POETIX
There is this duality set up when we talk about poetry, when we talk about life. (Wallace Stevens: “The theory of poetry is the theory of life.”) We talk about narrative/fractured, mainstream/experimental, rational/irrational, fixed/dynamic, masculine/feminine. But I look around at the world & these binaries start to fail.
On the one hand, the world is terrible because it is chaotic. Our president decides to take us to war; he says Iraq has weapons of mass destruction which Hussein will use against us. A poll is taken and 65% of Americans support this war; they are afraid for their safety. The war happens. Is happening. Then it comes out that these weapons never existed, and that our government has effectively lied to us, given us false reasons for the war. Maybe the poll numbers shift at this point. Less people support the war. So the government changes their tune. They say that the reason all along was to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, to remove Hussein, who was a torturing madman. The supporting numbers rise. Then we see our own troops treating the Iraqis just as cruelly as Hussein could have done. The numbers fall. A majority of Americans now believe that the war was never worth it.
When I hear these reports, I am completely baffled. Who are these numbers? Who is being polled? Who is our government? It is completely irrational. It makes no sense. Things happen one way. We are told it is the record. And then, again and again, the past is rewritten before the previous headlines can even start to fade. I begin to think that the concept of a smooth narrative is a lie, but it is a terrible lie. Was the war for protecting us from these WMD’s? To remove Hussein? To avenge 9/11? To bring democracy to the Iraqis? The answer changes daily. The daily answer reaches back into the past to reinterpret. There is no logic. There is no flow of causality. The past, which is supposed to be fixed, is in flux.
And then we have this other problem, this opposite problem. Our president gets on TV and says we are at war for peace. We are locking people up to protect freedom. He is the guiding father, he is the system. Some would say, he is a lot like language, a form of control. He uses a form of inescapable logic to destroy all arguments. He says, I believe in peace and democracy. How can you be against me? If you are against me, you are against these things. He steals words. He makes too much sense. He oversimplifies. He serves up sound bites on a plate and makes us eat them. If we believe in complexity, we lose the argument.
Which way is it? Is the world coherent, or not? And for whom? And which is preferable?
When Einstein’s theory of special relativity became public in the early years of the last century, everything fundamentally changed. Mass was not solid; mass was a form of energy. The world was not solid. And then quantum mechanics became developed and our world split again. Particles do not have an absolute location, ever. They only tend to be somewhere or somewhere else. They will be where we expect them to be. The observer determines the outcome of the experiment. The world is relative. Absolutes are a dying breed.
So the world is fundamentally irrational according to our Newtonian world view. Is this good or bad? It just is.
This is what I don’t understand: why has it been accepted that writing with fractured syntax is only to be seen as a mode of political protest? Who is to say that this irrationality is not the same irrationality that the system already uses? Haven’t the French theorists already shown that indeterminacy is the guiding force of language? That there is no meaning, only interpretation?
We have poets like Ron Silliman and other Language writers getting huffy that the “young poets of today” are using Language aesthetics without their politics. But isn’t it maybe true that some poets are writing the world as they see it?
It’s become clear to me that the only thing that makes sense is paradox. Contradicting ideas which must coexist.
Heriberto Yepez says that poetry is the problem with society, and the most responsible thing a poet can do is constantly contradict him/herself.
I contradict myself because I disagree with Yepez. And I agree.
I avoid a linear narrative because the government is evil. I avoid linear narrative because it is the only thing that makes sense. I do not write to engage in political arguments. At the same time, sure I do.
I tell little stories in my work because I want something to make sense in a crazy world. “I” stories with the “I” because “I” am pro-ego at the same time that “I” know “I” is a false construct.
I don’t believe in opposites.
I think the Buddhists are on to something but it doesn’t sound very productive to be enlightened.
I write sonnets because free verse is the literary equivalent of Manifest Destiny—we MUST use the whole page, no limits for us. How immoral! I write sonnets because the form has the whole weight of Western history and I want to contradict myself inside, destabilize the form. I write sonnets because the avant-garde says I shouldn’t and I’m resisting forms of control. I am a pain in the ass. I write sonnets because all I write are love poems and they wanted a pretty house to live in with some history to it. I write sonnets because all I write are anti-love poems.
Joan Retallack inserted an “h” into poetics and got Poethics. I want to insert an “x.” This is not just to be cute. The “x” is a diagram of two opposing paths at their intersection. X marks the spot. In an Newtonian universe, parallel lines will never meet. But only if space itself is not curved. Now we think space is curved. However separate we think things are, they will always intersect.
I find it impossible to really say what it is that I like about the poetry that I like. I can’t contain what it is within a sentence. All I can say is that the experience of reading something that is important to me is an ineffable experience. Why do I love this:
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older. (Ezra Pound)
or this?
Stems wax heavy when the face is divided
When I find a wheel
A stone occurs in less than half the time
When measured against rooftops
Archers make a body inside one yet whole
Though you have the combination
I can no longer see you through the orchard
I cast my locks on water and row with my arms (Elizabeth Willis)
Can anyone tell me why I love these? I don’t know. I could try to tell you but it wouldn’t be the real answer. The real answer is not sayable in the language that I’m using, the language of essay (“try”), the language of logic, the language of argument.
Argument is incompatible with my poetry. When I write it’s a slip beneath this surface to say what is normally unsayable. I lose argument, I lose some readers, but I think I gain a lot more. I gain connections that are not laboriously created; they happen intuitively. They happen because there is no random and no such thing as meaningless.
At the same time, the poetry is an argument. Every poem I write is an expression of my poetix. How I see connections everywhere, how pronouns shift around, how the world is beautiful and you can’t deny that and you can’t deny song, either. It is an argument; it is a retreat to an interior space. It is an attack in a form of escapism. It does not see a huge difference between the individual and the world, at the same time that it is pro-ego. I believe it is one truth of how the world is. Here’s some Bush-logic for you: we wouldn’t have egos if we weren’t supposed to grapple with them.
Poetix-Paradox. The intersection of two things headed in apparently opposite directions.
