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Content READING STRATEGIES FOR
CONTEMPORARY POETRY
by
Jeneil Kelsey Aeschbacher
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
September 1979
UMI Number: DP23069
All rights reserved
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a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation ruonsiwtg
UMI DP23069
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
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This dissertation, written by
under the direction of h Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
D ate.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairman
rCy.t.e. U-n......
' P h . i X
E
'■$0
# 3 53
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to express my thanks to all the people who have helped
me to complete this work. There are many— family, friends, and col
leagues— whose influence was significant, but I wish to thank in
particular, my husband, Bill Aeschbacher, and my mentor, W. Ross
Winterowd, for their patience, good humor, and encouragement.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT ............................................. ii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1
II: PROCESSING LANGUAGE STRUCTURES ..................... 5
Drawing Inferences ................................ 6
The Cooperative Principle ..................... 6
The Given-New Strategy....................... 10
More About Implicatures.......... 15
Processing Syntactical Structures ........ 19
Short-Term Memory . ......................... 19
Recoding .................................... 22
Meaning.......................................... 25
III: PERCEPTUAL STRATEGIES .............................. 30
Human Information Processing ........... ..... 31
Fringe Consciousness ......................... 31
Ambiguity Tolerance.............. 33
Essential/Inessential Discrimination ........ 34
Perspicuous Grouping ......................... 36
Closure.......................................... 37
Convergent and Divergent Thinking ............... 41
Egocentrism...................................... 44
Subjective Variables .............................. 46
IV. THEORIES OF READING................................ 52
Models of the Reading Process................... 52
Taxonomic Models.............................. 52
Psychological Models ......................... 53
Linguistic Models .............................. 54
Transactional Models ......................... 55
The Goodman Model .............................. 55
Hypothesis-Testing ................................ 57
Miscue Analysis .................................. 58
Reading as an Adaptive Process ................... 59
Units of Comprehension.............. 62
Largest Manageable Units ......................... 65
The Reader . . . : ............................. 66
iii
Chapter
V. THE PROCESSES OF VALUING............................ 70
Intentions........................................ 71
Illocutionary Force ............................ 71
Perlocutionary Force........................... 74
Form............ 76
The Dynamics of Form, Simplified.............. 76
The Dynamics of Form, Complicated .............. 78
Valuing: Its Beginnings in the Reading Event . . 82
Texts as Events................................ 82
The Bovine Theory of Reading................. 86
Caring........................................ 89
VI. READING THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES...................... 94
The Dedication— Forming a Global Representation . 96
"Under the Maud Moon"— Proceeding on Faith .... 96
"The Hen Flower"— Reading as Creation........... 102
"The Shoes of Wandering"— Comprehension as
Enlightenment.................................. 107
"Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue
Juniata"— Integrating Formal Elements ........ 110
"In the Hotel of Lost Light"— Seeking Grace in
the Beauty of Language....................... 117
"The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible"—
Adjusting the Global Representation ........... 121
"Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the
Moonlight"— Alternating Strategies ...... 123
"The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing"—
Recognizing Metaphorical Implications ..... 129
"The Path Among the Stones"— Reading as Sensory
Experience.......... 135
"Lastness"— Making Connections ................... 139
VII. VALUING THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES..................... 144
VIII. TURNING TO OTHER SOURCES............................ 149
Hilberry on Kinnell.............................. 149
A Look at Earlier Work............................ 154
Kinnell on Kinnell................................ 161
IX. INFORMALIST AESTHETICS.............................. 179
Aesthetic and Philosophical Principles Underlying
Informalist Poetics ............................ 180
Art Versus Experience ......................... 180
Reality....................... 181
iv
Chapter
Poetic Imagination ............................ 183
Language................................. 184
Imitating Other Arts.................... 185
The Development of Informalist Poetics... ....... 188
Hardy'*'s Crude Enthusiasm................ 188
Pound's Straight T a l k .................. 188
Williams* Impalpable Revolution ............. 190
Lawrence's Poetry of the Present ............. 192
Olson's High Energy-Construct ............... 193
Dickey's Perpetual Possibility ............... 195
Ginsberg's Living Speech ..................... 198
Informalist Poetics and Reading Strategies . . . 200
X. DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY ................. 205
Organic F o r m ............................... 206
Confessional Poetry and the Problem of Intention 209
Surcharged Imagism and the Recognition of Irony . 214
Integrating Tone and S e n s e ................ 216
Surrealism and the Dangers of Reductive Reading . 221
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................... 227
v
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Rhetoric divides itself neatly into three areas of concern:
invention, form, and style. Invention deals with the ways in which
ideas are generated— with reasoning, with the character of the speaker,
! and with the nature of the audience; form, as the term implies, deals
with arrangement, organization, coherence; and style, with such mat-
i ters as figurative language, diction, and syntax. This elegant and
j intriguingly large framework is hut one facet of rhetoric’s extra-
. ordinary absorbency. Modern rhetoric is a sponge. It soaks up its
i
I concepts from a wide variety of sources: psychology, linguistics,
| reading theory, grammar, philosophy, biology, and physics. Incorpo-^
rating these concepts into its own framework, rhetoric seeks to
1 explain all language functions: reading, writing, speaking, listen
ing, thinking, and the values inherent in these activities. This is
| no small task. Without the absorbent framework and rhetoricians will
ing to explore other disciplines, the task would be impossible.
Because rhetoric, like a mixed metaphor, can go any direction,
it tends to subsume whatever it needs to explain the functions of
language. Unlike specialized disciplines— linguistics, literary
1 criticism, or psychology— rhetoric is not bound to one area of con
cern or one set of legitimate questions. The approach to reading
1
offered by rhetorical study is therefore a thoroughly consuming one.
Such an approach deals not strictly with the author and his intention,
nor with the text, nor with the reader, but with all of these, and
with the relationships among them. Neither does it deal with
informational reading alone, as psycholinguistics has tended to
do, nor with aesthetic reading alone, as literary criticism has
largely done. Rather, rhetoric can incorporate all these concerns.
This, however, does not mean that rhetoric, in its approach
to reading, has no focus. Since it is a discipline of values
and since whatever direct value reading has belongs to the reader,
the rhetorical approach to reading always keeps the reader foremost
in mind. The relationships between the poet and the poem (intentions
inherent in language), the poem and reality, and the poem and its
own form are therefore specified in terms of the reader's activities,
goals, and values.
Our specific concern here will be the reading of poetry;
therefore, we will seek out, among the various descriptions of
reading available for rhetorical scrutiny, the particular strategies
most adaptable to the needs of poetry readers. Those strategies
will differ in some respects from strategies we use when we read
primarily for information. But in very important respects, the
strategies for both kinds of reading, as we shall see, are similar
enough to make the psycholinguistic analysis of reading very useful
to readers of poetry.
Although currently there is no theoretical consensus regarding
the specific nature of "the reader," a great deal of theoretical
2
and practical progress has been made towards defining the reading
process. We know, for instance, that reading demands the creation
and testing of hypotheses based on minimal visual cues; we know that
reading demands recognition of intention; and we know that reading
comprehension involves the transfer of information from the short
term to the long-term memory.
In order to consider the strategies of the reading process
systematically, it is necessary to understand that these strategies
derive from four basis sources, which we will consider in the next
four chapters. Current research in linguistics and ordinary language
philosophy has revealed much information about the processing of
language structures. This information is essential to a clear descrip
tion of reading, and will therefore be our first consideration. Chap
ter III will take up more general perceptual strategies inherent
in the function of the human mind. Specific research on reading
has also revealed the significant strategies of efficient readers.
This research, and the models of reading it has produced, will be
the subject of Chapter IV. In Chapter V we shall consider the pro
cesses by which readers come to value what they read, an essential
consideration for anyone interested in teaching or reading poetry.
Chapter VI will illustrate a close reading of Galway Kinnell's
The Book of Nightmares by a hypothetical reader who uses all the
strategies uncovered in the first five chapters. Further consideration
will be given in Chapter VII to processes by which the reader inte
grates the poems into his value system after having read them. Chapter
VIII offers a demonstration of the use of other tools the reader may
3
need for a fuller integration of the poems. In addition to examining
secondary sources, this chapter deals specifically with the develop- j
ment of Kinnell’s aesthetic and illustrates the use of the poet's '
aesthetic by the reader seeking a richer understanding of the poems, j
Chapter IX shows the relationship of Kinnell1s aesthetic to other
aesthetics developed by Twentieth Century poets and reveals that
Twentieth Century poetics demand precisely the reading strategies
current research in psycholinguistics and rhetoric have uncovered.
This point is further demonstrated in Chapter X by a reading of
five contemporary American poems representing different directions
taken by contemporary informalist poetics. Particular attention
will be given here to the strategies readers need for dealing
with Twentieth Century attitudes toward form.
What follows, then, is a compilation of the achievements
in the description of reading made available by the embracing nature
of rhetoric, and the specific ways in which those achievements can
be applied to the study of poetry.
4
CHAPTER II
PROCESSING LANGUAGE STRUCTURES
The essential ingredient in an understanding of reading seems
almost too obvious to name: reading is language use. Although this
fact is evident, it is often forgotten by both reading theorists
interested in measuring speed and efficiency and teachers of reading
interested in imagery and symbolism. The principles involved in
processing language structures, however, are currently being
examined by a variety of psycholinguists, grammarians, and philoso
phers, and are available for scrutiny to anyone interested in
the reading process. Among these principles are those involving
the inferences listeners and readers make in order to establish
connections between the sentences they hear or read. Since the
processes of drawing these inferences are complex, we shall discuss
them under three headings: "The Cooperative Principle," "The
Given-New Strategy," and "More About Implicatures."
A second important aspect of processing language structures
involves the transfer of information from the short-term to the
long-term memory. Inasmuch as readers can retain only a certain
amount of information in short-term memory, the information must
be recorded in such a way as to make storage in long-term memory
possible. Another complex issue, it will be discussed under the
headings "Short-Term Memory" and "Recoding."
I Finally, the issue of reading comprehension is introduced in
psycholinguistic terms by a brief consideration of the requirements
of an adequate theory of meaning. Since the strategies discussed in
I
j this chapter are all related to the processes of comprehension (as
l
1 opposed to the processes of letter or word identification), it is
! important to have a basic understanding of the theoretical foundations
j
■ of drawing inferences, negotiating syntactical structures, and
■ deriving meaning. The general procedure in this chapter will be to
explain each concept, in turn relating it to the specific strategies
I
, the concept offers for readers of poetry.
I
E
j Drawing Inferences
The Cooperative Principle
1
| Language use is an activity dependent upon assumptions language
■ users make in order to cooperate with one another for successful com-
I
munication. These assumptions make up what Grice calls the coopera-
! tive principle, which he explains in terms of four maxims:
| 1. Maxim of Quantity. Listeners can assume that speakers are
[ attempting to be informative, to give the information required, but
! not more than the information required to be informative.
I
j 2. Maxim of Quality. Listeners can assume that speakers
j attempt to say what they believe to be true.
3. Maxim of Relation. Listeners can assume that speakers'
statements will be relevant to the conversation at hand.
, 4. Maxim of Manner. Listeners can assume that speakers
]
’ attempt to be clear, to avoid obscurity, wordiness, ambiguity, and
( disorder.'*'
6
Without the cooperative principle and speakers’ adherence
to it, language use would be chaotic; on the basis of the assumptions
which form the cooperative principle, listeners construct meaning |
!
from speakers’ statements, meaning which has applicability to |
another important principle of language use, the reality principle,
according to which listeners assume that speakers refer to situations
2
or ideas they, the listeners, can make sense of.
If Barbara declares she is out of gas and Peter tells her
there is a gas station around the corner, Barbara can infer, accord
ing to the reality principle, that Peter means the next corner, not
the corner ten blocks down; and she can infer, according to the
cooperative principle, that since Peter's statement is relevant,
he believes the station to be open. Using the cooperative principle,
Barbara assumes that Peter is trying to be informative, truthful,
relevant, and clear, and makes inferences (which Grice calls conversa
tional implicatures) on the basis of these assumptions.
Any of the maxims, however, can be violated without violating
the spirit of the cooperative principle, in order to produce humor
or sarcasm. For instance, if asked how one liked a book, the reply,
"The cover was nice," would be violating the maxims of quantity and
relation, giving too little and irrelevant information, in order to
communicate one's displeasure with the book. These blatant violations
also produce conversational implicature, which requires the listener
to infer intentions beyond the speaker’s statements. An aspect
of the cooperative principle is the assumption on the part of
speakers that listeners will attempt to make these inferences.
Conservation, then, is full of implicature, for we create it
when we adhere to the maxims of the cooperative principle and when
| we violate them. But what about poetry? Consider the opening
stanza from Stevens’ "The River of Rivers in Connecticut":
There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts ^
! And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.
Let us assume the lines adhere to the reality and cooperative
principles. What inferences are required of us? First, we infer
i that Stevens has a reason for contrasting the real river in Connecti
cut, the subject of the poem, with the mythical river of death,
j In making the contrast, he is saying something about the Connecticut
■ river. Next we infer that since Stevens is not being intentionally
i
j ambiguous, he must intend the word "cataracts" to convey both its
1 senses, a clouding of the lens of the eye which obstructs the passage
i of light, and a large waterfall over a precipice. He is, after
I all, referring to death, which is associated with darkness, and
' to the river Styx, which we can associate with waterfalls,
i But what are we to make of unintelligent trees? Holding
I
| to the cooperative principle, we infer that Stevens believes it
! to be true that trees have a certain intelligence, but that these
! trees, presumably on the banks of the Styx, lack it. Perhaps he
i also intends another association with death, that trees made into
I
i
I coffins lack the intelligence of living trees.
f
Implicature, as we can see, is very much a part of the process
of reading poetry, and involves the same strategies we employ easily,
j unconsciously, in conversations.
Simple adherence to the cooperative principle requires readers
of poetry to make inferences no different in kind from the inferences
they make when conversing with friends. Recognizing this fact can
help to encourage readers to make these inferences confidently;
demystifying the process of reading poems is one of the essential
tasks for teachers of poetry, one which attention to conversational
implicature could aid.
But what happens when poets violate the maxims of the coopera
tive principle? Are different strategies involved in drawing infer
ences when these violations occur? In one seventeen—line poem
called "Poem," Frank O’Hara violates all four maxims of quantity,
quality, relation, and manner:
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
We can be suspicious, at the very beginning, of O’Hara’s
adherence to the maxim of quantity when we see his uninformative
title "Poem." He is also uninformative about to whom the poem is
addressed. The "you" of the poem is at first someone with him who
describes the weather as hailing, then someone he is hurrying to meet
9
j then, in the last line, Lana Turner. O’Hara violates the maxim of
quality when he says there is no rain in California; surely he
knows that is not true. And he violates the maxim of relation
by bringing up the weather in the first place. What has it to
do with Lana Turner collapsing? Finally, he violates the maxim
of manner by being wordy, ambiguous, and disorderly throughout
the poem.
But the effect of all these violations is exactly what O'Hara
j intends, an amusing and whimsical comment on the sensationalism of
j Hollywood news. O'Hara thus violates all the maxims of the coopera
tive principle without violating its spirit. A successful strategy
for dealing with violations of the maxims of the cooperative princi
ple involves, then, recognizing them, inferring intentionally behind
them, and tolerating the ambiguities they produce.
J The cooperative principle functions as a contract between lis-
1 teners and speakers or readers and writers. It defines the basic
i
l
i assumptions upon which listeners and readers can build inferences
i bridging sentences, thereby deriving meaning and intentions. One
refinement of the cooperative principle takes account of the fact
that in processing a sentence, listeners and readers distinguish given
information from new information. This refinement of the cooperative
principle is called the given-new strategy, and it makes explicit
the inferences required to integrate new with given information.
The Given-New Strategy
The given-new strategy, as described by Clark and Clark, is a
set of mental operations listeners and readers perform in order to
10
comprehend sentences.^ Basically, the strategy involves deciding
the given information (what the sentence is about), searching the
memory for the particular antecedent matching the given information,
and integrating the new into the given. Clark and Clark use the
example, "I met the general." The article the indicates that "the
general" is given information, that the reader is expected to be able
to identify the particular general in question. (The new information
here would be "I met someone" or "I did something.") However, the
sentence "I met a general" specifically instructs the reader not to
search memory for a general he already knows. Here, therefore, the
given information is "I met someone" or "I did something" and the
new information is "a general." It is often the case that definite
articles signal given information and indefinite articles signal new
information; however, in the sentence "It was the general I met," the
new information is "the general."
A rhetorical fact, long known by politicians, is that given
information is much more likely to be accepted as true than new infor
mation. Hornby effectively demonstrated this point using sentences
like "It is the boy who is petting the cat."*’ Since the new informa
tion here is "the boy," listeners attending briefly (1/20 of a second)
to a pictorial representation of the sentence, should assume that the
given information will be true (that is, that the picture will show a
cat being petted) and concentrate on searching the picture for the new
information (the boy). Therefore, since the listeners are not attend
ing as closely to the given information, more errors are likely to
occur when the listeners are shown a picture contradicting the given
11
information (that is, a picture of a boy petting a dog). Such was
the case in Hornby's study; errors occurred 72 percent of the time
I when subjects were shown pictures contradicting given information
j (and only 39 percent of the time when pictures contradicted new
| information).
I
Similarly, readers can be expected to assume given information
and concentrate their efforts on processing new information. In
: order for this processing to work smoothly, the given information
i should correspond in some measure with the reader's sense of reality;
|
| for instance, sentences like the following should be progressively
i more difficult to integrate.
| 1. I met the general's wife.
I
!
| 2. I met the general's husband.
3. I met the general's horse.
i
|
| 4, I met the general's movie industry.
i As we shall see in the discussion of mental sets, integration
! of given and new information depends to a large extent on how one
perceives reality. Some people would have less trouble stretching
the meaning of "met" to include horses than they would have in
recognizing the possibility of female generals. For these people,
! sentences 2 and 3 above would be reversed.
In addition to having correspondence with reality, given
j information should be readily available in memory. If the given
| information is not in memory or is too far back in memory, integration
I
j
■ of the given-new strategy will be more difficult. Carpenter and Just
, found confirmation of this fact when they measured the time it took
| subjects to read and comprehend sentences like these: "The ballerina
I
! captivated a musician during her performance. The one who the bal
lerina captivated was the trombonist."^
Because the given information in the second sentence is
explicitly stated in the first, the second sentence is easy to pro
cess. However, the more intervening sentences between the two test
sentences, the longer the time needed to process the second test
sentence. Extra time was also needed to integrate sentences requiring
l readers to make inferences. For instance, when the second sentence
i
: read "The one who captivated the trombonist was the ballerina,"
; processing took much longer because the inference "the musician was
j a trombonist" had to be drawn in order to comprehend the sentence.
1 The given-new strategy, therefore, requires recent mention
I of given information consistent with the reader’s sense of reality.
!
I This is necessary so that attention can be concentrated upon process-
|
; ing the new information.
j Two lines from Koch's "Down at the Docks" reveal some interest-
j ing things about the smooth operation of the given-new strategy. The
I first line is "The maple tree's not made of wood." The given informa-
| tion (what the sentence is about) is "the maple tree," a specific
i
I maple tree referred to earlier in the poem, as well as the generic
| maple tree. The new information, "is not made of wood," must now be
! integrated with the given. First we realize that the statement is
I
|
I a denial of an assertion we presumed to believe, that maple trees
are made of wood. Indeed, if maple trees are not made of wood, what
| are they made of? This is the question our integration of the given
and new poses. (Except for the fact that we know the speaker is
referring to a real maple tree he planted, and to maple trees in
general, we might also wonder if the specific tree in question
weren't somehow different from other maple trees.) With the question
of the tree's composition in mind, we proceed to the next line, "It
is wood," and discover that the syntax has tricked us. Our integra
tion of the new information in the last sentence focused our attention
on whether the tree was made of wood, and away from whether the tree
was made of wood. So, processing the second sentence, we find the
particular antecedent for "it," the maple tree, and integrate the new
information, "is wood" into it. This integration is a satisfying one
because it answers rather than asks questions. So it is that an end
less variety of experiences is facilitated by the given-new strategy,
even when it operates smoothly, and other interesting experiences,
as we shall see, when it does not operate smoothly.
The given-new strategy can be seen as one of several contracts
between speakers and listeners. These contracts are explicit refine
ments of the cooperative principle. Explained as a contract by Clark
and Clark, the given-new strategy goes like this:
The speaker agrees (a) to use given information to refer to
information she thinks the listener can uniquely identify from
what he already knows and (b) to use new information to refer
to information she believes to be true but is not already known
to the listener. ^
Two other important contracts are the common topic contract,
by which we "conjoin two ideas with and or o£ only if they belong to
Q
a common topic" and the order of mention contract, by which we "men-
9
tion two events in the order in which they occurred." Adherence to
. 1 4
these contracts (and violation of them) creates some of the rich com
plexities of modern poetry, and, for that matter, the complexities
of other forms of human communication as well.
More About Implicatures
The given-new strategy functions easily, unconsciously in
sentence pairs like these:
Harvey strolled into a bar.
The bar was crowded.
We naturally infer that the bar referred to in the second sentence
is the same bar as the one referred to in the first sentence. That
is, the antecedent for "the bar," the given information of the second
sentence, is explicitly stated in the first sentence. But suppose:
Sally opened her desk drawer.
She pulled out a piece of paper.
Here we must make two inferences. The first, an easy one, is that
the "she" referred to in the second sentence is Sally. The second
is that her desk drawer contained paper. Only by making this infer
ence can we proceed with the integration facilitated by the given-new
strategy. Clark and Clark point out that listeners:
. . . get over such impasses by building bridging assumptions.
Whenever they cannot identify an intecedent directly, they
suppose they are expected to do so indirectly— at least if
the speaker is being c o o p e r a t i v e . ^
These bridging assumptions or implicatures— inferences we must
draw in order to integrate the given with the new— take time to build.
Haviland and Clark found that it took more time to read and comprehend
a sentence like "The beer was warm" when it was preceded by "Mary got
some picnic supplies out of the car" than when it was preceded by
15
"Mary got some beer out of the ear." The extra time was apparently
spent building the bridging assumption, "The picnic supplies include
u11
some beer.
Some implicatures are considerably more difficult to draw.
Koch's "Thanksgiving" illustrates some of the interesting experiences
available to readers when bridging assumptions are difficult to make.
The poem begins with an assertion in the form of a question:
What's sweeter than at the end of a summer's day
to suddenly drift away
from the green match-wrappers in an opened pocket-book
and be part of the boards in a tavern?
Here, the new information "is sweeter" precedes the given information,
so we must hold it in memory until we process the given information.
This processing raises some interesting questions, first, what
are we to make of the semantically disjunctive phrase "suddenly
drift"? Second, why not matchbooks rather than match-wrappers?
Third, how do the'parts of the sentence, end of summer's day, match-
wrapper.in pocket-book, and boards in tavern connect? And finally,
what is the intent of the sentence?
If we assume that the intention behind the sentence is to
set a scene for the poetic revelations to come, the sentence can
be fit together. The speaker is sitting in a tavern staring at
green match-covers in an open pocket-book near him, not thinking
about anything in particular. The season is late summer, and the
speaker, in his lazy reverie, suddenly becomes aware of the floor
boards in the tavern. OK. Now we can integrate all of that with
the assertion of a pleasant experience.
16
The next stanza goes like this:
A tavern made of new wood.
There’s an orange sun in the sky
And a redskin is hunting for you
underneath ladders of timber.
I will buy this tavern. Will you
buy this tavern? I do.
Integration of the first sentence is simple, but the next sentence
is disjunctive; no discernible implicature can explain the connection
between the new wood of the tavern and the sun— unless the sun is
outside the window of the tavern. It is, after all, late in the
day, when the sun is often orange. Though the next sentence intro
duces "a redskin" as new information, in no sense is the given
information of the sentence consistent with "reality" or identifia
ble as referring to something the reader holds in memory, except
that wood is mentioned again. In attempting to process this sentence,
we can infer that the Indian may have something to do with the title
of the poem, "Thanksgiving" and that somehow the new wood of the
tavern has engendered a fantasy in the speaker’s mind about an Indian
stalking him (poetic you) through virgin forests. Evidently, then,
the orange sun is also part of this fantasy. The next line is a
whimsical reiteration, in the form of a wedding vow, of the pleasant
ness of all this fantasizing. It is possible of course that the
scene is not strictly fantasy, that it is a picture hanging in the
tavern, but we can never know for sure. The following stanza reads:
In the Indian camp there’s awful dismay.
Do they know us as we know they
Know us or will know us, I mean a—
I mean a hostile force, the month of May.
17
"In the Indian camp" serves as given information of the
first sentence of the stanza. Because we are expected to identify
the particular Indian camp, we must associate it with the previously
mentioned Indian. Integrating the new information, we infer that
the cause of the awful dismay will be explained shortly. In a
sense it is, in the next lines, which make up a question punctuated
as a sentence. If "they" are Indians, an assumption we must make,
then we must infer that "we" are white men. The source of the
awful dismay, then, is explained as a "knowledge" on the part of
the Indians of the terrible danger the white men present. The force
of the stanza is that the Indians are dismayed perhaps because they
see the white men as a hostile force, the month of May. But how is
May a hostile force? What implicature can connect two such disjunc
tive concepts? The answer is perhaps that May, as a hostile force,
is not supposed to make the kind of sense implicatures are so useful
in creating, but a more frivolous "sense."
The next two stanzas indicate that May itself is not the
hostile force but simply the season in which the white men arrive;
also, without warning, the speaker now takes the role of the Indians:
"How whitely the springtime is blossoming, / Ugh! all around us!"
There is frivolousness here too, and in the tone of the whole poem.
What we see then, in this instance, is the willful disjunc-
turing of language, for the sake, here, of creating a specific tone.
The cooperative principle is thus used in a most interesting way:
to necessitate implicatures which cannot be built consecutively,
one at a time, but only retroactively, in groups. For this kind of
18
| reading, one needs more than the usual amount of ambiguity tolerance,
I
i a well-developed short-term memory (concepts we will develop momen-
i
I
j tarily), and an ear tuned for the whimsical. These are not the
! usual skills listed among "reading skills," but they are obviously
i
j necessary to the understanding and enjoyment of poets who are more
concerned with making experiences than with making a step-by-step
kind of sense.
: The inferences listeners and readers build in order to deduce
! meanings for sentences constitute a kind of paragrammatical deep
i
■ structure of intentions. However, we must examine the ways in
which grammatical deep structures are processed in short-term memory
and recoded in long-term memory before we proceed further with
an examination of intentions.
I
!
I Processing Syntactical Structures
Short-Term Memory
Much psycholinguistic research has been designed to verify
f the psychological reality of language structure as explained by
transformational grammar. One such study by Savin and Perchonock
hypothesized that because (or if) sentences consist of underlying
propositions, along with additional information about syntactic
! structures (transformations), the more additional information a
j sentence contains, the more space it will take up in the short-term
i
I 12
j memory. For example, the active sentence, "The boy hit the ball,"
| requires no transformations of its underlying proposition; whereas
j the passive negative sentence, "The ball has not been hit by the boy,"
contains the same underlying proposition plus the passive and nega
tive transformations.
Savin and Perchonock asked their subjects to listen to and
recall verbatim various sentences of similar word-length, and then
to recall isolated words spoken after each sentence. After active
sentences, the subjects were able to recall 5.27 words, but after
negative questions, only 4.39 words; and after negative passive
questions, the subjects could recall only 3.85 words.
These dramatic results support the theory that each bit
of additional syntactic information takes up additional space
in the short-term memory.
The importance of this study for readers of poetry lies
in its recognition that more complicated syntactic structures (that
is, structures embedding several transformations) place more stress
on short-term memory. The thick fabric of deletions and other
transformations we find in concentrated texts makes them more diffi
cult to comprehend, an important fact for both teachers and readers
to recognize. Furthermore, besides attending to complicated syntax
(sometimes creating multiple meanings for structures containing
deletions), we place additional stress on our short-term memories
by attending to rhythm, rhyme, and other formal conventions, if
not (with informalist poetry) to the ways in which formal conventions
are being manipulated, altered, or violated. Impossible to explicate,
these lines from John Ashberyfs "Rivers and Mountains" illustrate
the complications faced by the reader of modern poetry:
Certainly squirrels lived in the woods
But devastation and dull sleep still
20
Hung over the land, quelled
The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons
Singing on marble factory walls
Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack
The air with heavy invisible rods
Pent in some sand valley from
Which only quiet walking ever instructs.
The second proposition (actually two propositions in one) is
that devastation and dull sleep still hang over the land. This
proposition gives ramification to the first proposition, that squirrels
live in the woods. The implication is that whatever disaster devas
tated the land is no longer affecting the squirrels (if it ever
did), but that it still holds consequences for other living creatures.
The first two propositions, therefore, are easy to determine, and
the connection between them can be discerned. However, the reader’s
problems are just beginning. If we assumed that "quelled" serves
as part of the proposition, "Devastation and dull sleep quelled
the rioters" (not an assumption we can make with confidence), we
must try to come to terms with six additional clauses modifying
the actions of rioters. The inexorable rhythm of the lines gives
them the appearance of a sense or premise which they never divulge.
Meanwhile, we have quite forgotten about the squirrels and the
devastation.
George Miller has demonstrated that the short-term memory
13
holds "the magic number 7±2" unrelated bits of information. In
information processing terms, a bit is any information which reduces
uncertainty by half; this means that if I am thinking of a number
between one and ten, you can reduce your uncertainty about the
number by half simply by asking if the number is five or less.
21
However, for our purposes, a bit can be any meaningful unit from
a grapheme to a sentence, depending on context. For instance,
a grapheme distinguishes the word "weak" from the word "week,"
a meaningful difference; the sentences "Shut the door!" and "Open
the door!" both function as commands, but differ in meaning. Since
the short-term memory only holds between five and nine chunks of
information, comprehending is a process involving transfer of informa
tion from the short-term to the long-term memory. How that transfer
takes place will be the subject for further consideration.
Recoding
Comprehending is an active, interpretive process. A reader
sampling a text selects enough semantic and syntactic information
to make predictions about meaning. These predictions are held in
the short-term memory until they are confirmed or modified. But
then what happens?
Apparently, once comprehended, meaning is stored without
attendant syntactical features in the long-term memory. Sachs
demonstrated this fact clearly, using the listening process rather
than the reading process. After hearing passages of connected
discourse, her subjects were given test sentences which were either
identical to sentences they had heard, or different in form, or
different in meaning. When there was no delay between the original
sentence and the test sentences, the subjects recognized changes
in both form and meaning, illustrating that syntax is stored briefly
in the short-term memory. But when 80 syllables, about 27 seconds,
intervened between the original and test sentences, recognition of
formal changes dropped nearly to chance, indicating that syntactic
j patterns are not retained. (Recognition of changes in meaning
i 14
i remained strong after 160 syllables, about 46 seconds.)
! We can speculate that similar, though probably not identical,
i
results might be obtained using the reading process. In any case,
it is clear that the meaning of a sentence, once derived, is stored,
i
| while its syntactical makeup is forgotten.
j Sachs' study raises an interesting question: Should the
recoding of comprehended information in the memory be considered
part of the reading process? Or, what constitutes the end of the
reading process? Answers to this question, seldom stated explicitly
I
, but always implied, range along a continuum. The first stop on
i
| the continuum is the clean, scientific break made by behaviorists,
J that reading is simply a learned verbal response to certain verbal
i
\ stimuli. The second stop includes the perception or recognition
j
interesting to behaviorists, but also includes the active cognitive
' skills used to process the stimuli, semantic-syntactic integration,
! and so on. The third stop on the continuum would include, in addi-
| tion, recoding, the reduction of comprehended material to its deep
j
■ structure. The fourth stop adds to these the affective concerns
I of feelings and behaviors produced by texts.
I
This continuum explains why so many critical disputes take
the form "Not in m£ reading experience." Where we place the end
of the reading process greatly influences the kinds of statements
> about literature we are willing to consider legitimate. Relatively
clean and narrow focus is achieved early in the continuum, say,
23
at the second stop, where semantic-syntactic integration takes
place. Stopping consideration of the reading process here, as
Stanley Fish does, renders questions about recoded texts illegitimate,
for the meaning of the reading experience is contained only in the
process of syntactic-semantic integration, and not in the process
of transferring texts into long-term memory, where syntax is not
retained. On the other hand, many critics are willing to go to
the third stop on the continuum, which includes recoding, because
recoded texts can then be used to make statements about aesthetic,
psychological, or political precepts. For example, when Leslie
Fiedler treats Huckleberry Finn and other works as homosexual
novels,he is using the recoded texts as transferred into long
term memory, rather than the experience of negotiating the syntax of
the texts, as the foundation of his statements. As another example,
new critical approaches to the structure of texts deal with recoded
versions of texts in order to make manifest structures often hidden
(not experienced by readers) during the process of semantic-syntactic
integration. Finally, in the fourth category, anything goes. The
diffuse and disorderly world of feelings and values enters here.
Bleich and others have recently attempted work in this area, where
the lack of ground rules has significantly impeded progress. Booth,
whose work we will discuss in Chapter V, makes a major effort to
fill this need, to set down the ways in which we can discuss the
important uses of literature: to comfort and heal us, to make us
see the world and ourselves in new ways, to enrich our lives.
24
i We arrive at the problem of motives, for it is motives for
j reading which will determing where we stop our descriptions of
I
j the reading process. A purely scientific or theoretical interest
I
i in the reading event will reside in the first or second category.
I
| Utilitarian interests in reading will fall into the third and fourth
! categories. And no amount of discussion will produce consensus
regarding a work without agreement about how far the reading process
extends.
Since our purpose here is to uncover the reading process
! fully, we shall consider the whole continuum of the reading process,
though with less attention to the first stop, which includes arhetori-
| cal considerations of neurological functions, and so on. We shall
i
1 consider the reader's semantic-syntactic integration as primary;
but we shall neglect neither the necessity nor the strategies of
j recoding and valuing.
| However, before proceeding with these considerations, we
need some groundwork in the psycholinguistic definitions of compre-
i
! hension.
Meaning
; What does it mean to say that a reader comprehends the meaning
‘ of a sentence? While an outline of theories of meaning is far
]
j beyond our scope here, suffice it to say that an adequate theory
j would have to be broad enough to explain that to know the meaning
; of a sentence is to know how it could be verified, how its intentional
I
| dimensions correspond to its literal dimensions, and the kinds
l
} of actions that would make up appropriate responses to it. Hence,
i 25
to know the meaning of the sentence, "John is smoking," is to know
who John is, what smoking is, and how to determine that John is
in fact smoking; to know the meaning of the sentence is also to
I know that its intention has, for example, the force of a request
to hand John an ashtray; and to know the meaning of the sentence,
I
in this case, is to know that among appropriate responses, one
would be to hand him an ashtray,
i Miller and Johnson-Laird have further delineated the require-
i t
ments for an adequate theory of meaning as follows:
A theory of meaning should represent meanings of words and
! sentences in a compatible form.
I It should account for the intentional properties of linguistic
j expressions and for the intentional relations between them.
i
j It should allow for the differing significance of sentences
depending on their context and for flexible access to information
j in lexical memory.
It should account for the extensional relations between
\ linguistic expressions and the world.
! It should account for the organization of words in semantic
j fields.
r
i The primitive terms of the theory should be logically adequate
I and psychologically motivated.
I
j It should be compatible with established psycholinguistic
j phenomena.^
' The virtue of this delineation is that, unlike early defini-
' tions of meaning (such as that proposed by Katz and Fodor as the
' 17
| semantic component of transformational grammar ), this metatheory
is context-based. That is, it takes into account the fact that
l
! human beings apparently prefer to have one word with several meanings
, rather than many words, each with its own meaning. Yet they are
i
26
able to distinguish between meanings in syntactically identical
sentences like "The pig is in the pen" and "The ink is in the pen"
without sorting through lists of features, as the Katz-Fodor theory
implied.
A context-dependent metatheory is essential grounding for
an adequate discussion of reading because, as in other forms of
human communication, contextual awareness is the primary element
of comprehension. How individual contexts for specific reading
events are framed by readers will be a subject for further discussion
in Chapter IV; however, determining context for comprehension can
also be analyzed in larger terms of the perceptual strategies we
all have in common as human beings. To that task we now proceed.
27
Notes
^H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in Syntax and Seman
tics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts, ed. P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (New York:
Seminar Press, 1975), pp. 41-58.
2
H. H. Clark and E. V. Clark, Psychology and Language: An
Introduction to Psycholinguistics (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano-
vich, 1977), pp. 72-73.
3
Sources for all literary works cited are listed in the
Bibliography.
^Clark and Clark, pp. 91-107.
~*P. A. Hornby, "Surface Structure and Presupposition,"
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974):530-538.
8P. A. Carpenter and M. A. Just, "integrative Processes
in Comprehension," in Basic Processes in Reading: Perception and
Comprehension, ed. D. LaBerge and S. J. Samuels (Hillsdale, New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977).
^Clark and Clark, p. 92.
8Ibid., p. 128.
9Ibid., p. 129.
10Ibid., p. 97.
^S. E. Haviland and H. H. Clark, "What,s New? Acquiring
New Information as a Process in Comprehension," Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974):512-521.
12
H. B. Savin and E. Perchonock, "Grammatical Structure and
the Immediate Recall of English Sentences," Journal of Verbal Learn
ing and Verbal Behavior 4 (1965):348-353.
13
George Miller, "The Magic Number 7 ±2," Psychological Review
63 (1956):81-97.
14
J. S. Sachs, "Recognition Memory for Syntactic and Semantic
Aspects of Connected Discourse," Perception and Psychophysics 2
(1967):437-442.
^Leslie Fiedler, "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!"
in An End to Innocence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 142-151.
16
G. A. Miller and P. N. Johnson-Laird, Language and Perception
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 706.
28
J. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor, "The Structure of a Semantic
Theory," in Readings in the Psychology of Language, ed. L. A. Jakobo-
vits and M. S. Miron (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, 1967), pp. 398-431.
29
CHAPTER III
PERCEPTUAL STRATEGIES
There are many perceptual strategies inherent in the function
ing of the human mind which reflect significantly on the reading
process. Among them are:
1. The ability to focus attention on one aspect of an event,
while maintaining awareness of peripheral aspects.
2. The ability to tolerate ambiguities which do not interfere
with one's central purpose of comprehending.
3. The ability to discriminate between essential and inessen
tial details.
4. The ability to recognize patterns without resorting to
trait-by-trait character lists.
5. The ability to form subjective contours; that is, the
ability to create forms using minimal or distorted cues.
6. The ability to shift one's attention back and forth between
global concepts (the whole) and the details representing
them (the parts).
7. The ability to perceive and respond appropriately to
both sociocentric and egocentric modes of communication.
8. The abilities to recognize, focus, and compensate for
one's predispositions.
In this chapter we shall discuss each of these abilities,
in turn, elucidating their ramifications on the reading process.
Though the list is not intended to be exhaustive, it does reflect
many of the important perceptual strategies readers bring with
30
them to texts. Understanding the use of these strategies as they
apply to reading is essential for teachers and students of reading
alike.
Human Information Processing
Fringe Consciousness
Fringe consciousness is one of four forms of human information
processing discussed by Hubert L. Dreyfus in his book What Computers
Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.' * ' The other three,
to be elucidated shortly, are ambiguity tolerance, essential/inessen
tial discrimination, and perspicuous grouping. Fringe consciousness
is the ability to maintain global awareness of the overall patterns
while zeroing in on significant areas. The fringes of consciousness
serve to enlighten our focused attention. As Michael Polanyi
describes the fringe area of consciousness:
Seen thus from the corner of our eyes, or remembered at the
back of our mind, this area compellingly affects the way we
see the object on which we are focusing. We may indeed go
so far as to say that we are aware of this subsidiarily noticed
area mainly in the appearance of the object to which we are
attending.^
Universal to human experience, fringe consciousness is essen
tial to the reading process. Without it, our attention would neces
sarily be focused on each individual word, or perhaps even each
individual letter, without global awareness of the pattern into
which each word or letter fits. That is to say, without nonfocal
awareness of the peripheral, we could have no focal awareness of
the signficant.
Notice how our fringe consciousness casts light on that
which is central in these lines from Yeats' "The Fisherman."
31
Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes.
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
! This wise and simple man.
j Inherent in the overall pattern of the sentence, that is, in the
nature of language, is the fact that the point here is not that
1 the man is freckled, nor that he wears grey clothes, nor that he
, casts flies. Yet all these peripheral facts elucidate our understand-
i ing of the significant: that the speaker has kept the man in the
| back of his mind for some time.
There are two key assumptions underlying the discussion
of this passage which should be brought to light. The first is
that our attention is always guided by motives; when we read, we
seek meaning. By focusing our attention on the syntax of the sen
tence, we derive the meaning. But when we read poetry in particular,
we also seek pleasure; so the special details which are peripheral
j to the meaning, but which are sensorily exciting, take on greater
i
i
I importance than they would if we were reading, say, a newspaper.
I
i
j This brings us to the second assumption: that by manipulating
I
J motives, we necessarily manipulate the fringe consciousness. If,
I for instance, I knew that after I read Yeats' lines from "The Fisher-
J man," you were going to ask me to describe the fisherman, my attention
; might reside on the details of his appearance, and the fact that
the man had been in the back of the speaker's mind for some time
might reside at the fringe of my consciousness.
i
32
Ambiguity Tolerance
Ambituity tolerance is defined by Dreyfus as "the ability
to narrow down the spectrum of possible meanings as much as the
3
situation requires." This ability is dependent on contextual
awareness. The simple impetative, "Stop!" may mean anything from
"discontinue acceleration" to "don't eat that poison," depending
upon the context in which it is uttered. Life itself depends on
the ability to handle such an ambiguous situation without having
to define it precisely. Furthermore, it is not possible to quantify
all the contextual cues to which human beings attend when they
derive the intended among possible meanings. We often give ambiguous
yet accident-preventive warnings like "Watch out!" which engender
appropriate actions as well as (or better than) would "Watch out,
the scaffolding on the building beside which we're walking is teeter
ing precariously."
Ambiguity tolerance is very important to the reading process;
on a basic level, it is the ability which allows us to hold a subordi
nate clause in mind until the main clause makes clear its meaning.
On a more general level, ambiguity tolerance grants us the ability to
recognize multiple intentions in a literary work and to narrow them
down as required by the work as a whole, or by our uses of it. This
is to say that "to narrow down the spectrum of possible meanings as
much as the situation requires" presents us once again with the ques
tion of motives. When we read a modern poem, our motives are to
understand it and to enjoy it (unless our motives are manipulated to
be other than these). Thus we need to narrow the spectrum of possible
3 3
I meanings only so far as our understanding and enjoyment requires.
I Modern poetry in particular requires a certain openness to a wide
I
j spectrum of possible meanings, a requirement due largely to the
I
t aesthetics of informalism, which will be discussed in Chapter IX.
In avoiding use of the conventions of formalist poetry, the informal
ist poets attempt to create in their poems the same ambiguity
i
| of situation that the reader experiences and handles without recourse
i
i
| to precise definition in other areas of his life. Look, for instance,
I
I
: at the range of ambiguity tolerance demanded for understanding
! and enjoyment of these lines from Sylvia Plath's "Daddy."
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
! In which I have lived like a foot
| For thirty years, poor and white,
! Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
I
! How precisely does our understanding and enjoyment of these
I
I lines require us to define "black shoe"? If we say that the black
I
shoe is the speaker’s life, her culture, her house, or her country,
I
j in which she has lived like a foot, then must we explain— to define
the metaphor— how a foot can barely dare to breathe or sneeze?
Or is the lack of freedom implied enough? And must we say explicitly
why "Achoo" is capitalized?
These lines, like many lines in modern poems, resist too
! strict a narrowing down of the spectrum of possible meanings.
[ Essential/Inessential
i Discrimination
I
1 In solving problems, human beings distinguish the essential
from the inessential without resort to trial-and-error searches.
I
: 34
j We need not examine every feature of every letter and word in a sen-
i
i
I tence in order to grasp the meaning. It is this ability which allows
I
us to recognize deep and surface structures. The child reading the
phrase "the very young pup" may neglect to read the word "very"
i
j without altering the meaning in any essential way.
i
l
| Studies of dichotic listening neatly demonstrate the ability
to discriminate the essential from the inessential. Subjects pre-
i sented with two messages simultaneously are quite good at attending
to one and ignoring the other, and usually remember little about
1 4
1 the message they have been asked to ignore.
I
! Of course, when we read poetry, little if anything is inessen-
I tial. Perhaps only graphemes not needed for word recognition are
! inessential. Much that would be inessential when we are reading
I for the purpose of obtaining factual information becomes essential
!
j when we read for enjoyment. We may say that all the structures
of poetry are essential to our enjoyment and understanding. For
j
! instance, surface structures often carry meanings (sometimes through
i rhythm, sometimes through syntax) that are not carried by correspond-
I
! ing deep structures. The deep structure of the opening line of
' Anthony Hecht’s "The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life" indicates
j
that Matthew Arnold and a girl stood there. But the line reads:
' "So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl." The whimsey and
I
sarcasm of the line, which are carried by the surface word order,
are not captured by the deep structure,
i The issue again is motive. Distinguishing the essential
from the inessential is not value-free activity, but activity which
answers the question, "essential for what purpose?" Reading for
pleasure provides a different context for determining the essential,
along with a different set of reading strategies.
Perspicuous Grouping
Perspicuous grouping, actually a combination of the three
other forms of information processing— fringe consciousness, ambiguity
tolerance, and essential/inessential discrimination— gives human
beings the ability to recognize patterns without resorting to trait-
by-trait character lists. We use past experience and background
experience neither attended to nor ignored; we use contextual informa
tion; and we use insight regarding what is essential to distinguish
an object as belonging to a class of similar objects.
This ability is crucial to the reading process. Theories
of word and letter recognition attempt to explain it; but in order
to do so fully, these theories must take into account the human
ability to recognize patterns even under the following difficult
conditions:
1. The pattern may be skewed, incomplete, deformed, and
embedded in noise.
2. The traits required for recognition may be so "fine and
numerous" that, even if they could be formalized, a search
through a branching list of such traits would soon become unman
ageable as new patterns for discrimination were added.
3. The traits may depend upon external and internal context
and are thus not amenable to context-free specification.
4. There may be no common traits but a "complicated network
of overlapping similarities," capable of assimilating ever
new variations.^
Perspicuous grouping is seen on a basic level in our ability
to determine the correct pronunciation of "read" in the sentence,
36
"Before they played, they read their books." We recognize the
pattern of the sentence as past tense. On a broader level, perspic
uous grouping allows us to recognize the rhyme scheme in these
I lines from Henry Taylor’s "Breakings:"
So nothing changes, nothing stays the same,
and I have returned from a broken home
alone, to ask for a job breaking horses.
I watch a colt on a long line making
tracks in dust, and think of the kinds of
breakings
there are, and the kinds of restraining
forces.
The rhymes here, though slant, give formal pattern to the poem. A
trait-by-trait character list would have to formalize not only the
exact rhymes, horses and forces, but the near rhymes as well. It
would have to specify that words sounding alike except for a plural
"s" are acceptable as rhymes; and it would have to specify that words
with different long vowels but identical ending consonant sounds are
acceptable. And elsewhere in the poem Taylor rhymes "storm" and
"farm," "father" and "weather," and "father" and "forever."
The ability to recognize patterns under difficult conditions is
particularly useful when reading modern poetry. Even the formalist
poets of the Twentieth Century are fond of disguising or burying form;
and the informalist poets tend to shy away from conventional form
altogether.
Closure
Closure is the ability to complete skewed or distorted forms
and has been tested using a procedure known as the cloze procedure.
The cloze procedure is deleting words from passages and asking subjects
37
to guess them. It has been used to measure information gain, read
ability, predictability of grammatical forms, complexity, and the
importance of context. For instance, Miller and Coleman used the
cloze procedure to demonstrate the importance of context; they
found there are more correct guesses at the ends of sentences,
£
because the beginnings of sentences delineate context. However,
when Coleman and Miller attempted to test information gain using
a cloze task, they found that subjects who had read the complete
test passage prior to testing guessed only slightly better than
7
subjects who had not read the passage. This did not demonstrate
information gain, but did show that closure is an important aspect
of skilled reading.
The ability to use context to guess words missing from texts
is a corollary to the ability to make hypotheses using only a sampling
of all the available graphic cues; that is, graphic cues one does
not sample are, in a sense, missing.
For readers of poetry, the applications of the cloze procedure
are enormous, since the compression of poetic texts necessitates
frequent guessing about deleted words and phrases. Philip Levine’s
"The Turning" begins "Unknown faces in the street / and winter
coming on," and demonstrates one of the most common deletions in
modern poetry— the deletion of the personal pronoun plus a verb
of vision— here, "I see."
Gregory Corso's "Paris" illustrates some other kinds of
closure found in modern poetry. The poem begins, "Childcity, April-
city," which, filled in, would say something like "city epitomized
38
by children and April weather." Later, Corso refers to dead French
poets as "poets, worms in their hair." Still later Corso uses
the phrase "deathical Notre Dame," suggesting "one feels death
about at Notre Dame." Finally, Corso1s lines "Eiffel looks down—
sees the Apocalyptical ant crawl, / New Yorkless city," illustrates
three more kinds of closure: the common deletion of articles,
"the Eiffel," the deletion of nouns from noun phrases, "the Eiffel
Tower," and the use of the suffix "-less" to indicate difference,
"Paris is a city very unlike New York."
Needless to say, the prosaic and uninteresting sound of
the phrases created by using the cloze procedure gives one an appre
ciation for the original poetic syntax. But of course no one is
suggesting that these prosaic phrases actually enter the conscious
mind during closure; the poetic experience the poet sought to create
would obviously be negated if they did.
Closure is not only an essential reading skill, but a cognitive
structure, a characteristic inherent in the function of the human
brain. The following diagrams from the April 1976 issue of Scientific
8
American illustrate this fact.
39
Notice that the brighter figures which appear to stand in front are
not really there at all; "the contours are subjective, and have no
through the process of closure. As in poetry, however, there is
not always one and only one possible subjective contour. The follow
ing diagram can be seen either as two triangles, a white one fore
grounding a black one, or as three dots and three angles, according
to one's predisposition.
In this diagram, minimal visual cues, only three dots, are needed
to suggest a white triangle overlaying the black triangle. Further
more, without the three dots creating the white triangle, even
the black triangle does not exist, but only three angles. Thus
subjective contours can create not only foregounds but also the
backgrounds against which they are seen.
process is, first, that because closure is inherent in the function
i
of the human brain, we can expect significant agreement in the
creation of subjective contours; and second, that we can sometimes
expect disagreements based on individual predispositions. A line
of poetry closed according to one predisposition may foreground
(give intensity to) elements another reader may not even notice.
9
physical reality." The mind creates these nonexistent figures
What the diagrams suggest about closure during the reading
40
There are countless classic examples of this kind of disagreement
in the history of criticism, but let us consider the above mentioned
phrase, "deathical Notre Dame.’1 In closing this phrase a reader
with a predisposition toward puns might attend to how similar "death-
ical" and "ethical" sound, creating an entirely different subjective
contour, perhaps something like "interest in death and ethics per
meates Notre Dame."
Convergent and Divergent Thinking
There are several pairs of terms which refer to the human
ability to shift one's attention between large concepts and the
details representing them; that is, between the whole and its parts.
Among these pairs of terms are divergent (or lateral) and convergent
thinking, depth and focused processing, and global and analytical
thinking. All these pairs of terms are useful for the slightly
different emphasis they give to this crucial human ability.
The intellectual development needed for and created by reading
involves both convergent and divergent thinking. Identifying words
and letters correctly demands convergent thinking, while the psycho-
linguistic "guessing game" of making and testing hypotheses requires
divergent thinking.
Divergent thinking, sometimes called lateral thinking, is
simply the branching out of the mind, and might be facilitated
by any of the myriad heuristics offered by contemporary rhetoric.
Familiarity and practice with these heuristics could perhaps improve
the reader's ability to shift his reading strategies efficiently,
a skill imperative for reading contemporary poetry.
Convergent and divergent thinking correspond closely with the
concepts of depth and focused processing, which we shall consider in
detail in the next chapter. Focused processing, or attention to
i
i
exact wording, is enabled by convergent thinking, while depth process-'
ing (comprehension) is enabled by divergent thinking. Both these
sets of concepts relate to analytic and global modes of experiencing. '
At times during the reading process, the reader must separate the
text into parts, considering the small units like words and phrases,
an analytic process. At other times during the process, he must
combine the text into wholes, using metaphors of his own creation
in order to comprehend and evaluate the larger picture, a synthetic
or global process.
Several important studies reported by Cazden indicate that
middle class children are better at analytic thinking and lower class
children are better at global thinking.^^ Inasmuch as both processes
are mandatory for reading, it is important, as Cazden points out,
that educators encourage both kinds of thinking.
An understanding of how global thinking works is especially
central to a discussion of reading since comprehension is its primary
goal. Studies by Barclay and Potts indicate that readers create
global representations that will tie elements together in such a way
as to allow the readers to process quickly sentences which, without
global representations, would require several time-consuming infer-
12
ences. Potts, for example, gave subjects a story which could
be schematized in this way:
A is smarter than B.
B is smarter than C.
C is smarter than D. 42
Without global representation, subjects should take longer to process
the sentence "A is smarter than D" because theoretically it requires 1
several inferences. But Potts found that subjects actually processed
13 !
it more quickly than they did the schematized sentences themselves. j
Another important study by Bransford and Johnson demonstrated
that the global representation the reader creates will dramatically
14
influence his recall. In this ingenious study, Bransford and John
son used a single paragraph, retitled for the second group of subjects.
Since the paragraph included a sentence not consistent with the first
title, but consistent with the second title, the sentence was recalled
much better by the second group. This study also confirms the impor
tance of mental sets, which we will consider shortly. Using the
effective reading strategy of attending to titles, the reader creates
his mental set on the basis of that attention, and is therefore some
times led into a miscue, which in the case of this study, resulted in
an inability to process the inconsistent sentence. Modern poetry,
of course, is full of such tricks.
Close, sequential reading (convergent thinking) combined with
the building of global representations (divergent thinking) will make
the experience of such miscues available to the reader as the poem is
being read. This balancing of the two kinds of thinking is essential
for reading modern poetry, for the experience of such miscues, if
missed in the first place, becomes unavailable for integration into
the reader's value structure. This is undoubtedly part of the reason
many readers have so much trouble making sense of modern poetry.
Unless they are prepared by the combined strategies of convergent and
43
divergent thinking, they will tend either to build global representa
tions which take no account of miscues or give up altogether.
Egocentrism
Modes of communication are often distinguished by two terms:
sociocentrism and egocentrism. Sociocentrism is speech used to
convey information and is characterized by concern for the listener's
point of view, by the use of complete sentences and clear referents,
and by independence from external contexts. Contrasting the public
nature of sociocentric modes of communication, egocentric speech
is private, usually between family members or close friends. Pri
marily used for expression of emotions, egocentric speech is charac
terized by dependence on context, incomplete sentence structures,
vague referents, and lack of concern for the listener's point of
view. The ability to perceive and respond appropriately to both
kinds of communication is obviously essential to the life of an
educated person. Since family and personal life educate children
in egocentric modes of communication, much of public education
is devoted to sociocentrism. However, because poetry is sometimes
an egocentric form of communication, it should not be neglected
by educators.
Egocentrism is a concept first developed by Piaget to explain
children's early use of noncommunicative speech.^ Essentially
expression of emotions, needs, and impulses, egocentrism is manifested
by the omission of significant detail, the use of ambiguous pronouns,
the rare use of personal pronouns, and the inability to shift one's
point of view in such a way as to accommodate the needs of the
listener. Piaget came to agree with Vygotsky that:
. . . the function of egocentric speech is similar to that of
inner speech: It does not merely accompany the child’s activity;
it serves mental orientation, conscious understanding; it helps
in overcoming difficulties; it is speech for oneself, intimately
and usefully connected with the child’s thinking. . . . In
the end, it becomes inner speech.^
So rather than being lost, egocentric speech becomes subvocal, and
therefore a resource for poetic inspiration.
Egocentric speech shares many characteristics and purposes
with the language of Twentieth Century poetry:
Piute Creek—
In a steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Jump, land by a pool, trout skitter,
The clear sky. Deer tracks.
Notice how these lines from Gary Snyder’s "Walk" seem designed
not for the purpose of conveying information but for expressing
impulses or emotions. The personal pronoun before njump" is
deleted, as if the subject were obvious, which it is. The language
seems to accompany the activity, to associate the reader with the
activity without any apparent effort to see the reader’s point of
view, and to organize a conscious understanding of the activity
as it takes place. Because the lines seem directed at the speaker
himself, intimately, it is as if the reader is along on the walk,
inside the speaker’s being.
So it is that some of the same creative listening strategies
we use for understanding young children— interpreting, filling in,
making allowances, tolerating ambiguities, and so on— can be usefully
employed in reading poetry. 45
Subjective Variables
The ability to recognize, focus, and compensate for one's pre
dispositions is essential to the reading process. The influence of
personal predispositions descends even to the level of word recogni
tion. Word recognition is apparently affected by subjective variables
such as set expectations, personal interests and values, or physiologi
cal needs. ^ The clearest demonstration of this fact (using physio
logical needs as the basis) was performed by Wispe and Drambarean.
Subjects deprived of food or water for twenty-four hours showed a
significantly lower recognition threshold for need-relevant words than
for neutral words. That is, a hungry person sees "waffle" at a lower
threshold (more quickly and easily) than "waddle" and a thirsty person
18
sees "lemonade" at a lower threshold than "serenade."
Studies using personal values and interests have also shown
lower thresholds for recognition of interest-relevant words. These
studies are suspect however since word familiarity could account for
the lower thesholds.
Set expectations definitely do have an effect on word recogni
tion. Samuels' study showed that an expectation set geared toward
word pairs of semantic relevance, like "dark night," produced recog
nition at lower thesholds than nonrelated pairs like "dark noise,"
though subjects were familiarized with both kinds of pairs prior to
testing.
The effect of subjective variables on word recognition brings
some interesting questions to mind. Specifically, what effect do
subjective variables have on comprehension? Will the reader whose
46*
expectations are set towards semantically paired words be more likely
to miscomprehend "dark noise" as "dark night"? Will the reader who
expects to be surprised have less trouble comprehending "dark noise"
I than the reader who doesn't? These questions suggest that the kinds
(
1 of strategies one is prepared to use may significantly influence
i
comprehension. The strategies one is prepared to use often take on
l the force of a mental set, providing a focus of intentions for read-
j ing.
j Mental sets can be very useful in helping the reader to select
!graphic cues efficiently. This, of course, does not mean that all a
I
jreader grasps is within his mental set. In spite of other, sometimes
i
|conflicting sets, readers will generally read for meaning. Postman
I
! and Senders tested this hypothesis on college students. Subjects were
I
|asked to read a passage from a short story by Chekhov according to a
!
.variety of instructions. They were asked to read (carefully, to be
i
I tested) for general comprehension, for sequence of events, for details
Jof content, for details of wording, for details of appearance (spell
ing and typing errors), or for speed. All subjects were then tested
I
{for all aspects; it was found that the scores varied as a function of
I
|the various instructions. Generally the specific instructions resulted
!in a trade-off of information types; for instance, attention to details
i
of wording resulted in poorer scores on sequence of events, and vice
I
versa. Details of physical appearance were recalled at the expense
:of all other details. Interestingly, general comprehension was as
good for those instructed to read for speed as for those instructed
to read for general comprehension; but was not totally lost by any of
47
the subjects. Postman and Senders explain this fact as an "omni
present set for understanding," an urge "to make experience coherent
and meaningful," and a general set "to understand and structure the
environment." The implication of these broad conclusions is that
comprehension is not only the essential goal of reading, but a cogni-
20
txve structure, part of human nature.
Mental sets as defined for experimentation are relatively
narrow compared to belief structures (which function as mental sets),
whose influence on comprehension is much more difficult to measure.
These include religious, political, and social beliefs, as well
as cognitive styles, literary training, and educational background.
Gibson and Levin define the process of assimilating what one
reads into these belief structures as part of comprehension. The
process is orderly, with new information becoming part of the struc
ture, and the structure changing to accommodate the new information.
It is doubtful that a truly isolated fact is understood by the
reader in more than a superficial way. . . . If the fact is new
and meaningful, it is more likely to change the existing struc
ture of the individual's knowledge and is understood in this
sense, or it increases the scope of the cognitive structure,
perhaps shifting relations of superordinate and subordinate
structure.
It is not known precisely how much belief structures inhibit
comprehension (assimilation) of new material. Clearly, some new
facts are harder for some people to assimilate than for other people.
When belief structures are rigid, for whatever reasons, new informa
tion presented in new forms may be dismissed as sheer nonsense. How
ever, work in creating thinking, such as that offered by the many
heuristics of contemporary rhetoric, might well help to combat
rigidity of belief structures.
Meanwhile the question remains, should assimilation be con
sidered part of the reading process? As Gibson and Levin conclude:
We comprehend the meaning of a word, the meaning of a sentence,
or the meaning of a passage of discourse when we apprehend the
intention of the writer and succeed in relating his message to
the larger context of our own system of knowledge.^
Other than arguments for an adaptive approach to reading (which would
be circular here), there is no theoretical justification for including
assimilation in descriptions of the reading process. There is none
for excluding it either, except that assimilation is so untidy, which
of course has much to do with the real reason many critics prefer to
exclude it. Imbued with values, discussion of assimilation makes con
sensus regarding literary works that much more difficult, and conven
tional proof of theoretical premises such discussion generates, nearly
impossible.
Everyone holds beliefs about the nature of the reading process,
not just reading theorists. These beliefs themselves function as men
tal sets! The person who believes that statements about the assimi
lation of a literary work into his cognitive structure are illegiti
mate will attend to the work differently from a person who does not
hold such a belief. That is why it is so important to be conscious
and clear about what we are discussing when we discuss the reading
process. We shall now turn to a specific discussion of reading
process models.
49
Notes
^-Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of
Artificial Reason (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 12-41.
^Michael Polanyi, "Experience and Perception of Pattern," in
The Modeling of Mind, ed. Kenneth M. Sayer and Fredrick J. Crosson
(South Bend, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1963), p. 214.
^Dreyfus, p. 21.
^Eleanor J. Gibson and Harry Levin, The Psychology of Reading
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965), p. 27.
^Dreyfus, p. 40.
^G. R. Miller and E. B. Coleman, "A Set of Thirty-Six Prose
Passages Calibrated for Complexity," Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior 6 (1967):851-854.
^E. B. Coleman and G. R. Miller, "A Measure of Information
Gained During Prose Learning," Reading Research Quarterly 3 (1968):
369-386.
^Gaetano Kaniza, "Subjective Contours," Scientific American
(April 1976):48-52.
9Ibid., p. 48.
l^Irene J. Athey, "Language Models and Reading," in The Litera
ture of Research in Reading with Emphasis on Models, ed. F. B. Davis
(Rutgers, New Jersey: Graduate School of Education, State University,
1972), p. 6-79.
■^C. B. Cazden, Child Language and Education (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 189-196.
1 2
J. R. Barclay, "The Role of Comprehension in Remembering
Sentences," Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973): 229-254. Also G. R. Potts,
"Information Processing Strategies Used in the Encoding of Linear
Orderings," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11 (1972);
727-740.
13Potts, p. 739.
^ J . D. Bransford and M. K. Johnson, "Considerations of Some
Problems in Comprehension," in Visual Information Processing, ed.
W. G. Chase (New York: Academic Press, 1973), pp. 383-438.
33J. Piaget, "Piaget's Theory," in Carmichael's Manual of
Child Psychology, ed. P. H. Mussen (New York: Wiley, 1970), I, pp.
703-732.
50
"^S. L. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Massachu
setts: MIT Press, 1962), p. 133.
17
Gibson and Levin, p. 220.
X8
L. G. Wisp£ and N. C. Drambarean, "Physiological Need, Word
Frequency, and Visual Duration Thresholds," Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 46 (1953):25-31.
19
S. J. Samuels, "Word Associations and the Recognition of
Flashed Words,” (Mimeographed Report, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1968).
20
L. Postman and V. Senders, "Incidental Learning and Generality
of Set," Journal of Experimental Psychology 36 (1946):153-165.
21
Gibson and Levin, p. 393.
22Ibid., p. 400.
CHAPTER IV
THEORIES OF READING
We begin this survey of those reading strategies derived
specifically from research in reading by considering briefly the
kinds of reading models currently under study. Important work
has come out of linguistic, cognitive, and information processing
approaches to reading, as well as transactional and adaptive
approaches. Goodman's linguistic model, for example, is useful
because of its emphasis on hypothesis-testing and miscue analysis.
Gibson and Levin, who now take a motivist approach to reading,
have much to offer regarding the flexibility of skilled reading.
Significant efforts toward understanding the units of comprehension
have also been made by both linguists and information processing
specialists. A brief schematization of reading models will be
useful, however, before we proceed to consider these issues in
more detail.
Models of the Reading Process
Reading models fall into four categories:; taxonomic, psycho
logical, linguistic, and transactional.'*'
Taxonomic Models
Taxonomic models are purely descriptive, separating the reading
process into skills such as word perception, comprehension, evaluation,
52
and assimilation. As such, taxonomies are of little use; more
comprehensive theory-based models supersede them.
Psychological Models
Psychological models can be divided into three groups: behav
ioral, cognitive, and information processing. Behavioral models
rely on the traditional behavioral learning approaches: rote,
operant conditioning, and signal conditioning. A typical behaviorist
formulation of reading acquisition is ’’ discrimination training,
where certain verbal responses are reinforced in the presence of
2
certain verbal stimuli.”
Cognitive models include those of Gibson and Elkind. Gibson’s
early effort was toward discovering phonological, morphological,
syntactic and semantic unit-forming principles in the reading process.
She has since taken a motivist approach, concluding that one model
cannot explain the variety of processes generated by multiple reading
purposes. Elkind’s cognitive model is based on Piagetian theory
and focuses on perceptual aspects of reading acquisition. Since
Elkind identifies perceptual skills with logic, he defines the
skills to included
(a) perceptual reorganization (the ability to rearrange mentally
a stimulus array without acting physically on it);
(b) perceptual schematization (the ability to organize parts
or wholes so that they retain their unique identities without
losing their independence);
(c) perceptual exploration (the ability to scan systematically
an array or figure so that all its features are noted).^
Clearly, the emphasis placed by the models of Gibson and Elkind is
upon the cognitive variables which make up the reading process—
the kinds of perceptual abilities to which we attended in the last
chap ter.
Information processing models are represented by Venezky and
Calfee, Roberts and Lunzer, and Smith. They all have in common the
precept that reading is done to reduce uncertainty. New information
generates new uncertainty, so more information must be obtained.
Venezky and Calfee’s model entails simultaneous syntactic-semantic
integration and forward scanning for largest manageable units. Roberts
and Lunzer emphasize the separation of the component skills of read
ing. Smith concentrates on feature analysis for letter, word, and
semantic identification. For the skilled reader, comprehension pre
cedes word identification because comprehension of meaning requires
less information than does word identification. This results, Smith
explains, from the skilled reader's use of contextual information,
4
such as his knowledge of semantic and syntactic constraints.
Linguistic Models
Linguistic models differ from psychological models mainly in
the emphasis placed on language structure. Transformational genera
tive theory has greatly influenced the development of linguistic
models, including those of Goodman, Ruddell, and Ryan and Semmel.
As a result, these models construe the reader as an active learner,
constructing language on the basis of linguistic universals. The dis
tinction between competence and performance is stressed, as is the
inseparable nature of reading skills. Perceptual aspects of reading
are deemphasized in favor of conceptual aspects like deep structure
in order to explain mature reading strategies.
Transactional Models
Transactional models of reading take account of differences
in reading purposes, favoring the reading experience over "instru-
j mental" reading, which is reading for the purpose of gaining informa-
| tional to be used afterwards. The goal of reading for Rosenblatt,
j
: who studied adults' reactions as they read poems, is a quality
j experience with the text.^ Like all reading models deserving of
! serious considerations, transactional models attend to the dynamic
: relationship between reader and text. Reading is "an active, cogni-
i
j tive skill, involving complex strategies of information selection
I 6
‘ and processing." We shall examine these strategies more fully
| by first considering the important revelations of the Goodman model.
|
i The Goodman Model
j
1 Goodman's reading model, when it was introduced in 1971,
I
j was somewhat revolutionary in that it departed from the usual premise
j that reading is a rule-governed, sequential perception of letters,
‘ words, and phrases. Goodman held instead that reading is a selective
j
j process involving:
| . . . partial use of available minimal language cues selected
I from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectations.
| As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions
are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading pro
gresses .
The important concept here is that learning to read is viewed
i not as a set of discrete skills which can be broken down and taught
sequentially, but as a series of strategies for seeking and finding
.meaning. These strategies, which are made up by the reader's cogni-
!
i tive style, his language competence, his motives, and his prior
55
expectations, guide the reader's selection of graphic cues, so that
his perceptual image "is partly what he sees and partly what he
3
expects to see." Every reader has experienced the necessity of
scanning back to find out why he did not see what he expected to
see, and finding that because of some prior expectation, he had
failed to select enough graphic cues, a failure which then induced
an expectation not confirmed by the text. This kind of negative
evidence provides strong support for Goodman's model of the reading
process.
Gibson and Levin describe the Goodman model as analysis-
by-synthesis, which refers to its essential hypothesis-testing
and confirming procedures. They raise some interesting questions
about the nature of the reader's predictions and how they are con
firmed:
1. On what basis are the predictions made: general context,
meaning, the preceding grammatical structures, words, sounds
(letters)?
2. How are the predictions checked? At what level of unit?
In reading, how does the reader know whe^e the confirmatory
unit exists and so direct himself to it?
Unfortunately, Gibson and Levin demand the specific, context-
free answers to these questions they admit multiple reading pur
poses make impossible. It is clear that for some readers, read
ing some texts, predictions are made at the letter unit; and that
sometimes, on the other hand, predictions are semantically-based.
A closer look at hypothesis-testing will make this fact apparent.
56
Hypothesis-Testing
Hypothesis-testing is a popular and well-substantiated concept
among reading theorists. Goodman, one of the first to suggest
the notion, describes it this way:
The reader . . . predicts and anticipates on the basis of
[syntactic and semantic] information, sampling from the print
just enough to confirm his guess of what is coming, to cue
more semantic and syntactic information. Redundancy and
sequential constraints in language, which the reader reacts
to, make this prediction possible.^
Goodman’s miscue analysis, which we will take up in detail shortly,
gives firm support to this view.
Levin and Kaplan, who share a similar belief, have suggested
that the reader
. . . continually assigns tentative interpretations to a text
or message and checks these interpretations. As the material
is grammatically or semantically constrained he is able to
formulate correct hypotheses about what will come next. When
the prediction is confirmed, the material covered by that pre
diction can be more easily processed and understood.^
It is, of course, quite satisfying for the reader when what
he has predicted is confirmed. But interesting experiences are
also to be derived when one’s predictions are discontinued. Fish
has made much of this issue. We shall consider some of his arguments
in detail later; but for now, notice how useful this concept is
for readers of Twentieth Century poetry, where a significant effort
is made to surprise the reader by discontinuing his predictions.
Lines from James Wright’s "Three Sentences for a Dead Swan" illustrate
the point.
And I heard them beginning to starve
Between two cold white shadows.
57
___
Semantic constraints lead us to predict something auditory
following "heard," but the prediction is disconfirmed. (More specif
ically, because the prediction is disconfirmed, the reader's imagina
tion must supply something auditory for "beginning to starve.")
Then in the next line, we are surprised by the word "shadow" because
we expected something semantically more consistent with "cold white."
These lines illustrate semantic constraints on the process
I of forming hypotheses. Modem poets violate not only these, but
j also many other kinds of constraints, including syntactic, punctua-
I
j tional, and rhythmic constraints to surprise the reader into close
' attention.
I
j Miscue Analysis
} The efficient reader does not use all the information available
P
s to him. He samples the graphic display to derive only enough semantic
i and syntactic information to make and confirm predictions. This
i sampling
I . . . is not a process of sequential word recognition. A pro-
l ficient reader is one so efficient in sampling and predicting
i that he uses the least (not the most) available information
necessary.^
| Because the reader only samples the text, he makes "errors" or
, miscues, which reveal the reading process because they are produced
; by the same process that produces correct comprehension of texts.
i
J Goodman illustrates the point through a first grader's reading
I
; of the following lines from Betts' The ABC Up the Street and Down:
, Mrs. Duck looked here and there.
But she did not see a thing
under the (old) apple tree.
; And on the (she) went
for a walk.
The child omitted the word "old" apparently without realizing
he had done so. But when he substituted "the" for graphically
similar "she" and attempted to read on, he
. . . found that subsequent choices were not syntactically
or;,semantically consistent. He then returned to the beginning
of the line and reread the entire sentence, this time cor
rectly. . . . This reader was evidently concerned that what
he reads be decodable, that is, make sense. The omission of
old did make, sense, but the the substitution resulted in an
----------------------- 9 - I o
unacceptable sequence which he corrected.
The reading process as revealed by miscue analysis presents
some special problems for readers of poetry. Because poetry is very
often so much more concentrated than prose, the reader must sample
more of the graphic cues in order to obtain enough syntactic and
semantic information to make and confirm predictions. Since efficient
readers sample the least (not the most) information possible, we are
put in the position of having to say that to read poetry;efficiently,
14
we must read inefficiently, a point well made by Winterowd.
If there is a way out of this dilemma, it lies in an adaptive
approach-to reading; that is, in emphasis upon the particular strate
gies for sampling we must use in reading poetry, andin an understand
ing of the kinds of creative efforts the reader must make to supply
syntactic and semantic information missing from compressed texts.
Reading as an Adaptive Process
As we have pointed out, instructions preceding reading greatly
influence the depth and focus of processing. Told to attend to sur
face details, readers will be somewhat better at recalling them and
slightly worse at recalling meaning, whereas readers attending to
meaning will recall it more accurately than they recall surface
59
I details. Several studies indicate this fact. Bobrow and Bower asked
j some subjects to repeat sentences aloud, requiring only shallow com-
| 1
; prehension. Other subjects were asked to provide sentences which
i
could logically follow test sentences, requiring deeper comprehension.]
Bobrow and Bower found the depth processors to be about twice as good
at recalling test sentences. Another experiment by Bobrow and Bower
showed that subjects instructed to attend to spelling were able to
recall only a third as:..many test sentences as subjects attending to
meaning.^ Mistler-Lachman used a task requiring three levels of com-
i
prehension and found, as predicted, that the deeper the comprehension,
16
the greater the recall. Tieman found also that subjects instructed
to attend to meaning were more accurate in selecting test sentences
than subjects instructed to attend closely to exact wording.^
Apparently, attention to exact-.wording takes its toll on comprehension.
One study by Smith revealed that good readers are more con
scious than poor readers of their purpose during reading; and they
are more aware of adjusting their strategies to accommodate different
18
purposes. Another study by Levin and Cohn showed 'predictable
differences in eye-voice span (the distance, measured in words,
that the eyes are ahead of the voice) when subjects were instructed
to read aloud for general ideas and details. When reading for |
details, subjects focused on smaller units, usually morphemes;
when reading for general ideas, they focused on longer units, groups
of words.
Clearly, reading as a process or set of processes adaptive
to a variety of purposes is well documented. When readers are
60
interested in exact wording, they simply do not use the same strate
gies they would if they were primarily interested in comprehending
main ideas. An understanding of this point is crucial for readers
of poetry; the nature of poetry itself seems to require simultaneous
depth (comprehension) and focused processing (attention to exact
wording). Since, as the research indicates, these two strategies
are at least somewhat mutually exclusive, readers of poetry are
caught on the horns' of a real dilemma. They must shift back and
forth, often within a single line of poetry, from one strategy
to another. As a fortune in a fortune cookie, the following line
would be read primarily for meaning:
He is poor who does not own content.
Many readers would substitute "contentment" for "content" without
even realizing they had done so. As a line in a poem, however,
such a substitution would be unthinkable, though the line may be
suggesting (among other things) the same basic idea. To read the
line as poetry, the reader must shift from a comprehension-dominated
strategy to an exact wording-dominated strategy, and back again.
Of course, skilled readers are better at this shifting than
poor readers; flexibility is the essence of skilled reading. The
adaptive abilities of the skilled reader are summarized by Gibson
and Levin in this way:
1. The mature reader exhibits flexibility of attentional
strategies in reading for different types of information.
2. Strategies shift with characteristics of a text such
as difficulty of concepts and style.
3. They shift with feedback (rate of gain of knowledge)
as the reader progresses (e.g., he slows down under some cir
cumstances, skims under others).
4. They shift with newness or oldness of information.
5. They shift with the reader’s personal interests (he likes
science fiction but doesn't like Jane Austen, or vice versa)
and his educational objectives, and with instructions (his
teacher said to prepare for a quiz on the history text).
The importance of all this for poetry readers lies in the
recognition that the flexibility of the skilled reader, so necessary
to the process of reading poetry, is not easily obtained. As Gibson
and Levin point out, a good deal of practice with a large variety of
texts precedes it. Patience with this fact, and with the poems one
wishes to read in the light of this fact, can go a long way towards
eliminating the frustrations of simultaneous depth and focused pro
cessing. It may seem obvious to say that acquiring the flexibility
required for skilled reading of poetry is not an easy process, but
teachers of poetry often forget the fact, giving the impression to
their students that reading a poem is as easy as reading the newspaper.
Another way to examine the skilled reader's flexibility is to
consider his ability to shorten and lengthen his units of comprehen
sion as texts demand.
Units of Comprehension
Readers comprehend texts in structural units, that is, units
containing semantic and syntactic relationships. The units may vary
in size from morphemic units, syntactic and semantic units, to
rhetorical units like paragraphs. Carroll points out that morphemic
and syntactic units are generally too small to serve as an efficient
measurement of comprehension, since the "total meaning" of an utter
ance has to do with the relation of a sentence or discourse to its
21
total content. The meaning of smaller units is comprehended in the
light of the larger context. 62
Semantic units have also been suggested as possible measure
ments of comprehension. Both efforts in this area, by Chafe and by
Simmons, use Fillmore’s case grammar, which delineates relationships
in sentences in terms of agent, action, location, etc. Chafe defines
a semantic unit as consisting of a verb standing in case-relation to
22
one or more nouns. Simmons elaborates the concept in this way:
"A semantic structure is a system of unambiguous representations
23
of meaning interconnected by logical relations." Semantic struc
tures can be defined empirically through "pause acceptability;"
2 A
as R. E. Johnson’s study indicates. Further, material presented
in structural units is recalled with positive correlation to the
strength of the units.
Admittedly, semantic structures measure comprehension on
a basic level. Comprehending larger structures is an even more
difficult activity to codify. Thorndike elucidated the creative
strategies of reading a paragraph as follows:
Understanding a paragraph is like solving a problem in mathe
matics. It consists of selecting the right elements of the
situation and putting them together in the right relations,
and also with the right amount of weight or influence or force
for each. The mind is assailed as it were by every word in
the paragraph. It must select, repress, soften, emphasize,
correlate and organize, all under the influence of the right
mental set or purpose or demand.^5
Clearly, a good deal of attention has justifiably been paid
to the strategies available for comprehending discourse units of
various sizes and complexities. Applications similar to those out
lined by Thorndike for paragraphs can also be used for stanzas of
poetry. Special emphasis can be given to the necessity of creative
reading when it comes to defining ambiguous phrase structures like
these from Jim Harrison’s "Sketch for a Job Application Blank."
But I had some fears:
the salesman of eyes
his case full of fishy baubles
against black velvet, jewelled gore,
the great cocked hoof of a Belgian mare,
a nest of milk snakes by the water trough,
electric fences
my uncle's hounds,
the pump arm of an oil well,
the chop and whirr of a combine in the sun.
It is no accident that the items on Harrison's list seem at
first to come from the salesman's case. The image of a door-to-door
eye salesman sets us up for the bizarre, but as the items on the list
become more and more unlikely as wares, we return to the original men
tal set— an effort to grasp a list of fears— for the correct compre
hension of the syntax;,but meanwhile we have given visualization to
the items as coming from the salesman's case, an exciting vision, to
say the least. The strength of the image of the eye salesman (coming
first, with its three modifiers) causes at first a misunderstanding,
really more interesting than unambiguous syntax would have been. The
weighing of each of the units makes up the comprehension of the stanza,
but a description of the process of comprehending the stanza which
failed to take note of the ambiguity that the reader experiences would
certainly be omitting one of the most interesting parts of the process .
Since smaller units are understood in the light of the larger
context, beginning poetry readers should be given a firm contextual
footing on which to build an understanding of each successive semantic
unit of a poem. Providing this context without spoiling the surprises
of the poem may be the quintessential task for teachers of poetry. A
useful tool for providing this context is the concept of largest
manageable units.
64
Largest Manageable Units
The concept of largest manageable units (LMUs) was introduced
26
by Venezky and Calfee as part of their model of the reading process.
This model is characterized by three processes: high speed visual
scanning, dual processing, and searching for largest manageable units.
The reader simultaneously integrates semantic and syntactic informa
tion while scanning forward for the next LMU. LMUs are, of course,
relative to the competence of the reader and the material being read.
They may be single letters or whole phrases. This is an enormously
interesting concept for reading teachers, and can be especially useful
to teachers of poetry. Readers failing to grasp poetry may be reading
smaller units than they could actually manage with a little practice;
readers failing to enjoy poetry may be attempting to scan larger than
manageable units.
Naturally, the size of manageable units differs greatly from
poem to poem. In a conventionally formal poem, the units may coincide
nicely with syntactic units, as in the opening lines from Roethke's
"My Papa's Waltz:"
The whisky on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
while in an informal poem, the size of manageable units may be more
difficult to determine. These lines from Ginsberg's "America" pull
the reader in two directions, one toward considering each resource
individually, the other toward lumping them all together:
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana
millions of genitals an unpublishable private litera
ture that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand
mental institutions. . . .
Nothing more complicated than the lack of commas (heightened by the
fact that these lines are preceded by five short lines) creates this
two-directional pull on the reader *s sense of largest manageable units.
Thus, particularly in the reading of informal poetry, readers must be
prepared to adjust their units of comprehension as texts demand.
The Reader
A full elaboration of the reading process requires an analysis
of the reader himself. Of course, there is no such thing as The
Reader, though our discussion has assumed the concept. For Burke, the
best actual reader lies between the two extremes of hysteric and con
noisseur, a reader who is open both to ritualization, art as art, and
to the power of the Symbol to influence his own experience, art as
27
medicinal.
For Fish, the ideal reader is the hypothetical construct,
intended reader, one "whose education, opinions, concerns, linguistic
competencies, etc., make him capable of having the experience the
28
author wished to provide." Of course, that experience may be
exactly the issue in a critical debate, a point Fish admits in
his discussion of "interpretive strategies," which function as
mental sets or predispositions. Interpretive strategies are ways
of attending to texts which make manifest "in texts" that which
the strategies are designed to value. "What is noticed is what
has been madeJnoticeable, not by a clear and undistorting glass,
29
but by an interpretive strategy." One such strategy is that
of attending to the text as if its formal characteristics and meaning
66
were separable, identifiable parts of the artifact. Attending
I
to the structure of the reader’s experience is another strategy; ,
but the reader’s experience can be attended to in different ways; ■
I
One can choose to attend to?line endings, or ignore them; one can |
attend to allusions, or ignore them; one can attend to surface '
linguistic structures as they are experienced in time, sequentially,
or one can attend to recoded deep structures, and so on. Much
depends (once again) on how far one extends the definition of the
reading process.
It is clear then that just as there is no such thing as
The Reader, there is no such thing as The Reading Experience, nor,
in fact, The Reading Process. But that does not mean we must despair
of discussing the subject; neither is there any such thing as The
Worker, the Loving Process, or The Human Experience. Yet, as readers,
we have much in common. We have in common all the specific strategies
psycholinguistic and reading research has uncovered: closure,
the given-new strategy, the recognition of implicature, ambiguity
tolerance, fringe consciousness, essential/inessential discrimination,
hypothesis-testing, and so on. Furthermore, we are language-using,
thinking, feeling, intentional beings. How these aspects of our
commonality influence the reading process will be the subject of
the next chapter.
67
Notes
Joanna P, Williams, "Learning to Read: A Review of Theories
and Models," in The Literature of Research in Reading With Emphasis
on Models, ed. F. B. Davis (Rutgers, New Jersey: Graduate School of
Education, The State University, 1972), pp. 7-141 - 7-165.
2
A. W. Staats, et al., "The Conditioning of Reading Responses
Using 'Extrinsic' Reinforcers," Journal of Experimental Analysis of
Behavior 5 (1962):33-40.
3
D. Elkind, "Piaget's Theory of Perceptual Development:
Its Application to Reading and Special Education," Journal of Speech
Education 1 (1967):357-361.
4
F. Smith and D. L. Holmes, "The Independence of Letter,
Word, and Meaning Identification in Reading," Reading Research
Quarterly 6 (1971):394-415.
M. Rosenblatt, "Towards a Transactional Theory of Read-
ing," Journal of Reading Behavior 1 (1969):31-49.
£
Williams, in Davis, p. 7-158.
^K. S. Goodman, "Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game,"
in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, ed. H. Singer and
R. B. Ruddell (Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association,
1970), p. 260.
^Ibid., pp. 269-270.
9
Eleanor J. Gibson and Harry Levin, The Psychology of Reading
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965), p. 450.
“ ^Goodman, p. 266.
Levin and E. L, Kaplan, "Grammatical Structures and
Reading," in Basic Studies on Reading, ed. H. Levin and J. P.
Williams (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 132.
12
K. S. Goodman, "Analysis of Oral Reading Miscues: Applied
Psycholinguistics," in Psycholinguistics and Reading, ed. F. Smith
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973), p. 164.
13Ibid., p. 165.
14
W. Ross Winterowd, "The Three R's: Reading, Reading and
Rhetoric," A Symposium in Rhetoric, ed. W. E. Tanner, D. Bishop,
and T. S. Kobler (Denton, Texas: Federation of North Texas Univer
sities, 1976), p. 53-54.
68
^S. A. Bobrow and G. H. Bower, ''Comprehension and Recall
of Sentences," Journal of Experimental Psychology 80 (1969):455-461.
16
J. L, Mistler-Lachman, Depth of Comprehension and Sentence
Memory," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974):
98-106,
^D. G. Tieman, "Recognition Memory for Comparative Sentences"
(Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford, 1972).
18 „
H. K. Smith, The Responses of Good and Poor Readers When
Asked to Read for Different Purposes," Reading Research Quarterly 3
(1967):53-83.
•^h . Levin and J. A. Cohn, "Effects of Instructions on the
Eye-Voice Span," in The Analysis of Reading Skill, ed. H. Levin,
E. J. Gibson, and J. J. Gibson (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
and U.S. Office of Education, 1968), pp. 254-283.
2^Gibson and Levin, p. 471.
J. B. Carroll, "Defining Language Comprehension: Some
Speculations," in Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of
Knowledge, ed. J. B. Carroll and R. D. Freedle (Washington, D.C.:
V. Hi Winston, 1972), p. 12.
22
W. L; Chafe, "Discourse Structure and Human Knowledge," in
Language Comprehension and the Acquisition of Knowledge, ed. J. B.
Carroll and R. D. Freedle (Washington, D.C.: V. H. Winston, 1972),
pp. 41-70.
23r . f . Simmons, "Some Semantic Structures for Representing
English Meanings," in Language Comprehension and the Acquisition
of Knowledge, ed. J. B. Carroll and R. D. Freedle (Washington,
D.C.: V. H. Winston, 1972), p. 72.
2^R. E. Johnson, "Recall of Prose as a Function of the Struc
tural Importance of the Linguistic Unit," Journal of Verbal Learning
and Verbal Behavior 9 (1970):12-30.
25
E. L. Thorndike, "Reading as Reasoning: A Study of Mistakes
in Paragraph Reading," Journal of Educational Psychology 8 (1917):329.
26
R. L. Venezky and R. C. Calfee, "The Reading Competency
Model," in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, ed. H. Singer
and R. B. Ruddell (Newark, Delaware: International Reading Associa
tion, 1970), p. 266.
27
Kenneth Burke, "Lexicon Rhetoricae," in Counterstatement
(Berkeley: University of California, 1968), p. 180.
28
Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," Critical Inquiry
(Spring 1976):475.
29
Ibid., p. 479.
69
CHAPTER V
THE PROCESSES OF VALUING
The issues involved in valuing a literary work, that is, in
assimilating it into one's cognitive structure, begin with the recog
nition of the work's intentions. It is axiomatic that recognizing
intentions is a skill separate from and beyond that of semantic-
syntactic integration, for it is a universal experience to process a
sentence syntactically and semantically correctly, only to find one
has misunderstood its intent. However, that this experience is rare
(comparatively) is also proof that recognition of intentions is a
rule-governed activity which operates by virtue of traits common to
all human beings. If it were not so, we would misunderstand one
another's intentions much more often than we do.
A second important issue of the process of valuing is the
recognition of form, which can take place during semantic—syntactic
integration, as a function of fringe consciousness, during recoding,
where form may be revealed as a difference between the original and
recoded versions of a sentence, or it may take place later, as one
contemplates what one has read. A useful tool for aiding the recog
nition of literary form is an understanding of how it compares with
forms we experience in other aspects of our lives. Kenneth Burke
provides this understanding in his encompassing schematization of the
70
dynamics of form. Therefore, we shall consider that schematization
after we have taken up the issue of intentions.
Intentions
Illocutionary Force
An important aspect of language for readers is contained in
speech act theory, that language is imbued with intention. Every
utterance embodies not only its propositional content, but also its
function, or illocutionary force. Uttered by a listener, "What?" can
function as a request for information, as a request for the speaker
to speak louder, or as a statement expressive of the listener's sur
prise. The functions of speech acts are categorized by Searle in
this way: 1) Representatives— assertions of the speaker's beliefs;
2) Directives— requests, questions, or commands which seek some action
from the listener; 3) Commissives— promises, vows, or pledges which
commit the speaker to some,future action; 4) Expressives— expressions
of the speaker's feelings; 5) Declarations— statements which themselves
accomplish actions.'*'
All speech acts function in one or more of these categories.
For instance, "It's hot in here" may have the illocutionary force of
an expressive, stating the speaker's feeling, and it may also have
the illocutionary force of a directive, requesting the listener to turn
on the air conditioner. Speech acts are therefore said to be direct
or indirect, but it is important to remember, according to the prin
ciple of expressibility— whatever can be meant can be said— that
"wherever the illocutionary force of an utterance is not explicit,
2
it can always be made explicit." This making explicit of indirect
7 1 .
speech acts may account for the fact, demonstrated by Clark and Lucy,
that indirect meaning of utterances is derived after direct meaning
has been derived. Subjects took about one second longer to process
the negative, "I'll be very sad unless you open the door" than the
positive "I'll be very sad if you open the door," presumably because
the subjects had first to process the direct meaning, which involved
3
processing the negative transformation.
Recognizing the illocutionary force of a sentence (Winterowd
calls this activity "uptake") is a context-dependent, rule-governed
4
activity. "X counts as Y in context C." Such a rule is a consti
tutive rule of language, used by Searle to explain language regulari
ties. Without these rules, language is reduced to a series of iso
lated "brute facts" rather than an institution imbued with human
intention.
The importance of speech act theory for readers can hardly be
overstated, first because it precludes a stimulus-response view of
reading, and second because it stresses the intentionality behind all
utterances. On our continuum of reading theories, speech theorists
would fall into at least the third category, where recoding, the
filtering down of the intended meaning of an utterance, takes place.
A line of poetry seen according to speech act theory cannot therefore
be seen as a series of brute facts (transformation or word counts,
etc.), but must be seen as embodying illocutionary force. Further
more, to read the line, one must also read its illocutionary force.
For instance, suppose a line of poetry indicated in its illocutionary
force that the poet thought the line funny (an expressive). To fail
72
to recognize this is to fail to read the line. Consider Stevens"
famous line from "The Emporer of Ice Cream:" "in kitchen cups con
cupiscent curds." A "brute facts" description of the line might
include the exaggerated alliteration, but once we ask what the intent
or illocutionary force of the line is, we are in the realm of insti
tutional facts. First, the line is an expressive, but what does it
express? Clearly, the exaggerated alliteration is downright frothy;
obviously it is deliberately amusing, an imitation of the lustiness
the words convey. Such conclusions are required for a successful
reading of the line according to speech act theory.
We should recognize, however, that determining illocutionary
force, like other aspects of reading, will be influenced by mental
sets or predispositions. Because determining illocutionary force is
a context-centered, rule-governed activity, we can expect a measure
of consensus regarding intent; but because reading intentions is a
human institution, subject to human idiosyncrasies, we can also expect
disagreement, particularly where ambiguity exists. If this were not
the case, one professional production of any play would suffice.
Some lines from Beckett's Waiting For Godot will illustrate the point.
ESTRAGON: (chews, swallows) I'm asking you if we're tied.
VLADIMIR: Tied:
ESTRAGON: Ti-ed.
VLADIMIR: How do you mean tied?
ESTRAGON: Down.
VLADIMIR: But to whom? By whom?
ESTRAGON: To your man.
VLADIMIR: To Godot? Tied to Godot? What an idea! No ques
tion of it. (Pause) For the moment.
ESTRAGON: His name is Godot?
VLADIMIR: I think so.
One reading of the illocutionary force of the lines would
suggest that when Vladimir finally grasps Estragon’s question, he
evaluates it and answers it in the affirmative. Another reading of
the illocutionary force would indicate that when Vladimir understands
Estragon's suggestion, he first thinks it absurd, but immediately
changes his mind about it, then undercuts his affirmation that they
are tied with, "For the moment." And finally, he isn't really sure
that Godot is the right name. This undercutting would be the normal
comedic progression and would reinforce a central theme of the play,
that nothing is certain.
Notice that it is only a short step from here to the fourth
category of the reading process continuum, the realm of values: the
play is valuable for its expression that nothing is certain.
Perlocutionary Force
Extending the definition of the reading process to include
the affective concerns of feelings and behaviors produced by texts
(perlocutionary acts) poses serious problems in theoretical justifi
cation. The lack of ground rules for discussion of values has been,
as Booth points, a central dilemma of the Twentieth Century. The
dilemma arises from the acceptance of a distinction between facts and
values. Facts are empirically provable, but since values cannot be
proven, there is no point in trying to reach a consensus regarding
74 .
them. Booth counters this belief by emphasizing the things we know
about ourselves as human beings:
1. Men are characteristically users of language.
2. Sometimes we understand each other.
3. Not only do human beings successfully infer other human
beings' states of mind from symbolic clues; we know that they
characteristically, in all societies, build each other’s minds.
4. We characteristically intend to change our fellows by
symbolic devices.
5. We are endowed with the capacity to infer intentions, not
just in the linguistic sense of meanings but in the sense of
purpose.
6. In knowing intentions we often know them under the aspect
of values.
7. Men's firmly held values . . . often conflict.
In attempting to open up the realm of values for discussion,
Booth argues for a new kind of "proof" based on these kinds of shared
knowledge. It is our commonality which both legitimizes and sets
boundaries on discussion of perlocutionary force. (Of course, died-
in-the-wool modernists would find the argument circular. How do we
know these things about ourselves? How can we prove them?)
Booth's common-sensical approach to discussion of values
engenders a theory of language useful for readers of modern poetry,
that language is a tool for building others' minds. It is not so
much a signal code for transmitting messages which have some prior,
independent status outside language, but a means of creating meaning.
Such a view of language helps to explain the demands made by modern
poets on readers, who must assist through the reading process in the
creation of meaning.
75.
A similar view of form is presented by contemporary poets (as
we shall see in Chapter IX) for whom form is a dynamic relationship in
which both reader and poet participate. To understand the function
of this relationship, we turn now to a consideration of the kinds
of literary form, as outlined by Burke.
Form
The Dynamics of
Form, Simplified
Progressive form (one of the three principles of the dynamics
&
of form outlined in Burke's "Lexicon Khetoricae" ) may be syllogistic,
advancing step by step as in a mystery story, or qualitative, where
"the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of
another."^ As with other aspects of the Lexicon Rhetoricae, an
understanding of progressive form is invaluable to readers of modern
poetry.
Progressive form can be recognized in the establishing and
altering of rhyme schemes and rhythmic patterns; it can be recognized
in the logical ending of any literary predicament (syllogistic)
and in the overall tone of a poem (qualitative): Syllogistic and
qualitative progressions differ principally in the force with which
we anticipate them, for qualitative progressions
. . . lack the pronounced anticipatory nature of the syllogistic
progression. We are prepared less to demand a certain qualita
tive progression than to recognize its rightness after the
event.
The following stanza from Roethke’s "I Knew a Woman" illustrates
both kinds of progressive form.
7 6
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).
The rhymes can be considered qualitative progression in that
the established pattern (chin-stand) prepares us for the similar pat
tern (skin-hand). And the rake-sake-make sequence alters the pattern.
Similarly, the rhythm, established then altered in the penultimate
line, is qualitative. The indubitable conclusion in the last line
can be explained as syllogistic progression.
Burke describes repetitive form (the second principle) as "our
9
only method of 'talking on the subject."' Inherent in all discourse,
repetitive form is the "consistent maintaining of a principle in new
guises."^ Any succession of details or images which restate a theme
can be explained as repetitive form.
The third principle, conventional form, is the "appeal of form
as form."^ Any form, simple or complex, can become conventional,
and when it does, expectations of the convention may precede the work,
rather than arising during the reading process.
The concepts of progression, repetition, and convention, along
with minor forms, such as comparisons and metaphors, can be used to
explain form in all discourse. (Burke makes no distinction between
"literary" and "ordinary" uses of language.) Since form is a dynamic
relationship between reader and text, the text arousing and fulfilling
expectations in the reader, recognizing form is clearly part of the
reading process. Recognition of form may take place during
77
semantic-syntactic integration; or it may take place during recoding;
i
I and occasionally it will not occur until later, when the text has an
effect on the reader's value system.
As Burke explains them, the three principles of form exist in
1 human experience, prior to the works of art which demonstrate them.
i
The changing of seasons, the beating of the heart, and the right
triangle are examples of the three kinds of fora. Literary forms,
then, are simply individuations of forms we experience in other
aspects of our lives.
The Dynamics of
Form, Complicated
Because each work exemplifies the fundamental principles of
fora in its own subject matter, there is necessary interrelation of
forms, and sometimes conflict of forms, and sometimes even "diseases"
of form.
The opening stanza from Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"
effectively demonstrates the interrelation of forms.
Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.
The beginning of the poem, announcing itself as a beginning,
is conventional. And, of course, the line—breaks and capitalizations
are conventional. Repetitive fora is exemplified as the poem main
tains discussion of its subject, supporting its thesis that heaven for
animals is like life for animals with successive illustrative details.
78
It is also repetitive in its syntax, the third and fourth sentences
being nearly identical.
The stanza is also progressive; syllogistic in that the argu
ment becomes inescapable (the logical, step-by-step detailing of the
facts); and qualitative in that "lived in a wood" prepares us for "it
is a wood" and the whole sentence prepares us for the following simi
lar sentence.
The interrelation of forms here produces a satisfying result,
but sometimes the intermingling of forms with their subject matter
forces a conflict between them, which the reader experiences. Merwin’
"Footprints on the Glacier," which we will consider more fully in
Chapter X, is a series of promises unfulfilled, meaning implied but
indeterminable. As such, its qualitative progression (the anxiety
of the first unfulfilled promise of sense preparing the reader for
the next anxiety) is gained at the expense of repetitive form. The
poem resists its own subject matter, as the last stanza illustrates:
nothing moves while I watch
but here the black trees
are the cemetery of a great battle
and behind me as I turn
I hear names leaving the bark
in growing numbers and flying north
While it is not possible to determine the nature of the "great
battle" or the meaning of the odd image of names flying from the bark
of the trees, or even whether the poem is about the past or the future
this indeterminacy does not seem to interfere with enjoyment of the
poem. For the indeterminacy is essential to the qualitative pro
gression of the poem. This is a case of onomatopoetic form, wherein
form and theme correspond. As Burke points out, these correspondences
are rare. ("In most cases we find formal designs or contrivances
12
which impart emphasis regardless of their subject." ) But in
modern poetry, so full of uncertainty (whether the subject matter
is love, or time, or America, or whatever) readers often experience
this indeterminacy. It is almost conventional.
Formal "diseases" (which Burke also refers to in quotations
because, like religious fanaticism, they are not really diseases)
occur when the details of the subject matter take on an intrinsic
value unrelated to their formal functions. Therefore, an imbalance
of form and information exists. Ted Berrigan’s "Living With Chris,"
a poem about America, illustrates, as many poems with such large
subjects do, the imbalance of form and information. The poet gets
caught up as the poem progresses in the details capturing the essence
of this or that aspect of American life.
I would like to get hold of
the owner’s manual
for a 1965 model "DREAM"
(Catalogue number CA-77)
I am far from the unluckiest woman in the world
I am far from a woman
An elephant is tramping in my heart
Alka-Seltzer Palmolive Pepsodent Fab
Chemical New York
If the reader is uneasy with Berrigan’s poem, it is because
the imbalance of form and information makes him uneasy. Another
imbalance of form and information can occur when the : form itself
takes on intrinsic value unrelated to its function. Subject matter
gets lost in pure form, as in Haki Madhubuti’s "Gwendolyn Brooks."
80
& from the poet's ball points came:
black doubleblack purpleblack blueblack beanblack was
black daybeforeyesterday blacker than ultrablack super
black blackblack yellowblack niggerblack blackwhi-teman
blackerthanyoueverbes 1/4 black unblack coldblack clear
The conflicts and "diseases" of form are prevalent in Twentieth
Century poetry. Even more than in other centuries, modern poetry
often lacks the accessibility of informational discourse, whose syntax
calls attention not to itself, but to its meaning. The hard truths
(difficult reading) of modern poetry are a measure of the poets'
sense of the difficult and complex nature of modern life. In many
poems (as in Berrigan's "Sonnets," which bear no resemblance to con
ventional sonnets) this dissatisfaction appears in the reindividuation
of forms as anti-forms. That forms can be reindividuated in this way
is the best proof, as Burke points out, that forms are individuated
in the first place. Burke uses the example of Joyce's "strictly
'un-Homeric'" version of Homer's Odyssey. "The Ulysses is the Anti-
Odyssey."^
Because, as we have seen, even these reindividuated anti-forms
are explainable according to the "Lexicon Rhetoricae," its concepts
are very valuable to the reader of modern poetry. Perhaps more than
any other Twentieth Century essay of literary analysis, "Lexicon
Rhetoricae" gives readers the language they need to describe the forms
they experience during the reading process.
In addition to recognizing intention and form, an essential
element in valuing a literary work is making conscious the variety
of experiences one has during semantic-syntactic integration. The
central strategy for making syntactic-semantic integration conscious
8 1
is to treat it as primary, thereby treating the literary work as an
event which takes place in time (rather than as a spatial configura
tion of black marks on a white page). To consider texts primarily
as events is necessarily to place value on those events as they
take place in time.
Valuing: Its Beginnings in the
Reading Event
Texts as Events
The particular interpretive strategies of Stanley Fish are
useful to readers of poetry largely because they are temporal, and
as such, they slow the reading process down for close scrutiny.
Though Fish makes the somewhat suspicious claim that he uses these
14
interpretive strategies for all his reading, they are useful for
reading poetry, which because of its concentrated nature, requires
the reader to make decisions as soon as the graphic cues allow
him to do so.
Fish's experiential strategy places emphasis on and thereby
locates value in sequential events of the reading process:
. . . the making and revising of assumptions, the rendering
and regretting of judgments, the coming to and abandoning
of conclusions, the giving and withdrawing of approval, the
specifying of causes, the asking of questions, the supplying
of answers, the solving of puzzles. ^
As the list indicates, Fish is less interested in the "right" answer
one comes to at the end of a sentence, stanza, paragraph, chapter,
etc., than he is in the questions and mistaken judgments the reader
faces as he goes along. That is why he attends primarily to surface
structure, ignores recoding, and therefore stops his analysis at the
second stage of our reading process continuum.
The basis of the method is a consideration of the temporal
flow of the reading experience, and it is assumed that the reader
responds in terms of that flow and not to the whole utterance.^
The meaning of an utterance is contained in this flow of experience
and not, as objectivists assume, in the words of the utterance
(message).
One interesting feature of Fishian interpretive strategies
is their handling of ambiguity. When a reader encounters an ambigu
ous phrase, he makes a decision or hypothesis about it (perhaps
not even noticing its ambiguity) based on interpretive strategies
engendered by his previous reading decisions or interpretive strate
gies he brought with him to the text. This is consistent with
the concepts of ambiguity tolerance and hypothesis-testing. Then
(let us suppose) the next phrase makes the reader doubt the certainty
of his decision, forcing him to stop and experience the ambiguity.
In this way, since meaning resides in the experience, the
meaning of the text is the reader*s magical and disconcerting expe
rience, which keeps changing before his very eyes. In valuing
the experience, Fishian strategy makes it particularly available.
Lines from Clarence Major's "Something is Eating Me Up Inside"
make an interesting illustration of the point. The poem begins:
I go in & out a thousand times a day
& the round fat women with black velvet skin
The normal syntactical structure of the first sentence prepares
us for a verb describing the actions of the women with black velvet
skin. But the next lines are:
expressions sit out on the
front steps watching— "where does he go
so much" as if the knowledge could give
meaning to 83
j The first word is a surprise, then. It is not that the women have
i
| black velvet skin, but that they have black velvet skin expressions.
i
i
! Processing this ambiguity, we assume intentionality behind the
!
i line break (because it is a convention of poetry, and therefore
I an interpretive strategy, to assume such intentionality) which
1 indicated the women had black velvet skin. Thus, it is not that
i they do not have black velvet skin, but that they also have black
l velvet skin expressions. We reduce the ambiguity only as far as
the need requires, accepting the fact that the women have both
black velvet skin and black velvet skin expressions. Now we are
ready for the fact that they sit watching. Here the sentence breaks
! off, without conventional punctuation, and the women speak. They
i
| ask a question which, if answered (the speaker supposes they imagine),
1 would give meaning to— their lives? No, to
a hood from the 20s I look like in
my pocket black shirt button-down
collar & black ivy
league.
Thus knowing where he goes would give meaning not to the women,
I
|
| as we had supposed, but to the speaker. And now we must ask if
the speaker himself has "the knowledge" of where he goes, a question
that becomes more pressing as the poem goes on.
(Notice how the piling on of details describing the ivy
league shirt resists closure. We want to stop and make sense of
"pocket black shirt" as a shirt with one or more pockets but the
line refuses to slow down. This is qualitative progression, pre
paring us for the speed of what follows.
84
league. In & out to break the
agony in the pit of skull of fire
for a drink a
cigarette bumming it anything the
floor is
too depressing. I turn around
inside the closet to search
the floor for a dime/a nickel
The comfort of normal syntax which opened the poem is replaced by
this frenzied anxiety which refuses to stop and make sense. That
is the experience, and the meaning, of the stanza.)
Fishian strategy is miscue analysis elevated to the art of
literary criticism. That, of course, is why his ideas meet with so
much resistance. Many critics feel uncomfortable with placing so
much value on the "mistakes’* the reader makes during the reading pro
cess. They wish to place the value of the text on the "right" judg
ment one comes to after processing and recoding the text rather than
on the twists and turns the reader must negotiate to get there. In
so doing, the objectivist, formalist critics convert texts from events
into artifacts.
This conversion is the natural result of extending the defini
tion of the reading process to include recoding, a conversion made
inescapable by the nature of the human memory. Once the temporal
events of reading are over, the text becomes a recoded object in the
mind, and finally, an artifact of one^s value structure. What one
remembers of a text read years ago, Huckleberry Finn, let us say, are
not the details of the experience, but its general aura, how one felt
about its humor and its cynicism, how one values its closing lines
about civilization: as Frye would say, its (nongrammatical) deep
structure. The text is no longer an event, but an artifact, as
85
perhaps it was by the time one had to take a test on it. But it is
important to remember that it becomes an event again as soon as one
opens the book to read.
The Bovine Theory of Reading
The definition of the reading process we have been structuring
might, in a simplified version, go something like this:
The reading process is a purposeful .rhetorical transaction during
which the mind, with all its attendant emotional and mental sets,
uses interpretive strategies, mediated by the operation of its
visual system on the printed page, to derive and create meaning.
This definition, similar to that offered by Winterowd,^ includes
all four stops on our reading process continuum. As a rhetorical
transaction, the process necessarily includes uptake, the recognition
of intentions, and persuasion, the incorporation of the (inevitably
recorded) text into the reader’s system of values.
As purposeful activity, reading falls generally into two not
mutually exclusive classes: reading for enjoyment and reading for
information. Winterowd calls these classes aesthetic andnonaesthetic,
and explains that aesthetic reading is not efficient in the psycho-
linguistic sense of the term because some aesthetic reading of poetry
requires mediated word identification. That is, 'rather than going
directly from graphemes to meaning, reading poetry often requires
18
going from graphemes to phonemes to meaning.
Because the interpretive strategies the reader uses during
the reading process are not specified by this definition of reading,
none is excluded. Therefore, this definition subsumes all reading
theories implied by various schools of criticism. Winterowd creates
86
, an ingenious schema to explain this fact. Using the divisions of
1 critical theory set up in M. H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp,
! Winterowd shows them each to be a fragment of the totality of rhet
oric. Mimetic criticism, which concentrates on the relationship
between the poem and reality (using interpretive strategies which
make that relationship available), corresponds to the rhetorical
concept of logos or reasonableness. Expressive criticism, which
emphasizes the relationship of the poem and the poet, corresponds to
the rhetorical concept of ethos, the character of the speaker.
Pragmatic criticism, which centers on the relationship of the
poem and the reader, corresponds to the rhetorical concept of
; pathos, the nature of the audience. And objective criticism,
, defining "the poem as a unique artifact with its own ontological
status, solipsistically implies a ratio between the poem and
19
itself," and corresponds to the rhetorical departments of
arrangement and style. Thus:
incorporates all interpretive strategies, all critical theories into
its definition of reading under one dramatic schema. Snake-
fashion, it swallows them whole.
Critical Viewpoint Ratio Correspondence to Reality
Mimetic poem-reality logos
Expressive poem-poet ethos invention
Pragmatic poem-reader pathos
Objective poem-poem arrangement, style
So it is that the "synthetic, holistic nature of rhetoric"
20
The particular strategies we have emphasized here have been
the common-sensical and research-proven cognitive strategies which
treat the poem first as an event, and later as a construct of the
value system. We concentrate on the pragmatic ratio and all the
interpretive strategies which make it available first. These strate
gies also make the expressive ratio available under the aspect of
uptake. Next, all the prelocutionary acts of incorporating a text
into one’s value system make the mimetic ratio available. And
finally, though the poem remains a part of that value system, it
seems to take on its own ontological status.
The rhetorical definition of reading, though it makes no claim
to 'use all specific strategies offered by all critical theories, nor
to value them equally, is indeed a broad and inclusive definition. It
makes legitimate a wide range of statements about literature and ar.
wide range of ways of attending to it. Statements regarding the men
tal operations of syntactic-semantic integration are made legitimate
by the experiential strategy of treating the poem as a temporal event.
Statements regarding the poet’s intentions are made legitimate by the
strategy of uptake, the recognition that language itself is imbued
with intentionality. Statements based on recoded texts are made
legitimate through the strategy of admitting that since the short
term memory can only hold between five and nine chunks of information,
the human mind must recode in order to comprehend. And statements
about the way in which literature chanes one's view of reality
and enlightens and enriches one's life are made legitimate by the
philosophy of good reasons; that is, by our commonality as purposive,
88
language-using human beings. Like cows, readers have several stomachs,
which allow them to digest and re-chew until texts have become
part of them, body and soul.
This does not mean that everything is legitimate. If, in
explaining his predisposition for happy endings, a reader chooses
to discount the unhappy ending of a story, we can recognize the
importance, of his mental set in determining his view of the story.
We cannot, however, accept it because he has recoded the reading
event in such a way as to destroy the commonality of the reading
experience otherwise obtained by taking up fully the writer*s inten
tions. The concept of intention, therefore, places boundaries
on interpretation. Similarly, to value a text for its expression
of the author*s acute mind as shown by a count of transformations
is too narrow a recoding to capture the essential features of the
reading experience.
Now that we can see how the processes of recognizing form and
intention .and valuing the literary work as a temporal event fit into
a rhetorical schema defining reading, we must consider one final
strategy. It is a strategy that encompasses all aspects of reading,
from semantic-syntactic integration to valuing. The strategy is that
of attending to and thereby valuing the intrinsic rewards of reading.
Caring
Because modern poetry is so difficult to understand and enjoy,
we are led to ask how people appreciate the things they do appreciate.
What sorts of strategies are used, for instance in processing sen
tences like these?
89
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of stammers
Makes you think all the world*s
A sunny day ;
I got a Nikon camera i
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Granted that some of the appeal of this stanza is carried by
the music accompanying it (the lines are from Paul Simon's song
"Kodachrome1') , the stanza nonetheless offers some important strategies
for students of modem poetry. Simon is one of the most popular
lyricists in contemporary music, so a good many people must be using
strategies of some kind to comprehend his work. i
The first strategy is to listen to the song over and over
for weeks or months, usually without attending too closely to it,
not forcing comprehension, but taking it as it comes. Even so,
many listeners will not consciously consider the relationship of
imagination to reality proclaimed in the song. Yet we feel we know
what the song is about; we are not troubled by the meaning of "they"
in the second line. The fact that Kodachrome is sensitive to reds
and yellows, while Ektachrome is sensitive to greens and blues does
not bother us. Nor do we wonder strenuously who mama is, or why
she would want to take the Kodachrome away. None of these "problems,"1;
which are exactly the kinds of "problems" we encounter in modern
poetry, interfere with our appreciation of the song.
Our mental set for attending to the song is determined by
its own intrinsic rewards, and not by rewards extrinsic to it—
the extrinsic rewards offered by education, for instance, which
90
engender an entirely different strategy for attending. Therefore,
we reduce the ambiguities only as far as the situation requires,
which, since we will not be tested on Monday, is not very far. We
attend with fringe consciousness, allowing the song to sink into
our value structures without a great deal of intellectual analysis.
We discriminate between the essential and the inessential without
recoding, casually remembering a line here or there. We also dis
tinguish the song from others we hear without ever having to analyze
its components. We use all the strategies Dreyfus elucidates as
natural to human comprehension. And we do so naturally, without
having to be bribed or forced.
The pedagogical implications of applying these strategies
to the Study of modern poetry are obvious, and currently not very
popular. But the reader who has somehow gained (either in or out
of the educational system) a sense of the intrinsic rewards of reading
will use these strategies on his own, whether the current pedagogical
mood permits it or not.
What we have here, then, is caring, the ultimate reading
strategy. As Pirsig so forcefully suggests in Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, once a reader has learned to care for poetry,
his search for Quality will be undaunted.
9 1
Notes
J. R. Searle, "A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts," in Minne
sota Studies in the Philosophy of Language, ed. K. Gunderson (Minne
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 344-369.
2
J. R. Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), p. 68.
3
H. H. Clark and P. Lucy, "Understanding What is Meant from
What is Said: A Study in Conversationally Conveyed Requests,"
Journal of Learning and Verbal Behavior 14 (1975):56-72.
4
Searle, Speech acts, p. 35.
Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
(Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp.
111-125. Emphasis in original.
^Kenneth Burke, "Lexicon Rhetoricae," in Counterstatement
(Berkeley: University of California, 1968), pp. 123-183.
^Ibid., p. 125.
^Ibid.
9Ibid.
10
11
12
13
14
Stanley Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," Critical Inquiry
(Spring 1976):482.
15Ibid., p. 474.
16
Stanley Fish, "Literature and the Reader: Affective Stylis
tics," New Literary History, II, 1 (Autumn 1970):127. Emphasis
in original.
^Ross Winterowd, "The Three R's: Reading, Reading and
Rhetoric," A Symposium in Rhetoric, ed. W. E. Tanner, D. Bishop,
and T. S. Kobler (Denton, Texas: Federation of North Texas Univer
sities, 1976), p. 51-63.
Ibid.
Ibid.,
P*
126.
Ibid.,
P-
135.
Ibid.,
P-
149.
1 f t
Ibid., p. 53-54.
92
19Ibid., p. 54-55.
^^Ibid., p. 56.
93
CHAPTER VI
READING THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES
The method of literary analysis suggested by the foregoing
survey of recent advances in rhetoric and psycholinguistics is in
many ways similar to other methods of reading analysis. That is,
the things a reader might uncover about structure, imagery, theme,
style, or tone in a contemporary poem are not different in any impor
tant respect from the things he would discover in using other more
traditional methods of literary analysis. However, contemporary
aesthetics, as we shall see, insist on precisely this method because
what this method does make available to the reader are his processes
in reaching the conclusions he reaches and his processes of inte
grating those conclusions into his system of values. The method
concentrates not so much on what the reader understands as how he
understands. For this reason, the method provides a significant
avenue for discovering the sources of literary disputes, and for
reaching some measure of assent regarding them. The pedagogical
implications of this avenue would be difficult to overstate because
it offers the reading teacher insights into the nature of problems
his students encounter when they try to come to grips with poetry.
To uncover some of these problems in more detail, we will now
turn our attention to a set of contemporary poems of considerable
94
weight. Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares will serve our pur
poses here very well because as ten poems connected by imagery, tone,
and theme into one major work, they offer the opportunity to examine
the whole range of problems encountered by readers of contemporary
I
poetry. These problems include the disentangling of complicated syn
tax in order to reach comprehension, the integrating of disparate
images into a unified whole, the continual rebuilding of one's global
representation of the poet's vision in order to come to a full under
standing of his art, the recognition of the function of variations in
tone, the understanding of the particularly contemporary kinds of
formal elements used to unify the work, the appreciation of the stark
beauty of the language, and the assimilation of the poet's dark,
modern views on living and dying.
A close look at the processes involved in reading The Book of
Nightmares offers by extension, then, a handle on the variety of prob
lems faced by readers of not these poems alone, but other contemporary
poems as well. For this reason, the examination which follows is
meant to express the sequential discoveries the reader makes in time
as he proceeds through the poems. In order to uncover the reader's
challenges in dealing with Kinnell's uncompromisingly dark vision,
the examination also assumes a reader unfamiliar with Kinnell's other
works and with his development as a poet, a reader unfamiliar, in
fact, with many of the complications of contemporary poetry. Though
more will be said later about Kinnell's other work, about the relation
ship of his work to the forms and themes of other contemporary poetry,
and about the aesthetics behind contemporary poetry in general, it is
95
I important that we uncover these concepts first by induction, by assum-
j ing a more or less tabula rasa reader, yet a reader capable of recog
nizing and dealing with the difficulties he encounters, a reader
intelligent in his use of strategies for comprehending and apprecia
ting poetry he has never encountered before, a reader not unlike the
! ideal student many teachers imagine, a reader, presumably, who uses
t
all of the psycholinguistic and rhetorical strategies outlined in
the previous discussion.
The Dedication— Forming a
Global Representation
The Book of Nightmares is preceded by a dedication to Maud and
! Fergus, Kinnell's children, and a quotation from Rilke:
I
1 But this, though: death,
the whole of death,— even before life's begun,
To hold it all so gently, and be good:
This is beyond description!
If we can trust the poet to select a relevant quotation, then
The Book of Nightmares is in some sense about death, a subject easy
to integrate with its title. Using this information, the reader
begins to form his global representation (or sense of the whole) for
reading the poems. He begins, perhaps, by attempting to create a
balance between the grim subject of death and the form suggested by
poems to one's children.
"Under the Maud Moon"—
Proceeding on Faith
A close reading of the first poem of The Book of Nightmares,
"Under the Maud Moon," illustrates many of the strategies our
96
definition of reading has uncovered. For example, the reader expe
riences the necessity of recoding (or transferring meaning without
attendant syntax) from the short-term to the long-term memory in the
first stanza. Early in the poem, the reader is also required to draw
inferences connecting one sentence (or T-unit) with another. In his
effort to comprehend, the reader finds demands placed upon his
imagination when he must integrate new information with information
not "given" by the poem, but implied. Further, in order to integrate
the poem into his value system, the reader must recognize the central
image of the poem as providing its qualitative progression; in this
way the reader comes to terms with the form of the poem. And finally,
the reader must take up the illocutionary force (or intention) of the
poem; in understanding the poet's illocutionary act of inviting his
daughter to examine with him the essential questions of living and
dying, the reader, by extension, is also invited. Overarching all
of these strategies, from semantic-syntactic integration to recoding
to valuing is the reader's primary interpretive strategy: a caring
communication with the poet, which attempts to see him clearly by
understanding the world-view he portrays.
It is fortunate for the reader that the poem begins with
clearly delineated syntax, for there are many elements in the poem
which are difficult to integrate. Though the reader must hold nine
syntactical units (the limit) in short-term memory until he gets to
the first subject and verb, the line endings and punctuation are
designed to make this easy for the reader to do. The poem begins:
On the path,
by this wet site
of old fires—
black ashes, black stones, where tramps
must have squatted down,
gnawing on stream water,
unhouseling themselves on cursed bread,
failing to get warm at a twigfire—
All of this scene-setting precedes the first subject and verb.
Granted, there are some bleak images for the reader to negotiate, but
the punctuation is so helpful that the beginning of the poem is essen
tially comfortable: The speaker builds a fire in the rain on the site
of previous fires for a woman he apparently loves. We have, in the
beginning then, the promise of sense. But the next stanza goes like
this:
The black
wood reddens, the deathwatches inside
begin running out of time, I can see
the dead, crossed limbs
longing again for the universe, I can hear
in the wet wood the snap
and re-snap of the same embrace being torn.
The speaker is sitting by the fire, watching and listening to
it, that much is clear. But the reader must make a hypothesis about
the meaning of the deathwatches. If they are inside of the speaker,
as opposed to the fire or the wood, and if they are running out of
time, are they about to signal the hour of death? The recoded hypothe
sis is that the speaker feels death surrounding him, and this hypothe
sis is confirmed by the next lines. The dead limbs in the fire wish
to reach for the sky again, and in their crackling the speaker hears
replayed their original breaking from the tree. To get to this
recoded version of the lines, however, the reader must posit an
98
implicature for "the same embrace being torn." Since he holds nothing
in memory with which to integrate "the same," the reader must infer
that the speaker refers to the branches' original breaking from the
tree.
j In section two, the speaker speaks to the fire, words chosen
j apparently for their initial "s" sounds, and sings a song he used to
; sing when his daughter had nightmares. Peace is being introduced into
this scene of turmoil, fire, rain, and sunderings. And the bear, in
the following stanza, ordinarily cause for alarm to campers, is
' treated very leisurely. The bear simply "eats a few flowers, [and]
!
trudges away." But then why not, since the bear exists more in the
speaker's mind than in his vision, as the reader must infer. ("Some
where out ahead of me / a black bear sits alone.")
j The first two sections of the poem, therefore, illustrate the
| demands placed on the reader's imagination as he proceeds with
i semantic-syntactic integration; and he must fulfill these demands
i
j with no clear sense yet of where the poem is taking him. At the end
of section two, for example, the dominant image of the poem is
reintroduced when the words spoken to the fire become song ("a love
j note / twisting under my tongue . . . curving off, into a / howl").
i
But of course, the reader doesn’t know at this point the force the
I
image will take on; he must proceed on faith. This faith is justi-
! fied when it becomes clear in section three that the preceding sec
tions were setting the scene for the poetic revelations to come.
Sitting in the woods in the rain, the speaker thinks of his newborn
; daughter, who reaches "into her father's mouth to take hold of / his
|
1 99
song." The image of the song has now been repeated in several guises
and the reader can begin to see this image as a reindividuation, or
manifestation, of qualitative progression. We also recognize that
the poem is written privately to her by a person as nearly like
Kinnell himself as he can make him. These are the poet's words to
his newborn daughter, and as such they take on extra power by virtue
of the reader's uptake of this intention. The next three sections of
the poem describe for Maud her birth, and conclude when she "screams
her first song," her arms "already clutching at the emptiness."
Part seven, the last, describes how Kinnell, "a specter, des
cendant of the ghostly forefathers" sang to Maud in her crib "his
only song," which he learned in the marshes under the stars in the
first nights of her life. The concluding lines of the poem offer a
kind of prayer for Maud when she finds herself orphaned, and an invi
tation; and their unmistakable force comes from these illocutionary
acts:
May there come back to you
a voice,
spectral, calling you
sister!
from everything that dies.
And then
you shall open
this book, even if it is a book of nightmares.
Having read and recoded the poem, the reader, whose primary
strategy has been to understand and enjoy the poem, may wish to fur
ther examine the nature of those pleasures. Looking back, he may
notice that the woman for whom the speaker built the fire at the
opening of the poem is never mentioned again. Particularly since
she is not named as Maud's mother, the reader may wonder why she was
mentioned at all. And he may wonder about why the bear was intro
duced. What is the necessity, in fact, of any of the first two sec
tions of the poem?
These questions are not easy to answer; the poem is clearly
not "well-made" in the usual sense of the term. But the beginning
of the poem does participate in a convention common to the beginnings
of many modern poems, particularly "confessional" poems, those in
which the persona and poet are openly "identical." Because the poet
wishes the poetic revelations to seem natural, he places them in the
setting during which they occurred to him (or so he makes it appear).
Further, he uses this scene-setting space to set up a world-view
against which the revelations will be played out. In "Under the
Maud Moon," the bleak images of rain and ashes, of sunderings and
broken oaths, of ensuing death, provide this world-view. But in
spite of the emptiness of this vision, the poet sings, and it is
the image of his song restated in several guises which gives the poem
shape.
The image of the song also provides the thematic power of the
poem. The poem is "occasional" in the sense that it is written for
his daughter at the beginning of her life. But as a reindividuation
of the form "poem on the birth of a child" the poem becomes anti-
occasional because the song, sung in the face of death to a torn and
empty universe, learned in the marshes, spectral, "like a coyote's
bark, curving off into a howl" is strictly a lullaby for nightmares.
Kinnell sees life as very much in need of such a song.
This discussion of the form and values of "Under the Maud Moon"
is intended in no way to discount the reader's difficulty in inte
grating the images, the vision, and the formal connections in the
poem. Though the song is the dominant formal and thematic unit, it
can hardly be said to function in traditional terms as a unifying
element of the poem, particularly for readers who find a lilting,
joyful tune a more appropriate gift for a newborn daughter. Such
readers will find major adjustments to their value-systems necessary
for full uptake of the poem. But even without full uptake they can
certainly appreciate the power of Kinnell's vision and the sincerity
of his gift.
"The Hen Flower"—
Reading as Creation
The reader's first problem in the second poem of The Book of
Nightmares is its title, "The Hen Flower." The reader who stops to
look up "hen flower" in the dictionary will find himself in the same
boat with the reader who doesn't bother: hoping the poem will make
its nature clear; for there is no such entry in Webster's Unabridged
nor in the OED. While the poem does not make the nature of the hen
flower clear, the reader, recoding, participating in the creation of
the poem, generates some possible explanations for its title. How
these explanations develop we shall see momentarily.
The reader participates in the creation of the poem in some
other interesting ways as well. By juggling two reading strategies,
reading for sense yet attending to line endings, the reader makes
several phrases in the poem serve double functions. The-poem begins:
Sprawled
on our faces in the spring
nights, teeth
Coining to sense as quickly as possible, the reader visualizes a spring
day, and this visualization is reinforced by the line ending after
"spring," then retracted by "nights." The reader who wants to stop
and consider the values implied by such an experience will be aware
that what seems like an ordinary, lovely spring day turns out to be
darkness. Other readers, still attending to line endings, and having
processed "spring nights," will be intrigued by the sounds and the
strange line integrity of "nights, teeth." In either case, the
reader is "rewarded" by the gruesome image of teeth "biting down on
hen feathers, bits of the hen / still stuck in the crevices," and by
the full description of the hen’s willing death. Here the reader
participates also. For the hen goes to her death only in the reader's
mind, between sections of the poem, and the speaker is seen with "a
hen flower / dangling from a hand." Here the hen flower is the hen's
wing, an extension of the speaker’s own "wing," for the image con
tinues :
Wing
of my wing,
of my bones and veins,
of my flesh
hairs lifting all over me in the first ghostly breeze
after death,
Again the reader is tricked by a line ending; the biblical
echoes are strong, and strengthened by "of my flesh," but at once
diminished by "hairs lifting all over me."
If the reader is now lulled by the lovely, sweet, and mildly
amusing image of "pink skies, where geese / cross at twilight, honking /
103
in tongues" (the promise of afterlife), he is in for a shock in the
next section of the poem, where the speaker studies thoroughly the
j realities of the hen's death: "by corpse-light . . . the mass of tiny,
j unborn eggs . . . the zero freez[ing] itself around the finger dipped
i
j slowly in." Who would want to read such a poem? But having read this
j far, who could resist its ghastly power? Furthermore, the reader can
i
| now begin to recognize the poem as the speaker's debate with himself
i on the serious subject of salvation. How this debate will be resolved
; provides the essential concern of both poem and reader.
I
j In the next section of the poem, the speaker receives an awful
i
vision of the nature of death, but refuses, with some doubt, to accept
I
it. Great care is required of the reader to perceive the ironies of
i
! this vision. Watching the Northern Lights
I
j lighting themselves up
j so completely they were vanishing,
j the speaker reads the "cosmos spelling itself" in broken letters.
' The line integrity of "so completely they were vanishing" reinforces
t
| the fleeting, temporal quality of the message; but the message is
i
| that death is permanent. Or at least that is one hypothesis the
i
I recoding reader might make of the lines:
the rose would bloom no one would see it,
the chameleon longing to be changed would remain the color
of blood.
However, the permanence of death is again placed in question when the
| speaker throws the hen killed by the weasels into the sky and thinks
he hears her dead wings creak open (for flight into heaven).
The next section of the poem presents an interesting problem
for readers attempting to integrate Kinnell's vision into their own
104
experience, for the poem refers in a most curious way to New Testa
ment events the reader knows (we will assume) differently. Jesus
prayed face down during the night before he was captured, after
prophesying that Peter would deny him three times before the cock
crowed. An echo of the first line of the poem, the stanza goes
like this::
Sprawled face down, waiting
for the rooster to groan out
it is the empty morning, as he
groaned out thrice
for the disciple
of stone,
he who crushed with his heel the
brain out of the snake, . . .
How far should the reader go in attempting to make sense of these
lines? Should he assume that like Christ, the speaker waits for
the betrayal of morning, a betrayal that has something to do with
senseless evil? On the other hand, since the poem so far has had
nothing to do with betrayal (unless by fate), should we simply dismiss
the images as sad and pretty, but formless, having no integral rela
tionship to the poem? The caring reader, I submit, will place himself
somewhere between these extremes. Unable to connect the image pre
cisely with the New Testament story, he will accept its transfigura
tion for the moment, having no need to reduce the ambiguity of
the lines further, and attend to the hopeless tone of the lines.
The sense of the lines thus resides at the fringe of the reader's
consciousness, while their tone becomes central.
The reader's hypothesis about how to attend to the lines
is confirmed when it turns out that this section of the poem is
1 0 5
indeed about hope and hopelessness. The speaker remembers planting
a milk tooth and a wishbone under hen feathers "for the future," j
which has brought him only uncertainty. 1
In the last section of the poem, the speaker addresses Kin
nell, and the reader is reminded that, like "Under the Maud Moon,"
this is a poem without a persona:
Listen, Kinnell,
dumped alive
and dying into the old sway bed,
a layer of crushed feathers all
that there is
between you
and the long shaft of darkness
shaped as you,
let go.
The lines are clearly an echo of the first stanza (which the reader
holds as a recoded unit in memory), where the speaker longed to
give in to the mercy of darkness. Hearing this echo, the reader
will no doubt feel the hand of form after all. And again there
are feathers; the dominant image has carried through to the end
of the poem. If he remembers now his difficulties in deciding exactly
when the hen was slaughtered, in connecting the promise of afterlife
with the grim realities of the corpse, in determining the fleeting
vision of the nature of death and then integrating it with Kinnell’s
wondering negation of the vision, in making sense of the Biblical
allusions under the terms of hope and hopelessness, the reader will
nonetheless feel certain that he is dealing with a highly structured
though not conventionally structured poem.
Only feathers stand between the living Kinnell and the long
shaft of darkness, his shadow, or his grave, or death itself. "Even
106
these feathers" we are told in the last lines, "freed from their
wings forever / are afraid." Are these feathers the hen flowers?
Or is the hen flower the hen’s wing after all, waiting "for the sweet,
I
i eventual blaze in the genes" to carry it back to heaven? Or is the hen
flower the future which grew from the planted milk tooth and wishbone,
a future of uncertainty, fear, and death? How does Kinnell feel about
| death and afterlife anyway: Like many of us, he is uncertain. He is
I
j afraid.
"The Shoes of Wandering"—
Comprehension as Enlightenment
! Kinnell has by now taught the reader that the poems in The Book
| of Nightmares are formed around dominant images and that information
j about the images is contained in the titles. The song controlling the
i
I first poem was learned by the speaker "Under the Maud Moon" in the
s
1 first days of Maud’s life. And "The Hen Flower" of course has much to
i
: do with hens, though it was necessary for the reader to participate in
the creation of meaning for the hen flower. It is apparent, then, that
i Kinnell can be trusted to talk on the subject, that he is faithful, at
! least in spirit, to the cooperative principle. Though the poems are
i
difficult, full of uncertainty, cynical in their vision, and clearly
part of the informalist tradition, the reader can now have a good deal
I of confidence in his ability to read them.
At the beginning of the third poem, "The Shoes of Wandering"
(which does indeed have to do with shoes and wandering), the reader
! participates in a small joke by using a strategy with which he is well
familiar:
' Squatting at the rack
in the Store of the Salvation 107
Attending to the line break while hypothesizing about the sense, the
reader is aware that although "Army" will begin the next line, this is!
somehow also The Salvation Store. That is how line breaks work; they !
cut apart the sense of what is said in such a way as to signify more ,
than the words themselves say. The joke itself (inherent in the name
of the organization) is not very funny, and certainly not new. But it
does remind the reader ihr.a gentle way that Kinnell is seriously
interested (as we saw in the last poem) in salvation.
Simply enough, the speaker (again Kinnell himself, or so it
appears) buys some shoes at The Salvation Army Store, goes back to his
dumpy hotel, and dreams the nightmare of the shoes* former owner;
these events are stitched by prophesies Kinnell received from a crone.;
But this recoded version of the events of the poem is deceptively sim
ple; even with his confidence to carry him this far, the reader will
still have difficulty integrating certain parts of the poem. The
dream section, for instance, begins:
The witness trees
blaze themselves a last time: The road
trembles as it starts across
swampland . . .
First of all, how does the reader know that this section is a
dream? Earlier, the speaker lapsed back into darkness to groan the
groan of the shoes* former owner, who may have been (the speaker
imagined) a Vietnam soldier. So when the reader comes to this section.
of the poem, only the inference'that this is the soldier’s dream can
integrate it into the poem. Still, what are witness trees? And why
do they blaze themselves? Questions like these can only be answered
in dream logic. Similarly, dream logic is all that can explain the
108'
presence later in the stanza of mirrors (puddles?) shattering under
foot on the road through the swampland.
The next section of the poem presents more questions for the
reader. The first stanza asks if feet are "the last trace in us of
wings." To understand this question, the reader must remember the
search for salvation implied by the opening lines of the poem; the
speaker bought the shoes apparently hoping they would take him to the
path of salvation. The next stanza asks whether it is "the hen's
nightmare, or her secret dream, / to scratch the ground forever."
The perplexed reader will remember the importance of the hen in the
last poem, and the description of her dead wings creaking open for
flight to heaven. Some relationship is evidently being drawn here
between the hen's salvation and the speaker's own. Both are unable
to fly, but the hen, perhaps, prefers the ground.
In the next section, the speaker continues down the dream road,
longing "for the mantle of great wanderers" because "whichever way
they lurched was the way." It is clear now that "The Shoes of Wander
ing" is a poem about salvation, a fact captured by a simple recoding
of the events of the poem. But to uncover this fact, the reader had
to draw numerous inferences, integrating seemingly disparate images.
Does the meaning of the poem reside in the creative work the
reader performs during the process of this integration, or does it
reside in the recoded conclusions he eventually reaches? Clearly,
since both syntactic-semantic integration and recoding are essential
elements of comprehension, an exclusive answer to this question is
simplistic. However, to value the sequential experience of
109
semantic-syntactic integration as primary, as Fish does, is to locate
the meaning of the poem primarily in that experience. Seen as such,
the poem offers the reader precisely the salvation it denies the
speaker. The reader creates his own path of understanding, while
the speaker is destined to "feel all [his] bones / break / over
the holy waters [he] will never drink."
If we accept Fish’s definition of the meaning of texts as
residing not in the poet’s vision, but in the reader’s experience of
reading (negotiating twists and turns of) that vision, then such a
poem as "The Shoes of Wandering" can speak even to readers (like
Booth, for instance) who do not share the poem’s ultimate denial of
salvation. Booth, who is tormented by the paradox of goodness inher
ent in the ability of modern artists creating works evil in their
vision, needs only to relocate the meaning of those works from the
visions expressed in them to the experience of reading them, in order
to resolve the paradox. And his own Rhetoric of Assent suggests the
solution; because we are so alike in our humanness, all users of lan
guage, all perceivers of form, even when it is hidden, all creators
of meaningful connections between disparate concepts, we are, as
readers, always on the path of enlightenment. As readers, we are
great wanderers, finding (by creating) meaning whichever way we lurch.
"Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the
Blue Juniata"— Integrating Formal Elements
The recoding reader is well aware now that The Book of Night
mares is not merely a collection of poems, but one poem written as
ten poems. The bear has appeared in three guises: in the first poem
110
in his natural setting, eating flowers; in the second poem as the
constellation across which the dead hen flies; and in the third poem
as the astrological sign under which the speaker is denied salvation;
and the hen has appeared in both the second and third poems as the
| pivotal image of Kinnell's search for salvation. In terms of these
j recurring images, the reader experiences both repetitive form (as
i
i Kinnell defines and discusses his subject, a message for his children
i
i about his own attempts to understand death), and qualitative progres-
I
sion (as the images are repeated in new guises). The reader will also
have noticed that each poem has seven sections, a form conventional to
i
! The Book of Nightmares only, but conventional nonetheless. The number
I
j of sections in the poems controls their movement just as surely as the
!
i form of a Shakespearean sonnet controls its movement. These sections
j have been serving (in our efforts to comprehend) as largest manageable
j units. So, in many respects, these seemingly un-well-made poems are
! highly structured, designed to allow the caring reader (with some
creative participation in the poems) to establish a relationship with
| them.
| Nevertheless, new difficulties in comprehension and integration
! await the reader of the fourth poem, "Dear Stranger Extant in Memory
i
by the Blue Juniata," whose title sounds like a salutation of a
■ letter. The reader who integrates this fact fully into his mental
set for reading the poem will experience the long suspense and its
I
ultimate satisfaction when, in the last section of the poem, the
; stranger is finally addressed personally.
| The opening section of the poem, like the opening of many per-
i
; sonal letters, provides a setting for the revelations to come. i, ■ .
("Dear Diane, I'm sitting in the sun under a blue fall sky today.")
But Kinnell's poem begins:
Having given up
on the deskman passed out
under his cloak, who was to have banged
it is morning
on the police-locked, sheetmetal door.
"The deskman" indicates the setting is a hotel, but if so, what
are we to make of "police-locked, sheetmetal door"? Since "it is
j morning" is a satisfying echo of the rooster in "The Hen Flower,"
I
i the reader feels confident of the poet's control, supposes that his
conclusion was right after all about the setting being a hotel, infers
j that it is somehow prison-like however, and, having no need to reduce
i
ambiguity further, proceeds:
I can hear the chime
| of the Old Tower, tinny scaring-bell drifting out
| over the city— chyme
I of our loves
j the peristalsis of the will to love forever
drives down, grain
after grain, into the last,
coldest room, which is memory—
j and listen for the maggots
i inhabiting beds old men have died in
j to crawl out,
i to break into the brain and cut
; the nerves which keep the book of solitude.
This is hardly a sunny day in the fall. But in addition to
!
, the bleakness of the images (as setting for personal letter) there are
j other problems for the reader. Determining the syntax for the remark
set off by dashes is the first difficulty. Many readers, aware of the
1 visual pun, and aware that the remark has something to do with love,
will tolerate the ambiguity (place it at the fringe of consciousness),
\
and read on, intending to solve the problem on second reading. This
112
is not an unintelligent strategy, for the caring reader will ulti
mately recode the lines (the contractions of the desire to preserve
love drive its partly digested images down, finally, into frozen
memory) and see the relationship of chyme to the waves of chimes.
But the reader's syntactical problems are not over; he must
recall or look back for the subject of "and listen"; he must process
| several transformations in order to comprehend that the maggots
inhabit the beds, that old men have died in the beds, that the maggots
I crawl out of the beds, that they break into the brain (the speaker's
I
! brain presumably) and that they destroy his solitude; the reader must
j deal, whether at the fringe of his consciousness or centrally (since
part of his strategy is to attend to exact wording), with the strange
juxtaposition of images which suggest the destruction of the speaker’s
solitude ("cut the nerves which keep the book of solitude"). And on
top of all this, maggots, yet! We are not merely syntactical beings,
after all, but beings with sensibilities, and subject to some aver
sions .
Since poems do not ordinarily contain letters, lined as prose,
I from other people to the poet, the reader (in a general reading-
poetry set) feels his formal acuity startled when such a letter
i
appears as section two of the poem. But since our mental set for
i this particular poem has placed us in the framework of letters, we
i
| feel a formal satisfaction along with the surprise. This is one of
I the great pleasures of reading poetry, and is an example of syllo-
, gistic progression. When a poem does what poems do not do, and yet
, makes the reader feel the inescapable logic of the action, the reader
1 1 3
can be confident that he is dealing with an artist, someone partici
pating fully and consciously in the creation of his (the reader's)
experience. This aesthetic control undoubtedly motivates the attempt
among so many modern poets to try new forms of poetry; unfortunately
all informalist poets are not so successful in making these experi
ments seem inescapable as Kinnell is here.
The letter itself is a haunting description (as is the letter
in section six) of the writer's fearsome relationship with God.
Section three is further scene-setting, but some tricky maneu
vers are required of the reader. The recoded essence of the stanza
is that at dusk the root-hunters dig love-roots (of which digging
we are given an auditory description). But once again, much goes
on parenthetically. The stanza begins::
At dusk, by the blue Juniata—
"a rural America," the magazine said,
"now vanished, but extant in memory,
a primal garden lost forever ..."
("You see," I told Mama, "we just
think we're here . . .")—
The reader is at once amused by these lines and puzzled by
the necessity to integrate the "primal garden" with the awful hotel.
An implicature like "The hotel is lousy, but the scenery is great"
helps. But wait, are we sure this the same setting? (The poem
later makes clear that it is, but for the moment we are not sure;
thirsty for comprehension, we integrate at every opportunity.)
But another strange thing is happening here. The speaker
quotes the magazine, then quotes (in parentheses) someone making a
little joke (for Mama) about the magazine quotations. Whom is he
quoting? Himself perhaps, though it is not clear why, as the speaker
114
of the poem, he needs quotations around something he says. And who
is the "we" he refers to? Is it possible that he refers to himself
and Virginia, the author of the letter, that they were once together
here, then went their separate ways, and that now he is here again
without her?
Section four of the poem is a recipe for a potion made from
the love-roots, and following the recipe, which ends "Drink. / Sleep."
are these lines, helpful because they bring to the surface the
I
j reader’s developing sense that time in this poem is indeed disjointed:
! And when you rise—
if you do rise— it will be in the sothic year
| made of the raised salvages
j of the fragments all unaccomplished
j of years past, scraps
j and jettisons of time mortality
j could not grind down into his meal of blood and laughter,
j In this time, the sothic year, the speaker asserts the possi-
| bility of writing the quintessential love poem, a poem called "Tender-
I
* ness toward Existence."
! But who is the "you" he speaks to about the writing of such a
j poem? He could be speaking to the reader; or he could be speaking to
t
! himself; but if the poem is a letter to Virginia, then maybe he's
| speaking to her; maybe she's a poet too. Still in doubt about the
: nature of this poem as personal letter, the reader has trouble
deciding exactly who is who.
But the next lines confirm many of our hypotheses:
I
On this bank— our bank
| of the blue, vanished water, you lie,
crying in your bed, hearing those
small,
1 1 5
I fearsome thumps
of leave-taking trespassing the virginal woods at dusk.
I, too, have eaten
the meals of the dark shore . . .
Clearly, the you of the poem is indeed Virginia, as her letter also
mentioned her crying in bed. Also it is clear that Virginia lived
on the river bank ("your bed”), and that the stanza goes back in
time, to the time, perhaps, right after Virginia took the potion.
] The rest of section five goes on to confirm that the speaker
! is now at the river bank, without her, in the awful hotel. The
j speaker lies in bed remembering the hen
; blooming again in the starlight. And then the wait—
i
‘ not long, I grant, but all my life—
' for the small soft
J thud of her return among the stones.
I
! What the speaker makes of the hen this time adds a new dimen-
i
j sion to his quest for salvation, reinforces the essential theme of
this poem, and justifies the reader’s earlier confusion about who
| was who:
| Can it ever be true—
; all bodies, one body, one light
| made of everyone’s darkness together?
The sixth section of the poem is Virginia’s second letter,
addressed "Dear Galway" (once again, no persona), and the last sec-
| tion, finally, is the speaker’s letter to her. It begins with the
title of the poem and suggests that Virginia may be dead but that
the speaker is not positive they will not meet again across the void
1 these letters
across space I guess
i will be all we will know of one another.
Let our scars fall in love.
1 1 6
Clearly, the crone’s prophecy at the end of "The Shoes of
Wandering" that Kinnell is to be denied salvation cannot stand as
the last word on the subject.
"In the Hotel of Lost Light"— Seeking
Grace in the Beauty of Language
The generalizing nature of language forces conclusions about
the poems in The Book of Nightmares (and other poems, for that
matter), which artificially sum up the concerns of the poems and
necessarily distort the reader’s experience of coming to such conclu
sions. The dissatisfaction of such conclusions is particularly
evident with "In the Hotel of Lost Light." It is true that the
poem concerns time; and it is true that the poem concerns the immor
tality of the printed word; and it is true that the poem concerns
the regeneration of human flesh (bones, precisely) in plants which
grow up over it. But the reader’s effort to connect these concerns
into a sensible statement which explains the workings of the images
is (intentionally, I believe) subverted.
The poem opens with Kinnell taking on yet another existence.
(We have seen him identify himself with the bear and the hen; and
we have seen him in another’s shoes, dreaming his nightmare; and
we have seen him entangle his being with that of a stranger "extant
in memory." The effect of all these selves is to reinforce the con
fessional nature of the poems, to de-persona-fy by personifying;
taking on second selves in some stanzas, he heightens our impression
in other stanzas that we are listening to the real Kinnell, or one
as nearly like himself as he can make him.)
1 1 7
The poem begins:
In the left-
hand sag the drunk smelling of autopsies
died in, my body slumped out
into the shape of.his, I watch, as he
must have watched, a fly. . . .
Besides negotiating the syntax of these lines, the reader
must decide why the drunk smelled of autopsies. From the Greek, mean
ing to see with one’s own eyes, "autopsies" suggests the drunk was
repeatedly cutting himself open to understand his living death and
the real death to come. This existence, therefore, is one Kinnell
might learn from, for it pursues his own unanswered questions.
As the drunk must have done, then, the speaker studies the
determination of the fly, caught in a spider’s web, whining its wings,
"concentrated wholly on time, time." This is not the first poem
written on the determination of an insect, but here the insect fails,
its music sounding out like Roland’s horn.
The second section continues setting the awful scene of poetic
revelations and entwining the speaker’s existence with the drunk’s,
full of spiders and crab lice. In the third section, as is often
the case, the speaker makes his purpose clear.
Flesh
of his excavated flesh,
fill of his emptiness,
after-amanuensis of his after-life,
I write out
for him in this languished alphabet
of worms, these last words
of himself, post for him
his final postcards to posterity.
The fourth section, the drunk's speech, begins with seven
lines of similar length which set down the desolation of his life.
1 1 8
I sat out by twigfires flaring in grease strewn from the
pimpled limbs of hen,
I blacked out into oblivion by that crack in the curb where
the forget-me blooms. . . .
A haunting entropy is created by the repeated rhythm of the lines,
while the rest of the section demonstrates progressive form, reiter
ating the image in the first stanza of autopsies: "the sweet, excre-
mental / odor of opened cadaver" emanating from the hotel room is
explained this way:
• • • To Live
has a poor cousin,
who calls tonight, who pronounces the family name
To Leave, she
changes each visit the flesh-rags on her bones.
The fifth section records the drunk's death, and the sixth,
his rebirth in the pear tree. The final section sets down the time
and place of the foregoing words ("on my sixteen thousandth night of
war and madness"). The seventh section is therefore falling action,
while the sixth section is really the climax of the poem. Its form
suggests a summing up, with the stanzas beginning "as for the bones"
and "as for these words." So it is that when the reader comes to the
last stanza of the sixth section, he has the distinct sense that here
is the point, that it is all about to be made clear. The lines how
ever are only a puzzling semblance of a statement of the poem's con
cerns :
As for these words scattered into the future—
posterity
is one invented too deep in its past
to hear them.
The reader's confusion in comprehending these lines is both
syntactically and semantically based. First, posterity, the word, and
119
I posterity, the thing, become entangled in the syntax, as if the word
were the generating force bringing the thing into being. But second,
even when the reader untangles the syntax, the lines are virtually
; unintelligible: future generations will not understand these words
I
j because the future has already been invented by the past. Which, if
it means anything at all, means we do not understand what it means.
; Many readers unfamiliar with this discomforting confusion
j (prevalent in modern poetry) will blame themselves for it. Other
| readers will be inclined to dismiss the whole poem as nonsense. Still
! other readers, willful creators of sense, will tinker with the lines
i
, (as I have done here out of the necessity to generalize, to come to a
j
i conclusion, however unsatisfying) until they dc> make a measure of
[ sense.
But all these problems disappear when the reader locates the
meaning of the poem in his experience of reading it and asks himself
! what his confusion is telling him. The subversion of sense in "In
j the Hotel of Lost Light" seems to assert that as an avenue of immor
tality, the printed word (the poem) holds minimal hope for Kinnell.
Even the rebirth of the flesh in the trees (enough for some)
l
i provides little solace for Kinnell*s tormented search for salvation:
i
^ As for the bones to be tossed
i into the aceldama back of the potting shop, among
i shards and lumps
which caught vertigo and sagged away
i into mud, or crawled out of fire
crazed or exploded, they shall re-arise
in the pear tree, in spring, to shine down
on two clasping what they dream is one another.
What is striking about this stanza, as with so much of Kin-
1 nell’s work, is the beauty of the language unfolding the darkness
1 2 0
of the vision. This biological regeneration is the one gate to sal
vation Kinnell leaves ajar. Yet when the reader is finally brought,
after a syntactical trip through the potting furnace, to the pear
tree, where the bones "re-arise" (which the inevitable distortion
of recoding has translated as "rebirth"), he is startled to find
that what the bones shine down on is a lie: "two clasping what
I
I
J they dream is one another." For the reader experiencing the poem
! sequentially, the last word of the line is a dark surprise.
| Nevertheless, the beauty of the language is unquestionable.
' It is a beauty which derives, as is often the case in Kinnell’s
j work, from the arcane flavor of the words themselves, the syntacti
cal and rhythmic complexities, and the darkness of the images,
| all combining to imitate the sense of what is being said. Here,
for instance, the lines "which caught vertigo and sagged away /
j into mud" rise rhythmically and fall as the pottery itself is said
! to do. Experiencing this beauty as he reads, the reader once again
i
' ■ gains a salvation the poet denies himself.
!
i
"The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible"—
Adjusting the Global Representation
j As we have seen so far, the poems in The Book of Nightmares
are spoken by a speaker admittedly Kinnell, but one who takes on
' the being of others in order to pursue an understanding of death.
1 There is no question that the poems are nightmares, formed around
i
• the logic and imagery of nightmares, but poems nonetheless, beautiful
in the intensity of their language; the syntax is complicated, the
I
lines dense with images. These facts make up our developing global
i
t representation of The Book of Nightmares, a representation which 121
helps to explain why the sixth poem, "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incor
ruptible," is so easy to read and so difficult to appreciate. Here,
! the speaker of the poem is not apparently Kinnell, but an omniscient
voice reporting on the destruction of mankind. (That, at least, is
one of the speakers of the poem.) And the language of the poem is
intentionally banal.
\ "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible" is set (if it can be
i
said to have a setting) in the Vietnam War. The poem*s first and
last sections close with the image, spoken by a soldier, of burning
flesh. The second and sixth stanzas, spoken perhaps by the same
1 soldier, now mad, describe the horror of the war. The third and
1
| fifth sections have to do with the human body, first as the subject
i
i of television commercials, and.second, as food for a mosquito and
as birthplace of a fly ("the last nightmare"). The long central
: section is a set of five-line stanzas making up the last will and
testament of Christian man, in which he leaves various parts of
his body to people representing various evils of Christian civiliza
tion— his blood to the bomber pilot, his stomach to the Indians,
I
his flesh to the advertising man, and so on.
I
The poem is organized, then, around the destruction of mankind
through its sick disrespect for life. But what shall the reader
make of the title? The last section of the poem makes clear that
the title is ironic; the dead are raised incorruptible in their
thirst for the poisons of destruction. "Do not let this last hour
pass, / do not remove this last, poison cup from our lips."
There is much about the poem, therefore, that, it would seem,
should make it more difficult to read. It violates our developing
global representation for The Book of Nightmares in its use of per
sonae, in its tone (as exemplified by its ironic title), and in its
organization around societal rather than personal nightmares. But
the simplicity of the syntax counteracts all these violations.
Because the reader seldom has to make any intricate implicatures,
nor attend to dense sets of images, the poem as a sequential event
is not difficult to process, even though the reader must contend with
multiple voices and an encompassing subject. The reader will find
himself appreciating the power of "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorrup
tible" more as angry essay than poem.
Yet, there are places where the intensity of language we have
seen in the other poems comes through. The sixth section, describing
rotting flesh, is one example:
In the ditch
snakes crawl cool paths
over the rotted thigh, the toe bones
twitch in the smell of burnt rubber,
the belly
opens like a poison night flower. . . .
And in the last section, there is a beautiful if disturbing
image of the final result of human self-destruction:
And a wind holding
the cries of love-making from all our
nights and days
moves among the stones, hunting
for two twined skeletons to blow its
last cry across.
"Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the
Moonlight"-— Alternating Strategies
The seventh poem of The Book of Nightmares is a welcome relief
from the unrelenting darkness of the poems preceding it. The poem,
123
unlike the others, it is not a nightmare at all but a sort of lullaby
for a nightmare of Maud’s. Yet, "Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair
in the Moonlight," however tender toward existence, sticks to the
subject Kinnell has set up for himself: an understanding of death.
The central focus of the poem is impermanence. As Maud clings to
the speaker (Kinnell, once again) "as if clinging could save us,"
he communicates to her the "permanence of smoke or stars." He sur
mises that perhaps her nightmare is "being forever / in the pre
trembling of a house that falls." He gives her some carpe diem
advice; and he sees his father’s death in her eyes.
The concerns of the poem, therefore, are not too difficult to
determine; yet this recoded description is much less exciting than the
processes the reader negotiates in order to arrive at a recoded ver
sion. In the second section, for instance, the speaker tells Maud:
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup
I would suck the rot from your fingernail
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying
light.
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little
ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle
back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever. . . .
The intent of these lines is absolutely clear by the time the
reader gets to the last one, but the process of developing that
clarity is a gradual one. The first line is a lovely image, but
an image of what? The second line, the more shocking for its
juxtaposition with the first, makes clear that the speaker considers
these actions protective; and that he is not averse to whatever
124
protective action is necessary. We make this prediction without
time-consuming implicatures on the basis of one aspect of our
global representation: father speaking to daughter. Now the reader
will reprocess the first image with attention to how blowing the
flame from the silver cup is protective. But the answer to this
question is still not clear. The third image is also puzzling;
if one brushes dying light out of the hair, what is left but dark
ness? How is that superior to dying light? The third and fourth
images confirm our earlier prediction that all these actions are
somehow protective in the speaker’s mind, and the fifth suggests
that the speaker will summon whatever magic is necessary.to protect
the girl. The final statement of the stanza provides the satisfying
clarity of our confirmed predictions about the intent of the stanza.
We have processed these lines by alternating strategies of
close attention to exact wording and broad hypothesizing for the
sake of comprehension. What happens now is that the images we were
not quite sure about, the flame in the silver cup and the dying
light in the hair, move to the fringe of consciousness where they
reverberate around and focus the central point of the stanza.
The next stanza provides the reader with the same experience
of gradual clarity without ever explaining its beginning image.
The sentence continues from the previous stanza:
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades.
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
• • •
125
And so on: until things are set right. Again, the wonder of the
first image reverberates around the point of the stanza.
A number of important satisfactions of reading poetry are
exemplified in these stanzas. First, the reader has the satisfaction
of making and confirming hypotheses about the sense of the stanzas.
Second, he experiences the repetitive form of the syntax of the
stanzas. Third, his attention to exact wording pays off in intrigu
ing graphic images which make the experience of comprehending not
only intellectual, but sensory as well. And finally, tolerating
the ambiguity of the images he cannot explain precisely, the reader
allows their enchantment to surround his experience of the sense
of the lines.
Another interesting process of the reader's experience is
exemplified in the sixth section of the poem, where the experience
is one of using our global representation of the poem to build suc
cessively more comprehensive interpretations of a graphic visual
image:
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his
last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
The processing of this stanza presents an interesting theoret
ical problem. If reading is a succession of events taking place in
time, what precisely jus that succession of events? One reader may
read the whole section quickly, coming to what he might describe as
126
no understanding (though he would obviously have some clues on
which to build hypotheses), then read it again, making sense of
it in smaller units, one at a time. Another might be inclined
to try to come to a more complete understanding of each successive
unit as he reads, going back repeatedly in order to integrate each
unit. Since both of these readers can come to the same recoding,
that the speaker sees his father's death in his daughter's eyes,
and since both can participate equally in enjoyment of the lines,
it is not important to choose one strategy as superior to the other.
But is is important to recognize that these two readers will have
different reading experiences.
(The obvious implication of such recognition is that descrip
tions of "the reading experience" will be more distortive of some
reading experiences than of others; but then, since one cannot
say everything— how the visual system operates to select features
of letters in order to predict and confirm words, for instance—
all descriptions of the reading experience are necessarily distor
tions anyway. This is a point we have made before, but it is worth
repeating, here especially, since the two different strategies
create experiences different in very interesting ways.)
Our first reader, having scanned the larger unit, pictured,
in all probability, the kite, and gleaned that someone's death is
recorded, is likelier upon "second" reading to take the kite liter
ally, either as an object of "waved" (though the punctuation negates
this hypothesis) or as a second reflection in the child's eyes. Our
second reader, going more slowly, is likelier to attend to the
127
appositive construction and recognize the kite as a metaphor for
the hand. Both experiences create graphic (though different) mental
pictures; and both readers are likely to process the syntax (make
a decision about it) without recognizing the possible ambiguity.
This would be a simple matter to test, but the theoretical point
(demonstrated consistently in the history of criticism) is that
different strategies produce different experiences; recognizing
this, a reader may wish, on future readings, to alter his strategies
consciously, so as to create for himself a different experience
from the one he had before.
At any rate, before any such theoretical questions arise,
the reader (for descriptive purposes, now, a hypothetical combination
of the two kinds of readers) attends to the reflections of reflec
tions described in the lines. The reader shifts his strategy from
comprehending that the scene takes place in the moonlight to a strat
egy of attending to the exact wording, and discovers that the scene
takes place in the light the moon reflects from the sun. In that
reflected light, the speaker sees "the" hand (his own? his daugh
ter's?) reflected in the child's eyes. This reflection now becomes
the pivot for the speaker's memory (or visualization) of his father's
death (the hand now reflected in his father's eyes); and when the
last stanza of the section returns to the generalizing present tense
("and the angel / of all mortal things lets go the string") the
reader uses his global representation of Kinnell's interest in the
eternal repetition of death to build an infinity of reflections of
all the deaths of the forefathers. The enormity of the concept
128
inherent in the minuteness of the image (gazing into the child's eyes)
provides the reader with the quintessential pleasure of reading
poetry, a pleasure best described by another image: the concentric
circles formed by a stone thrown into a pond.
"Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" is the
most hopeful of the poems so far in The Book of Nightmares, for here
Kinnell sees a kind of salvation in taking in the world fully, in
all its sorrow and death. Kinnell's advice to his daughter is that
she "learn to reach deeper / into the sorrows / to come ..." and
that she "kiss the mouth / which tells you, here, / here is the
world." He further offers the possibility that both he and Maud
may learn, in the eternal dying around them, the importance of love:
We will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge,
the wages of dying is love.
"The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing"—
Recognizing Metaphorical Implications
The nightmare in "The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing"
is Aristophanes' concept of love as the search for one's other half.
This is a nightmare from which Kinnell takes some comfort, for he
considers the wound itself to be the agent of love, forcing "us to
search out to our misfit." For the most part, the poem seems straight
forward. Kinnell declares his love for the mother of his children
in a number of ways throughout the poem. He claims, for instance,
that if he had stayed with his other half, he might have moved "from
then on like the born blind, / their faces / gone into heaven
already." While this sounds like the salvation Kinnell has been
129
t seeking, we know from his advice to his daughter to "reach deeper
into the sorrows" that it is not.
The salvation he seeks is more like that described in the
| last section of the poem, a sexual-spiritual communication across
i
j the void. But even that salvation, which he also describes as "the
| most tragic concumbence," is framed as a question. Because this
| is the hesitant and questioning Kinnell we have come to know, this
j vision is easy to assimilate: we are lost strangers, sharing "a
J moment of our moment on earth." This is not a traditional love poem
to one’s wife, but then, if it were, our global representation of
The Book of Nightmares would require massive revision in order to
j accommodate it.
On the other hand, though not a traditional love poem, it
i
j is full of romantic notions. Taking the Aristophanes definition
| of love seriously is romantic enough, but Kinnell’s insistence that
, by an incredible coincidence he met (and recognized!) his other half
I
I is almost mystical in its romanticism; but this romanticism is carried
| even further when Kinnell asserts that he is better off with his
|
i misfit wife than he would be with his "other half."
[ Balancing this sense of mystical romanticism (exemplified
; not only in this poem, but also in the prophecy of the crone in "The
j Shoes of Wandering" and in the love-root potion in "Dear Stranger
i Extant in Memory") against Kinnell's cynical realism, as exemplified
in his dark and gruesome imagery, has been the reader’s problem
| throughout The Book of Nightmares. To create this balance, the
reader alternates his strategies between attention to exact wording
130
and attention to general concepts, continually revising and enlarging
his global representation of Kinnell’s vision to accommodate these
two seemingly disparate elements.
Such adjusting of strategies is required of the reader when
he comes to the fifth section of "The Call Across the Valley of Not-
Knowing." Because the first four sections are a coherent discussion
of the Aristophanes myth, the following lines seem at first to be
i
I
! part of some other poem.
I
I Of that time in a Southern jail,
when the slier iff, as he cursed me
' and spat, took my hand in his hand, rocked
from the pulps the whorls
and tented archways into the tabooed realm,
the underlife
wheEe the canaries of the blood are singing,
j pressed
1 the flesh-flowers
j into the dirty book of the
] police-blotter, afterwards what I remembered
1 most
| was the care, the almost loving,
1 animal gentleness of his hand on my hand.
i The reader’s first problem is to disentangle the syntax and
i
I
imagery enough to grasp what events are being described here. The
I
, fourth through sixth lines will be the most troublesome, but once
it is clear to the reader that the speaker is describing his finger-
' printing by a Southern sheriff, the larger question of what his
, fingerprinting has to do with the poem will occupy his mind. Since
I
: there is no immediate answer to this question, the intelligent reader
j will feel pulled by two competing impulses; one to linger over the
stanza, attempting to make more precise sense of it; and the other,
to press on for an answer to the larger question of what this finger-
j printing episode has to do with the poem.
131
For the moment, let us linger over "rocked / from the pulps
the whorls / and tented archways into the tabooed realm, that under-
j life / where the canaries of the blood are singing ..." Finger-
I
1 printing requires the rocking of the fingers from side to side over
i
] the inkpad and the blotter; but what is the "tabooed realm"? The
i
[ police-blotter can be associated with taboos, of course, but the
appositive construction "that underlife where the canaries of the
1 blood are singing" seems to negate the hypothesis that it is merely
( the police-blotter being discussed here.
i
| What the reader makes of these lines, therefore, is largely
[
\ dependent on the kinds of creative leaps he is willing to make. One
reader may prefer to take note of the sexual nature of the imagery
and move on, reducing the ambiguity no further. Another reader may
i wish to infer the loss of part of the self in the fingerprinting,
j thereby connecting the fingerprinting with the previous discussion
; of the less-than-whole nature of human beings as seen through Aris
tophanes1 conception of love.
! It is important to note here that neither strategy is demanded
j by the words themselves, and that the strategy a reader chooses will
! change his reading experience. The poem continues:
' Better than the rest of us, he knows
! the harshness of that cubicle
in hell where they put you
with all your desires undiminished, and
with no body to appease them.
These stanzas present an interesting and universal problem
, for readers of poetry. The problem is that of the literal and symbolic
and drawing the line between them. Though the larger questions of
132
the nature of metaphor are beyond our present scope, let us examine
the problem briefly. When a poet refers to roses in a young girl's
cheeks, he is not suggesting literal roses; and without time-
consuming inferences, the reader's global representation of poetry
allows him to determine this fact. He knows without thinking about
it that "roses1 ' suggests "rosiness."
In this stanza, "cubicle" immediately suggests a jail cell;
and as a hypothesis, "jail cell" makes perfect sense; having so much
contact with the jail, the sheriff should know its harshness well.
After the stanza break, when we discover that the cubicle referred
to is in hell, we use our global representation of poetry to infer,
virtually automatically, that hell is simply a metaphor for jail.
But when the line goes on to suggest the "real," "literal" hell, we
must abandon our firm conviction of its use as a metaphor. (The irony
here is, of course, charming; a play on Dante's myth becomes literal
here, by virtue of the reader's having to retract his hypothesis of
metaphor.) We are left wondering, then, why the sheriff should have
a special knowledge of that part of hell where all desires continue
unappeased. Many readers will want to reconsider the possibility
that Kinnell really is describing jail; and the idea has some appeal,
since the loneliness of prison may coincide with an inability to
fulfill desires. However, as with the previous discussion of the
"tabooed realm," more than a discussion of jail seems to be suggested,
but the exact implications of this greater dimension are indetermina
ble.
Separating the literal from the symbolic, in the way we have
just done, is a continual problem for the reader of poetry. The ^33
difficulties of doing so are likely to make him feel either that
he is inadequate to the task, or that the poem is senseless gibberish,
an idea that will not occur to him during the experience of enjoying
the poem, and which he will dismiss if his tolerance for ambiguity
is well-developed. Of course, learning ambiguity tolerance in liter
ary matters is learning what so many teachers and critics are reluc
tant to teach: the confidence to say "I do not know for sure."
A similar, though not so troublesome, discrimination between
the literal and metaphorical takes place in the next two stanzas,
as the section continues with a hypothetical description of the sher
iff’s death. As the reader perceives the sheriff’s drowning as meta
phorical, it comes to stand for any death. The drawing of this con
clusion allows the reader to understand the full implications of
this section of the poem, for as metaphor, the description takes
on larger dimensions, the universality of human contact and its value.
Unless he draws these implicatures, the reader will have the
strong sensation that the poem is .incoherent, and that section five
is an unrelated discussion of a sheriff in a Southern jail. But
by making these inferences, the reader can come to the sense of opti
mistic faith Kinnell clearly intends here in human interchange; the
connections between section five and the Aristophanes myth can be
realized in the final section of the poem:
We who live out our plain lives, who put
our hand into the hand of whatever we love
as it vanishes,
as we vanish,
and stumble toward what will be, simply by arriving,
a kind of fate,
some field, maybe, of flaked stone
scattered in starlight
134
where the flesh
swaddles its skeleton a last time
before the bones go their way without us,
might we not hear, even then,
the bear call
from the hillside— a call, like ours, needing
to be answered— and the dam-bear
call back across the darkness
of the valley of not-knowing
the only word tongues shape without intercession,
yes . . . yes . . . ?
The mention of hands here is a strong echo of the sheriff's
hand, and of course we are well familiar with the bear, which here
suggests the instinctive creative urge for spiritual-sexual communica
tion.
"The Path Among the Stones"—
Reading as Sensory Experience
"The Path Among the Stones," the ninth poem of The Book of
Nightmares, presents the reader with the most philosophical-mystical
of the nightmares. The poem is also the greatest challenge to the
reader's tolerance of ambiguity, for it can be read neither literally
nor metaphorically. A richly detailed experience, capturing elements
of many of the earlier poems, the poem acts specifically on the read
er's senses, eluding repeatedly his intellectual grasp. Since the
poem seems to be dealing with so many of the questions raised by the
earlier poems, to be tying them up in a penultimate statement, the
reader can hardly resist trying to discern the exact nature of that
statement; but since the poem avoids the statement so thoroughly, the
reader is bound to feel a profound frustration of his efforts. This
is, no doubt, exactly the experience Kinnell intends to create, an
experience which the imaginative reader will meet by relaxing when
he can, his deliberative attempts to make clear, precise sense. He
135
will allow the details of the poem to wash over him, participating
sensorily in the elusive existence being set forth in "The Path Among
the Stones."
The first section of the poem provides it apparent setting:
; On the path winding
upward, toward the high valley
of waterfalls and flooded, hoof-shattered
meadows of spring,
where fish-roots boil
in the last grails of light on the water,
j and vipers pimpled with urges to fly
drape the black stones hissing pheet! pheet! — land
of quills
and inkwells of skulls filled with black water—
I come to a field
I glittering with a thousand sloughed skins
j of arrowheads, stones
j which shuddered and leapt forth
to give themselves into the broken hearts
] of the living,
who gave themselves back, broken, to the stone.
The clarity of visualization of this passage can hardly be
overstated. For one who has seen fish disturbing the surface of
: a pond, the precision of "where fish-roots boil / in the last grails
< of light on the water" is delightful. Yet the reader has no real
I idea where he is. The scene is suggesting of the top of the world,
| which for Kinnell is, in spite of its stark natural beauty, a sort
i
; of quintessential battlefield.
And the scene is also very reminiscent of one created in the
previous poem:
some field, maybe, of flaked stone
I scattered in starlight
1 where the flesh
j swaddles its skeleton a last time
i before the bones go their way without us.
136
I The scene asserts, then, the final fate of mankind. But Kin-
I 7 7
nell does not dwell here. He closes his eyes and imagines "the heat-
rippled beaches." The second section of the poem can loosely be
described as a mystical-geologic description of the workings of time
on shells and stone which turn them ultimately into sand. The reader
^ who-reaches for more than this loose understanding of the section
will find his efforts thwarted at every turn. The stanza becomes
progressively less accessible to recoding, and the other two stanzas
! which make up this section of the poem expand this progression.
I
With considerable relief the reader comes to the third section
of the poem and finds a sensible statement within his grasp.
I walk out from myself,
| among the stones of the field,
I each sending up its ghost-bloom
into the starlight, to float out
I over the trees, seeking to be one
! with the unearthly fires kindling and dying
I
! in space— and falling back, knowing
the sadness of the wish
to alight
back among the glitter of bruised ground,
the stones holding between pasture and field,
the great, granite nuclei,
glimmering, even they, with ancient inklings
of madness and war.
' < As soon as the reader makes the simple implicature that
"unearthly fires kindling and dying / in space" are stars, that is,
I as soon as he derives the metaphorical meaning, the sense of the
I passage becomes clear. Kinnell can feel himself part of the stars
i
; (and by extension heaven?) only indirectly, by virtue of the star
light on the stones of earth, stones which seem to share in man's
madness.
137
In the next two sections of the poem, Kinnell makes an impor
tant descent into a mineshaft, "the unbreathable goaf / of everything
I ever craved and lost." His footprints fill behind him, a vanishing
past, but they fill with "pre-sacrificial trills of canaries." In
the mineshaft an old man stirs a cauldron of parts of birds and flow
ers, "strings of white light," and "sand stolen from the upper bells
of hourglasses," indicative of the future, but produces only:
Nothing.
Always nothing. Ordinary blood
boiling away in the glare of the brow lamp.
The assertion of emptiness in this stanza is clear, but in the next
stanza the reader finds a qualified retraction of it:
And yet, no,
perhaps not nothing. Perhaps
not ever nothing.
In his ascent from the cave, Kinnell reaches "the whorled arch
way of the fingerprint of all things," clearly an allusion to the
fingerprinting of the previous poem wherein the commonality of desire
was implied, and discovers the commonality of all things in despair.
The next section of the poem presents the reader with several
images from earlier poems, witness trees, burning bones, blue light,
and sacrifice. And once again, the creative reader is forced to
relax his deliberative powers. He is rewarded by a strong (if inex
plicable in its reversal) assertion of salvation:
in the legends of blood sacrifice
the fatted calf
takes the bonfire into his arms, and he
burns it.
The reader now adjusts his global representation of The Book
of Nightmares as search for salvation to include this strange vision
138
of the self-healing powers of the spirit. Kinnell offers, after all,
a philosophical hope derived from the link he draws between the
fires of the spirit and the stars, reflecting their fires downward.
The last section of the poem presents this statement in a lyrical
yet emotionally distant way:
As above: the last scattered stars
kneel down in the star-form of the Aquarian age:
a splash
on the top of the head,
on the grass of this earth even the stars love, splashes
of the sacred waters . . .
So below: in the graveyard
the lamps start lighting up, one for each of us,
in all the windows
of stone.
"The Path Among the Stones" thus becomes the most powerfully
optimistic of the nightmares, maintaining the darkness of vision
Kinnell has been unable to escape, but taking solace in the ties
between man and the natural world of stone, bird, shell, and star.
"Las tnes s"— Making
Connections
The final poem in The Book of Nightmares, "Lastness," comes
back to the beginning in several ways. The first secion recalls
the setting of the first poem, during which Kinnell built a fire
in the rain. The implication is that this fire is in some sense
eternal, that the spirit in which it was built, in the full recog
nition of inevitable death, warms animate and inanimate alike. The
fire takes on the unquenchable quality of the human spirit, and may
be taken by some readers as a metaphor for the poems themselves.
In the second section, the bear, whose presence was so puz
zling in the first poem, is recalled, forcing the reader to make an ^
interesting implicature. Catching Kinnell’s scent, the bear under
stands that:
a creature, a death-creature
watches from the fringe of the trees,
finally he understands
I am no longer here, he himself
from the fringe of the trees watches
a black bear
get up, eat a few flowers, trudge away,
all his fur glistening
in the rain.
Kinnell identifies with the bear so strongly that he becomes
the bear, watching himself. This is more than a neat trick, for
it is this dramatic identification with the natural world (as in
the eighth poem, "The Call Across the Valley of Not-Knowing," where
human contact is equated with the calling of the bears across the
valley) which provides man with the only salvation he can expect.
This point is reinforced in the description of the birth of
Kinnell’s son, Sancho Fergus:
When he came wholly forth
I took him in my hands and bent
over and smelled
the black, glistening fur
of his head, as empty space
must have bent
over the newborn planet
and smelled the grasslands and the ferns.
Interesting experiences are in store for the reader as the
section continues:;
Here, between answer
and nothing, I stand, in the old shoes
flowed over by rainbows of hen-oil,
each shoe holding the bones
which ripple together in the communion
of the step,
and which open out
in front into toes, the whole foot trying
to dissolve into the future.
140
The opening phrase, "here, between answer / and nothing" is engaging
in its exactness as a description of the process of reading the poems;
but "rainbows of hen-oil," and the mention of shoes "holding the
bones / which ripple together" may strike the reader as nothing more
than disappointing flourishes which only further complicate the
earlier images. But if he attends closely to the word "communion,"
he can make the inference that taking a step is a religious expe
rience. And the stanza seems worth the trouble, after all, in its
concluding image of the foot dissolving "into the future."
The next stanza offers another interesting challenge:
A clatter of elk hooves.
Has the top sphere
emptied itself? Is it true
the earth is all there is, and the earth does not last?
Many readers assume that words published in books must have
been clearly understood by someone before they got there. Surely
this is not necessarily the case with "a clatter of elk hooves."
The reader has nothing in memory, recoded or otherwise, with which
to associate this image. He may speculate that the hooves are a
verisimilitude detail which further set the mountain scene, or that
they suggest the passing of time by their sound. But these are specu
lations only, and illustrate the lengths to which the reader must
sometimes go to create meaning in modern poems. Following this leap,
the reader may wonder what the "top sphere" is. If he happens to
remember the hourglass image of the previous poem, he will have no
trouble. But if the implicature does not occur to him, he must be
prepared to go on without it, without feeling that he is inadequate
to the task.
141
Standing "between answer / and nothing," then, Kinnell comes
to the same conclusion he has reached repeatedly in these poems, that
"living brings you to death, there is no other road." But in this
poem, the reader's problem is to integrate that vision with the
poem's comparatively light, postscript tone. Ultimately addressed
to Sancho Fergus, Kinnell seems to be making the vision tender for
the child's sake. Almost whimsically, the poem comments on itself:
This is the tenth poem
and it is the last. It is right
at the last, that one
and zero
walk off together,
walk off the end of these pages together,
one creature walking away side by side
with the emptiness.
Part of the felicity of the stanza is the implication that
emptiness is outside man, that zero equals nothing while man equals
something. To walk side by side with the emptiness is both the essen
tial vision of these poems and Kinnell's challenge to his children.
Yet, he offers here, as he has in other poems, the tools his children
need to fulfill such a challenge, including a sense of the circu
larity of living and dying. This craving voice of the dead at
the end of the section becomes in the next section of the poem
the wail common to all things, and is equated with music. The natural
terms in which the music is described remind the reader of its source
in the natural world. The violinist puts his face "into the opened
palm / of wood"; there is "a shower of rosin"; and the strings, blood
strings of the previous poem, are "the sliced intestine / of cat."
142
In the next section when Kinnell refers to the poem as a "con
cert of one / divided among himself," the reader draws the inference
equating this wail not only with music but with poetry as well, spe
cifically Kinnell's own poems, which offer some sense of permanence
for him after all. He also refers to the poem as an "earthward ges
ture" of one who sought heaven, but "obeys the necessity and falls.
I I
The poem concludes with its greatest challenge for the reader,
for it offers Sancho Fergus a tool powerful and repelling (if not
distinctly disappointing) in its cynicism.
Sancho Fergus! Don’t cry!
Or else, cry.
On the body,
on the blued flesh, when it is
laid out, see if you can find
the one flea which is.laughing.
The problem for the reader is that the movement of the poem,
indeed of the whole work, has been into and through this sort of
cynicism toward a more tender view of existence. Why Kinnell wants
to return to the cynical in his conclusion can only be guessed at.
The body Kinnell refers to is no doubt his own. As a father protec
tive of his newborn son, he wants to offer the child a way of coping
with his father's inevitable death. He is, perhaps, asking his son
(and his other readers) to see with humor the necessity that life
itself feed on death, to seek out that life in death’s inescapable
presence, and to find the courage to laugh at the immense spectacle
of nothingness.
143
CHAPTER VII
j VALUING THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES
i
| The final part of the process of reading The Book of Nightmares
j is the process of valuing, which we defined in Chapter V as a coming
to terms with the intentions, form, and universality of experience
l
j expressed. This is an ongoing process and cannot be adequately summed
\ up in a few words; it is the process of drawing further connections
between the poems, creating answers for oneself for the questions
raised by the poems, integrating, during the course of the effort
i
j to reach a fuller understanding of the poems, the hope and despair
| they offer, into one’s system of values. This process, which
j obviously involves some re-reading, is a matter of deciding, in one’s
J own terms, the character of Kinnell’s expression regarding the major
issues of birth, living, love, and death the poems explore. As the
reader comes to grips with Kinnell’s expression, he realizes that
I
the essential source of energy and beauty in the poems is Kinnell’s
| struggle with these major concerns of us all.
How readers proceed with this integration (uptake in the full
sense of the word) can only be suggested, for even more than the
I
i processing of the syntax, integration of the poems into one's value
system is largely dependent on the background the reader brings
to the poems, his mental set for reading them, the uses he wishes
to make of them, and so on. ...
Though the process of integration often includes turning one’s
attention to other sources— Kinnell’s earlier work, his interviews
and essays, and secondary critical materials— many readers will prefer
to begin with the relationship they have developed with the poems
themselves. These readers will seek a firmer grounding with the poems
by exploring their intricacies without outside assistance. One
reader, for example, might wish to ask himself some questions about
the nature of the speaker in The Book of Nightmares. What is it in
Kinnell's conception of poetry that forces him to present his poems
directly to us, without the appearance of a mediating persona? If
the poems represent Kinnell's own journey, how (and when) can they
be said to speak for all of us? Answering these questions, the
reader will recall that the poems begin and end with essentially
personal statements, but that there is a progression in between them
into the existences of other individuals, into social consciousness,
into philosophical analysis of the nature of love, and into metaphysi
cal dreaming on the relationships of man to the natural world. That
Kinnell creates this journey of the self through all its important
relationships prevents the poems from being merely confessional.
Exploring this idea further, the reader may want to consider
the progression of specific poems from the personal through the uni
versal and back to the personal again. The first poem, "Under the
Maud Moon" works this way: the opening of the poem lingers in the
poet's personal setting; the central fourth section records Maud's
birth in universal terms (as compared with the personal description
of Fergus' birth), "somersaulting alone in the oneness," "sculpting
145
the world with each thrash," "being itself closes down all over her,"
and so on; and the last section offers the poems personally to Maud.
Another way to explore the question of the personal and the
universal is by comparing specific passages, such as sections two and
six of "Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight." Section
two contains these lines:
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from- your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of
your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into
the wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever . . .
And section six goes like this:
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
The differences in tone and rhythm between these passages are
dramatic enough to require no comment. Suffice it to say that the
first is frantically personal in its depiction of Kinnell's protec
tive feelings toward Maud, while the second is a lyrically philosophi
cal picture of death.
The foregoing is intended as a merely illustrative and not
exhaustive discussion of how the caring reader might go about dealing
with conception of self Kinnell's aesthetic seems to demand. At the
least, it is clear that Kinnell uses his own "undisguised" experience,
146
his "real," personal self to open up for himself and his readers the
universal issues of living, loving, and dying. Kinnell's advice to
Maud in the seventh poem is analogous here. He tells her to "reach
deeper into the sorrows to come," to "kiss the mouth which tells you,
here, here is the world." Similarly, Kinnell reaches deeper into the
self in order to engage the reader in a sense of the commonality of
all men, and in their oneness with the universe.
There are, of course, many other kinds of questions the reader
might wish to explore for himself in his attempt to come to terms
with The Book of Nightmares. He may wish to trace a set of images,
such as the hen or bear, or the images of light and darkness, or fire
imagery through the poems. He may ask what the relationship of the
form is to the content of the poems. He may seek a fuller understand
ing of the structure of the poems and their relationship to each
other. He may wish to explore the varieties of tone and rhythm in
the poems; he may wish to undertake a transformational analysis of
Kinnell's syntax in order to "explain" his style; or he may wish to
use the poems as grist for a psychoanalysis of Kinnell himself; none
of these approaches is illegitimate for the caring reader seeking to
call the poems more fully to himself.
However, this variety of approaches can result in heated dis
putes among readers, readers who are bound to feel that the approaches
they don’t select are those which don't direct themselves toward the
important questions. And clearly, some avenues do seem to take the
reader away from rather than more richly into the experience which
generated his questions in the first place. However, by continually
147
returning to that experience, any of these avenues can lead the reader
to the meaning he seeks, to a wealthier appreciation of the poems,
and to a wider understanding of the aesthetic which engendered them.
148
CHAPTER VIII
TURNING TO OTHER SOURCES
The foregoing analysis of the process of reading The Book of
Nightmares has uncovered by inductive methods the principles of
Kinnell’s aesthetic: these principles include the infrequent use
of personae, the direct use of his own experience to lay bare the
esssential nature of living, imagery which the reader must partici
pate in elucidating, and formal units which are seldom extricable
from the reading experience. The reader who now seeks to further
his understanding of Kinnell’s aesthetic may wish to turn to other
sources including secondary critical works, Kinnell’s earlier poems,
and his own words on the subject. Conrad Hilberry’s "The Sructure of
Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares" is one such useful tool.'*'
Hilberry on Kinnell
The first to take the poems up in detail, Hilberry’s essay is
as straightforward as its title. It begins with the argument that
The Book of Nightmares moves from wholeness to fragmentation to
wholeness. The idea has some appeal and can be defended (though
Hilberry uses other kinds of support) on the basis of the reading
experience. The births of Kinnell’s daughter and son at the beginning
and end of the book are the sources of the wholeness and the central
fifth and sixth poems describe the individual and social depravity
149
Kinnell forces himself to examine- (Hilberry makes the interesting
2
point that "both poems have the quality of legal documents." "In
the Hotel of Lost Light," which records life and death of a drunk,
is signed and dated as if it were a kind of death certificate,
while "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible" contains a last
will and testament.) The reader will remember his progression
into the questions of death, and from them, beginning in the sixth
poem into the genuine hope for man’s salvation in love, art, and
nature. Kinnell becomes thoroughly acquainted with death in order
to open again to the possibilities of life.
Speaking in detail about the organization of "The Hen Flower,"
Hilberry makes the point that "two views of death alternate." The
reader will remember his difficulty in determining Kinnell's attitude
toward resurrection when he encounters this passage in Hilberry's
essay:
The first [view] sees death as a simple extinction, the cheeks
of the axed hen caving in, the gizzard convulsing, the next
egg skidding forth, ridding her of the life to come. This
is the tone of the passage in 5 in which the mockingbird sings
the cry of the rifle, the tree holds the bones of the sniper,
and the chameleon is not changed, not raised incorruptible,
but remains the color of blood. It is the tone of the para
graph in 6 in which the rooster groans out for Kinnell, as
for the stonily docrinaire Peter, it is the empty morning.
But playing off against this view of death as literal and final
are those wonderful, half-comic hen-resurrection passages—
the one in which the beheaded hen waits for the blaze in the
genes that according to gospel shall carry it back into pink
skies, where geese cross at twilight honking in tongues. And
the one in which the Northern Lights, seen through the speal-
bone of a ram, appear to spell mysteries against the black
sky. And the one in which Kinnell flings high the carcass
of the hen and watches the dead wings creak open as she soars
across the arms of the Bear.^
The trouble with this description is that it captures the
structure of the poem as artifact but captures none of the
i structure of the reader’s experience. The agony of not knowing,
!
j which Kinnell carefully built into that experience, and which the
, reader necessarily participates in as he reads, is distorted out
i
of existence by such a description. This does not mean Hilberry
i is wrong. It simply means that he is interested in reporting not
I
; on the reader’s experience but on the recoded version of it he
has reached by separating himself out of that experience. It is
■ important that our hypothetical tabula rasa reader recognize this
difference in approaches to the poems if he is to maintain his
confidence in the reading experience. Hilberry's description, by
ignoring the pain generated by the reading experience, makes the poem
I
; seem easy, and may convince the reader unfamiliar with the authorial
1 tone of most critical essays that reading poetry, while easy for
others, is just too difficult for him. Once he recognizes the tone
i
and motive of the critical essay, however, the reader can go on from
there to make use of it on his own terms.
To his credit, Hilberry does give passing recognition to the
persistent ambiguities of the poems, and his essay demonstrates that
his route through the poems has brought him to a full appreciation of
them. The most interesting aspects of the essay, however, are those
which manifest actual differences between Hilberry's experience of
the poems and that of our hypothetical reader. These differences
can be of real use to the confident reader, as we shall see.
Referring to "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible," Hil
berry says:
Only the prayer in the last section, "do not remove this last
poison cup from our lips," may be intended without irony.
151
Perhaps we must drink horror to bottom of the cup if we are
to have any hope of recovering from it.^
The reader will remember that his reaction to the lines was
directly opposite Hilberry's, that the line represented the highly
ironic explanation of the title of the poem. Hilberry is making,
I would argue, a misguided case for his point, probably based on
Kinnell's insistence in the poems (and in his interviews and essays)
that we face rather than ignore the serious questions of existence,
that we "reach deeper into the sorrows." Kinnell is not, however,
suggesting that we pursue ("drink horror to the bottom of the cup")
the depravity described in "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible,"
the destruction of others, the land, and our respect for our own
bodies. He is recording the human thirst for such destruction in
order to do battle with it.
This is a case in which the reader's mental set, here influ
enced by his beliefs about Kinnell’s attitudes, has led him astray;
away, that is, from the actual experience of reading.
Another interesting difference between Hilberry*s experience
and that of our hypothetical reader can be seen in his comment dis
missing "The Path Among the Stones":
"The Path Among the Stones" (IX), for me the least energetic
of the poems, recapitulates the movement of the whole book
down into the dismal mineshaft where a^man squats by his hell-
flames and then, tentatively, back up.
This difference, however, is probably more a matter of taste than
mental sets, and illustrates the reality of different reading expe
riences provided by different tastes among readers. Perhaps Hilberry
finds the metaphysical stance of the ninth poem unappealing, and
152
therefore lacking in energy. Our hypothetical reader had more diffi
culties with the lack of energy in the syntax in parts of "The Dead
Shall Be Raised Incorruptible" than he had in accommodating "The Path
I Among the Stones" into his global representation of The Book of Night-
i
! mares.
I I... i
I
| One final example will further illustrate the use a reader can
i
make of the differing experience of another reader. Hilberry finds
the tenth poem, "Lastness," magnificent, and offers a view of the
j final lines which can be helpful in resolving some doubts we had
i about them:
j
; We are left with an image of how one may live: the sky-diver,
floating free, opening his arms into the attitude of flight, as
he obeys the necessity and falls. He has come back to the instruc
tions of "The Hen Flower," to let go, to throw himself on the
mercy of darkness. The ambiguity persists to the end. The worms
on his back are still spinning forth and the silk of his loves
are already gnawing away at them. And for a son whose father's
body will be laid out, both reactions are fitting: Don't cry!
Or else, cry.^
; Hilberry further elucidates:
When one and zero walk off the end of the poem's pages together,
they are not headed toward a conclusion. The lone creature can
only keep on journeying, side by side with the emptiness. But
! now, at the poem's end, the journey reverberates with cosmic
; terror and grandeur.^
It is helpful to see the lines as suggesting for Fergus, for
Kinnell himself, for us all, a continuation of the journey of the
poems into "cosmic terror and grandeur." In this view, the sardonic
bitterness of the laughing flea is not the end of the journey, but
simply another step along the path; and the aesthetic behind The Book
of Nightmares not a set of tenets, but an ongoing process of search
and discovery.
153
A Look at Earlier Work
The development of Kinnell's aesthetic, as it shows itself in
The Book of Nightmares, is a progression from his earliest work, a
laying bare of his experience in order to come to an essential bed
rock statement of existence. Even his earliest poems, written in
his teens and twenties, hint of the Kinnell to come; star and fire
imagery, and the imagery of light and darkness are all evident in
the early poems, as is Kinnell's personal relationship with nature.
Like many contemporary poets, Kinnell did not move beyond
conventional rhymes and rhythms without first moving through them,
as this stanza from "Passion" shows:
Overhead the stars stood in their right course.
Later a mourning dove stirred the night
With soft cries. I was deaf, and the light
Out of the east fell on extinguished sight.
My new eyes searched the passion of the stars.
In addition to conventional rhymes and rhythms, the stanza
also indicates that the beauty of language Kinnell would later come
to through a more complicated syntax was part of his development
as a poet. The syntax here is quite straightforward, and less
interesting than it would later become.
Another gradual element of Kinnell's development is his voice.
He had to learn in stages his ultimately eloquent views on the per
sona. His little poem "Walking Out Alone in Dead of Winter" is
subject to the same criticisms Kinnell leveled at Robert Bly, that
the poem does not actually transcend the voice and personality of
the poet, but simply ignores it:
Under the snow the secret
Muscles of the underearth
154
Grow taught
In the pain, the torn love
Of labor. The strange
Dazzled world yearning dumbly
To be born.
Here we see the imagery of birth, so important in Kinnell’s
later work, and the dramatic identification with nature; but here
the identification is reversed. Later Kinnell avoids the pathetic
fa.llacy by admitting the human feeling first, then seeking its
representation in nature, and later still, as in "The Bear," by
identifying the human feeling in terms of the realistic details
of nature.
In addition to Kinnell’s close relationship with nature,
his early work also shows him seeking out at times the horrors
of existence. "Sunset at Timberline," though it does not wrestle
with the horrors as his later work does, shows this openness to
the more gruesome side of life:
"Shit,
Today I see this cat
Blow his nose,
And right in front of the shoeshine
Boys he bends down
And greases his goddam shoes
With his snots ..."
Kinnell also shows in his early work his interest in the
tough questions of existence. "Meditation Among the Tombs" contains
this conversation between an old man and a youth:
Old Man: Later, when our love burned not so wild
Or brilliant, but with steady, subtle fuse
And she was fevered with a coming child
They said to me, "Choose you the living wife,
Or risking her, the babe delivered safe?"
Youth: They might have chosen better word than choose.
155
Old Han: You who are so young have no such memories
Of trysting by the oak in the thick
And shining grass, or kissing under skies
And singing wind. So which alternative,
A dead creation or a dying love?
Youth: Creation is a sorry thing to pick.
Both the bitterness and tenderness with which Kinnell examines ques
tions like this one are evident in these stanzas.
Kinnell’s first book, What a Kingdom It Was, further illustrates
the development of his aesthetic. The book was praised highly by
critics and other poets, among them John Logan who called it "one
g
of the finest books of the past decade," and James Dickey who said:
"Kinnell’s development will depend on the actual events of his life.
And it is a life that I think we should watch. It is warm, generous,
9
reflective, and friendly." Ralph J. Mills makes the point that
Dickey’s comment was indeed prophetic:
For what we encounter as an essential ingredient in his work
as it grows is not only the presence of the poet as man and
speaker, but also his identification, through thematic recur
rences, repeated images revelatory of his deepest concerns
and most urgent feelings, with the experiences his poems drama
tize. . . . [Kinnell] explores relentlessly the actualities
of his existence to wrest from them what significance for life
he can. Through the compelling force of his art, we find our
selves engaged in this arduous search with him.
It turns out that while Dickey’s comment was prophetic, it was
also in some respects mistaken in its application to What a Kingdom It
Was, for many of the incidents in that volume were f ictitious. ^ ^
"First Song," for instance, makes use of boyhood experiences of the
rural Illinois twilight which are not Kinnell's own. The voice of the
poem, using third person and past tense, is nostalgic and distant,
perhaps happily so, for the distance saves the poem from sentimentality.
156
In "First Communion" and "To Christ Our Lord," however, Kin
nell explores the relationship of the sacred to the natural and secu
lar, explorations which show the beginnings of his relentless search
for salvation. "First Communion" concludes that, compared with the
beauties of nature, church is a "disappointing shed" in which to
worship. "To Christ Our Lord," on the other hand, admits the natural
laws of survival, though they conflict with the purity of Christian
love: "There had been nothing to do but surrender, / To kill and
to eat." The poem records, again in third person, Kinnell's boyhood
killing of a bird for Christmas dinner, and the last stanza draws
a relationship like that seen in so much of his later work, between
the stars and human acts:
At night on snowshoes on the drifting field
He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?
The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.
Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,
The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.
Already we see the hint of Kinnell's stance "between answer
and nothing." Mills discusses this stanza in terms of acceptance
of the crucifixion:
There can be little consolation or resolution in this image
with its indications of death, but there is a certain under
standing, possibly, the beginnings of acceptance. A darkened
universe returns to the watcher an enlarged symbol of the actu
ality he has so painfully met; the crucified figure, Christ
or bird, is the proper image for the world's conditions.^2
Another poem concerned with the relationship of the sacred
to the secular is "Easter." Here the voice is plural, but quite
personal in its description of a congregation, unmoved by the Easter
sermon, coming to terms with ressurection as they watch "unrealistic
157
fisherman" dragging the river for the body of a drowned nurse. The
speaker advises her at the poemfs end not to be too sorry
That the dream has ended. Turn
On the dream you lived through the unwavering gaze.
It is as you thought. The living burn.
In the floating days may you discover grace.
The precise statement that "the living burn" may stand as explanation
of Kinnell’s increasing use of fire imagery.
While death and resurrection are central among the subjects of
Kinnell’s early work, his insistence upon a sense of humor for deal
ing with our most wretched common miseries is also illustrated in the
playful rhythms of his little poem, "In a Parlor Containing a Table":
In a parlor containing a table
And three chairs, three men confided
Their inmost thoughts to one another.
I, said the first, am miserable.
I am miserable, the second said.
I think that for me the correct word
Is miserable, asserted the third.
Well, they said at last, itfs quarter to
two.
Good night. Cheer up. Sleep well.
You too. You too. You too.
The long poem concluding What a Kingdom It Was, "The Avenue
Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," seeks again to
find the sacred in the secular and shows most clearly Kinnell’s debt,
both thematically and formally, to Whitman. Glauco Cambon uses
the poem as an extreme example of the ease in diction and rhythmical
movement of Kinnell’s poems, one which builds by accumulation and
expansion rather than by compression. He goes on to say that "a
Whitmanic spirit moves this expressionist endeavor to seize the throb
bing and shrill variety of New York life, and the incidental failures
158
■— — 1 13
of thickness, loose diction, and commentary are Whitmanic too."
Kinnell himself has said that "in Whitman ordinary and average things
are seen in a sacred light. He was the really democratic poet, who,
standing among the streets, finds the sacred exists there."^
Mills places the poem in the tradition of Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass, Crane’s The Bridge, and Williams’ Paterson. He goes on
to say that the poem moves from light into darkness and captures
the victimization by the God of the Old Testament and by the promise
of America of the characters inhabiting it.^
A child lay in the flames.
It was not the plan. Abraham
Stood in terror at the duplicity.
Isaac whom he loved lay in the flames.
The Lord turned away washing
His hands without soap and water
Like a common housefly.
And later:
From the blind gut Pitt to the East River of Fishes
The Avenue cobbles a swath through the discolored air,
A roadway of refuse from the teeming shores and ghettos
And the Caribbean Paradise, into the new ghetto and new
paradise,
This God-forsaken Avenue bearing the initial of Christ
Through the haste and carelessness of the ages,
The sea standing in heaps, which keeps on collapsing,
Where drowned suffer a C-change,
And remain the common poor.
The intense social consciousness we see in "The Avenue Bearing
the Initial of Christ into the New World" is further developed in
"The Last River" (in Body Rags) and is the same social consciousness
we see in all its bitterness in "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorrupti
ble."
The development of Kinnell’s aesthetic in his second and third
collections, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock and Body Rags,
159
j progresses toward a tightening of syntax and imagery, a darkening
l
of vision, a deepening of Kinnell’s relationship with nature, and
an increasing use of the poet’s personal voice. Mills sums up Kin-
j nell's development in these two volumes this way:
The desire to articulate what the poet sees, hears, thinks,
' and dreams with undeviating accuracy, with as little departure
I from the quality of the original experience as possible, causes
i him to tighten his language ever further; imagery becomes sharp,
spare, precise and is set down with an admirable directness
! that enhances the effect of lyric purity. And the relationship
' to nature we have observed throughout Kinnell’s work increases
in importance for him. Like Roethke or Gary Snyder, he is
attracted to the nonhuman world, not as a field for intellectual
conquest but as the basic context of man's living— the only
one he really knows— in which other forms of life manifest
i their being together with him.
i
‘ We can see Kinnell going deeper into the self (as seen in
i
j relation to nature) which makes up his existence in these stanzas
■ from "Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock":
' I kneel at a pool,
| I look through my face
[ At the bacteria I think
! I see crawling through the moss.
| My face sees me,
The water stirs, the face,
Looking preoccupied,
r Gets knocked from its bones.
I
I
j But Kinnell’s most profound use of the nonhuman world is displayed
I in "The Bear," where his identification with the animal is
. . . urgent, violent, and terrifyingly absolute; the whole
poem possesses the aura of symbolic nightmare in which the
meaning may prove elusive but the details are dreadfully realis
tic. The poet goes off at once on the track of the bear; no
hesitations or deliberations are involved, for every step pro
ceeds with a predetermined and frightenly rigid logic, while
nonetheless, nothing appears reasonable or humane. The manu
facture of the fatal bait with its vicious sharpened wolf’s
rib for the bear to swallow marks the first stage in a hunt
of ever more agonizing, distasteful, yet necessary propor
tions . ^ ^
160
Ultimately, the poet-hunter sleeps inside the hide of the
dead bear, merging his identity with the bear’s, and dreams the bear's
dream, repeating from the bear's point of view its death. The last
section of the poem gives an eerie eternity to the whole scene as
more bears are born:
I awaken I think. Harshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one
hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor
of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?
The combination here of concretely sensory detail with elusive
meaning, as we saw, is common in The Book of Nightmares. "The Bear,"
also written in seven sections, and a nightmare in its own right,
clearly stands as a precursor to The Book of Nightmares; the reader
who, having explored this poem along with Kinnell's other earlier
poems, now turns back to that work, will find himself attending with
new awareness and depth to the imagery, voice, and themes of the
nightmares.
Kinnell on Kinnell
Kinnell's essays and interviews are another valuable tool for
the reader seeking a richer understanding of the aesthetic engendering
161
The Book of Nightmares. The first interest of such a reader will
be to see what Kinnell has to say about the poems themselves. These
comments are useful for three reasons. First, they are informative
about the kinds of questions other readers have asked Kinnell about
the poems; second, they help to reveal the aesthetics behind the
poems; and third, they give the reader new directions and new strate
gies for rereading. The poet's comments, however, must be treated
with caution, for as Hilberry points out, the poet's comments on
18
a poem tend to stand as the last word, diminishing the poem. Kin
nell also has said:
It is a modern assumption that there is a key to every poem
and the author has it. . . . I happen to think that the author
may be the last one to know what his work is about. I've often
noticed that the more I like a poem I've written, the less
IQ
sure I am that I can explicate it.1:7
This caution explains why the reader himself was often faced with
difficulties in explaining the concerns of this or that poem. The
poet wrote these confusions into the poem intentionally. Kinnell
sheds more light on the reader's experience of confusion when he says:
What I wanted to do in The Book of Nightmares in regard to
politics, as well as in regard to other elements that come
into the poem, was to bring from the central core of the poem
a sort of light onto— well, I could say onto any subject what
ever. I wanted it to be that any one of those ten sections
could have been about anything at all. This light would bind
each unconnected thing into the wholeness of the poem.
This wholeness, in spite of the reader's confusions, was an essential
part of the experience of reading the poems; and it is the wholeness
which ultimately directs the reader through the fear, transcience,
21
and death and towards the affirmation offered by the poems.
162
In this regard, Kinnell goes on to say:
I could evoke in the poem the most revolting presences. I
could do this in total faith that something was sustaining
the whole poem that would not allow it to be a record of self-
disgust, or hatred of nature, or fear of death, or loneliness,
or defeat, but rather ultimately a restorative and healing
and, if I can use the word, a happy poem.
There is a sense in which Kinnell's freedom to include the
horrors of existence and yet make his poems restorative depends on
the reader's assent. Since the central purpose of art has always
been restorative, the caring reader will find, and if necessary
create, the affirmation of poetry, no matter how revolting its
details are. The creation of this affirmation is the essential
strategy of the caring reader of poetry, and like other strategies,
it is learned. Readers unwilling to meet the extra demands for
creating affirmation placed on them by contemporary aesthetics like
Kinnell's will surely find contemporary art lacking the moral dimen
sion affirmation provides. The willingness-to learn the strategy
of seeking affirmation begins in many readers when they have a sense
of the poet's good intentions. That is why we are so often interested
in how poems were generated. The Book of Nightmares, Kinnell tells
us, began in this way:
I began it as a single ten-part sequence. I had been rather
immersed in the Duino Elegies. In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke
says, in effect, "Don't try to tell the angels about the glory
of your feelings, or how splendid your soul is; they know all
about that. Tell them something they'd be more interested
in, something that you know better than they, tell them about
the things of the world." So it came to me to write a poem
called "The Things." Like the Elegies it would be a poem with
out a plot, yet with a close relationship among the parts,
and a development from beginning to end. I did write a draft
of that entire poem one spring, while I was living in Seattle.
I didn't like it and threw it away, almost all of it. One
of the surviving passages became "The Hen Flower." Then I
163
started again. The poem has moved far from its original inten
tion to be about things and now probably does try to tell the
angels about the glory of my feelings!2
This charming admission explains the reader's curiosity during the
reading process about the voice, character, and life experience of
| Kinnell himself, and about the relationship of these to the "things,"
the details, of the poems.
Among the specific questions we had during the reading expe-
i rience, some concerned "The Hen Flower." Kinnell’s interest in hens
i derives from his early memories of his family’s henhouse in Paw
tucket. "Though not very personable, hens have an unusual psychic
i
dimension, due, I think, to the suppression of their capacity to
24
fly." This psychic dimension is manifested for Kinnell by the
I trances hens seem to go into when their heads are held under their
1
wings, or their throats or stroked, or they are "faced toward infin
ity" by holding their beaks down on a straight line drawn on the
| ground. It is is these trances which suggest the willingness in
the hen (and by extension in man) to give in to the mercy of the
! darkness, to stop fighting existence and accept it.
! Another question we had about "The Hen Flower" concerned its
i
j closing stanza:
^ Even this haunted room
all its materials photographed with tragedy,
: even the tiny crucifix drifting face down at the center
I of earth,
1 even these feathers freed from their wings forever
; are afraid.
It is possible that Kinnell’s intentions cannot be discerned
i
■ here without his help. Of the image of the crucifux Kinnell says:
I wanted to retain the Christian terminology, but to alter
its reference. I wasn't trying to say that the cross of , ,
Jesus lives at the very center of existence. I was supposing
that a body that pressed down on the earth creates under itself
a "shaft of darkness" that gets smaller and smaller as it
approaches the center of the earth, until at the bottom it
makes a formalized shape— which here happens, due to the form
of the outstretched body, to be a cross.
And of the stanza in general Kinnell says:
As for the "haunted room," I was thinking of one of the rooms
in my house that people say is haunted. The walls of haunted
rooms are supposed to hold the sorrows of their former inhabi
tants like photographic negatives. If we could know that every
thing in existence knows fear, even the ghosts, we ourselves
would perhaps feel less afraid.^6
These are very useful comments for the rereading strategies they
imply, and we can see how the lines could be taken that way. But
we may seriously ask whether most readers could come to the intended
sense without Kinnell’s comments. In this case, I think they could
not, though as we shall see, Kinnell offers suggestions for rereading
of the concluding lines of "Lastness" which give the reader the
sense that the intention was indeed discernible in the lines. Here,
where fear permeates everything, the reader does not take any comfort
that Kinnell’s (or his own) fear of letting go may be therefore alle
viated. As Kinnell himself has pointed out, however, the poet is
sometimes the last to know what he is getting at. Perhaps years
from now Kinnell will reread the lines for the undiminished trepida
tion the reader saw in them to begin with.
"Dear Stranger Extant in Memory" was the source of more ques
tions for the reader. Virginia of the poem is a mystic with whom
Kinnell has had a long correspondence. She lives in southern Pennsyl
vania in a region described in a review of Malcolm Cowley’s The
Blue Juniata as belonging to the past. Readers who have come to
believe that whatever is confusing in poetry is a result of their
own inadequacies will be happy to see Kinnell's explanation of who
is who in section three of the poem:
So I allude to the fact that Virginia found it amusing to have
her own sense of nonexistence thus confirmed. ("You see,"
I told Mama, "we just think we're here.") In this case, the
"I" is Virginia— that _is confusing.
And since the "I" is Virginia, the "we" is herself and her mother,
not herself and Kinnell, as we inferred. Kinnell met Virginia only
once, over coffee in 1969:
It wasn't a successful meeting. Mostly we warily circled those
strange containers, each other's bodies. I think it's the
opposite of what Plato thought. I think that if people know
each other only mind to mind they hardly know each other at
all. Later, it was again possible for us to write trusting
letters and even to reestablish an intimacy, though we now
knew it was in part illusory, being purely platonic,
"Sexuality," Kinnell explains elsewhere, "is at the very root
of all things." It is natural, therefore, that the reader should be
led to infer a sexual relationship in the poem, and natural also that
he infer the possibility of Virginia's death in its absence, that is,
in the void which separates her from Kinnell at the end of the poem.
Kinnell also offers the reader some useful assistance with the
variety of voices in "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Admit
ting that the poem "fails in some ways," he says it was motivated by
the wish "to understand certain things, such as what has become of us
30
that we can kill on a vast scale and not even be able to say why."
At the root of this evil is technology, for it gives us the power to
ignore our mortality. "Christian man" was the term Kinnell used for
31
"technological man." The other voices in the poem represent various
soldiers, though the lines of section six, about the man with the
broken neck, came to Kinnell when he was thinking about lynchings
166
| 32
in the South. Kinnell also casts some light on our dispute with
i
, Hilberry regarding the lines "do not let this last hour pass, / do
| not remove this last poison cup from our lips." Kinnell says:
And it is the membranes, effigies, etc., the memories of itself
left on the earth by the human race, which is imagined to
I have destroyed itself, who prays for earthly experienc^to
! continue no matter how painful or empty it has become.
I Clearly, We were right in inferring that the lines explain the
irony of the title, that the dead are raised incorruptible in their
desire for continued destruction.
I
Kinnell confirms the reader's confidence in another of his
| strategies, that of relaxed participation in the images of "The
1 Path Among the Stones." Asked if the stones represent poetry,
| Kinnell remarked:
I notice that readers, especially those trained in universi-
; ties, tend to look straight off for a symbolic interpretation.
: It's true that things in poems sometimes are symbolic, but
not often in so direct and mechanical a way as this standing
for that and that standing for this. Stones, for example.
When stones come into a poem, they usually are actually
stones. Part of poetry's usefulness in the world is that
it pays some of our huge unpaid tribute to the things and
creatures that share the earth with us.
It is interesting to note that the reader's tolerance for ambi
guity, his willingness to relax his need to pin down with finality
this or that image improved during the process of reading the poems,
almost as if the poems themselves were teaching him this tolerance.
Compare, for instance, the experience of reading "The Hen Flower"
which was marked with questions about the image and about Kinnell's
apparently conflicting attitudes toward death with the ambiguity-
tolerant participation the reader experienced in the imagery of "The
167
Path Among the Stones." Because the reader was able to relax, he
was able to discern Kinnell's intention precisely: the tightening
of the relationship between man and the other elements of the natural
world from stones to stars.
The tone of the concluding lines of The Book of Nightmares
still troubled us however:
Sancho Fergus! Don't cry!
Or else cry.
On the body,
on the blued flesh, when it is
laid out, see if you can find
the one flea which is laughing.
Because our confidence in our reading strategies had grown, and
because we had been watching the progression of the poems through
their dark center toward affirmation, we were suspicious of Kinnell's
motives for turning away from that affirmation. Becuase it seemed
pointless that the poems end in bitterness, we created the affirma
tion we sought, rationalizing the bitterness away. It turns out
that an affirmation of sorts was exactly what Kinnell intended, just
as we thought he should. He did not realize at the time he wrote
the lines, however, that the affirmation would be quite so difficult
for the reader to create, as he makes clear: "I hoped the flea
of the last line wouldn't sound quite so tentative. I had been think
ing, you see, that fleas on the body of a happy person would be a
35
bit happier than other fleas." What this suggests is a strategy
for rereading which the reader can use to arrive more easily at the
affirmation the lines intend. The essence of the strategy is simply
168
to trust the necessity for affirmation. By doing so, the reader
is able to recognize that the image offers Fergus (and Kinnell him
self) the deliverance achieved by understanding that the natural
regeneration of existence is itself an ironic situation, one which
can be taken with both sadness and joy.
In addition to Kinnell’s specific comments on The Book of
Nightmares, his more general remarks on writing also reveal the read
ing strategies his aesthetic requires. His attitudes towards per
sonae, for instance, imply a reader willing to give up the literary
barrier of "the speaker" (as The Book of Nightmares gradually taught
us to do) and allow the poet to speak at one and the same time in
his own voice and yet for all of us. Kinnell calls in "Poetry, Per
sonality, and Death" for the death of the self or ego which separates
itself
. . . from the life of the planet, which keeps us apart from
one another, which makes us feel self-conscious, inadequate,
lonely, suspicious, possessive, jealous, awkward, fearful,
and hostile; which thwarts our deepest desire, which is to
be one with all creation.
The death of this conquering self makes way for a transcendent self
which can relax and merge with the life around it. This transcendent
self is the ideal voice of poetry, but it cannot be created by simply
ignoring one’s own personality as Robert Bly does, Kinnell argues,
in "The Busy Man Speaks" nor by taking on a persona which fictional
izes "what one does not want to know is real," as James Dickey does
37
in "The Firebombing." Instead, the poet must confront and express
the worst along with the best in his own character, living and writing
according to Thoreau’s dictum, "Be it life or death, we crave only
169
reality." (Kinnell is not the only contemporary poet, as we shall
see, to call for the expression of reality in poetry.) Exploring
the reality of one’s own personality (including its wretchedness)
i
' carries the risk of revealing at its center only more wretchedness,
but carries also the hope that such exploration may transfigure us.
(Perhaps the weakness of "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorrupti
ble" is not so much a failure of syntax, as we had guessed, but a
! failure of voice. Among the voices in the poem, none is Kinnell's
|
own voice exploring and transcending human depravity. He seems always
i
I to be talking about someone else's depravity, whether that of the
I
I soldiers, or that of Christian [technological] man. We might say
then that in this poem Kinnell falls into both traps; he creates
personae which fictionalize rather than make real the horrors of
| war, and he gives the appearance, without the substance, of a tran-
i
| scendent voice by ignoring his own personality, his own place in
|
the evils he describes. For this reason, the reader himself does
not know where to stand. Should he stand condemned along with the
rest of technological men, or should he take pride in standing above
| the group, and in recognizing their evils?)
; Whether Kinnell fails his own aesthetic in this poem or not,
he has stated many times the character of voice he strives for, per
haps most clearly in this passage:
t
Often a poem at least starts out being about oneself, about
| one’s experience, a fragment of autobiography. But then if
’ it's really a poem, it goes deeper than personality. It takes
on that strange voice, intensely personal yet common to every
one, in which all rituals are spoken. A poem expresses one's
most private feelings; and these turn out to be the feelings
of everyone else as well. The separate egos vanish. The ^g
poem becomes simply the voice of a creature on earth speaking.
170
Kinnell holds forth cheerfully, to his great surprise, on
other aspects of form as well. His surprise is based on the fact
that he has "always firmly believed that in poetry there is no such
thing as technique that can be talked about apart from the poems
39
that use it." In any case, he does state his general views on
form, which include the belief that for modern poets, conventional
forms such as rhyme and meter are merely mechanical and without rela
tionship to modern living. He illustrates the point by speculating
that:
. . . the Elizabethans, for instance, sensed some lovely repeti
tiveness about existence. The rhymes in their poems are a
way of acknowledging the everlasing return of things. A har
mony sounded through time. The formal aspects of their poems
were ways of sharing in it, perhaps of propitiating it. Most
of us moderns hear nothing like that. When we listen we hear
outer space telling us we’re a race living for a while on a
little planet that will die. As for what lies beyond, we know
nothing— our brains are the wrong kind, or are too small, or
something. When the astronauts looked back on earth, what
they felt most keenly was its fragility. The seasons do return,
but now with poignancy, because almost nothing else does.
Kinnell's mention of the return of the seasons here is inescapably
reminiscent of Burke's illustration of qualitative form.
Many contemporary poets have rejected conventional forms
because the forms inhibit the expression of the realities of modern
living and prevent the poet from seeking new truths. As a poet
experienced with the use of conventional forms, Kinnell is able to
come to clear opinions about their consequences for the poet:
The poem has to confine itself to meanings that one of the
available rhyme words can accommodate. It's here that rhyming
poetry is "easier" than free verse. Seeing the possible rhyme
words taking shape out there ahead of you, you aim for them.
So the rhymes lead you forward and actively aid the composition
171
of the poem. In free verse you have no such guide. You have
nowhgre to go except where the inner drive of the poem takes
you. ^
Speaking of his early poem "To Christ Our Lord" Kinnell refers to
his use of a complicated rhyme scheme as a game:
But I think the effort that goes into these formal complica
tions distracts you from things that matter more. I like "To
Christ Our Lord" but I think it might have come out more
interesting if it had not been rhymed. As it is, it's per
haps a little predictable. But I was so grateful whenever
I managed thg rhyme that I gladly overlooked a little pre
dictability.
In rejecting conventional form, Kinnell is not however
rejecting form altogether, as the reader of The Book of Nightmares
knows well. Like other contemporary poets, Kinnell redefines the
issue:
I don't think the term "form" should be applied only to such
things as stanzas of uniform size, rhyme schemes, metrical
patterns, and so on— elements which may be regarded as exter
nal trappings. I think form properly speaking also has to
do with the inner shape of the poem. Some of the most "for
mal" poems are rather formless in this sense: they change
subject, lose the thread of their arguments, and lack the
suspense and sense of culmination that come from the pur
suit of one goal.^
The pursuit of one goal, however, need not be limiting for
the poet. Kinnell has repeatedly illustrated his interest in the
long poem "in which you can say everything, in which there is nothing
44
that has to be left out." Whitman, Pound, Williams, and Ginsberg
have all influenced this faith in the inclusive possibilities of
poetry. However, Kinnell does not want to build the long poem by
accretion only, but to retain as well the sense of the poem's organic
form, the sense of its wholeness through birth, growth, and conclu-
45
sxon.
172
Specific manifestations of Kinnell's belief in an organic
form which searches out the most basic feelings of modern man are
shown in his attitudes toward language and rhythm.
Discussing the development of the poet, Kinnell argues that
to imitate first one poet then another, in a series of exercises,
would disturb one's relationship with language. "It would tend to
give you facility— mastery over words— whereas what you want is to
be the servant of words." This belief in the creative power
inherent in language is common among contemporary poets, as we
shall see. As a servant of words, rather than master over them,
the poet is better able to capture the reality of experience without
fictionalizing it. Of course, through certain habits of expression,
poets often achieve facility whether they aim for it or not. Kinnell,
for instance, preferring the connotative verb over the simile, is
adept at suggesting the metaphorical without separating it from the
Kinnell’s attitude toward rhythm also reveals an interest
in forms which cannot be separated from the poems which use them.
As a description of organic form, one can hardly exceed that quoted
by Kinnell from Whitman, perhaps his most influential teacher:
Whitman seeks in the music of his verse what he calls the
"perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of ani
mals" and his lines have that— they are exactly right yet
there's no way to systemize them. Some of the most wonder
ful lines are rhythmically the oddest, the least systematic—
"Let the cow, the horse, the camel, the garden-bee— let the
mud-fish, the lobster, the mussell, eel, the sting-ray, and
the grunting pig-fish— let these, and the like of these, be
put on a perfect equality with man and woman!" All that is
a single line. It's written in what could only be called
the rhythm of what's being said.^®
173
j We have considered Kinnell’s attitudes toward voice, rhyme,
i rhythm, and language, those attitudes which make up his vision of
i
■ form. But his aesthetic has thematic direction as well. The Book
of Nightmares was essentially a search through the questions of
death and salvation, but one which began and ended with the births
; of Kinnell’s children, births beautiful told, granted, but by their
I father, after all. Birth has a larger significance for Kinnell,
however, because it reveals the paradise we seek:
Isn't the very concept of paradise only a metaphor? Our idea
of that place of bliss must be a dream extrapolated from our
| rapturous moments on earth, moments perhaps of our infancy,
j perhaps beyond that, of our foetal existence.
i We can see the importance of the births of Maud and Fergus for
Kinnell not as their father only, but as human being and as artist
I
seeking the essentials of human existence. In his elaboration
; of this point, Kinnell contrasts the radiance by which we invent
salvation with the temporal quality of experience, which also pro
vides a measure of glory to our lives:
It is through something radiant in our lives that we have
been able to dream of paradise, that we have been able to
invent the realm of eternity. But there is another kind of
glory in our lives which derives precisely from our inability
to enter that paradise or to experience eternity. That we
last only for a time, that everyone and everything around
us lasts only for a time, that we know this, radiates a
thrilling, tragic light on all our loves, all our relation
ships, even on those moments when the world, through its
poetry, becomes almost capable of spurning time and death.
This paradox of an eternity we can envision but not know
is the pivotal experience and generative force of Kinnell’s work.
174
he states it,
To open oneself to the rhythm of reality, the whole rhythm
being born and dying, while it is awful, since it means
facing your terror of death, it is also glorious, for then
you are one with creation, the cosmos.^
Notes
^Conrad Hilberry, "The Structure of Galway Kinnell*s The Book
of Nightmares," Field (Spring 1975):28-46.
2Ibid., p. 40.
3
Ibid., pp. 37-38; emphasis in original.
^Ibid., p. 40.
**Ibid. , p. 42.
^Ibid., p. 45.
7
Ibid. , p. 46.
g
John Wakeman, ed. , World Authors (New York: H. W. Wilson Co.,
1975), p. 793.
9
James Dickey, Babel to Byzantium (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1968), p. 135.
^Ralph J. Mills, Cry of the Human (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2975), p. 135.
^^Galway Kinnell, Walking Down Stairs (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1978), p. 22.
^2Mills, p. 141.
13
Glauco Cambon, Recent American Poetry (Minneapolis: Univer
sity of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 31.
14
Wakeman, p. 793 (quoting Kinnell).
15Mills, p. 164.
16Ibid., pp. 167-168.
17Ibid., p. 187.
1R
Hilberry, p. 28.
"^Kinnell, p. xi.
20Ibid., pp. 25-26.
21Ibid., p. 27.
22Ibid., p. 28.
176
23
Ibid. , pp. 35-36.
24 , . .
Ibid., p. 107.
25 , - j
Ibid. , p. 108.
26t..,
Ibid., p. 90.
27tu-a
Ibid., p. 108.
Ibid., p. 109.
29
Ibid. , p. 62.
30_. ..
Ibid., p. 25.
3 1t v ,
Ibid., p. 98.
32
Ibid., p. 109.
33
Ibid.
34 .
Ibid., p. 61.
35t v ,
Ibid., p. 28.
36
Galway Kinnell, "Poetry, Personality, and Death," Field 4
(Spring 1971):61.
Ibid., p. 58.
38
Kinnell, Walking Down Stairs, p. 6.
39
Ibid. , p. xi.
Ibid. , p. 29.
4L..,
Ibid., p. 94.
42t, . ,
Ibid., p. 95.
43T.
Ibid. , p. 105.
4 A
Ibid., p. 26.
45Ibid.
46Ibid., p. 87.
47Ibid., pp. 52-53.
177
^Ibid. , p. 47.
49
Galway Kinnell, "The Poetics of the Physical World," Iowa
Review (Summer 1971):121.
50
Ibid., p. 125.
"^Galway Kinnell, "’Deeper Than Personality’: A Conversation
with Galway Kinnell," ed. Phillip L. Gerber and Robert J. Gemmett,
Iowa Review (Spring 1970):129.
178
CHAPTER IX
INFORMAL1ST AESTHETICS
While a precise understanding of the development of KinnellTs
aesthetic is useful to students of his work, it is important to recog
nize that this development took place not in a vacuum, but in a cul
tural and literary milieu which engendered similar aesthetics in
many other contemporary poets. An understanding of how these
aesthetics grew and how they compare with KinnellTs offers the
student of contemporary poetry a handle for using many of the read
ing strategies he found so useful in reading The Book of Nightmares
to pursue other words of contemporary poetry.
As a loose generalization, poets of the Twentieth Century
have developed their aesthetics along two distinct paths. The dif
ference between these two paths cannot be explained more simply than
to say in Burkian terms that "formalist" poets have pursued more
conventional forms and "informalists " have pursued progressive and
qualitative forms. However, the reasons for choosing these routes
are made up of a complicated set of aesthetic and philosophical prin
ciples .
Since clearly Kinnell is an informalist poet, our concern
will be primarily with the development of informalist poetics, though
in order to thoroughly examine that development, comparison of the
179
two movements will be useful. We shall begin, then, by analyzing
in general terms the aesthetic and philosophical principles under
lying informalist poetics, including the relationship of art to expe
rience as viewed by informalists; the informalist views of reality,
the poetic imagination, and language; and the resulting attitudes
toward poetic form. Insofar as possible we will demonstrate these
attitudes by allowing informalist poets to speak for themselves;
in that way we shall avoid the mediation of other readers, the ques
tions of taste and mental sets influencing their interpretive strate
gies. We shall seek out, as would any reader interested in discover
ing the aesthetics of Twentieth Century poetry, the most direct
sources.
Aesthetic and Philosophical Principles
Underlying Informalist Poetics
Art Versus Experience
The first philosophical principle influencing informalist
poetics we need to consider is the relationship of art to experience,
a concern of both formalists and informalists, but one which is
handled very differently by each group. The effort of the formalist
poets is to make experience into art, while the effort of the infor
malists is to make art into experience. Formalists treat art and
experience as separate entities. Informalists attempt to treat them
as one, to fashion art as close as possible to life. What we wit
ness in Twentieth Century poetry, then, is the conflict between an
aesthetic and an anti-aesthetic, the formalists endeavoring to create
aesthetic experiences, and the informalists endeavoring to evoke
life experiences. 180
Ellmarm and 0*Clair wrote:
In general, the movement of formalism is towards the world where
experience is mastered, and the movement of the contrary school
is towards what Pound calls "the green world," where experience
is registered. The search of the one group to sift and purify
is met by their opponents* search for "impure poetry." . . .
Their rival conceptions derive, at last, from the symbolist
contraposition of a heroic and artistic dream to the wasteful,
incomplete, yet ever-engendering life around them.
It has always been axiomatic that the essential defining
characteristic of art is that it is not life. It is precisely
this axiom which the informalists seek to battle. For example,
because the informalist wants to create in his poems not a styliza
tion of experience, but experience itself, he upsets the traditional
unity of beginning, middle, and end. He gives his poem the logic
of a dream or nightmare as a way of moving as far as possible from
a simplified, predictable logic of art. Kinnell obviously is an
informalist poet; sometimes, as we saw in "The Path Among the Stones"
and "Under the Maud Moon" his poems seem to begin in the middle
and end at the beginning, the latter moving back and forward in
personal time,.and ’the former moving back and forth in geologic
time. This shifting around of logical form gives the reader a
sensation he often experiences in life, that events are mixed up,
happening simultaneously, or happening in illogical order.
Reality
A second important difference underlying the approaches taken
by formalists and informalists is their views of reality. While
formalists tend to view reality as stable and explainable, informal
ists see it not as a fixed given, but as a relationship between the
181
phenomenal world and him who experiences it. This view of reality
results in the reaffirmation of the voice and personaltiy of the poet,
and in the rare use of personae. We have seen that Kinnell uses no
persona because he seeks to express the bedrock essentials of the
human personality in its wholeness and in its fragmentation. Allen
Ginsberg expresses a similar point of view in "On Burroughs* Work":
A naked lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don*t hide the madness.
The frustrating rhymes and rhythms here are deliberate; through them,
Ginsberg is suggesting that the conventions of sanity, the polite
conventions of formalist poetry, including the use of personae and
the use of elegant rhythms and rhymes, stand as a barrier between
the poet or the reader and the natural, life-giving experiences avail
able to him. The implication is that poet and reader alike should
open themselves to "imperfections" in poetry and accept and confront
them as they do in other areas of their lives.
In elucidating his own aesthetic, James Dickey asserts a simi
lar attitude toward art. He conceives of a poem with
. . . the capacity to involve the reader in it, in all its
imperfections and impurities, rather than offering him a
(supposedly) perfected and perfect work for contemplation,
judgment, and evaluation . . . [a poem] that would cause
the reader to forget literary judgments entirely and simply
experience.
These imperfections, like the rhymes and rhythms of the Gins
berg quotation above, often take the form in the reader’s experience
of frustrations, the sensation of having to retract or qualify one’s
hypotheses, the sensation of uncertainty regarding the poet’s
182
attitude (as we experienced with the two views of death in "The Hen
Flower”), the sensation of being unsure of where the poet is taking
us in space or time, and so on. These "imperfections" are meant to
create for the reader experiences which require, as Dickey says, the
kinds of mental maneuvers the reader uses in ordinary daily life,
i
but discourage specifically literary judgments. Informalist poets
attempt to create a reality in art similar to that we experience in
l life, a reality dependent upon the operations of the perceiving mind.
j Poetic Imagination
I How informalist poets view the poetic imagination is the third
important principle defining informalist aesthetics, and is directly
related to their view of reality. While formalist poets see the
| poetic imagination as a source of order, as something which can be
imposed over experience to create art, informalists see the poetic
I
: imagination as revealing the disorder inherent in reality. They see
the imagination as revealing a disorder underlying the so-called
j utilitarian order with which we negotiate our daily lives. This
I
I
] entropic conception of the universe takes artistic shape as a sort
of reversed naturalism, that is, as a belief that human events imply
! not merely free will, but a vengeful indeterminism; and the formal
character of this world view is manifested not by intricate connec-
i
[ tions, but by intricate ruptures.
j
; Hyatt Waggoner traces this aesthetic to Pound and Williams,
' who
l
i
i
i are the progenitors of today's poets. Eliot and Stevens, both
in their different ways, thought of the poetic imagination as
i
183
imposing form on the formless, or creating order out of disorder.
The tendency of a great many younger poets is to distrust and
dislike any "created" or "artificial" order, to seek only for
the order which pre-exists. If necessary, they willsubmit to
the chaos for the sake of creating verbal simulacre.
Language
In addition to these important revisions of the formalist con
cept of the poetic imagination, informalist poets also revise their
conceptions of language. For informalist poets, the creative nature
of language, language seen as imbued with human intention, is beyond
both the ordering imagination and arbitrary form in its power to
engender meaning. Further, words themselves take on a will and force
of their own and often seem to be not quite under the control of the
poet.
The informalist poet breaks the language contract both with
regard to how poems should look and sound, and with regard to the
form and function of the words and sentences, as these lines from
Clarence Major's "Something Is Eating Me Up Inside" illustrate:
this is from time & drunks of time again nights when
the pants pockets turned
inside turned
out but seriously something is
eating me up inside I don't
believe in anything anymore, science, magic—
in tape worms inside philosophy inside
I go outside
One can barely resist quoting the whole poem because it moves
forward so inexorably, without clear stopping places. The poem negates
the basic language contract: the sentence. Reminiscent of Cummings,
the poem tinkers with punctuation and line break conventions. Notice
also how the clear statement "I don't / believe in anything anymore,
184
science, magic— " is undercut by the bewildering "in tape worms
inside philosophy inside." Words and sentences here function as
much to confuse as to communicate. Or more precisely, they register
the life experience of confusion. Words and sentences function
to imitate experience.
Imitating Other Arts
In attempting to narrow the distance between art and expe
rience, the informalist poet also sometimes, paradoxically, imitates
other art forms, dissolving the distinction between imitating art
and imitating life. If they are one, imitating one becomes equiva
lent to imitating the other. Consider the third principle of the
Imagist Manifesto regarding rhythm, that a composition be in accor
dance with the musical phrase rather than the metronome. Poetry
imitates music, as in the rhythms of the following stanzas from
Lawrence’s "Snake” and H.D.’s "Heat":
II II
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat
/ /
to drink there.
through this thick air
fruit cannot fall into heat
/ / /
that presses up and blunts
/ /
the points of pears
/ /
and rounds the grapes. 185
| All Pound was suggesting when he discouraged the formalist
!
use of metronomic phrasing was that weak and strong beats not alter
nate, as they did in much of the innocuous but popularly successful
poetry of the early Twentieth Century. This suggestion may seem
I simplistic on the surface, but its corollary is that poetic phrasing,
i
J like musical phrasing, should be designed to create specific and
! varied feelings in the reader or listerner. The rhythmic principles
1
i of the two stanzas from Lawrence and H;D. could not be more different
j from one another, though both are concerned with communicating physi
cal sensations of heat. In disobeying metronomic rhythm, Lawrence
is able to use a number of weak beats to illustrate the laziness
j
j of a hot day; H.D., on the other hand, piles up strong beats early
j in the stanza so dramatically that when she returns to metronomic
rhythm in the fourth line, the strong beats sound with extra clarity,
reinforcing the connotations of the oppressiveness of a hot day.
i
! As informalist poetry imitates musical rhythms, it also imi-
I
tates modern painting. This point has been made particularly with
respect to Williams. A. K. Weatherhead points out that:
The poet, or for that matter the prose writer, who by pushing
syntax to the margins of our attention makes us dwell more
' on images or particulars than on the relationships between
them brings the literary form close to modern painting. . . .
The traditional presentation in older pictures of a central
subject in a subordinated environment gives way in modern
painting to a general spreading of significant items over
i a whole canvas.^
| Williams’ poem "Fish" provides an apt illustration of this
point. The poem concerns no fish in particular, but several kinds
of fish from herring to cod to kingflounders. But it also concerns
the Lofoten Islands, and the way in which the sun circles them
186
summer and winter, and the manner in which Swedes drink tea. And
the poem concludes with mention of a water spirit:
and the nekke, half man and half fish.
When they see one of them
they know some boat will be lost.
The imitating of other art forms, as a common element of
informalist poetics, was evident in The Book of Nightmares. The
desperation of the following stanza is emphasized rhythmically by
the anticipatory space between "Listen, Kinnell," and "let go," and
by the four short lines:
Listen, Kinnell,
dumped alive
and dying into the old sway bed,
a layer of crushed feathers all that there is
between you
and the long shaft of darkness shaped as you,
let go.
Further, the piling on of images in the second section of "The Path
Among the Stones" illustrates the "spreading of significant items
over the whole canvas." No single image in this metaphysical-geologic
description is foregrounded against the others; they each suggest
circularity:
and the agates knocked
from circles scratched into the dust
with the click
of a wishbone breaking, inward-swirling
globes biopsied out of sunsets never to open again,
and that wafer-stone
which skipped ten times
across the water, suddenly starting to run as it went
under,
and zeroes it left
that met
and passed into each other, they themselves
smoothing themselves from the water ....
187
We can see clearly now that Kinnell participates in an infor
malist poetic which alters traditional concepts of reality, poetic
imagination, language, the relationship of art to experience, and
the relationship of poetic form to other art forms. We shall turn
now to a brief consideration of how this poetic developed.
The Development of Informalist Poetics
Hardy’s Crude Enthusiasm
Hardy is one of the earliest precursors of the informalist
movement. Ellmann and 0'Clair refer to him as "the first of the
poets, so numerous now, who are suspicious of writing well." He
avoided poetic diction and "the jewelled line," and savored "crude
enthusiasm."”* He claimed that art disproportioned realities "to
g
show more clearly the features that matter in those realities."
Hardy’s "unadjusted impressions," as he called his poems in the pref
ace to the 1902 edition of Poems of the Past and Present, were thus
precursors of the theories of informalist poetry, and his influence
was no doubt significant; Auden, who considered Hardy his first
teacher, referred to him as "a good poet, perhaps a great one, but
not too good."^ However, the first important movements in the direc
tion of informalist poetics began with Imagism and Vorticism.
Pound’s Straight Talk
Pound coined the word "Imagism" to describe the poetry of
g
H.D. and described it as "objective— no slither; direct— no exces
sive use of adjective, no metaphors that won’t permit examination.
9
It's straight talk, straight as the Greek!" Imagism, then, was
188
~ a“reaction against the popular sentimental romanticism of the early
1900s; H.D., Richard Aldington, and Pound formulated its principles
I in 1912:
I
1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or
objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to
the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the
, musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
i
| Though Pound believed that the poet as craftsman must become
s
adept at as wide a variety of traditional forms as possible, he was
1 also committed to freedom from those forms. He further elucidated
i
i the formal requisites of Imagism in this way: "I think there is
j a ’fluid* as well as a ’solid* content, that some poems may have
| form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase."'*''*'
Poetic form imitates, therefore, not only other art forms,
but the forms of nature as well. This is an idea we shall see repeat
edly in informalist poetics, and is inescapably reminscent of Burke’s
i
| description of qualitative form as the form of the changing seasons.
(
; However the most pointed explanation of Imagism is Pound's
; definition of the image itself. "An ’Image' is that which presents
1 12
i an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."
1
1
■ Pound further elaborated the point in his discussion of Vorticism
i
i
! which is simply Imagism made dynamic: "The image is not an idea.
' It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce,
j call a VORTEX; from which, and through which, and into which, ideas
13
J are constantly rushing." The definition, inescapably similar to
I
1 Williams' phrase, "no ideas but in things," calls for the "precise
189
rendering of the natural object" and shows the influence of Whit
man, one of the true progenitors of informalist poetry, on Pound’s
thought. Whitman argued that the responsibility of the imagination
was "to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science, and to com
mon lives, endowing them with the glows and glories and final illus
triousness which belong to every real thing, and to real things
only."*’ ' * Whitman’s remark can stand as a clear statement of the
Vorticisfe conception of the relationship between nature and art.
The effort of the poet is not to sterilize or rigidify, but to give
ultimate vivification to the life he perceives, not to divorce art
from life, but to make them one. This he does through image, "con
crete presentations of objects that also incarnate the act of per-
„16
ceptxon as a continuous process m time.
Williams* Impalpable Revolution
Though William Carlos Williams considered himself in opposition
to much of Vorticism, he shared many of its concepts. "Most current
verse is dead," he wrote in 1919 to Harriet Monroe.
Now life is above all things else at any moment subversive
of life as it was the moment before— always new, irregular.
Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the
same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in
the nature of an impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal
let me say. I am speaking of modern verse.
These lines suggest Williams’ disaffecton with Eliot’s concept of
tradition, and accord with Pound's directive to "make it new." But
their importance lies in the specific definitions of reality and
art, and in the implication that art must subvert its own order in
the way life does. The formal result of this belief was, for Wil
liams, a thorough disaffection with poetic conventions. inn
\ I propose sweeping changes from top to bottom of the poetic
structure. . . . I say we are through with the iambic as
presently conceived, at least for dramatic verse; through
with the measured quatrain, the staid concentration of sounds
in the usual stanza, the sonnet.
A second important similarity between Williams* ideas and
the tenets of Vorticism was the belief that "the language is worn
out," though Williams' prescription for the ill was somewhat differ-
j ent. He opted for localism, slang, and an American idiom in order
to create direct communication or "contact." Stiff artifice or
"poetic language," Williams believed, erected barriers between poet
and reader and "between the reader and his consciousness of immediate
19
| contact with the world." A new idiom for poetry would give the
i
reader direct contact with the world, uncluttered by the poetic
I ideas, except as they arise from things.
! — Say it, no ideas but in things—
i nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
I secret— into the body of the light.^
j It should be noted, however, that the assertion that Williams' dis-
i
1 trust of ideas in art "very rightly brings in its train a complete
21
disinterest in form" is not accurate. Williams is distrustful
!
I
! of artifice and poetic conventions, but not actually uninterested
in form in other senses of the word. He was, in fact, passionately
interested in redefining art, and in all the formal considerations
; attendant to such a task.
I
' This is a common misconception plaguing informalist poets.
Because poetic conventions come to stand for all form, it is assumed
191
that poets who avoid these conventions are ignoring form altogether.
Nothing could be further from the truth, as a cursory examination
of informalist poetics shows. Further, an understanding of the
larger issues 'of form, like that provided in Burke’s Counterstatement,
indicates that poetic conventions, even in traditionally formal
poems, are only a small part of their form. Our tabula rasa reader
was able to discern this fact inductively, recognizing the absence
of some poetic conventions, but recognizing as well other kinds
of structures revealed by the reading experience.
Lawrence’s Poetry of the Present
Another poet passionately interested in form is D. H. Lawrence.
His essay "Poetry of the Present" which introduces the American edi
tion of New Poems (1918) : is not only a vigorous defense of free verse
but also considers larger formal issues. Lawrence describes two kinds
of poetry, one of the past and future, the other of the present. The
first, like the song of the nightingale or skylark,
. . . must have that exquisite finality, perfection which belongs
to all that is far off. It is in the realm of all that is per
fect. It is of the nature of all that is complete and consummate.
This completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the per
fection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the
rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link
and loosen and link for the supreme moment at the end. Perfected
bygone moments, perfected moments in the glimmering futurity,
these are the treasured gem-like lyrics of Shelley and Keats.
The poetry of the present, however, like the present itself, contains
"no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished." The immediate
moment is "the source, the issue, the creative quick" of all poetry,
and is presented uncrystallized and unfinished in:;poetry of the
present, an "unrestful, ungraspable poetry." This poetry must
192
manifest "mutation, swifter than iridescence, haste, come-and-go, not
fixity, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself,
without denouement or close." Notice the insistence, like that
of Williams, that poetry must subvert its own potential perfection
in order to reflect the quality of life itself. "There is some
confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only
23
belong to the reality as noise belongs to the plunge of water."
The poetry of the present, Lawrence implies, is more unset
tling than comforting. "There is no static perfection, none of the
24
finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened."
Obviously, poetry of the present is not designed to ease our fears,
which is why the experiences it..offers are so often disconcerting.
Olsonfs High Energy-Construct
Charles Olson is another poet who emphasizes the importance of
the present moment. He conceives of the writer as "someone who is
25
totally, maximally here, living in his moment." For Olson, as for
Williams, the virtue of the present moment is that while the past and
future are full of ideas, the present moment is full of energy.
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he
will have several causations), by way of the poem itself to,
all the way over to, the reader. . . . Okay. Then the poem
itself must, at alljpoints, be a high energy-construct, and,
at all points, an energy-discharge.
Olson discards all the formal patterns of "verse that print
bred" in favor of "composition by field." Plainly, this theory
is born of Vorticism; and yet we see again, in The Maximum Poems,
a poet passionate about form.
193
one loves only form,
and form only comes
into existence when
the thing is born
born of yourself, born
of hay and cotton struts,
of street-pickings, wharves, weeds
you carry in, my bird ....
A second tenet of Olson's aesthetic, once again inescapably
reminiscent of Pound, is that of "objectivism." The poet does not
comment upon the world around him; rather as an object himself, he
participates like other objects in intersections of time and space.
Objectivist poetry rids itself
. . . of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego,
of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by
which Western man has interposed himself between what he is
as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry
out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with
no derogation, call objects. For man is himself an object. ^
This conception of poetic voice is similar to that suggested
by Kinnell in "Poetry, Personality, and Death," except that Kinnell
believes the ego can be transcended only by accepting it.
These formal characteristics of Olson's aesthetic are backed
by a whole set of beliefs about the nature of man and reality, and
the poet's responsibility to carry the message to the people. Olson
held, for instance, the debatable theory that "nature takes nothing
but leaps" and that art, rather than stifling itself in humanism
and tradition and culture, should do likewise, as the graph on
the following page indicates. The graph also reveals the play
fulness with which informalist poets sometimes present their
theories
194
ENERGY vs humanism
non-deductive vs deduc (educ. polituck, cultchuk)
NATURE TAKES worsues progress, humanism, succession,
NOTHING BUT tradition
LEAPS
ART AS THE WEDGE vs art as culture
OF THE WHOLEFRONT
(god help us)
When Olson commits himself by "fronting to the whole of
29
reality," what saves his art from naturalism? The answer lies
in his wish to replace "the classical-representational by the
30
primitive-abstract." Olson does not seek to represent life, but
to give us the energetic, living moment itself, and to overwhelm us
into experiencing it. The informalist poets demand nothing less than
that we experience fully; that is their reason for narrowing the dis
tance between art and life. They breathe life into art in order to
give a fuller life to their readers and to themselves. As James Dickey
puts it,
In the eternal battle between life and poetry or life and art,
I’ll take life. And if poetry were not a kind of means, in
my case, of intensifying experience and of giving a kind of
personal value to it, I would not have any interest in it what
ever . ^ ^
Dickey’s Perpetual Possibility
Like Olson, Lawrence, and Ginsberg, as we shall see momentar
ily, Dickey has a great interest in poetry as a physical act.
My work is almost entirely physical rather than intellectual
or mental. There are many times when I am trying to write
something that reason tells me to say in a certain way but
it just doesn’t feel right. It’s something in the region
of the solar plexus which tells me to say it this other
195
way. . . . There’s a very real involvement of the musculature,
such as it is, in the act. I like that. Terribly intellectual
people like Auden and Eliot, essentially indoor men, probably
would put this down as nonsense and they could easily prove
me wrong. But I wouldn’t go al^g with any such proof because
I know and I know that I know.
Dickey's description of his writing process is typical of informalist
poets. They prefer to trust feeling above reason and body above
mind, if there is a choice to be made. This conception of poetry
obviously requires the abandonment of intellectual forms, and is
no doubt related to the informalist aesthetic of the present moment.
Where past and future future are fixed in the mind, the present is
physical experience. Dickey’s particular attraction to the present
derives from an openness to possibility he demands for his work.
I think the only good state of mind for a poet is the feeling
of perpetual possibility. That something that happens today
or might happen tomorrow is going to have a very powerful effect
and a very great deal of value for you. . . . It’s this business
of the unknown that seems to be the most fertile ground for the
poet to live in. . . There’s got to be a way for the poet to
open the world up to himself from the standpoint of there being
an infinite number of chances, none of which he can predict,
for him to move through and among.
Perpetual possibility is for Dickey, as for Olson, antitradi-
tional. He speaks ill of the
. . . dead hand that Eliot insists has to be clamped on the
individual talent by the poetic tradition. . . . I’m only
trying to get some kind of a way to give absolute, whole
hearted r e s p o n s e .34
These beliefs about poetry have resulted in Dickey’s gradual
release from the formal conventions of rhyme and rhythm in favor of
35
what he calls "presentational immediacy." Beginning with Buck-
dancer’s Choice, Dickey has used a long, interrupted line, measuring
sometimes in breath units shorter than Ginsberg’s, and sometimes in
grammatical units.
196
As Lawrence Lieberman has pointed out:
This form adapts perfectly to a welter of experience in flux.
The rhetoric keeps drawing more and more live matter into the
poem, as from a boundless supply. The entire poem maintains
a single unbroken flow of motion. In this respect, the medium
owes more to the moving picture, to film technique, than to
other poetry.
As we have seen before, the informalist poet is fond of
employing the forms of other artistic media. Notice the strikingly
filmic images in the following lines from "The Firebombing."
the inland sea
Slants is woven with wire thread
Levels out holds together like a quilt
Off the starboard wing cloud flickers
At my glassed-off forehead the moon's now and
again
Interrupted face going forward
Over the waves in a glide-path
Lost into land.
It is axiomatic to say that poetry is visual. But here one sees
the visual images in motion as filmed from the window of an airplane,
the window framing the scene.
As we noted earlier, Dickey seeks to break down specifically
literary judgments. In his discussion of this effort, like other
informalist poets, he affirms the replacement of literary forms with
the forms of life.
Of late my interest has been mainly in the conclusionless poem,
the open or ungeneralizing poem, the un-well-made poem. . . .
If I am successful in this, my themes will stand forth clearly
enough: the continuity of the human family, the necessity
of both caused and causeless joy, and the permanent interest
of what the painter John Marin called "the big basic forms"—
rivers, mountains, woods, clouds, oceans, and the creatures
that live naturally among them.
One facet of the effort to overturn literary judgments involves the
rejection of conventional logic, which as the informalist poets see
197
it, encourages traditional, logical, literary interpretations, and
prohibits full experience.
Ginsberg's Living Speech
Like Dickey, Ginsberg too seeks to break the conventions of
logic. But the source of this impulse for Ginsberg is surrealist
poetry and painting, to which he gives thanks in "At Appolinaire's
Grave."
I’ve eaten the blue carrots you sent out of the grave
and Van Gogh's ear and maniac peyote of Artaud
and will walk down the streets of New York in the
black cloak of French poetry . . .
Ginsberg’s attraction to the surrealists was natural in that
they saw poetry as a way of reaching visionary discovery, rather
38
than a realistic presentation within traditional formal limitations.
They offered Ginsberg a freedom of state of mind denied by the New
Criticism. One of the most important aspects of this freedom was
an openness in selection of subject matter, the freedom to discuss
in poetry what one discusses with one's friends.
The problem is to break down that distinction: when you approach
the Muse to talk as frankly as you would talk with yourself
or with your friends. . . . It's the ability to commit to
writing, to write, the same way that you . . . are! Anyway!
You have many writers who have preconceived ideas about what
literature is supposed to be, and their ideas seem to exclude
that which makes them most charming in private conversation.
. . . And the hypocrisy of literature has been— you know like
there's supposed to be formal literature, which is supposed
to be different from . . . in subject, in diction, and even
in organization, from our quotidian inspired lives.
Here again we see the distinction between art and life, and
the wish to make art more like life itself. Ginsberg's "ideal is
a living speech and an organic metric which expresses the poet's
40
psychological state at the time of composition." Thus for ing
example in Howl, Ginsberg attempts to create in the reader a physi
cal state corresponding to the physical and psychological reality
of his own presence; he does this by using long lines and syntax
41
which inhibits breathing during the lines.
Williams and Whitman were Ginsberg’s formal teachers. From
Whitman, he learned the freedom of the long line. From Williams,
Ginsberg received this advice: "Listen to the rhythm of your own
42
voice. Proceed intuitively by ear." Of Williams, Ginsberg said,
I suddenly realized, oh, he's just writing the way he talks.
He's really talking in his poetry, he's trying to say some
thing, for real, he's not just making a lot of pretty words
like I was, like "If money made the mind more sane." He
wasn't just throwing out a line, you know, to complete the
form, but the form was absolutely identical with what he
was saying. It was^o absolutely simple, simple-minded
almost— so obvious.
Another important influence on Ginsberg's poetic vision was
Kerouac, who taught the sanctity of the uncorrected first draft.
Ginsberg explained the belief this way:
What Kerouac said was that it was sort of like lying if you
revised, in the sense that you make believe you didn't say
that. Like you revealed what was on your mind, but he felt
that most revision would be motivated by embarrassment— in
other words, you'd be embarrassed by the truth of what you
were saying, therefore revise.
All of these elements— the demand for living speech, the
refusal to revise, the openness in selection of subject matter—
all combine to form an absence of personae, another common trait
of informalist poetry. But of all the informalists, none is more
messianic that Ginsberg, who remarked he sometimes feels in command
when he is writing. Asked if by "command" he meant "a sense of the
whole poem as it's going, rather than parts," he replied, "No— a
199
sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe." Ginsberg’s
poems are all fragments of the same human self rather than masks
of that self. The absence of personae in informalist poetry is one
aspect of its exuberance and self-confidence, one much in evidence
in The Book of Nightmares.
Informalist Poetics and
Reading Strategies
We have seen it illustrated repeatedly that informalist
poetics seek to unite art and experience into one entity; that
informalist poets view reality as highly mutable, a relationship
between natural phenomena and the perceiver; that the poetic imagi
nation is seen as revealing the disorder common to human experience
rather than imposing order over it; that language as imbued with
human intention takes on a creative power greater than arbitrary
form in its ability to engender meaning; that informalist poetics
imitate the forms of other arts and the natural world; that informal
ist poets perceive order in their poetry as subversive of that which
has gone before, and are consistently interested in re-creating the
quality (including the imperfections) of the present moment; that
while informalist poets shun conventional forms, they are passionately
interested in the larger issues of form; and that the personality
and voice of the poets themselves become primary tools for creation
of the vital living experience of their poems.
The kinds of reading strategies suggested by this aesthetic
are exactly those we employed in reading The Book of Nightmares. The
first and most important of those strategies is attention to the
200
actual experience of reading as it takes place in time, the refusal
to treat the poem primarily as an artifact. Attending to the expe
rience in time, we allow the disconcerting imperfections of the
present moment to color the reading experience as they color our
other life experiences. As perceivers participating in the creation
of reality, we make our own pivotal connections between images. We
listen to rhythms as we would listen to music, allowing the rhythms
themselves to express meaning. And we listen to the voice of the
poet as a human voice, if more lyrical at times, nonetheless like
our own in its expression of the personal struggles, hopes, and
desires common to us all.
201
Notes
^Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds., The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 18.
2
James Dickey, Babel to Byzantium (New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 1968), pp. 290-291.
3
Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the
Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), p. 616.
4
A. Kingsley Weatherhead, "William Carlos Williams: Prose
Form and Measure," ELH 33 (March 1966):128.
^Ellmann and 0’Clair, p. 45.
^Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928
(New York: MacMillan, 1968), pp. 146-147.
^W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York:
Random House, 1962), p. 38. Emphasis in original.
g
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), p. 174.
9
D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941 (New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 11.
^Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect," in Literary Essays of Ezra
Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1954),
p. 3.
^Ibid. , p. 9.
12
Ibid., p. 4.
13
Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review 96 (1914):470.
14
Grace Schulman, Ezra Pound (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974),
p. 3.
^Walt Whitman, "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," in
Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, ed. Harold W.
Blodgett and Scully Bradley (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 564.
160 ^
Schulman, p. 4.
^Ellmann and 0’Clair, p. 285.
18
William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: Random
House, 1954), p. 281.
202
19
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New York: Contact
Publishing, 1923), p. 1.
20
William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions,
1946), Book 1, lines 14-19.
21
Vivienne Koch, William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Connecticut:
New Directions, 1950), p. 38.
22
D. H. Lawrence, Collected Poems (New York: J. Cape and H.
Smith, 1929), pp. 181-182.
23
Ibid., pp. 182-184.
^Ibid., p. 184.
25
Ellmann and O’Clair, p. 802.
26
Charles Olson, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New
York: New Directions, 1966), p. 16.
^Ibid. , p. 24.
28
Charles Olson, Letters for Origin 1950-1956, ed. Albert
Glover (New York: Grossman, 1970), p. 11.
29
Ibid., p. 5.
30
Olson, Selected Writings, p. 28.
31
Carolyn Kizer and James Boatwright, "A Conversation with
James Dickey,” in James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, ed.
Richard J. Calhoun (New York: Everett/Edwards, 1973), p. 19.
32
Ibid., pp. 11-12; emphasis in original.
33
Ibid., p. 8.
"^Ibid., pp. 13-14.
■^Dickey, p. 290.
36
Lawrence Lieberman, "Notes on James Dickey's Style," in
James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, ed. Richard J. Calhoun
(New York: Everett/Edwards, 1973), p. 199.
37
Dickey, p». 291.
38
John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of
the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), p. 228.
20.3
39
Allen Ginsberg, Writers at Work, ed. Thomas Clark, 3rd series
(New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 287-289.
40
Ellmann and 0'Clair, p. 1119.
42
Jane Kramer, "Profile of Allen Ginsberg," The New Yorker
(August 24, 1968):88; emphasis in original.
43
Allen Ginsberg, "Early Poetic Community," in Allen Verbatim,
ed. Gordon Hall (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974), p. 146; emphasis in
original.
44
Ibid., p. 147.
45
Ginsberg, Writers at Work, p. 320.
204
CHAPTER X
DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY
We have been concerned here with the strategies for learning
to read poetry, particularly contemporary informalist poetry. We
have seen that current research in psycholinguistics and rhetoric
reveals these strategies, and we have tested them by examining the
adventures engaging a reader armed with these strategies as he reads
a long, serious work. Admittedly, this has been a grueling process,
and that is part of its point; unless teachers of poetry recognize
the complications of the reading process, they are ill-equipped to
prepare their students for them. We have also examined the aesthetics
behind contemporary poetry, finding that the formal and thematic
tenets of these aesthetics require specifically the strategies revealed
by current research in psycholinguistics. Principles of psycho
linguistics, such as implicature and the cooperative maxim, have
helped throughout to explain the effects of poems on readers.
The range of experiences available to readers of contemporary
poetry, along with the range of problems readers encounter, can be
further demonstrated by looking briefly at a few short poems repre
sentative of various schools of informalist poetics including the
San Francisco and New York poets and confessional and surrealistic
poetry. This examination will also serve to make clearer the
205
differences and similarities among schools of contemporary aesthetics.
Discussion of a poem by Sylvia Plath, for instance, will illustrate
the poet-reader transaction in terms of the problem of intention;
discussion of Robert Bly’s "Counting Small-Boned Bodies" shows the
reader’s imaginative recognition of irony and form. In O’Hara’s
"Poem" we see the reader handling the problem of sensical tone com
bined with nonsensical events; and discussion of Merwin's "Footprints
on the Glacier" will demonstrate the dangers of reductive reading.
First, however, we begin with an illustration of organic form.
Organic Form
Gary Snyder's "Things To Do Around Kyoto" illustrates several
of the principles of contemporary aesthetics. It contains "no ideas
but in things"; it imitates musical rather than metronomic rhythms;
it speaks in a natural, personal voice, using no mediating persona.
The poem begins:
Lie on the mats and sweat in summer,
Shiver in winter, sit and soak like a foetus in the bath.
Paikaru and gyoza at Min Min with Marxist students full
of China
Look for country pot-hooks at the Nijo junk store
Get dry bad red wine to drink like a regular foreigner
from Maki’s,
Trudging around with visitors to Gardens.
In the first line, the reader is drawn into the poem. The use of the
definite article "the" treats the mats as given information, but since
the reader has nothing specific in memory with which to integrate the
given information, he can only assume that the poet is deliberately
treating him like an insider. This is a common effect of the ego
centrism prevalent in contemporary poetry; when the poet uses images
206
which he knows the reader is unlikely to be familiar with, as if he
were talking to himself, the reader often accepts his lack of famil
iarity, identifies himself with the voice of the poet, and partici
pates in the images as if the poem were a journey he too is taking.
The reader may be aware of another important sensation in
the first two lines; the poet is obviously being cooperative. The
title suggests a list of things to do, and that is precisely what
the poet gives. The satisfaction this cooperation provides is only
slightly diminished by the Japanese words "piakaru" and "gyoza,"
which is a fried dumpling stuffed with minced pork. The reader who
has no immediate access to these meanings can simply make a guess
at them and go on. The rest of the sentence contains four place
names— Min Min, a bar perhaps, or at the least a meeting place for
students, Nijo junk store, Maki’s, and the Gardens. All of these
places can be imagined in greater detail by the reader, using the
brief clues the poet gives to build that detail. This kind of crea
tive participation on the part of the reader is often demanded by
contemporary aesthetics. Notice also that the poem teaches the reader
to get along with less punctuation. It begins with commas separating
the items on the list, but continues by eliminating some of the separa-
tons, except as they are indicated by line breaks. The poem continues:
Pluck weeds out of the moss. Plant morning-glories.
Walk down back alleys listening to looms.
Watching the flock of sparrows whirling over trees on
winter sunsets;
Get up at four in the morning, to go meet with the Old Man.
Sitting in deep samadhi on a hurting knee.
Get buttered up by bar-girls, pay too much.
Motorcycle oil-change down on Gojo,
Warm up your chilly wife, her big old feet.
207
Trying to get a key made
Trying to find brown bread
Hunting rooms for Americans
Having a big meeting, speaking several tongues.
No new problems are introduced in these stanzas. The conscious
reader will be aware of the alternation of syntactical patterns, and
the qualitative form of the poem as accretion of details taken from
the poet's own life. He will be aware also that these details are
deliberately ordinary (in places, quite mundane) meant to capture the
fabric of Snyder's daily life. Even without knowing that samadhi is
meditative concentration, the reader can infer from "a hurting knee"
that Snyder is describing a religious exercise. These details are
intrinsically interesting enough to keep the reader moving through
the poem; but the reader is also interested in what, if anything,
the poet will make of them. He can already infer that Snyder's rela
tionship with nature is one of peaceful coexistence, and that Snyder
takes pride in the culture of Kyoto. The poem concludes:
Lose your way in the bamboo brush on Hiei-zan in winter
Step on a bug
Quiet weeks and weeks, walking and reading, talking and
weeding,
Passing the hand
around a rough cool pot.
Throwing away the things you'll never need
Stripping down—
Going home.
In the conclusion of the poem, the reader's curiosity about what
Snyder would make of the details of his life is satisfied. The poem
might well end with the words "rough cool pot." But Snyder wants to
make it clear that the things he does around Kyoto are precisely the
things he does need for a meaningful life, the things he would not
208
want to strip away, for they are the essentials. "Home" here takes
on the metaphysical sense of peace with one’s life. The creative
reader might be able to come to this conclusion even without the help
of the final lines, but their presence provides the reader with a com
forting sense of expectations met, curiosity satisfied.
This satisfaction corresponds with Snyder's sense of organic
form, which he describes as "the perfect easy discipline of the
swallow's dip and swoop.Associated with the Beat poets of San
Francisco, Snyder derives many of his ideas concerning the form of
poetry from his studies of Buddhism. He holds, as he says,
the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late
Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals,
the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and
re-birth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work
of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in
mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things
and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.^
Seeking the true measure of things, for Snyder, means delighting in
"the non-human, non-verbal world, which is nature as nature is itself;
and the world of human nature— the inner world— as it is itself,
3
before language, before custom, before culture." This relationship
to human and nonhuman nature is what distinguishes the San Francisco
poets from the group known as confessional poets, who also use the
details of their own lives to shape their poems.
Confessional Poetry and the
Problem of Intention
Sylvia Plath is one such confessional poet. Her poem "Poppies
in July" serves to demonstrate both the aesthetics behind confessional
poetry and the problems readers encounter with it. The poem begins:
209
Little poppies, like hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
| Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the
skin of a mouth.
The halting rhythm of the two-line stanzas is reinforced by the sim-
| plicity of syntax, as if every line were torture, as if the poet were
I
! saying all she can force herself to say. Even so, the stanzas alter-
i
j nate through the poems, as we shall see, between comparatively
! relaxed and staccato rhythms. (The second stanza contains four sen-
| tences!)
J In the first stanza, Plath speaks directly to the poppies,
| drawing a parallel between their color and the fires of hell. But
J in the second stanza, the poet is disturbed by the fact that the
i
poppies look like fire, yet do not burn. The reader must infer a
double meaning for "touch" in order to make sense of the stanza.
j Though Plath can touch the flowers literally, she can neither affect
|
! nor be affected by them. Furthermore, as the third stanza declares,
’ she finds this alienation exhausting, as if the poppies were somehow
{
I
i to blame for it.
At the end of the stanza, Plath compares the color of the
i
| poppies to the color of mouths, and the reader immediately notices
, the inaccuracy of the simile. But as the poem continues, Plath makes
1 the image more precise:
! A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
210
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?
If I could bleed, or sleep!—
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.
But colourless. Colourless.
"A mouth just bloodied," then, is bizarrely satisfying for the reader
because it both clarifies and intensifies the imprecision of the
earlier image. Then Plath shifts suddenly to another macabre image,
bloody skirts. In their violence, the images suggest a perverse
sexuality.
The next stanza makes another aspect of Plath's alienation
from the poppies clear. Not only is she separated from the intensity
their color offers, but she is also denied the oblivion their deriva
tive drugs offer. She longs for both the intensity and oblivion
of death, for the dulling liquors to flood her encapsulated existence.
She longs for nothing less than the obliteration of experience. The
stanza "If I could bleed, or sleep!-— / If my mouth could marry a
hurt like that!" is particularly interesting for how it carries this
information to the reader. The stanza represents a passionate state
ment of desire, but it is the desire for oblivion.
None of this is difficult for the reader to discern; a few
simple implicatures stand between the actual words of the poem and
the recoded version just set down. The reader must decide, for
instance, what is meant by "this glass capsule." Integrating this
phrase with the previous mention of capsules, and with the alienation
expressed earlier in the poem, the reader simply infers that Plath
211
sees herself as enclosed in glass, visible to the visible world but.
separated from it.
This view of the relationship between the human and nonhuman
worlds is opposite to that expressed in most contemporary poetry,
and is bound to present the reader with difficulty. Unless one feels
that the poem expresses one’s own alienation from nature, one is
likely to find a relationship with the poem difficult to establish.
Of course, everyone feels some measure of PlathTs alienation occa
sionally, but that is not to say that the poem speaks, or even tries
to speak for us all. Neither does the poem contain the affirmation
KinnellTs relentless search through death produced. At the center
of Plath’s dark vision, one finds only more darkness. Indeed, if
the poem can be said to contain any affirmation at all, it is by
virtue of its existence, that is, by virtue of its artfulness. If
the rhythms, dramatic tone, and gruesome imagery of the poem (the
experience of reading it) are in some way charming for the reader,
then he can take that enjoyment for what it is worth, even if he
cannot take her vision seriously. To state this more plainly, many
readers, those who are not simply put off by the self-pity of Plath’s
world view, will want to laugh when they read "Poppies in July."
The simplicity of syntax and rhythm (together with the brutality
of the images) creates a childish tone that many readers will find
amusing (though it is certainly not Plath's intention to amuse),
but lacking, finally, in the grace one seeks in art.
To take up the poem fully, under its own terms, one needs
to go nearly the whole distance of the rhetorical relationship
212
between reader and poet because Plath gives the impression of not
being concerned in the least with what her poems offer the reader.
She is simply stating the pain of her own alienation; and the reader
may make of it what he chooses. But the real problem with the poem
is that Plath*s willing submission to her alienation and pain dis
courage the reader from making an effort to construct any value for
it.
Suppose, however, that the reader is willing to go so far
as to assume that disenchantment with her vision is exactly the
response Plath intends for the reader. Then the poem serves to
strengthen the reader's own affirmation of all that the poem seems
to condemn. This is a delightful idea, for it demonstrates a real
integration of the values a reader brings to the poem with the expe
rience of reading. This integrating process changes the poem before
the reader's very eyes and the images of the poem take on a new fasci
nation.
Delightful as this idea is, however, in order to assume an
intention opposite to what the words of the poem suggest, the reader
must posit a very wily persona uncharacteristic of Plath's other
poetry and a world view inconsistent, finally, with the events of
her life. For this reason, the assumption is one the reader may
entertain briefly, but cannot hold with conviction.
We are left, then, with Plath's statement of her alienation
and her desire for oblivion, with the poem's artful rendering of
her experience. To go further than this in constructing value for
the poem requires a generosity of spirit many readers (myself
included) will find beyond them.
j Surcharged Imagism and the
! Recognition of Irony
i ~ ~ ;
| The childlike tone of "Poppies in July" is characteristic
I
I of many Twentieth Century poems. Not all of them achieve this tone
using the voice of egocentrism, however, as "Poppies in July" does.
"Counting Small-Boned Bodies" by Robert Bly, for instance, achieves
i its childlike tone by endeavoring to communicate the direct, unmedia-
I ted apprehension of its subject. The poem goes like this:
I
; Let’s count the bodies over again.
\ If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the
! moonlight!
j If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
i A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!
i If we could only make the bodies smaller,
! We could fit
! A body into a finger-ring, for a keepsake forever.
The poem may strike the reader as having come to the poet effort-
j
lessly in an instantaneous flash of insight, a direct apprehension
I of the kind children sometimes make. That the tone of the poem is
! also childlike, then, is perhaps more a result of this direct appre
hension than a conscious effort on the part of the poet. Bly's com-
; ments on political poetry, it turns out, confirm this impression:
Some poets try to write political poems impelled upward by
hatred or fear. But those emotions are stiff-jointed, rock
like and are seldom able to escape from the gravity of the
body. What the poet needs to get up that far^and bring back
something are great leaps of the imagination.
, But these leaps of imagination produce an experience for the reader
which takes place in time. Encountering the poem in an anthology of
214
contemporary poetry, the reader would probably discern from the title
that the poem came out of the Vietnam War, during which the American
government announced daily body counts of Vietnamese dead. (Future
generations might need a footnote explaining the title.) Without
such an inference, the force of the poem is diminished.
The voice of the poem is that of an imaginative, mischievous
child speaking to another child like himself. The reader infers this
tone from the easy rhythm of the first line, from the repeated line,
"if only we could make the bodies smaller," and from the simplicity
of syntax throughout the poem. The tone serves another important
purpose, however. Together with the extremity of the suggestions,
the tone forces the reader to infer the irony which both makes sense
of the poem and achieves its affirmation. In condemning the body
count through images of miniaturization (a technological process)
Bly also condemns the reduction of human worth and the racism which
produce such activities as body counts. The irony inherent in this
condemnation results in the affirmation of peace, life, and human
worth. Thus, the affirmation of the poem exists by virtue of the
irony the reader infers. That the focusing in of this affirmation
takes place in steps, as the speaker imagines smaller and smaller
bodies, makes the reader’s discovery of the affirmation a stunning
experience.
Part of what makes this experience so forceful is the logic
of form which encompasses the poem. Though it employs no conven
tional form at all, it makes significant use of the other forms out
lined by Burke. The ordering of the images of miniaturization
215
illustrates both qualitative and syllogistic progression; the first
image prepares the reader for the second and third; and the images
taken together have the infallibility of the syllogism. Repetitive
form is evident in the repeated line, "if only we could make the
bodies smaller." And minor forms (metaphor) are apparent in the
images of miniaturization themselves, the white plain, the desk, and
the finger-ring. It is a mark of Bly's artistry that he can create
such a precisely (though not conventionally) formed poem and still
make the reader feel its effortless insight.
The simplicity and clarity of the experience of reading "Count
ing Small-Boned Bodies" is not merely a matter of its uncomplicated
syntax; Frank O'Hara’s "Poem" (one of many O'Hara titled with the
same uninformative title) also contains an uncomplicated syntax, but
one which is deceptively simple.
Integrating Tone and Sense
Just a glance at O’Hara’s "Poem" tells the reader that the
poem is made of four four-line stanzas. Seeing this, the reader
might suppose that the poem is conventionally formal, a supposition
he will be forced to withdraw before he gets out of the first stanza.
The eager note on my door said "Call me,
Call when you get in!" so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and
headed straight for the door.
The language and syntax here are so clear and unencumbered that they
reinforce the reader's puzzlement about the actions they describe.
Two distinctly different inferences for explaining the action might
216
occur to the reader; one is that the speaker of the poem is desperate
to avoid the author of the note; the other is that the world of the
poem is one in which ordinary conceptions of cause and effect do not
apply, a world in which the connections between events only appear to
make sense; that is, they make sense only syntactically but not seman
tically.
The reader may notice the repetition of "call," "door," and 1
"straight" in these few lines, but these repetitions do not explain
I
why the speaker chose to take tangerines on his sudden trip. The
repetitions only serve to contrast the laxity of expression with .
the inexplicability of the actions. The apparent whimsy of the choice J
of tangerines contributes to the reader’s sense of the lighthearted
tone. The poem continues:
. . . It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!
Here the reader's confusion multiplies. The precise clarity of the
statement that the season was autumn is reversed after the line break,
where we find that it was autumn, not when the trip began, but by the
time the speaker got around the corner. Our conceptions of time and
space are immediately disjointed; unless it was a very long trip to
the corner, how could the season change? The reader may be wondering
by now about the poet's faithfulness to the cooperative principle;
the maxims of quality and matter are particularly in question here.
Does the poet really believe that autumn came before he got around
the corner? Or is he telling us something we have no hope of making
217
sense of? The words "oh all" at the end of the line reinforce the
light tone and prepare the reader for a clear statement (all) of the
speaker’s feelings. When it turns out that the speaker is unwilling
to be pertinent, the reader feels vindicated in his suspicions. But
on top of that, the speaker is unwilling to be bemused, a willingness
he apparently assumes in the reader. What are we to do, except con
tinue, hoping to come out of the stanza with some sense?
But the sense is not forthcoming. Instead we are presented
with grass on the sidewalk. Unless the reader posits the rather
stretched implicature of grass clippings, gray compared to the
oranges and golds of recently fallen leaves, he can make no sense
of the line at all. And even with such an implicature, the reader
is at a loss to draw a meaningful connection between the image and
the previous line. The exuberance of the tone, however, is inescapa
ble; and it is this exuberance (which constitutes the appearance of
sense) which keeps the reader moving through the poem. The conclud
ing stanzas go like this:
Funny, I thought, the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was
there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There
are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.
The reader makes sense of the first line by creating an implicature
that the speaker has arrived at his destination, but what that des
tination is, we aren’t sure yet. He has arrived at the house of
218
someone, a jai-alai player, who the.speaker expected would be in bed
by now. But the lights are on and the door is ajar. The word "host"
in the last line, therefore, is puzzling. It suggests that the
speaker was invited. Now the reader may draw the inference that
the invitation to "call" in the first stanza was made by the "host"
of the third stanza. This inference presents a very intriguing sensa
tion for the reader because it gives the appearance of fitting every
thing into place, but actually explains very little. We do know that
the speaker responded quickly to the "invitation," but that it took
him a long while to arrive.
When it turns out that the host is dead, the reader sees that
the zealousness of the host is attributed not to his waiting up, as
the reader was led to hypothesize. That the speaker makes of the
host's death an appreciably dramatic show, staged specifically for
his arrival is bound to cause the reader wonder. What sort of person
would so misread the events of a friendship as to describe the eager
note as a casual invitation, take several months to respond, and then
assume that the host staged his own death to coincide with the guest's
arrival? It is ludicrous to the point of being funny; and here the
tone and meaning of the lines converge. The poem takes on the quality
of an attack (vitriolic, yet at the same time, because of its good
humor, gentle) on the blindness human egocentrism introduces into
friendships.
Saying so, though it is not intended to do so, diminishes the
importance of the amusements and confusions the reader experienced in
reaching such a conclusion. That is why readers who value the
219
experience of reading itself should treat such recoded versions with
l
caution. j
O'Hara’s aesthetic demands this caution, for what he is pri
marily interested in communicating is not abstract ideas (of which J
recoded conclusions are made), but the force and wit of his personal J
voice.Thus he specifically avoids "philosophy" in favor of dream- j
I
like, irrational images such as those in surrealist paintings or
films. As a member of the New York school of poets, O’Hara was influ
enced by abstract expressionist painters like Pollock and de Kooning,
whose personal styles also dominate their work. Of poets, as one
might expect, O’Hara was less impressed by the tradition-bound imper- !
sonalism of Eliot than he was by the strong voices of Whitman, Crane,
and Williams. "After all," he said, "only Whitman and Crane and
6
Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies."
O’Hara's perspective on poetry as simply one among other amuse
ments illustrates the importance of the reading experience in contem
porary aesthetics; unless the experience as it takes place in time
is valuable to the reader, he may as well spend his time on other
amusements. The tricks of literary analysis (from structuralism
to Freudian interpretation) offer the reader a range of methods for
getting beyond the reading experience, but unless he treats these
methods with caution, the reader can find himself distorting signifi
cantly the experiences which attracted him to poetry in the first
place. This problem was apparent in the process of reading O'Hara's
"Poem" and is even more dramatically manifested in W. S. Merwin's
"Footprints on the Glacier."
220
Surrealism and the Dangers
of Reductive Reading
The lines of Merwin*s poem keep pulling the reader onward
in order to catch some kind of sense that keeps fleeting; so the
reader feels a tension between wanting to stop and figure out what
is happening and the inexorable motion of the lines; he is repeatedly
made to feel that the poem will be made coherent, and then confronted
with images that do not cohere. The poem opens:
Where the wind
year round out of the gap
polishes everything
here this day are footprints like my own
the first ever
frozen pointing up into the cold
In the beginning there is no confusion. Even the lack of punctuation
does not create any troublesome syntactical ambiguity. The speaker
is describing the weather, which has clear manifestations. With
"pointing up into the cold," however, the reader begins to wonder.
Where are the footprints going? Whose are they? The motion through
the stanza is fairly rapid in the first four lines, but slows down
dramatically in the last three lines, which also helps to undo the
security with which the poem started.
The poem continues:
and last night someone
marched and marched on the candle flame
hurrying
a painful road
and I heard the echo a long time afterwards
gone and some connection of mine
"And last night" reinforces the sense of real time indicated in "year
round" and "this day." Beginning the stanza with this clarity assures
the reader that his questions will be answered.
221
But "someone / marched and marched on the candle flame" the
lines say, "hurrying / a painful road." What is the meaning of
"road"? Could it be a metaphorical rendering of "painful journey"?
But if so, to and from where? And how can the journey take place
on the candle flame? The end of the stanza comes as a relief for
the reader, for here the speaker and reader share in their inability
to make meaningful connections.
But the next stanza contains all the same images, the foot
prints, the candle, and real time ("lately here"). Perhaps the
speaker does understand them:
I scan the high slopes for a dark speck
that was lately here
I pass my hands
over the melted wax
like a blind man
they are all
moving into their seasons at last
my bones face each other trying
to remember the question
Since the reader has not yet determined who or what the subject is
here, the lines "they are all / moving into their seasons at last"
will certainly be puzzling. In the concluding stanza, the words
"great battle" sound with such authority that the reader is again
made to feel that the poem will be made coherent. The last stanza is:
nothing moves while I watch
but here the black trees
are the cemetery of a great battle
and behind me as I turn
I hear names leaving the bark
in growing numbers and flying north
The stanza does not conclude with the sense "great battle" seemed
to promise, but instead with another puzzing image. The reading
222
— _—t
experience has been an accumulating sensation of something unnamed
being lost.
Most readers will want to reexamine such a mysterious poem
as this one. In doing so, they may want to attend more closely
to the title, which suggests human history over a long span of time.
The reader may also notice again how often the poem mentions or
images time. The past and present (or future and present) seem
to be in conflict, and it seems that in the inexorable movement
of time, the past (or present) is lost to the future.
The reader will want to be careful how he conducts this
reexamination, however, because establishing a cut-and-dried one-
to-one correspondence for the images will turn the poem into an
artifact, not only diminishing the importance of the reading expe
rience, but negating it. To prove this point requires me to demon
strate it. One possible recoding for the poem turns the images
into a sentimental lament for the loss of the past. Such a recoding
would go like this:
Time erodes everything. The speaker sees his earliest memories
trailing up into the frozen, dead past. A part of himself tries
to keep the memories warm over a candle flame, but he hears the
echo of their receding. He has trouble remembering, and locating
the importance of remembering; time keeps moving; but it is not dis
cernible in the present setting. Yet the trees mark the cemetery of
the battle between his past and present selves. The present wins
out over the past as the names carvedmn trees in youth are polished
off by time. They fly into the cold death north of the past. The
223
title indicates that the poem may he taken as a history of man, as
well as a personal history.
The trouble with this recoding is that the equations of wind
with time, footprints with memories, cold with the dead past, warmth
with the re-kindling of memories, and youth with names carved on
trees are trite, sentimental equations. The recoding has trivialized
and sentimentalized the reading experience.
Clearly, since the experience Merwin intended to create is
not the trivial, sentimental experience the recoded version makes
of the poem, the reader is better off accepting the surrealist juxta
position of images in the poem. Pushing and pulling at them to make
them fit into logical sense negates the deliberate illogicality of
the experience Merwin designed and therefore fails to take up the
poem fully under its own terms. The inexorable motion of the lines
functionsformally in the same way that time functions thematically
in the poem, resisting clarity in its drive for the future. This
resistance is the essence of the experience of reading the poem.
It turns out that Merwin’s conceptions of form are quite
thoroughly bound up with his views of time. Merwin argues that form
in poetry of the Middle Ages was transparent (separable from content)
because the poets were able to conceive clearly the roles of time
in poetry and poetry in time. Merwin goes on to contrast the earlier
age with our own:
The invention of a new form of stanza was a matter of genuine
poetic importance to the troubadours. To us it would probably
seem scarcely a matter for much curiosity. For the troubadours
the abstract form (which certainly they did not hear as an
abstract thing) was unquestionably related to that part of
224
the poem that was poetic. For us it is hard to remain convinced
that the form, insofar as it is abstract, is not merely part of
what in the poem is inescapably technical. For us, for whom
everything is in question, the making keeps leading us back into
the patterns of a world of artifice so intricate, so insidious,
and so impressive,^that often it seems indistinguishable from
the whole of time.
This belief is very similar to Kinnell's notion of form in
Elizabethan poetry, that it represented a harmonious and repetitive
universe genuinely felt. It is clear that contemporary poets feel
that their rejection of conventional forms is integral to their render
ing of our age. Merwin also points out that in technological times
like ours, the danger of conventional form, which is only a means to
an end, takes on, like other means, an extrinsic importance which can
eclipse or destroy its ends. Merwin therefore sees the abandonment
of conventional form as a way of battling the increasing influence
technology has over our lives:
In an age when time and technique encroach hourly, or appear to,
on the source itself of poetry, it seems as though what is needed
for any particular nebulous unwritten hope that may become a poem
is not a manipulable, more or less predictably recurring pattern,
but an unduplicatable resonance, something that would be like an
echo except that it is repeating no sound. Something that always
belonged to it: its sense and its conformation before it entered
words.®
Like Snyder, Merwin sees the source of poetic energy as pre
ceding words. Like Kinnell, and many other contemporary poets, he
sees himself (ironically) as a strict formalist, a reshaper of the
whole conception of form:
What are here called open forms are in some concerns the strictest.
Here only the poem itself can be seen as its form. In a peculiar
sense if you criticize how it happens you critize what it is.^
It is the reader's task and pleasure to recognize this new conception
of form as the reading experience. ^
Notes
'*'Gary Snyder, "SomeYips and Barks in the Dark," in Naked
Poetry, ed. S. Berg and R. Mezey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
1969), p. 357.
2
David Kherdian, Six San Francisto Poets (Fresno, California:
Giligia Press, 1967), p. 26.
8Ibid., p. 35.
4
Robert Bly, "On Political Poetry," Nation (April 24, 1967):
522-523.
“*Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems, "Personism: A Manifesto."
(New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 498-499.
8 Ibid., p. 498.
^W. S. Merwin, "On Open Form," in Naked Poetry, ed. S. Berg
and R. Mezey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1969), p. 270.
8Ibid., pp. 270-271.
9Ibid., p. 271.
226
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