I heard a fascinating piece of gossip the other day. I heard that Helen Vendler doesn’t believe good poems are ambiguous!
I call it gossip because I heard it secondhand from someone who had heard her say this at some talk or other. At any rate, it led to lively speculations about what separated good old High-Modernist Ambiguity from bad Postmodernist Indeterminacy.* And it dovetailed with this Monet show I was mulling over, which in turn spoke to issues of ambiguity that I’ve been in love with since I first read a poem I couldn’t understand.
For Monet’s Waterlilies series crystallizes the question haunting all art: What is real?
That is, what is reflection? What if the painting can’t tell you what the difference is between a water lily and its reflection in a still blue pond? No matter, the art-viewing public seems to say: it’s easy on the eye. Similarly, I always found this Charles North poem easy on the ear:
TYPING AND TYPING IN THE WANDERING COUNTRYSIDE
including the pond bitten down to its cuticles,
whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness
it doesn’t mean we exist as writing.
What is flat is on trial for its flatness.
Whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness
is a particular: it is its own witness.
While air billows and closes around the petal of evening
(whatever you were doing pursuant to flatness)
it doesn’t mean we exist as writing
—fringed in charcoal and umber fields, loosestrife utterly mismanaged.
Obviously, the world is rife with poems of many shades of ambiguity (of which I am highly tolerant), but I chose this one because the ambiguity doesn’t lie in the language, which is precise and clear and hews to the rules of “good prose;” the ambiguity lies in what North is describing. Is he describing a mental landscape, or a real one? Is that loosestrife in his ken or is it a trope (looseleaf; life’s strife)? Is the pond in a landscape or a “landscape” (on a wall)? I like poems that play with description (I like description in general). At any rate, this is an ambiguous poem, and it is good. It is about the confusion of art and life, and it jests about that confusion. It is cousin to Monet’s waterlilies.
About the time I was contemplating these things, I was reading the novel Ravel by Jean Echenoz:
Technique Number 2: While spending hours tossing and turning in bed, seek the best position, the ideal accommodation of the organism called Ravel to the piece of furniture called Ravel’s bed, the most even breathing, the perfect placement of the head upon the pillow, that state in which the body becomes confused with then fused with its couch, a fusion capable of opening one of the doors of sleep.
This droll passage on the artist’s insomnia also speaks to the confusion of states—here, sleeper and couch, animate with inanimate. While we wouldn’t want to say that successful art is a kind of robotic somnambulism, what Monet, North, and Echenoz’s Ravel seem to agree on is that the liminal experiences of the senses are dear to art. Therefore we’re interested in the place where the senses become synaesthetic—where waking and sleeping are confused, or seeing and touching, or life and art, because we also want to believe there is a place where animate and inanimate meet, and life and death, and therefore that there is no real non-animate, no real death; that in fact what we know is provisional, and ambiguity provides the escape-hatch to an unbearable realism that also may be quite false. We don’t know. We’ll pretend not to know. As long as it’s beautiful.
Echnenoz: “It’s just that one can’t do everything at once, right?—always the same old story: it’s impossible to fall asleep while keeping a sharp eye on sleep.”
And so we soften the eye (I), like an Impressionist.
It seems bizarre to me that Helen Vendler would say such a thing–though maybe in context it made some kind of sense? Where would one place the Aeneid then? I suspect Steve will be able to enlighten us.
Posted By: Alicia (A. E.) on September 24, 2007 at 3:56 amI am fascinated with the subject of ambiguity, Though I only teach a few weeks in the summer, I am often struck by how students obfuscate when they do not mean to, and keep hidden (as though it were a precious secret not to be revealed) what they really want to say. When I teach, I point out the utter clarity (on a grammatical level) of successful poems that are nevertheless thematically or narratively “ambiguous” (whether Yeats or Ashbery), and I love your distinction here between ambiguity (which seems to me a fruitful kind of vibration or dissonance, two doors open at once) and indeterminacy. I didn’t know the North poem before, and I like how you describe its clarity and precision on the level of language–that the ambiguity is on a deeper (or higher) level. It reminds me of the Pound dictum that poetry should be “at least as well-written as prose.” For me that would include that any murkiness on the level of language is deliberate and generative rather than accidental and sloppy, a quality that applies to bad poems across the spectrum, from the infra red to the ultra violet.
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At the recent Empson symposium at Harvard, Helen did say, about Seven Types of Ambiguity, that she didn’t believe in the idea of ambiguity in lyric poems. She used a Stevens poem as an example, demonstrating that good lyric poets have enough control and precision to avoid or overcome ambiguity.
Posted By: Don Share on September 24, 2007 at 9:04 amSteve was there, so I’m hoping he can correct or add to the foregoing!
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Don, yes, that was the occasion. I’m reticent to say more on ambiguity until I hear more about the conversation around that remark.
Posted By: Ange on September 24, 2007 at 10:32 amReport this comment
1. Thank you for the thoughtful and thought-provoking post(s). This one especially had me thinking.
Posted By: Michael Gushue on September 24, 2007 at 10:39 am2. I have solved the first problem by adhering to the principle: Everything Helen Vendler says is ambiguous.
3. Hence when she says lyric poems are not ambiguous she is being…etc.
4. Thanks for the amazing Charles North poem—I don’t know him much, but am now hot on his trail.
5. Liminal experiences are dear to other than art too, and essential to a lot of 20th century thinking.. For instance, Husserl—is that sound in my head or is it the air-conditioner—wasn’t going to eliminate obscurity by clarifying it. His intention was to clearly show that obscurity cannot be eliminated, it is in fact essential to us. And this is important for thinking about art, too. But are you saying that art provides us with a beautiful mirage? One where there’s nothing absolute about death, and we can pretend we don’t know we are each headed for annihilation? Is art palliative? The wool over our eyes?
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The North poem hails from the book _The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight_ (Adventures in Poetry).
Posted By: Ange on September 24, 2007 at 9:21 pmThanks for the Husserl. I suppose one could make the argument that art is precisely that which counters the obscurity and contingency of our lives; that is, it’s the poet’s job not to mimic life, but to provide its antidote. But, like you, I think obscurity (mystery? the ineffable?) is essential to us. And I wouldn’t pursue poetry if I thought it were merely the well-wrought urn, “The Shield of Achilles,” and so on. I want Crane’s “The Broken Tower.” I want Ashbery’s “Clepsydra.” I want _Moby Dick_ and Robert Walser. I’m afraid if we were to throw out all the ambiguous works, I would have to finally admit my father was right and I should have gone to law school.
(Oh – and as to whether art pulls the wool over our eyes? Even that – or that especially – is ambiguous.)
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Reading the Vendler tea-leaves is an endlessly enjoyable game. Especially since she’s not usually given to gnomicisms.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on September 25, 2007 at 3:13 amNorth and Monet have something in common, which is what (in my working life) I’d call an unexpected gauge choice of gauge.
Think of various realities painted on canvasses. Stack the canvasses (horizontally, say), and take a plane oblique to the surface.
That’s (one kind of) a gauge transformation, and it’s a powerful technique. Those more versed in the arcane arts of rhetorical taxonomy might have a clever Greek word for it.
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I quite like that gauge transformation idea, Simon.
Posted By: Ange on September 25, 2007 at 12:48 pmI also feel I should clarify that I didn’t put Helen Vendler’s name out there to invite attacks on her. I’m not trying to be snarky. I’m really trying to get a sense of what ambiguity means to people now.
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I’m still trying to envision Simon’s oblique plane and where it intersects and what it might mean. That Simon.
Posted By: Jeffery Bahr on September 26, 2007 at 7:11 pmAfter considerable thought, I think I prefer indeterminacy. Ambiguity (particularly in poetry) strikes me (in practice) as the kind of conscious obfuscation that admits of indecision, or perhaps worse. Or a lack of willingness to commit (which somehow reminds me that three-fourths of the recent BAP contributors are male). Indeterminacy seems more natural (both in life, quantum mechanics and poetic expression) in that it demonstrates the underlying absence of final meaning until we engage. Not that I have a lot of aesthetic resonance with LangPo and its successors. So what the hell am I talking about? If the worst of poetry is stale and predictable (not that it doesn’t adorn many a litmag), much of the best is wondrously incomplete. Reader Response? The Effect of the Observer on the Experiment? My general preference is that this indeterminacy take the form of metaphorical strata (onions have layers, ogres have layers), each increasingly improbable and important.
Ms. Vendler, no doubt, has other ideas.
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Hmmm. I think for one would benefit from a definition of ambiguity versus indeterminacy…
Posted By: Alicia (AE) on September 27, 2007 at 11:05 amReport this comment