Poetic Space

Can the unexplainable be explained?  Sometimes poetry is defined as the saying of the unsayable.  How? Poetry is powerful because of a union of image and sound and a strange combination of the seen and unseen. When we love a poem, it is because of its resonance or reverberation, a concept examined in The Poetics of Space.

 "A poem possesses us entirely," Gaston Bachelard says.  He says that the poetic image takes root in the reader.  His book is ostensibly about architecture but uses poetry as its metaphor, and in doing so, creates a wonderfully resonant approach to both.

Meena Alexander evokes this resonance. "Poetry and place—if poetry is the music of survival, place is the instrument on which that music is played, the gourd, the strings, the fret." I especially appreciate her thoughts about the importance of place or landscape.

Gaston Bachelard writes that poems awaken our being with their mysterious blend of knowing and not knowing.  A good poem is perpetually new. It has a quality that evokes new meaning every time it is read. "Forces are manifest in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge."  (xxiii) He talks of the passions that perturb poetry, or disturb.

Similarly, Muriel Rukeyser identified poetry as an energy that passes from the writer to the reader. She also viewed a poem as a "theater."  A theatrical space is one that is open to and resonant with image, voice, and action.  The image and reverberation of a poem has the ability to "touch the depths before stirring the surface," according to Bachelard. This is the most poetic explanation of poetry that I've read, and it confirms my theory that poetry dissolves some sort of boundary, and in doing so, it is spirit speaking to spirit.

Literally, poetry has empty space. Lines break before the end of the page, and stanza breaks leave gaps between lines. Patterns are more apparent.  This empty space gestures toward another kind of empty space inside or beyond.  "As essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn," says Lewis Hyde in The Gift. Creating gaps or empty spaces in poetry can develop a dialectic or field of meaning.

Bachelard says, "poetry puts language into a state of emergence."  What are these forces? I'm not sure, but I do recognize them when they happen. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” asks Emily Dickinson.  I think she must be referring to the physicality, the five senses, and friction. It must be music, myth, memory, and deep patterns in the landscape. We resonate, reverberate, and emerge anew.

The Never-ending Selfie: Who Is the I?

In fiction, readers are much more familiar with the concept of narrator, and they are comfortable with the idea of an unreliable narrator. No one assumes that a novel about a murderer reflects a writer who has committed this crime. Yet, in poetry, readers sometimes expect the narrator and the poet to be one—that this, somehow, is truth-telling. Readers need to consider the “I” in a poem more carefully.

Selfies posted on Facebook and on social media sites reveal both the given and the made: the face one is born with and the identity that we construct, and perhaps even more than that. Often others can see more than what is presented, a shadow self. Gertrude Stein believed there are two selves: “I am I who my little dog knows me,” and another interior self that cannot be observed and is not known. Her book Geographical History ends: “Identify is not there at all but it is oh yes it is.” Identity is fluid, changing, but always present.

Students of poetry are trained not to assume that the narrator of a poem is the writer. Some poems adopt a persona, and it is the persona who narrates the poem. The poet Ai Ogawa, for example, wrote persona poems. She explained that she did this because “first person voice was always the stronger voice to use when writing.” Duane Ackerson characterized her persona in Contemporary Women Poets as “people seeking transformation, a rough sort of salvation, through violent acts.” Personae and truth-telling are not mutually exclusive. 

Visual artists have often explored self portraits. The Frida Kahlo with a monkey or parrot on her shoulder says something different than the Frida Kahlo with an excavation revealing the organ of her heart. So perhaps the question is: what images and colors does the self adopt and what do those express?

The Vermilion Trail

Initially, the Vermilion Trail, the oldest road in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, was a footpath and trail for horses.  It holds so much history. Marvin Lamppa has written about the Lake Esquagama location as an important location early in history. There are burial mounds of the Woodland Indians, about 1000 A.D. and many Native tribes afterward. Besides a road, a chain of lakes and streams flow nearby and eventually empty into Lake Superior. Soon after the end of the Civil War, veterans arrived on this road because of the news of a Gold Rush at Vermilion. There was gold, but it was embedded in quartz, and it proved too expensive and difficult to extract. Geologists arrived to evaluate the iron. Native people willingly relocated when plans were put in place to begin mining. They were given "scrip," not money.

Night Train Red Dust focuses on the Vermilion Trail or Highway 4, and some of its stories are excavated, as layers of earth might be, to reveal a different time. A common story form is 'the road story.'  The Canterbury Tales, for instance, focuses on pilgrims. Mark Twain's stories centered around the Mississippi River. My work offers several perspectives on one stretch of road, a hundred miles perhaps, in a landscape itself that is being mined and shipped on trains to ships in the Duluth harbor to go to the steel mills. It is not just people who are on the train, but the earth.

Muriel Rukeyser: These Roads Will Take You Into Your Own Country

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is described by an essay on the website of the American Poetry Foundation in this way: "Impassioned, self-confident, eclectic, a poet of powerful expression, a poet of the political and the personal...."  In an earlier era, 1938, she travelled to the coal mining region and wrote about what she witnessed using her form: poetry.  This work inspired me to take on the same challenge of writing about mining in northern Minnesota. For this reason, I chose a line from one of her poems, "The Book of the Dead," as an inscription for Night Train Red Dust.  

Her title refers to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It expressed her metaphor that the miners in the coal industry were archetypal figures that descended into the underworld. The Academy of American Poets has an essay about this important work that reflected many voices in the community, historical documentation, and a socio-political perspective:

Where Is the Line of Energy?

Muriel Rukeyser said, "The work that a poem does is a transfer of human energy." In the article "Gesture Writing," Rachel Howard suggests that writers can learn from drawing techniques.  Poetry is even closer to visual art than other genres; the economy and compression of language, the image and metaphor make it so.

Life drawing requires the visual artist to look for the energy of the work using strong gesture and line before doing fine details. Howard says:

Realizing that writing is a lot like drawing gives us a deeper approach. Because really, before we put a word or a mark on the page, both writers and artists must first step back and see. And seeing is not simple...Ellen Collett said:

As fiction writers know, every story is told by a narrative voice, and voice reveals itself by what it sees. Voice is a synthesis of seeing and speaking, of sight and syntax. While syntax — the mechanics of diction — can be made to toe the line and conform to a particular “style,” seeing is trickier to control. Seeing is choice. It’s inherently personal.

To see in the way that Collett is describing, to see deeply enough to capture the vibrancy of life on the page, a writer must move her consciousness out of information organizing mode into an intuitive way of seeing subtle organic connections and capturing them in bold strokes.

When Howard used the technique of gesture drawing, "There was the whole. It made leaps. It had perspective. It had emphasis and connection. It had life."

Poetry has a lot of energy: opposing forces, resistances, enjambments, and tension between the lines. Drawing can lend its gesture, but there is also an element of sculpture in poetry.  An excellent poem has been described as a "perceptual object" or "tensile being."  Poetry is physical; by this I mean it must be in the body and engaged with all of the senses.  Christopher Allen said of sculpture: "The material must undergo transformation; and it must have its own distinct and even stubborn character, so that the transformation is a kind of metamorphosis."  The language, the image, the metaphor, the patterns are the materials in poetry; the line of energy initiates the transformation or metamorphosis in a poem, creating new meaning at each reading.

Where is the line of energy in a poem?  Throughout the poem, and then, if it's a good poem, into the reader, the place of its transformation.

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To read "Gesture Writing" in the NYTimes:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/gesture-writing/?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

Quotes from the Masters

"Poetry is made up of nothing except beautiful details."   --Voltaire


I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (July 12, 1827)


This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
-- Walt Whitman,  from Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)


If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way.  --Emily Dickinson

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions. The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.  If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
--Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry


Walking, like prose, has a definite aim....When the man who is walking has reached his goal...when he was reached the place, book, fruit, the object of his desire...this possession at once entirely annuls his whole act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the means; and whatever the act, only the result remains. It is the same with utilitarian language: the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard....The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically. 
-- Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The Art of Poetry

The difference between the action of a poem and and of an ordinary narrative is physiological.
--Paul Valery, "Remarks on Poetry," The Art of Poetry

What Do Poems Do?

It's hard to describe exactly what a great poem does. Here are some thoughts: 
  
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
--Emily Dickinson

"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin