Does a poem mean?
We studied Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean? in college
I don’t think Ciardi gets it
“Have you ever felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”
Whitman asks in futility of our post-modern age
I’m tired of Wallace Stevens
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR never meant a word to me
I tried and gave up trying and now I don’t care
Precious language, specious language, and that’s about it
I want meaning in a poem more than precious language
And Plato cleaved art from truth and made much of propositions
Though his dialogues read like stories and some have myths
My English professor almost omitted Robert Frost
From his Modern American Poetry course due to Frost having “subjects”
Let alone rhyme and rhythm beats and feet, like Blake’s Tyger
It wasn’t all that long ago that Percy Bysshe Shelley
In EPIPSYCHIDION or MONT BLANC: LINES
Imaged more than meant, or imaged as meaning
And it is late, and I am old, and the time and my age are making me cranky
Maybe it’s too much to say I don’t care about Stevens
I get Jackson Pollock, but own an expensive Andrew Wyeth print
I read Stevens, but I like Robert Frost
Time was, language communicated
Truth was told, wisdom was passed down to generations
Story was religion, and verse, prophesy
And art was more than style and originality,
Poetry more than precious word choice
But it’s late, and I’m getting tired and old
I still care how a poem means
I may be going the way of rhyme and rhythm, beats and feet
But it’s nice and sweet not to have to like Wallace Stevens anymore
MUSINGS ON STYLE AND TRUTH
30 Apr 2021 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: Andrew Wyeth, Blake, EPIPSYCHIDION, Jackson Pollock, language, poem, poetry, Robert Frost, Shelley, style, truth, Wallace Stevens, wisdom
When Wallace Stevens Won the Robert Frost Medal
05 Feb 2021 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: abstract, art, atonal, criticism, music, Robert Frost, theory, Wallace Stevens, Whitman
Robert Frost is so far out there when we consider where poetry is now, my English professor almost decided not to include him in a course on Modern American Poets. In the Modern Period, Robert Frost’s poetry had rhyme, rhythm, beats, feat, and profound themes and sentiment. Since Frost, and in his own age, poetry typically has none of these. OK, maybe theme and sentiment at times. I checked out a journal as a possible place to publish my own poetry. In their guidelines for submissions, they said, “No rhyming poetry.” That’s where we are.
Art, generally speaking, doesn’t rhyme. Visual art doesn’t represent recognizable objects but abstractions; morphs into performance; has become so cerebral that it emulates bare theory. Music went through an atonal period epitomized by Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system of atonality in which anything like melody or harmony is abandoned. Since then, harmony and melody stab at presence in compositions. Along with this general trend in art, abstract poetry finds a place, exemplified by the likes of Wallace Stevens. Abstract poetry is like atonal music. And, in fact, at least one modern composer set Whitman’s I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC to music. (Try finding him/her with Google if you can get past all the posts about Fame.)
Robert Frost was a retrenchment into poetic form that was slip, slipping away. Yet he is still a master poet. With rhyme and rhythm, maybe, indeed, despite rhyme and rhythm Frost’s preeminent place in literary history is firmly established. No course in Modern Poetry can omit Frost.
Beginning with Walt Whitman, poetry loosened the constraints of meter and rhyme. And despite my best efforts at appreciation, it appears to me that Wallace Stevens also loosens the constraint of meaning. In his life, Robert Frost won 4 Pulitzer Prizes, and was awarded 40 honorary degrees. Wallace Stevens won 1 Pulitzer Prize. I chuckle, no, sneer, when I think of Wallace Stevens winning the Robert Frost Medal in 1951.
But today, poetry is more like Wallace Stevens than it is like Robert Frost. Frost was a last gasp of poetic form. At one time, Frost said he would have sold his soul to modernism but for its sameness of sound. Themes created poetic variety for Frost. When one reads poets like Stevens, one can tire quickly of words that deconstruct meaning. Like reading a glossary without definitions. I know of a poet who wrote out in prose a poem about the murder of her parents, then cut it up–either physically or conceptually–and reassembled the story “abstractly.” If one has a story to tell, it is a lie to make it unintelligible in order for it to be art. Then art is a lie.
Whither art? We don’t know. Art must evolve become new;–all things new. We wouldn’t want a steady diet of Rembrandt only–even if it be Rembrandt. We want a new song to sing. But we also want to be able to sing the song.
Criticism: Wallace Stevens Wins the Day
05 Jun 2020 5 Comments
in Blog Tags: criticism, Eliot, Mallarme, poetry, Robert Frost, subjects, Wallace Stevens, word
Wallace Stevens, I believe, is the progenitor of contemporary verse. Maybe Mallarme, before Stevens. Mallarme’s poetry “evokes” meaning, rather than stating it. His “Prelude a l’apres-midi d-un faune,” probably his most well-known poem made even more immortal due to Debussy’s musical setting of it, is a model example of his style. Even in English translation, one can discern the flavor of his French evocations. I put Wallace Stevens in his lineage as Stevens, also, evokes and does not declare in his poetry.
Contemporaries of Stevens–Eliot and Frost–differ in their treatment of language. They make declarative sentences and they make points. While they both employ the modern “objective correlative,” the imagery they employ is to make a point, or argument. Their sentences connect subjects with objects. When Robert Frost writes, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” we know that Frost is using a New England stone wall to reflect on division between humans. Wallace Stevens criticized Frost for this, saying, “The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about–subjects.” To which Frost replied, “The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.”
When one approaches a Stevens poem, one doesn’t ask what Stevens is writing about. He doesn’t write about subjects. He writes “about” language and word juxtapositions. Some say he writes about human subjectivity or the creative process. But I won’t even give him that. His word situations defy meaning. One enjoys the words themselves, not what he’s talking “about.” Contemporary verse follows the style of Stevens. He doesn’t write about subjects, but I’ll not say it’s bric-a-brac.
My complaint about Stevens and much contemporary poetry is I find it wanting in depth. Having fun with words is fun, as far as it goes, but ultimately one wants to come away from a poem with more than a bare feeling evoked by words. Nietzsche turned philosophy into literature. Though his literary works are as vapid as Stevens at his worst. Frost is a true embodiment of Emerson’s philosophical poet. Frost was a philosopher, maybe even a mystic (he said he was). And Frost made philosophy in verse. I fear that contemporary styles of poetry are but a fad. Everybody is writing in the school of Stevens, just like a generation ago everybody was writing sestinas because Pound reintroduced them into modern poetry. What will last into time we cannot say today. But we can say that for today, Stevens wins the day.
Poetry Lives!
20 Jun 2018 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: apathy, poetry, Robert Frost, spiritual death, strong feeling, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens
Prose about poetry. A few years back, my church held a celebration of the arts. We were invited to bring personal art works for sale at our national gathering. I brought some CD’s and some booklets of poetry. I sold some CD’s but hardly any poetry booklets. By way of consolation, one minister told me that people just aren’t reading poetry anymore. He told me that poetry is a lost art. About a year ago, I placed 3 of my poetry books on the “local writers'” shelf at a bookstore near where I live. One book is gone, to date. I sadly had to agree with the minister, that poetry is a lost art.
Then I noticed other evidence. In my own blogging, I usually get a better response of likes when I post a poem, rather than when I post prose. I visit the sites of the likes I receive, and, to my surprise, there are a lot of people out there also writing poetry. Good poetry. I also used to go to a late night coffee shop which held a poetry night once a month. There was usually quite a good turnout for these poetry nights, and there were a lot of local poets sharing their verses. I found out that there are other coffee shops in town which do the same thing. And I have to mention hip-hop. While some of the rhymes are simple, there is strong rhythm, and solid rhyme.
Then there are those university poetry journals. Wallace Stevens started the trend to write verse that an ordinary reader can’t understand. I am an educated reader, otherwise ordinary, and I can’t understand these poems. I don’t mean that the ideas are complicated, or that they use big words–like T. S. Eliot, whom I do understand. Rather, the verses are not ordinary sentences, with subjects, verbs, and objects. The poets I’m talking about deliberately craft sentences in which the words don’t go together. Why they would want to do that, I don’t understand, don’t care to understand. But the poetry I read online, that I listen to in the coffee houses, that I hear in hip-hop songs I do understand, care to understand.
Robert Frost said that strong feeling is the beginning of poetry. With the cultural apathy we seem to be surrounded by, I find strong feeling in the poetry that I encounter. Underneath the political rhetoric, the apparent nonchalance of people you run into, the apathy to organized religion, there is strong feeling. One poet writes, “Indifference is by far the least/I have to fear of man or beast.” I disagree. Indifference is a virus that infects the human spirit and leads to spiritual death. But if poetry lives, humans live. Poetry lives because humans live. And that minister wasn’t right. Poetry isn’t moribund. It is alive, lively; it lives.
Saint Lucia (An Epic)
29 May 2018 Leave a comment
in Blog Tags: atheism, indolence, life, poetry, self-esteem, Southern Cross, Wallace Stevens
I am posting a poem called “Saint Lucia (An Epic)” over a few days. It is a long poem in 5 parts. I am posting one part per day. Yesterday I posted part I. Today I post part II. My girlfriend said that passages in part II sound racist. My intention is social criticism, not racism and I hope that readers will understand my intention.
II
Arrival: The Resort
Beyond words, beyond generous
Our luxurious resort home for a week
Riding through impoverished exclusively Afric locals
We few white riding into opulence
Did I detect resentment in our driver’s responses to our questions?
Morning coffee overlooking the ocean
Reflecting about self, self-esteem, why we are who we are
What we want, what we wish for out of life
Last night I saw the Southern Cross for the first time
My camera can’t photograph it
It belongs to the sky—the dark, night sky
Breakfast and the pool for a while and some Wallace Stevens
A Hobie-Cat, a snack, and some Wallace Stevens
The pride of the atheist and texts of atheism
Smart words
We few white
Pleasant indolence, calm, tranquil
And some Earl Klugh
And there is no time but the clocks and the calendars mark it
What day is it today?
Is it Tuesday?
And enjoying Joe Zawinul
The easy pace-in everything-leads me to wonder if my life in the city is too frenetic
David Fekete 