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CLARITY, OBSCURITY, AMBIGUITY, AND MYSTERY: THE POETRY OF THE INARTICULATE
by William Greenway William Greenway's seventh full-length collection, Everywhere at Once, winner of the 2009 Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, is from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series, which also published his seventh collection, Ascending Order (2003), winner of the 2004 Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, and I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio (2002), which he co-edited with Elton Glaser. He has published over six hundred poems in periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was 1994 Georgia Author of the Year. He's Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship in Teaching and three in Scholarship.
Billy Collins has been accused of clarity, a terrible charge to level at a poet. His poetry has also been called accessible, which tempts one to imagine contemporary readers as being confined to mental wheelchairs, and aren't we glad of a handy poetry ramp? It's even been called (shudder) prose. Jeremy Noel Tod, for example, in "The Sugared Pill," a review of Nine Horses, carps: Collins replaces the verbal intensity of lyric poetry with the transparency of narrative prose. At the same time, he foregoes the psychological range of the novel for the narrowness of the lyric . . . . [T]he current US poet laureate writes cosy prose for people who prefer novels. But only a few years ago, Dana Gioia, in his 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay "Can Poetry Matter?" chastised contemporary poets for willful obscurity, a bad and elitist habit inherited from the modernists. These terms, clarity and obscurity, always seem to be the Scylla and Charybdis of the poetry of every generation—Eliot in one corner, Williams in the other. And sometimes one poet gets interpreted in completely opposite ways, like Frost, who is seen as both the quintessential charming, old-fashioned, bucolic figure by the public, but is called "a terrifying poet" by Mark Van Doren. The common aim of both camps is the ambiguity that William Empson describes in his critical masterpiece Seven Types Of Ambiguity, arguing that if a work has more than one possible meaning (say, seven), it's richly ambiguous, but if it has too many possible meanings, it's obscure. Great poetry aims for such ambiguity, or what Robert Scholes sarcastically calls the poem's "secret-hidden-deeper meanings" (6). To describe how we try to achieve ambiguity, I'll use a culinary metaphor and suggest that poets write a poem one of two ways: the first way is to take a prosy first draft (of a thin, bland clarity) and boil it down to get a rich reduction (ambiguity). The second way is to start with the ground beef of experience (composed of god knows what) or language and, pulling out one's spice rack, build the poem up from a fairly skimpy narrative, or a few phrases and images, extending possibilities, and exploring nuances, elevating the raw material into a flavorous ambiguity. Bad poems, however, either give us the unreduced clarity of their experience—how the squirrel was run over in the street—or just skip the meat of the experience and go straight for the Poetry Helper of obscure emotion by telling us how to feel about the squirrel run over in the street without actually describing the event. But, as Robert Lowell says, "A poem is an event, not a record of an event." If you describe the squirrel's death but reveal nothing of your thoughts or feelings, you have clarity, but if you reveal your thoughts and feelings without describing what prompted them, you have obscurity. Everything in between is the ambiguous business of giving our poems ambiguity. We're not going to solve this obscurity/clarity/ambiguity problem now; it's enough that we're asking the question. Answers may be irrelevant, anyway—the great critic Northrop Frye says that "to answer a question is to consolidate the mental level on which the question is asked" (xv), and scientist Stephen J. Gould agrees, arguing that the only good questions are those that provoke not answers, but more questions, which is not only good science, but more fun. (417) And so I'd like to destabilize the discussion further by throwing in a fourth term: mystery, which, Einstein says, "is the most beautiful thing we can experience. It is the source of all true art and science." You're probably familiar with Hemingway's famous pronouncement from A Moveable Feast: " . . . you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood" (75). The reason we read Hemingway's stories is because of what he leaves out—his simplicity produces not his ambiguity but his mystery. The reason we don't read his poems is because of what he didn't leave out, his clarifications. In his stories you see what he is leaving out by looking at his vague and even clichéd adjectives, his "good's," "fine's," "dark's," etc. These terms are not ambiguous, because none of their connotations helps us. They are mysterious. For example, he remembers Paris in the twenties in A Moveable Feast: With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. (45) Notice how much mileage he gets out of the bland adjective "cold," which he uses three times, twice to modify the same noun, "rain." It's one of those devices it seems we can never get away with in poetry (only Elizabeth Bishop is allowed the stylistic strategy of almost absent-mindedly repeating herself) because each word is supposed to be so freighted with ambiguity, the "secret-hidden-deeper meaning." Keats advises us to "Load every rift with ore." But Hemingway is giving us the deeper image by giving us, ironically, the shallow image—marking it off, reserving it for the use of our own consciousness, or subconsciousness, allowing us to substitute for his common, simple words something non-verbal, pre-verbal, sub-verbal. Hemingway's words encourage us by their very vagueness to supply some personal mysterious feeling of our own. This vagueness is the very reason Hemingway's stories are so suggestive, and his poems are not because they hog all the emotion and meaning; their images, metaphors, high-falutin" adjectives try to force you into feelings. Killed Piave—July 8—1918 This is not juvenilia. It was written only a few years before The Sun Also Rises. You can almost see him reaching deeper into his adjective bag because he's writing Poetry, which everyone knows should be as hot-swollen and throbbing as possible. The adjectives, such as "sullen," are plenty ambiguous, they're just not mysterious. Hemingway here has violated his own theory of art: it's what he has not left out that has sabotaged the poem because he has trespassed on the admittedly negotiable but finite mutual space between artist and audience. To withhold the emotion from this space in a work of art is to produce a vacuum that pulls the reader in. To fill up all the space with one's own feelings is like a word balloon so large it fills up the cartoon frame, leaving no room for the image, nor for the reader to realize their own feelings about the matter, no reason for them to want to read the poem again. (What a bullying word "sweet" is, for example.) Listen to how artists express this belief in reticence: "Make your poems as clear as you can. Let others find the mystery in them." Robert Bly "Any life will seem dramatic if you omit mention of most of it." Anne Beattie "Tell almost the whole story." Anne Sexton "Truth is a silence towards which only words can point." W. H. Auden "No poet can be the creator of all the meaning in his poem." Owen Barfield "The poem is not made from these letters that I drive in like nails, but of the white which remains on the paper." Paul Claudel "The poet endlessly attempts to speak the silence." Howard Nemerov "The greatest poet is not one whose work is the most accomplished: he is the one who suggests the most, with whom at first one does not grasp entirely all that he has meant to say and express, and who leaves one much to ask, to explain, to study, much for one to finish." Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve "There is but one art—to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A writer who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper." Robert Louis Stevenson "I write half the poem. The reader writes the other half." Paul Valery "To name is to destroy; to suggest is to create." Paul Valery "At its best, poetic lore is like what may be heard of conversation in the dusk, from speakers far or hid, of which we get only a few broken murmurs. What is not gather'd is far more—perhaps the main thing." Walt Whitman "Poetic language says that it cannot say what it means and so succeeds in meaning what it cannot say." Harry Mathews "The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery." Francis Bacon Living in an explicit age should have shown us that to look at something too closely is often to miss the meaning of it completely: for instance, one wonders if the makers of pornographic movies have any idea what human sexuality really is, or if they have only read about it in a textbook, as a Martian might. Morris Zapp, the post-structuralist critic in David Lodge's novel Small World, describes the gynecological quality of such pornography: "Staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest" (27). He much prefers the teasing titillation of The Dance of the Seven Veils. (Remember Seven Types of Ambiguity?) No, if an elusive thing is to be seen at all, we must point to its presence, signposting it, taking readers to dark places lit only by moonlight, looking askance at the ghostly presences. E. M. Forster says, "Only what is seen out of the sides of the eyes sinks deep." Whitman concurs: "Grandest poetic passages are only to be taken at free removes, as we sometimes look for stars at night, not by gazing directly toward them, but off one side." It may seem that because I'm invoking Hemingway what I'm talking about is a matter of style. It is not. I'm talking about something more fundamental than style, which only water-skis on a depth of faith and confidence in the language itself, and in its limitations, and in the ability and alacrity of the mind and heart of the reader of that language to supply what you're courageous and skillful enough to leave unsaid, putting the art back in inarticulate. How hard it is sometimes to be silent, with lovers as well as readers, and let silence speak, just as a good teacher knows when to shut up and listen, letting the feared silence fill up the room with what Lorca calls duende, the shadow that is present in art but can only be evoked, never articulated: "The magical quality of a poem consists in its being always possessed by the duende, so that whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water" (48). As Robert Bly has pointed out, we tend to feel uneasy in the presence of such reticence instead of trusting it, letting it bloom. Frost said he was "a believer in silences," and that "The unsaid part of poetry is its best part." In "The Secret Sits," he writes, "We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows." Jay Parini says of the poem, "A poet has to allow for mystery, has to cultivate it just as he cultivates the silence that underlies, that buoys up and surrounds, language itself" (342). James Wright learned the power of the unsaid from the great haiku poets, and grew to have confidence in it, as in the last sentence, and stanza, of "In Ohio": A widow on a front porch puckers her lipsAnd whispers. (127) Whatever our poetry gives our readers, we must also give them an opportunity, a marked off space for them to fill. When Yeats wrote of the Spiritus Mundi, and those universal symbols such as the rose and the cross, and the emotions they had the power to evoke, he was using them not as symbols of a specific ideology, but rather as grails, shapes to be lowered into the well of the subconscious to bring up intimations that are at once personal and impersonal, universal and idiosyncratic. Again, Yeats uses these symbols to mark off a space in which the mystery can happen or deepen: in "The Second Coming" he says "and what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born" (401) (my italics). What an adjective "what" is! How vague can you get, and yet how chillingly evocative? The word explodes into its own immensity (although "slouches" is no slouch either). Yeats' whole career was composed of the tension between his insistence on the importance of subjective meaning that is ultimately objective and the resistance to a too-specific meaning, one objective meaning that would be imposed on everyone. Just as Jung, referring to the existence of God in our minds, describes a psychic organ whose function is belief, we seem to have a space in our psyches that is eager to respond to what I'm calling mystery. To illustrate this response, I'll use a famous poem; some have even called it the purest lyric poem ever written. It dates from the 16th century, but who wrote it is unknown. It goes O western wind, when wilt thou blow It would be hard to imagine a clearer poem. It doesn't teach well, because, as Scholes says of such poems, "it supposedly lacks those secret-hidden-deeper meanings so dear to our pedagogic hearts" (6). There's not enough ambiguity to talk about. But there is a mystery, and the mystery is why it works so well, and how. Partly, of course, it is because it is so sympathetic to that most painful of human experiences—loss, separation, perhaps forever, and the recalling of what was once perhaps taken for granted. As Dante's Francesca says, Nessun maggior dolore, And partly it's the repetition of the word "rain," which suggests the inevitability and indifference of nature, as Hemingway's "cold rain" and "cold, wintry light" does in his prose. And, of course, the haunting rhythm of the phrasing of "small rain down can rain." But it's more than that, and I think it boils down to one word and the context in which it is used. The word is a small word: in fact it is the word "small." You can talk until you're blue in the face about the meanings, connotations, and ambiguities of "small," but the more you discuss it the further you get from the effect the word has. Insignificant, trivial, modest, humble, quiet (archaic), drizzle, inconsequential, etc., etc., none of which gets you any closer to its duende, the opportunity it provides for our subconscious to leap, in Bly's term. Paraphrasing is a shabby business at best, but when you try to analyze a poem this simple, you come close to what John Steinbeck in Cannery Row describes as sea organisms "so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch" (2). Terms like "obscurity," "clarity," or "ambiguity" have for me little to do with this mystery, this ability of poetry, like music, even simple music, to point to what is ineffable, beyond language, simple or obscure, to either surround a feeling or intimation, or to point to it. A friend of mine recently tried to return to his boyhood faith and was enjoying the mass right up until the time of the sermon, when, he says, it was as if you're enjoying this beautiful play and halfway through it, somebody stands up and starts telling you what the play is about. I feel like that kind of idiot trying to teach a poem like this. When the mystery of the Mass is spoken of, what is meant is a transformation for which we have no words, and many Catholics feel that the Mass was more powerful back when it was spoken in a tongue we didn't know. The meaning of poetry, too, can lie in the cracks between the words, and, as Leonard Cohen says, "There's a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in." The Coen brothers' film-noir The Man Who Wasn't There is not a great movie, but its title alone tempts me to use it here, since it's about, in current critical jargon, an absence that is a presence. The title is taken from a poem by William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965), supposedly the first person ever to teach creative writing: Yesterday upon the stair At the end of the movie, the main character, a hapless barber who is a victim of circumstances, is being led to the electric chair, and his voice-over says, in that ingenuous eloquence typical of a Hemingway or Carver character, I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky, but I'm not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there, and maybe there I can tell her all the things they don't have words for here. The passage is humbling because, though Yeats claimed that "words alone are certain good" (65), there are things we don't always have words for, a fact painters, sculptors, and musicians know and prosper by. Arthur Rubenstein says, "I play the notes like any other pianist—but the pauses, ah, the pauses!" William Matthews speaks of "the silence all poems are unfaithful to (35)." I'll conclude with another quotation, by Shelley, that I think reminds us of the essential mystery of what we do; and thank God that there is still mystery in the world, the promise of worlds either beyond, behind, or alongside this one: A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet, even, cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; their power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic whether of its approach or of its departure. (285) At the core of poetry is something mysterious: that much is clear, and obscure.Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandlebaum. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. Bly, Robert. Leaping Poetry: And Idea with Poems and Translations. Boston: Beacon P, 1972. Coen, Ethan and Joel. The Man Who Wasn't There. USA Films, 2001. Cohen, Leonard. "Anthem." The Essential Leonard Cohen. Columbia Records, 2002. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Ark, 1983. Gould, Stephen Jay. "Sex, Drugs, Disasters and the Extinction of Dinosaurs." The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History. New York: New York: Norton, 1985. Hemingway, Ernest. Ernest Hemingway: 88 Poems. Ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York: Harcourt, 1979. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner's, 1964. Lorca, Federico Garcia. "The Play and Theory of Duende." In Search of Duende. New York: New Directions, 1998. Matthews, William. Search Party: Collected Poems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999. Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Defense of Poetry. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1904. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945. Tod, Jeremy Noel. "The Sugared Pill." The Guardian, 3 Apr. 2003. Wright, James. Above the River: The Complete Poems. New York: Noonday, 1990. Yeats, William Butler. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
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