Standardized Snoopy Poetry

Image: "Our Fortress" by Steve Harrington




For me, Fenollosa's ideas are--to use the most virtuosic term--a bummer. Though Fenollosa promotes English as a capable translator of Chinese, since the two share the genius of strong verb-based constructions, his depictions of Chinese ideographs make me feel like the poetry of English lies pretty lame by comparison. I feel like a kid with a water pistol, staring at the .22s.

Take the Chinese "I." No matter what I make the "I" do in English, I can't really change the sign, only dress it. We don't get the five I's of Chinese: "spear in the hand," "five and a mouth," "holding off a crowd by speaking," "cocoon," and a "mouth .. who takes pleasure in his own speaking" (375). I mean, we can get it: I can throw out all those examples and you can imagine them by translating the abstract signs and sounds into concepts and brain pictures, but the process is long and shoddy. It's metaphoric, not descriptive. All I can give is a map of coded directions to the thing. My map makes you know what I’m talking about, but only if you think about it, i.e. the truthiness instead of the truth. There is some sense that the feeling is lost along the way, the farther you get from the thing. Fenollosa constantly stresses this. Take "green," the color, which is "only a certain rapidity of vibration" (374), the light moving. Remember, all "things" are only what they "do." So the farther you get away from green, the less you feel that vibration: rock dropped in the lake, ripples slowing outward toward eventual dissipation. With the word green, you have to imagine the rock from the ripple that hits you, a meager and frustrating act of logic. To Fenollosa, of course, a language's logistic processes ruin its poetry.

English is full of processes, steps, coded directions. How do we ever get poetry? Imagism is one thing, but then you're sort of pretending that our verbs are as cool as ideographs. They're not. Even if they're short and punchy, onomatopoeic, whatever. Take the first three lines of Amy Lowell's "The Traveling Bear:"

Grass blades push up between the cobblestones
And catch the sun on their flat sides
Shooting it back,

Okay, so we've got "push" and "catch" and "shooting" (uh oh, there's that nasty implied "is" that Fenny hates so much). All very punchy. Were we to do the work, as we automatically do, we will sort of imagine all that stuff happening and imagine the grass and sun and stones and whatnot. But really. Really, wouldn't it be more tangible, more grass-y and sun-y, if there were three graphical symbols for "Grass catches sun" on the page, maybe with little dashes of cobblestone and squiggles of light? While still representational, wouldn't those symbols get us closer? When Wallace Stevens said (disparaging Imagism) "The problem is ... not all objects are equal," maybe he was thinking of the English word itself as an object, versus the objects our words try to depict. You're not getting "grass" with the word "grass." You're just not.

What's worse: it's not just objects. Remember the different concepts of I? We don't get those either, not without convoluted linguistic maps.

So what do we do? Well. I think (I hope!) we can still do a lot. Nature and its profound delivery of feelings is not the only ideal. Scabby little humans still run around, well, talking, so there's that. There is also the candy of verbal music, of anything that rhymes, even a little: okay potato, maybe she likes sherry. Word-sounds ringing in of and off of each other, which can produce what Fenollosa calls "a delicate and lucid harmony" (387). I wonder what we’re after here, when our brain says "ooo, that sounds nice." Just an indication that we’re still alive, still able to make connections?

Wait. I was reading Baudrillard's America, written in the '80s when Polaroids were really popular. He talks about how the Polaroid, with its instant capture of not Thingness but visual surface, takes us back to old Greek philosophy about a thing's appearance being a sheen dinstinct from its "essence." What Fenollosa might call the "soul’s mask." This is, physics-wise, wrong. But let's think about this. If all natural things are just do-ing stuff, transferring force (leaf vibrates its color, air rises and makes wind and sound of the leaf, etc), then things are already outside our comprehension. We are receiving their action. If all existence is acting, then all Others are audience. Even ideographs don't reproduce the action of the leaf (the action occurs for itself), only what we see of that action. Even visually oriented language that captures things super precisely still only "records." The important thing, maybe, is us, is recording itself.

When you shake a Polaroid, you don't actually make the image come faster, you just mess it up a little, at the bottom (Alex Burford). You get something interesting, something imaginative. When we record the world, no matter how swell our language, we're not going to recreate it exactly--so why not fuss it up a bit, realize that what we're doing is world making, use that imaginative power? Make the grass fondle the sun. Make the grass kneejerk the sun. Make the grass jimmy the sun. Try, sometimes, to make words actors for themselves, just like things in nature act for themselves. Make the linguistic map into a drawing of Snoopy, the way you used to subvert those standardized bubble tests (you little rebel, you). Use language not to see the world and what it does, a task at which it falls pretty short. Try, instead, to convey some of the world and break the rest, to see what’s not there, to dream the world cooler.