By Heather McHugh
“Poetry's about something the way a cat’s about a house.”
(courtesy of Allen Grossman)
My 7th-grade instructor had us all read Flatland—said we’d figure out dimensions. (Cultivating depths in us, the scoundrel, when asked to teach arithmetic!) He told us Think one step above your level, look beyond your rulers, over all your overlords: see how the lights available to you cast shadows down upon your own flat desk. From three dimension, you can understand the two. Read up and down, and back and forth, then past the lights, until you've got your three dimensions all in one mind's eye.
Now, sense what they're the shadow of, he said.
*
In all the essays I'm assembling from a life of teaching, I keep starting off by distancing my thinking from some basic older terms of taxonomic oversight, cast into poetry by misconstructions in your genre studies. Those words, which so many teachers tend to introduce in counterpoise when we're discussing art, are "form" and "content." As if each poem had a "meaning" hidden in it, like a present in a box; to find it readers are required to "open" something up, take off a lid. (There is a reason Gertrude Stein, in TENDER BUTTONS, plays those puns on books and boxes, on insides and lids of things. She writes in what most people would define as paragraphs; I consider her a poet. There is no discursive propositioning; she's using language as a kind of inquiry, or an adventure. (Compared to works of text, the arts of painting and piano can remain more naturally immune to form-and-content misconstructions; it is poetry that suffers most from the well-meaning interference.)
People say they can't make sense of poems (and they mean they cannot find "the hidden" messages, having at some time been made to think, of poems, that some deep or unambiguous pronouncements can be found beneath some surfaces of frill. But form and content can't be told apart in poetry's adventure: and the best poetic punch will hit you, whether cumulatively or all at once, from how the sense and sentences are bound the one into the other, like air in branches, waves in water. A poetic text can work to tighten up the cross-threads of its natural components (eunexpectednesses and recurrences): that's how a poem holds its sway. When it delivers, it can alter how you understand the very nature of your words.
A poem won't diminish life's perennial inquiring; won't deliver sermons or get rid of questions: It is likelier to keep provoking them. But those same provocations call out something from yourself, a recognition only you can bring to its encounter. A poem's writer, like its reader, is engaged in a discovery, especially in leaps and bounds about ideas of boundary. The "deal" cannot be closed; it's open, and it's meant to open you.
The passenger adjacent on public transport seat is asking what my poems are "about" —but she does not deserve a lecture or locution. She's been drilled, or bored, or stunned so many times before (by the certificate-dispensers, the experience-encoders, lessons from another altitude of luck or labor or hard knocks) that she does not deserve a dreariness of academic drone. She's being socially polite, but since the honest answer has to satisfy a taste for neither formula nor sensational "bohemian" cliché, you'd best recite a thing to make her smile. (And make it smart, like Philip Larkin's ever-timely gift "This Be The Verse.")
Least of all does she desire the actual repudiation of her word "about"—although to ask what art's "about" invites a misconstruction of the sense of space or information. (Anyone who jumps at teaching learns to keep in mind how often skillful leapers had to miss their marks in practice sessions. How for artists, all of a working life, even the conduct of a putative success, is just another form of practice.) Art is invitation for participants to open up as many access to the senses as materials (the senses of the words, the structures of the sentences, the oddball interventions of the line breaks, and the sequences from first to last, can justify. A poem's not a vision from beyond, as writers better know: it is the sum of its revisions.
A literary writer isn't looking just to nail an object, or to cover territory. The unforeseeable must find its ground in you. You better bring along your extra senses, as it's not sufficient for a poem to recount, or turn a trick of numbers. If you can earn its magic, it's because your objects (like your subjects) move; among the senses you require will be the sixth and seventh, at the very least.The very frames of sense are moving: tracking and transcribing and releasing our attentions. First you bring your own attention to it, then release it to the poem's distension: Notice how the bounds come bursting out of nouns, and reverbs out of breath. The thing redounds. (A poem’s untoward.)
*
Right there, on every hand, the end of manacles! Yet still sometimes you cannot get a grip.
*
With art you work to reach the very point it tells you how to turn, and when to let go, and only in revision can you follow (with the finest of attentions you can muster) the final moments of your own original encounter with a force past a poor possessive grip. A hand in things can complicate them because complications ruin the complex. After the poem comes to life, no aftermath of arguments about semantics, "deeper" senses, upper hands (howsoever spotlit, spit-shone, building, built upon) can catch enough.
The mouse is headed for the hole.
The cat (about the house) gets drawn into the deeper dark, where next is near, and glowers disappear before the glow: Where textures overflow the text.
The Importance of Arts, Culture, The Creative Process and how this project resonates with you:
Even authors aren't authorities: they are inquirers, feelers for the breadths available to the expressions of our human creativities. We all are interested in "larger" truths—but predefining them (in "form" or "content") never gets a chance at apprehension of a world that will remain forever uncontainable by so few senses as our own. To make a statement isn't the ambition; the extraordinary artist's driven by his curiosity, especially about what most people declare to be beneath our notice, or beyond it. Much will always be beyond us, but as poets and philosophers have long averred, we cannot even know ourselves entirely. Even our own words for "senses" have so many senses that where one respondent will assign the definition of them, then the next as ardently defies. But use, in any case, is not the point. Only our curiosity can bear us even past the edges of our senses, even of imagination. Among our adjectives, it's the superlatives that remain most impotent; but the comparatives are too much for a single lifetime to research, and the most presumed-upon, the mere indicatives? well, those are where the mysteries are greatest, and most nourishing. It bears remembering today a passage that Stravinsky wrote in 1947: doddering old crones like me weren't even born. But humankind repeats its old mistakes, and Igor was no fool: he saw the dangers for an art. He speaks of music, but you'll get the gist: "According to the present [political] mentality, there are basically two formulas that explain what music is. One kind... in a more or less profane style, the other in an elevated or grandiloquent." The former at his time in Russia meant the working man surrounded by the mechanisms of production "dancing with a reasonable gaiety (in keeping with the requirements of Communist dignity) to the accompaniment of a people's chorus." The other kind, the "elevated" style, he went on, will call on music "to contribute to the formation of the human personality imbued with the environment of its great epoch." Tolstoy wrote (in greatest seriousness) about Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony: "Music must present the consummated formulation of the psychological tribulations of mankind, and should accumulate man's energy... " He calls the Shostakovich piece "the Symphony of Socialism" and declares that "It begins with the Largo of the masses working underground, an Accellerando corresponding to the subway system; the Allegro in its turn symbolizes gigantic factory machinery and its victory over nature. The Adagio represents the synthesis of Soviet culture, science, and art. The Scherzo reflects the athletic life of the happy inhabitants of the Union. As for the Finale, it is the image of the gratitude and the enthusiasm of the masses." (Translate for enthusiasms in contemporary American governance, and you will recognize the plethora of Greatnesses.
Stravinsky properly goes on to say: "What I have just read to you is not a joke which I myself invented. It's a literal quotation from a musicologist of some repute and recently appeared in an official [political] organ. In its line it is a consummate masterpiece of bad taste, mental infirmity, and complete disorientation as to recognition of the fundamental values of life.... As for myself, you will readily understand, I consider these two formulas, these two conceptions, to be equally inadmissible and hold them to be a nightmare."
You may have occasion to reflect, as I so often have been forced to do, what political considerations make a chief of state announce himself the head of a capital's arts program, or causes his administration to require the moral content and social effects of the works adhere to "content" guidelines. Here you see how "content" isn't necessarily an adjective for peaceful cows. I'm feeling like a mad cow, now, myself.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
What do I love and wish not to lose, in the "natural world"?
Its ultimate elusiveness.
