Jee Leong
04-21-2004, 02:55 PM
I was browsing in Barnes & Noble when I picked up Donald Hall's new and selected essays in 'Breakfast Served Any Time All Day'. Bad idea: before I knew it, I had forked out close to $30 to get the hard-cover book. Impulse buying.
The essays are suggestive for me, especially this passage from 'Journal Notes':
Writing poems is not like writing an editorial for a newspaper, or telling how to knit a sweater. In these activities, we search for words to implement an argument or to name an activity already known (known either as inferior or incomplete words, or as images that encode rote action). Much bad writing (or bad reading) results from the confusion of poetry with the use of words in other connections, as if words remained the same material when used as art and as information. Writing poems is more like making sculpture than like making speeches. Poems are objects which we manipulate with the fingers of our tongues. Sculpture is a useful analogy, either carving or modeling, though these methods are different. Sculpture creates volume. Poems have volume as editorial do not. Rodin said that a sculptor must never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume. In a good poem everything pushes up from under, against the taut surface of the word.
The thoughts that came to mind:
(1) I have been thinking of a poem as an 'argument'. While that analogy is useful in insisting on clarity and logicality, it has its limits, like all analogies. What else can poems be if I think of them as 'objects which we manipulate with the fingers of our tongues'?
(2) What does it mean to say 'Poems have volume'? Beyond the use of metaphors that imply volume (e.g. a conceit based on 'boulders' or a poem about sculpture), what other formal or technical elements may give the sense of volume, massive or otherwise?
(3) How are words used differently as art and as information? This question reminds me of Hart Crane's defence of his poetry in his letter to Harriet Monroe based on 'a logic of metaphor' and not everyday logic.
In relation to his line 'Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive no farther tides', Monroe complained that the instruments do not contrive the tides. Crane says:
Hasn't it often occured that instuments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured?
Crane also defended, in the same letters, lines like 'Frosted eyes lift altars' and 'The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath/An embassy'.
The essays are suggestive for me, especially this passage from 'Journal Notes':
Writing poems is not like writing an editorial for a newspaper, or telling how to knit a sweater. In these activities, we search for words to implement an argument or to name an activity already known (known either as inferior or incomplete words, or as images that encode rote action). Much bad writing (or bad reading) results from the confusion of poetry with the use of words in other connections, as if words remained the same material when used as art and as information. Writing poems is more like making sculpture than like making speeches. Poems are objects which we manipulate with the fingers of our tongues. Sculpture is a useful analogy, either carving or modeling, though these methods are different. Sculpture creates volume. Poems have volume as editorial do not. Rodin said that a sculptor must never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume. In a good poem everything pushes up from under, against the taut surface of the word.
The thoughts that came to mind:
(1) I have been thinking of a poem as an 'argument'. While that analogy is useful in insisting on clarity and logicality, it has its limits, like all analogies. What else can poems be if I think of them as 'objects which we manipulate with the fingers of our tongues'?
(2) What does it mean to say 'Poems have volume'? Beyond the use of metaphors that imply volume (e.g. a conceit based on 'boulders' or a poem about sculpture), what other formal or technical elements may give the sense of volume, massive or otherwise?
(3) How are words used differently as art and as information? This question reminds me of Hart Crane's defence of his poetry in his letter to Harriet Monroe based on 'a logic of metaphor' and not everyday logic.
In relation to his line 'Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive no farther tides', Monroe complained that the instruments do not contrive the tides. Crane says:
Hasn't it often occured that instuments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured?
Crane also defended, in the same letters, lines like 'Frosted eyes lift altars' and 'The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath/An embassy'.