Words and their irritable reaching
+ + +Somewhere I remember reading advice for beginning writers not to show their work to anyone, at least that in the early stages. The author argued that it took all of the power out of the idea, like a pressure-release valve, before any of that creative power got to be applied to the page. It made me think of “Meditation at Legunitas,” when Hass writes “that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea.” As a self-confessed General Idea person, I identify with the remark: it does seem as though, no matter how lofty the idea I originally have for a poem, once I sit down to write the thing I quickly get bogged down in the details, the particulars. I guess the writer of that lost article must work the same way, leading to their advice: if the “luminous clarity of a general idea” is so fragile that just beginning to write it down ruins it somehow, telling people about it is even worse.
+But back to that Robert Hass poem: while he does say that thing about the “luminous clarity of a general idea,” and he adds to it that “a word is elegy to what it signifies,” his tone is lightly chiding this philosophy. He opens his poem with “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking,” which to my mind lampoons both the new and the old thinking for not having anything new, ultimately, to say. He attributes these thoughts to a friend, whose voice carried “a thin wire of grief, a tone / almost querulous” about that loss of luminous clarity. The speaker of Hass’s poem remembers a woman he made love to, once, and this image takes over the poem in all its specificity, from “her small shoulders” to his “childhood river / with its island willows,” to “the way her hands dismantled bread.”
+Even in disproving his friend’s remarks through his imagery, the speaker of “Meditation at Legunitas” admits that “It hardly had to do with her”—and here is the heart of what Hass is saying about poetry. A poem hardly has to do with what it’s written about, on the surface level; as Richard Hugo says it in a famous essay, a poem has a “triggering subject” and it has a “real or generated subject,” which for Hugo in “Meditation at Legunitas” is something about the way that not only general ideas, but particulars, such as the body or hands or “the thing her father said that hurt her,” which is such a beautiful generality that is somehow also a particular truth, are luminous to poetry and to life-as-lived. The philosophers can say what they want, but we experience the world bodily and particularly to ourselves.
+There’s still a problem with language, however, to which Hass speaks by the end of his poem, with those repetitions of “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry,” in that, as Jack Gilbert says in his poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / but frightening that it does not quite.” There is still that “irritable reaching after fact & reason” that language, as communication, requires—I think Keats would agree that he wrote about a near-unattainable ideal in his letter that only Shakespeare and maybe Coleridge and a few others could achieve, this “Negative Capability.” Gilbert furthers Keats in asserting that no matter what we write, “the words / Get it wrong,” that utterance is itself that irritable reaching.
+In Gilbert’s poem, though, he does reach after something. In the second half of the poem he begins to imagine what the “mysterious Sumerian tablets” could be as poetry, instead of just “business records:”
+++[…] My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley under the wind’s labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark.
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This is my favorite part of the poem, and I think it’s because Gilbert, like Hass, reaches for the specific in the general; he brings huge ideas like the Lord or Love or Joy into the specific images of salt, copper, or honey, or like he says at the end of his poem: “What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.” This, ultimately, is what Keats was getting at, and Hugo, too: that the real subject of any poetry is not capturable in the words of the poem, but that rather a poem speaks around its subject. To be honest, all art may do this. What sets a poem apart is its honesty about that fact.