A Little Riff on How and What

At least, let�s acknowledge this: each of us in our own way is quite fond of our Whats � those particular and myriad goods we collect, cherish and enjoy throughout our lives. O.K. So we like stuff and often covet more. This admission clears the way for us to entertain the notion that it might be invigorating to climb out, every once in a while, from behind our seductive What-clutter, and take a long, thoughtful look at the How, namely, at some of the underlying aesthetic strategies which keep our What-stuff in motion.

If we believe our poems must work and play in the service of love, help us abide one another while illuminating the hard-fought ambivalences and ambiguities that make us human, we do well to remember the seminal lines from Wallace Stevens: "The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it." (�An Ordinary Evening in New Haven�) Stevens� claim challenges poets to let the presiding impulse be how the events (our occasions) enter language, and not just the events themselves.

Anyone can write about the actual. Transcribe the literal like cub reporters. But poetry that reaches frisson, that speaks to the heart/mind/body of others demands that we go further than merely the What. In its moments of highest achievement, poetry should give others, as W. D. Snodgrass argues, �not some objective truth about the world, but rather the nature of the mind experiencing that world, the nature, if you like, of cortical response.� (To Sound Like Yourself)

Perhaps such a dynamic is analogous to how a wave turns over a shell, again and again � a rhythm or an unfamiliar pulse, a curiosity propelled by the thrust of syllable or syntactic pattern, combined with the nudge of the imagination. As bodies of words, sounds and silences, our most accomplished poems are much like our children. They too are from us, but they are not of us. We do well, at times, to stand up and get the hell out of their way. Moreover, poems that draw only from memory and avoid imagination often suffocate surprise, their occasions overwhelming the as-yet-discovered possibilities of the cry. In our best efforts, those �crying� possibilities enrich our poems with philosophical and psychological opportunities without a loss of emotional intensity. Simply put, the language finds a locus from where it can think and sing, sing and think.

What else about How? Stevens insists that cry and occasion are symbiotic and often almost identical with each other but not quite. This �not-quiteness� relationship, a dynamic interaction between the act of the poem and the event of the poem, Stevens asserts, produces the dramatic tension characteristic of compelling poetry. This achievement, in turn, discloses that the poet understands how the How serves as aorta for the imagination, understands the beauty and force of "sounds passing through sudden rightnesses,� (Stevens, �Of Modern Poetry�) Poems which lack this �not-quiteness� interaction remain flaccid and mundane, do little service for the art, and seldom bring us, as powerful verse does, new wine in old wineskins.

Which takes us back around to another apt metaphor for How. Ripened on the vine, aged in oak barrels, and, subsequently, bottled and turned, the grape becomes wine. And no matter the quality of the vintage, be it Cabernet, Shiraz or Riesling, when wine is sipped leisurely from Riedel crystal the fruit�s flavor and bouquet reward the drinker. Conversely, that same vintage chugged from a paper cup in no way reflects the former experience. Summon the sommelier! The How is being abused.

And so, when we begin to stumble in the half-light toward what we believe might become a poem we should try to remain fluid, even porous. The act of the poem � the syntactical maneuvers, pacing, tone and music which comprise the cry � is often how naked ideas and resistance to those ideas arrive. We demand that contemporary films and music discover and surprise from start to finish, keep us so enthralled in their dreamscapes that we find no excuse to leave. Why shouldn�t our poems do the same? After all, we can argue that in the history of western literature there have only been two stories, two whats: man goes out on a journey; man journeys back home.

Obviously, we can�t escape subject matter, the What-stuff of our lives. Nor do we want to. There are intellectual opportunities and emotional intensities laden �in things� as William Carlos Williams championed. But we should be careful how we take Williams� long-standing aesthetic creed. We�ve always understood that his two famous short poems aren�t merely about their central What-stuff: a wheelbarrow and plums. Williams� subjects are developed, maneuvered and altered so effortlessly, (undoubtedly the nimblest line-breaker of the 20th-century), that his poems cease to be about X or Y and end up providing the reader with another expression of human consciousness confronting and being challenged by itself and the world � so much depends upon .... this is just to say.

The idea that an artist�s temperament dictates how he exercises his imagination is a central component of Stevens� aesthetic project. In his essay �Effects of Analogy� Stevens asserts that subject matter is never a static thing, a particular What, but rather the poet�s inexhaustible and ever-flucuating sense of the world, a sense that balances a deepening understanding of reality and the possibilities of the imagination. He writes, �The measure of the poet is the measure of his sense of the world and of the extent to which it involves the sense of other people.� It follows that a poet�s sense of the world as imaginatively articulated through within phrases, Biblical archetypes and those crucial dashes and copious silences, as well as an abiding empathy for humanity tempered by sharp wit, her language leaps to the psychological and philosophical effects these incidents produce. Thus, she enabled the energy pulsing though her poems to span the complete range of human feelings from irony to sincerity, from "a perfect - paralyzing Bliss to that White Sustenance - /Despair."

In her work the language becomes a river through which the reader passes to �finish� the poem. Because she allied herself aesthetically to the powerful fluidity of the How, Dickinson�s poems, written a more than a century ago, continue to reverberate in us.

In our best efforts the language moves effortlessly from surprise to surprise, engages our readers, and, perhaps, even compels them to speak the words aloud. We should hope our poems advance some sense of unexpected inevitability that will get us, if only momentarily, to where aesthetics leaps to encounter latent or conspicuous metaphysical questions and concerns.

I�ll conclude with a small poem, one in which the triggering occasion is rhythm-and-memory-driven. In revision and in the time away from the poem, that specific memory was happily shuffled by my imagination enabling, I hope, innocence and experience consciousness to collide, and language to loose itself from itself. Figuratively speaking, I entered the school with my son and came out with my nephew, swapped a male teacher for a female administrator, all the while pursuing some happy fiction bouncing this way and that.

Well Through the Test

for entrance into kindergarten
the administrator places a ball

in my nephew�s restive hands.
Alex, please describe this ball,

its shape and color, how you
play with it, those kinds of things.

After a pause he looks up and says,
Rainbow eye. If you get hungry

lollipops make a parade.
She bites her lip and scratches notes

on lined paper fastened to a board.
No Alex, describe the ball, she says

a little more emphatically.
Lots of things are good to watch,

he says. Her forehead crimps
then releases. Tell me about the ball

in your hands, sweetheart. Can you do that?
Another pause, this one longer.

What ball? he says.