Don't Keep it Hid

Thanks to high school, I missed the line about coffee-spoons. Did you? At the end of Wednesday's class, we all groaned about our high school poetry explication experiences. For sure: high school skews and skewers poetry. Or, really, poems. After my AP English class mucked with Prufrock, I thought the whole poem was just Eliot's half-ass Horatio monologue. I tuned out. But we never talked about Howl, so that stayed fine. Poetry kept a pulse.

Later, when I actually read Prufrock, I felt the brunt of that killer coffee-spoon line, or other lines like "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." I had (me) let my stance toward a "school lesson" ruin my ability to receive a cool poem. I had used school as an excuse to take my feelers out.

Let's not blame me, though. I cry. Easily and often, like Yellowstone. Let's say this: despite the existence of great educational texts like Koch's Sleeping on a Wing, most 7-12th grade pedagogical philosophies still tell us that we "win" the poem if we find, I don't know, juxtaposition. Or, like, discover that, um, this line uses the imagery of a sailboat to convey the innocence (the while sail?) of, like, life, and the absurdity (the whole, um, ocean thing) of death. Can I go now? It's high school. I have awkward relationships to calcify. I smell like a chimney full of jockstraps. Etc.

Yeah, poem explication sucks. We knew it sucked. Everybody knew it sucked. You still had to do it. Like washing dishes. Whenever you wash dishes, you sing, daydream, yo-yo your brain, distract yo-self. As a kid, I would pretend to be on a gameshow--HOW FAST CAN YOU WASH!--and do the announcer voices in my head while I sped through the pots and pans. I gave myself points for thorough cleanliness and for not--what's that called?--not breaking shit. Since I had to wipe the stove, I threw the sponge across the kitchen to give myself an extra few seconds. Don't worry: I don't understand that part either.

Somewhere along the line, I got this warped notion that poem explication was, like dish washing, a game. You're not really "figuring out" the poem. What you're doing is lugging in a set of goggles and flashy words (juxtaposition! antithesis!) and diving into the au naturale poem, just as we use perfectly nice fields for baseball. This attitude got the essays wrote. I wasn't "solving" or "winning" the poem. Just sprinting through the text in some dazzling or devious fashion, seeing if I could collect the trinkets that fit my suitcase: "oh, this noun is in present tense, that means, um, the fallacy of history!" Sure, essays have to "make sense." A small goal, really. Maybe baseball is a bad analogy. Did anyone ever play that computer game The Incredible Machine? You have this random set of doo-dads, and you try to make your incredibly complicated doo-dads execute a simple task, like light a candle. You use stairs, ramps, bombs, cats, whirligigs, whatever. Meanwhile, the candle itself the ever cool and self-contained and mysterious candle. No harm done.

So too with Zukofsky, Pound, Davie. Sure, these guys are descriptive and prescriptive. They're only trying to explain "good poetry," but once you read "a good poem is full of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia" isn't one reaction to gulp and get to work at self-consciously deploying -poeias? So I try to avoid that feeling. I try to watch it like a game. See what loopy courses get built to light candles. Some of this stuff doesn't even seem to get the candle lit--it just dances around. From Zuk:

"Add--the core that covers the work of poets who see with their ears, hear with their eyes, move with their noses and speak and breathe with their feet. And yet lunatics are sometimes profitably observed: the core that is covered, the valuable skeptic knows, may in itself be the intense vision of a fact."

Honestly. If I read that and go "oh shit, so I'm supposed to breathe with my feet--um, wait--okay, be a lunatic? no--wait, cover my core--what's a core? I have a core? is that like--should I make sure to wear underwear while I'm writing poems? or wait, does it mean I shouldn't write about my 8th grade girlfriend--um, wait, how do I move with my nose? is there a jetpack sort of thing I should have? is there a poet store I missed? should poets sew tissues?" -- then I'm going to be seriously effed. But Zuk is still fun to read. His paragraph above is the very definition of "jazzing around." And I would argue that Davies--with his "Is there not" and "it will be remarked"--jazzes around as well, displaying his skill at the Incredible Poem Chatter Machine to basically just display his skill, though surely his motives involve more, some baffled, brandy-tumbler, tea lawn haze of "chastity" and all that.

Actually, yeah, the game notion is a little simplistic. Most extensive explication, game or not, tends to colonize a poem, and may (more dangerously) ruin it for reading. Snuff the candle! And many people who chatter and explicate think they really are unsheathing the poem's secrets. They think they are figuring out the properties of light, to overextend the candle analogy.

But let's not, to retaliate, chuck all the rhetoric and try to always speak in hardcore truth flame. Or not at all! Isn't that boring? Every now and then, in the right mood, with a caffeine hum and nothing to do, nobody to save from drowning, it is fun to hear somebody gnash about poetics. People say cool things: Zuk's cabinet scheme. Fenollosa's horse. Frank O'Hara's tight pants joke. Or, since I am contractually obligated to quote Mr. Frank Stanford in every poetry discussion: "Poetry will put you out of your misery for no charge, and then will do the undertaking cheap and sometimes it rides up out of nowhere .. and gives you a lap to dream in."

That's poetics. And meaningless, on some level. But is it prescription? I don't really think or feel like it. When I read that I want to write more poems. Not Frank Stanford poems. I'm not a big fan of undertaking or horses. But after reading Stanford's letters, I will look at my poetry and think of more things than before, and I will look at the world and think of more things than before, and I will think how many beautiful and silly ways we have to light candles, and that is, I think, swell.