Poems - a lot of poems - come across this virtual desk. Some I need to read with extreme attention, because my advice or input or decision is needed; some, often written by friends, feel like gifts during my day. Others - the majority - are part of the large volume of words that pass in front of my eyes, sifting and tossing but eventually falling like bits of colored paper drifting from skyscraper windows during a parade. My words, too, are part of that constant fluttering: some catching the light for a brief moment before coming to their own rest, lost among so many others.
Today, unaware, I read a poem that utterly devastated me. It wasn't a good poem. It simply sliced me, the way a sheet of paper turns into a thin, efficient blade and cuts the side of a finger.
A friend quotes W.S. Merwin, in conversation with Bill Moyers:
"I think poetry's about what can't be said. And I think that language emerges out of what could not be said. Out of this desperate desire to utter something, to express something inexpressible. Probably grief. Maybe something else. You know, you see a silent photograph of an Iraqi woman whose husband or son or brother has just been killed by an explosion. And you know that if you could hear, you would be hearing one long vowel of grief. Just senseless, meaningless vowel of grief. And that's the beginning of language right there.
Inexpressible sound. And it's antisocial. It's destructive. It's utterly painful beyond expression. And the consonants are the attempts to break it, to control it, to do something with it. And I think that's how language emerged."
Poetry is about what's can't be said: yes, often true. And we need poetry, art, music to try to express the rawness of our pain more often, I think, than our joy. We enter the realm of art full of emotion, need, and desire, wanting to say something about ourselves, about existence, about what has happened to us or what we've seen happening to others.
But if poetry is the language that emerges from inexpressible sound, we must learn that handling words is like handling knives. Becoming masterful often means saying less, or coming at the subject obliquely: the slant light of late afternoon picking out one falling shred of paper and setting it aflame during its flight to earth. Becoming a master of oneself as well as the words.
The amateur and the egotist, however, say everything. Their work has the capacity - perhaps even the intent - to violate rather than move us, like the graphic news photograph on the front page that can now never be erased from our mind.
It was safer, perhaps, before the internet gave everyone a platform from which to dump their buckets of vowels.
and if you're playing music it is important to play the silences between the notes
Posted by: zuleme | May 26, 2011 at 06:05 PM
Impressive post.Trying to express the inexpressible...I like the W.S.Mervin comment.Also thats a pretty eclectic collection of poetry books.I assume they are yours.I see a book,it looks like of Pablo Neruda poems that I am going to look into.I am climbing in Patagonia next January and writing about it and so looking to perhaps weaving his writing into the story.Thanks again for this post
Posted by: john | May 26, 2011 at 07:09 PM
Oh Beth, this is devastating in its turn and should make all of us amateurs (yes, and egotists, of course we are) pause and think. The price of freedom and opportunity is always a high one, I guess. Hopefully worth paying, but, yes, to be handled with care, and trying never to forget, while revelling in them, the power of words.
Posted by: Jean | May 27, 2011 at 06:53 AM
Yes, Zuleme, you're quite right.
John: do read "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" (which reminds me to re-read it!) And please send me your piece when you've finished, I'd love to read it.
Jean - thanks for understanding. I would never call you an amateur though! And labels are always misleading and narrow. I knew when I wrote that phrase that I was succumbing to the same thing I'm criticizing, to some extent, in order to make a point.
Posted by: Beth | May 27, 2011 at 09:08 AM
What is left out--often what is revised out--is present like a shadow, essential to give full dimension to what might otherwise be flat.
I disagree with the Merwin quote, though I think it is interesting, and in such interviews to be interesting is often the main point. His words are like shrapnel, cutting in different directions and with a political agenda.
Me, I am more with Chaucer, wanting to live the "larger life," to embrace the fullness of life without fear.
Posted by: marly youmans | May 27, 2011 at 04:23 PM
Marly, I'm curious about what part(s) of the quote you disagree with. I'm not sure he's right, that language emerged from wails, from grief, but of course it's quotable, which (as you say) may have been his intention. What I was trying to get at is my own feeling that spilling one's guts doesn't necessarily make art. We live in a confessional, celebrity-ridden, talk-show exposé, sensationalized and voyeuristic society, and a good deal of that spills over on the internet and into our own ways of expressing ourselves. Your poetry isn't like that at all: you talk about difficult things, but with restraint and carefully-chosen words. That's what I was getting at, not a fear about living life fully. But maybe you read it differently?
Posted by: Beth | May 27, 2011 at 06:49 PM
Oh, I agree with you. I like the idea of reticence (lost quality, that), and I don't like celebrity "culture," etc. Although I sometimes write about family, etc., I really like making things up--the joy of something coming out of nothing is delicious.
But his slant in those words suggests to me a view of poetry and of life that is very different from, say, Yeatsian joy and insistence on a high, proud gaiety despite the terrible wounds and blows that come to us. There are things that cannot be pinned down, certainly, and I believe that mystery is a great fount for poetry. But that's rather different from what he is saying.
Oops, gotta run to dinner! More anon.
Posted by: marly youmans | May 27, 2011 at 07:26 PM
As you can imagine, Beth, this post has something of the power of the well-honed knife for me. It slices deeply into the inexpressible, but also carves up the territory with one clean cut. Indeed, if what cannot be said is poetry, I’ve been apprenticed to the best the ineffable can provide. As for handling the words, those knives, well, it seems that I am stuck at the fair, tossing them and praying that I have just enough training to miss the bound subject on the spinning wheel, while at the same time conscious of the crowd’s desire to be entertained by the idea of seeing blood drawn.
Clearly, I need to get out of the circus. But then again, that’s where the people are, and as much as I want to express the inexpressible, I also want to (and I hate to use this word, but with my set of dulled knives it will have to do) communicate because grief, particular and private as it may be, is the common ground.
Posted by: maria | May 28, 2011 at 12:07 PM
Back again... I also question the whole premise of grief being the ground of language. Is it any more than fancy?
Plenty of scientific people have come up with other arguments that seem equally implausible. Example: anthropologists have argued for the invention of language for courtship. But that seems too small as well. Most cultures have used daughters as bartering chips, trade items, markers of status, etc. Is it likely that early cultures had a pool of prospective mates, and that they would vie through creating language?
Likewise this language-from-grief seems too small. And it seems more like a stab against American activities in Iraq than a genuinely reasoned point.
Like you, I don't particularly like the idea of "spilling one's guts" as the source of either language or art. I do like the idea of the suppressed power of an emotion, reined in, ready for a ride that may take us anywhere, even east of the sun and west of the moon. And I like the idea that all of life gives birth to language and to art.
Posted by: marly youmans | May 28, 2011 at 04:37 PM
Yes, Marly, well said! Thanks for thinking hard about this post and sharing your ideas. I think grief is absolutely too small to be the origin of language. In fact, I don't think we need to go any farther than remembering we're primates: intensely social creatures who want to communicate about all of life. Whether the first words were "Food!" or "Danger!" or "Fuck Me!" doesn't really matter, it seems to me; it's the fact that early humans lived in groups and had innumerable reasons to communicate both simple and complex concepts quickly and clearly in a way that wails and grunts just couldn't manage, i.e.: "I found food in the next valley, come with me!"
Posted by: Beth | May 28, 2011 at 04:52 PM
Mmm, agreed!
Posted by: marly youmans | May 28, 2011 at 06:02 PM
Kia ora Beth,
This is very interesting for me to ponder upon. I spent some days this week with my oldest son in the mountains and he got lost, and spent a night out in freezing cold conditions while I waited for light in a warm hut having been unable to find him. I found him the next morning, but I am finding it difficult to express the lonliness and dispair I felt in those in those dark hours. Hope all is well. Kia kaha.
Aroha,
Robb
Posted by: Robb | May 28, 2011 at 07:40 PM
Wow, Beth. One of your most powerful entries. Or, perhaps it just hits closer to home.
Posted by: Jan | May 28, 2011 at 08:48 PM
For me, "less is more." My way seems to be spilling out all over notebook pages --- then out of that, the compression, the core of it all, the poem. I work with the Asian forms, to this end, the few words that can hold an entire experience.
And I must add: your bookshelf is not much different than mine. Whatever path we take in our preferences, it seems to be well traveled even if we often feel we are alone. Yes?
Posted by: arby | May 29, 2011 at 11:58 AM
Am enjoying the exchange.I think it was the philosopher Whitehead who said to distrust the joy that does not come from the far side of a broken heart.To me to live Chaucer's "larger life" a worthy goal for us all, you have to attach and commit, but attachment and commitment are also the sources of pain.Yeats says we " must lie down where all ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart" To me Merwin is saying by attempting to make words which describe our pain or grief, we shape it and start on the ladder
Posted by: john | May 29, 2011 at 01:31 PM
Maria, thank you for that sharply-felt and finely-crafted comment! Believe me, I have no answers...
Arby -- thanks for commenting. As someone who also writes in Asian forms, what you say here rings true for me. And it's nice to know that your bookshelf and mine have an affinity! do you have a big poetry collection?
John, I've really appreciated your comments on this thread, and these quotes add a great deal to it. Thank you. Don't you love Yeats' "foul rag and bone shop of the heart?" Yes, indeed.
Posted by: Beth | May 30, 2011 at 07:54 AM
yes, restraint is an important part of creativity. what we leave out of our poems and paintings. distilling the thing down to something purer, more concentrated than the splurge that comes out automatically. and there is discipline in this, and discernment. this reflection of yours and your commenters' is helpful.
Posted by: Fire Bird | May 30, 2011 at 01:41 PM
Such a powerful post, Beth, its nucleus that riveting declaration by W.S. Merwin and a fascinating extrapolation from it all here. Yes, Fire Bird: distillation through discernment in the selection of language and discipline in the structuring of its presentation have it. In writing of pain, I worry only about this and I worry every time, knowing that failure to distil will predominate.
Posted by: Dick | May 30, 2011 at 06:44 PM