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from Sketch for a New Poetry Workshop

Richard Jackson

1

Let me start with an autobiographical note: when I was a junior in college I took a course in the Romantics and had already begun to write "seriously" (comically according to many others). The major problem for me then was that my own practice as a writer, and what I had been reading in books by Curtis Bradford and Jack Stillinger on Yeats' and Keats' methods of composition, were fundamentally at odds with what I was being taught in the Romantics class. The way we went about things in that class was to see poems as philosophical constructs, more sophisticated than many classes, but still for me an approach that missed the essence of poetry. Instead I lined up with Stevens: "Poetry is nothing if not experiment in language." And Milosz argues, "Language is the fabric from which garments of all philosophies and ideologies are cut." Even Umberto Eco, asked which characters in The Name of The Rose he liked best, answered, "Why, the adverbs, of course!" Unfortunately, when it comes to poetry workshops the same philosophy that dominated the literature class seems to be widespread. The last thing that often gets discussed is the art of the poem. Or sometimes the opposite happens: the discussion plunges into talk about particular words, line breaks, images, or the like, with no sense of the poem as an artistic whole, a made thing. The language of the poem, what Dante in his La Vita Nuova and his Convivio spends so much time discussing, becomes a mere window to address personal, biographical or political issues.

Later, in graduate school, I took a Romantics course form a poet/critic from Jamaica, Michael Cooke (author of several fine books of Romanticism and on Byron) who always tried to see poems, as he said, as "acts of mind" (to borrow Stevens' phrase) with the emphasis on acts: on seeing how the poet's mind acts, works. For example, we saw the Prelude in that class as a poem based upon a poetics of failure; how, attempting to declare and observe one expected thing, the speaker always fails, and yet that failure leads to surprising discoveries. And if it all leads in the end to something that sounds vaguely transcendental, then it is quickly undercut with the suggestion that the mind's discoveries will go on (thus the title, Prelude). It sort of resembles Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit from the same time period which is written in a format echoing a novel where the main character is consciousness and where the author's end in the last pages, as Hegel says, is the reader's beginning. In other words, I was learning to read from the inside out, from a writer's point of view,--the way, really, that writers read their own work. Rather than look at the surface and dive into the poem to find its meanings, I found myself already inside the poem, working upward to break through the surface from beneath.

What I was getting from all of this was a radical sense of the movement, the dynamic, the structure of process of a work that in fact is the key to everything else in it, and this was the way I would, and still do, talk to other poets about how poems work. It is almost as if you can graph this movement. Whenever I have looked at poems, whether to edit them for a variety of journals and anthologies, to read them for my own pleasure, talk about them in workshops and lectures, or to edit my own work, I always have looked first at this basic sort of movement. The trouble has been that it is fairly amorphous and difficult to talk about, and so I have usually talked about the effects hoping that after a while students would get a sense of that essential inner movement. I remember a few years ago talking with Stanley Plumly about the impossibility yet the necessity of talking about/teaching/dealing with content in a poetry workshop. While this approach I am describing seems to focus entirely on language as the motivator behind poems, I mean it in a larger sense, what Stanley and I were talking about, a sense of how poems might "resonate" in a deeper way, how the language might suggest a more rich sense of associations, meaning--of content, really. So the aim here in what follows is not some hollow exercise in so called "language poetry," but rather a fuller, more mature, more resonate poem, a poem of vision rather than of simply seeing, of imagination rather than reportage, transformation rather than witness. This is something Bill Matthews and I used to talk about extensively--seeing the big picture before seeing the minute elements. In fact, as he'd say, you can't see the minute elements clearly until you see the big picture. In our classes, that's what we'd focus on because that's what would help the student with the next poem, that's what would help the student understand the issues behind the usual workshop comments. More importantly, that's what would keep a student from becoming workshop dependent, from having to rely on those narrow comments to "fix" each poem as it arrived.

What I have been working towards is a three fold sense of rhythm and pacing, a way of looking at poems from the inside out rather than, as a literature teacher, from the outside in. It involves looking at poems first through the basic and deep dynamics of language, then working up to the undercurrents and movements of a poem's form or arc, and finally breaking through the surface to the format and other inter-textual relationships of the poem. I think what I am proposing is essential to all poetry and which, amorphous as it is, can be adapted to our discussions. Indeed, I did a workshop at a writers' conference this past August where we did just that. I suppose the method in some ways it has to do with what Ezra Pound once described in his essay "How To Read" as three levels of writing. The first is melopoeia, how the words get charged with a musical effect, something someone who doesn't even know the language can hear. This has to do with the surface format of the poem only. But poetry is more than that, he says, it is also phanopoeia, how the words that comprise the music also are images that suggest visual things (the analogy so far, then, is to music and poetry). The final and most important thing about poetry is logopoeia, "the dance of intellect among words." Dance suggests the rhythm, the music on a larger scale than just mere sounds, and the intellect suggests that the images relate to larger contexts. Logopoeia has to do with the underpinnings of the image narrative, with transport, with energy of language: it suggests an investment of the poet's whole being in the poem, especially since intellect as he uses it in the context of the Greek definitions includes emotion--it means something like consciousness, awareness. This is really the basic movement of the poem, what is ultimately my focus here.

The poem in front of us may reveal unexpected things: we often tend to want to chop out the weak parts, and yet they may be where the poet is straining to say something he or she has tried before and the language is straining--in which case we may want to go after what Marvin Bell calls the "ghost poem" behind the poem on the page, the as now impossible poem not yet there but revealed in the weaker sections. I want to avoid the tiring and claustrophobic workshop comments which begin "I'm uncomfortable with..." or "I have a problem with" one or another particular line or image, and which focus on tiny things that miss the big picture. This also moves us away from the fix-it shop mentality for poems, or where we try to bandage wounded poems--though these localized approaches may be of some limited use on a particular poem (but just as often the comments may not be so helpful since they miss the dynamic of the poem): but in the end this band-aid approach or scalpel approach merely makes the student workshop dependent--just as the literature student who focuses on the surface becomes teacher dependent. Instead I want to look first at the underpinnings, at how the poem is put together with the stuff it is always made of, language.

All this means taking a more objective and honest look at our work than workshops often allow. I guess the final point here is to be truthful, not to "coddle" each other as Phil Levine warns us, but to show respect for the art and each other with our honesty and frankness. Berryman once said to a class: "No holding back. One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be."

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