A Deficit of Consonants

I've been re-reading some of the Cassandra Pages archive. Here is a post from May 26, 2011.

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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.

Comments

[Peter]

Buckets of vowels? Ewww.

[Roderick Robinson]

"It wasn't a good poem."

How I'd appreciate to see that substantiated. As someone who came very late to poetry I tend, through ignorance, to glance only at well-established work - masterpieces, you might say. I know no better. But a continuous diet of masterpieces is not a true guide to the width and depth of poetry; bad or inferior poetry can retrospectively frame a masterpiece, emphasise its greatness. So long as the defects are pointed out.

Yet it's considered bad form to discuss defective poetry. There seems to be conspiracy, as there is with music - strange how reluctant musicians are to discuss their antipathies. That's why it was so refreshing to hear Ashkenazy reminiscing about being forced by the then USSR to compete in the Tchaikovsky competition (because it was thought an American, Van Cliburn, might win it; ironically I believe they tied for first place). "I didn't care for that showy kind of music," he said, referring to the piano concerto. As it happened I felt the same way about the violin concerto, but got short shrift when I tried to raise the point. No doubt I was wrong but what can I do about my lack of enthusiasm for that piece?

As I see it one may discover defects in poetry but the decent thing is then to remain silent about them. Is The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner a masterpiece? It's well established. But it also contains the lines:

Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,
Twas sad as sad can be.

Untutored, on my own, I remember coming upon that and it was like a softish blow to the solar plexus. How was I supposed to react? Of answer came there none.