A month ago Jews celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The day is the holiest one of the Jewish year: It recognizes that one must look at one’s self and what one has done not only through the past year, but all through one’s life. I’m not a particularly religious guy. I go to Yom Kippur services because my mother, and her parents, did.
One of the prayers at the start of this holy day is the Sh’ma koleinu, which begins, “Hear our call, Adonai our God. Show us compassion. Accept our prayer with love and goodwill.”
Later in the prayer, the words directed at God say, “Do not cast us away when we are old; as our strength diminishes, do not forsake us. Do not forsake us, Adonai; be not far from us, our God.” The gloss in my prayerbook says of the first of these lines, “The power of the Sh’ma Koleinu deepens for us as we age. Those aware of their aging often question the value and significance of their lives, seeking spiritual connection in questions such as “Did my life mean anything?” and “Of what use am I, now that I am old?” In Sh’ma Koleinu we hear a voice -- perhaps our own – calling out from the winter of the heart, an inner landscape of loss and uncertainty about the future.”
The prayer hit me, this year, with particular force, for it seemed to reflect what I inquired of myself and the world at the beginning of this letter. This letter is written in that key, of inquiry into what my life has been.
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides
William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel That Greeny Flower,” end of Book I
Things slow down as one ages, and I am beset by doubts. What does it mean that I taught poetry for many years. What work, in the grand scheme of things, does a poem do? Is reading poems, in the end, a worthwhile endeavor?
There is a branch of philosophy and religion called ‘eschatology.’ It has to do with ‘last things.’ What, when all is said and done, when death forecloses all possibilities, is important? What remains when life ceases? For most religious persons, the question has to do with God, death, judgment.
For me, a secular guy, what is finally valuable has to do with poetry.
Poetry? Yes, poetry. I have spent my life teaching it, reading it, referring to lines from poems as the guiding compass for my navigation of the confusions and dilemmas that life puts in my path.
But in recent months I have been putting two questions to myself: What does it mean to have taught poetry for five decades, and in a larger sense, is poetry necessary to education? And the second, and more difficult question, what use is poetry in a world of power, economics, transaction? [That last term is the one that defines our age, isn’t it? Donald Trump has taken over our discourse: How we talk and what we value merge in the stream of language. Everything is traded, one thing for another, and whoever comes out ahead is the winner….]
In the trade between one thing and another, in the transaction to gain higher value, poetry seems beside the point. If one can always amass more power, more wealth, more of anything, what and how does a poem matter?
In the academies of higher education, marketing and nursing rank way above studying something abstruse like poetry, or literature, or history. You can get a job with marketing skills or a nursing degree. Get a job with a degree in literature or Italian or history? Philosophy? Ballet? Our colleges are re-orienting themselves in favor of useful subjects, which will lead to a job in an ever-narrowing market for employment.
The conventional answer humanists give to the shrinking of the humanities is to deplore the values inherent in this shrinkage: How else can we learn to think but to study, critically, novels or philosophic texts or historical data? There is something to recommend this ‘answer,’ but it does not address a central question (for most students, and their parents): How will this help me find a job? It is all fine and good to say that a well-trained humanist might be more responsive to shifts in the economy or in the political scene, but the question that so often looms large is how to gain a foothold in the first place, not how to maintain one’s balance as the world seems to shift. So the answer to the first question, of whether poetry is necessary to education, is “Maybe. But other things are far more important.” Ugh.
My sense is that the world, despite the emergence of chat-bots, is comprised of persons, and the need to understand the person nearest to hand (the self) and those others who are farther away and not easily understandable (others). Poems, literature – and history, and philosophy – help us understand ourselves and those strange objects we call ‘others.’ It seems to follow that these areas of study are necessary to human existence.
We need poems, to put it simply, because they help us to understand deeper, or hidden, or unexplored, areas of ourselves. And because the reality of other persons is ineluctable, poems help us understand something of what goes on in their thoughts and feelings and sense of themselves.
“Ineluctable.” The word means ‘impossible to avoid.’ We live in and with ourselves, and among others. No matter how many computers we surround ourselves with – on our desks, on our phones, on our wrists – that unruly self still has to type in the questions. Human beings? There seems no way of avoiding the need for companionship, parenthood, collaboration: They are part of what we depend on as we navigate the world around us. Persons – our own selves and others – are ineluctable.
There are, of course, models of what human beings are and what they might do. Computers get better and better at creating such predictive models, and more and more they can help us as we interact with persons in our daily activities. Still, a good while ago Sigmund Freud pointed to the word ‘uncanny’ (das Unheimliche – the not-at-home-ness) to help explain how odd we humans are at times in our lives. He was likely referring to the return of the repressed – childhood memories (anxieties, fears) – that intrude in everyday life and make our motivations seem strange to not only others, but to ourselves.
But that is a logical explanation for what is, to those who are not eternally watchful for psychoanalytic explanations, the strangeness that erupts in human life. The uncanny is part of a deep wellspring within ourselves that makes our actions and our living in the world, sometimes unexplainable. There are things beyond or below reason that shape our lives and our consciousness of whom we are. Dostoyevsky knew this, and knew it well: his “Notes From Underground” is an exploration of how irrationality, rather than rationality, controls our lives.
Irrationality, meaning beyond explanation, but also complexity. The world is, to use a Marxian term, overdetermined: There may be, and usually are, many determinants of the decisions we make, many dimensions to ‘who’ we are. That is part of why humans are so hard to explain: Human existence is guided, propelled, by a whole lot of different forces. An act, or an attitude, can be shaped by love, and at the same time by hurt, and resentment, and jealousy, and a need for status. Unlike in logic, which is governed by the ‘law of the excluded middle’ (which means that something is either x or not-x, and not some muddle in-between), in the actual lives we live there can be lots of things that motivate us. And opposites, like love and hate, devotion and fear, do not exclude each other. We are, as humans, messy creatures.
One of the primary functions of art, music, poetry, dance is to be inclusive, to include all that can be contained rather than to rule out one thing or another because logical thinking demands that there be no middle. The rather academic terms ‘ambiguity,’ ‘irony,’ ‘uncertainty’ refer to the complex and inexplicable aspects of life and consciousness that we come to understand by reading poems, looking at paintings, listening to music, considering the history that precedes us.
In a long and difficult poem, Wallace Stevens wrote astonishing lines about the complexity if the world, and how it is inclusive rather than exclusive: We must embrace it, rather than chisel away at all that we should be embracing. Life does not end with thinking; we must accept life in all its messy incoherence. In this passage from Stevens, a sleeping man in a dream decides to accept everything:
Forth then with huge pathetic force
Straight to the utmost crown of night he flew.
The nothingness was a nakedness, a pointBeyond which thought could not progress as thought.
He had to choose. But it was not a choice
Between excluding things. It was not a choiceBetween, but of. He chose to include the things
That in each other are included, the whole,
The complicate, the amassing harmony. [Boldface added]
Poems reveal to us the diversity that is within us, that “complicate, amassing harmony.”
Near the end of “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman, recognizing he has said one thing and then done another, famously declares:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Here we have, in short compass, what I have been maintaining: that the self is large, and can include all sort of excluded middles. “Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,” Whitman had declared earlier in the poem, in a statement of the ineluctability of each person, each consciousness: Not only his own, but that of every human.
If Whitman is right, and I believe he is, the only route to self-understanding, and the understanding of other selves, is through studying poems and paintings and sonatas. You may be asking, how did ‘sonatas’ creep in there? Poems, maybe, but music does not have words, it does not refer to things – even to the multifarious things which drive us onward. Music does not explicitly reference thing, and so maybe it does not refer to the things of our world…..
Let me turn to a line from a poem that is not among the world’s greatest, but still a line which is very dear to my heart. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire begins (well, after a forward) with a long poem, and then proceeds to offer commentary on it and an index to it. From such fragments is a world created. In the poem, John Shade writes,
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D’appui, Echo’s fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life.I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinatorial delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is in iambic line. [boldface mine]
What do these lines say? That we perhaps can understand our lives through art, because perhaps – perhaps – the regularized order we can find in art approximates an order that pertains to the world about us. That, maybe, the intelligibility of art is a reflection of an intelligibility that exists in the world.
This, of course, is a wager. The world may not be intelligible. The regularities of a created world may not be a reflection of the chaos that is the world. Like Pascal’s wager (that we should live as if God exists because the reward is greater than if we live as if he doesn’t exist, eternal life being the reward of living as if God exists), our wagering that art is somewhat like life is better than living in a chaos that is incomprehensible to human beings.
So: The wager that art imitates life is a major commitment. If one makes the wager, it is worth studying art – be it poetry, or sonatas, or sculpture. If not, well, not. We go forward in life without any simulacrum of what life might be or might hold for us.
Lyric poems are concentrations of the complexity that exists in our lives. (Stories, the base of narrative, offer another way to bring order to the strangeness that is human life and human society. Things are organized along a continuum of time, and maybe even causality, as one element of the story unfolds into the next element of the narrative….) When we read a poem we hold, as it were, in our hand a bundle of different things which we can unpack, through close analysis, into the strands that comprise the density of lived experience.
Sheesh. That’s a whole mouthful to try to comprehend. What it means is that there is a lot of stuff in life, and when we read a poem, we encounter a thicket of words that encompasses that stuff. If the parts of a poem cohere, then maybe (this is the wager we make), like Nabokov’s poet John Shade, the world about us coheres, too. If we can comprehend the ambiguity, tease out the varying levels of the irony, confront the uncertainty, then maybe we can understand not just the poem, but something about ourselves and about others.
Earlier, I mentioned sonatas, and by extension, music. Music is vital to self-understanding because it too addresses order, an order in some ways larger or deeper than that of and in words. If music is harmonious or patterned in some way, so might the universe be – and ourselves. And if it has uncertainties, or drives that are either fulfilled or unfulfilled, well, men and women composed the music, and so in some fashion contained the uncertainties and drives that make our consciousness what it is.
Ah, back to Wallace Stevens. In his “The Idea of Order at Key West,” a narrator talks to his friend Ramon while they walk along the beach and simultaneously hear a song from a nightclub, see lights of a harbor in the distance, and also hear the underlying sounds of the waves as they break upon the beach. Here is how the poem concludes:
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Just prior to these lines, the narrator has turned to his friend and spoken of how the desire to bring order to what consciousness hears and sees is a way of “arranging, deepening, [and] enchanting.”
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights.
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
That’s it. ‘Mastery’ through description/measurement (“portioned out”) is what we strive for, and poems help us master the chaos of experience. Earlier in the poem Stevens’ narrator had recognized that the physical world was “empty” and “inhuman.” But the human voice – the woman singing in the distance, but also the voice of the poet declaiming the poem (the voice of the poem) – recognizes that our world is a human world, and that we humans make it. We impose order, and then we are able to discover the order we have imposed. [For those who want to read the whole magnificent poem, type ‘Stevens the idea of order’ in your browser.]
That order is the order we inhabit. Poems, thus, are our guide to and through the world as we live in it.
There is a choice we make as we encounter the events of our lives. Chaos or a world that has order and the possibility of being comprehended. Poems create that order, and so the world is not incomprehensible. (Actually, it may not be a choice. No one can live in chaos all of the time: We must have some sense of order, somehow. Whether the order we choose aligns with the world we encounter, and how much chaos we can acknowledge as we move through our lives, are the measures by which we judge the order we have accepted…)
We always sense that outside any order is the incomprehensible, the chaos that pre-existed us and that is the primordial constituent of the world. In the Hebrew Bible, before we get differential (created) night and dark, there was primordial chaos: “Tohu bohu,” rendered into English s “without form and void.” Poems incorporate traces of that chaos – what a deconstructionist might see as the arbitrary link between language and the world: Every poem is either undercut by the perception that maybe its words do not quite cohere, or is unfinished, so that its ‘meaning’ unravels and unravels. No one said this better than Emily Dickinson, in her poem “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind”
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before—
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls—upon a Floor—
Dickinson’s “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind” is a very powerful poem. Ostensibly, it is about a feeling of dissociation, about a mental condition which she experienced with frightening intensity. But as I have been claiming, poems continue onward; as I was fond of telling my students, poems are NOT their meanings, since any ‘meaning’ of a poem can go on, and on, into further ‘meanings.’ Poems are just themselves, not the ‘meanings’ we like to assign to them. They are like the world itself, just there, for us to tease meanings from them. Like balls of yarn that slip from the lap and unroll, impelled by invisible forces when they land on the floor, the tight order we have of our world is jarred by this openness of poems to further and further scrutiny. When we encounter a poem we can be ‘at home’ in and with it; and yet, discomfited by its uncanniness , the ‘not-at-home-ness’ that results from an encounter with it is never complete. (To read the whole poem, of which I have only given you the second stanza, use your search engine and type in the words ‘Dickinson I felt a cleaving.’)
I fear that I have grown abstruse. Put in simpler terms, the poem – like the world – exists. It provides us with a sense of order, but like the world which it mimics, any attempt to fix that order (find its ‘meaning’), is too limited.
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look atwhat passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides [bold print, mine]
For fifty years, I have treasured these lines from William Carlos Williams. They come at the close of Book I of “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” The whole long poem – too long for me to have written about – is, I think, one of the two great poems of the twentieth century. (The other is Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, also too long for me to write about…)
Many of my students did not like “Asphodel,” since it is an apologia from Williams to his wife, an apology for his having had sexual relations with other women. ‘How dare he!’ these students felt about his sexual transgressions of the marriage vow, and I could not quite find them wrong in their disdain. Yet the poem is a celebration of love, his enduring love for his wife, and at the same time a celebration of poetry.
Williams is quite right in his assertion that poems in our time are “‘despised.” That is what I started out this letter bemoaning; he is accurate in his assessment of not only his time, but ours. In our transactional universe, reading poems ranks well below making money, amassing power, even playing video games. But not everything is transactional. Where else, as Williams claims, will we get the news – of who we ourselves are, what humans are, what love is, even of what is ‘real’ – but from poems? Without that kind of news, that kind of knowing, we die miserable deaths. And live lives which, in retrospect, are likewise miserable.
Of all the poems I have written about, these lines from “Asphodel” are the least complex, even as their reverberation is profound. We need poems, just as Robert Haydn had claimed we need freedom,
This liberty, this beautiful
And terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth
in his poem “Frederick Douglass,” about which I have written in a previous letter.
Our need for poems is not mere assertion, one more claim among the many claims that clamor for our attention and assent. The need for poems is not merely a proclamation by an English teacher that what he taught for many years was of value. It is, on the contrary, a base reality of our lives. We need to understand ourselves, we need to understand other people. We need to find order in our lives, and at the same time recognize that there is a chaos that is resistant to understanding even though chaos too is part of our lives. As Theodore Roethke wrote (I also sent out a letter on Roethke):
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
I have cited these lines to myself, often, since I love their alliteration (the l’s in those first two lines, and then all those m’s in the last line, which physically mimic emptiness), but only now do I have some awareness of what these wonderful lines signify: That we know that all around us is chaos, but we still continue to struggle to keep ourselves aloft.
Over two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth was right:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…
Amassing money and consuming too many things; handing our lives over to machines, the internet, and now artificial intelligence; seeking to gain advantage and then more advantage: We lose any sense of who we are and what other human beings are and can be. Poems (and novels and paintings, and dance, and music) can restore us to ourselves.
We live in a time when it is easy to get lost. Many are depressed; many are dependent on machines (especially cellphones) for their experience of existence. Many are friendless and not rooted in any sort of natural world (“nor can foot feel, being shod” Gerard Manley Hopkins complained 150 years ago). Poems root us in the world that is easily displaced by the machinations of corporations and political messaging. Poems bring us “the news” that we need as we struggle to live our lives.
Perhaps it has not been a mistake to live so much of my life in and through poems? I am aware that words are seductive, that they themselves may supersede reality and become more ‘real’ than the reality they seek to describe. Yet what else do we have but words to anchor us in what we experience? Our consciousness consists of ‘reality’ mediated by words and images and sounds. Poems and created images and music are what we remember, they are what we inhabit as our sensory being moves from one moment to the next.
Near the close of “Asphodel,” in the “Coda,” Williams declares, “Only the imagination is real! I have declared it, time without end.” The imagination, using words, gives us the poem. And poems, in turn, give us the “news” we need to live by.
We cannot make a living, or a career, through the reading and studying of poems. So, in an important sense, nursing or marketing are better college majors than English or art history. Religion may give us more secure moral values than art does. So, in guiding our ethical decisions, religion may be of great utility and comfort. But we have lives to live, not just careers to embark upon, nor even ethical decisions to make, and in those lives it may be that poetry provides us with the necessary “news” that enables us to make our way through the complexities of ourselves, of others, of the existence that continuingly spools out in front of us. It may be that poetry, and its allied arts, tells us what we most need to know. I think, in the end, Williams is right: Where else get the news but from “despised poems”?