poets have divergent output and cross schools; we’re going to quibble on what is/is not a set of difficult aesthetics.
Also, please keep in mind that I originally constructed the toy to roughly sketch out where, from my fictional CAP centrist perspective, certain poets might be located. What I’ll do now is try to push it toward a more analytical tool for grouping and characterizing schools/movements, and refine the toy a bit further with the following binaries.
True Consciousness v False Consciousness: True Consciousness would be poetry that has a relatively accurate approach to how social patterns unfold, one that does not advance or reinforce cultural “myths.” On the other hand, False Consciousness can be all over the map, either Eliot’s morbid depression, royalism, and anti-Semitism, or Yeats occultism. Given that this is so hard to define/achieve *within the poems,* perhaps the best way to qualify for “True Consciousness” is to crest into it now and again by directly speaking to human beings as I suggested the best poems do. We could also lump someone into False Consciousness (for purposes of the toy) if their work consistently displays an element. But let’s divide False Consciousness into Assertive or Passive.
Easy Parse v Difficult Parse: An Easy Parse would be poems that are “understandable” on the first read through – poems that have a surface that “make sense” to the reader. This does not preclude depth in the initial or subsequent read. A Difficult Parse is a poem which, either accidentally or by design, resists the average reader’s understanding it to an uncomfortable level. The poem could be simply symbolic or obtuse, Or the poem could also demand a specialized knowledge. Surrealism would be, by definition, a difficult parse, as would poetry that significantly depends on allusions not available to our centrist audience. So lets subdivide the Difficult Parse into poems which are difficult via Structural mandate (e.g., Surrealism) and poems that are difficult via Subject (some Wallace Steven’s abstract philosophical poems, or Eliot’s).
Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric/Flaccid: an Easy Aesthetic is a poem which displays artistry as a made thing without that artistry creating a barrier to understanding or importing structural False Consciousness. So, a formal poem in the service of True Consciousness might be an Easy Aesthetic, but a free verse poem which is impenetrable (parsing) but is in the service of true consciousness would be Formally Esoteric. Formally Flaccid poems are poems that lose their sense of poetic artistry to the extent that they might as well be a political essay or pamphlet – while there aren’t many, I think Sandberg comes up to this line. Perhaps some WCW.
Politically Left/Right: there might only be a few more distinctions to be made by lumping in any poems articulated political stance, but this might distinguish some rightist poets who deny the social/political myths. There’d be a strong corollary between Left and True Consciousness and Right and False Consciousness.
Open/Elitist Readership: Again, just to make finer distinctions along the aesthetics/subject lines.
This gives us:
True Consciousness v Assertive False Consciousness or Passive False Consciousness
Easy Parse v Difficult Chosen Subject Parse or Difficult/Impossible Structural Subject Parse
Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric or Formally Flacid
Politically Left v Politically Right
Open Readership v. Elitist Readership
So, let’s finally look at some poems in light of school poetics:
For that task I’d like to adopt a “blind” approach. This works well enough in baseball if you’re comparing player trends or individual years – you strip off the names and just look at the stats. Often, you’re surprised at the results; one under the radar player will seem better than another, etc.
Here, the goal would be to look at the poems, not the poets or the schools. I doubt this is going to work for most of the poetry blogosphere, since I suspect many of you have read the pomes, but it might age well. If you don’t want the blind analysis spoiled, please DO NOT follow the links in this paragraph, until you’ve finished the post.
Recently K. Silem Mohammed has taken up Thomas Basbøll’s challenge to compare and contrast two poems, A and B, which have appeared in the past 5 years. (No link following kids, I’ll reveal the poem’s authors at the end of the post.)
It’s an interesting challenge because the poems are written out of (or allude to, depending on your point of view in these matters) two different and opposing schools. Yet they’re of similar length, employ similar themes, and have other parallel characteristics which might be illustrative of how different schools might approach the same “thing.” I think Kasey does a good job with the line reading and I agree with some of his analytical points. I’d like to use his comments and add some of my own to further illustrate the poetics matrix that I’ve been posting about. I will change all of his references to the poets and poems in the his posting to [A] and [B], [Poet A] and [Poet B] (my own references will not use the [ ] marks). I will also try to keep my comments on his analysis broad so that you don’t need to read it before reading mine – yet you’ll be able to turn to his after this and decide if I’m out of my skull.
A v. B
“Poem A
By Poet A”
What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
“Poem B
By Poet B”
Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.
Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.
Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.
Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.
We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.
Your dreams are just words
like table salt.
Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.
On a first reading of the two poems we can pick up on a few structural/stylistic tags that serve to nudge them slightly toward schools.
A quick list:
Poem A
Free Verse
Employs short stanzas that don’t exceed @10 lines and seem to regularly divide the poem down the page.
Each stanza is a single sentence.
Lines normally range from 5 to 15 syllables.
First person, addressing either the reader or an unnamed “you”
A uses a number of dashes as parenthetical markers
A has modest sonics, nothing strongly noticeable.
Poem B
Free Verse
One singe stanza.
Lines are relatively smaller than A’s lines (including several 3 syllable lines).
First person, overtly addressing a “you” which may be the reader
B uses an & instead of the word “and”, once, and uses “and” elsewhere in the poem.
B capitalizes two abstract nouns: Futures, Hopeful.
B also does not use a comma between Me I in L23.
B has modest sonics, nothing strongly noticeable.
Right now, the poems don’t display anything all that unusual, and both are fairly centrist with B showing some small traits which characterize any number of schools – normally those less Iowa/Centrist and more Beat/AG/Lanpo, whatever might be ever so slightly more disdainful of conventional punctuation. Yet these are so small they only serve to put me on the slightest of notices that A might be more centrist than B, B more radical than A.
But really, they’re very similar from a structural point of view. It’s hard to tell them apart, as it were. (We’re not comparing a sonnet with a random chunk of Silliman’s work.)
So, how to dig into the poems? Let’s look at Kasey’s response first, then play with the toy afterward:
Kasey’s Big Picture
Certainly we who consider ourselves among the opposition would like to believe that the reason we oppose the mainstream in the first place is that its dominance fosters bad art, not just that we would like to have the brick buildings it inhabits for our own use. But that's exactly why it's important not to reduce the very real reasons for opposition to quibbles over superficial aspects of craft or craft-based "approaches." The real reason mainstream poetry is bad is because any art produced by a complacently "established" class of artists will inevitably reflect the vicious, chauvinistic, and insipid values of the interests that underwrite that class's position of "job security." This is a moral reason.
For the same reason, there is no formal style or technique that in and of itself absolutely resists or absolutely expresses such corrosive values. Disjunction and parataxis, for example, are not inherently more "radical" in the political sense than elegant iambics or epiphanic cadences. What matters is who is using them and in what cultural or historical context. That being said, it does periodically arise that powerful cultural regimes find it efficacious to use euphoniously dulcet instruments in the service of some oppressive agenda or other. This does not mean that those instruments are themselves oppressive. It means that euphony is pleasurable, and can be used opprobriously. Similarly, noise and dissonance often accompany resistant social action, but they also make for good dance parties. After a while, they may not be recognizable as noise or dissonance anymore.
I like much of this, but his analysis does not go nearly far enough.
1) While art produced by an “established” class of artists or school will reflect that classes or schools values, it does not follow that those values will be “vicious, chauvinistic, and insipid values.” For example, I’m not sure one could say that of Stanley Kunitz or Adrienne Rich, although they are surely a part of the “establishment” group of poets. As I pointed out above, we’re dealing with many schools that make up “mainstream” poetry, in the sense that these schools have access to those limited resources.
2) I do agree that formal style and technique carries no inherent political sense (meaning, I take it) when viewed in isolation. However, these techniques and styles do not exist in isolation; they exist in, as Kasey alludes to, a “cultural or historical context.” And while different styles and techniques can drift across the social/political spectrum over time (usually from radical to conservative), the question of the moment is “where are we now?” or “is there a social/political sense (or ‘weight’) carried in any given techniques or in the mode of expression itself?” I would argue that there is, but not that it cleanly splits into: Established = Bad and Opposition = Good.
Thus when Kasey writes (and I quote this because I think it’s a common misconception):
For the poet who has not yet attained recognition in the wider literary community, there is a choice to be made: adopt that set of compositional practices which has been earmarked for mainstream use and thus identify oneself as in alignment with the dominant formation, or adopt practices that set one in symbolic opposition to that formation.
He’s engaging in hopelessly broad analysis. It is true, in a theoretical sense, but in the field of actual poems, things quickly become a lot more subjective. For example, if Kasey does choose to adopt this viewpoint, I’d be damned hard put to say just *what* the difference between Poem A and B is, beyond those minor drifts I noticed. Can we really say that one poem (in terms of style and technique) is so different as to constitute a critique of the other? It seems like an “established poet” who wrote either of these poems could write the other a few years later.
Further, it would seem that if one was doing something so radical as making an either/or choice in terms of “compositional practices” (not quite sure what that means in this context) then the final result of the poetry would reflect those practices in a meaningful way. If the phrase “compositional practices” stands in for technique, the argument is equally weak.
We’ve been just looking at the shapes of the poems, the devices they use, so let’s turn to content.
Examining content (like poetics) assumes a field of understanding that the reader is attempting to integrate the poem with. This will vary from reader to reader. In Kasey’s case, we can see what he’s concerned with through how he reads the poems. Basically, domesticity and security, bourgeois existence,
(BTW, I have to add Kasey has a Nice writing style, by which to say it’s academic; if you wanted to apply a poetics field test to our different posts, it should tell you something about where we’re coming from and who we’re hoping to address.)
I might approach the poems any number of ways. For the purposes of this post, I’ll view Poem A as a meditation on place. The speaker sits at a kitchen table, thinking about his compositional space and what happens outside it in the immediate and greater world. The speaker concludes that the table is “all he needs” along with a few odds and ends to muse on. The poem closes with a kind of harmonious moment of sensory reflection ending in an act of imagination.
Poem B begins by apprehending a “you” – one way of reading the rather vague language of the first half of the poem is to say that “the you” is living in a well known neighborhood, concerned with safety and conformity. The speaker then criticizes that “you” as having “big dreams” which are ultimately “just words like table salt.” The poem then turns to the “I,” who informs us that “this year’s moment/will be 2 a.m., my life savings/and one train ticket/down the fault line.”
Of course, the tempting fun comes in where we might read B as critiquing A, and B was written later than A, so it’s entirely possible.
But to leave that aside, I’d say what becomes immediately apparent is the difficulty that we have discerning B’s intent. The language seems to be a code for us to decipher or “translate” into some more functional understanding so that we might on some level understand what’s going on.
So:
Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.
Here “the you” is located indoors (apparently), listening to a clarinet and smoking, while “the you” pitches (sells, speaks for, tries to convince someone of) “safety and comfortable Futures.” That last bit could either be general or a comment on day trading. Or both. Or Neither.
Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.
“The you” lives in a neighborhood that’s “on the map” (or just literally on a map). “The you” is either ruffling money and coming up short or ruffling through bills (e.g. utility bills) and coming up short. Or perhaps “conjure” means they’re not short after all. Either way, it’s hard to see how “pitching safety” aligns with “conjuring up scarcity” – unless this is meant to say something about “the you”s psychology, that “the you” always thinks “the you” does not have enough.
One of the easier readings is to see “the you” as some kind of salesman, tracing the map after a day at work. But that’s guesswork.
Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.
Again, this is a bit difficult to parse. I’m not sure what this phrase means since it usually is applied as a justification for common wrong-doing, like cheating on taxes.
Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.
The “I” becomes critical of “the you”’s life/activity? I’m not sure what it means that no one can “sing fate” or pick up that dime. . . perhaps this means that the I does not think a belief in “fate” justifies the status quo, but I can’t really connect that to anything above – unless it’s meant to tie in to selling something that the “I” can no longer afford.
We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.
Apparently some kind of compromise was not reached (or was reached) and now cannot be revisited. I don’t know what the two hundred miseries are, or what “all that commotion” is. Here, the poem seems to be at it’s lowest sensical ebb. I’m also not quite sure who the “we” are – I assume it’s a general “we,” given the presence of “nation,” but it could refer to a specific point in the I and “the you”’s relationship.
Your dreams are just words
like table salt.
A return to critiquing “the you” – but I’m at a loss to know (should have mentioned this earlier) just what those “big dreams” are. Perhaps the activity that “the you” is engaging in has an element of self delusion to it. If so, it must be a different kind of self delusion, since “big dreams” sound aspirational. Perhaps “the you” is some kind of salesman, comfortably well off, but still ambitious.
Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.
A turn to the I. Apparently this year will have an (important?) moment. That moment will involve “2 a.m., my life savings/and one train ticket/down the fault line.” Given the grammatical structure, I’m led to believe that the I has already established such a moment for “the you,” but I can’t find such a moment in the poem. Whatever it is, the moment will probably be significant since it involves “life savings” – and that relates to the mention of finances above. One train ticket suggests single travel. Fault line, literally, might be California’s or some other fault line, but could be entirely metaphorical; the speaker is traveling alone down a divide or split of some kind. To me, that suggests the dissolution of a relationship between the I and “the you.”
Basically, my impulse to read the poem this way stems from my hope that the poem is written by someone with something important to convey to me, the audience. I’d like it to be more than an overheard critique of some salesguy the I might know. I’d like it to be something that could have personal resonance to me as a human being, even if it's only a lover's complaint.
The most effective way to do that is to make a leap of my own and read the poem thusly:
I and You are in a relationship. I imagines addressing or overtly address You about their impending split. You is lit by the light of one lamp, engaged in contradictory behavior – smoking while talking about safety, ruffling bills but “conjuring” scarcity. “The you” thinks everyone does or should live this way. However the I thinks otherwise. The I repudiates the arguments “the you” has given the I, fate, thriftiness, and reminds “the you” of a time when they could have chosen another path (crossroads) but instead compromised to make a union with each other characterized by many miseries and commotion. Now the I thinks the dreams of “the you” are just words, common and bitter as salt. The I knows that the big thing that will happen this year is that “the I” will leave one morning, alone, with whatever “the I” can, saving, in some measure “the I”’s life.
Scoplaw makes a smug bow. However, the problem (from my point of view) is that I have to “willfully” read the poem to get that kind of understanding out of it. It’s as though the poet put a number of elements down on the page and said “go make a story out of it.” Which means I’m merely being clever.
Poem A
Poem A on the other hand, is much easier to parse, so easy that this is almost redudant:
What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
The I asks what scene (location, perhaps also implying this is all made up) he would rather be in than this one, sitting at the kitchen table, alone, ready to write (a poem? This poem? A letter?). The “you” is somewhat rhetorical, perhaps “the reader” – certainly there is no actual other person being addressed in the sense that the “I” is addressing another character within the poem.
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
The “I” reflects on things outside the house.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
The “I” does not value romantic jobs or a fancy (real fancy) car above this moment.
No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.
The “I” appreciates what the “I” immediately apprehends – small creature comforts.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
The “I” is unapologetic about listening to the world as it is, to listening to the I’s own heartbeat, and this results in an imaginative leap to either a different state of mind, or a vision of a place radically unlike the immediate one.
Now, while this is an easy top level parse, there are deeper resonances here. The difference between them and Poem B is that we have a fairly solid level of meaning to hang our speculations on. For example, we could look at the frog on the edge of the pond and think of Basho’s frog, which adds some resonance to the close. The province of empty sky and branches could be death, or winter, but it contrasts strongly with the warm oranges, the water glass, the flowered wallpaper. I’m getting a bit tired, so I don’t want to dig all that much, but the crucial point is that I feel as though I could go in and *reinforce* the poem’s basic thrust at every juncture (for example, we could read the candles as the Norns, or the past, present and future, or Alto, Tenor, Bass candles and Yeat’s “music of what happens.”)
So, back to what happened with Kasey -
Both engage the notion of an affluent bourgeois existence in which those domestic trappings confer a set of associations involving familiarity and comfort. Both also invoke a larger, unstable world outside this existence. Both, perhaps in keeping with their lyric status, contain references to singing. Both end with an allusion to some sort of egress or escape.
As apparent by my readings, I couldn’t agree less with the above. While the speakers may be bourgeois, it’s possible that neither one is. (Kasey might be conflating what he knows of the actual poets with the speakers in their poems.) In any case, the speaker in B seems deeply uncomfortable with their current situation, while the speaker in A seems to transcend it, or deny wanting anything more than what could be a small apartment kitchen somewhere.
Now Kasey is an intelligent guy – and his argument is somewhat convincing *if* you read the poem as he does, via his political concerns. Poem B is very malleable, and tends to allow for that kind of argumentation, while Poem A is a bit harder to stick. When Kasey writes of poem A – Material desire is very clearly articulated in this poem, and describes a reality that, for the speaker at least, is entirely realistic and maybe even already realized. Well, I’m not sure if it’s that or if it’s the speaker denying material desire and preferencing artistic creation. This makes Poem A seem more vital, and poem B either sloppy or transitory or confused or obscure.
I think Kasey is spot on when he writes:
Both poems are written in a prosaic, "casual" diction, but [Poet B]'s seems more oblique, sprinkled with phrases that sound idiomatic, but whose meaning is not utterly transparent: "your neighborhood shows," "no one here can sing fate," etc. Even the homey little simile "just words / like table salt" is at root irrational and arbitrary, though its general emotional sense comes through. Nothing in [Poet A]' poem invites excessive interpretive exertion. As fanciful as his trio of singing tapers may be, it is immediately intelligible as a routine figurative device.
But am not sure that this: The speaker melts into whimsical reverie in the inevitable consummation of his middle-class bliss, follows from that (beyond that it’s something Kasey is projecting into the poem.)
And Kasey’s close:
And it is ultimately this that signals the greatest difference between the two poems. One expresses a relatively conscious set of relations to life within the contradictions of late capitalism, and the other blithely shrugs the contradictions off and gloats. Form comes into the equation only as a necessary adjunct to the reigning emotional timbre of each poem: in the one case, an uneasy apprehension of one's tenuous position in a booby-trapped system, and in the other, a narcotized sugar-coating of bad faith, complete with anthropomorphic Disney candles.
Well, I don’t think that’s right at all. Poem B might not be criticizing a “system” at all, and Poem A might have a valid approach to appreciatively living in the moment.
Granted, A might be argued to reinforce false consciousness by not critiquing the system that brought A to that point. However, A isn’t displaying any of the behavior that is criticized in Poem B (in fact, one suspects that were “the you” to behave like the speaker in Poem A, then there wouldn’t be a problem, a reason, for poem B to exist.)
However, B might also be as complicit as anybody else – B might go on to find someone who did the same things but didn’t smoke or “conjure” scarcity. The problem is really that Poem B is fundamentally unclear and can be made to hold too many types of baggage, should the reader bother to load anything into it.
Perhaps I’m feeling generous, but I think that A’s “basic message” of only needing to imagine/write at a table cuts to a humanistic understanding of how we are. (A could have been dissatisfied that A the people in A’s life aren’t acting as A would like them to.) On the other hand, I think that B also evidences that understanding if I read the poem generously.
Toying Around
To apply my toy, with new categories:
True Consciousness v Assertive False Consciousness or Passive False Consciousness
Easy Parse v Difficult Chosen Subject Parse or Difficult/Impossible Structural Subject Parse
Easy Aesthetics v. Formally Esoteric or Formally Flacid
Politically Left v Politically Right
Open Readership v. Elitist Readership
I’d say that Poem A is:
True Consciousness, Easy Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Open Readership, Politics Unknown
(Rough Contemps: Doty, Dobyns, Lux (late), Collins, Szymborska, Clifton, Creeley, James Wright (late))
We could make an argument for Passive False Consciousness, but I think the poem is more or less “open eyed” – even to the extent that the speaker realizes there will be detractors of this view (“So forgive me/if I lower my head now).
While Poem B is:
True Consciousness, Hard Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Elitist Readership, Politics Unknown
(Rough Contemps: Langpo, R. Lowell, Jorie Graham)
I’d characterize B as a kind of half structure/content difficultly parse. It’s also kind of a “style” – few segues, all phrases turned a notch toward ambiguity via the desire to sound new/interesting/affecting, the odd and small leaps of logic required. When Kasey wrote that the diction was meant to sound casual but is in fact alogical, I believe he was picking up on this - a milder variety of the vapid neo surrealism that Galvin took to task in Mumblings of a Young Werther.
On the other hand, I chose Elitist readership because to write in that style assumes a reader who is familiar enough with the conventions of that poetry to “fill in the gaps,” as the very educated Kasey quite easily did one way and as I quite easily did in another way.
Even though the poem seems “open eyed,” it’s forceful in advancing it’s ambiguities, and relies on the reader to do a lot of work filling in the blanks to come up with their own understanding of “what is going on.” Does that, overall, mean there’s a kind of False Consciousness being displayed with regards to politics, human understanding? That whatever True Consciousness is being shown, it’s veiled by those stylistic choices which then render poem B, as a kind, *more* reinforcing (through near total irrelevance to the general readership) of a false consciousness than poem A? Eh. Tough call.
But we could also say:
Passive False Consciousness, Hard Parse, Easy Aesthetics, Elitist Readership, Unknown Politics (Muldoon, Surrealism, Ashbery)
To remove the veil:
Jennifer Moxley
Life Policy
Lit by the light
of one lamp,
with clarinet backdrop
& ashtray,
you pitch safety
and comfortable Futures.
Your neighborhood shows
as you trace the map,
ruffle the bills
and conjure up scarcity.
Everybody’s doing it, you say,
Hopeful.
Take your big dreams, I say
through the back door,
no one here can sing fate
or pick up that dime, anymore.
We left crossroads back there
with compromise, one nation
two hundred miseries
and all that commotion.
Your dreams are just words
like table salt.
Me I know
this year’s moment
will be 2 a.m., my life savings
and one train ticket
down the fault line.
(Imagination Verses, Tender Buttons, 1996; rpt. Salt Publishing, 2003)
Billy Collins
I Ask You
What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
(Cortland Review 7, May, 1999).
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