Trains, Punks, Pictures and Books You Maybe Shouldn't Read, Picture Show Blog
Call me sentimental, but that last image really is something.
--CQ
Friday, April 12, 2013
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Let's Start by Talking with Mary Ruefle Once More
KCRW Bookworm, Mary Ruefle on Madness, Rack, and Honey
Besides my emphatic love for her essays in this book, the wonderfully titled Madness, Rack, and Honey, I can't seem to let go of the exchange she and host Michael Silverblatt have after he asks her:
"Tell me, are poets different from other people?" (23:05 approx)
Ruefle's initial hesitance to say "yes they are," has haunted me, as the question itself has haunted her. My suspicion is that she's responding in part to poetry's reputation as something inaccessible to the average reader, and to say outright that poets are different is to commit to the cartoon perception of poetry in modern life: it's lofty, it's difficult, it's hyperbolic and stuffy and you simply cannot read it without a monocle, book propped just so on your escritoire, right hand grasping with pinky extended a snifter of brandy and left hand stroking your curled mustache.
If, with a Whitman-esque exuberance, she were to say, "Yes! Yes, we are different. We experience the world in a fundamentally different way," she has just raised the hackles of anyone who doesn't consider themselves to have this special, diamond-encrusted poetic inclination.
She doesn't want to insult or exclude anyone from this wonderful world of poetry, and saying that those who write it are different from those who may read it does just that--whether necessarily or not, we'll hopefully flesh out at least a little as this post goes on. And, perhaps an even greater motivation than her desire not to exclude anyone else, she doesn't want to exclude herself from them. Loneliness is a big thing in Ruefle's writing, and probably one of those fundamental experiences that do seperate the poetic writer from the rest-- because of the degree to which we understand and feel that loneliness, whether we want to admit it or not.
I'm interested, of course, because my own experience with poets and poetic writers has taught me that we are indeed a different sort of person, and the difference is rooted in just that: the manner and degree to which we experience life. A friend and poet once characterized it as having so many "feelers" in the world. I always envision these tiny, thread-like synapses extending from our bodies outward in all directions, reaching and reaching and reaching, receiving, receiving, receiving. Interpreting, interpreting, interpreting.
It's being aware that I am in a small room in an apartment building, just outside of St. Louis, surrounded by Missouri rivers and fields and hills and forests that extend and connect to eight other states, branching out across the Midwest, pulsing outward to the coasts, across oceans, circumnavigating the globe, simultaneously reaching up, up, up through the atmosphere, into the dark, foreboding vacuum that extends unfathomably and terribly far.
On the best of days, it feels vast and infinite and wonderful. One can extend as far as one's feelers, mysteriously rooted in the strange faculty we like to call "imagination," care to, almost weightlessly inspired by how unlikely it all is, and what good fortune that we may bear witness to it.
On the worst of days, it feels vast and infinite and terrifying. One feels shrunken and shriveled, condensed and crushed under the weight of all that's bearing down, the feelers hemorrhaging, sending such overwhelming signals that the only interpretation we can conceive is pain.
And yes--Ruefle is right about one very important thing in that first answer. Poets do have a particular facility with language. That's part of the understanding of loneliness I mentioned earlier, since how do we humans understand anything without somehow being able to articulate it. And the better we articulate things, especially the immense joy and beauty and pain and sadness of existence, the higher the degree of our understanding of them as well.
But this does make you different. It makes you weird. It makes you lonely. You only feel at home when you have the good fortune of stumbling across someone or something that is also able to articulate what you know deep in your bones about the world and life and meaning--someone or something speaking your language. A dear friend telling you about his experience of the world over coffee. A baby bird splayed out on the concrete, neck twisted, chest rising and falling with such horrible, panicked rapidity. The first sprouts in the starter box of your garden, somehow surviving the early-spring cold snaps.
It cuts you off from a culture that wants so badly to keep you contained in little boxes, to keep the feelers contained, because somehow the inevitable pain that comes with this kind of understanding has been demonized as something wholly unnecessary-- frivolous even. Self-indulgent.
But it also makes you beautiful. It makes you vital. It teaches you to love so much and so deeply. And it's what helps or even drives you to write. Because you know that there's all of this out there, and you can see the understanding of it getting lost somehow. And you feel yourself getting lost, too. You've got to go find it again, like Ruefle does in her poems. So many have lost it and found it, lost it and found it, then handed it to you, their wonderful words on the page forming the centralized nervous system to which the feelers are attached. They did the initial work for you; now you must do it for them, for yourself, and for everyone who is also a part of this swirl of life, but maybe whose feelers have been cut off by an alcoholic father, an incestuous uncle, an absent mother, a school who decided they had a disability, a government that told them they are not citizens--a world that shoved them into a box, and will keep transplanting them from box to box until they bury that last box in the ground.
It gives you a responsibility, a legacy to carry on--you must act as translator between worlds and languages. Ruefle is one of many, and you can tell in her heart of hearts she takes her task the right kind of seriously.
But does this task, almost undoubtedly self-appointed after years of cultivating and caring for those feelers, nurturing them and tending the wounds that will always come--does it separate the poet from the populace in a negative, you-shouldn't-admit-to-it way? I don't think so. I think the poet-as-translator holds true--we need them to help us make sense of the depth and complexity of experience, because of the way they receive, perceive, and then tell us about that experience. Does it make them "better" than everyone else?
I think, ultimately, that's a pointless question. The answer will always be subjective, and to answer it "yes" or "no" is to buy a little box and shove the poet into it.
All too often, we equate different as being "special" and therefore "better," when in fact, different as "distinct from" has no inherent judgement of value carried with it. It sounds hokey, but we would all do well to celebrate our differences, à la Walt Whitman and all his undoubted feelers, extending far and wide throughout the cosmos.
Carrying on,
CQ
Besides my emphatic love for her essays in this book, the wonderfully titled Madness, Rack, and Honey, I can't seem to let go of the exchange she and host Michael Silverblatt have after he asks her:
"Tell me, are poets different from other people?" (23:05 approx)
Ruefle's initial hesitance to say "yes they are," has haunted me, as the question itself has haunted her. My suspicion is that she's responding in part to poetry's reputation as something inaccessible to the average reader, and to say outright that poets are different is to commit to the cartoon perception of poetry in modern life: it's lofty, it's difficult, it's hyperbolic and stuffy and you simply cannot read it without a monocle, book propped just so on your escritoire, right hand grasping with pinky extended a snifter of brandy and left hand stroking your curled mustache.
If, with a Whitman-esque exuberance, she were to say, "Yes! Yes, we are different. We experience the world in a fundamentally different way," she has just raised the hackles of anyone who doesn't consider themselves to have this special, diamond-encrusted poetic inclination.
She doesn't want to insult or exclude anyone from this wonderful world of poetry, and saying that those who write it are different from those who may read it does just that--whether necessarily or not, we'll hopefully flesh out at least a little as this post goes on. And, perhaps an even greater motivation than her desire not to exclude anyone else, she doesn't want to exclude herself from them. Loneliness is a big thing in Ruefle's writing, and probably one of those fundamental experiences that do seperate the poetic writer from the rest-- because of the degree to which we understand and feel that loneliness, whether we want to admit it or not.
I'm interested, of course, because my own experience with poets and poetic writers has taught me that we are indeed a different sort of person, and the difference is rooted in just that: the manner and degree to which we experience life. A friend and poet once characterized it as having so many "feelers" in the world. I always envision these tiny, thread-like synapses extending from our bodies outward in all directions, reaching and reaching and reaching, receiving, receiving, receiving. Interpreting, interpreting, interpreting.
It's being aware that I am in a small room in an apartment building, just outside of St. Louis, surrounded by Missouri rivers and fields and hills and forests that extend and connect to eight other states, branching out across the Midwest, pulsing outward to the coasts, across oceans, circumnavigating the globe, simultaneously reaching up, up, up through the atmosphere, into the dark, foreboding vacuum that extends unfathomably and terribly far.
On the best of days, it feels vast and infinite and wonderful. One can extend as far as one's feelers, mysteriously rooted in the strange faculty we like to call "imagination," care to, almost weightlessly inspired by how unlikely it all is, and what good fortune that we may bear witness to it.
On the worst of days, it feels vast and infinite and terrifying. One feels shrunken and shriveled, condensed and crushed under the weight of all that's bearing down, the feelers hemorrhaging, sending such overwhelming signals that the only interpretation we can conceive is pain.
And yes--Ruefle is right about one very important thing in that first answer. Poets do have a particular facility with language. That's part of the understanding of loneliness I mentioned earlier, since how do we humans understand anything without somehow being able to articulate it. And the better we articulate things, especially the immense joy and beauty and pain and sadness of existence, the higher the degree of our understanding of them as well.
But this does make you different. It makes you weird. It makes you lonely. You only feel at home when you have the good fortune of stumbling across someone or something that is also able to articulate what you know deep in your bones about the world and life and meaning--someone or something speaking your language. A dear friend telling you about his experience of the world over coffee. A baby bird splayed out on the concrete, neck twisted, chest rising and falling with such horrible, panicked rapidity. The first sprouts in the starter box of your garden, somehow surviving the early-spring cold snaps.
It cuts you off from a culture that wants so badly to keep you contained in little boxes, to keep the feelers contained, because somehow the inevitable pain that comes with this kind of understanding has been demonized as something wholly unnecessary-- frivolous even. Self-indulgent.
But it also makes you beautiful. It makes you vital. It teaches you to love so much and so deeply. And it's what helps or even drives you to write. Because you know that there's all of this out there, and you can see the understanding of it getting lost somehow. And you feel yourself getting lost, too. You've got to go find it again, like Ruefle does in her poems. So many have lost it and found it, lost it and found it, then handed it to you, their wonderful words on the page forming the centralized nervous system to which the feelers are attached. They did the initial work for you; now you must do it for them, for yourself, and for everyone who is also a part of this swirl of life, but maybe whose feelers have been cut off by an alcoholic father, an incestuous uncle, an absent mother, a school who decided they had a disability, a government that told them they are not citizens--a world that shoved them into a box, and will keep transplanting them from box to box until they bury that last box in the ground.
It gives you a responsibility, a legacy to carry on--you must act as translator between worlds and languages. Ruefle is one of many, and you can tell in her heart of hearts she takes her task the right kind of seriously.
But does this task, almost undoubtedly self-appointed after years of cultivating and caring for those feelers, nurturing them and tending the wounds that will always come--does it separate the poet from the populace in a negative, you-shouldn't-admit-to-it way? I don't think so. I think the poet-as-translator holds true--we need them to help us make sense of the depth and complexity of experience, because of the way they receive, perceive, and then tell us about that experience. Does it make them "better" than everyone else?
I think, ultimately, that's a pointless question. The answer will always be subjective, and to answer it "yes" or "no" is to buy a little box and shove the poet into it.
All too often, we equate different as being "special" and therefore "better," when in fact, different as "distinct from" has no inherent judgement of value carried with it. It sounds hokey, but we would all do well to celebrate our differences, à la Walt Whitman and all his undoubted feelers, extending far and wide throughout the cosmos.
Carrying on,
CQ
About as Anti-Climactic as Possible
Well, there will one day be a new and improved KTCR--it's just going to take a little more cyber-finagling before I get it right. Between my technological ineptitude and my recent move from the boonies back into some semblence of civilization, this here conversation's been much too much silent. So we's back, in our usual format, for now.
Hopefully this makes up for it:
Got it? Good. Now, we may proceed.
Back in black,
CQ
Hopefully this makes up for it:
Got it? Good. Now, we may proceed.
Back in black,
CQ
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