Originally Posted by
Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
Essay on Poetic Theory
Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems (2006)
By Brenda Hillman
Introduction
In 2006, poet Brenda Hillman delivered the lecture “Cracks in the Oracle Bone: Teaching Certain Contemporary Poems” at the University of California at Berkeley as part of the Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lecture Series. Hillman—whose own poetry often brings together narrative fragments, language-led lyricism, ideas steeped in social activism and Gnosticism, and a deeply personal voice—here examines the role of complexity in contemporary poetry and the benefits that engaging such complexity can offer readers.
As an advocate of poems that some readers might regard as difficult and therefore intimidating or off-putting, Hillman offers close readings of several such works by tracking their syntactic, tonal, and imagistic shifts. Contemporary poetry, Hillman notes, “favors process over destination,” and her readings model a way to enter, rather than paraphrase, these poems.
While her students have often praised what they call “flow,” Hillman examines inventive or disruptive grammar as a means of indicating where “the yes of a brush stroke meets the maybe of a thought.” She notes that contemporary poetry should be read in its historical context, in the wake of Modernism, which challenged and redefined our relationship to the world as well as made room for disjunction and fragmentation in the arts.
Hillman organizes her lecture according to the four main ways in which she believes poetry can serve contemporary readers. First, she argues, poetry helps us see ourselves in the context of a range of environments, and thus to find our place in the world. Secondly, poetry displays the breadth of language’s power and potential. Thirdly, truly engaging with the matter of a poem can offer a reader a means by which to process emotion. Finally, poetry can help a reader tap into the precise beauty and strangeness of our days.
Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.
I’m thrilled to be presenting a lecture honoring Judith Stronach to many colleagues and friends, and I’m grateful to Ray for publishing this series of lectures by poets—I feel fortunate to be among such illustrious company.
When I began to work on this lecture some time ago, I had just received an email saying that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, having retired from the Cabinet, was seriously hoping to be selected as Poet Laureate of the United States. Ashcroft’s best-known poem, “Let the Eagle Soar,” was used at President Bush’s swearing-in ceremony:
Let the eagle soar,
Like she’s never soared before.
From rocky coast to golden shore,
Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,
As the land beneath her sings:
“Only God, no other kings.”
This country’s far too young to die.
We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,
And we can make it if we try.
Built by toils and struggles
God has led us through.
I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing this poem. It makes a straightforward patriotic statement based on an image of a bird; it rhymes. The problem here isn’t straightforwardness, or rhyming, or birds; Dickinson, Hopkins, and Frost all employ those things. The problem is that Mr. Ashcroft has not used his imagination in his poem. He needs to sign up for my introductory creative writing class at Saint Mary’s, where we could help him begin his poetry studies in just two weeks. The fact that Ashcroft wants to represent American poetry officially and to be its servant is frightening. His poem reminds me of the 21-year old pipe-bomber planting his bombs all over the Kansas countryside in the shape of a gigantic smiley face. The world quite literally suffers from a lack of imagination.
Here is a poem with imagination, written by Lisa Fishman, It’s called “Note”:
Was wintered in
unmade of stone and what-
not
This compact poem, like the inverse of a dreamed place, invites a sense of uncertainty and of safety. Its three-line form suggests haiku, but it is not haiku. The lines hold an unbalanced number of stresses: 2-3-1. The poem has neither noun nor pronoun for its subject; who is speaking? It begins mid-thought: someone or something has been entrapped by winter. The second line, after an implied comma, seems an extension of the first thought; the someone or something being “unmade of stone” is either being released from a previous condition of being “made” of stone, or the “unmade” means “not yet made.” The third thought-perception is the colloquial, but not current, “what-/not,” broken in half by a hyphen and a new line: “what-not” points to the tentative quality of the initial perceptions. To live without expectation seems a particular terror and amazement in this brief structure.
Could the same thought have been expressed in any way other than in these nine words? A poem cannot be paraphrased. But it can be described, its effects analyzed to heighten appreciation for how such a delicate mechanism plays itself out. In poems, the meanings coincide with the rhythms of someone thinking them; they are the subjects of their own making.
My argument for this talk stems from the idea that it is all right for poetry to have made it into the twentieth century and beyond, and that it is a healthy thing for us that poetry engages with complexity, that this complexity is practical and aesthetically pleasing in ways that offer beginning and advanced readers more reality. Complexity and simplicity are not mutually exclusive. The paradoxical inevitability and openness of poetic expression make it both satisfying and mysteriously difficult to teach. To engage the mysterious or the difficult is not such a bad thing. It is mysterious and difficult to be alive and to express why. For lovers of poetry, there is disequilibrium between ourselves and the world that nothing restores to balance but poetry. The Stronach Lectures are meant to address issues of teaching poetry for audiences that have both scholarly and non-scholarly interests in the subject. I want to approach the topic in a fairly intuitive and jargon-free manner, and to present four survival tools for contemporary culture that poetry is especially good at providing: (1) the sense of who we are in our historical, cultural and—for want of a better term—natural (but I really mean “not man-made”) environments; (2) a sense of the power of language, of each word and phrase; (3) the ability to think through emotion on many levels—literal, abstract, concrete, metaphysical, figurative; and (4) an awareness of how particular and odd everything is, especially in moments of compressed thought captured in time. Taking delight in this four-fold toolkit provides my primary pedagogical energy. I think about these things when composing my own poetry and when teaching at all levels. Poetry is the most powerful method I’ve found for expressing the particular and extreme states life has to offer.
The idea for this talk came from hearing hundreds of questions over several decades—not only in the classroom, but also in conversations with friends and strangers—about the challenges of current poetry. “I can’t say I read much poetry; it really kinda loses me,” someone will say. “Why can’t they just say it normally?” or “Am I supposed to feel stupid when I read it?” as a friend recently asked.
The challenges of reading contemporary poetry also came up in a stimulating lunchtime conversation I had with Judith Stronach in the late nineties. We discussed stylistic difficulties of poetry in relation to states of mental suffering. Judith was troubled by a struggle she was having understanding a particular poem, and asked me whether poetry might not have a special obligation to present directly what might seem inexpressible. I said I thought poetry has the obligation to try to express what cannot be expressed, but that it could not always be done in direct ways. We talked about how the confusion of daily life, the impossibilities, the unredeemed moments of spiritual darkness, as well as massive social and political injustices, could all find shapes in poetry. I know Judith wrestled with these things, and I thought of this lecture as a way of continuing that conversation with her. Thinking about stylistic difficulty and the ineffable in poetry resonates in other types of hermeneutical reading I’ve done for decades—including literary theory, gnostic and occult writings of the second century, spam sent by pharmaceutical companies, and instructions for various pieces of technology. I would say all of these require considerably more interpretation than poetry!
A while back, my husband showed me a thrilling article in the magazine Representations by David Keightley, a Berkeley scholar, about the origins of writing in ancient China. I will try to summarize a few of the main points. Keightley discusses divination by fire (pyromancy), and the development of writing in neolithic Chinese culture. In the Shang dynasty (that’s 1200–1050 B.C.E.—around the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt and of the Trojan Wars), the bones of ancestors and animals were used for this sort of pyromancy, often exhumed from burial grounds, and then reburied and exhumed again, and then burned for the purposes of divination. After the diviners interpreted the messages from the stress-cracks resulting from fire, they uttered sounds as they “read” the cracks, and the sounds of their spoken prophecies were carved deeply into the bones and emphasized with ink. It is in part from these painted carvings that the written Chinese language evolved. Keightley notes that these rituals of divination and writing were open only to a few, and that their interpretation remained a specialized field. He demonstrates that this form of Chinese writing kept the power of knowledge specific to the scholar classes over the centuries. It seems these individual logographic signs were different from the alphabetic or syllabilary scripts in other cultures (Microsoft did not recognize “syllabilary” and tried to suggest “salability” in my laptop)—for instance, those in Mesopotamia—that combined syllables or signs to make meaning. Nor were they pictographic. Each sign came with a single sound and a prediction, with its own meaning. When Bob and I were in Paris last summer we visited the Asian Museum and saw some of these amazing bones and turtle shells and my breath was taken away by the beauty of the markings—like the tracks of small animals surrounding their own absence.
The ability to produce and to interpret the cracks, to utter the sounds from the dead, and to carve the encoded signs became the most valued form of literacy. The signs produced in this manner were more stylized and abstract than those of ordinary writing. Because they came directly from the ancestors whose power was considered to be of an abstract and collective nature (unlike the Egyptian and Greek idea of the particularized soul existing after death), these writings had a powerfully generalized aesthetic function in the culture. I am intrigued by this idea of purely abstract, sound-based script—the signals from the ancestors. The value of these markings lay in their very mystery and abstraction, and in the fact that the accompanying sacred sounds had a social function. This oracle bone script exists between words and music.
A few weeks ago, a poet-friend, Lauren Levato, gave me an article about the development of nüshu, an encoded secret script developed more recently by women in the mountains of southern China for the purpose of sending secret messages men couldn’t read. It is thought that this script derived from the oracle bone tradition. The figures are graceful and stylized—even more so than the bone scratches—bird prints, chevrons, spiked angles. Both these scripts seem like modernist practices in the twentieth century. As Robert Kaufman reminds us that Theodor Adorno reminds us, the vast expressiveness of the abstract and the lyric—as in Kandinsky paintings—help aesthetic culture reconceive its social function. The oracle bone signs and nüshu script both remind me of Mandelstam’s poems criticizing Stalin in secret metaphors, and of reports that servicemen in Iraq are doing highly encoded rap and hip-hop in order to express criticism of the military hierarchy and of the presence of multinational corporations benefiting from their labors.
One of the big jobs of a teacher is to convince students that any effort whatsoever is worth it. In the remarks that follow I’m thinking mostly of introductory poetry classes, but the students might be of any age. Some of my students, especially those new to reading poetry, become afraid when they think they are supposed to understand contemporary poems and can’t. Slant or oblique styles of poetry make them feel stupid, even if the very same techniques are used in music videos. Panicked that they will produce the wrong response, students may grow impatient in an increasingly impatient culture, believing that if poetry does not have an immediate appeal, it is undemocratic and ungenerous. Even some grown-up, famous poets put forth these opinions—arguing that poetry should be easy, should give a quick story, should never make them feel as if a highbrow or academic trick is being played on them. My goal as a teacher is to bring students closer to the initiating impulses of the poem, so that what might have evoked a hostile response can move them to a sense of accomplishment, to the deep pleasures of finding multiple interpretations for what may have seemed obscure.
The fearful student and the equally fearful famous poet might need a small review of the basics of twentieth-century modernism, which redefined the nature of art in several important ways: (1) in light of—or in the dark of—the First World War, modernism broke from the past—but also brought a new consciousness of cultural history—think art deco with its Egyptian motifs; (2) modernism brought an interest—through Freud, but not only Freud—in the mind’s psychological processes, which inspired artists to incorporate images reflecting mental process; (3) modernism defined creativity in new ways (by redefining god and nature); and finally, (4) modernism recognized that the modern city—people living together as alienated beings—was as important to the subject matter of aesthetic expression as rural scenes had been to pastoral traditions. (Readers might want to take a look at Charles Altieri’s The Art of 20th Century American Poetry.)
To most of you this will seem basic, but I wanted to remind the reader that a little background goes a long way. These redefinitions—what we are, what art is, what nature/god is, what we are in cities in relation to our mental lives—and the fact that dramatically new forms of art can include the threadlike, the fragmentary, the unfinished, that objects can point to their own synthetic qualities—all these are concepts worth reminding students of—even if “make it new” is by now one hundred years old. Much contemporary poetry that readers find mysterious makes use of modernist modes, tones, types, levels, styles that we take for granted in other aspects of our lives. It doesn’t take more than half a day to present this summary to students, though it might take them many years to absorb the art itself. Not having arrived at the twentieth century is, incidentally, one of the many problems in Mr. Ashcroft’s poem.
The fact that art comes from other art as well as from non-art, that it should be current, that the dilemmas of our present poetry come from unresolved arguments about representation and expression in the nineteenth century should not dismay us—it is a good thing. As romantic emotion, symbolist moody alienation, surrealist wild irrationality or Russian formalist philosophy make their way into contemporary poetry, we can remind students that originality in art, as in the human genome, resides in the way things are reconfigured, not in some god-given attribute (though I personally talk to rocks, plants, birds and the piece of paper when composing my own poetry, and thus do not want to put down people who think an actual muse still exists). Oracle bones of ancient China speak metaphorically through their ancestors’ recirculating messages. An overwhelmed, busy, depressed, confused or mystified contemporary reader can depend on the poet to make expressive signs, to give meaning to—or even to undermine meaning in—the sounds of her time.
I want to go through the four-fold toolkit I mentioned earlier: the sense of who we are in our environments; the understanding that every word and phrase matters and can be of interest; the idea that meaning circulates on many levels; and the conviction that the strange mystery of our existence can be represented. To proceed inductively, I thought about some poems I have taught in the last few years, and recalled some of the pedagogical challenges they present.
I. The sense of who we are in our environments
Contemporary poetry has a huge range of approaches to this question of who we are. What we find in nineteenth-century poetry—Wordsworth’s hopeful meditations, Coleridge’s depressed intimate ones, the symbolist Baudelaire’s haunted outsider descriptions, Rimbaud’s hallucinatory narratives, Whitman’s capacious sweep, Dickinson’s uncanny metaphysical puzzles—provided twentieth century poetry with a satura—“satura” being a food medley, what the word “satire” comes from—of mental states. In that mix, for example, Stevens’s speakers are both Keatsian and très français; Eliot and Pound offer collage fragments of literature, polyphonies of urban, pastoral, medieval and Renaissance voices; Gertrude Stein assembles human thought patterns in abstract, cubist fashion; HD introduces vatic and oracular lyricism, while Williams uses concrete, everyday American speech, and so on.
Often the persona in poetry is assumed to be that of the poet recounting an experience, or series of thoughts, about an experience in narrative or meditative form. That this became the main mode in the twentieth century is probably because personal accounts have, and well continue to have, a particular appeal. When students first come to poetry, they are excited that it can address their own states of feeling, their questions: Who am I? What is my problem? The lyric poem is still going steady with the turbulent heart that loves its own turbulence. The basic desire for emotional identification, and the lack of it, brings most people to poetry in the first place. No poet forgets the power of emotion. My introductory students have often been drawn to Sylvia Plath’s poetry despite—or perhaps because of—the perilous nature of her metaphors. Here is one of her poems:
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot-soles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Many students can enter this poem relatively easily. It seems to have a “single speaker,” and though Plath deploys wildly contradictory metaphors, her persona is a familiar figure—that of an exhausted new mother. The style is one of apparent realism: this could “really happen.” The poem depicts feelings and a setting most students, even if they don’t have children, recognize. The new parent in the poem feels alienated from her new baby. Students can follow how Plath builds her personal myth: the baby is an “arrival” in a museum, the mother a rather detached figure who moves between feeling like a cloud and like a cow. The images show the progress and irony of her condition as they range from surreal—moth-breath, a window swallowing stars—to a more hopeful, easier simile: vowels like balloons. When students are first studying poetry, they are often told it is bad to “mix metaphors,” but Plath, like Dickinson, wildly mixes metaphors in search of the transformation into a different realm. It’s good to question prejudices about inconsistency. In addition, I wanted to present this as an example of a poem with difficult metaphorical language that is relatively easy to teach.
It’s more challenging to teach poetry that confuses the issue of “who is speaking.” I’ve often taught a book-length poem, Muse and Drudge, by Harryette Mullen, of whom Sandra Cisneros has written, “Hip hyperbole, thy queen is Ms. Mullen.” The book, a lyric meditation which shakes up the question of “speaker” and “speakingness,” uses the style of a collage-voice, a composite of many types of utterance. Its playfulness ceaselessly undermines our expectations of poetic procedure, mixing common aphorisms, song lyrics, cultural truisms, mottos, clichés, asides. Written in unpunctuated quatrains, every page of this eighty-page book can be taken as a separate work. You can read each page by itself, each quatrain by itself; even each line can stand as a separate poem. The opening of the book, like any epic, invokes the muse figure—in this case Sapphire, punning on lyric poet Sappho with her lyre/liar:
Sapphire’s lyre styles
plucked eyebrows
bow lips and legs
whose lives are lonely too
my last nerve’s lucid music
sure chewed up the juicy fruit
you must don’t like my peaches
there’s some left on the tree
you’ve had my thrills
a reefer a tub of gin
don’t mess with me I’m evil
I’m in your sin
clipped bird eclipsed moon
soon no memory of you
no drive or desire survives
you flutter invisible still
In response to this poem, one student noted: “You know who is talking, but it’s confusing to know what she’s saying.” Another said: “You don’t know who is talking, but she has a really particular style of talking.” Not being certain of who is speaking in a poem isn’t always appealing to a junior English major endeavoring to “find herself” through poetry, to identify with a group, to find the money to buy a sweatshirt with a hood, or to believe someone will love only her. Poetry without an identifiable speaker or a single emotional register may be a hard sell. It is nonetheless inappropriate at every level to say to a student that it doesn’t matter whether she finds herself in poetry or not; it is also inappropriate not to include many alternative strategies for self-discovery—such as Mullen’s kind of poetry.
Mullen’s stanzas present multiple possibilities rather than assertions of bold certainty of what we are. Each line pursues its own logic in paratactic relation to others. The lines and phrases interact, and all interaction becomes the “who is speaking.” When students discuss the speaker issue here, the word polyvocal comes up—how the character in the poem pursues her cultural, sexual, ethnic critiques, taking references from jazz, literature from the Renaissance to the present, from mo ........................................
much more at link, great article but tis, very, very long..-Tyr
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