Inadequate memory and the adequate imagination

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2003 by Reeve, F D

You can rub words against words until you're blue in the face, getting neither light nor heat. In the end it is imperative to take on what is out there. There is no poetry on museum walls, only trophies. The single recourse is to plunge struggling into the totality of whatever life this is we live in-not play safe by framing bits of local color, or settling like lint into deep dark psycho-emotional pockets. This is not a matter of program, programs are an issue of time and place, but of attitude.

-James Scully, from "Culture War"

The first step in actualizing the attitude is to reconstruct the past not as a chronological sequence but as a series of expanding waves: as the rings enlarge, the imagination dominates until its adequacy generates the imagery. From a set of fond pictures of a past, or lost, time we are encircled by a new, demanding, but plausible consciousness:

In the kitchen, the apples mound in a white bowl, duchess apples on an oak table beside the window, where tomatoes from a garden shine in the sun. How necessary their forms are, as if their color could spill and wash down the cottage panes like something extruded, a recollection of joy, or joy itself. Let us eat thin slices, with garlic pressed upon them, and sweet vinegar. In time, I'll wake to morning snow on roofs and lawns, and when ice-out comes, to the cold pond. But why should I remember ripeness gone, or so helplessly dazzle, memories spread across a table like stamps from foreign countries, colorful and strange?

I have attended promenade concerts where thousands of people join in when an anthem strikes up, listeners who sing and cheer, and I know that during a solar eclipse millions of people in our hemisphere stand on street corners and hold sheets of blank paper, on which to read the shadow as it passes over them. So in our towns let us stand on porches or before fast-food counters, let us assemble at the designated hour, and call out the lines of a poet who lives among us, raising our voices with such a rush of air that clouds draw their shadows over the mountain with the semblance of serenity and great change.

-Jay Meek, from "Haystack"

From the point of view of adequacy, it makes no difference whether we have before us a prose poem or rhymed verse. Any example is sufficient demonstration of the principles for judging any other. Subject, theme, form, diction, specifics vary as the creative patterns take shape, but time and again we find that the prevailing, harmonizing principles express the aptness of part to whole and of whole to context:

"Damn it," McGrath once quipped to a table of aestheticians, "we don't need poems that are beautiful, we need poems that are useful, and if you can't write one that's useful, then steal one!"

How one restores vitality-hence, credibility-to the rag doll of a language left by the ads is the poet's job of work. Once upon a time, Pindar made a living by writing poems to celebrate athletic victors. Today manufacturers, promoters, ad men, photographers, reporters all make a living by wrapping the victors in shoes, shirts, socks, trousers, jackets, sport cars, cereals, vitamins, real estate, cruises, video games, lawn chairs, juices-items both ordinary and quasi-exotic through which, by laying out a credit card number, a consumer can identify with the sport hero. And the heroes of the once-Olympic games, enriched by posing for the ads, remain identified with the merchandise they sell. They themselves become merchandise, bought and sold by the owners and the ad-men, and the games that once represented achievement become the foci of marketing strategies and capital investment. Most of the competitors are professionals, not amateurs. The selling of the games has replaced sportsmanship just as the marketing of poetry has replaced poetry, and verbal collages, as novelties, substitute for poetic innovation.