Daisy,

Well, perhaps you misunderstood my post when I said that poets were the modern day soothsayers. I never meant to imply that what they were offering was always the only outcome or a certain firm right or wrong. That’s too didactic for me. I can barely tell what’s right and wrong myself, let alone assume someone else can. What I meant to imply however was that truth and revelation can come from poetry. Does that mean that this “truth” can’t be one of total confusion or absolute loss of one’s self? Absolutely not. Rather, I think the poems that I find myself relating to the most (especially when at low points) are the ones that say, “It’s okay to feel lost and want to jump off the bridge. Sometimes we all do.” But that’s TRUE to me. As in Robert Hass’s poem, Faint Music:

It's not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized--,"
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had this idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps--
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

The uncertain and the unclear and the painful is usually what I find the most true, much more so than anyone attempting to instruct me on what is or is not a moral imperative. I agree with you that states of confusion lead to wonderful poems. What I simply meant to say was that poets should be listened to, unlike Caesar’s soothsayer, because great personal truths can come from them…even if the truth you discover is that no one knows anything at all.

All the best,

Ada

Hi Daisy,

I think I know what you're talking about, and agree with much of it, but how about some examples? I have always had a visceral reaction against "major" poets of deep thoughts -- the Heaney-Walcott-Brodsky-Pinsky axis when I was in Boston in the '90s, for instance -- preferring a Niedecker or Schuyler or Mayer.

(But then I think of poets who did both, like O'Hara -- his odes do everything, really -- and I think, like you, the only generalization that can be made about poetry is that generalizations are bad.)

Anyway -- any snippets of "clarity" vs. "Truth" might be interesting to examine.

Best,
Ange

Were I to encounter someone running down the street, tattered book in hand, smelling of something foul (or at least lightly unshowered), proclaiming "HARK YE, HUMANITY, FOR I THE SOOTHSAYER DO PROCLAIM THE END OF YOUR AGE!"...I'd be a tad suspicious.

I am, however, equally suspicious of the poet who does not aspire to some level of insight that may indeed put him or her in the realm of...what term shall we use? Wise sage? Learned figure? Sensei? Must we completely abandon the idea of poet as teacher, and not solely for the way that poet can turn a line?

I don't know whether Robert Hass aspires to soothsayer status, and I doubt greatly that he aspires toward sentimentality, but I must tell you: one of the greatest, most poignant lessons I've ever learned about love comes from the woman in Hass' immense poem "Privilege of Being": "the woman says to the man,/ I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized/ that you could not, as much I love you,/ dear heart, cure my loneliness...

Hass stakes out a very clear position about limitations. And he spells it out in a clear, succinct, insightful way that only a poet can. Maybe he's not a stinky bo-ho poet talking crazy about the Ides of March, but I'll take this Hass...dare I say, the soothsayer...any day of the week.

Those Auden quotes display a dandy-ish, myopic ignorance.

Poetry makes physiological, emotional, and epistemological changes happen in the reader or hearer. Are goosebumps nothing? Are delight and tears nothing? Is the development of a sense of awe at the immensity, complexity, unknowability of existence nothing?

Taking it beyond the subjective, if poetry made nothing happen, why do authoritarian regimes censor it? Why have people been executed for it? Are executions nothing?

And as for people loving so-called appalling trash -- what snobbery. The "appalling trash" he ascribes to "maiden ladies" speaks to people's SENTIMENTS. (Auden's conflation of bad verse with aged female virginity is disgusting, by the way.) People's SENTIMENTS are important to them. You can be an anti-sentimentalist and still write lively, interesting poetry; and I'm not saying you have to LIKE sentimental poetry. But it's OK -- it really is -- that other people do.

In a time of grief, I have found comfort in lines by Ted Berrigan. Poetry is not helpless or incompetent. But it's not for everybody.

Rich--I think I'd call your experience with the Hass lines recognition rather than lesson-learning.
Ada--Thanks for responding. I guess to me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to call confusion and unknowing soothsaying, nor to equate soothsaying and consolation. I'm also uncomfortable with the conflation of poetry and consolation, though I recognize that some people seek and find consolation in poetry.
Ange--Examples to come. Thanks for the suggestoin. Will do it in another post, I think, though. Since the Harriet beast must be fed anyway. Yes, to what you say about O'Hara!
Daisy

Daisy: Trust me. It was a lesson. :-) A profound personal one, for me.

When I read your post today, a little bell went off in my head that I had another association of poetry and pigs. Then I remembered it was this quote I had underlined in an old copy of Soren Kiekegaard's Either/Or. He says,

"I would rather be a swineherd... and be understood by the swine, than be a poet and be misunderstood by men."

Looking at the larger passage from which that quote comes, a passage abut poets and critics, I can't tell now whether he's being critical of poets, or only of critics. I do know (trying to make some connections here) Kierkegaard was a big influence on Auden. But I'll have to do some more reading now. I think at the time I underlined that quote I was struggling with my own self-loathing viz. "poetry makes noting happen" yet "poetry is all I do in my free time." Yet I claim to care (I do care) passionately about all of these social causes...and what if I put half the energy and time I spend staring at the computer screen, into explicit action toward those causes, and toward changing those circumstances I decry?

And the other thing I was thinking (and still think) as re: K's piquant pig quote, is, it depends what you mean by "understood." I don't think the quote has to necessarily be a criticism of poets (though it may be--I do have to go back and read). So many of the poems I love, I love because by the time I get to the end of them I feel completely bewildered and...estranged. Even helpless. But those moments are as much moments of insight and understanding as they are anything. In fact if we're talking about "truth," in some ways poetry that bewilders may even be more honest. These days all I need from a poem (I say "all") is some kind of charge (as though my kind of "charge" isn't entirely subjective and complicated and picky)--if I get charge, I feel...reached out to. It's when I don't feel reached out to, as a reader, that I don't understand. Or care. And then I would rather hang out with pigs. Who actually, like dogs, make very lovely company.

I get really exercised about drawing a thin line between truth-telling and moments of clarity. Perhaps you should reconsider the definition of truth. In my moments of clarity, be they few and far between, they come to me as visions of past, present, and future. All of this is truth and engaging in the act of writing is the conflation of experience and capture. In my opinion, it's consoling to tell the difference between beautiful and banal. Perhaps next time instead of quoting & critiquing poets, you should shut up & write a poem.

People who insist on their ignorance -- I don't trust them. Socrates and Sgt. Schultz both bellowed, "I know nothing!", and both were lying. I'm not at all sure that uncertainty leads to better poetry. If so, bye-bye Milton!

No, wait, maybe I *do* agree with you, Daisy! Yeah, Milton sux! That know-it-all. "justify the ways of God to man" indeed. Dude, that's some serious hubris.

If a serious Milton-esque were to appear today, people would freak.

Certainty about uncertainty leads to silly paradoxes. Bertrand Russell painted himself a fool when he said, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." He sounds so certain of himself there, doesn't he?

I'm having doubts about my anti-Auden blast. I fear I've decontextualized his "poetry makes nothing happen" remark. I was responding to a decontextualized citation of it. The context of the phrase is quite beautiful, in Auden's elegy for Yeats. It's only when it appears decontextualized -- which is often -- that it appears dandy-ish.

And Daisy, you're right, the following lines -- the less truthy-sounding, certain-sounding lines -- are lovely.

"Certainty about uncertainty leads to silly paradoxes. Bertrand Russell painted himself a fool when he said, 'The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.' He sounds so certain of himself there, doesn't he?"

That's pretty cheap. Sometimes paradoxes can't be avoided. That's not Russell's fault. You really don't think it's true, what he's saying? Come on.

Yes, in fact, I think Russell's statement was foolish, and the rhetorical self-contradiction is just funny. I don't know the context -- I saw the quote on a T-shirt, which just struck me as hilarious -- so maybe he was saying it with a wink.

I am 100% certain that George Bush's policies have been disastrous for America. If you think my certainty makes me a fool, I am curious to know why.

Yeats said that the worst are full of passionate intensity. Sometimes the best are too. Martin Luther King didn't hedge.

I'm as upset as you are, Dmitri [John], about Bush, but I know that my certainty about him is based on my faith in particular media outlets and artistic types I admire, as well as on a general, liberal gut feeling that I suspect is partly genetic anyway. So I'm not technically certain about my certainty, though 99%, or even 89% certain is good enough for me when it comes to politics.

Matt, Is Dmitri an allusion to Dostoeyevsky? Do I have to read him now too? (I should, I know I should.)

Russell exaggerated, and in context, I found the exaggeration funny, but on the whole, more or less, for the most part, usually, I'm pro-doubt.

Of course Bush & Co. are malevolent. Writing a poem saying so would almost certainly be utterly boring if it did nothing else but say so. On a side note, I recommend the poem "The Bush Administration" in Frederick Seidel's great book Ooga Booga.
Daisy

John, it's an allusion to Dr. Strangelove, but don't let that stop you from reading Dostoevsky. :)

Daisy, yes of course, good theme doesn't a good poem make, and that goes for doubts and uncertainties too.

President Muffley [Matt], parts of that movie bug me big time, but I love that scene (Scott is as terrific as Sellers in it), and I love being cast as the unheard voice on the phone.

And on that note, maybe I should pipe down -- cheers --