A few years ago, I found myself strolling down a narrow, car-free street in Bury Saint Edmunds, a gorgeous little town in Suffolk, England. Admiring its houses’ irregular roof line, I realized that although the human mind needs patterns to orient itself, it’s also thrilled by the sabotage of these patterns, that the coexistence of order and chaos lies at the heart of the aesthetic experience.
That’s why a poem that adheres to a rhyme scheme and/or syllable count becomes too much like a too-straight street, announcing its intentions miles in advance. Your place or mine? Although the sights along the way may intrigue, we know there’ll be a stoplight at exactly three hundred yards, and that we should keep our speed constant until we’re sucked into another equally soul-destroying-yet-A-OK-for-commerce gridded artery.
Borges joked somewhere that literary surprises are unseemly for civilized people, but his works are nothing but surprises, sentence by sentence, sometimes word by word, practically, as in the much celebrated passage from “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,” translated here by Eliot Weinberger:
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that from a distance resemble flies.
With his “animals are divided into,” Borges tricked us into expecting some sort of scientific classification, some recognizable pattern of thoughts, only to yank all of our mental anchors. If this isn’t poetry, I don’t know what is. Again, I think poetry lies in the violation of mental patterns. Check out this Vietnamese figure of speech:
Mother chicken, son duck.
Since we had expected another chicken, duck became a poetic moment, albeit a tiny one. Here’s the nickname of Anthony Heyward, a Brooklyn street baller:
Half Man Half Amazing
That’s already better, since the surprise’s greater, the discovery of an adjective where we expected a noun. With neither rhymes nor line breaks, we get something like a poem in six syllables. It’s not much, I agree, but there’s still more poetry here than in many volumes of verse. In short, give me the poetry and quickly!
Oh no! Formal verse flamewars coming! Let me join in –
accentual-syllabic : free verse :: Macintosh : Linux
Honda Prius : Hum-Vee?
Hilary Clinton : Barack Obama?
Loop Quantum Gravity : String Theory?
Small Town in France : Small Town in Wisconsin?
MBTA : MTA?
Thanks folks, I’m here all week.
Simon, Time magazine, which is all-knowing, has declared String Theory to be over.
Can you tell me 1.) if, as a physicist, you agree; 2.) if so, how this affects the above syllogism; and 3.) what you think will happen to all those poems about String Theory, e.g.:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/18996
http://www.missourireview.org/content/features/2007/weeklypoem/2007-03-20_hicok.php
Welcome back!
I actually love straight streets. It gets me to the Walmart quicker.
String theory is not over (I am a non-combatant, but have friends in the game.) But actually the analogy works very well:
Loop Quantum Gravity: in some ways a more “traditional” approach to quantizing gravity. Retains, on the surface at least, many of the features that people considered aesthetically good about general relativity. Appears to be a “natural” development from the earlier part of the century. Some people who do LQG like to discuss these facets quite a bit, to the annoyance of string theorists who claim that just following the rules won’t give you something as great as the past. Complaints of being ignored, oppressed, etc.
String Theory: crazy free-for-all, can do it even if you have no idea how to solve a grad-level problem in classical quantum mechanics. Anything you do is right because nothing, so far, is wrong. Amazing results appear occasionally but people complain it’s just fashion-driven and that the bulk is just repetitive and sterile, or at least deeply out of touch with the needs of the larger community.
As for poems about string theory: sort of like poems about alchemy? I think a John Donne type could do it best.
Yours,
John Dee
A John Donne type, or maybe an Empson type (anybody remember his essay, “Donne the Space Man?”)…
Linh– it’s great fun to catch up on all the little parcel bombs you’ve been leaving on this site.
I like your examples a lot here, the way each one of them busts out of its little language game, but I don’t know if I agree with the little side swipe against rhymed / symmetrical poems– which, when good, are all about ruining expectation, breaking rules, keeping the reader on his guard. As I recently heard George Szirtes say, good rhymes are about strangeness, not familiarity. It’s a particular challenge to show that even in the gridded world life will spring some nasty surprises, that even if you know when the stoplight’s coming, even if that end is inevitable as death, you still don’t know what exactly is waiting for you there. I thought it was the quick, straight way, you know, but when I finally got to the Walmart, 300 years had passed, and all traces of human life had vanished.
Ah
shadow of Schwitters
still, still expanding.
concrete puppy
woolen hard