Tuesday 3.38: The How
I had a whole thing, coming out of the holidays, a lot of notes, but I figure I’ll put it off for a week or so and collect myself a bit, as I assume most everyone is doing.
Sometimes when it comes up that I read and write poetry, people ask me how it’s supposed to be done. The question’s asked in different ways, and I don’t always answer it the same, but I do often invoke Joseph Brodsky, who said that you shouldn’t try to figure out what a poem means, but how a poem means. It’s meaning isn’t encoded in its function, it is its function.
For the past four years, like a lot of people reading this probably, I’ve done my share of reckoning with politics. I don’t have the best nose for it. I don’t have the capacity for reference, the keen eye for the relevant detail, the ability to single out the important lesson. When I look for what something means, I find only amoral indifference and hatred. Most of the time, I try to look at it from an angle that makes it funny.
The Soviets hated Brodsky, even though his work wasn’t particularly political. The funniest things in life are often those that aren’t funny at all.
When I try to see the poem—when I try to understand how, rather than what something means, I feel like I can approach a clear view. How the poem is working, the space it occupies, the speed at which it moves, its sound, where it rhymes and where it doesn’t, its logic, the attention it demands—this is the meaning of the poem. This is what establishes the reality the poem allows.
And so on days like today, I try to remember that. I try not to see the meaning, but to see the poem, working. This was not willed by a truth or a meaning that is, but allowed by a structure of mutual dependence.
Another thing about poetry is that it usually has line breaks. While prose—which is mellifluous, sonic, continuous—fills the page from margin to margin, poetry is an interruption on an otherwise blank sheet.
It is, rather, the displacement of silence:
A well-kempt forest begs Our Lady's grace;
Someone is not disgusted, or at least
Is laying bets upon the human race
Retaining enough decency to last;
The trees encountered on a country stroll
Reveal a lot about a country's soul.
A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
This great society is going to smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.
From “Bucolics 2: Woods” by W. H. Auden