Poetry as Special Speech

A possible way of seeing poetry that came to me recently:  special speech.  

That came after maybe some years of Jakobsen's 2-word definition of poetry as "verbal art" had been in my mind.  That definition had, for me, run into the problem of the roles poetry has played on and in different occasions, including those for which they appear in greeting cards, that privilege clarity over creativity, meaning over method.  The use of poetry in such instances doesn't seem to me to be an artful one in the sense that Jakobsen meant, and they seem prevalent enough to me that they should not be excluded.  

This definition, poetry as special speech, has nothing to do with literary merit.  Poems as eulogies, wedding blessings, celebrations of birth and birthdays, and other special events derive their value, I believe, from how they suit the occasions, which goes back primarily to the hopes or expectations of the participants.  The goal of inspiring emotion comes together with the one of establishing connections among members of the community defined by the occasion, it seems to me.  Where literary merit might be connected with innovation, the specialness of occasional poetry may stem from the opposite, from its appeals to the familiar, to convention.  

Poetry defined in part by literary merit may be considered special speech because of its innovation, so, it's special to an audience with a strong understanding of the poetic traditions it responds to.  It does something compellingly new, perhaps, both in departure from and in incorporation of older conventions, and may excite interest based on the interplay of the two.  That sense of the specialness in poetry also brings a sense of community with it--one defined by readers and practitioners--in my opinion.  

The word "speech" I find broad enough to include poetry delivered as writing and out loud, whatever the medium or platform.  Even those devoted to poetry in whole or in part, where it may said to be normal, still, I find, occupy special niches in cultures, so, for me personally, the term remains a helpful one.  

The New/Old Feudalism

 Corporations have perhaps been the most persistent and pervasive way that feudalism has survived, maybe starting centuries ago.  

With web 2.0, maybe I, maybe like many, experienced a sense of freedom, for some time, years even, from their demands, constrictions, even economic and emotional predation.  The owners of all this technology seemed to be satisfied with simply being significantly rich and sticking to the work they were satisfied with, which I found benefits in, frequently and soon daily, for free.

I don't know when the combination came to my attention of their overwhelming wealth and their companies' invasive, relentlessly invasive really, harvesting of, sucking up of, whole consumption of, and wholesale marketing of, my information.  What first seemed optional for me to give, at some point, stopped being that way.  And that began to make a sick sense--to them I am, or my identity is, a product.  The old or ancient corollary started to come to light:  for the lord of the manor, are the peasants human workers, or are they livestock?  For the sake of the manor, perhaps, it doesn't matter.

But feudal power structures were, and are, qualitatively different from those of democratic institutions.  So the manor essentially ends at the ballot box, at the voting booth.  Or it did.  Then came Citizens United.  Then came the Heritage Foundation.  Somewhere in there came Reagan.  Charisma with no skill for governance, perhaps with no conscience--useful, feudal, for feudally minded people.  But not enough, and neither of course was Clinton, though his economic policies did make the rich richer.  But then, then came Trump.

To have a king, a malleable one, with no soul politically speaking, no ideals, nothing except the same craving for wealth and power as theirs, and with some of Hitler's horrific gifts for stirring up the worst sorts of darkness in his followers, not to say "This is sick but we'll heal from it together," but to say "you are right, our enemies are outside of us and can be identified by their differences from us," and to plunder not just castles and museums like Hitler did but the wealthiest country in history, natural resources included.  So, they lined up, and, as lords must do to their king, even one they ultimately control, they bowed down.

Fearful of what's ahead, and of not being able to find more freedom.  Grateful, though, that I am very loved and not alone.

The epic reliquary in Shakespeare's Hamlet

 The characterization of Hamlet by Northrop Frye as presenting a “titanic spirit” in its main character certainly is not unusual by type, and, naturally, the adjective he uses could simply be taken as “massive.”  But the original one, or a more original one, “of the quality of the Titan’s,” may offer another and less problematically monolithic way of reading the play.  The Titans aren’t prominent in current classical discourse, but in a sense hide behind the pantheon of gods that they prefigure.  There may be no way to know now how displaced they were as literary figures by the Homeric epics, but for centuries or more, they have been, thoroughly. 

Both the Homeric and the gods appear in the monologue by the first player, or player king, who, narrating the scene between Priam and Pyrrhus, departs from the play’s focus, disrupts the unity of action, abandons Aristotelian conventions to present a gruesome scene that reinstates the theme Shakespeare would read and reread in Ovid:  the rule of all, more or less for the worse, by the unbridled wills of elites, by the passion of the gods.  Along with the return to the Ovidian, by acting and speaking the Player King’s part himself, Shakespeare backtracked from the Aristotelian to the Platonic, taking on the role of rhapsode performed by Ion in the dialogue of the same name.  Translating Homer for and to this new audience, not as any theater titan himself but as performer of a character, Shakespeare offers moments of epic reliquary, of Homeric remnants or fragments in a setting that invites an audience beyond the play. 

To focus on that moment may be to see the play not as an entity unto itself but as massively involved outside of Aristotelian confines, shadowed by its intertexts, full of multiplicities, putting characters into play who themselves are multiplicities as Deleuze and Guattari might say, none in command, none bound by or given justice, all available for a viewer to interact with multiplicitously as well.  Perhaps it actuated what was done to the playwright by the death of his son. 

Plot and Subplot in Shakespeare's Henry V

 W.H. Auden made the claim that King Lear was the first of Shakespeare’s plays since Henry IV to have a subplot, overlooking the one in the next Henry, or the next of the Henriad, Henry V.  It’s an odd omission, since, as he observed about King Lear, the subplot of Henry V parallels the plot—Harry, driven by disaster, goes to war in France in the plot, and in the subplot, Harry’s former partners in crime, driven by disaster, go to war in France.  It’s not important whatever might have led Auden to overlook it, but the nature of the relationship between plot and subplot very well may be. 

The death of Sir John Falstaff, the disaster that set his former followers off to war, is in a sense a victory for Harry—not that the death itself benefits him necessarily, but that it represents his shedding of his old, essentially dead self—as one of Sir John’s ‘minions of the moon.”  The “use we made” of those times does not require any of the characters in it to ascend with him, and the obvious use that Sir John attempted to make of hi, to leverage an advantage that might let him continue his myriad forms of harm in immunity, meant that nothing like love or genuine friendship had ever connected them. 

The parallel appears clearly in Bardolph’s parody of Harry, his “On, on, on, on, on!  to the breach, to the breach!” counterpointing the king’s rallying cry, and offers a point of contact and contrast, as Harry is taking this new territory, his drive having transcended the insult that instigated it, while these essentially destitute men have no more drive, are more or less dragged in the same direction as the rest of Harry’s army. 

So, the death that leads to more death for them has given life, or land, or both, to him. 

Foundational Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Richard III

 For Hazlitt, Richard III’s drive “to be greater than he is” continues throughout the play, and includes his trying to be seen as higher in worth than the already-lofty social station he was born into; “making use of these advantages to commit unheard-of crimes” might not seem great on its face, but Hazlitt  seems to be assuming that what Richard finds great can also be monstrous.  That idea certainly holds up with his seduction of the woman whose husband he has murdered—he’s crowing, alone, “Was ever woman in this humor won?” may show him in competition with everyone in his memory, for the most reprehensibly persuasive behavior.  He may stay in that mode, of striving for the worst of all time at least toward his enemies (and maintaining a level playing field by seeing everyone else as an enemy), but, contrary to Hazlitt’s characterization, he does end up unable to keep chasing greatness when he ends up alone, with “none else by,” trying to maintain his villain façade, but finding it falls away in the face of his crimes:

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.                                          Is there a murderer here?  No.  Yes, I am.

In this soliloquy, his archly wicked rhetoric gives away to debate and stumbling repetition:

Alack.  I love myself.  Wherefor?  For any good                         That I myself have done unto myself?                                     O, no!  alas, I rather hate myself                                         For hateful deeds committed by myself.

Harold Bloom dismissed this, basically, as bad writing, and went on to pinpoint a far more obscure moment in Shakespeare’s oeuvre as the one where the subjective human being was born, but if that’s anywhere in Shakespeare’s work, I believe it’s here.  A character dissembling and coming disassembled sees that he has more than one self—he is able to regard and treat himself as an other.  

On a moment in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

"Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face."  What does Juliet say in saying this to Romeo?  "Mask" may be a gently metadramatic word choice, as opposed to "dark," or "cover," or even "veil."  The actor playing Juliet acknowledges being in a play, and that "Thou" knows that this is a theatrical event.  Is "Thou" Romeo, or only Romeo?  Maybe it would only be if the plays events were actually happening, or at least if they were happening without an audience other then the one the two actors are for each other, say in a rehearsal space.  "Thou," watching the play, are aware that it is a play, that Juliet represents a performance, that there is no tragic risk in these actors speaking to each other.  But that knowing can get obscured, can get masked, in the plays emotional knowing, so the metadramatic "mask" offers a reminder, a relief.

And "the mask of night" is different from "the mask of dark," "the mask of shadows," and other words he could have used.  Night represents a natural event, a recurring, routine one--regularly recurring, predictably expected.  Juliet may be expressing that the greater and brighter fact of her love of Romeo has been covered up, even defaced by the overwhelming trappings of her civic and familial realities.  Hers--families, realities--are at war with his by virtue of birth, by the nature of the city's strict hierarchies, and by the vicious clannishness of their families.  The night of being young in Verona's humdrum or normal forms of war, its aristocratic drama that has been deadly not only for people but for the bonds between them, is marring her.

In this moment of awareness of multiple realities--that the actor is in a play, that the daughter is in a family drama, and that Juliet is in love with Romeo--the sounds of the line mimic or perhaps incarnate it.  Instead of an alliterative move as in Romeo's "I am fortunes fool," which might embody a bond, Shakespeare has a variety of sounds and the only repeating consonant start of a word, "n" in "know'st" and "night," complicated by the silent "k."  It gently disrupts, but only gently and with metric grounding--as if to say "know this is a play, and play anyway."

Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in relation to Aristotle's Unities

Samuel Johnson claiming Shakespeare didn't use Aristotle's unities of time and place leaves out, I believe, two important exceptions that have another significant distinction.  They are Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, both of the plays that prominently feature magic--not just prophecy or descriptions of magical or supernatural events, but magic of physical transformation.  In Midsummer Night's Dream it's Bottom the Weaver getting an ass's head, in The Tempest it's a storm.  

The Aristotelian meeting the magical in these plays seems easy to me to overlook, though, partly because, among classical philosophers who wrote about poetry, Aristotle may be among the more conducive to the material, the mundane, the non-ethereal.  Plato may have been anti-poetry but he still saw it as ex nihilo.  Horace may have dismissed the outlandish in poetry but he wrote his own that could be said to undercut his position.  Aristotle so systematized, structured and segmented that his discourse might seem closed off against unexpected storms, let alone a misplaced donkey head.  

One possibility that comes to mind is that, here and elsewhere, Shakespeare drew creative energy from being at odds with his influencers--not necessarily in Oedipal grappling like Harold Bloom talked about (though maybe--I say that and am not grappling with him, with Bloom, I hope), but relating to them at a slant, like Emily Dickinson talked about.  So, the narrative poem about Romeus and Juliet became the play, the story of Amlothi became the play of Hamlet, and that of King Lear became what it became.

Also, this possibility:  that place (like the woods outside of Thebes, like the island away from Milan) held a kind of magic for the man who could not get away from his life as the Shakespeare we know, back to his roots in Stratford.  Not until that life ended, perhsp with the help of Aristotle as well as Shakespeare.    

Questioning Aristotle's Poetics: Spectacle

 Aristotle's downplaying of the worth of spectacle, as compared to poetry, suggests that there is a difference between the two--that the spectacular can't have its own poetry, and that poetry can't be a linguistic spectacle.  Is this a false binary?

Looking at it in terms that might make sense both to him and contemporary readers, it could be said that the most spectacular event in classical theater might have been the Deus ex machina--least true to the writing or poetry of the play, most dependent on mechanical effects, maybe most potentially pandering to an audience he doesn't see as part of the poetry.  But for Deleuze and Guattari, the machine of language is not dissimilar to the machines they understand each member of the audience to be, or the machine the gods have sent down--all of them acting automatically.

To move up a lot of centuries, to Shakespeare's maybe most famous piece of stage direction, "Exit pursued by bear," the question becomes which is more worthy--the stage direction, or how it's acted out.  The writing of it may have happened relatively quickly.  The staging of it could not be worked out quickly or easily no matter how it was done.  It would require the concerted, as in strenuous and also together, work of two communities at least: that of the theater company and that of the audience.  And has that less poetry than writing four words?

To move forward into today, I just watched a movie, Rebel Moon: Child of Fire, that included a weapon made of some form of fire, that inflicted a wound with fire at its edges.  Was that not poetry?  Seen online, on my phone, I understand it literally to be language--lines of computer code that create a moving image.  That's one way it could be seen as poetry.  Then there's the argument that if could be seen as verbal art, poetry to Jacobsen, simply of a system of verbage that includes a script, visual effects, direction and more.  Finally, the movie's auteur lost his daughter tragically several years ago.  Might that moment of spectacle express his pain more clearly than traditional words can?

On the poem "Thanks," by WS Merwin (written in 2020)

 On my first reading of "Thanks," I teared up, and maybe on the second one too.  Maybe both times were when I was in the mode of talking at gratitude but not feeling it, and the poem's litany of mostly-dark events reached where my feelings were.  "Funerals," "wars," "animals dying," "forests falling"--somewhere in there was some of what was choking me up.  And I got to let some of it out.

Then, COVID arrived, and then the murder of George Floyd, and this national, toxic darkness embodied by Trump seemed in both instances to eclipse the shapes, names and faces of the dead.  And of course George Floyd's murder being one of horrifyingly many of exactly the same kind, but manipulated by the nation's quasi-fascist pseudo-leadership--I went into the numb, hovering mode of waiting for it all to be over that seems too internally brutal for tears, but somehow not for the poem's whole middle two stanzas to do some silent, vibrant work in me:

back from a series of hospitals back 

     from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are 

     saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and

      in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the

      door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying 

      thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

It's like those stanzas tick off boxes of what COVID has brought my way--"over telephones" is almost all of my life at the moment, through the screen of mine I see "a series of hospitals" including those set up to handle the overflow and then "the news of the dead" of this pandemic, I see police beatings of nonviolent nonwhite Americans, and the mugging in more than one sense is being done being done right in the public eye by a rich man who's become not only an official but the most powerful one in the world, and who only seems likely to change for the better if it's from a suit into an orange jumpsuit.

And that horror goes on, but also "we go on."  There and throughout the poem, the pronoun stays plural--identifying with the subject of the poem, I'm not alone.

And then I notice that no "thank you" in the poem (I count fourteen) are for any of these events in the poem.  If I say "thank you," I generally make it for something, and I assume that about anyone else's saying of it also.  "Thank you."  "For what?"  And juxtapositions in the poem would suggest that it's for all the damage, so the thanks would either be bleakly ironic or coming from some space of abuse.  Except thanks also tend to be addressed to someone, and these are not addressed to anyone, I see in the last stanza's "with nobody listening we are saying thank you."  If they're not to anyone, then why do they need to be for anything?  So, "we are saying thank you"  while, not because, these dark times keep coming.  

So if the thanks aren't for (as in addressed to) anyone, or for (as in about) anything, what do they do?  How do they help me find some grounding in the face of multiple, concurrent national nightmares (that might yet, unthinkably, continue in whatever forms for another four years)?

When I got to hear Merwin read at AWP one year, he read after Anne Carson, and talked kindly about how difficult it was to read after her.  I had been introduced to her work maybe seven years before that, by way of some of her translations of classical poets, and found something, for me, new and truly helpful:  a space opened by the poem that drew from the accessible and the monumental, or the ancient, at the same time.  I wasn't being intimidated by tradition; I was getting a friendly hand up (or in, or down) to some of it.

And I believe I get that gift in, or out of, this poem too, because Merwin's speaker is actually a chorus, isn't it (or he, or we)?  Like in Sophocles and beyond?  But here the ancient is made war for me again--there are no names i don't know, there are no impossibly lofty goals expressed, and his lack of capitalization and punctuation here take away restrictions on even how to read this chorus's lines, so I can get at home in it, find where and how it fits me, where and how I am right now.

And I find the thanks to no one in particular to be another way of saying yes, this is.  It's all happening, and I am not outside of it, not even in one of the "glass rooms" of stanza 1.  I'm in its midst.  And more importantly, maybe more important than the facts of all these realized nightmares, is the one that I'm not alone.  Connected by phone to my loved ones, I don't have to witness any of this without them.  Perhaps unlike the desperate men who have driven these crises for their own gain (like dictators have since there were Greek choruses and before), I deeply love and am deeply loved.

Stephanie Burt wrote about "spiritual resistance" in Merwin's work, and I believe I find that in "Thanks."  The resistance isn't in the mode of war, which the speaker(s) don't fight but remember; it's in this persistence of an unbreakable common bond between people.  It reminds me that the statues of ancient dictators may first and foremost present reminders that the dictators themselves are long gone, and of the many and intangible gifts I've been given in the midst of this time of crisis, "dark though it is."