Duck/Rabbit

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Sarah Howe’s poem, “Sirens,” appears in the December 2015 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

How (if at all) can words make us see pictures? When we talk about an “image” in a poem, what do we actually mean? These are questions I’ve thought about for a long time, sometimes as a poet, at others as a literary scholar. My poem “Sirens” came out of this fascination. Half-lyric poem half-academic essay, it walks through a single, unexpectedly tricksy poetic image—one that, even as I watch, twists out from under me. The metaphor in question comes early on in Theodore Roethke’s poem “Elegy for Jane,” with its lovely portrait of a dead girl and her “pickerel smile.” “A studen’ of mine who was killed by a fall from a horse” is how he introduces her in one recording:

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;

There was a while when I would listen again and again to Roethke reading the poem, his voice alternately fleet and halting—like an uneasy horse’s gait, I fancied.

“Sirens” had its seed in a lexical curiosity. The word “pickerel,” according to the heavier sort of dictionary, can mean either “a small pike” or, more obscurely, “a type of wading bird.” The two nouns evolved separately, converging by accident: the former is a diminutive, while the latter probably formed along similar lines to “cockerel,” to denote a bird that “picks” things out of the sand. I began to recall an incidental detail from my reading, years earlier, about the evolving iconography of Sirens, whose songs lured the unwary sailors of myth to rocky shipwreck. At some point after the Greeks, European tradition began to blur and conflate them with mermaids. One moralising Renaissance emblem presents the Sirens as literally neither fish nor fowl: the illustration shows Homer’s original bird-women, while the accompanying verses speak of fish-tailed temptresses. That coincidence slowly fleshed into a conceit, led to a poem.

“Sirens” comes from a sequence that runs through my first collection, Loop of Jade. In one of his essays, Jorge Luis Borges cites (which is to say, invents) “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” called The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, quoting its entry on “animals.” After Borges, I wrote one poem for each of the fourteen creatures listed there. Among that oriental work’s peculiar categories, “sirens” rub shoulders with “stray dogs” and “sucking pigs,” with beasts “included in the present classification” and “having just broken the water pitcher,” with ones “belonging to the emperor” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” I first came across this hilariously mismatched and contradictory bestiary as a graduate student, excerpted in the preface to Foucault’s The Order of Things. Foucault recognised that what the spuriously Chinese encyclopedia illustrates is not so much the “exotic charm of another system of thought” as the “limitation of our own.”

Borges’s confection of wry Chinoiserie instantly spoke to me, as someone half-Chinese half-white, who felt vaguely monstrous as a seven-year-old transplanted from Hong Kong to England. Populated by chimeras of all stripes, the larger sequence from which “Sirens” comes has at its root my experience of bi-racialness as a sort of optical illusion—identity as a puzzle dependant on the eye of the observer. When you’re primed to listen for it, the Roman poet Horace’s call for artistic decorum in his Ars Poetica starts to sound like a warning against miscegenation: poets shouldn’t mix up their genres just as painters shouldn’t portray a “lovely woman” who “ends below in a black and ugly fish.” “Sirens” kicks off my sequence’s work of meditating on hybridity—creatures born between cultures, countries, races, but also ones hovering across other sorts of binary: imagination and reality, angel and beast, Madonna and whore. In my poem, the “pickerel girl” flickers between opposed identities and interpellations, a bit like the perceptual conundrum of Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit.

Hybrid creatures lead us away from the world of reason to face our unacknowledged animal selves. From antiquity on, they were even emblematic of the imagination itself and its workings. The psychology of the time held that our imaginations—the image-making part of our brains—functioned by a process of synthesis and analogy, recombining fragments drawn from sense data into new mental pictures never before seen. That’s how (it was thought) we are able to form the image of, say, a golden mountain in our minds, since we have previously seen in the world mountains and gold. This model of the mind helps explain why the freakish mishmashes of human, animal, and inanimate parts painted by Hieronymus Bosch were so often interpreted by sixteenth-century viewers not as devils in Hell, but as a sort of nightmarish dream-sequence. Natives emanating from the human fantasy, hybrid monsters were also synonymous with it.

The curious thing about reading “Elegy for Jane” is that it leaves me with a sensation of visual intensity—of having seen something—only to realise later I have no real idea what the Jane of Roethke’s memory looks like. I “see” so vividly the curls gathered at her neck, yet couldn’t tell you the color of her hair. In What We See When We Read (2014), Peter Mendelsund considers how we go about visualizing characters in novels, forming mental sketches which, on closer inspection, turn out to be worse than police composites:

A thought experiment: Picture your mother. Now picture your favorite literary character. (Or: Picture your home. Then picture Howards End.) The difference between your mother’s afterimage and that of a literary character you love is that the more you concentrate, the more your mother might come into focus. A character will not reveal herself so easily. (The closer you look, the farther away she gets.)

The portrait Roethke’s poem offers is complicated by the fact that so much of its “imagery” takes the form of metaphor. Metaphor’s brand of painting is not straightforwardly depictive, but involves a transformation, a leaping of categories. Paradoxically, metaphors and similes get us closer to a thing by first nudging it out of frame to show us something else.

Aristotle thought metaphor necessarily involved some sort of visual experience. He recommended that poets create metaphors “neither far-fetched, as that makes it hard to see the two things together, nor superficial,” but that will “bring things before our eyes.” As we unpack an image like Roethke’s “pickerel smile,” how do the literal and figurative interact in our mind’s eye? Do we see one then another, or both at once? Will your mental sketch of Jane’s face, her smile, tally with mine in all its details? With Roethke’s? Almost certainly not. And does that matter?

Long after writing “Sirens,” I realized that my two successive attempts at picturing the pickerel girl, as narrated in the poem, were likely colored by two texts I’d read as a teenager: Ted Hughes’s poem “Pike” (“three inches long . . . green tigering the gold”) and James Joyce’s bird-girl from Portrait of the Artist (“Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s”), standing midstream on the beach in Stephen Daedalus’s epiphany. Your own imaginative shadings will differ, no doubt, as your memories and experiences diverge from mine. How do you picture Roethke’s “pickerel smile”? What personal associations did you bring to it? Answers on a postcard.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s poem “Ducks & Rabbits” is an intriguing philosophical meditation on “what metaphor / is for.” “Given A and see / find be,” she playfully charges her reader. I’ll leave you with the poem’s opening lines, in which Wittgenstein’s impossible hybrids take on an uncanny life (complete with mock-scholarly footnote) as they paddle through the river in Cambridge:

in the stream;¹
look, the duck-rabbits swim between.
The Mill Race
at Granta Place
tosses them from form to form,
dissolving bodies in the spume.

 

¹ Of consciousness.