Kay Ryan MARIN COUNTY, CA Kay Ryan used to write poems but now she just blogs and stuff. Friday: 12.08.06 | Permalink | Comments (19)

In spite of my description above, I really haven’t been spending time blogging, or even reading blogs. This is my first, and undertaken because I was asked. I could give it a grumpy title, like Larkin’s title for his collected prose: Required Writing.

My first impulse was to cheat and prepare a week’s worth of foil wrapped entrees that the Poetry Foundation could pop into the microwave each morning. That way they’d be all clean and polished and I wouldn’t be up against the wall like this. But two things stopped me: One, my inability to take my job seriously until the very last minute; and Two, the sense that doing them ahead would really be cheating on the idea of a blog.

Because isn’t a blog supposed to be immediate and risky and regrettable? The blogger is supposed to be bringing some immediate fire to this thing, right? Be kind of off balance, intemperate, hasty? (Like here, in my haste, I can’t stop to choose between intemperate and hasty.)

However, these are things that fire my disinterest. Of course I court Risk and Regret, but I am not so interested in the lightweight risk and regret of just lacking the time to think things through. I want to take a long time for everything.

“‘I want to take a long time for everything,’ artist says.” This is the continued-on-p. E9 title of an article in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle (Saturday, December 2). (OK, I’m writing this two days before it will be posted, but to me it’s a split second.) I had hoped that the pressure of having to write this blog would make something special appear, and it did. Much as I hate it, pressure does deform the mind in useful ways, pressing the brain more firmly against material. So, anyhow, in this article we meet Chinese camera obscura artist, Shi Guorui, currently making a series of enormous pinhole camera photographs in the Bay Area. He sits inside his dark tent/camera watching the picture come up on photographic paper against the back wall. He sits there anywhere from 90 minutes to eight hours. He might drink some tea or a beer. He likes the blankness: “When I’m inside, I feel this quiet in my mind, in my heart. The time for normal people is very long. For me, I feel the time is blank. It goes by very quickly.”

As another person who seeks sensory deprivation, I just love this artist. I love the patience of the silent light gradually blackening the paper (camera obscura photos are reversed, like negatives.) I love sitting in the dark of an empty mind, seeing what comes up. The beer is nice too.

So there are two forces working here, as you have no doubt already noted, dear reader. There is one’s reluctance to hurry, with its natural companions: silence, emptiness, and dark. And there is, on the other hand, the pressure to get something done, with its natural companion, attentiveness to any possible handhold that might save one from disgrace or death (if you distinguish).

It seems cruel that forces have to come in pairs, like this, in order to work at all.

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If you have read all the way to the bottom of this, I hope you will go one step further and communicate with me. I’m hoping to use readers’ ideas, augmentations, refutations, tangents, and so on instead of relying on the newspaper for tomorrow’s musings. Does that sound opportunistic? Well, you can see why.

Ekphrastic poems. Norris Palmstreick asks if I write them. Well, now that I have looked up the word and determined that an ekphrastic poem is one that describes another work of art, usually a painting but also possibly sculpture or music, I am prepared to say that I have done so, after a fashion, but not recently.

I should start by admitting that I have a certain prejudice. I am inclined to see poems-about-paintings as easy poems, or exercises, or trainer poems. The writer is playing tennis against a nice, solid backboard. The artwork is already there; all the poet has to do is dance around in front of something both fixed and culturally valuable. One feels a sense of pre-approval if one writes about Great Art.

But please, I don’t want anybody throwing Rilke’s torso in my face. Of course there is no “kind” of poetry that one can really say is “easy” or any such thing. We all just have approaches that rub us mostly the wrong way.

Twenty years ago, yes; I demonstrated definite ekphrastic tendencies: poems treating of Hopper, Van Gough, Matisse, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Chagall, even Giotto and El Greco. And why wouldn’t poets write about artists of all kinds? One is alone and cherishes the struggles (ending in triumph, of course) of others who were alone. Also, there is the pleasure of jobbing out one’s aesthetic musings.

Maybe I’m wrong to think I ever really wrote ekphrastic poems. I have always found “material” (such as the content of a picture, or a story from my life or anyone else’s) very hot to stand on; I’ve had to jump off pretty fast. Here is my kind of poem-about-a painting from my first book (1983):

LILACS IN A WINDOW
Mary Cassatt

Do colors
call to one another—
lilac in a window
call green; green
beg relief from
green—each
thing the other’s
name? No lilac
without end?

Lilac,
my mother’s choice,
one bush
by the desert house
against sand and
bitter wind
called to her
green, green
without end.

This little poem owes more to color theory—the idea of complements—than to Mary Cassatt, and doesn’t tell you a thing about the painting. It did give me a way in to say something personal about my mother, though, that I’m sure I could never have come to if I hadn’t started with the idea of colors calling to one another, and the possibility of their getting no answer. The idea came from a painting by Mary Cassatt, but that really doesn’t matter.

I have always been uncomfortable describing what already exists. Existing things are just too hot, too self-radiant. My words get soft and gluey if I try to mold them into a facsimile of something. If I were a sculptor, it would be as if I were forced to work with clay that clung to my fingers instead sticking to my projected dog sculpture.

But enough complaining. An artist I’ve returned to over and over in poems is not a painter but the French composer, Eric Satie. In contrast to the thoroughly not-Cassatt poem above, the Satie poem that follows IS, I think, very Satie—and ekphrastic—even though it’s a pure fabrication. Because I’m going to define an ekphrastic poem as one that invokes the spirit of the artist (without having to describe features of any actual work.) Call me a cheater.

Here’s my entry (from 1996) in the Ekphrasti-Off:

LES PETITES CONFITURES
(The Little Jams)

These three pieces
in Satie’s elegant notation
were just discovered
at the Metro station
where he rolled them
in a Figaro of April twenty-second
nineteen twenty-seven,
and put them in a pipe
two inches in diameter, the type
then commonly used for banisters.
They are three sticky pieces
for piano or banjo—
each instrument to be played
so as to sound like the other.
That is really the hub
of the amusement. Each piece
lasts about a minute.
When they were first tried
after being in the pipe,
they kept rolling back up.
Really, keeping them flat
was half the banjo-piano
man’s work.

This story is so made up that even the date in it doesn’t work. Satie was dead years before the poem has him rolling up his manuscript. Satie did not write any “Little Jams” (though of course he wrote much ridiculously titled music). But this is of no consequence. Nothing is of any consequence, and that’s the thing. It’s just a poem having some fun, in the spirit of Satie’s music.

Actually, I don’t care at all if it’s ekphrastic; I adore Satie, but all I care about is I found a little jumping off place for myself to try to be free. And of course that’s how every poem uses material; a poem can’t over-respect its material. Even that torso; it would never have spoken German without Rilke.

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Again, I invite comments. Get them in early because I’m depending on them for tomorrow. In answer to Montgomery Maxton’s question as to whether blogs must really be “spur-of-the-moment,” I’m behaving like that’s the rule partly because that’s what seems to distinguish them from other sorts of “notebooks” or “journals”—they’re operating in a very speedy interactive medium that is splattered all over the world and, as best we understand it, are worrisomely permanent despite their offhand immediacy—and partly because I didn’t prepare in advance.

This is a good question that reader Robin Yim poses: Can one court sensory deprivation
(which I mentioned on Monday in relation to the camera obscura photographer) or does one just have to be ready to take advantage of it when it happens by?

First of all, of course I’m not really talking about sensory deprivation. The phrase sensory deprivation should be understood as an amusing overstatement (though I suspect that it may read as unremarkably neutral in our culture of ambient overstatement.) What I really mean is sensory modulation, just some serious turning down of the knobs for bright, fast, and loud. Oh, and the pressure knob too, turning that down.

Maybe all of us who desire more of this have the mildly predefeated tone of Robin Yim, assuming we’ll just have to wait till things align. Perhaps we are a passive people, by nature doubtful of the worth of anything you have to struggle too hard for. We wonder, we People of the Dusk, what’s the use of yelling that we must have some quiet. If we did get some quiet that way, it would be a jangly, fraught, wholly useless quiet.

We do not prefer to wait, but we can’t think of anything else to do. I am reminded of the life of the tick, as described in the strangely empathetic brochure, Defeating the Tick, by Robert Brown Butler, which accompanied a tick removal tool my partner Carol brought home some years ago. My favorite line in it is, “With only three meals in two years, time goes by slowly for the lowly tick.” I kept it above my desk for a long time. Apparently the young tick instinctively crawls up something vertical like a stick until it reaches its furthest tip and then waits for months or years for something warm blooded to come within jumping-on distance. There must be occasions when nothing ever does. Other texts, by the way, document waits much longer even than Brown Butler describes. For example, John N. Bleibtreu, in a gorgeous essay titled “The Moment of Being,” describes how “In the Zoological Institute, at Rostock, prior to World War I ticks were kept on the ends of twigs, waiting for this moment [of feeding] for a period of eighteen years.”

Imagine the researchers at the Zoological Institute at Rostock watching the ticks for eighteen years. Perhaps, toward the end, the scientists began to wonder if they could hold out longer than their subjects. And what must the incremental psychic costs have amounted to from all those years of consciously denying satisfaction to the ticks? So much restraint for a bit of knowledge, so much endurance for a bit of blood.

Still I would like to think that there are, Robin Yim, some things one can do to bring the tick and its meal closer faster, or in our case to actively seek—what shall we call it—emptiness? For example, in my own life it was recently the case that my home—for many years mine alone to wander vaguely around in during the day as though it were my own skull—became more densely occupied. Therefore I decided (with the help of some outside coaching) not to just wait for things to change back to the way they had been (which they might or might not do) but to find myself a study elsewhere. In other words, I would recreate the sensory dampening that I require, using my own Initiative! I set about this, and within a few weeks had contracted to rent for a very modest fee a tiny travel trailer that sits in the yard of some friends. So see? It is possible to press against incursion, to fling oneself toward, in my case, a teardrop-shaped refuge from the knobs turned up. I have to say that it didn’t work and that I have abandoned poetry as a result, but it does show that you can try.

EMPTINESS

Emptiness cannot be
compressed. Nor can it
fight abuse. Nor is there
an endless West hosting
elk, antelope, and the
tough cayuse. This is
true also of the mind:
it can get used.

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Thank you all for your comments. I hope you’ll continue to say your pieces. I count on them, including those to which I do not specifically respond.

Reader Kim (no last name) is curious about my admitted discomfort with using poems to describe what already exists. This came up earlier, when I was thinking about ekphrastic poetry. I said, essentially, that a little outside stuff goes a very long way for me. She thinks maybe I’m missing something. She quotes some ideas about what poetry does or should do. I direct you to her comment.

I think it’s all just pretty constitutional, and should be constitutional, what you think poetry does or should do. Theories keep turning out to be just what some person couldn’t help thinking.

Take me: my theory is a poem should set you free: reading a real poem should leave you feeling less tired and more exquisitely yourself. Aerated. You’ve been speeded up and perhaps somewhat dispersed, your bits enjoying more distance from each other than they had previously. You seem to have been augmented, but not in any one place like a lump; no, just some extra electrons here and there; you could never say where. No; that can’t be right. You couldn’t be heavier if it was a real poem. So maybe it’s more of an electron swap or adjustment; hard to say, because these are very small, fast exchanges. In any case, every poem does some small thing to fit us to the galaxies

Feeling as I do, it was a great satisfaction when I encountered Joseph Brodsky’s thrillingly immense claims for poetry. He believes that composing poetry, thinking in that way, is the greatest mental accelerator, and that acceleration is the nature of poetry—really: its job is to propel us beyond the constraints of space and time. His arguments are of an ecstatic nature, and irresistible to the prepared mind. Here he is, in his magnificent book of essays, Less Than One, describing how when he read, in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Auden’s line, “Time . . . worships language,” he all at once came to understand the true dimensions of poetry. Let me quote:

Auden had indeed said that time (not the time) worships language, and the train of thought that statement set in motion is still trundling to this day. For “worship” is an attitude of the lesser toward the greater. If time worships language, it means that language is greater, or older, than time, which is, in its turn, older and greater than space. That was how I was taught, and I indeed felt that way. So if time—which is synonymous with, nay even absorbs deity—worships language, where then does language come from? For the gift is always smaller than the giver. And then isn’t language a repository of time? And isn’t this why time worships it? And isn’t a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language plays to restructure time? And aren’t those by whom language “lives” those by whom time does too?

Brodsky understands language to be the god of time. And who controls language and thus controls time? Brodsky and Akhmatova, Auden, etc: gods equal to God. Sure, it sounds a little over-exhilarated. But Emily Dickinson says much the same—just substituting “brain” for “language”—and surely it was her own brain, and surely it was her own brain as a poet she was taking about. She makes her claims in a poem, rather than prose, however, which is probably a better place.

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other contain
With ease—and you—beside

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Dickinson has the advantage over Brodsky; the kind of heat it takes to weld such propositions into a credible whole are more available when one is in the concentrated condition of writing a poem rather than in the more dilute condition of writing an essay. One has the tool of rhyme, for one thing, which confers upon the mind a boldness. Rhyme leaps to rhyme, over the head of reason, over the head of modesty or meekness, claiming territory far out in front of the settlers.

Some days it’s that big.
Some days it isn’t.

SWEPT UP WHOLE

You aren’t swept up whole,
however it feels. You’re
atomized. The wind passes.
You recongeal. It’s
a surprise.

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I continue to invite your comments.

Reader Rowan Steigs, sounding slightly tetchy as though he himself may be short of a little quiet time, asks what I want the emptiness for. (See his comment.) This is a very good question.

Just to have, that’s what I want it for. Just to jump in, the way Scrooge McDuck jumped—dove—into his money pile. It’s a condition of wealth. It just has to be there and I have to visit it regularly.

Now, as a wealthy person, I can do the laundry or anything, in my wealth. I don’t know, is that a Buddhist thing to say? It does sound a little like chop wood/carry water, but I have arrived at it purely by predisposition. The one thing I do know is it’s important not to think that emptiness converts to anything. It’s just that nothing’s any good without it.

Imagine an anti-kryptonite that Superman had to go back to for his powers. I feel like that about emptiness; and I’ve already said more than I should.

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Thank you so much for your comments.