Echo Soundings: Notes for an Introduction to Essays on Poetry & Poetics

I have no idea what poems are. I feel an odd double-take when I see one on the page. The way it simply assumes itself. How absurd, how extravagant. What is it doing there? Like a frog on a lily pad, blinking. Like a child it stands before you—ready, curious, expectant—without the least worry of what it means that it should be. Of course I am, say the eyes of the child. What else would I be? The innocent audacity of simply existing.

Pick up a stick from the imagined beach you are now standing on, and draw a circle with it in the sand. Now lay the stick down inside the circle. What the heck is that? I can’t figure it out. I want to protest. I want to laugh. The stick is just a stick; it existed before now, and now there it is inside a circle. Before there was nothing, and now there is a circle with a stick inside it, a shape and a content. Or take a further step; pick up another stick and lay it down somewhere else on the sand: all on its own, a shape and a content. You took a thing that was over there and you put it over here in this new place, a place that is new because a stick was put there. Poets spend their lifetime trying to get it right just once, laying the stick down in the sand, just so.

A poem assumes itself. It is the potential reality of what it summons. But what does it summon? What does it do? On the one hand, as a collection of deferential signs, it speaks of things, points to them in the actual world, the way a sailor long at sea would cry out at the first glimpse of landfall: a place over there. On the other hand, there is something tantalizingly solid, buoyant even, about the poem itself. However far from shore the sailor finds himself, there is decking under his feet. For there it is. There what is? The made thing that floats on the abyss, so long as it holds together.

Of course poems refer to things and can have meaning and authority according to how aptly they evoke them. The poem is a box: it has stuff in it. Even Wallace Stevens’s very preliminary, very unthingy “The the” is a box with stuff in it. We think of boxes in a certain way. Once their contents have been delivered or taken out of storage, you can throw them out. (This reminds me of a cartoon strip I once saw: in the first frame a boy takes a brand-new peddle fire truck out of its four-foot-long carton; in the second frame, we see the child sitting inside the carton, pretending that he is in a fire truck). Certain kinds of poems can be like photographs—or rather, a certain picture of photographs—interesting insofar as they have interesting content. But this value is potentially limiting, and it comes at a price. The words become secondary and subordinate, displaced from the content they reference. Photographers know that there is journalistic photography—it has its important place—and then there is photography in its own right. The photograph as a stick laid down inside a circle. This is. We look at hundreds of images a day and take them at face value, as it were; occasionally we come upon that one photograph that slows us down, leaves us looking at it a little longer, not just at what it shows, but what it is.

The first glimpse of landfall. Poems are made of words, words that are everywhere outside you and inside you. We are in the midst of words. They do things, tell us things, tell us to do things, convey information, cajole, argue, and convince; they lie and feint and finesse; they go before and between; they explain and justify; they are well nigh indistinguishable from our thoughts and perceptions, our mindset, the culture we inhabit. The poem sits in the midst of all this verbal noise. It is hard not to assume that poems are trying to do the same thing in the world as other linguistic conveyances. So much of our criticism about literature and our teaching of it falls back on the assumption (often useful, as far as it goes) that the task of a poem, just so, is to convey information, convince you of something, argue a truth, compel or command, sway a disposition. But it can seem to do so very poorly, since it often makes so much fuss about the business. It seems coded by nature to make its own kind of trouble. Keep the teachers in business. Confronted thus, a young student thinks, quite reasonably: “If that’s what the poets meant, why the heck didn’t they just say so!” Poems are out of their element, in over their heads when they try to do the work that an instruction manual, a conceptual argument, a treatise, a political speech, a weather or news report, a science experiment will do much better.

Poems are offered freely, out of nowhere. They are like ghosts, unreal. We come upon them, mysterious, lingering presences, insubstantial but strangely there nonetheless. It is the familiar-unfamiliar voice half-heard in the night, apparently saying something. A poem is the abandoned house at the edge of the village: someone once lived there; now it is evidently empty. Nothing but signs of a former dwelling, a former having-dwelled. Those broken windows were once seen through from the inside. Someone comes upon it in its belatedness, its abandonment. Good-for-nothing place. What could possibly be going on in there? All poems are come-upon poems, eerie, unto themselves, where unseen things happen.

The mystery of purposes. In Robert Frost’s “The Wood-Pile,” a winter sojourner in a lonely wood finds himself alone and “far from home:”

The trees are all in lines straight up and down too much alike to mark or name a place by so as to say for certain he was here or somewhere else.

Lost. He comes upon a stack of firewood. Nothing else as far as the eye can see. The woodpile is ghostly, like the haunted house, a made, abandoned, apparently useless thing. Why is it there? It insists upon itself as useful, if unused. A supply, a source. It is a form made out of the raw materials gathered up from the place itself. A woodman worked with what he apparently found around him. He shaped it: “cut and split and piled and measured four by four by eight.” I always think of a sonnet. A bunch of sticks, like the ones on the beach above, gathered to a form. How sad to find it there, “far from a useful fireplace,” where it is left behind

to warm the frozen swamp as best it could with the slow smokeless burning of decay.

It is certainly telling that “decay” gets the last word here, that all this creativity has amounted to very little in the end, subject to a vast entropy that makes quite actually nothing of it. But notice that by the time we get to the “decay”—the end, that is, in every sense—the speaker’s imagination has been drawn away in the syntax of the sentence toward the mysterious intentions of the woodman himself who made it and left it there:

I thought that only someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks could so forget himself, the labor of his ax, and leave it there far from a useful fireplace …

Someone seemed to have had an idea about this place and what it needed. Someone was at work. No cabin anywhere in sight. No hearth. Just this remnant of an effort, this sign that the home—of which there is no sign—ought to be provided for.

I have always thought of the scene as a vision of literature in its entirety, the ghostliness of poems, what they are and who abides within them. We contemporary readers are wanderers alone in a place evidently far from where we belong. Where do we go now? Every direction seems the same, leading nowhere we recognize. But in our wanderings we come upon evidences that someone else has gone before us in this place, and that his or her intention was somehow to provide for a home not otherwise to be found. That person is gone now. Chaucer is gone. So is Alexander Pope, and Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Bishop. We have no connection with them save these measured wood-piles they left behind, accomplishing a kind of work by becoming nothing the way they do.

“The made thing that floats on the abyss, so long as it holds together.”

It seems very likely that nature, as it does with everything, will take back what they made. But they themselves are not here. We think of them and their personal reasons for making these doomed provisions for a home yet to be. They have moved on to fresh tasks.

Your bookshelves are quite actually wood-piles of a sort. The home they seem to provide for is nowhere to be found. They are crammed one end to the other with ghosts. Someone who lived, in turning to fresh tasks, left behind these decaying fictions, the labour of their ax.

As far as the eye can see. They aren’t everyone’s favourite variety, but I’ve always been attracted to poems that seem to be partly about themselves as poems, their own ghostliness. Some associate this kind of transparency—language watching itself be language—with mere navel gazing, a self-indulgence. Poets with their heads in the clouds, writing their poems about poetry. In Stevens’s phrase, “Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.” But I like to think all poems are like this, partly watching themselves be poems. What if a poem’s simply being a poem was already this degree of self-awareness in a nascent form? God says let there be light and there is light, and he sees that it is good. We often associate a certain degree of self-consciousness with wisdom, a standing at once inside and outside a thing. It suggests a degree of detachment that falls somewhere between indifference and fanaticism, cynicism and naiveté. I would associate certain kinds of self-awareness with a higher achievement in a profession: car sales agents who can be tongue-in-cheek about the hard-sell formulas they use; politicians who allow that they trade in fictions—that rhetoric is all—and who let that irony, made visible, infuse all they say with care and attention. Imagine an ad by the Conservative Party of Canada: “this is an ad we have put together to make you feel that Justin Trudeau is in over his head.” Stephen Harper no doubt would consider this particularly unwise, which just shows how many levels of wisdom there are.

“We often associate a certain degree of self-consciousness with wisdom, a standing at once inside and outside a thing.”

Poems watching themselves be poems. Think of a passenger on a train looking out the window at dusk (I have stolen this analogy from Northrop Frye, who used it in a slightly different context). As evening comes on, the landscape darkens. The window that the passenger looks into shows two images at once: the vast world outside the little vehicle and the interior of the vehicle itself, with the passenger seeing herself looking. Both at once: her patient eyes superimposed over, and becoming a part of, the mountains in the world beyond. Frost’s poem above offers ready examples. Consider again: “the trees were all in lines straight up and down.” Reflected there, in that wood, is the inference that unshaped lines of verse produce a poetry that would itself be too much alike to mark or name a place by. The constraints of form make an occasion, a certain place. Or again: “It was cut and split and piled and measured/ four by four by eight.” It isn’t only woodpiles that we leave behind us in the wilderness, but sonnets and their like, in the forms that hint at them. They warm the frozen swamp as best they can.

Poems watching themselves trying to be most what they are might gain a further reality. The ad for THX Sound that is often shown in the cinema at the beginning of a movie: “The Audience is Listening.” It is something that you’re told and something that becomes true in the telling. Or think of the lucid dream, the dream in which you are conscious of yourself dreaming. It is at that moment of sudden awareness—the empowering recognition of the very conditions of your being there—that you can start to fly, or at least know enough at last about where you actually are to wake up.

Poems tell us that we ought to be better listeners and that poetry is the art of listening. Poems sound. That wonderful verb: to emit sound, to resonate, to echo, but also to measure a depth, to detect by sounds that are emitted and then recalled. Poets and sailors have this in common: they sound the fluid element on which they float. They let out line, so to speak, line that sinks beneath the visible surface: more and more line as they go, sounding for unseen depths, for the bottom, for the creatures that move there. Seasoned sailors, like seasoned poets, can become very adept at feeling the line as they feed it out, holding lightly to the taut lowerings, a certain weighting that pulls them down. They attend to the line, tender it with listening fingers, wait for it to catch and run out, or to give, come loose, let up, listening for any least vibration carried along its length into their hands. It is by the line in their hands and how they feel for it that they know things.

Any encounter with a poem is already a ghostly encounter: “a body wholly body fluttering its empty sleeves.” It is an encounter with something that is both there and not there at once. The poem’s ghostly presence is not its own; it is a condition of the person who sees it, who has simply noticed that it is there. Without being looked at, it is nothing. It reaches out; it invites you to recognize it for what it is. Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, it speaks not just of itself (an egotistical ghost is almost an oxymoron), but of the reality in which it has dwelled, from which it has momentarily appeared, and whose existence is entirely dependent on the ghost’s being free just then to speak of it. What little the ghost says of that world—just these hints and guesses, no more, of what in every sense it is like—suggests that it is a place unto itself, larger than anything we might imagine, with its own laws, its own intelligible purposes and relations. A world like ours, but different, and not as we formerly thought. The ghost is sorry that it can’t say more about it than it does. Its time is short. But know that we neglect it at our peril. It exists, it exists, it is, it is, the ghost implores, as its voice comes to a resolution and begins to fade. Take my word for it.

Encounters with poems are ghostly encounters, but they also have ghostly encounters inside them. What we hear in a poem is voices, voices not ours, saying things to one another, soft and loud, distant and near. We overhear them. We listen in. Poets have voices of their own, though their relation to them can be as distant as the voice of any other when it is shown to them. When you hear a recording of yourself speaking, you think, is that really how I sound? And of course it is. There is that scene at the dentist in Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” where the child Elizabeth hears her aunt cry out in the next room. What confuses her at that moment is not the recognition of her aunt’s voice, but of her voice inside her aunt’s voice, the two voices mixed together, and it throws her into the mother of all identity crises, falling through cold blue-black space. She realizes, she hears, that her voice actually belongs to something that is not her voice, something bigger than she is, metaphorically both hers and not hers at once. The scene suggests for me a powerful allegory of how voices in poems come clear to us and send us scrabbling after the identity of the speaker.

“The words become secondary and subordinate, displaced from the content they reference.”

Voices in poems are rarely singular voices. To begin with, the words that make up these voices don’t belong to anyone in particular. Words belong to all of us, to our memory of how they have been used over time, in other contexts and in other poems. Each word comes weighted, pregnant with its earlier incarnations. Your ability to say anything at this moment—of what you feel, what you think—is founded on the fact that others have said similar things in the past, in similar ways. What you might say now has very likely never been said in exactly the way you would say it. (Sceptical? Make up a random sentence of five words, simple as you like, and then Google it inside quotation marks). But resonating inside what you say are other voices; they linger just at the margins. Often we only hear those other voices when they seem especially obvious (in clichés, for instance), but they are there no matter what we say. We think of ourselves as possessing a unique voice and of that voice as somehow related to our identity as individuals. But that voice itself is possessed. We speak out of an indebtedness. Your voice is owed to other voices. Everything you say is a conversation.

While much of my critical work has been on metaphor and metaphoric thinking, I moonlight as an inquirer into echo and allusion (which is of course a kind of metaphoric relation, one voice relating to another and creating something different than either alone). Poems, which seem especially preoccupied with how to say things, and whose voices will often listen to themselves being voices, have a unique relationship to this expression of indebtedness that is echo and allusion. In fact, poems may be one of the few places in which that indebtedness comes clear, where language stands out as an embodied history of how we say what we do. At any moment we might hear, resonating inside a line, the voice of another poet saying something similar. The two voices are in conversation. What do they converse about inside the echo? Why, about how to say this thing, of course! “What are you trying to say here,” says the echo of Milton inside a line of Hopkins. I’m not really sure, replies the line of Hopkins, but maybe you can help me. Well, let’s talk about it, replies the Milton, and we’ll see what we say.

I have always been less of a reviewer than a reader. Not that I disapprove of reviewer judgements. In the three years I wrote the Letters in Canada Annual omnibus review of Canadian poetry, slogging through 125 odd volumes each year, I found myself occasionally willing to voice displeasure or impatience. It is something that happens to your sympathy as you come upon volume after volume trying to insinuate itself on what gradually starts to sound like white noise. You think: bless you my friend, but you’re not helping. The reviews were rarely longer than a paragraph each; there were times when I found the pithy nay almost impossible to resist. I don’t have difficulty with negative reviews per se and have found myself often informed by them when they’ve been applied to my own work. It is only that reviews and what I would call readings represent two different kinds of writing about poetry.

“We have no connection with them save these measured wood-piles they left behind ...”

There is a video of Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin playing a sonata for violin and piano by Schoenberg. Menuhin was known not to care much for Schoenberg’s atonal music, but in their conversation before they play the piece Menuhin is eager to hear more about Schoenberg from Gould, who admired the composer’s work very much. He said to Gould, memorably: “I’ve always had the motto in my life that anyone who liked something knew more about it than one who didn’t.” A very simple thought that has stayed with me. I don’t think Menuhin intended his comment as a general critique of negative commentary. He himself is quite eloquent (and funny) in talking about what he doesn’t care for in Schoenberg’s work (you can watch the video on YouTube). But he recognized that the reserved reading of a work of art is bound, almost by definition, to miss something, and he wanted to know what it was he was missing. He wanted to give Schoenberg a fair hearing. And, of course, he then went on to play Schoenberg brilliantly in the duet that followed.

Not to like a thing, but to play it well. Menuhin’s brilliant performance of Schoenberg might make a corollary point: the more you master and internalize a work, the more your tacit misgivings, whatever they should be, gain authority. Have you ever tried this experiment in a disagreement with a friend or partner? You have argued for hours and have come to an impasse. What now? Well, you might challenge each other to make an account of the other’s position that the other would willingly sign on to. It’s quite hard to do. You have to use your imagination, all your skills of empathy, to picture how your partner would view the matter and then put it in terms that he or she would gladly choose. The more fully you can articulate what your partner feels and believes, in exactly the way he or she might express it, the more your own view gains in authority, not as the right approach by any means, but as a viable one that might in turn deserve to be imagined. At the very least the exercise tends to lower the rheostat on the adversarial condition so easily associated with argument itself. Wherever they end up, reviews should strive for the kind of authority that begins in empathy.

Scholarly criticism offers, well, criticism: the approaches represent analysis, interpretation, exegesis, this last term suggesting to me more of the operating table than the armchair. I can become weary of strictly critical analyses of a poem, especially when the critic seems to pick it up with a pair of tweezers as though it were something wet lifted from a compost heap. At the same time, I recognize in myself a tendency, much to be resisted, of overworking an idea. I become obsessive; I begin to stalk. You want your readers to feel that they are swimming in the deep, not that their heads are being held under water. It is sometimes a fine line, and I’m still looking for it.

In the meantime I prefer the picture of the critic as a reader. One offers readings. To be sure, reading can imply interpretation, analysis, but at its best it is more comprehensive. It suggests the experience itself of reading, the reading as an experience. The reading assures the reader that you have read, that you have had an experience. There is a corollary suspicion sometimes voiced in response to negative reviews: “did this guy actually read the book?” A reviewer’s main goal, whatever his or her judgement, should be to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind.

My website of individual readings of single poems is entitled Jeweller’s Eye. It’s a term that I’ve been using for 30 years to describe the kind of approach to poems that I find most useful and sympathetic. One can certainly go too far with magnification: showing a whirl of electrons in orbit on the canvas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers can only going tell me a tiny bit about the painting. One ought to be careful not to over-enlarge the poem out of existence. But you can discover things going on that you didn’t know were there.

“It isn’t only woodpiles that we leave behind us in the wilderness.”

What I especially like about the term “jeweller’s eye” is the suggestion of a labourer taking things apart and putting them back together. The watchmaker sits down at his table in the early morning. It is quiet. He turns on his little lamp. Before him are spread the tools of his trade, including the small jeweller’s eye that he fits under his brow to look at things up close. But there is also the array of things to be looked at. I love that sense of an array. Before him is a vast miniature landscape of specimens, watches and gemstones, the variety of things that in his profession he has to do with. He picks this one up and moves it over here, puts these two things together, makes a collection of three others that he will look at later. He makes a little clearing in the small space before him, puts a thing in it.

Some of these specimens are in need of repair. Some are there simply to be identified before being offered to market. Some favourite pieces are kept at hand to be admired as keepsakes, for reference or learning. A lot of old wrecks are kept around for the different parts he might need, to see how a thing goes together. Some are sent to him to be identified or evaluated. He squints into the eyepiece, murmurs to himself. The jeweller at his table of oddments is not a politician or a military commander or a buyer and seller of corporations. But he does have a social function to go along with his interpretive one. His work is not a mere hobby or pastime, and his declarations, whatever the comment or judgement, are worth more than a tinker’s damn.

A lot of timepieces come across his counter. Pieces of time: he looks at the face, he listens. In certain cases he will take the back off, fix the monocle into his eye, and peer into the fragile intrication of tiny pins, springs, and gears, each one nearly too small to handle on its own. Perhaps he’ll be able to tell you its vintage. He could show you what this or that part does. He knows that only when all the elements are working together does the piece become accurate and true enough that we might depend on it, live by its rhythms. He hands the watch back to you. He knows that, when you next stare into its face, it will tell a particular hour of your experience, a moment in your life. Come night, the watchmaker gets up from his table and turns out the little lamp. The table is dark and quiet again.