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Saturday, February 19, 2005

Poems aren't philosophy or science, but philosophy and science are things people do, and the doing both shapes and is part of "the feeling of living with other people in the world we're given." Wordsworth and Whitman, despite oppressively learned astronomers and murderous dissectors, both argued that poetry should have a role in humanizing the results of science. Doing so means presenting at least some of the kinds of material and argument that really are hard for people to grasp (a wonderful metaphor buried in that last phrase, repeated even in its latinate cousin to "apprehend"). When faced with these kinds of difficulties, instead of lamenting the self-referentiality of texts or the radical isolation of the constructed self, poets should listen to what scientists and those philosophers not infected with postmodern doubt (in philosophy departments Derrida's not generally taken seriously) have to say. Here's Richard Dawkins:

I think, let the science speak, because it's inherently fascinating. That's one piece of advice. The second, separate piece is try to put yourself—it's so obvious, I mean it doesn't need saying—in the position of the reader. Not just one reader, but, successively, lots of different readers. Imagine this was being read by Uncle Joe, imagine this was being read by your doctor, imagine this was being read by your lawyer, imagine this was being read by your old French teacher. So every time you read through your stuff, imagine it through the eyes of some particular individual, and it will have an automatic sort of Darwinian selection effect on your words, and you'll recognize—"Oh, he wouldn't have understood that, she wouldn't have got that point," and so you change it. And by the time a chapter has been through this succession of filters, it comes out clearer, because you've anticipated all the difficulties that people will have.

That sounds a lot like the advice we give freshman comp students. Why shouldn't it apply to us, as poets? We certainly must assume intelligence and motivation on the part of our readers, but readers don't and can't share, in detail, our thoughts and feelings and experience, and, if they did, why would they need to read what we have to say?

I've been struggling with just this issue in my sonnet "Sleepless after Ovid." I've posted briefly about it here, the whole year-long wrestle is here, and here's the poem as it stands now:

Sleepless After Ovid


The moon, days from the full, slips off the sky
Behind me while the sun's still at my feet,
And for a time that famous crowd swings high,
So clear and bright — no sight so darkly sweet,
Or strangely dark. There reels Callisto, raped
And spurned and murdered, never let to rest;
Andromeda's still chained; there's Cygnus shaped
Into a swan to end that hopeless quest.
It's colder when the heavens clear at night,
But not so cruel as it clearly seemed
In the grip of gods two thousand years ago —
For blessedly, they're gone, and now we know
The stars are suns, far older than he dreamed,
Though still too young to flood the sky with light.

There's some surface difficulty: Just who is Ovid, and Callisto, and maybe especially Cygnus, and what crowd is it that's famous? Will a person who knows the Metamorphoses know that waxing moons first appear in the sky around sunset, when they are also setting, and that each night they set a little later, so that in the fall, as the nights grow longer than the days, a moon already full enough to obscure with its light the fainter stars will still set some hours before sunrise, leaving, among others and in the northern hemisphere, these particular constellations easily visible? (Will anyone be able to navigate that last sentence?) How many people will recognize the poem to be a Petrarchan/Shakespearean hybrid with Sicilian instead of Italian quatrains in the octave and, even though not marked by rhyme, a switch in thought in the last two lines? How much does it add to know those kinds of technical details or detract to not know them?

Although I can't know whether the poem will motivate readers to try, most, if not all, of the difficulties mentioned above can be resolved with a dictionary or else don't really matter to the argument of the poem. The last pair of lines is a different matter. How many people have realized that the darkness of the night sky is something of a puzzle? (read Darkness at Night.) A dark night sky means that the universe is not infinitely old nor infinitely large, because in either case the light of distant stars would make the night's sky as bright as the day's; they would be, in fact, indistinguishable, and our kind of life would be impossible. So the very fact that we can see the constellations which Ovid wrongly attributed to vengeful and jealous gods places our experience in a world where time matters, and for other reasons we know that time is on a scale nearly unimaginable both before and after we have anything to do with it. We don't matter in such a universe, but it's better than being at the mercy of any god.

I have serious doubts about whether the poem is successful in conveying all that. At Eratosphere, Tim Murphy (a marvelous poet: books here, here, and here) told me the ideas just aren't sonnet-shaped. Maybe not.


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