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In one of Dickinson’s oft-quoted poems, “Hope” is defined as “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” A “thing with feathers” is, of course, a bird. But saying it that way, as if it is unfamiliar, and needs to be described again, causes us to rethink those qualities of a bird that resemble hope, and in turn to rethink hope. Just imagine how, if the poem just said “‘Hope’ is a bird / That perches in the soul,” we would be immediately in the land of Hallmark cards. Describing a bird as if she didn’t know the name for it, and assigning its qualities to the abstract concept of “hope,” is the defamiliarizing technique of the poem. It has an almost clinical unsentimentality, an objectivity of insight that feels trustworthy, won from hard thinking.
Free verse and rhyming poetry are often said to be in opposition. But, really, they are just different versions of what poetry does. Just as a rhyming poem is built up out of a pattern of repeating end sounds, in some pattern or even irregularly, a poem can rhyme conceptually: that is, through ideas that relate in some way, obvious or hidden. Through their redness, “rose” and “fire truck” rhyme conceptually, as do “deconstruction” and “deep sea diving” (Jacques Derrida and Jacques Cousteau). It can not only be fun to conceptually rhyme, but also be good practice to write formal poems that use conceptual, as opposed to sonic, rhymes. A poem that seems too static because it is locked into a single idea, or a rigid expository framework, can often become both looser and also more true when the poet allows ideas to rhyme conceptually. Conceptual rhyme is not merely a pleasure for poets, but very close to the purpose of poetry, to provide a place for associative thinking.
I think this is one reason why Ashbery is often thought of as difficult or elusive. It can seem to readers either like there is nothing there, or that they are missing something. “The poem is sad, because it wants to be yours, and cannot,” he writes in another poem, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” which begins:
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
I think if we are being honest, we probably would admit that at times we fear there is an unbridgeable gap between us and others—readers, friends, family, partners—that language cannot cross. Or maybe we fear the gap is in fact bridgeable by someone less damaged or more talented or attractive or authentic than ourselves. To cross this gap is the dream of all writers, and that dream is a kind of metonymy of the human dream to cross over into intimacy or connection. It is this melancholy awareness of inevitable distance between humans, and the hope that it can somehow be crossed over, that gently permeates this poem.
Shakespeare’s plays are, as we know, populated by some of the most vivid characters ever created. They feel alive to us. When we read them, or see and hear them onstage, we experience each of these characters as fully developed beings, with ways of seeing the world that are, for them when they are speaking, fully true. We know these points of view are inherently limited, but that does not make them any less real. These limitations are precisely what make the characters feel so alive.
The perspectives of the characters conflict, giving the plays their plots and energies. It’s not that we necessarily agree with the characters, or approve of their actions, especially some of the most vivid—Lear, Othello, Iago, Macbeth, and so on—who are the agents of their own disasters. It’s possible to know a character is mistaken, but also to become completely immersed in his or her point of view, especially during a soliloquy.
If in reading the poem you get distracted by an irritable need to come up with a consistent, coherent set of ideas that the speaker has in his feelings about the urn, an overall message about the urn, or silence, or time, or mortality, instead of thinking about the statements of the poem as a series of deeply felt, shifting, even contradictory thoughts, you will miss what is truly great about the experience of reading it. Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.
Unlike every other use of language, poems are where contradictions and possibilities of the material of our meaning-making system are not an unfortunate and troubling ghost in the machine: they are brought forth to be celebrated. The role of the poem is to bring out all the aspects of language: its provisionality, uncertainty, slippage, as well as its miraculous ability to communicate, to mean. Consistency, logic, the pleasurable obligations of plot and setting and characters . . . those are conveniences for the poet, to be adopted or discarded at will. What are the marks of a failed language act everywhere else—not following through on what you have started to say, jumping around and making unjustified connections, saying what is beautiful and exciting rather than what is strictly necessary, and so on—are, if not the mark of, at least the beginnings of poetry.
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birth is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remember how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled
bread,
the thing her father said to her that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as
numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.
I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.
If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe
start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I keep working, working
half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.
by James Tate
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
by Robert Hayden
I OFTEN SAY TO MY STUDENTS—AND IT IS STILL SO FUNNY AND strange to me to think that I am no longer a student but am a teacher myself, because in my mind, especially in relation to poetry, I will always be one—that without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty. Clarity for me in poetry is a kind of generosity, a willingness to be together with the reader in the same place of uncertainty, striving for understanding. To give the impression that something important is happening but that the mere reader cannot, without some kind of special, esoteric knowledge, have access to it strikes me as deeply ungenerous, even cruel.