Question:

How do you feel current modes of poetry, your poetry in particular, are related to the original impulse from which poetry was born? That is to say, does poetry occur now for the same reasons, or from the same necessity as it originally did and always has, or is poetry more like a skin that shifts to name various modes of expression? What are the origins of poetry?

Response:

I’ve written a good deal about “the origins of poetry”: see “Words & Books; Poetry & Writing,” “The Current State of Poetry,” and “What About All This...” in O Powerful Western Star (Pantograph, 2000). Like Wittgenstein in his famous discussion of games in Philosophical Investigations, I can find no “essence” to poetry, though I do find a great many patterns, connections. Wittgenstein writes:

I can think of no better expression to characterize [the similarities among games] than ‘family resemblances,’ for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.--And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family...And we extend our concept...as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

Poetry, like games, must be understood as “the overlapping of many fibres.” The Greek word, “poet,” means simply “maker”--and it can mean the maker of anything: a table and chair, a pair of shoes. I think its special meaning, “maker of linguistic constructions,” must have come  long after the fact of its origin. In designating the poet as such, we are categorizing, separating out: this is a poet, this is not.

The difference between a cry of pain and a poem centering in a cry of pain is that we understand that the poem is an artifice (however “realistic” it may seem) and that we are able to repeat it. We can say, “Tell me that poem again,” and expect an experience similar to the one we had initially. These qualities of artifice and repetition (which involves us with memory) are characteristic of all poetry--though often, in its intensity, a poem will passionately deny such qualities and attempt to represent itself as utterly real (not artificial) and fully present (not a repetition, unique, never to be repeated).

There isn’t space enough here to attempt a description of the enormously complex history of poetry. The idea that the poet is a “maker” means that the poem is a construction like a house: just as we “make” a house, so we “make” a poem. From this point of view, the poem is understood as a kind of “thing” in the way that a house is a thing and can be judged as such.  Modern poets--like modern painters--have moved away from this idea. The poet is less a “maker” than he is a provoker of consciousness in others. For the moderns, the poem is less a “thing” than it is a means to a response. When Marcel Duchamp labeled a discarded urinal “Fountain” and displayed it as a work of art in a museum show, he was insisting that the “artist” was not the “craftsman” (or “craftsmen”) who actually made the urinal. The “artist” was the one who responded to the urinal in a certain way and who re-named it‑‑calling it, in a burst of wit, “Fountain.”

There is of course a sense in which a chair “takes place” in the mind of the person who wishes to sit in it--in that person’s “response” to the chair--but to assert that a chair primarily takes place in the mind of the sitter would seem rather absurd. To say that a poem primarily takes place in the mind of a reader, however, is not absurd at all: from this point of view, the poem is measured not by the skill of the craftsman who “made” it but by its transformative power--the same transformative power Duchamp displayed when he turned a urinal into a fountain. But can that transformative power be repeated? Can we read the poem again and be just as transformed by it as we were the first time? Presumably other people can be transformed by the poem--but is the poem a one-time-only experience for any particular individual?

A poem is always an artifice--something made--but the moment that we judge a poem by what it does to us rather than what it is “in itself” is the moment we enter into modern history. To judge a poem experientially is to move poetry towards religion--a space it may well have inhabited “originally.” The Greek notion of the “maker” is an esthetic notion; it removes the poet from the realm of religion and places him in the realm of the craftsman.

..................................

What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton’s consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon...Lee is inexorably pressed into the world of fiction.

    --William Burroughs, Queer

This is Rilke’s “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” in the original German:

Wir kannten nich sein unerhötes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, 

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nich ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.
 
Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinem Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

Here are two rather different translations of the poem, both rhymed; the first is by Stephen Mitchell, the second by C.F. MacIntyre.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not gleam like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.

TORSO OF AN ARCHAIC APOLLO

Never will we know his fabulous head
where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened. Yet
his torso glows: a candelabrum set
before his gaze which is pushed back and hid,

restrained and shining. Else the curving breast
could not thus blind you, nor through the soft turn
of the loins could this smile easily have passed
into the bright groins where the genitals burned.

Else stood this stone a fragment and defaced,
with lucent body from the shoulders falling,
too short, not gleaming like a lion’s fell;

nor would this star have shaken the shackles off,
bursting with light, until there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

For us, to really read something is to take a risk--not least the risk of changing oneself. It is to encounter another person in all that person’s vagaries and problems, needs, brilliances and insights: it is to take the risk of contacting another. Most people don’t wish to read at that level. But it is the level at which the greatest writing of the modern era asks to be read. In Rilke’s sonnet, the poet stares at a broken, time-damaged statue of the Greek god. Rilke is trying to understand what the statue could possibly mean--since it seems to mean something quite intensely. Finally a voice speaks. Is it from the statue? from Rilke? from the god? “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”--“You must change your life.” The entire poem has been alive with the possibility of the invasion of Rilke by another consciousness, a consciousness not his own, and at that moment the invasion comes. The words arrive not in the “proper” “Sie” form but in the “Du” form--the form you would use for intimates or children or dogs. The poem is about many things, but it is certainly about the experience of reading. That “other” consciousness which has threatened to surface throughout suddenly tells the poet/reader in a way that leaves no doubt or room for argument that he must “change his life.” And what does that mean? I think it means that he must live--or try to live--at the intensity which the poem names: he is that broken body of a god which still retains power. The voice is telling the poet that he himself must rise to the power which the statue exemplifies:

 

                                                his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

 

The poem offers, I think, a kind of parable on how to be a modern reader. Though it is a carefully-made sonnet--and so we might be tempted to admire the poet’s skill at his craft--the sonnet is entirely transformational. It is trying to turn the reader into the poet--or, beyond that, into the god.

Jack Foley