NAMING AND THE PARTS OF SPEECH
Naming has to do first of all with nouns and secondarily with verbs. Using only nouns and verbs, we can begin to create a world out of words and then set it in motion, start it moving as a story: “The deer crossed the field . . .”; “The car skidded off the road . . .”; “The boy loved the girl. . . .” This is a world that our readers can enter. The right nouns and verbs give us vividness and precision—they can both ground us in the world we live in and also bring that world alive inside our reader’s brain, make it appear before the “mind’s eye” (William Butler Yeats’s term for the imagination).
If I say “table,” the chances are that most listeners and readers would see a similar object in response to that naming. It would probably have four legs and a flat top. Some might “see” a table made of wood, others one made of plastic, metal, or stone. Some might see something quite grand—on which a banquet is served; others might see something smaller and more modest—where a lamp or a laptop rests, or where people eat in a kitchen. If, however, I say “beauty,” it’s difficult if not impossible to predict with any certainty what people would “see” in response to that word. They might see hugely various things: a person, a place, a creature, an object in nature or in a museum—or they might see nothing at all. We may no longer (did we ever?) agree on what “beauty” looks like, what objects or things or creatures it conjures up to the mind’s eye. Beauty is an abstract concept, an idea.
Naming in language suggests that while it may no longer be possible to assume that we all have shared values that can be expressed in conceptual language, we do share a world of objects. Especially when we’re young poets, we’re tempted to use abstract nouns like beauty because we sense that they’re value words we may wish to associate with our poem or ourselves. We feel that if we can use them in our poems, then our poems might sound (or be) more important, more grand, more meaningful. It’s an important humility in poetry-writing to start with the world of our own sensory experience and the power of simple Naming.
Nouns connect us to the world through Naming, and that connection is a source of wonder and delight. You can see it in its naïve glory and glee in the face of a two-year-old who’s just learning language and shouts “doggie! doggie!” whenever that creature enters the room.
The variety of images brought before the mind’s eye by the naming of things is rich and varied. Think how each of the following nouns summons a different bird image: sparrow, egret, pigeon, chickadee, robin, eagle, swan, swallow, parakeet, penguin, finch.
Or consider the accuracy of verbs. Think how each of the following verbs names a different way a person might move down a sidewalk: amble, stride, stumble, race, stroll, run, sashay, hobble.
How much precise information the right nouns and verbs convey!
Oddly enough, adjectives are less useful to poets, less important to poetry than they are to prose. Maybe this has to do with poetry’s desire to compress and focus the reader’s attention in order to get to the heart of something right away. After all, we usually don’t have twenty pages in which to create a world in poems; we have to move quickly and efficiently, trying to capture the essence of that world. But it isn’t only that nouns and verbs are more efficient than adjectives; there’s also the issue of a lazy writer bullying his or her readers with adjectives. When someone says “the amazing dog” or “the beautiful dog” in writing, the language is telling the reader rather than showing. And there’s another issue with the use (or misuse) of adjectives. We’ve been taught since grade school that to enlarge our vocabulary is to show that we’re smart; that as we proceed in our education, we can accumulate all sorts of elaborate adjectives (e.g., munificent, audacious, intriguing, scabrous) that might turn up on vocabulary quizzes or statewide tests. We’re also told that this large vocabulary of adjectives will make our writing richer and more various—and for all I know, that might be true about writing prose. But for poets, the main goal is often to focus on the heart of a scene or situation with precise nouns and verbs; elaborate and showy adjectives can clutter our lines and distract our readers.
The one big exception to this advice concerns color adjectives. For some reason, color words have a vividness that even poets respect. Almost inexplicably, the phrase “the blue truck” provides a more vivid image than “the truck.” Maybe the reason for this is obvious, maybe not—but many poets appreciate what color adjectives can accomplish.
It can be hard to realize that Naming and describing are different. Naming seldom involves description, which can be extremely important in prose writing but can be clumsy and awkward in poetry. Naming is succinct. Using precise and accurate Naming, lyric poets hope that they can conjure up not only the thing they’re naming, but also its mystery and wonder.
NAMING TO ORIENT IN A LANDSCAPE
Naming is important when it concerns the things and characters in your poem, but there’s also a corollary that involves the poem’s setting. When writing a poem that inhabits a landscape of some kind (urban, suburban, rural, wilderness, indoors, a yard in a town), you should orient your reader or characters in that landscape and keep track of where they are in relation to it. You, as the poet, may know what your character is doing at any given moment, but the reader will only know if you use orienting words, which are often simple nouns (stairs, door, tree, street, path), to locate a character precisely and to keep track of that character as she or he acts or reacts in that setting. Think again of the title and opening line of Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”: “I walk through the long schoolroom, questioning”; here he not only names “school children” and “long schoolroom” but also gives us “walk through” and “questioning,” both of which orient us in that world and name it more clearly.
When William Carlos Williams says there should be “no ideas but in things,” he represents a movement away from abstraction in poetry in English that happened in the early years of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound pointed the way when he urged young poets to “go in fear of abstractions.”
Naming worked well for Williams for a number of reasons—he wished to set his poetry solidly in America and to write in American speech rhythms. (Both Pound and T. S. Eliot had left America for good as young poets, and even Robert Frost went to live in England for three years.) To Williams, it was an ethical as well as an aesthetic issue. Working as a pediatrician in suburban New Jersey, he incorporated into his poems the speech rhythms of his patients and the landscapes and objects he encountered. (That famous “red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens” wasn’t on a farm, but in a back alley in the city of Paterson that Williams drove down one afternoon on his way to see a patient.) Williams was only following Walt Whitman, who walked the streets of New York with joy and tried to name as much of what he saw as he could enliven in his poems. The premise behind such Naming is that we share a world of objects, and this sharing can be the basis of connection between poet and reader or listener. The rapper Jay-Z proposes the same thing as Whitman and Williams when he writes in his memoir, Decoded:
New York has a thousand universes in it that don’t always connect but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the Post, read the same writings on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don’t. (here)
The power of Naming is based on what Jay-Z calls a “shared landscape,” even though he is right to point out that the uniting takes place “in some small way” and that the sense of knowing each other is sometimes an illusion.
NAMING AND THE FIVE SENSES
To cherish the language force of Naming is to stay connected to the vividness and reality of our own five senses, which are the first and most essential sources of our knowledge and understanding. Let me give a crude example. If we were to hear a spiritual authority (preacher, priest, imam, or rabbi) give a sermon about “the necessity of acting with love” on one day, and the next day we saw that person walking down a sidewalk and pausing to kick a cat, would we place our faith in the noble words or in what our own eyes had seen? Naming helps us to stay in close contact with the world of our senses, and to value that world.
Walt Whitman, Abstraction, and the Reality of the Senses
The human mind has the ability to think abstractly and to use language abstractly. Probably the most abstract use of written symbols that humans use is mathematics. Much of the world we live in uses the language of mathematics: computers, obviously; and mathematics is at work when we try to balance a checkbook or handle a credit card. Isaac Newton, the great seventeenth-century scientist whose discoveries profoundly affected science and technology, once said: “We have discovered the language that Nature speaks: it is mathematics.” Newton came to understand the world through experiments, scientific formulas, and charts expressed in the language of mathematics; but many of us still speak a different language, the language of our five senses.
Here’s a poem by Whitman that acknowledges the world of science and abstract diagrams, but that also is a critique and satire of it. He knows the astronomer is respected (“much applause”), but he also knows that he’s bored by these abstractions (“How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick”) and needs to return to the reality of his senses—the simple act of gazing at the stars:
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman (1865)
Even as I write this primer, I worry about becoming the boring astronomer. I’ve taught and lectured for most of my life, and I use abstractions to teach (think of the concepts of “order and disorder”), yet I believe that the heart of poetry is somehow the effort to share human experiences and affirm their value—to speak of the world in a way that communicates (names) something as basic as “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” As if to show us that adjectives’ careful and sparing use can have a strong impact in a poem that mostly comprises nouns and verbs, we can note that mystical and perfect are essential to the impact of Whitman’s brief poem.
No poet was greater at naming things in the shareable world than Whitman. We could say that his skill at Naming came out of his training and work as a newspaper reporter and editor, jobs that required a focus on facts and details. A journalist must be observant, precise, and economical with language; must quickly translate the scene before his eyes into words that will go on a (newspaper) page. Naming is the heart of it. But is to name to celebrate? It’s an interesting question. Certainly, Naming and celebration of self and world and others was the heart of Whitman’s great moral vision as realized in Leaves of Grass. True to his belief that poetry should be based in both pride (in self) and empathy (identification with others and with not-self), Whitman named in order to celebrate. In what was a scandalous breach of good taste for his time, Whitman claims very early on in his “Song of Myself” that he prefers being naked in the open air, where he can admire and celebrate his own physical body and its sensations:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.
from “Song of Myself,” section 2
Later he namingly celebrates others—creatures and people and anything that populates the world around him. According to Whitman’s radical mystic vision of democracy, all genders, all races, all ethnicities, all occupations, all creatures and things should be named and celebrated; nothing was beneath his notice. Sometimes he extends his Naming into a brief scene or sketch—a vignette, really. Notice how the first three naming sketches in the following lines are a quick “tour” of three major human mysteries: birth, sex, death. After that, the poem’s attention moves out into a busy, urban street and gets more random in its listing or Naming:
The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. [birth; my parenthesis]
The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top. [sex]
The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. [death]
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of roused mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the center of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starved who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them—I come and
I depart.
from “Song of Myself,” section 8
Read also this, the beginning of section 15 of “Song of Myself”:
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain’d with crossed hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loaf and looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blur with the manuscript;
The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table,
What is removed drops horribly in a pail;
The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, . . .
from “Song of Myself,” section 15
It’s as if the Naming that is so extensive in Whitman’s long poem is the evidence that will support his larger, more philosophical claims about the perfection and beauty of the material world and those who dwell in it. These larger claims are made in the language of Saying, and I’ll talk about them and how they sound later in this chapter.
Haiku as a Poetry of Sensation
The Japanese poetry form known as haiku adheres to the strictest principles of Naming. It is a poetry of sensation—it demands that the poet present in seventeen syllables some scene or object or action, but it is against the form’s rules to editorialize or emotionalize in any way or to make use of any abstract nouns. Here are a couple by the seventeenth-century haiku master Bashˉo, in which I haven’t attempted to keep the syllable count, but only the observational spirit, the clarity and alertness this kind of poem cherishes:
Summer’s End
Fall starts now:
Sea and rice fields—
One, single green!
Suma Beach; Autumn
When each wave recedes:
Tiny shells revealed,
And shreds of beach clover
Mingled with them.
The fact that haiku are about accurate and alert observation does not imply that they aren’t intended to evoke a complex emotional and intellectual response in the reader. Quite the contrary. But a haiku does so by strictly avoiding any abstractions or concept words and limiting itself to simply and precisely naming what the poet sees or hears or smells or tastes or touches. Again and again, haiku poets are urged to return to their senses and to gather knowledge directly from experience. “Learn about the pines from the pine,” says Bashˉo (who was also a teacher of poets)—go and see and smell and listen and name.
Knowing and Naming in Poems
It’s important that we as poets know the world we’re talking about—the world of our poems and what’s in them. This often means knowing about the world we live in. You don’t need to know everything; but if it’s a poem about fish, or streams, or basketball, or recreational drugs, or driving a car, or gardening, you should know the words that are appropriate to that experience or activity, and you should use them with accuracy and precision. It will go a long way toward making your poem believable, credible, persuasive.
“Learn about the city block from the city block.” The American poet Galway Kinnell has a great early poem called “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World,” which is structured as an exuberant walk along Avenue C in the Lower East Side of New York City—an area famous for its history of absorbing various immigrant groups and ethnicities into its crowded streets and tenements. The poem wants to notice and celebrate and name everything that it can about the neighborhood. At one point in the poem, a woman opens her window to set two potted plants on the window ledge: “tic tic” the poem says, perfectly naming the sound that a soil-filled terracotta flowerpot makes when it’s set down “terribly softly” on a stone windowsill.
TWO NAMING EXERCISES
Naming alone doesn’t constitute a poem, but it situates you in a world and in a context in that world. And Naming has the power to bring something before your (and your reader’s) imagination. Recall that when you did the “I Remember” exercise in Chapter 1, you turned wordless memory images into words that named what you remembered. Some of those “I remembers” stirred you up emotionally. If you were to reread your list (which is now a naming list), would it lead you back to those memories and even to those or other emotions? One aspect of the power of Naming in poems is the possibility that Naming leads to emotions—not just in the poet, but in a reader also. Can the words and Naming that evoke emotions in you also evoke them in a reader? It’s hard to know, but Naming in poetry often aspires to such an outcome.
What I’m proposing here is more a meditation on language and how it connects you to the world than it is an exercise designed to lead to a poem or a draft of a poem. Consider this: If you can’t name something, do you really notice it, are you really aware of it?
In other words, do Naming and noticing and having knowledge make you more aware of your world and more connected to it (or alienated from it, if that’s where the noticing leads)? Connection and an alert awareness of alienation are both significant human experiences—countless poems have been written from those experiences. Which is to say, countless moments of heightened consciousness have been brought about when language in a poem names the world a person inhabits.
Here’s the first exercise. Go somewhere (e.g., to a room, a streetcorner, a park, a field), and name what you encounter. Make a list that names what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Is the number of things that surround you surprising? Do you notice some things that you can’t name, don’t have names for? Sit or pause in a place (e.g., room, park bench, stoop, under a tree, coffee shop), and try to notice and name twenty things that you see or hear or smell. Write them down. Can you circle four or five that give the most vivid sense of the place or that would most effectively orient a person reading them in that world you’re trying to evoke?
As the second exercise, do another naming list. This time, take something you know and care about—something you enjoy or are deeply involved in. Name the things that are part of it, the sensations that are involved with it. It needn’t be the obvious choice of a sport or hobby or skill you have; it could be anything (good or bad) that you’re experientially familiar with (e.g., a kind of music or a favorite spot). Try to come up with around twenty things you can name that are part of your involvement—objects, actions, sensations—and when you’re done, circle the four or five that seem most vivid and essential to you. Again, as with the “I remembers,” the key is to give yourself permission to remember, know, and name.
NAMING AND CLAIMING AND TAMING
A crisis can occur when the nouns (the Naming) available to a person aren’t adequate to the reality that he or she is facing. Imagine being a young English boy eighteen years of age in 1914, when World War I broke out; he might well have responded to that event by writing an excited poem about how he was looking forward to the heroic adventure of battle. Wilfred Owen was just such a boy. Eager to enlist in the army, he wrote a short poem about how thrilled he felt at the prospect of being a soldier among his comrades and perhaps dying a hero’s death:
O meet it is and passing sweet
To live in peace with others,
But sweeter still and far more meet,
To die in war for brothers.
Wilfred Owen (1914)
Owen used the vocabulary—the Naming—that was available to him at the time. His little poem is abstract and sentimental; it uses old-fashioned “poetic” language (meet is an archaic word for “fitting”—no one, even in Owen’s day, would have used it in ordinary conversation). Neither young Owen nor anyone else at the time had any idea of what this first “modern” war was going to be like for soldiers. No one yet knew how to name what was going to happen, because World War I changed warfare forever by introducing a whole new set of “things” (nouns, names) into experience: poison gas, machine guns, barbed wire, trench warfare, airplanes that dropped bombs from the sky, the area between the two front lines that would come to be called no-man’s-land.
The war that young Owen soon joined as a front-line officer had new and horrible realities to show him: horror upon horror of trench warfare, and hopeless charges across the desolation and through the churned mud of no-man’s-land under ceaseless artillery barrages. The destruction was on a scale that was impossible to comprehend. In the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 55,400 soldiers on the first day of their attack. By the time the battle finally ended five months later, the British had suffered 415,690 casualties, the French 200,000, and the Germans 434,500. And the battle with its unimaginable carnage changed nothing—when it was finally over, the front lines had shifted a scant and meaningless seven miles.
Embedded in this mathematical hugeness of horror were Owen’s own particular experiences. After leading a charge, he was pinned down in a shallow hole for seven days of artillery fire before being relieved. During that time, he watched his men being blown up, right and left. He himself suffered a breakdown (what we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder) and was shipped back home to recover briefly and then sent back to the front again. My point isn’t about the trauma Owen suffered in the war, but about his response. After having been in battle and experiencing its horrors, he was determined to write a different kind of poem that named the new and terrifying reality he and countless other soldiers had experienced:
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And toward our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—an ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen (1917)
In this and other fierce poems Owen wrote during his short life, the Naming of a new reality of war is powerfully insisted upon and the old patriotic “lies” about the glory of war are rejected. As in his early poem, sweet and meet are present in the Latin motto “Dulce et decorum,” but now the sweetness and meetness are harshly ironic. Now Owen presents a new Naming that includes “flares” and the artillery shells called “Five-Nines” and the gas “helmets” and the horrible poison gas itself.
My point isn’t about patriotism or war, but about language and Naming. If we can’t name something accurately and bravely, then we can easily become a victim of experience. This holds true for the intimate traumas and civilian traumas of social life just as much as it does for something as vast and universal as warfare.
NAMING AND THE LIBERATION OF SELF THROUGH LANGUAGE
Paolo Freire (1921–1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who had a lifelong belief that literacy—the ability to read and write—could be a powerful force in freeing people from political and economic oppression. According to Freire, political oppression is built into our teaching systems as a kind of indoctrination: children are taught to read and write in the vocabulary determined by the ruling groups in their particular culture. Learning the vocabulary, thought structures, and value words of the ruling establishment dooms students to a restricted freedom and an unconscious acceptance of “things as they are.” If you happen to be a member of an oppressed or exploited group, then “things as they are” only confirm and continue your oppression. Freire believed that “true literacy,” a literacy of self-liberation, begins when we learn to “name our world in our words.”
In the course of developing his ideas about “naming our world in our words,” Freire went back to “reread” his own childhood—that is, to revisit his childhood experiences in Recife, Brazil, and turn those memories into words. He remembered the birds and the weather, his fear of ghosts, the trees and the backyard of his family home. He called childhood’s awareness of things an act of “reading the world.” This world is outer (e.g., the trees in the backyard of Freire’s childhood home, the weather, the cats and dog and rooms and birds), but also inner (e.g., his terror of ghosts, how at night the sounds seemed louder because he was more frightened). Reading and writing one’s world is a way of claiming one’s personhood. Following Freire’s thinking, I would say that to name your world is to claim your world. You must claim your world before the world claims you (and renames you: person #3498345374). When Friere developed the notion of reclaiming his dignity and subjectivity by going back to remember his childhood, he was doing his own version of “I remember.”
In a real sense, your impulse to write lyric poetry can also be understood as your struggle to become fully human: to name and thus lay claim to your experiences and feelings, and to derive your values and beliefs at least in part from these experiences and feelings.
A genuine personal literacy has the power to spread this doctrine of the assertive self. That the literate self can witness and affirm its own existence is the cause of both excitement and anxiety, as we see in these words from the contemporary American poet Dorianne Laux recounting her first time attending a poetry workshop:
I was in my late twenties, a single mother, working as a waitress at a small family restaurant. . . . I had been told to write about what I knew, and what I knew was my life, a life I wasn’t sure was acceptable as a subject matter for poetry, a life that included instances of domestic abuse and sexual abuse. In Steve’s workshop I was given permission to write about that life. I was working class. I was a woman. I was a mother. Could this mundane, ordinary world be a subject for my poetry?
from her Foreword to Steven Kowitt’s In the Palm of Your Hand, here
And, of course, the answer to Laux’s question is yes. This is one of the important things poetry does for all poets—helps them lay claim to the life they live and turn it into vivid words that dramatize and dignify it. To bring us further into the contemporary world to a point at which literacy, lyric poetry, and the power of passionate personal testimony intersect, we have these autobiographical words from the Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca on how he first came to write poetry as a young man in prison. First came reading poems late at night from an anthology stolen from a jail guard. His reading started as mere curiosity, but the more absorbed he became in the sounds and rhythms, the more he felt a pleasure that verged on happiness—even in that bleak place of confinement—as memories and emotions began to surface.
Shortly after experiencing the exhilarations and ecstatic release of reading lyric poetry, Baca discovered the even more dynamic liberating powers that come with writing poems. Propped on a bunk in his cell, with a notebook on his knees and a pencil stub gripped in his hand, he wrote his first words. As he did so, he realized that, prior to that moment, he felt as if his whole life had been spent swimming a shoreless ocean, but as he wrote he felt an island rising up under his feet—that the words he placed on the page were creating something solid and real: “As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew . . . into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived” (from “Lock and Key,” in Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio). For the first time, he discovers the power of shaped language to express and transform all he has endured and seen and felt into the complicated affirmation of individual being that lyric poetry can represent.
SILENCE AND NAMING
In the examples of Baca and Laux, the silencing is connected to cultural bias and the insecurity that social prejudice can induce in the self—the sense that one is unworthy of self-expresssion. There’s another power Naming has: to say what has been silenced, what people are afraid to say out loud in conversation or in other social circumstances—say, in a family or among friends. Often, we discover that we can “say to the page” (write) what we wouldn’t dare say out loud, even to (especially to?) those nearest us. Whether out of fear or shame or a sense of confusion, many things that are personally urgent to us can’t be spoken in the day-to-day world we inhabit—the world of school, job, friends, and family. But there is nothing a person can’t say to a page. That sense of freedom and liberation of the self isn’t just one of being free of other people’s judgments, but—even more important—one of being free of our own self-censorship and self-judging. To give ourselves permission to put words down on the page—what a delicious risk and thrill!
This discussion brings us back again to the crucial first steps of poetry-writing. First comes the decision to turn the world into words, to turn away from the ordinary world we inhabit and to speak openly to the page, without fear or shame or embarrassment. This is one of the great freedoms and adventures of poetry-writing. And it begins with Naming. Naming is the antidote to silence. To name is to speak truly and accurately—to name what is in us, or what we have seen or done or endured or yearned to do.
Many of those first words we come up with in the “permission phase” of poetry-writing will be clumsy or clichéd or confused, but it’s important not to judge them; instead, trust the process of writing, and know that you’re often moving toward trying to name what’s important to you. By the way, in terms of what we have silenced in ourselves—it isn’t just others we’ve concealed it from, but also often (and importantly) from ourselves. Another great reason for writing poems is to discover our own secrets. Poets have often and truly said: “How do I know what I feel until I see what I write?” Writing often reveals us to ourselves, lets us name what’s important to us and what has been silent or silenced inside us.
HOW NAMING CAN MOVE INTO SYMBOL-MAKING
Classical Chinese poetry, like Japanese lyric, is full of Naming and focuses on the world of things and people. Here the eleventh-century critic and poet Wei T’ai tells why he (and all Chinese poets) consider Naming the essential element of poetry:
Poetry presents the thing, in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects with the thing the feeling shows in the words; this is how poetry enters deeply into us. If the poet presents directly the feelings which overwhelm him, and keeps nothing back to linger as an aftertaste, he stirs us superficially; he cannot start the hands and feet involuntarily waving and tapping in time, far less strengthen morality and refine culture, set heaven and earth in motion and call up spirits!
from A. C. Graham, Poems of the Late T’ang, pg. 8
While Wei T’ei is encouraging us to name accurately and precisely, he is also presenting an argument for symbols. He warns us that direct statement of feeling in poetry (“I’m sad”; “I’m lonely”; “I’m happy”) lacks resonance; it doesn’t really affect us deeply. But an object presented (named) in a poem can sometimes go beyond its naming function to suggest multiple meanings and implications, some of which are emotionally expressive of the poet’s being. When it does so, that object is on its way to becoming a symbol.
The role of symbols in the human mind and in poems is a dauntingly broad topic, but Wei T’ei’s comment can get us started by emphasizing that symbols come into being out of Naming: the poet begins by naming the thing itself, and if he chooses the right object (or action), then feelings (and meanings) will attach to it, “shine up through it,” and affect the reader. Recall the “I Remember” exercise you did in Chapter 1. Some of the things you remembered were rich with complicated feelings and meanings. Those were what I’d call private symbols—symbols whose multiple and complex meanings and implications only you could feel and intuit, because they were so embedded in the private information of your own life events.
When Robert Hayden wrote “and polished my good shoes as well” (see here), a symbol entered his poem. Those polished shoes were shoes—they were a Naming, but they were also symbolic of the father’s selflessness. He offered them to his frightened and evasive son, just as a priest or a person attending church makes an offering in the context of a religious ceremony. The “lonely offices” that love performs, that the father in the poem performed toward the son and his family (the fires, the polishing of the shoes), hint at the depths of feeling and complexity of circumstance that the poem cannot say directly. If you are a poet for whom symbols do emerge, then you possess a kind of thinking and knowing that can be quite powerful in poetry. But symbols can’t be invented or forced into being. They often emerge from a story as what seems like just one more detail, one more named particular; but then they become something more.
Let’s try a “for instance” with personal memory (Naming) and the power of images to function as symbols. Suppose your father had a beer mug that he drank from every night—drank to excess, drank to the point of personality change and meanness and even violence. For you, that beer mug could well be a symbol of all the misery and terror and sorrow and regret that centered around your father’s drinking; yet for another person it would simply be an ordinary beer mug. Is there any way that you could communicate to a reader the intensity of associations that you have with that mug in the short space of a poem? It’s hard to say, but the answer should be yes. Unfortunately, there’s no formula for how to do it. Here’s an odd thing: you would probably have more luck with the richness of your personal associations with that mug by focusing on the mug with your words than by speaking directly of the misery and uncertainty of having a drunk father.
That may be one way symbols come into being in a poem—by focusing on the thing with your imagination and words, and trusting that the hidden meanings will somehow emerge from the indirect focus on the object itself. Recall, back on here, when you began the Story exercise by choosing a significant figure in your life and then having that person do something (e.g., “My Uncle Weeding His Backyard Garden”). What you chose probably wasn’t just a “typical” action—your imagination seized on it because you intuited that careful attention to that action and subsequent actions would reveal the meaning of that relationship to you (or at least one meaning). That action was symbolic of your relationship with and attitude toward that figure. Symbols are a mysterious form of knowing, a mysterious way in which our imagination taps into the rich complexities and contradictions of our multifaceted emotional life.