Poetics of Tension and Encounter

Apologia

Thus far I have managed to avoid making any public statement of my poetics, choosing instead to answer all questions by directing the enquirer towards my poems. “Judge for yourself,” I have said. “Here are my poems. Read them. They themselves are my statement. If you are interested in my poetics, deduce them from my work and then come back and tell me what they are.”

This I have done not from laziness, muddleheadedness, or fear of explanation or exposition, but simply from fear of death. I am not of course speaking of personal death but of the death of my work, or rather the death of the current phase of my work. For expressed poetics must, I feel, be nothing less than an epitaph. “From these and these insights and positions I have written. Heaven only knows what stand I shall take
tomorrow.” Amen, amen.

And so in hope of a new phase of my work I lay me down to sleep with these statements of my poetics folded beneath my pillow. May these words enter my head and then fly out again making room for better poems than I have ever written
before.

For the poet, that absurd combination of naiveté and sophistication, can never be satisfied with her work, must find a new tune and saw away at the broken fiddle forever.

Our Sullen Art

the language of poetry has something to do

with the open mouth the tongue that jumps

up and down like a child on a shed roof calling

ha ha and who’s the dirty rascal now?

the same boy sent to his room for punishment

leans from his window listening for animals

far away in the woods strains his ears to catch

even the slightest sound of rage but nothing howls

even the hoot of owls in the dusk is gentle

•

he hears the tiny snarl of the shrew

the rasp of the snail’s foot on the leaf

the too-high squeaking of bats which comes

to his head as the vibration

of distant hacksaws he hum humms

with his lips tight shut he stands there

listening and humming almost through the short night

then falls into the tangle of sheets and blankets

where fitfully he sleeps while slowly

the window greys to four panes of bleak light

•

the day’s first traffic travels carefully

past the windows and doors of the shut house

so as not to awaken in the child

those savage cries our violent

our pathetic language of poems

Elements of the Poem

self

other

insight

the interpretive role

the imaginative vision

tension and struggle: that is person against poet, reader against writer

language first and always

the physical landscape

the landscape of the mind

The Poetics of Tension and Encounter

Poetry is great passion under great restraint.

is imagination struggling against form.

is an overriding idea in conflict with an assertive language.

is great risk set against great certainty.

is insight arguing with logic.

is vision in contention with knowledge.

poetry is the energy of the body (expressed in rhythm, sound, repetition, and so on) wrestling with the energy of the intellect (expressed in theories, ideas, logic).

The Influence of Place – The External Landscape

This prairie, this place to which we have come, or from which we have emerged, has never so far failed in its overriding influence on those who write in it and of it. We have so often expressed the struggle of poetry by the struggle of man against the violence and oppression of the elements. Other landscapes, other poems. From gentler places may have come pieces that glorified Nature and her motherly beauty. Not from the prairie. Her beauty is spacious and unrestrained, as well as pitiless and ruthless. Drought, fire, heat, cold, privation and loneliness, these have been recurring images and themes in our prairie writing: Man against nature, Natural Man against the civilized interloper, the land itself against those who would tame her.

For our prairie writers are first of all riders. They have ridden their ponies on and off the pages of our history and literature, trampling the grass, marking the land with the hooves of their steeds. Somewhere out there beside a grid road is an abandoned and roofless farmhouse. A flock of birds flies up as we pass in our racketing vehicles (not horses any more, but we like to give them horsey names, Pinto, Mustang, and so on).

The birds then, which rise up so readily into the huge skies

of our reality and our imagination, are screeching out prairie poems, not so much songs as anecdotes of our foremothers and forefathers. Grandma is fighting the dust and loneliness for the sake of the family. Or perhaps Grandpa is withering out there on the prairie, refusing in his old age to leave the place which is rightfully his own. Meanwhile he is relating those stories and incidents which are to become myths for his descendants.

from “The Question”

behind the woman a window is open a breeze pushes

against the back of her head causing her voice to empty

itself into the room the wind gives her words the

twang of an out-of-tune harp they shape themselves

•

into a question she’s been asking about the scheme

of things it all seems to be rushing away from us she

remarks as from an abhorred centre

•

beside a small table a naked man sits with his legs

crossed where skin touches skin his body hairs lock

each one tangling with another the light enters the

glassy cones of his eyes which glint like the eyes

of a dog wandering on a road at night

•

with one hand he fondles the brass stem of the lamp

on the table beside him with the other he reaches

for the woman’s hand counting her fingers with his

own why can’t he remember how many fingers this

woman has

The Influence of Space – The Internal Landscape

Then what of those poets to whom the prairie is apparently more or less incidental – who seldom write of the external prairie, wilderness or forest? There are more and more of us lately whose prospect is an urban one; that is, whose external landscape is an urban one. The internal landscape is quite another thing.

For a prairie poet is a prairie poet. The amazing place of his birth or his choice cannot easily be forgotten or set aside. What happens I think is that the physical place, the place which he has lived in, or driven through, or heard of, or seen, becomes his internal landscape. And this landscape of the mind, of the poetic imagination and vision, has become part of the writer’s thought, part of the poet’s poetic. It may never be expressed as an image, a symbol or an anecdote; it will almost certainly be expressed as a contention, an argument, a struggle. Perhaps it is in this sense of conflict, this urge towards conquest that the prairie is best described by our non-landscape poets, of whom perhaps I am one.

(1986)