So, following Ange Mlinko’s suggestion in the comments section of my last post, here’s all I’m talking about regarding the difference between Truth and Clarity. (They sound like allergy medicines, don’t they?) Truth (to me) might go something like “Socialist democracy is the best form of government.” And I’m always delighted to read good poems by people who hold that opinion (Anne Winters?) but most poems that merely want to tell me that Truth aren’t usually good poems. There are much better ways than poems to make arguments or deliver messages.
Clarity, meanwhile, is more like caffeine. Or a pair of glasses. (I rely on both.) See better, see with more energy, become awake. What does Truth have to do with a poem like (to pick one everybody knows) “The Red Wheelbarrow”? What do we talk about when we talk about this poem?
When you teach “Wheelbarrow,” I think you’re supposed to get people talking about what it is that depends upon the wheelbarrow. But it’s much more important to understanding the poem to realize that we can’t answer—are not supposed to answer—that question.
Maybe we talk about the fact that the poem aspires and also fails to be a snapshot or painting. The poem’s scenery seems perfectly clear. And yet: If you were looking at a picture of this scene, you’d get it all at once: Chickens, weather and wheelbarrow, simultaneously. In the poem, each stanza, each line, revises what came before it; it happens over time, not all at once. A poem can revise itself. A picture can’t. A picture is immediate. A poem is not.
Or maybe we talk about the fact that the image itself seems to be devoid of human presence—until we realize that the word “glazed” is a metaphor, and that metaphors are only possible with a human present—so that the poem is at least partly about human perception of objects, not just about objects by themselves.
Etc.
We may have multiple realizations (epiphanies?) reading and thinking about this poem, but in what sense does it contain a relatable Truth? If it does contain a Truth, than what does it make False outside the poem?
Nothing, of course. The poem is an actuality made of words, which, no matter how many times I read it, makes me feel like I’ve just gotten a huge infusion of oxygen.
As William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there-”
I like your use of “The Red Wheelbarrow” as illustration here.
But do you really want to define Truth as the self-evident, the obvious, the prose fact?
What if Truth is more like a poem?
Maybe the most precisely true statement anyone can make is a tautology (A = A). And Williams’ poem, you might say, celebrates the pleasure of tautology. Things are just so… THERE. The argument (”so much depends…”) sort of dribbles off…. & yet it’s a complete argument : so much (everything) depends upon the simple, brilliant THERENESS of things. Their “quiddity”, in Joyce’s sense.
Paul Fry meditates on this in his book A DEFENSE OF POETRY. From the blurb at Amazon : “The author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the “ostensive moment” that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.”
This is a possibly interesting thought as regards truth in literature. It’s from Ursula K. Le Guin’s THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (Ace Books, 1969):
“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive…”
Best,
Yerra Sugarman
Hi Henry. I’m only trying to distinguish in a practical sense between my use of the words “truth” and “clarity” in the post where I took issue with Ada’s use of the word soothsaying to describe what poems do. Not trying to get us all to agree on what Truth, etc. is. Thanks for the Fry recommendation–it looks interesting. Cheers, Daisy
Evocation. The Surreal uses discontinuities in expectation
to force the mind to manufacture bridging material…
..the reader adapts the poem. Red Wagon is far from
Surreal, but it does have the evocatory power. In Red Wagon,
the small, immediate, close focus on symbolic things creates
a wide backstory that is vastly bigger than the scene. Like
walking around an old fort and digging up a piece of a
china teacup….the whole inferred from the part.