September 3rd, 2011
Link • Essays, Tributes • Leave a Comment
Maryhelen Snyder
THE ART OFWAITING:
THE PARALLELS OF POETRY AND THERAPY
O you and me at last, and us two only!
—Walt Whitman
There are only the two of us. The poet and the page. The therapist and the client. These are the central creative activities of my life. And each is an intimate experience that I and others have compared to that of being a midwife. Because the fact is that the primary satisfaction lies in waiting. And then, as a poem or a person emerges, in being receptive, and sometimes astounded.
Neuroscience is daily revealing more about the not-yet-formulated, not-yet-materialized energy of the brain in repose, an energy virtually infinite and vastly more intense than the motor activity of putting language on paper or applying language to therapy. Formulated energy springs from the chaos of possibility. I wait and I trust: trust the muse to tell me what she is wanting to sing, and the client to tell me what is alive in her in this moment.
* * *
Sometimes a client has failed to notice that I am present—or I have failed to notice it myself! We slip into something that is simply a repetition of already thought thoughts, already assumed problems, already stale ways of seeing each other (or, rather, of not seeing). If I notice that I am bored or restless, anxious or discouraged, my task is to be attentive to my mind, to stop with my pen in mid-air so to speak, or stop a therapy session in midsentence. If my client is boring me, then I am boring myself. I might say: Wait, let’s take a moment to notice I’m here, you are there. Two human beings. We matter to each other.
Something shifts. Perhaps we are quiet together, perhaps we take time to breathe, perhaps my client takes time, with my guidance, to experience this moment in his body, in the sights and sounds around us, in his current feelings and thoughts, in our relationship, to discover what wants to be said now. This is a parallel process to the one Lucille Clifton often described as discovering “what the poem wants to say.” What is emergent from the latent energy of the embodied and relational mind, from what neurobiologist and Mindsight author Daniel Siegel describes as the “open ended plane of possibility.”
What is the mysterious “energy” that allows every aspect of the mind to come into play? As though the two hemispheres and the frontal cortex stretching back in evolution to its origins, and all the stuff of existence that makes each self a self-in-world, and the deep “light” within that no-one can name, suddenly got switched to on? Whatever it is, apparently the capacity to surrender to the creative intelligence available to consciousness exists in all of us. Sometimes “we” intend it, sometimes it takes us by surprise without conscious intention.
I watched a documentary on the life of Whitman in which the narrator points to a manuscript revealing the very beginnings of the writing of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s handwriting suddenly changes. He is become new. Magical and musical language and the truth of experience is available to him as though from a bottomless well.
As therapist and poet, I have done my homework. For some 60 years of my thus-far life, I have been studying my two primary crafts. I have the degrees, the certificates, the licenses, the publications—and I do believe that much of this training and this almost daily practice, have made some difference. But the biggest difference resides in my openness to the shift to a new beginning.
* * *
The word poem comes from the Greek poien, to make or construct. Although my poem can be created within a wide range of structures, I remain conscious, as poet, of each part within the whole, as well as of the whole.
Sometimes I choose my container before embarking. Certainly, in the case of therapy, I have chosen that the session will last a certain amount of time and take place in a certain location. Beyond this, I let the form emerge almost entirely from the co-created meanings that emerge in the therapeutic dialogue. Sometimes I choose to work within a particular structure, as a poet might choose the sonnet form before beginning, or part way through the poem. In my own case, I attempt to never be more committed to the container than to the ever-emergent meaning and “music.” The moment is always guiding me; at least, this is what I strive for.
One structure that has come to define my work as a therapist is that of “becoming the other.” This is a form of empathic listening in which I quite literally enter the “lifeworld” of a client by speaking as if I am that client. We don’t understand the neurology of what makes this possible, but Martin Buber found the best language I have discovered to date. He writes of the “bold step” involved in taking the consciousness within another human being into our own. He says that this step requires “the deepest stirring of our own being.” He expressed to Carl Rogers, in a recorded dialogue, his belief that empathy is not an accurate enough word to describe this possibility, that a preferred word is inclusion.
I have a rather strict structure for using this method, a structure I can teach to couples and other therapists in the same way I can teach the form of the villanelle to students of poetry, step by step with examples and practice. But with therapy, as with the poem, following the form will not be
enough.
In one of my favorite sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of “Chaos” trapped in a poem:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
These lines have precise parallels to the therapeutic relationship and to the client’s struggle with internal chaos. Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach had a rigorous, consistent, and open-ended form to which I can re-call myself when I wander away (and permit the client to wander away) from the flow of creative intelligence that is available when we are listening for it.
What has been called “aesthetic knowing” or “poetic intelligence” is different in nature from reasoned knowing. It informs both poetry and therapy, this in the activity of “becoming the other.” Sometimes I do this silently—in my own mind—as I listen. I attune to the body language and to the implicit meanings. I exercise the miracle of intuition. Einstein tells us that he did not arrive at the theory of relativity with his rational mind. Something else, something inexpressible and inexplicable, happened.
In a play, entitled Explain This Moment, that is likely no longer in print, Harry Willson created this opening scene: A grandfather is dying in the next room (off-stage). His daughter and young grandson are front stage. The boy asks his mother to explain death. She tells him that some things can’t be explained. He looks at her disbelieving, and insists that she can make sense out of death, that everything can be explained. She kneels down in front of him, takes his shoulders between her hands, and looks intently into his face. “All right, then,” she says, “Explain this moment.” I remember a stillness in the audience as we all felt the impossibility of that.
When I consciously choose to enter the space of my poetic intelligence about the other, I say what I did not know I knew about their lived experience. The client often responds with words like these: “How did you know that! I feel exactly what you expressed—but I didn’t know I felt it until you said it. It’s as though two of us existed in my one mind.”
And the truth is that I don’t know how I knew it (as we often don’t know where the clear insight and language of a poem comes from). Nor did I consciously know I knew it until I said it. And I’m not always right, so I quickly self-correct if what I say doesn’t resonate as true for the client. I have no concept of “resistance” in the vocabulary of my work as a therapist. My attunement either fits or it doesn’t.
* * *
There comes a moment (often many moments) in virtually every therapy session and certainly in the creation of any poem when I realize that I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going.
Perhaps relevantly, my mind’s heart just went to the battlefields on which American soldiers currently risk and lose their lives and the lives of our so-called enemy. So I will give space to this flight of my mind away from the apparent subject of this essay. It is perhaps most on the battlefield that we don’t know what we’re doing, where we need to be forgiven because we know not what we do. But it is also on the battlefield that we are taught to act quickly and forge ahead. It is not a moment when we can stand in the stillness of not knowing, not knowing why I am dropping this bomb, killing this man who is likely as young and brave and terrified as myself, destroying this home and family and child, murdering people I would likely love if I knew them. We must act, and act irreversibly. In this respect, the therapist’s role seems more dangerous than the poet’s. In the irreversible present moment, she has the power to allow herself to be seen as an expert, to pathologize, diagnose, medicate or at least recommend medication, hospitalize, intensify self-doubt, hatred and despair. And likewise, she has the expert’s power to encourage, to keep families at least temporarily intact, to heal internalized trauma. She is asked, even begged, to know.
In the therapy session, however, as in the poem, we can and must stand at least for awhile in not knowing. We cannot allow urgency, necessity, or habit to guide us. We must be capable, as Keats’ often quoted letter to his brother reminds us, of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
This concept of opening space wide for not knowing allows something to happen that is contrary to all our pedagogy and up-bringing and to cultural discourses worldwide. It is no wonder that the oracle at Delphi was amazed by Socrates. How did he achieve this wisdom of knowing that he did not know? My favorite therapists and philosophers and poets have stood in this space. Quakers have no creeds or beliefs. They perceive the “inward light” as either an actual lived experience, or not. They perceive Jesus as one who experienced the “Father” (not a gendered word in Aramaic) in himself and in us. Faith, then, becomes a commitment to such experience, a willingness to trust it. This awareness is at the heart of all so-called religious experience, but often gets lost in the rigidities of institutions and rituals and cultural discourse.
Again, we can’t explain this with our rational minds. What does it mean for a poem or a human being to embrace nothingness, emptiness, and notknowing? The poet Rumi wrote, “Way out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” These words are widely quoted because we know what they mean experientially without being able to explain them any more clearly than in poetic language. The didactic poem and the didactic therapist may be momentarily reassuring—but we require the mystery. We do not want these lines from famous poems to be explained or turned into the prose of interpretation; they can’t be.
* * *
The poet makes of experience a metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, “to carry beyond.” This metaphorical experience of carrying, or being carried, beyond the event itself, to its hidden and potential meaning is the impetus and the result of the creative acts of poetry and therapy.
A powerful “mystical” experience in my own life occurred several weeks after my older son almost died of a grand mal seizure that left him not breathing, and then unconscious for close to an hour. I was terrified. One day, with a friend, I was exploring my fear, entering it as fully as I knew how, when these words “came” to me fully formulated and not rationally believable: We live in an absolutely perfect universe, and the whole thrust of existence is to participate in that already existing perfection. I could not accept this with my rational mind—but the words seemed to literally push against my locked voice and cry themselves out. And when I said them, over and over and over, they felt right to me—and I cried with the release of fear
and grief.
The etymology of the word perfect reveals that it means made thorough, through and through. It is not a static end point; it is a context, an ever-repeated origin for the infinite nature of creation. The poet and the therapist, alive in the movement-in-relation that is our actual experience, allow our love affair with the world to step forward, not in spite of the mundane or the tragic, not in spite of failure and betrayal and loss, but with all of it in the embrace of radiant consciousness.
* * *
A final word about the nature of this creative energy. I drove down a street in my neighborhood many years ago listening to an audio tape of a talk given by Krishnamurti. He was describing the difference between effort and energy, how energy comes to us most often when we give up all effort. A man had come to Krishnamurti because he was suffering with the knowledge that he had not really loved his now deceased wife. Krishnamurti simply invited him (them) to sit quietly with the fact of that. At a certain moment in this practice of stillness and waiting, the man felt an “enormous energy” arising out of the darkness of his experience, and “that,” said Krishnamurti, “was love.”
__________
Maryhelen Snyder is a psychotherapist and writer living in northern Virginia. Her poems and essays have appeared or will appear in numerous literary journals, including, most recently, The Gettysburg Review, Sojourners, and Passager. She has published two books of poetry and a memoir, No Hole in the Flame (Wildflower Press, 2008). Her essay on the work of Emily Dickinson, “Guarding Master’s Head,” appeared in last winter’s issue of Poet Lore.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
June 18th, 2011
Link • Essays, Tributes • Leave a Comment
Richard Brostoff
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN POETRY AND PSYCHOLOGY
Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces an inversion of our conventional beliefs: “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.” What poetry may refer to as the abyss, our wilderness or wild, psychology more likely refers to as the unconscious. Poetry offers psychology its own perspective on the reaches of this realm, a unique repository not only of energy, but also of imagery, metaphor, paradox, inversion, contradiction, and often enough, beauty. Rather than a territory to be conquered, poetry valorizes and embraces the resources of the unconscious; it celebrates rather than subdues its creative genius. The poem invites our fascinated commerce with our deep world beneath the world; it invites us to linger in the sensory experience of its inhabiting. Stay awhile, it says.
Often enough, having entered an underworld, the poem suggests: you were here once, lived here, knew this, and the sense of discovery is a bit like walking into that odd, half-ruined city below the city in Rome—sitting there all the time waiting to be recovered, entered and explored in all its strangeness. At other times our underground world opens like a brief visitation. As Jane Hirshfield has written: “There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing./ Through them/ the belled herds travel at will,/ long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.” (Hirshfield, 3)
The psychological view comes to us from Freud, who believed the unconscious was a realm to be journeyed to, conquered and tamed. If Freud’s early ambition was to be a military general, he found, ironically, not an external front but an internal frontier to be subdued. For Freud, the domain of aggressive and libidinal impulses was largely instinctual, and unconscious energies were, at best, to be sublimated. If psychoanalysis’ methods allowed entrance to this unseen world, it was not to linger and bring back its wisdom, but, through insight, to make conscious and therefore colonize its foreignness and potentially dangerous energy: “the therapeutic effort of psycho-analysis…is to strengthen the ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organization so that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall be ego.” (Freud, 80) Freud’s extraordinary discovery of an alternate, secret world inside each of us is often underappreciated, the idea having become integrated into our cultural ideology. Yet, while disturbances of the psyche, a kind of overflow of the “id,” can lead to dis-ease, excess or psychosis, Freud may have nonetheless undervalued the unique resources of the void or abyss, of chaos, of strangeness itself.
Of course the terrain of poetry is not one of unstructured wilderness; it insists, much like psychology, on the ordering, structuring principle of craft (in some ways analogous to the ego or analyst), which holds, with form, in dynamic tension the disorder and storm force of the abyss. In the vessel of language, irreducible metaphor and structure, poetry holds in suspension contradiction and paradox, our conflicts and wild energies; it achieves a dynamic balance between the visible and invisible worlds, surface and depth, valorizing neither at the expense of the other.
On the surface of things, of course, the mediating presence of language is the essential medium of psychotherapy as well as poetry. If one wants to understand the life of another realm, another country, and communicate with those who live there, one must become conversant in their language. Poetry offers a less abstract, more sensory, Anglo-Saxon directness—a language of the body, as opposed to a more conceptual, Latinate language. At worst, the intellectual language of psychoanalysis serves as an obstacle course to feeling. When I return to my psychotherapy office in the afternoon, after writing a poem in the morning, my mind is more fluent and at ease with trope. As is true for our dream life, image and metaphor suggest an older, primal means of understanding and representing the world, a language in themselves. The practice of writing facilitates the metaphormaking facility of imagination (that sixth sense, as Emerson suggested), which has its roots planted in the unconscious. Like a traveler in a foreign country, one becomes immersed in its odd expressions and syntax, conversant with the illogical logic of its ways, entranced with its strange linguistic fauna and flora. Falling into the rabbit hole of imagination, into my shadow world certain mornings, warms up my ability to speak the dialect of the place, and therefore aids me as a therapist in speaking more directly to another’s wilderness, to the precincts of the heart. It aids in piercing the elaborate web of resistances and defenses on the borders of the deep life, in piercing the veil of our everyday lives.
Still, poetry is entranced not only with the strangeness and signification of our deep life’s language, but with the materiality of verbal surfaces, texture and tone, sonic life—the music of its making. I believe the psychologist is enlivened, steadied in his or her joint journey with a client by this simultaneous appreciation for the surface—the “manifest content” of the patient’s associations as well as its “latent content,” to use the language Freud used to discuss the interpretation of dreams. Close attention to verbal construction, to rhythm and the orchestrations of sound—to the aesthetic surfaces of a patient’s “productions”—energizes the journey, and, often enough, offers a portal to the interiors. Curiosity, deep attention, appreciation for the forms of our expressions—these are crucial values of the poet no less than the therapist. Fascination with the surface draws us in, invites us to “know the world more magnificently,” as Jane Hirshfield has said of poetry, and is the hook that draws us into depth.
Yet if a fascination with “surfaces” remains an energizing value of poetry, and a potential source of illumination for psychology, no less important is poetry’s comfort with uncertainty. Poetry, like the unconscious, is a domain of “ands” rather than “ors,” tolerates and even valorizes contradiction, drift and counter drift; it multiplies its meanings, embraces difference, remains comfortable with its elusiveness, its mystery. “Do I contradict myself, very well, then I contradict myself,” as Whitman wrote. How much room there is for multiple truths, for the slipperiness of truth, its fragmentary nature, its penchant toward inversion. Poetry is as likely to gesture toward or deconstruct its own assertions as to finally insist on them. Psychology interprets; poetry leans into its truths. It “tells it slant,” as Emily Dickinson said. Poetry is less likely to offer an overarching interpretation of its images and associations. The poet surrenders to his or her journey of discovery, without restless hankering after final truths; he practices, as Keats called it, “negative capability.” Poetry therefore keeps one humble as a therapist, suspicious of too much didacticism, definitive or final truth—suspicious of the one who, finally, knows. It’s not that the therapist or analyst wants to deconstruct him or herself, or fail to offer guidance and interpretation, or surrender the authority at best earned through study and experience, but rather to be wary, and to allow some of the values of poetry to penetrate the inevitable fault lines of his or her psychological and conceptual terrain.
One central aspect of that psychotherapeutic terrain and its framework remains Freud’s suggestion that the therapist be a kind of blank slate onto which the patient might project pieces of him or herself or his or her past. Analysts have therefore traditionally attempted to remain reasonably silent. Elsewhere Freud advises the analyst to have the objectivity and distance of a surgeon. The risk is in becoming absent, a kind of absentee landlord of the patient’s psychic real estate. When I attended my first analytic conference in medical school in the late seventies, I was surprised to find the central discovery of several papers presented that afternoon was that the analyst’s real presence mattered, that there were in fact two people in the room.
Poetry has served as a kind of model for me in this regard, because one of its central impulses is toward presence: it seeks to embody itself in the moment of its activation as it is read, to embody and unfold itself in voice, breath, and rhythm, and in the particularity of the world. Rather than beginning with an overarching interpretive frame as psychology does, poetry begins in specificity. It feeds the phenomenal world through the eye of its needle, takes up residence, and seeks to waken itself. While it searches out “insight” as well, it does so as a flowering on the taproot and stalk of its inhabiting presence. Poetry reminds me to lean into my inhabiting presence as a therapist, as well as to keep building toward understanding from the ground up, from specificity, from “the thing itself ” as Williams said; it reminds me not to be overly attached to what Nietzsche calls a “reification” of our ideas and interpretive frame. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” the therapeutic hour, like the poem, “must ride on its own melting,” as Frost would have it, finding its own pathway and “law” as it goes.
Of course one might equally well outline the multiple ways psychology illuminates, even nurtures the poet and the poem. Certainly, psychology’s conceptual framework and methods, its lens, can be extraordinarily helpful in interpreting image and metaphor, the “associations” of an early draft, and therefore help the author find a poem’s “focus.” It can be terrifically helpful for writer’s block, or helping the poem “come out,” to say all it needs to say, or to understand and overcome, or perhaps embrace its resistances, or to understand the poem’s “transference” to an audience. But I mean only to be suggestive here. These ideas are for another essay.
A larger question remains: To what extent can poetry and psychotherapy mutually illuminate the shadows of the other? In a dialogue between poet and psychologist, how often might one attempt to dominate or colonize the conceptual or artistic domain of the other, or is it possible for each to engage in mutual, concentrated listening, allowing the brightness of the other to expand the realm of his or her awareness? What remains critical is to find a mutually empowering manner of relating in which neither dominates, but nudges one another toward their distinct, sometimes mysterious selves. At best they might throw one another into relief, clarify their respective resources, their particular “genius.” Science has taught us when two ecosystems meet and overlap, land and ocean for instance, sudden fresh pockets of life appear, new niches where life might be nurtured. Similarly, when two disciplines meet, such as poetry and psychology, one might hope they settle into a long-lasting relationship in which the vital contribution of each creates new forms of understanding, as well as the rich unfolding of the other.
__________
WORKS CITED
Hirshfield, Jane. “The Envoy,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (Perennial, 2002).
Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture 31,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of SigmundFreud (Hogarth Press, 1932).
__________
Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist and has worked in the mental health field for over 25 years. He studied literature at Bennington College and Brandeis, and medicine at Duke and Harvard. His literary work has appeared in Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, Confrontation, Permafrost, Wisconsin Review, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. His chapbook, Momentum, was published by La Vita Poetica. In 2000, Brostoff was awarded the grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, and in 2003 was editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award. He also received an international publication award from the Atlanta Review and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize in 2010.
–from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
June 4th, 2010
Link • Essays, Tributes • Leave a Comment
T. S. Davis
THE RECRUDESCENCE OF THE MUSE: ONE POET’S JOURNEY
Freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against
the background of an artificial limitation.
—T. S. Eliot
Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and
muthafucking rhyme.
—George Clinton
I went through graduate school in poetry under the workshop paradigm that came to dominance in the 1960s as a result of professors who had rejected formal verse for free verse in their own writing. The thinking was that there was no need to teach the outdated metrical rules, forms, and techniques of traditional poetry because rhyme and meter had been replaced universally by free verse. In many cases, this resulted in an abdication of teaching altogether and the professor became simply a workshop facilitator for the many student voices who critiqued each other’s work. This was a qualitative change in the study of prosody which is the study of rhythm, rhyme, meter, stress, and language in poetry. For the first time, poets were being trained to be poets without being taught the traditional techniques of writing poetry. I could understand the teaching of the techniques of free verse in place of rhyme and meter, but free verse prosody itself seemed to be in its exuberant infancy, and still not well defined, despite 100 years of Whitman’s progeny. So no system of versification, whether traditional or modern, was taught. The only prosody I learned was that of my fellow graduate students as we sat around and talked about our poems and how to write them. For two decades afterwards, by default, I wrote free verse poetry pretty much exclusively.
Except that I also wrote songs and was the singer for several rock bands. As I brought my poetry skills to bear on my lyrics, the use of meter and rhyme in my songs began to influence my poetry. Soon, even without music, I found myself counting measures and stresses and enjoying a newfound strength in the implosive power of a more formal prosodic structure. The line between my poems and songs began to blur as more frequently I took poems and adapted them to rhyming lyrics.
I remember looking at one of my older poems one day. It had been written back in the graduate school workshop almost twenty years before. Out of habit, I scanned the unrhymed lines to determine the rhythm pattern. To my surprise and revelation, I had written a perfect iambic pentameter blank verse poem at a time when I prided myself as a rebel against convention. Iambic pentameter is a line of ten syllables with the rhythmic stress on every other syllable, for a total of five stresses or beats per line.
Although there are many other rhythm patterns, iambic pentameter poetry constitutes the overwhelming majority of all English poetry written prior to the twentieth century. The fact that I could unconsciously but flawlessly write an entire poem using that rhythm made me think that somehow it was not just an artificial construction but one of the natural and fundamental rhythms of the English language, maybe even its heartbeat. Yet as a poet, I was ignorant of how to consciously manipulate it, or any of the other accoutrements of traditional prosody, to my own ends. At that moment, I knew this had to change if I were to grow as a poet. I could not afford to ignore what had been so painstakingly learned and perfected by generations of poets before me. To figure out where poetry was going, I felt I had to know where it was coming from. Or as Eliot put it, “There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.”
That was the day I started teaching myself the prosody that had its antecedents in old Anglo-Saxon—the language modern English grew out of—the prosody that was born in Chaucer, and then refined through Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, and countless others. I realized I had accepted the benefits of the new without bothering to learn the lessons of the old.
At the same time, in the late 1980s, I was also beginning to listen to hip hop under the influence of my young nephew, who was still in high school, and had made it his goal to open his old rocker uncle’s ears to the new sound by sending tape after tape of his favorite groups. I was often amazed. Present were many of the elements of free verse prosody wedded to heavily cadenced rhyme: vocal presence or persona, wordplay, the specificity of vocabulary first engineered by Whitman, speed and breath control, the most personal of details jumbled with broad political swipes, braggadocio and humor, repetition and litany, all tied together with heavy meter and rhyme.
I started scanning the lyric sheets from Public Enemy and other groups. There were lots of metrically irregular lines, but iambic pentameter and tetrameter (four beats per line) tended to predominate. The traditional metrical “rules” were broken wide open, such as the prohibition against rhyming unstressed or weak syllables. In fact, what was considered frivolous and even clownish in traditional rhyming was the mark of highest skill in hip hop—the rhyming of words with multiple syllables or all the syllables of a multi-syllabic word being rhymed with a run of shorter words. Several slant or off rhymes could be used to “evolve” a rhyme into a completely different rhyming sound in the course of several lines. Enunciation could be exaggerated to make assonant and consonant rhymes prominent. These last two skills are what make Eminem such an amazing rapper, for instance. Traditional prosody tries to hide end rhyme with enjambment, making sure the sentence does not end with a rhyming word at the end of a line, but instead wraps into the next line. This hides the sound of the end rhyme in the middle of the sentence. But in hip hop prosody, the rhyme is proudly emphasized. In fact, overwhelming the listener with a plethora of rhyming sounds is much of the point in hip hop.
How ironic that as free verse prevailed from mid-century onward, it took a group of artists from outside the academy, way outside, from America’s black ghettoes, to revolutionize poetic prosody irrevocably, despite their lack of acknowledgement from the academy even today. I think the academy preferred to set up the more pedantic of the New Formalists as a less dangerous paper tiger to argue against. At least the New Formalists flattered the academy by desiring recognition from it. But doctrinaire fascination with traditional technique, combined with contempt for Modernism, made the New Formalists an easier target to be labeled reactionary, thus discrediting their return to form.
So the true innovators in the resurgence of formalism were the rappers who embraced the power of rhythm and rhyme but radically transformed both to meet the needs of their content, breaking and making rules as they went. Being outside the academy, the full impact of their influence has yet to be felt. But it eventually will be, in the same way, for instance, that Bob Dylan and John Lennon tangentially influenced an earlier generation of poets. The impact has already been fully felt among younger poets, slam poets, and performance poets in general who eagerly use the full toolbox of techniques available to them including meter and rhyme. One prominent example of this new type of poet who commands respect in hip hop and academic circles is Saul Williams.
Ironically, some in the academy complain that this formalism among rappers and young performance poets has occurred without conscious awareness or appreciation of traditional English prosody. They may have a point. But they can’t have it both ways. As guardians of the canon, they hid the keys to the toolbox and then complained that the keys were stolen.
T. S. Eliot himself had predicted that the free verse experiments of Modernism would eventually lead poets back to formalism. He saw the deviation from traditional prosody as a necessary corrective, as a “contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.” Presumably, the same fate of monotony would eventually befall free verse itself without an infusion of formalism for contrast. Eliot explains himself best in his essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” from which the quotes above are taken. But he demonstrates his concept of contrasting fixity with flux most demonstrably in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
A couple of years ago, I was asked back to my undergraduate alma mater for a poetry reading and to sit in on a class taught by my old mentor, the poet Ron Bayes. Ron is an excellent teacher. He is a Modernist, an Imagist, a Pound scholar, and completely eclectic in his aesthetic tastes. What little I knew about formalism before graduate school I had learned from him as an undergraduate when he had made me write in all the major forms, much to my grumbling and dislike at the time.
The class was discussing “Prufrock” that day and I was expected to provide them with some insight into the master. I had dusted off my slim volume of Eliot in preparation and reread the poem for the hundredth time. But since the last time I had read it, I had written about 75 Shakespearian sonnets. A sonnet is typically a fourteen line poem of iambic pentameter meter with a strict end rhyming pattern. The type of sonnet written by Shakespeare always ends with a rhyming couplet. So my eye was trained to take in fourteen lines at a gulp. My mouth dropped open as I read the first stanza, composed of twelve lines, followed by a space, and then the famous rhyming couplet, “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo,” for a total of fourteen lines.
This was something I had read many times, but never really recognized for what it is. Eliot opened “Prufrock” with an embedded sonnet! Can this really be, I thought? I scanned ahead. The next time the famous couplet appears in the poem, it’s also preceded by a discrete stanza of twelve lines. Quickly I looked back to the beginning sequence to scan the meter. Four beats, five beats, six beats, three beats per line, and so on, irregular regularity, the way some heartbeats are classified. Taking into account slant rhyme and off rhyme, I scanned the sonnets this way. The first I artificially broke into lines of three, tercets, to make the rhyme structure more obvious: AAB CCB BDD EFF GG. For the second I used the traditional quatrain, lines of four, to the same purpose: ABCA BDCD EFFE GG. From these scansions, it was clear to me that Eliot fully knew what he was doing. Continuing to read through, I found other remnants of form, pieces of potential sonnets, but never again complete fourteen line poems.
I pointed all this out to the class, using a chalk board to demonstrate, letting them sound out the beats and rhymes. It seemed to be a revelation to them as well. I suggested that this poem was the object lesson of the place Eliot occupied in poetry. He relied heavily on forms, but shattered them for contrast, for fluidity, for the sake of the poem rising out of the ruins of what had gone before. I suggested the class look at the poem structurally as a tightly controlled explosion of form to counter the prevailing view that Eliot wrote outside of form, or formlessly. I suggested his work echoed the cubism of Picasso, built upon and growing out of the representation that preceded it, but deconstructing it, taking it apart and exposing its architecture to suggest that what we take for granted as natural is really just the bias of familiarity. The poem demonstrated Eliot’s point in its transmogrification of the old into the new. Eliot knew the old rules. But he had the street cred and the balls to break them.
Eliot’s concept is not that far from Robert Frost’s notion: “Work easy in harness.”
When I started my self-study of traditional English prosody, I set myself the task of learning the old rules, the old forms, with the clear intention of using what I learned to push my own poetry into the future, to build on the prosody of the canon, including the prosody of free verse incidentally, but to “Make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound. What I did not anticipate, but probably should have, was that the form would also make me new.
In my own writing, primarily Shakespearian sonnets now, I often deviate from the traditional metrical rules of accentual syllabic poetry by using a looser and freer scansion that conforms to my own idiosyncratic modern ear. Instead of parsing each arcane type of metrical unit (and practically every rhythmic deviation from iambic pentameter has a name), I count the overall beats in the line in much the same way it was done in Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the predecessor to Modern English. In my prosody, any number of unstressed syllables can be glossed over because what really matters is that strong thumping beat, similar to the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And like Geoffrey Chaucer, who basically “invented” iambic pentameter by combining the heavily stressed beats of Anglo Saxon with the syllabic poetry of his day, I have no prohibition on using a four beat or six beat line as needed. In fact, I often use the hexameter or Alexandrine couplet (six beats per line) for the final rhyming couplet of a sonnet. If the Alexandrine line divides naturally into two tercets, I find that the rhythm signals a distinctive counterpoint to the preceding pentameter. It slows down the reading and creates a visceral change in emotional content.
My cobbled aesthetic creates its own acceptance problems when I submit my poems for publication. On the one hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my formalism. On the other hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my cavalier notions of scansion when all my lines were not perfect iambic pentameter. I’ve found my work is often considered too formal for the free verse mags, too ragged for the formal mags. But what I find particularly comical are some of the descriptions of what an editor is looking for in Poet’s Market. Often an editor will say that if a submission is rhymed, it must be of the “highest quality,” whereas no such demand is enjoined on free verse. Apparently mediocre free verse submissions are less suspect and welcomed. Editors also ask that no “greeting card verse” be submitted, but apparently no restrictions apply to unrhymed free verse doggerel.
When I was a young man, I was much more confident about my ideas of the world and the impact I intended to have on the world. I had no doubt that my art, obscure as it was at the time, would one day take its place in the great canon of literature. I had all the time in the world to make it so. But now, at the age of sixty, I no longer have that time, and I certainly haven’t received the level of accolade that as a young man I had anticipated would automatically follow the recognition of what I naively thought was my undeniable talent. It has not helped me, of course, to buck the dominant academic paradigm of free verse with my turn to an invented formalism in late career. I look back wistfully, not so much with regrets, as with the desire to be able to talk to that young man, to tell him some things I have learned about the nature of life, and of poetry.
But looking back, I also realize I didn’t have much to say then in my poetry that wasn’t just an extension of my fairly rigid ideology. The older I got the less confident I was and the more I understood how little I knew about the world and how little my work is likely to influence the world. Paradoxically, now I seem to have more to say and I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been, though less well known than I once was. Somehow one needs to know less to know more.
I often think about the story of Antonin Artaud. He sent some poems to an editor who basically told him they sucked. Artaud struck up a correspondence with him, vehemently defending and explaining in prose pieces his rejected poems. The editor replied that the poems still sucked but that his defense of them—full of angst and passion and paradox—was brilliant, and he wanted permission to publish it. Those pieces became the prose poetry for which Artaud is most revered today. And his rejected poems still suck!
What this says to me is that beneath the assertion, is the real question.
I toyed with rhyme and meter for years, working it into my poems, creating new forms of my own fancy. And then one day in 2002, under the influence of a cobalt blue Arizona sky, alcohol, and John Keats, I took a leap and started writing Shakespearian sonnets, one after the other, exclusively. The first ones were like a child’s finger-painting, full of spirit, but naïve, as I was somewhat ignorant of what I had undertaken. But the sonnets came one after another, usually one a week, for months, and I was exhilarated. After a couple dozen, I thought if Shakespeare could write 154 of these suckers, then I can write 155! And so I set myself the juvenile task of doing just that. As stupid as that may sound, it has often been a motivator for me when nothing else was. I just recently broke through 100 sonnets, some good, some bad, but I continue to write them. But the better I get at writing sonnets, which is another way of saying the better I become at understanding the form of the sonnet, the harder they become to write, and the longer they take.
From the beginning what really surprised me was this: I didn’t know where they were coming from.
When I started writing poetry over 40 years ago, I wrote all free verse. I was making up all the rules then under the influence of the Modernists, deciding the shape or shapelessness of each poem according to what I needed to express myself, yet much of what I wrote then tended to sound the same. My content determined my form. And there is a point of view that says that is as it should be, that form should serve content.
But now, 40 years later, I come to the same template for each poem—fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rigid rhyme scheme—yet I am continually amazed at how different each sonnet can end up sounding, at how this form can put the poetry under such intense pressure and yield such different results.
I’m also amazed at what I end up saying because usually I’m six to eight lines into the sonnet before I know what the poem is actually about, such are the hidden alleyways that rhyme and form lead you through. Toi Derricotte, in an interview in Rattle, once said, “I think a lot of times poems know things that we’re not ready to know yet, and we write the poem and then we figure it out.”
And even when I do know, I never know how it will end until it just does, because the rhyme controls where it goes. And that’s really odd because there is no stronger nor assertive couplet in English prosody than lines thirteen and fourteen of a Shakespearian sonnet. How could one start a sonnet not knowing where it’s going but knowing that twelve lines later a lyrical certainty, an epigram of unimpeachable elegance, would be required?
What this says to me is that beneath the question, is the real assertion.
It also says that my form determines my content.
Or maybe something else does, masquerading as form.
At the risk of waxing mystical, I must admit that writing sonnets has rejuvenated my belief in what the ancients called the Muse. Sonnets can be incredibly labor intensive and agonizing to write. So “finding” my way through the maze that the form creates, eliminating one rhyming dead end after another yet eventually coming out the other end, all gives me the strong intuitive feeling that I have been guided, led, coaxed into places I would not normally go by the “form” and made to discover what seems to have already and always existed. The more well wrought the sonnet, the more organic it feels, the harder it is to imagine a time when it did not exist.
This is a shock for a long time materialist such as myself. I do not pretend to understand it. I often feel like a translator of an ancient language no one else speaks with an incumbency to ensure the received wisdom is meticulously transcribed and correct. I never really felt that way writing free verse. Writing free verse, I often felt the exhilaration of what Kerouac called “spontaneous composition” when a free verse piece seemed to burst forth from nowhere completed on first writing with little or no editing needed. But I never felt the deep laborious ache that resolves so beautifully at the end of writing a good sonnet.
I have learned a few things about Shakespearian sonnets, commensurate with my modest chops. I usually start with a line I really like. Since I usually don’t know what I’m doing, I might as well start with something I like. There is absolute freedom in that first line, in fact, in the first two lines. But after that, the direction is dictated by the rhyme. If you’re used to writing free verse, this will come as a shock to you. You will need to learn to follow, not lead, or you will quickly find yourself down a rhymeless dead end, a babbling cul de sac, and have to hit the backspace key over and over until you’ve eaten that first line or two you loved and you’re staring at blank paper again. That’s when what you thought this sonnet was about crumbles and you realize George Clinton nailed it: “Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and muthafucking rhyme.” At that point you have a choice to make: quit, or trust the form to show you where to go.
Years ago, when I told a poet friend I was writing sonnets, he said that he assumed I was writing a free verse poem first and then manipulating it to make the shoe fit. I just laughed at the fanciful notion that I could impose the sonnet onto a poem. No, instead, the sonnet allows entrance—what you do inside determines whether you’re worthy of the form. It doesn’t conform to you; you conform to it.
But even with the form pulling you in the direction of a particular rhyming sound, the choices of where you can go in the labyrinth of the sonnet are still pretty much inexhaustible. Yet like the I Ching, the wisdom a sonnet can reveal as you write it is often serendipitous.
You may choose to bleed a sentence from the first quatrain into the second quatrain at line five in a Shakespearian sonnet, and that’s okay, but unless you wish to drive yourself crazy, truly crazy, trust me, put a period at the end of line eight. The first eight lines set up the problem. Line nine is “the turn,” and like “the river” in poker, fortunes should change, possibilities appear, or more in keeping with the extended metaphor, you should feel the centrifugal force of going too fast around a hairpin curve. So like Shakespeare himself, start line nine with a nice qualifier, such as but, or yet, or at least start a new sentence to signal your reader that change is coming.
You’ve now only got four lines to solve your dilemma. By now, the sonnet should have revealed to you what it’s about, what problem you are trying to resolve. Only four lines are left to basically end the poem, the first time, that is. Most sonnets have an organicity, a degree of resolution, by the end of line twelve. But it ain’t over yet: the biggest challenge of any Shakespearian sonnet is the final rhyming couplet.
The word sonnet in Italian means “little song.” And it is that, but “little” is also deceptive. A sonnet is little in the way a firecracker is little or in the way a toddler squalling his heart out on the floor is little. I think of the sonnet as a pattern of energy tightly pressurized and shaped by the tight constraints of the form. Eliot’s injunction of an “artificial limitation” is relevant again. At the risk of sounding ludicrous, I compare a sonnet to the internal combustion engine. Gasoline will always burn, but if you add a spark to a mixture of gasoline and air inside a cylinder, the resulting explosion is shaped by the cylinder and directed toward the end where a piston moves. It is the constraint of energy that creates the power. In a sonnet, that constrained energy is directed toward the final rhyming couplet, and the power, the tension, is released there. The couplet is no denouement. It is a full on climax, in every nuance of the word.
The final rhyming couplet is why I write Shakespearian sonnets instead of Petrarchan sonnets. Those two lines can be some of the most powerful and elegant lines in English poetry. They definitively end the sonnet on a much higher level of meaning than line twelve, while often standing alone at the same time as though a rarefied form of English haiku: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”
A sonnet needs its couplet, but a couplet can often lead its own life. Any of us would be proud to be included in the canon for a body of work, for a book, or for a single poem. I would settle for a single rhyming couplet, cut off from its sonnet and author, anonymous and unattributed, quoted by unknown speakers at funerals, weddings, toasts, in bars, or in moments of triumph or despair. Is there any higher calling than to put your words on the tongue of the world? That is what the couplet should strive for, that is what anyone as a writer of sonnets should live for.
Unless of course…the couplet is crap. My best critic is Sue, my partner of twenty-five years. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve thought I was done with a new sonnet, exhilarated that I had stumbled through it gracefully somehow without it all falling apart, and allowing myself to rise after hours of rearranging approximately 125 odd words to read it aloud to her, only to have her say something like: “You know I really like it—up until the last two lines. Somehow they feel a little weak to me. You need to rework them.”
Dejected, intoxicated with rhyme, I’d return to my desk and try once more to fashion two elegant lines, for hours if need be. I try not to stop until I’m done—I don’t dare risk the loss of momentum because I already have too many twelve line sonnets in want of one good couplet sitting stranded and helpless in a digital doc. And if I feel the Muse is listening, real or imagined, you can bet I will continue to quietly sing my “little song,” to whisper my rhymes into the ear of the Muse. I also know that if it comes too easily, somehow it’s not earned. When a breakthrough finally arrives, from somewhere, nowhere, often simple, or obvious, or understated, no matter how tired I am, and sonnets are exceedingly laborious, I feel elated, relieved, awed, overwhelmed, and most interestingly, grateful, not for something I’ve done, but for something I’ve discovered. Any pride I may feel is on behalf of the beauty of the sonnet itself.
As a young man I tried to show the world something that I thought was coming from me. Now I try to show the world something I have found. It can be argued that literary vision is different for the young than for the old. The young choose their ideas and try to change the world with them. And that is good. The old allow the world to change their ideas. And that is good.
Yet I would argue that the path one takes is continuous. The choices you make today are the basis for whom you will become tomorrow. Just as the person you were as a child is still within you, so the person you have not yet become exists within you as well. Just as the person you are today has answers to the questions you asked when you were young, the person you have not yet become has answers to the questions you are asking today. So a conversation with your past and your future is entirely appropriate, necessary, and for poets, that conversation occurs in poetry.
But I do not mean to suggest the way to Nirvana is to ensconce yourself in traditional forms like the sonnet. After all, you are who you are, so “Come as you are,” in the words of Kurt Cobain. In fact, your view of the world and your character may lead you to destroy old forms and invent new ones in the same way Whitman used free verse as an axe to splinter nineteenth century prosody. If the Muse is poetry idealized, then as times change, so must the ideal—the Muse always demands the new. As poets we all need to be cognizant that the new tradition Whitman founded is still the dominant paradigm today and retains the faint aura of insurrection though it is now over 150 years old. No longer the revolution, free verse is now the status quo. And the Muse?—the Muse is bored, has been for a long time.
New art, whatever form it takes, can be brutal when it finally breaks free, suppressing what came before in order to gain dominance. But it also builds on top of what it obliterates. The Modernists ransacked the past for their influences, and they chose well: Greek literature, Japanese and Chinese poetry, the troubadours, Dante, the English Metaphysical poets, among others. What’s important now is not whom they chose, but that they chose. Because that is the task that faces us. All poets before us have stood precisely at the crossroads we now face. We would be stupid to ignore their counsel. Without their work, however antiquated by current popular tastes, our own prosody would not exist. Any true formal revolution in poetry will be a step into the future, not the past. But it is the fixity of the past that distinguishes the flux of the future.
What transcends time and form is the ancient heartbeat of our Mother Tongue, old Anglo Saxon. It beats now strong, now faint, now regular, now irregular, but it beats still today in line after line of your poetry and mine. We can choose to palpate it, or not. But as Chaucer put it, “The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
____________
T. S. DAVIS is the author of two books of poetry, Sun + Moon Rendezvous and Criminal Thawts. He lives in Asheville, NC.
December 18th, 2009
Link • Essays, Tributes • 1 Comment
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett
THROUGH THE INVISIBLE CLOAK: SOME PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES OF BEING A WHITE READER OF AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY
I teach college courses in poetry and poetics, which means that twice a year, I have to drop off materials for my course packets at my local copy shop. Last semester, the white employee filling out the order for my course packet asked me a question about African American poetry which, nearly a year later, I continue to contemplate. Our exchange went something like this:
“Course number?” she asked.
“English 376M, African American Poetry and Poetics,” I responded.
“…really?”
“Yes, but let me check the course number on my syllabus just to be sure I’ve given you the right one.”
“No…I mean…that’s funny—I just had another red-haired professor in the other day. She was even whiter than you, with an Irish complexion—teaching an African American lit course.”
Here I paused, said nothing as I contemplated her statement.
“So tell me,” she said with a smiling confidence between the two of us, “what is the deal with all the white professors teaching African American literature?”
That question struck me at once as both entirely offensive and entirely legitimate, and it spawned a dialogue in my writing and teaching that continues to grow more complex. It is not as if I had never thought critically or deeply about being a white person teaching African American poetry; I just had never heard perceptions around the issues of white teaching and readership put to me so bluntly. This perception is not, I believe, just limited to one employee in a copy shop. Students of various ethnicities have told me, by their own admission, that they were surprised to learn on the first day of class that their teacher of African American poetry is white. In my own experience, hiring committees comprised of people of many different backgrounds—young and old, black and white alike—will regard a faculty opening in African American literature as an opportunity to recruit a black faculty member because they assume that only African Americans will be interested in or authorities on the subject.
With this in mind, the question “What is the deal with all the white professors teaching African American literature?” begs a number of others. Why do so many of us expect African Americans to be the authoritative last word on African American literature? How does one’s perceived “degree” of color or whiteness influence how we see his or her understanding of the literature? How would my students learn differently from having an African American teach a course in black literature? Do others see me as a less competent or qualified teacher and critic of African American literature because of my skin color? And does the reverse perception hold true—are African American teachers perceived as somehow less of an authority on literature by people of ethnicities other than their own?
All of these difficult questions translate, I believe, to issues of white readership and criticism of African American poetry. Even in the optimistic and progressive age of Obama, it is easy for any reader—white, black, and shades in between—to participate in a kind of literary segregation based on who he or she perceives can authentically and legitimately engage the literature. If the reaction of this particular employee, my students, and my colleagues at various institutions are any indication, it appears that many of us reading African American poetry hold the deep-seated but largely unspoken notion that African Americans are de facto best equipped to engage and speak about literature written by African Americans.
In many ways, this is a dangerous assumption. It not only attributes a racial essence to African American texts, it also implicitly assigns a racial essence to African Americans themselves. Even as particular tropes, themes, and modes of address may re-occur in poetry written by African Americans, and even as African American authors themselves may share a cultural heritage including the acute and sometimes ineffable experiences of racism and slavery, we must dispel the notion that there is a “black experience” which is either singular or inherent to every African American. Such a belief denies the diversity of those who identify as black in America as well as the multiplicity of voices that make up African American poetry.
On the other hand, contemplating the voices of African Americans as they speak about their own varied experiences—both individually and as a chorus—is incredibly necessary. Because African American poets have been excluded from the canon for extraliterary reasons, it is important to consider the literary production and reception of African American poets as a group even as it is important to consider their contributions to American letters as individuals. Considering side-by-side the poems and poets collected in this issue brings into sharp relief some commonalities of black experience and the fraught politics of an African American literary tradition, one that began in 1772 with the Phyllis Wheatley’s testimony in court required to prove that she, a house slave educated by her master’s family, was intelligent enough to write the poems in her collection Poems on Various Subjects. Only after Wheatley was examined by a panel of white male luminaries was the title of author bestowed upon her. Their legal attestation was published as a preface to her book, launching a tradition in American letters in which white literary authorities introduced, “authenticated,” and attested to the quality of texts written by black writers for white readers (one which persisted through the early twentieth century). Although such prefaces are roundly considered racist today, in many ways the anxiety over agency, authenticity, and authority that influence the contemporary reception of African American poetry recall those of nearly 250 years ago. This persistent dynamic between black authors and white literary authorities prompted the late scholar Nellie Y. McKay to declare that the Wheatley court is still in session today.
Of course, there are problems inherent in putting together a tribute to African American poets such as this one. Some may regard a special section dedicated to African American poets as a politically correct way to segregate black texts from the larger poetic conversation or to hold it to different standards of quality. Others may see it as a way to fetishize black texts and black writers, valuing and valorizing the expression of a marginalized identity over the poem itself. Still more may view the tribute as a way to make the black poet a token, a novelty or oddity, or to put undue burden on a small group of poets to represent African Americans as a whole. All of these objections are valid, and yet none of them get to the heart of why it may still be appropriate to consider black poets together as well as apart. Not only does such a grouping highlight the diversity of African American poets, it also acknowledges the very real experience of being an African American writing as part of the American literary tradition and as an agent in American culture. Speaking at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference this spring, poet Duriel E. Harris summarized the necessity of African American writing communities and practices this way: “Black narratives help us organize our experience so that we can survive in the world.”
In considering black poets together, a reader is also (hopefully) forced to confront how and why whiteness and white texts are constructed as the invisible norm in American letters. In an interview featured in this issue, Toi Derricotte speaks of how it was not that long ago that there were few or no black poets included in most classrooms and anthologies, an exclusion performed under and in the name of that invisible cloak of “universality” so often synonymous with whiteness. The idea of literary universality, as Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, silently situates whiteness as normative, unbiased, transcendent, and timeless. The often unspoken but incredibly persistent idea that black readers, writers, and critics are the only ones who can fully engage literature written by African Americans is a child of the same logic. It too feeds the illusion of black authenticity, of white universality; it too renders the cloak of race identification into sameness and invisibility.
The idea that any poem can be universal, somehow apart from its author’s and reader’s subject positions, is an outdated and insidious fiction. Being a white person reading, evaluating, and teaching a black author’s poem carries with it certain questions and complications that a black reader probably does not have. But being a black reader carries with it other difficult negotiations of identification and representation. None of us are free from the limits of our own subject positions; as Derricotte notes in her interview, “We tend to read through what we know and what we read through are often the limits of our own understandings.” (Rattle #31, 152)
Still, we should also remember that we are not forever wed to those subjective limits; rather, our engagement with poetry should be about testing and expanding those limits. Poems are not just elaborate birds resting in snow; they are living animals that instigate empathy, realization, dialogue, and change. This sense of possibility is what I think is most important to remember as a white reader of African American poetry—that in this careful dance between poet and reader we begin to understand our connections to and through race with new nuance and complexity. By reading and criticizing black poetry in ways that challenge us, the invisible cloak of whiteness is made visible, and when it is visible, we must truly wear it. In doing so, we learn of the weft and warp of the garment of race, the lightness or the burden of its fabric; we know its rough texture and its fine tailoring.
My choice of metaphor here for reading through whiteness—the invisible cloak—is quite a deliberate one, even as it may conjure uncomfortable images including the clansman’s robe and hood. Though the white reader may disavow racism and hate crimes performed in the name of white supremacy, to make visible this metaphorical cloak is to acknowledge the sometimes violent and almost always secret history of the designation of whiteness as a social privilege. The cloak also conjures the professor’s or critic’s academic vestments, the garb of authority so often synonymous with whiteness (and also, until very recently, men). The white reader, in acknowledging the visibility of his or her cloak, acknowledges this sense of privilege without being doomed to recapitulate its oppressive power. The invisible cloak is also an imagistic analog to W.E.B. DuBois’s veil of double consciousness: the idea of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” and always feeling the “two-ness” of being an American and black. Making the cloak of whiteness visible and truly wearing it means assuming a similar sense of consciousness about one’s race—not in a way that inspires a crippling guilt, but in a way that can liberate and inform how and why we see the world the way we do. Finally, the image of the invisible cloak is apt, I believe, because its existence is fabled; the invisibility of both whiteness and of the cloak is only an illusion, a grand ruse. In its fabled invisibility, it is a festooned and pristine robe; when made visible—when we acknowledge its visibility—it is a second-hand coat showing all of its loose threads, its holes.
____________
I’ve come across another type of white response to African American literature, one that is perhaps the most well-meaning but that is also the most troubling: the response fueled by white guilt. Some white critics will effusively laud African American writers because of their guilt over the social position of some African Americans (I call to mind here certain reviews of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway in which poets of color are praised for their “gritty realism” and “fresh urban vibe”). Others go to the opposite extreme and translate that guilt into a crippling silence—It was not written by someone like me, this reader thinks, and so I have no authority to speak about it. Both responses are two sides of the same troubling coin. These readers consciously or unconsciously use the cultural politics of race as an excuse to ultimately disengage from black literature altogether. Not only are such responses unsavory, they more importantly fail to regard African American poetry for what it is: not some body of literature infused with an unknowable racial essence, but poetry that happens to be written by African Americans.
This begs the question: Can a poet’s race (or any other aspect of his or her identity) ever truly be separated from the poem that he or she authors? Probably not, but I think in the case of African American poets and poetry, we have to be able to consider the work both ways—as in conversation with both black and American literature as well as with black and American culture. In this regard, identity becomes not a matter of essence but of perspective. The spectacular (and arguably calculated) performances of blackness enacted by African American poets such as Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, and Maya Angelou suggest a dialectic beyond an audience of black readers and critics; they engage readers and critics as diverse as the body of American letters. Each of these authors helped to define in his or her own era what black is and black ain’t, but in ways that served to open doors for the next generation of poets of many ethnicities. The example of their poetic practice was what propelled African American poetry, if not American poetry, to take its next step. In light of this, the relevant question becomes not “Why group?” but “For whom?”
Although the goal of this essay is to discuss the complex dynamic that happens between white readers and black poets, I also have to acknowledge that some African American authors aren’t interested in engaging white audiences, and that too is acceptable. Despite my emphasis here on how black texts have engaged me as a white reader, I fully acknowledge that there will always be moments in black literature with which I may not be able to fully empathize or even comprehend because of my cultural position. It would be ridiculous to suggest that all there is to say about African American poetry can be told through how it engages or rejects the white reader alone. Exclusively black spaces, meanings, and expressions serve an important purpose, for they can provide models of identification for black poets and inspire work that speaks both to and beyond a racially exclusive community.
In underscoring why we should consider African American poets and poetry under the rubric of race (as well as apart from it), I don’t want to suggest that there is or ever has been one “black voice” in African American literature. The styles and influences that contemporary African American poets reflect are just as diverse as those in all of American poetry, from formal to experimental and from textual to performed. Poetry written by African Americans is just plain poetry after all, and in seeking such poetry out, one soon comes to realize that there really is no such thing as “African American poetry.” Black folks can share certain experiences, and they can share a history of struggle and oppression in the U.S. as they may globally, but political, social, or creative solidarity does not equal sameness of voice.
One of the totems of contemporary African American poetry is Cave Canem, a week-long summer retreat dedicated to cultivating the new voices of black poets in the U.S. Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996, the Cave Canem community has grown exponentially in size and influence over the years; it now sponsors first and second book prizes, publishes annual and special-topic anthologies, and hosts regional workshops and readings in addition to the summer retreat in which residents participate over three years. This retreat is the center of the Cave Canem, fostering a close-knit community of adult artists that rarely exists beyond the framework of an artist’s colony. Every time I hear an alum speak about the program, he or she remarks on the breadth of styles and aesthetics among the poets, which range from formalism to the slam. In creating all-black spaces in which poets can write, the Cave Canem community creates a necessary insularity, a “safe space” for African American poets to experiment and try on many voices. In this regard, Cave Canem is not about fostering “the black voice” in American poetry (again, said in the erroneous singular) but about nurturing African American poets so that they can find their own voices.
And those voices are plural, indeed. The field of contemporary African American poetry, like the field of poets selected to join Cave Canem, is deep as it is wide. African American poets practicing today are formalist poets such as Marilyn Nelson and poets re-inventing received form such as Ruth Ellen Kocher; experimental poets such as Harryette Mullen and Nathaniel Mackey; poets experimenting with sound-text such as Tracie Morris, Douglas Kearney, and Duriel E. Harris; poets working in blues and jazz idioms such as Tyehimba Jess, Cornelius Eady, Kevin Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Quincy Troupe; Black Arts poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni; poets rising from and moving beyond the national slam scene such as Regie Gibson, Saul Williams, and Patricia Smith; poets of the South and Affrilachia such as Natasha Trethewey and Nikky Finney. And then of course there are two of my very favorite poets, Lucille Clifton and the late great Gwendolyn Brooks, who deserve categories of their very own. This short and very incomplete list of authors is evidence enough that African American poetry is as diverse as American poetry itself.
___________
One of the texts that I like to begin with when teaching an African American literature course is Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In this speech given at a women’s studies conference in 1979, Lorde discusses how asking women of color to present token perspectives on an issue asks them to place their experience against the backdrop of whiteness, an act which forever sets them apart as marginalized. “How come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us,” she asks of her white feminist colleagues, “when it is key to our survival as a movement?”
When I read this essay as an undergraduate student, that sentence resonated deeply with me and helped set me on the path of study I follow today. The idea that it was my own responsibility as a white woman to educate myself about writers of color—to initiate the conversation of difference rather than assume people of color were the best and only sources from which that dialectic could emerge—was profound. I decided to seek out African American poets precisely because their work challenged and taught me new things about black expression and myself. “Difference,” Lorde wrote, “must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark.”
As a result of my own imperative desire to read African American poetry and speak authoritatively about it, I have discovered a beauty and a complexity that I had not known before. Acknowledging difference does not erase the complications of my reading practice; rather, it is about embracing and welcoming those complications. Reading African American poetry from and through the cloak of whiteness carries with it the possible entanglements of cultural voyeurism and fetishism, and for white writers, it can produce a special kind of anxiety of influence. But the alternative to this is not to engage in dialogue, which is no alternative at all. I choose the trouble and the self-doubt of this reading practice because by embracing the complexities of race and of difference, by making the invisible cloak of whiteness visible, extraordinary possibilities emerge.
That, in the end, is the deal with this white professor teaching African American literature: she is a white reader critically engaging the troubles and joys of this poetry as art, as cultural engagement, as specific human connection.
–from Rattle #31, Summer 2009
Tribute to African American Poets
____________
SUSAN B. A. SOMERS-WILLETT is the author of two books of poetry, Quiver (VQR Series, 2009) and Roam (Crab Orchard Series, 2006), and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (U of Michigan Press, 2009). Her honors include the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize and the Robert Frost Foundation Award as well as fellowships from the Millay Colony and the Mellon Foundation. She is anAssistant Professor of poetry and poetics at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
