The Fascinated Beast - Critical Essay

Literary Review, Fall, 2000 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Years ago I saw a painting that depicted a monk at his desk writing while a lion stands on its hind legs against the chairback to peer over the monk's shoulder, eyes wide with fascination at the mysterious activity of quill on page. I do not remember where I saw this or what it was from, other than that the lion had that medieval look of inaccuracy--perhaps not many painters had actually seen a lion then. What I particularly liked about the picture was that it represented not a fascination merely with a text, but with the process of creating a text, the art, the act, and the actor.

When it comes to poetry, this rough beast of a fiction writer identifies with that lion. Poetry is the mystery--so concise, musical or fiat, indirect, taking such leaps, assuming such distances, by turns so elusive and overpowering, brilliant and opaque. My own few and very meager successes writing poems have been matters of sheer chance; the poem just happens and if I try to monkey with it, it tends to unhappen again. I am awed by the craft of the poet which seems to me so much more intricate and technical than the craft of fiction.

Fiction writers, too, have their little arsenals of terms and tricks, but we are spared engagement with that great warehouse of poetical technique--the iambs and trochees, tetrameters, trimeters, dimeters, anapests and dactyls, sprung rhythms, terza rima, amphibrachs, bobs, enjambment and end-stopping, feminine and masculine endings, pararhymes, pentameter, hexameter, ottava rima, couplets, quatrains, quintains, sextains, and sonnets with their octaves, sestets and voltas, sestinas and villanelles, Skeletonics, spondees, Horatian stanzas, metaphors subtractive, reversed, mixed or telescoped, and conceits Petrarchian or metaphysical. It is a little like observing the gleaming racks of tools in a dentist's office--how does he or she ever know which one to choose and when?

Of course, a poem is so much more than the sum of its techniques. Some poets dislike discussing their work. In the film Il Postino made from the novel by Antonio Skarmeta, the character based on Pablo Neruda says to Mario, the postman, who yearns desperately for a clue to the meaning of one of the master's poems, "When you explain a poem it becomes banal."

A few of the poets I approached for this anthology responded in much the same way to my request for them to produce an essay that might help give the reader insight into the process that resulted in their poem. John Updike said, "I am pleased to be asked to do something as a poet but rather distrust these essays by poets on what a poem means, or should mean, or meant to them. Better the poem speaks to the reader, not the poet." However, he did kindly provide a sonnet with four earlier versions of it and a brief commentary to help guide the reader through the drafts. Neither did Charles Simic or Albert Goldbarth wish to explain the process. What has this to do with "the proper power and beckon of someone's poem?" Albert Goldbarth asked. I don't know. But even the explanations provided by Messrs. Updike, Goldbarth, and Simic of why they did not wish to explain are, I think, useful to the reader seeking a glimpse into the process.

After all, statements by poets on the art of poetry have always helped readers to come closer to the poems, even if the statement concerns the impossibility of comprehension, or necessity of incomprehension. I think of Keats's negative capability, how the poet must be "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Yet the fact of that statement provides clarity and strength to face the uncertainty.

So, too, Rilke's statement on the futility of criticism paradoxically helps expand the critical faculty: "With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences the life of which, while ours passes away, endures."

When I was in my early twenties I was desperate as Mario for assistance in finding my way into a deeper understanding of the literature that was so important to me. It was then I learned of the existence of a book by John Ciardi entitled How Does a Poem Mean? Unaware that it was out of print, I went from bookshop to bookshop looking for it, and I recall how amused some of the shop clerks were when I asked for it. "How does a poem mean?" one or two asked me in return--as though it were a patently ludicrous title or question.

But the book proved invaluable to me, particularly so I think because it contained a poet's reflections on an approach to poetry rather than an academic's--not an outsider looking in, but an insider reaching out.

Ciardi's book was helpful, but I wanted more, and still do. I do know the pleasure of struggling on my own with a poem to experience it, have enjoyed assisting students and my own children, too, in their studies to equip themselves for that struggle by showing them, for what it is worth, what I have learned over the years of confrontational technique with a text.