Some time ago, poetry expressed universal experiences; a little later it posed important questions and, even if it was about as radical as a lukewarm mug of Sleepytime tea, tended to take risks and transgress. Lately it’s a really good thing to attack the language. I’m all for attacks. But is there any more dreary cliché than the feeling that language is inadequate to describe experience?
This is said by poets about their own poetry—to whom I often feel like saying “try harder then”—and even more often by critics about poems they’re praising. It seems to me language is most inadequate in inadequate poems, as any teacher of poetry writing can attest. When a poem is good, even if the poem is about language’s alleged inadequacy, then language is doing the exactly the job it’s being called on to do—adequately.
While I’m being Andy Rooneyish, can I just say that the most inane thing I’ve heard in the presidential primaries so far is the New Hampshire voter who said “I was torn between Edwards, Obama and McCain, but then I saw Hillary cry and voted for her.” The mind, as they say, reels.
I cannot understand what Daisy Fried is talking about. Her language is inadequate to the task. But if she promises to cry I will vote for her anyway.
Perhaps Hugo von Hofmannsthal was feeling crabby when he composed “Ein Brief,” commonly known to English speakers as the Lord Chandos letter. Nonetheless it is an exception to Ms. Fried’s complaint about this line of reasoning and expression, even if it proves her rule. How wonderful it would be if poets’ complaints about their medium always found such enjoyable form! It’s out in a new collection from NYRB Classics, and can be read on-line at:
http://depts.washington.edu/vienna/documents/Hofmannsthal/Hofmannsthal_Chandos.htm
A lot of this line of thinking in poetry that Daisy describes seems to be the reverberation and absorption of lit crit theories from the late 1980s and the 1990s into the creative world–the use of semiotics, deconstruction, and reader-response theories to analyze literary texts. A lot of this theory–Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, and those critics with the Cher-like popularity of being known only by a single name, Foucault and Derrida–a lot of it is pretty interesting to read, contemplate, and apply to texts. I encountered most of this in the early 1990s in lit grad school.
It’s really cool that for many years it’s been possible to combine lit and creative study, getting a PhD in the process. But I wonder whether some of this stuff is more useful to literary analysis than it is to creative writing itself precisely because it leads to the sorts of conflicted statements that Daisy mentions. If you write, you write, and you can certainly toy with the idea that language is inadequate to what you’d like to accomplish in your writing, but in the end, you must master the medium. Or pick your way though it, or something. Well, of course, even ‘duh’, language is a form of representation, and as such, artificial, but do you really want to become trapped like a bug in this Platonic web of representational abstraction, with the spidery consciousness of Derrida advancing to suck the life out of you?
W.C. Williams’ take on this problem is much more apt and applicable to the processes of writing–that the worlds of experience (reality) and existence (imagination) overlap somewhat, and that it is when the writer can break the bonds of representational reality and find herself in a world built of imaginative linguistic furniture, plants, animals, persons–a world structured from the imagination, only tethered lightly to reality–it is when that happens that art/poetry happens.
Leave analysis to critics–language is a ‘live’ force, an activating force that creates and structures its own ‘reality’, and, in that sense, is never inadequate. My favorite critical sound bite in a vein similar to that is from Stanley Fish’s (the scholar who keeps reinventing himself) essay “Literature in the Reader”, most easily found at the end of his book Self-Consuming Artifacts: “Kinetic art does not lend itself to a static interpretation because it refuses to stay still and doesn’t let you stay still either. In its operation it makes inescapable the actualizing role of the observer. Literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it assumes prevents us from seeing its essential nature, even though we so experience it. . . . we forget that while we were reading it, it was moving . . . we were moving with it.”
Not to be outdone by my erudite friend, Daniel Bosch, I’ll chime in to say that Jules Laforgue invented an entire poetic form for being crabby in “Les Complaintes” – how’s your French?
Crabbiness is an underappreciated virtue. I think crabby thoughts help keep me sane.
The overuse of the word “innovative” has left me particularly crabby of late.
Language IS inadequate to describe experience. Conversely, language can also let us imagine “experience” compared to which anything we live through firsthand seems inadequate. Our inner lives at once exceed and fall short of the external world. Some good poems call attention to one or the other of those imbalances; other good poems create, for a while, the sense that the two balance, or fit, after all.
If you feel that language is inadequate, etc., and you want to write a poem about it, you have to make the poem interesting, adequate to the experience of inadequacy, as it were. “The poem is dull because it’s about feeling bored,” “inadequate because it’s about inadequacy,” is never a good excuse.
Language is also inadequate to prepare French toast. To put a finer point on it, what does one mean by “inadequate” or by “experience”? “Inadequate” is a comparative term–compared to what? If it’s inadequate to define our own experience, then how can it allow us to imagine someone else’s experience at second or third hand?
What’s the difference between an “inner life” and the “external world”? Is “experience” a function of an inner life or of the external world? If language is inadequate, how can we know if our inner lives exceed or fall short of an external world? If our inner lives both exceed and fall short, then it might be that our inner lives are, in fact, in balance, the mean between two extremes. It also seems possible that many people, perhaps people who don’t enjoy art, experience no difference between inner life and external world. So it’s relative.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful by asking additional questions. But it seems to me that language is a mediator, like all other sorts of communicative systems–painting, music, ASCII code, etc. Language is one mode of communication that allows mediation between inner self and external world. So, from that perspective, language itself creates balance, rather than calling attention to imbalance.
So I think the statement that “language is inadequate to describe experience” represents some sort of theoretical position, and is not a truism or a form of absolute truth (whatever that is). The question is, of what philosophy is that statement a part?
Sure there’s what we don’t have words for.
But what about what we have for words!
Sugarloaf, scry, blowth…….that’s the boat
I want to bark in.
A lot of this line of thinking in poetry that describes seems to be the reverberation and absorption of lit crit theories from the late 1980s and the 1990s into the creative world–the use of semiotics, deconstruction, and reader-response theories to analyze literary texts. A lot of this theory–Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, and those critics with the Cher-like popularity of being known only by a single name, Foucault and Derrida–a lot of it is pretty interesting to read, contemplate, and apply to texts. I encountered most of this in the early 1990s in lit grad school
What is a dull poem?
A poem that describes experience.
What is a fine poem?
A poem that is an experience.
How is a poem an experience?
When you read it, you are there.
Where is there?
A cone of light, which is the poem’s own space.
A momentum, which is the poem’s own time.
Are words adequate?
Shall the joiner question the saw’s utility
or doubt the spirit level?
WTF?
WTF.
.
.
I love “try harder then.” I may have to respond in another post!