Before I wrote my piece on doubt Friday, Rob Stanton sent
in this perspective, suggesting that the author’s & the reader’s relation
to the text might not be symmetrical, so that each might involve a different
sort of doubt.
Dear Ron,
Thanks for the excellent
reading of Fanny Howe's poem 'Doubt'
in your blog last week, and for reproducing Rodney
Koeneke's similarly fine response on Monday. The discussion made me think
of another 'essay poem' about doubt and poetry: Anne Carson's 'Essay on What I
Think About Most' (from her collection Men in the Off
Hours) - I don't know if you've come across it, or what you think of
her work in general.
'Error' is the thing most on Carson's mind, but 'error' in
the sense of a positive mental possibility - indeed, as (following Aristotle)
the very basis for metaphor (and therefore poetry?) itself: 'Metaphors teach
the mind//to enjoy error/and to learn/from the juxtaposition of 'what is' and
'what is not' the case.'
This made me wonder whether a different sort of 'doubt'
exists between poet and poem during the writing process than between poem and
reader once the poem is 'out in the world'. Isn't it true that, for the poet, a
'finished' poem (whether one takes a 'finished poem' to be something which has,
in Yeats' too-smug phrase, 'clicked shut like a box', or, in Valéry's more honest take, been 'given up in despair') has
gone beyond 'doubt' to some extent? Or, to put this another
way, is the doubt which the poet may have felt over his of her 'inexact
vocabulary', his or her willful 'errors', not now transferred over to the
reader? As your close reading of Howe's more typical-seeming poem 'Again' on
Tuesday shows, a poem can be formally complete ('the word again') and still
full of questions, doubts, fears and 'bewilderment' for the reader. Of course,
such success within the poem will not automatically mean that the poet him- or
herself feels any more 'complete': as you sort of suggest, Spicer's eerie last
words might relate to an all-too-precise or too 'knowing' vocabulary, rather
than an 'inexact' one (he was, after all, a linguist).
I also wondered whether this distinction did not address,
to some extent, Koeneke's anxiety over whether 'doubt' invalidates any possible
political stance taken in the poem (or elsewhere). If a 'finished poem' - one
which has perhaps 'contained' the poet's doubt and errors - once published and
out in the world for people to look at, can generate 'doubt' in the reader, is
that not a political act? Keats himself, personally, did not expect an answer
to his question 'Do I wake or sleep?', but he probably hoped that Ode to a
Nightingale might make some readers think about their perceptions. (And, in an
example closer to home, the individual questions in your own Sunset Debris do not ask for individual
answers* - the piece as a whole surely ask a more 'overwhelming question' about
the power relationship between speaker and listener, writer and reader.) It may
be true, as
And talking of smugness: given that 'certainty engenders
repose' (as Uncle Ez sez in
Canto CIX.) - and
who sane would want personal repose in the current world situation? - I
certainly (!) agree with you that doubt is preferable, especially if it
indicates 'healthy negative capability', 'held properly' as you say, rather
than the sort of self-harming 'existential angst' Howe is writing about in Woolf and Weil or that dark political mirror of negative
capability, Orwellian 'doublethink'.
(Another semi-random, grim and pedantic aside: doesn't
Woolf's filling of her pockets with stones indicate an all-too-practical
awareness of the substance of the body, and the need to weigh it down, as much
as the actual act of suicide might represent a sloughing off of the body? Woolf was particularly worried at the time about another
bout of mental (and therefore 'spiritual'?) instability.)
Anyway, I'm sure you get rambling emails relating to your
blog all the time so I'll cut off now, while I'm still making (some kind of) sense.
Thanks, by the way, for including my
site in your recent round-up of poetry blogs - I'd never realised I was 'post-avant' before!
All the best,
Rob
Rob’s ongoing “dailyish” poem “Issue” certainly is post-avant. It’s a fun
project to watch as it evolves. Because of the nature of Blogger software –
though it’s a feature that can be toggled in the opposite direction – one gets
the curious experience of reading the poem in reverse sequence, rather like the
films Memento or Irreversible.
* Though
Alan Davies’ piece “?s to .s,” published in the issue
on my work in The Difficulties in
fact does just that.
