Showing posts with label Theodore Roethke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theodore Roethke. Show all posts

Monday, December 1, 2008

Fooling Around With Surrealism













There's not a lot of time left in the semester, so we had to race through the topic of surrealism today. A student made the apt point that a "manifesto of surrealism" seemed liked an instance of hypocrisy: we need a manual of rules for telling us how to break the rules?!

We also talked about the important role surrealism played in Modernist poetry; arguably the most famous Modernist poem, The Waste Land, is surrealistic.

Sometimes it's easier to start talking about surrealism in connection with painting, so I established a spectrum between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with Dali and Pollock thrown in there somewhere for kicks. Almost everyone in the class loved paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, thought Dali was amusing and relatively accessible, but didn't quite know about Pollock. I described Warhol's film of the egg, and they didn't seem amused, although a couple of them noted that showing such a film would make people reconsider the practice and act of viewing films.

We then read a poem by Charles Simic, and one by Theodore Roethke. In the Simic poem, the key is that he begins by refusing to see the fork (in this case) in a routine way. The poem assumes we are seeing a fork for the first time, and that assumption is the trigger for surrealism. Roethke's poem takes a different approach. It is more like expressionism. It presents a kind of violent, confused emotional response to something ordinary--cuttings, as in cut flowers or cut willow branches. Surrealistic images spring from the emotional response, the inner turmoil. But again, the poem refuses to be merely descriptive.

We then talked about why anyone would want to write surrealistically. Answers: to represent reality more faithfully than realism (ironically); to break through the confines of conventions and predictable genres or modes (like the contemporary first-person, autobiographical narrative poem); to explore the unpredictable murk of the psyche.

I had also asked the class to bring relatively ordinary objects from home. These included a penny, a 2 dollar bill, a black candle, some kind of mysterious lamp shade, a stuffed animal that looked like a kitten and actually seemed to breath (this item freaked out everyone), a deer-skull, a watch, and dice.

We then began to write poems about the objects--our object own or someone else's. The poems needed to be "surrealistic" in some way--that is, not simply and conventionally descriptive. Robert Bly calls this kind of poetry "leaping poetry," and he argues that there's not enough of it in the American tradition. Of course, as I mentioned to the class, the trick is to make sure the reader has a prayer of making those leaps with you.

At any rate, I chose the dice (or die) someone had brought--red, with white dots. I couldn't resist. This is the draft I wrote:

Dice

Fold night several times until
it becomes a cube. The North Star
shines on one side, Orion's Belt
on another, and so on. Repeat the
process. You have two cubes.
Now let your fist swallow both
die. Hold your fist high, shake
it against the sky defiantly.
Make a wager with God.
Toss the cubes onto
a flat black velvet night. Look
at the way the constellated cubes
have come to rest, inert
and grave. Of course, you've lost.
The House always wins. God is
the House. The sky is God's casino.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Concerning Joy

Poet Hayden Carruth died last week. I did not read and have not read a lot of his work, but what I did read was good, in my opinion. Also, he did seem to have one of those names that seemed manufactured just for a poet. He's considered an important American poet.

My most specific memory regarding him goes back to an evening maybe two decades ago when I was having dinner with three other poets, Lee Bassett, Sam Hamill (best or most recently known for the Poets Against the War project, but also a fine poet, translator, and publisher), and Madeline DeFrees. This was not long after Richard Hugo had died, and Madeline was angry about a bad review Carruth had written about Hugo--maybe it was about his collected poems. I don't know. I never tracked down the review. I just remember that Madeline, not the type to anger easily, was pretty miffed at Carruth's review, especially where it (according to her) had observed that Hugo "had no hear"--for poetry, that is. Hugo's poetry is deliberately clipped and sometimes purposely monotonous and/or staccato, but he had a great sense of language. My own view is that he was writing in the way he'd heard language when he was growing up, working class, Pacific Northwest. And he just leaned more toward the Anglo Saxon side of the language as opposed to the Latin side. Carruth probably just didn't get what Hugo was doing, but Hugo had studied with Roethke, after all, and Roethke was all about sound. If you've read Hugo's The Triggering Town, you know Hugo was almost all about sound, too.

To digress from the digression, the NY Times obituary (which I think I found online) of Carruth mentioned his once saying that he wrote a lot about loss, a statement that made me giggle because, well, don't we all write about loss, even people who don't write? Then I scolded myself for a) giggling and b) writing about loss too much myself. So I made one of those precipitous resolutions. I resolved to write about joy more. I don't know precisely why I chose joy as the opposite of loss when gain, possession, interest-accrued, or permanence would probably have been more reasonable choices as opposites to loss. Fulfilling the resolution hasn't gone all that well, but here's one poem, at least, allegedly on joy--with one of my classic, numbingly obvious titles, which Carruth probably would have hated, along with my poetry, although I doubt if he ever read even one by me, unless maybe one I had in Ploughshares. (Anyway, Mr. Carruth, I'm sorry you're dead.)


Concerning Joy


When an infant laughs,
especially at nothing,
joy has scrawled a note
for anyone to read
and get a giggle.

When people see someone
they love receive what's right,
joy juices a corpuscle of time.

When you sense that thing
move through you, the one
that feels as if your bones
just told a joke to your nerves,
which then told your feet
to dance (knowing full well
your feet ache) joy just might
have been nearby. Mercurial,

needed, and nimble,
as small as a thimble
and as big as a moon,
joy is, I'm telling you,
welcome most any time,
including midnight,
noon, and soon. I'm

saying something about
joy, okay? I'm not trying
to reproduce it, so don't
get all joyless on me. If
joy comes to you, let it.
If it doesn't, ask around.
See what you can find out.
Somebody has to know something.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom