Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. 1912
Below, we have a new essay by Robert Mueller. He deals with two fine poets, Barbara Guest and Jill Magi, with imagination and verve.
Jill Magi’s author’s page over at Shearsman Books can be found here. Jill’s homepage can be found here.
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The topic of poetic space on the page is an interesting one. How it looks alters our reception and perception. We read it differently to ourselves depending upon topography.
Poetry is both spatial and aural. Traditionally, poetry was heard, not seen, passed down to us from bard to bard, from shaman to shaman, registering across the centuries in the ear, as we imagined the words and their referents with our inner eye. With the advent books, of the printing press, and much later, the multimedia revolution, things changed radically. Kept changing. Back and forth we go now, different schools of thought tout different authenticities and purities, and we choose.
Is the best poetry that which reads well and sounds glorious in the internal ear? Or is it solely a matter of externalities? What we hear, not what we see? For me the answer is obvious, mostly. It’s both. And the most successful poems lead us off the page and far away from our own space and time, so we can return to ourselves recreated in some small way. Or more than that, if we’re lucky. A merger of art, linguistics, music, science, collective, mysterious memories. Haunting us. The architecture of the poem on the page reminding us of the architecture already there in our mind. Consciously or subconsciously.
I have just started rereading one of my favorite novels, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This time, however, I’m relying on a different, brand new translation by Burton Pike. Here is one of Rilke’s best expressions (through the voice of Malte) of what it takes to make poetry happen.
(Slightly abridged with ellipses. Worth reading in full):
But alas, with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could write perhaps ten lines that are good. For poems are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) — they are experiences. For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people, and things, one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning … But it is still not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them, if they are many, and have the great patience to wait for them to come again. For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a line arises in their midst and strides out of them.
–Rainer Maria Rilke
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Thank you for these thoughts toward a theory of poetry that is strong and absorbing. I think that Rilke’s own great achievement in the Sonnets to Orpheus may bear out some of your and his dynamic principles for a poetry arrived at by way of the deep structures of gained experience.
The 5th sonnet of Part II, which begins with the word “Blumenmuskel” (“flower-” or “plant-muscle”), develops an intricate conceit seeming to unite plant and animal movements into a single great species-form according to their most important shared attribute, their participation in the productive cycle of vital energy. The poem’s complex ideas correspond to the mere complexity of photosythesis, so that a dense notion, the essential process by which the plant can be imagined to flex its muscles, extends the image of plant life by a sweeping movement over space and cosmic dimensions, thus relating biological activities closest to earth to the “loud” sky or heavens (“bis in ihren Schoss [the flower’s receptive lap] das polyphone / Licht der lauten Himmel sich ergiesst”). The concept of polyphonic light draws on synaesthesia and thus contributes an even greater density to the poem’s image pattern, borne out by the surprising fact of this very correspondence enacted as the thunder and the lightning that produces life-nurturing rain.
Therefore your enriched concept of spatial dimensions in poetry is at work in the verbal and thematic structure of Rilke’s sonnet, what you might call properly speaking (for me) its “topography”. The expanded dimensions are contained within a dense poetic idea that is at once metaphorical and not metaphorical, and furnishes potential strength, as it were, in reaching a crucial mass in the balance of chemical processes that are themselves the poem’s individual form of expression.
“Wir Gewaltsamen, wir währen länger.
Aber wann, in welchem aller Leben,
sind wir endlich offen und Empfänger?”
[German typography does not use italics but rather spaces out the letters a little for emphasized words. I use the italics for convenience and clarity.] [There should be no line space before the final line, I can’t seem to get rid of it.]
The beauty of this ending is that the “powerful” humans (Gewaltsamen) who survive where the tiny flower with its puny ephemeral existence does not are transported to an unfamiliar sphere that is not a trip through far-away space, not a heavenly transcendence, but a paradoxical transport of the earth to the greater power of something smaller and infinitely weaker (and a qualitatively different form of life (aller Leben)). By her or his removal from a familiar place, the reader is swept away to a deeper involvement in the combined plant and animal species-form, and so we have really gotten somewhere in terms of something we can only envision, the great access, for Rilke and Heidegger and going back to Hölderlin, to the “open”: But when will we be finally open? Aber wann … sind wir endlich offen? The great beauty is that we will then be “receivers”, “catchers” (Empfänger) (Catchers in the Rye(?!)), by analogy to the leaves of the plant receiving and transforming the light’s energy (all vividly depicted in the sonnet’s second quatrain and the following tercet).
The next question is what does this have to do with the poet as a person of experience? I am sorry, but I am too tired right now to attempt that question, and leave it to you to think about.
Rilke’s brilliant synopsis of what a poet needs, from Malte, is posted above. A fairly young man at the time, Rilke certainly was speaking in general, through his character, and most likely didn’t mean it for himself. Experience. Having more than is needed for the page. Much more. Like with novels. Already knowing the entire biography of your leads, even though you’ll never approach more than a fraction of that bio on the page. Enough knowledge and wisdom gained to not need it all.
Interesting about the Heidegger essays on Rilke. Some of the best writing, and most accessible, he ever did. He had a pretty good hook on Rilke and Holderlin. Other things, not so much.
I see that when it shows up as a submitted comment, the line spacing for the lines in German is ok; so disregard the bracketed remark about the line space.
Hello Robert,
I cannot abide these mini computers, so I’m “outta here”! However, I want very much to read your essay. Since I’ve had no luck commiting it to print today, will it be possible for you to email it to me?
If so, many thanks!
Jean
Jean, welcome to Spinozablue. Hope you can find a normal computer and comment on the creative works here. Please leave suggestions and general comments about the website as well. They are always welcome.
I would like to continue the discussion of Rilke by suggesting that in the sonnet I discussed (Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, No. v) there are three analogous kinds of compression: first, photosynthesis, the conversion of light energy traveling vast distances to biological energy in the very tiny factories of the plant leaf; second, the compression that has to do with the feeling here, and in other sonnets by Rilke, that an entire moral and philosophical treatise is being presented in the tight space of just 14 lines; and, third, the comparison of the proud and powerful form of human existence, and all this standing up tall and reaching to the skies and everything, to low-lying, receptive and humble vegetable existence, a fleeting evanescent approach as opposed to I am great I am the center of the universe I am going to live forever. So the theme is compression, the large compacted into the small and the small being inversely valued over against its opposite. Its seems that this poem thus fits nicely with what you describe above as characteristic of the best poetry, the inspired combination (i.e., compression of sorts) of effects and spatial dimensions figured as a response and a feeling, sort of like traveling out to the circumference and veering back, with revised and enriched perspective, to the enabling center.
Now, what the character Malte Laurids Brigge describes is falsely analogous to the design of the sonnet as I am making it out in that he does not quite describe a lifetime of experience being compressed into “the perhaps ten lines that are good” but something else again. I still think that what the character in the novel says can be related to the results of Rilke’s own poetry. And maybe here it is the notion of being “open” that we might think of as coming by way of the process Rilke’s character alludes to of forgetting and then remembering (the lines once again from the poem: “Aber wann, in welchem aller Leben, / sind wir endlich offen und Empfänger?” — “But when, when, can we finally be open, in a different existence, and be the receivers?”). If you consult Anthony Stephens, “Cutting Poets to Size — Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke” online in Jacket, No. 32, you will see a completely fascinating discussion of how the two poets use the term “das Offne” and Heidegger’s way of misinterpreting them. The relevant portion of Stephens’ essay comes early on, but is then expanded at the very end of the essay, so be warned, you may have to push your way through. Or you can skip to the end. But I go on too long.
Very interesting, Robert. Yes, Malte is talking about compression. As is Rilke through him. Compression in Paris. Poverty in Paris. Hunger in Paris. He is, in fact, writing a novel that can fruitfully be compared with Hamsun’s Hunger. I imagine that the experience of poverty in big cities during that time was foundational for both men, and both men tried desperately to forget that hunger. It would always creep back into their work.
I also imagine Rilke being more open to it, finally. Open to drawing upon that hunger. Hamsun wanting to forget it and forget it again. I think Pride was stronger in Hamsun. Perhaps Resignation greater in Rilke.
Thanks for the recommendation of the article in Jacket. Will definitely take a close look.
More good connections. Thank you once again.
And thanks to you, Jean! Good to hear from you.