Thursday, December 11, 2003
All the others translate.
--W.H. Auden, “The Composer”
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So, Mr. cummings. What have you to say for yourself?
So long as feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
Very well, then. We will not argue with the fundamental condition of Mr. cummings’s statement, that “feeling is first.” Indeed, we will happily accept feeling to be first in all things; as Roethke says, “We think by feeling. What else is there to know?” Nor can we argue his logic: it is perfectly true that attention to syntax does mar one’s sensual apprehension of a poem. To intellectualize an emotion is to cruelly and coldly wrench the full-blooming flower from the soil by its roots. To be quite honest, we are left no choice but to admit that Mr. cummings is absolutely right.
He is also a duplicitous lying bastard who seduces his readers into believing Romantic fancies. Yes, his verses are delicious and one could happily eat them for hours--we recall the lotus fruit of the Odyssey. Here, he seems much more a second-rate Romantic wolf dressed in cute prosodic lamb’s wool than the relentlessly original genius we know and love. Heaven knows, perhaps it would be more appropriate to excuse Mr. cummings for having suffered a temporary lapse in judgment caused by the fatigue brought on by the impossible weight of his Shelley-appointed legislative duties, than to condemn him without trial to that circle of hell reserved for seducers. That is to say, Mr. cummings is either evil or deluded. It would be a real gas to spend the rest of the essay attempting to figure out which one he is, but that particular structure would fall apart rather quickly, considering that, realistically speaking (for that is, after all, what we are trying to do here), Mr. cummings is probably not evil. But let us trample onward.
Whence all this protestation? Where is there deceit in a piece of logic just admitted to be airtight?
It lies, pun intended, in that one word: “wholly.” This is the first crime of which Mr. cummings stands accused before us today: the assumption that a thing is ever “whole.” For do we ever “wholly kiss” anybody? What the devil does that mean? He assumes that there is such things as a perfect, ineffable kiss. Mr. cummings, meet Mr. Plato. Meet Mr. Plato’s dog, Theory of Forms. We’ll leave you three to talk.
For what is a kiss? The encounter of two mouths. But we still leave ourselves open to accusations of literalism. Fine, then. Let us define a kiss as a merging of passions. Oh, yes, that sounds lovely. But still, this pleasant merging does not occur in a vacuum. It still requires a bare minimum of two actors (only one need be active; see Romeo and Juliet V.3). And these actors are endeavoring to produce--this is the crux of the argument--not a feeling, but a reaction in one another. Feeling is vague and random; reaction, less so. To this end, the kissing poets draw on experience. They draw on technique. Because this is this question: how do we kiss, and why? How much tongue? A little nibble on the bottom lip there? Or do we attack with abandon, slavering and slobbering? Do the heads meet straight on, or do they form a right angle? Do we enjamb the line? Do we throw in a slant rhyme? Are not these the formal elements of the kiss? Are not these the indicators of the mood? Are not these Richards’s vehicle, the How a thing is said? We consider these things as we kiss and are kissed, and in so doing perform what Tate calls “acts of intelligence.” Furthermore, we are not simply kissed (unless we are a catatonic Juliet). No, we kiss back. And we decide how to do so based on our criticism, based on knowledge of the discipline, of our partner’s kissing. “Criticism is as inevitable as breathing.” Criticism is fundamental to kissing, its sine qua non, and so too it is with reading. For this is the point of poetry. Not to stimulate vaguely, but to produce a concrete, conscious response. And the only way to do that is to guide the reader’s reading.
We’re supposed to close our eyes when we kiss, to the end of isolating stimulation in the mouth. But we do not shut our bloody eyes when we read a poem; we’d miss out completely. Mr. cummings, are you telling us that all your trippy haphazard sprinkling of punctuation on the page--is “wholly” irrelevant?
It seems that Mr. cummings and his adolescent acolytes are quite thoroughly convinced that as Billy Joel says, “it’s all about soul.” Poetry, to them, is “met him pike hoses:” the transmigration of souls. We need not consider the vessels it is carried in; the soul will make its own way. This is such a pleasant fancy it seems a pity to shatter it. But these are the duties our office dictates.
When we kiss, we are not inhaling one another’s soul. Frankly, that’s just eerie (like something out of the Princess Bride). We are communing physically. The rootin’-tootin’ NeoRomantics would say that the body is a prison, and poetry is the soul pouring forth from the mouth because that is the only escape route it has. More likely, poetry borne of such philosophy tends to pour from another, more nether, orifice. The body is the point of the kiss: as a voice teacher would say (very quickly), the teeth, the lips, the tip of the tongue. In kissing, as in poetry, “form is content, content is form.” Because it it’s not about how we kiss, it’s about how we use our tongues. And it’s not about how we write a poem, it’s about how we use our tongues. After all, “kiss” is just our word for a specific type of lingual manoeuvre, the same way “poem” is the name we’ve given to a specific type of linguistic manoeuvre. It is purely by chance that we have a word for the encounter of two mouths, but not for the encounter, say, of two armpits. Having a name does not automatically sanctify a thing. In fact, it does precisely the opposite: it limits it. A nameless thing is the holiest thing of all, because no one can say what it is not. We must do away with the idea of “the Poem.” It does greater injury to poetry than any pillaging horde of Philistines or publishers ever can. Because it is simply the text. Not even the text--the object. The achievement before us.
One is indeed sorely tempted to unsheathe Derrida and dismember cummings with accusations of Logocentrism, but we doubt the point wants for belaboring, and furthermore, it would be little more than a regrettable exercise in sciolism. So we move on.
There will always be the adolescent conviction that formal analysis on both ends (poet and reader) quite destroys the beauty of a poem. That, we suppose, would be a fair assessment if we were for a moment convinced that poetry is about beauty and emotion, and there end. For this seems the chiefest among Mr. cummings’s thoughtcrimes: that poetry is just a kiss. That it should only be considered on the sensual plane. If we have read him right, this is hardly forgivable. A poem is part kiss, part conversation. This is why we do not refer to the words in the poem as the author’s, but the “speaker’s.” We are engaged in conversation, not with the poet, but with his poem. There, there is exchange. The poet, as Joyce says, should remain “invisible...paring his fingernails.” He recuses himself altogether from his poem, for
“the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the
mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its
material.”
There is very flatly no feeling in a poem save that which the reader himself brings to it. Anyone who is, in this age, fool enough to persist in believing poetry to be a connection between the author and reader, must be rather a firm believer in telepathy, too. Because that isn’t poetry. That’s the Vulcan bloody mind-meld. In terms of feeling, all a poet can do is present situations carefully designed to produce not just a sensation, but a reaction in the reader. To imagine a whole as being anything more than the sum of its parts is sadly, pathetically Romantic. It is the third dimension that only the reader brings to the poem that lifts it up off the page. Nauseous as it may be, there is some truth to MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica:” “A poem should not mean/But be.” “As the moon climbs,” just let the reader make of it whatever he damn well pleases. But let us remember, finally, that emotion, wherever its provenance, is not all in poetry. Ideas are also somewhat worthy of consideration, are they not?
Why is it that we tend to reduce novels to their ideological structure, and analyze the latter as though that were the sole purpose of reading them? Right--because it is. Because fiction is our way of representing reality. Fiction is the only way to write out reality; theory is just that: theory. But it is one of the queer idiocies of our age that while we quite happily read novels for their ideas, we at the same time restrict our reading of poetry to marveling at the simple fact of its existence. Novels, poems: not much difference. Whose idea was it to robe the poem in this mantle of fragile purity? There is one art, and only one art, that can even think of claiming wisps of ineffability, and for that, refer to the epigraph. When did language, the fundamental instrument of cognition, the sine qua non of the intellect, become ineffable? Is not the very point of language to be effable? It’s just information arranged on a page. It’s very simple: for all the glory we heap upon it, for all the panegyrics, for all the mystique, poetry is not now, nor has it ever been, anything more than language. And there lies its beauty. When we accept these are words enchanting us, when we accept that it is a body kissing us, then, finally, we see the point of the exercise: that these things are not visions or images. They are not the undercooked whimsies of absinthe-addled rhymesters. These things--the delicacy of the word Delicate. The twine of tongues--are unmistakeably, ineluctably, finally real.
--W.H. Auden, “The Composer”
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
So, Mr. cummings. What have you to say for yourself?
So long as feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
Very well, then. We will not argue with the fundamental condition of Mr. cummings’s statement, that “feeling is first.” Indeed, we will happily accept feeling to be first in all things; as Roethke says, “We think by feeling. What else is there to know?” Nor can we argue his logic: it is perfectly true that attention to syntax does mar one’s sensual apprehension of a poem. To intellectualize an emotion is to cruelly and coldly wrench the full-blooming flower from the soil by its roots. To be quite honest, we are left no choice but to admit that Mr. cummings is absolutely right.
He is also a duplicitous lying bastard who seduces his readers into believing Romantic fancies. Yes, his verses are delicious and one could happily eat them for hours--we recall the lotus fruit of the Odyssey. Here, he seems much more a second-rate Romantic wolf dressed in cute prosodic lamb’s wool than the relentlessly original genius we know and love. Heaven knows, perhaps it would be more appropriate to excuse Mr. cummings for having suffered a temporary lapse in judgment caused by the fatigue brought on by the impossible weight of his Shelley-appointed legislative duties, than to condemn him without trial to that circle of hell reserved for seducers. That is to say, Mr. cummings is either evil or deluded. It would be a real gas to spend the rest of the essay attempting to figure out which one he is, but that particular structure would fall apart rather quickly, considering that, realistically speaking (for that is, after all, what we are trying to do here), Mr. cummings is probably not evil. But let us trample onward.
Whence all this protestation? Where is there deceit in a piece of logic just admitted to be airtight?
It lies, pun intended, in that one word: “wholly.” This is the first crime of which Mr. cummings stands accused before us today: the assumption that a thing is ever “whole.” For do we ever “wholly kiss” anybody? What the devil does that mean? He assumes that there is such things as a perfect, ineffable kiss. Mr. cummings, meet Mr. Plato. Meet Mr. Plato’s dog, Theory of Forms. We’ll leave you three to talk.
For what is a kiss? The encounter of two mouths. But we still leave ourselves open to accusations of literalism. Fine, then. Let us define a kiss as a merging of passions. Oh, yes, that sounds lovely. But still, this pleasant merging does not occur in a vacuum. It still requires a bare minimum of two actors (only one need be active; see Romeo and Juliet V.3). And these actors are endeavoring to produce--this is the crux of the argument--not a feeling, but a reaction in one another. Feeling is vague and random; reaction, less so. To this end, the kissing poets draw on experience. They draw on technique. Because this is this question: how do we kiss, and why? How much tongue? A little nibble on the bottom lip there? Or do we attack with abandon, slavering and slobbering? Do the heads meet straight on, or do they form a right angle? Do we enjamb the line? Do we throw in a slant rhyme? Are not these the formal elements of the kiss? Are not these the indicators of the mood? Are not these Richards’s vehicle, the How a thing is said? We consider these things as we kiss and are kissed, and in so doing perform what Tate calls “acts of intelligence.” Furthermore, we are not simply kissed (unless we are a catatonic Juliet). No, we kiss back. And we decide how to do so based on our criticism, based on knowledge of the discipline, of our partner’s kissing. “Criticism is as inevitable as breathing.” Criticism is fundamental to kissing, its sine qua non, and so too it is with reading. For this is the point of poetry. Not to stimulate vaguely, but to produce a concrete, conscious response. And the only way to do that is to guide the reader’s reading.
We’re supposed to close our eyes when we kiss, to the end of isolating stimulation in the mouth. But we do not shut our bloody eyes when we read a poem; we’d miss out completely. Mr. cummings, are you telling us that all your trippy haphazard sprinkling of punctuation on the page--is “wholly” irrelevant?
It seems that Mr. cummings and his adolescent acolytes are quite thoroughly convinced that as Billy Joel says, “it’s all about soul.” Poetry, to them, is “met him pike hoses:” the transmigration of souls. We need not consider the vessels it is carried in; the soul will make its own way. This is such a pleasant fancy it seems a pity to shatter it. But these are the duties our office dictates.
When we kiss, we are not inhaling one another’s soul. Frankly, that’s just eerie (like something out of the Princess Bride). We are communing physically. The rootin’-tootin’ NeoRomantics would say that the body is a prison, and poetry is the soul pouring forth from the mouth because that is the only escape route it has. More likely, poetry borne of such philosophy tends to pour from another, more nether, orifice. The body is the point of the kiss: as a voice teacher would say (very quickly), the teeth, the lips, the tip of the tongue. In kissing, as in poetry, “form is content, content is form.” Because it it’s not about how we kiss, it’s about how we use our tongues. And it’s not about how we write a poem, it’s about how we use our tongues. After all, “kiss” is just our word for a specific type of lingual manoeuvre, the same way “poem” is the name we’ve given to a specific type of linguistic manoeuvre. It is purely by chance that we have a word for the encounter of two mouths, but not for the encounter, say, of two armpits. Having a name does not automatically sanctify a thing. In fact, it does precisely the opposite: it limits it. A nameless thing is the holiest thing of all, because no one can say what it is not. We must do away with the idea of “the Poem.” It does greater injury to poetry than any pillaging horde of Philistines or publishers ever can. Because it is simply the text. Not even the text--the object. The achievement before us.
One is indeed sorely tempted to unsheathe Derrida and dismember cummings with accusations of Logocentrism, but we doubt the point wants for belaboring, and furthermore, it would be little more than a regrettable exercise in sciolism. So we move on.
There will always be the adolescent conviction that formal analysis on both ends (poet and reader) quite destroys the beauty of a poem. That, we suppose, would be a fair assessment if we were for a moment convinced that poetry is about beauty and emotion, and there end. For this seems the chiefest among Mr. cummings’s thoughtcrimes: that poetry is just a kiss. That it should only be considered on the sensual plane. If we have read him right, this is hardly forgivable. A poem is part kiss, part conversation. This is why we do not refer to the words in the poem as the author’s, but the “speaker’s.” We are engaged in conversation, not with the poet, but with his poem. There, there is exchange. The poet, as Joyce says, should remain “invisible...paring his fingernails.” He recuses himself altogether from his poem, for
“the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the
mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its
material.”
There is very flatly no feeling in a poem save that which the reader himself brings to it. Anyone who is, in this age, fool enough to persist in believing poetry to be a connection between the author and reader, must be rather a firm believer in telepathy, too. Because that isn’t poetry. That’s the Vulcan bloody mind-meld. In terms of feeling, all a poet can do is present situations carefully designed to produce not just a sensation, but a reaction in the reader. To imagine a whole as being anything more than the sum of its parts is sadly, pathetically Romantic. It is the third dimension that only the reader brings to the poem that lifts it up off the page. Nauseous as it may be, there is some truth to MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica:” “A poem should not mean/But be.” “As the moon climbs,” just let the reader make of it whatever he damn well pleases. But let us remember, finally, that emotion, wherever its provenance, is not all in poetry. Ideas are also somewhat worthy of consideration, are they not?
Why is it that we tend to reduce novels to their ideological structure, and analyze the latter as though that were the sole purpose of reading them? Right--because it is. Because fiction is our way of representing reality. Fiction is the only way to write out reality; theory is just that: theory. But it is one of the queer idiocies of our age that while we quite happily read novels for their ideas, we at the same time restrict our reading of poetry to marveling at the simple fact of its existence. Novels, poems: not much difference. Whose idea was it to robe the poem in this mantle of fragile purity? There is one art, and only one art, that can even think of claiming wisps of ineffability, and for that, refer to the epigraph. When did language, the fundamental instrument of cognition, the sine qua non of the intellect, become ineffable? Is not the very point of language to be effable? It’s just information arranged on a page. It’s very simple: for all the glory we heap upon it, for all the panegyrics, for all the mystique, poetry is not now, nor has it ever been, anything more than language. And there lies its beauty. When we accept these are words enchanting us, when we accept that it is a body kissing us, then, finally, we see the point of the exercise: that these things are not visions or images. They are not the undercooked whimsies of absinthe-addled rhymesters. These things--the delicacy of the word Delicate. The twine of tongues--are unmistakeably, ineluctably, finally real.
