Another great point: “poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking.” That’s the tightrope thing I’m getting at. You have to walk the line–what Orr calls the threshold space–etc. etc.

I’m all for disappearing. Let’s all do it!

Thanks for that, Heather.

Another great point: “poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking.” That’s the tightrope thing I’m getting at. You have to walk the line–what Orr calls the threshold space–etc. etc.

I’m all for disappearing. Let’s all do it!

Thanks for that, Heather.

I wanted to add in some of my scattered reading connections with this. (This comment has, since I wrote this sentence, become VERY LONG. I’ve tried to keep the paragraphs on the small side. And I can’t figure out how to do block quotes, so I’ve just marked them with quotation marks. Sorry!)

1. The poet’s fascination with animals is reminiscent of the child’s. In ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES, Brian Boyd writes:

“Long before anything like narrative became possible, animals have had to be aware of other agents as volatile and potentially urgent threats or opportunities. Agency itself therefore catches attention. Although most of us now see far more cars than we do animals, and face more danger from them, and have been warned since childhood about the risks they pose, experiments show that we detect change of position far more quickly and accurately in animals than in cars. Long before narrative, too, animals have needed to distinguish one organism from another at first sign: by smell, sound, or especially, in the humans case, by sight. Hence human children have an innate fascination with identifying animals of all kinds, out of all proportion to the likelihood of their encountering alligators or zebras.”

In other words, it’s the animal in us that wires us to seek, recognize, and create the animal other. Boyd’s reasoning, I believe, both complicates and strengthens Levis’s argument that:

“Animals are objects of contemplation, but they are also, unlike us, without speech, without language, except in their own instinctual systems. When animals occur in poems, then, I believe they are often emblems for the muteness of the poet, for what he or she cannot express, for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature.
[…]
In many poems, of course, the animal is not natural, because in a poem the beast may be wholly imagined, and therefore altered from the prison of nature, and paroled, briefly, by the poem itself, and by the poet. And sometimes a poet chooses an animal because the poet is mute, and also because…the poet is prophet.”

So there are, it would seem, layers to the animals’ attractiveness to poets. We’re wired to notice them first and foremost because they are the potentially dangerous change in an otherwise relatively static world. As we develop an understanding of language, we also develop a fascination in the otherness and muteness of the animal, and a simultaneous feeling of connection with them. They, like us, appear to have agency, and it’s not hard for us to ascribe all sorts of human narratives to their behaviors. In our imaginations they speak. (And take on the strangest looks! See this superb compendium of bestiaries http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalpha.htm.)

I’m also pretty fascinated with poets’ use of the very word and category of “animal.” I like anything that uses a slightly wrong category (either a bit too vague or a bit too specific—usually the former) so that I prefer a tree to a pine, a building to a cottage or skyscraper, and certainly an animal to an otter. It creates a distracted kind of looking, allowing the brain to unfocus in a useful way. Anyway, Joe Wenderoth’s “Morning Fiction” (from DISFORTUNE) (look it up on Google Books!) makes superb use of “the animals.” Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Oldest Animal” (from TSIM TSUM) is another memorable instance.

2. John Ashbery is responsible for providing me with one of the best bits of thinking I’ve come across about poets’ discomfort with writing about how they make their poems. (He didn’t write it; David Schubert did, but Ashbery quotes it in OTHER TRADITIONS, his excellent and surprising collection of lectures from the Charles Eliot Norton series.) Having traveled through many minds to reach you, here is:

“A Short Essay On Poetry” by David Schubert

A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gaiety by contrast with the burden it carries — for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry’s career, perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.

3. It does seem very important to empty oneself, to disappear. The strange thing is that in order to reach that point of disappearance, one has to travel through this immensely egotistical act of beginning to make something. There’s a wild single-mindedness to the process, which is mentioned in the lines Levis quotes from “Thrushes” by Ted Hughes:

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.

People do love to think about Mozart’s brain. Me too! I am also people. I’ve written about this before, but if you have not read it, I highly recommend Daniel Dennett’s “Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?” in which he quotes Mozart and the painter Philip Guston on their creative processes. Dennett writes that Mozart “is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: ‘Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.’” Guston’s take on the matter feels just about perfect:

“When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”

Here’s to disappearing! And thank you, Alexis, so much for these words.

I wanted to add in some of my scattered reading connections with this. (This comment has, since I wrote this sentence, become VERY LONG. I’ve tried to keep the paragraphs on the small side. And I can’t figure out how to do block quotes, so I’ve just marked them with quotation marks. Sorry!)

1. The poet’s fascination with animals is reminiscent of the child’s. In ON THE ORIGIN OF STORIES, Brian Boyd writes:

“Long before anything like narrative became possible, animals have had to be aware of other agents as volatile and potentially urgent threats or opportunities. Agency itself therefore catches attention. Although most of us now see far more cars than we do animals, and face more danger from them, and have been warned since childhood about the risks they pose, experiments show that we detect change of position far more quickly and accurately in animals than in cars. Long before narrative, too, animals have needed to distinguish one organism from another at first sign: by smell, sound, or especially, in the humans case, by sight. Hence human children have an innate fascination with identifying animals of all kinds, out of all proportion to the likelihood of their encountering alligators or zebras.”

In other words, it’s the animal in us that wires us to seek, recognize, and create the animal other. Boyd’s reasoning, I believe, both complicates and strengthens Levis’s argument that:

“Animals are objects of contemplation, but they are also, unlike us, without speech, without language, except in their own instinctual systems. When animals occur in poems, then, I believe they are often emblems for the muteness of the poet, for what he or she cannot express, for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature.
[…]
In many poems, of course, the animal is not natural, because in a poem the beast may be wholly imagined, and therefore altered from the prison of nature, and paroled, briefly, by the poem itself, and by the poet. And sometimes a poet chooses an animal because the poet is mute, and also because…the poet is prophet.”

So there are, it would seem, layers to the animals’ attractiveness to poets. We’re wired to notice them first and foremost because they are the potentially dangerous change in an otherwise relatively static world. As we develop an understanding of language, we also develop a fascination in the otherness and muteness of the animal, and a simultaneous feeling of connection with them. They, like us, appear to have agency, and it’s not hard for us to ascribe all sorts of human narratives to their behaviors. In our imaginations they speak. (And take on the strangest looks! See this superb compendium of bestiaries http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastalpha.htm.)

I’m also pretty fascinated with poets’ use of the very word and category of “animal.” I like anything that uses a slightly wrong category (either a bit too vague or a bit too specific—usually the former) so that I prefer a tree to a pine, a building to a cottage or skyscraper, and certainly an animal to an otter. It creates a distracted kind of looking, allowing the brain to unfocus in a useful way. Anyway, Joe Wenderoth’s “Morning Fiction” (from DISFORTUNE) (look it up on Google Books!) makes superb use of “the animals.” Sabrina Orah Mark’s “Oldest Animal” (from TSIM TSUM) is another memorable instance.

2. John Ashbery is responsible for providing me with one of the best bits of thinking I’ve come across about poets’ discomfort with writing about how they make their poems. (He didn’t write it; David Schubert did, but Ashbery quotes it in OTHER TRADITIONS, his excellent and surprising collection of lectures from the Charles Eliot Norton series.) Having traveled through many minds to reach you, here is:

“A Short Essay On Poetry” by David Schubert

A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gaiety by contrast with the burden it carries — for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry’s career, perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.

3. It does seem very important to empty oneself, to disappear. The strange thing is that in order to reach that point of disappearance, one has to travel through this immensely egotistical act of beginning to make something. There’s a wild single-mindedness to the process, which is mentioned in the lines Levis quotes from “Thrushes” by Ted Hughes:

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth
That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own
Side and devouring itself: efficiency which
Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it
Or obstruction deflect.

People do love to think about Mozart’s brain. Me too! I am also people. I’ve written about this before, but if you have not read it, I highly recommend Daniel Dennett’s “Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?” in which he quotes Mozart and the painter Philip Guston on their creative processes. Dennett writes that Mozart “is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: ‘Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.’” Guston’s take on the matter feels just about perfect:

“When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”

Here’s to disappearing! And thank you, Alexis, so much for these words.