over our lives.
Etymologies are forms of association, to which Osman adds other forms, such as maps and chronologies. Forms of association invite further association, as for example when Osman gives a chronology, listing various events in the order of their occurrence, identifying them by the year of their occurrence, and ending with this event:
1920: A horse and buggy loaded with dynamite explodes in front of the J.P. Morgan Bank, killing 40 people. Although the perpetrators are never identified, the event fuels suspicion of immigrants and anarchists and builds support for the deportation of foreigners. Wall Street and the financial markets become a patriotic symbol; questioning the economic system becomes anti-American. The Washington Post calls the bombing “an act of war… The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.”
Because chains of association ask to be continued, Osman does not have to tell her readers to note the points of analogy between this event and the events of 9/11. Simply offering it as the last item in a chronology invites continuation of the chronology with the association to that later event. But the association is between historical events. Osman’s poetry bases itself in, and purports to present, history. Aristotle’s privileged model of poetry as a contrast to history doesn’t cover this case; Osman must have had some other privileged model in mind when she was writing her book.
A third common cognitive model is proposed by Shakespeare’s Theseus in the familiar speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” The lunatic sees devils everywhere, the lover sees beauties everywhere. The frenzied poet sees what isn’t there: “as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The model Theseus offers is exciting enough, bordering as it does on sex and madness. Poetry, his model would have it, is poetry not by contrast with prose, as in the lineation model, or with history, as in the algebraic model, but with reason. Call this the “fantastic model.” In it, poetry is the discursive result of seeing things. The lunatic imagines things that aren’t there, but fails to make and maintain a distinction between things that aren’t there and things that are. The lover sees one thing, the beloved, as he or she is not. The poet experiences the same press of imagination as the lunatic or the lover, but records it, displays it to others in words. Poetry records fantasy, the seeing of unreality in place of reality.
Like the lineation model and the algebraic model, the fantastic model, according to which the poet is animated, even overwhelmed, by her hyperactive imagination, enjoys currency in popular culture, but Lisa Fishman could not have written Flower Cart if she had accepted it. Fishman opens her book, not with something she imagined, but with something she found. The first full page of her book contains not a single word she herself wrote: it’s a photocopy, reproducing a 1916 letter from F. J. Sievers, the Superintendent of the Milwaukee County School of Agriculture and Domestic Economy, to Mr. C. E. McLenegan of the Public Library in Milwaukee, describing the results of tests performed on a sample of corn sent by McLenegan. Fishman is not transcending “cool reason” by means of her own “shaping fantasies.” She is, if anything, applying cool reason to a decidedly non-fantastic document. Fishman’s poetry does not begin in “aery nothing,” but in fully material somethings. About the items reproduced in Flower Cart, such as the fieldbook about trees and the 1916 letter about corn, Fishman claims that she did not have “an intention or purpose or ‘project’ in mind” for them. Instead, she “transcribed and/or materially reproduced [them] after years of living with them and feeling in contact with them in ways not clear to myself,” including them in the book as an attempt “to understand why they became necessary to me, how they were functioning, what they have to do, for me, with writing or with the possibility of writing.” Flower Cart is not imagined by bodying forth “forms of things unknown.” Fishman has found things, and seeks in her poetry to prevent them from becoming unknown.
How I conceive of poetry (what I think poetry is) will go a long way toward determining what I can and cannot do in my poems. By keeping “live” the question of how to conceive of poetry, my practice of poetry will have not only the technical aspect we name “craft,” which asks “What means will help me achieve my ends?,” but also a conceptual aspect I have here named “metacraft,” which asks “What ends might I, or ought I, embrace?” As exemplified by the ways Rankine, Osman, and Fishman realize in their poetry possibilities not available to the most common models of poetry, a practice of metacraft (my reconsidering what I think a “real poem” is) might, no less than a practice of craft (increased mastery of anaphora or metonymy, say), create for my poetry possibilities not previously available to me, expanding the range of what I can “just make up myself.”
Article 2:Double stance, double vision.
2.1: Poetry For Relationship
Ambiguity can sometimes make things murky. “Her recommendation letter was ambiguous,” I might grouse. “I couldn’t tell whether she was praising him or sending us a warning signal.” But ambiguity includes, as William Empson observes, “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language,” and sometimes presenting alternatives makes things clearer, not murkier. That giving of room for alternative reactions can clarify instead of blurring; it can make things more specific, not less. The ambiguities in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry perform that clarifying, specifying function well.
It matters that there be such ambiguity. Customarily, we think of our world as a world of things. Asked “What is this world made of?,” a person might respond by listing things. “Look around you,” she might suggest. “Our world is made of chairs and coffee mugs and windows and shirts and trees and people and such.” This common-sense view is sanctioned by the grammar of the English language, which stocks our sentences with things: subjects and objects. The horse galloped across the field, we might say. The things there, the horse and the field, are the “substantives.” We say that “galloped” gives information about the horse, but it would sound awkward and odd to say that the horse gives information about “galloped.” In English, the horse and the field are the realities. Even that word, “realities,” embodies the common-sense notion: “reality” comes from the Latin word res, meaning thing. What is real has thingness; it is real because it is a thing.
But what if the common-sense view (that the world is made of things) is misleading? We easily recognize it as misleading in certain contexts. If I’m trying to account for the earth’s apparent stability, I’ll soon err if I appeal only to things. Atlas is holding up the world, I might postulate. And what about Atlas? Ummm, he’s standing on top of… a turtle. And the turtle? For a satisfying account, what we need is not a thing but a force: gravity. We need, that is to say, a relationship. “Gravity” does not name a thing that occupies the space between the earth and the sun: it names a relationship that holds between the earth and the sun. “The world,” Wittgenstein reminds us, “is the totality of facts, not of things.”
If the world consisted, first and foremost, of things, then in our language uses (our poems, our stories, our essays) we would want always to disambiguate. We’d want to analyze, to take things apart so we could see each thing on its own, separated from the rest, taken out of its relationships. We would want our words to pick out one thing at a time, and ambiguity would impede and corrupt our analysis. If, however, our world consists not so much of things as of relationships, then we want ambiguity. We need it. Only ambiguity, itself a relationship between meanings, could hope adequately to signify relationship. We can’t say what holds between things if we’re too exclusively intent on
