Paradigms and Poetry

As I continue my desultory reading of the philosophy of science, I am getting reacquainted with ideas from Thomas Kuhn, specifically his notions of "paradigm shifts" and "theory-laden data." The latter notion is meant to disrupt the idea that data can be neutral, just sitting there waiting to support this or that theory. ("Just the facts, ma'am.") Kuhn suggests that the way the data are gotten or placed or shaped springs from theory. It's not so much that, like Disraeli ("lies, damned lies, statistics"), Kuhn is mocking or dismissing data; he's just pointing out, I think, that data are never innocent ("theory, damned theory, and data").

With a paradigm-shift, I reckon a way of putting the idea is that one overarching way of looking at the world is replaced by another one. One of the most dramatic paradigm-shifts in my lifetime, I think, has been the one shaped by feminism and its effects. Not that long ago, it used to be unthinkable for women to hold a huge spectrum of jobs they now hold, and even people who remain allergic to the word "feminism" accept women in these roles--because the paradigm has shifted.

Two paradigms that simply will not, apparently, stop butting heads are so-called Evolution and Creation.

Bush took a bit of LBJ and a lot of Nixon and created a paradigm by which the president is an elected dictator, as well as a compulsive gambler. He seems to have put about as much thought into invading and occupying Iraq as a drunk does when he decides to hit on 15 at the blackjack table in Bordertown, Nevada. I exaggerate, but I wish I were exaggerating more. Even his former press-secretary, Scottie the Wonder-Dog, referred to Bush as "a gut player." That's quite a paradigm-shift.

In a minor key, the paradigm-shift can be useful for poets. You can get stuck writing one kind of poetry--first person, semi-autobiographical free verse remains a dominant paradigm, for instance. But then you can glance at Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner," to pick just one example, and realize you can write from the perspective and in the voice of someone different from you, relate an experience you have not had but can imagine, and, by the way, have a dead person speak. Or, like Hopkins, you can look at the dominant "music" of your contemporary poetry and decide, "Gee, I think I'll blow that up." With sprung rhythm, he blew up the monotony of iambic pentameter. Dickinson ignored so many paradigms and seriously bent others that it's hard to keep track of them. Surrealism was once a scandalously new paradigm. Now it's pretty much a dominant one, as is the image-devoted poem.

I think poets are naturally comfortable with the idea of "theory laden data"; or at least they sense that all that stuff we encounter and perceive out there is laden with something. Often it's laden with our desire to write a poem about it. That summer's day didn't know Shakespeare was going to write about it and show why it shouldn't, in fact, be compared to his love; and those plums didn't realize that a) Williams would eat them and b) that he would then write a poem in the form of a note apologizing for having eaten them. They were cold, delicious, and poetry-laden data, those poems.

Invitation from a Poem

Often I enjoy reading poems that somehow invite the reader into them. Sometimes they do so merely by being accessible, but even difficult poems can signal, in a variety of ways, that the reader is still welcome. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's poems belong, I'd argue, in the latter category. You know going in that there will be some knots to untie, but you also know you'll probably enjoy being inside the poem nonetheless. With some so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems, a few of Robert Creeley's poems, and a lot of Pound's poetry, I'm sometimes uncertain about how welcome I am in the poem.

Here's a poem that takes the idea of invitation both literally and figuratively:

Make Yourself, At Home

by Hans Ostrom

You are always welcome here
at the end of this sentence,
in a courtyard of expression.

Your presence shapes utterance,
organizes this garden of letters.
With your permission, afternoon

arrives. We could say “shadows
lengthen,” but that’s not very good,
and you prefer to think of Earth

always moving, pulling trees, people,
hills, and buildings toward and away
from sun. You are and change the subject.

You murmur a tale, which brings laughter
at its close. Will you tell that tale?
Please tell that tale again.

The invitation at the end is "spoken" by the one "uttering" the poem to an implied listener "within" the poem, but the invitation is also literal. The last stanza invites you to tell an engaging, perhaps humorous, tale or anecdote today to someone you know--or to a stranger, if the stranger will stand for it.

The poem is from Subjects Apprehended, by Hans Ostrom (Ohio: Pudding House Press, 2000).