Exploring Literature Jack Marion

Poetry Stays Potent As Narrative Persists Daring to reduce poetry to a heat-sinking, passion-guided missile of the intellect, the poet finds himself peering over the edge of a story. There is one relentless story, made tangible in books and renewed in conversation. It takes a long, wide path in a generally assumed but as a whole, indiscernible direction. Precocious secondary trails lead to forests, scan beaches and crawl over deserts. And each of them either rejoins the master path or risks losing a slippery foothold in memory. If poetry is to forge and fill a contemporary niche and serve a catalytic role, it needs the poet's eyes and ears at those fortuitous moments when they see the stitches and hear the cracks in the story. Poetry wants to stop the cogs of assumption. It wants to stop the time-god who threatens the poet from his cosmic clock tower as the poet runs toward the object of looking over his shoulder. "Ordinarily, the events that are told about will unfold in time in an order that makes sense to human beings for whom "time" … is the primary category of experience." ¹ Narrative is a sequence of events arranged in a digestible, often appetizing order. Two prongs of the narrative assertion, linearity and rationalism can be bent or broken. In its process, logical thought forces the former and infects the latter. Once the story unfolds we are reluctant to abandon its structure for paradoxical poetic musings. Logic is co-dependent with language. The tongue is the valve of all logical thought- In the beginning was "la-la-la." In the end there will be "la-la-la." Poetry can't forsake the body for the mind; can't forsake the intellect at all. Poetry can use language like mirrors that can be bent and stretched to show what circuits and doublings of words can do. Poetry can elicit experience without telling. It can jar sunspots on the brain; trip switches free of sequence and bring the sensual world to terms with mental reality in the larger sense. Poetry has nothing to fear from narrative. It owes its language to narrative; it owes its spirit to the loopholes found in phrases and clauses, its structure to the verb confronting the noun. "Narrative … is a primary and irreducible form of human comprehension, an article in the constitution of common sense." ² To grasp and understand, to put reality on track is the function of the narrative asserting instinct. If the narrative doesn't spell out why the grass is green in verse one and purple in verse three, the reader will need to know how it changed color…maybe even why it did. Caught in the tide of rationalism and unsatisfied with his own story, he wants to find the poet's intent, as if it controlled the outcome of poetic events. Meanwhile, the flash of green in purple and purple in green has vanished. Without regret, the persistent poet will follow language in search of such flashes of apparent discord, departures from rationalism that are as firmly rooted in logic as the phrases from which they are generated. In his introductory essay, "The Poethics of Andre Breton," Jean-Pierre Cauvin describes the poet as a sort of alchemist, making revelation out of common words. Cauvin's poet is also an adventurer, a public servant on a ruthless quest to "liberate the immense potential of the human psyche by repudiating the forces of reason and routine which hold it in check." ³ The great mistake of the surrealists was their habit of shooting the messenger. Whether or not he used the "the white-haired revolver" to do the dirty deed, Breton let his politics overtake his craft. The reader is bound and strangled as much by surrealism as by rationalism. Thankfully, the power of Breton's work supersedes the taint of his public persona. In his work, the power of reality, the engine of logic generates imagery, which disturbs, provokes and entices the reader to depart from the narrative. But, the narrative is always there; Breton does not try to sabotage it with non sequitur and sloppy wording. Instead, he lets the language lead ("Apres vous, mon beau langage"), lets the narrative unfold with familiar form. The images that ride that form attempt to upset the equilibrium of perception. The reader will inevitably try to rectify that imbalance (or abandon the poem). At the moment in which the reader is held by an imbalance, by a break in rationalism, the control of time is lifted. Logic cannot work without time. Without repudiating reason, but submitting to its process, the reader may access a place of irresolvable images, dislocated from clock-time. Poetry's unique place in literature may be defined by its provisions for things uncanny and asynchronous. In "Postman Cheval" Breton substantiates dream, lets it merge with reality, and lets the gates of possibility swing open: We would then move ahead of you we the plants prone to metamorphoses Who each night send signals to ourselves that man can pick up While his house collapses and he wonders at the odd interconnections That his bed seeks with the hallway and the staircase The staircase branches out indefinitely It leads to a millstone door it widens suddenly onto a public square It is made of swan backs with one wing extended as a railing It spins upon itself as if to bite itself 4 The narrative in "Cheval" is so rich and well constructed you can almost touch it. The dynamism of the sequence is what energizes the reader. As the "house collapses" the narrative persists. "Cheval" is a reader's guide to appreciating poetry's unique function. Breton leads us from sleep to physical sensation to a public place to a disturbing by gracefully overlapping image of swan, serpent and passageway. Mark Strand describes a vaguely similar process in "The Sleep", but his narrative, equally elegant, fails to recognize the chance of meeting any previously unrevealed wonders. His sleep brings a parallel reality, not an extension of the common one. Death and peace in plain light lie outside the narrative.. There is the sleep of my tongue speaking a language I can never remember- words that enter the sleep of words once they are spoken There is the sleep of one moment inside the next, lengthening the night, and the sleep of the window turning the tall sleep of trees into glass. 5 In "Postman Cheval" violence and passion are the objects of desire. Strand does not give in to the passion underlying rationality. His directorial hand avoids the imbalance that looms in the shadow of his story and resolves the poem with rational powers of observation and speculation. He continues with sleep metaphors, evoking past and future events. Then, Strand resolves any query, doubt or imbalance: And there is the sleep that demands I lie down and be fitted to the dark that comes upon me like another skin in which I shall never be found, out of which I shall never appear. Where "The Sleep" could have gone is where poetry is empowered to go. When poems do not close the loop, when their narratives fail to meet a discernable destination, the reader is disoriented. Disorientation and asynchronicity demand more of the reader and less of the poet. The poet as director may leave the language to its tendencies, removing or replacing words that kill the narrative, but staying cautious where the pull of publication seems to demand imposing formalism on the narrative. I am not worried that trendy formalism, popular stylization or the desire to be published will ruin poetry. As long as we convey with stories, the potential of wonder and revelation is nearby. The wolf may be an endangered species, but the redhooded girl has a whole forest of old and new denizens to fear. §

Notes 1 Northrop Frye, The Rythms of Time, in MYTH AND METAPHOR 157 (1991) 2 Louis Mink, Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument, in THE WRITING OF HISTORY:LITERARY FORM AND HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING 129, 132 (Conary and Kozicki eds. 1978) 3 Jean-Pierre Cauvin, in POEMS OF ANDRE BRETON (Cauvin and Caws trans., eds. 1982) 4 Andre Breton, from "Postman Cheval" in POEMS OF ANDRE BRETON, 67 (Cauvin and Caws trans., eds. 1982) 5 Mark Strand, from "The Sleep" in SELECTED POEMS, 66 (1980) 6 Id.

Copyright © 2000 Jack Marion All Rights Reserved

Also by Jack Marion: Emily Dickinson, "The Road to Paradise is Plain..." v3, i12 The Lure of Politics, The Promise of Poetry v3, i11 Poet As Civil Servant v3, i10 Honest Abe Rides the Web v3, i9 Stevie Smith: Drumming Out The Cynic v2, i8 The Meaning's in the Swing v2, i7