Companionship: Between Wading and Plunging

Molly Peacock
Prologue
The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008

She points out a concern to reach and embrace:

What I see, from poets from diverse backgrounds, provinces, ages and personal categories, is a unity, a core, something identifiable as a gesture in Canadian poetry itself, not in the poets' backgrounds or personalities, but in the poems they produce, poems that presume a kind of companionship with their readers and assume their readers's willingness to undertake a tandem adventure.

And she goes on to offer an analogy to swimming

Think of this volume as a swimming pool. Poet and reader go in together. Finally they hit the place where their feet leave the bottom and then they swim, experiencing something they both know is over their heads. That is what poetry is trying to stay afloat in a element in which you might sink, and which is surely over your head.

In our imaginations, diversity is reintroduced: back stroke, breast stroke, butterfly.

And so for day 2342
12.05.2013

Poetry After Freud

A. Alvarez
Introduction
The New Poetry
1962

The introductory essay outlines a set of negative feedbacks operating in British poetry in reaction to the work of T.S. Eliot. This is what it concludes:

What poetry needs, in brief, is a new seriousness. I would define this seriousness simply as the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence; not to take the easy exits of either the conventional response or choking incoherence. Believe in it or not, psychology has left its mark on poetry. First, the writer can no longer deny with any assurance the fears and desires he does not wish to face; he knows obscurely that they are there, however skilfully he manages to elude them. Second, having acknowledged their existence, he is no longer absolved from the need to use all his intelligence and skill to make poetic sense of them. Since Freud, the late Romantic dichotomy between emotion and intelligence has become totally meaningless.

I may venture to surmise that emotion and intelligence are connected by feedback loops.

And so for day 2339
09.05.2013

Applied Imagination and Reason

In the Lab with the Poets

Once upon a time poetry and science were one, and its name was Magic. Magic, for our earliest ancestors, was the most effective way of understanding nature and their fellow-men, and of gaining power over them. It was not till some three centuries ago that science finally broke away from magic: the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century withdrew from the 'supernatural' as a field of study; and if science since then has led to other varieties of superstition, we must blame, not the scientists, but the layman, who finds superstition a difficult thing to live without. The course of poetry has been different. If the first great pre-scientific method was imitation, then poetry, in so far as it still rests upon imitation and animism, must seem a very primitive procedure.

Nevertheless, I believe poetry to be a possible way of gaining and imparting knowledge — a son of the same father as science: the brothers may quarrel from time to time, but each in his own field they are working towards compatible ends. To define the field of poetry should make it clear in what sense we may claim that poetry is concerned with knowledge. This I shall try to do. And I shall also suggest that there are remarkable affinities between the method of the scientist and the method of the poet — between the ways their minds work, particularly at one crucial stage of their investigations.

[...]

The poet, on the other hand, must not only imagine but reason — that is to say, he must exercise a great deal of consciously directed thought in the selection and rejection of his data: there is technical logic, a poetic reason in in his choice of the words, rhythms and images by which a poem's coherence is achieved.

From C. Day Lewis The Poets Way of Knowledge 1957 [The Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, delivered in Newnham College, Cambridge, 1956]

And so for day 2326
26.04.2013

Do You Believe in Magic?

Philip Pullman in The Guardian presents the case for a way of seeing connectedness.

I’m relying on poetry to make this point because I think that poetry itself is a kind of enchantment. The effect that certain lines and images can have on us can’t be explained by translating them into simple modern English. The very form is part of the meaning, and the sound the poem makes works like a spell on our senses and not only on our minds. But it’s not just true of poetry. Everything that touches human life is surrounded by a penumbra of associations, memories, echoes and correspondences that extend far into the unknown. In this way of seeing things, the world is full of tenuous filaments of meaning, and the very worst way of trying to see these shadowy existences is to shine a light on them.

Reminds me that "the real" extends to "the imaginary".

And so for day 2263
22.02.2013

The Insanity of Poetry

From the Republic of Childhood, a tool? a weapon? a field?

We call these children's games, not children's work, but isn't a child precisely one who doesn't yet observe a clear distinction between what counts as labor and what counts as leisure? All children are poets in that sense. I'm asking you to locate your memory of that early linguistic instability of language as a creative and destructive force. I have done the reading, and the reading suggests that we always experience this power as withdrawing from us, or we from it — if we didn't distance from this capacity it would signal our failure to be assimilated into the actual, adult world, i.e., we would be crazy.

It seems an echo of Kristeva's chora here in Ben Lerner The Hatred of Poetry.

And so for day 1861
17.01.2012

Circular Joy of Submission

C.D. Lewis
The Lyric Impulse

[About a poem by John Clare produced during his confinement in Northampton Asylum] This, to me, is a test poem. If any student of English literature failed to respond to it, I would advise him to take up some other course: if I heard a teacher or critic dismissing it, or adopting a supercilious attitude towards it, I would wish to have him instantly deprived of his post. It is a test poem, because we can only accept it on its own terms and at its own level [...] To feel it as it should be felt entails an act of joyful submission. such an act of submission may be difficult for a modern reader, habituated by the earnestness or officiousness of literary critics to believe that no poem is worthwhile unless a fine dust of footnotes can be beaten out of it. But if the reader cannot make this surrender to simple poetry, his mastery of more complex kinds will be a little suspect, for it means that his channel to poetry's source has become clogged.

One dusty note:
supercilious = behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others [I always thought this word meant "super silly".]

And so with Wordsworth we are always ever "Surprised by joy" and mindful of loss. To this we gladly submit.

Wordsworth's sonnets are disclosures of intense emotion. Whether or not they have an identified addressee, they seem to require a listener.

Carol Rumens. The Guardian. Poem of the week: Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind 22 September 2008

From one's poet reading of another (of Lewis reading Clare) by the analogy of being open to surprise and submitting to the complex magic of simple poetry, we came to another (Rumens) reading another (Wordsworth) — a small leap across the years when impelled by a certain attentiveness which is all that is asked of us, all that is proposed, submitted to us.

And so for day 1308
13.07.2010