Judith Skillman - Ars Poetica: A Discussion

'Ars Poetica' literally refers to 'the art of poetry' (Webster's New World, 3rd Edition), and, as such, it provides a fairly simple method by which one may fathom an individual poets' philosophy of poetry, his or her motivation, ambition, background, and poetic vision. The 'ars poetica' form may be regarded as the quintessential poem, in that it distills and exemplifies essential qualities found in a poet's canon, and therefore lends transparency to an author's signature--style, voice, and choice of formal or informal verse.

One of the most anthologized 'ars poetica' poems is Marianne Moore's. From the first line, "I too dislike it,...", Moore immediately disposes of any claim to pomposity, which is one of the problems most readers have in their conceptions of poetry, generally formed from early school experiences, when as students they were forced to memorize arcane, pedantic, full-rhyme poems. Notice Moore's use of indentation, enjambment, and line breaks in this excerpt from her famous work:

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they
are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against "business documents and
school-book"; all these phenomena are important...

(from Selected Poems, Marianne Moore, 1935)

The benefit of discovering a poet's particular philosophy in his or her ars poetica poem (granted, there may be more than one, but generally one stands out), is not only that a reader can perceive a distillation, or essential 'theory of poetics' there, but one may use the poem as a basis for comparison with other poets. Neruda, for example, is quite clear that the poet's "art" is more than a mere personal endeavor; it encapsulates the "obligation" of an artist to society, and does so in the first person. His poem is not playful. While it does not include the whimsical, specific images of Moore's vision, Neruda's poem is not dismissive of poetry's necessary "derivative(s')"; which, for him, become intelligible precisely because they speak in natural voices:

The Poet's Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or dry prison cell,
to him I come, and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a long rumble of thunder adds itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam,
the groaning rivers of the ocean rise,
the star vibrates quickly in its corona
and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating.
So, drawn on by my destiny,
I ceaselessly must listen to and keep
the sea's lamenting in my consciousness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the sentence of autumn,
I may be present with an errant wave,
I may move in and out of windows,
and hearing me, eyes may lift themselves,
asking "How can I reach the sea?"
And I will pass to them, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing from itself,
the gray cry of sea birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reed

Although there are many passive attitudes in this poem, which is taken from one of the poet's own personal favorite collections, "Fully Empowered," and written during a particularly fruitful time in the writer's life, the overall sense is one of great activity and depth. The poet as vessel for the sea--"a breaking up of foam and quicksand" (l. 26 ) responds as one who may pass through normal boundaries of self, cell, prison, building, and window, much as water can flood. The person who receives the gift of 'freedom', however, is almost a communal persona--"...and, hearing me, eyes may lift themselves" (l. 22).

This oblique distancing mechanism has the effect of making the "poet's obligation" not one of egoism and personal power, but rather, a sincere marriage to natural forces. Reading other of Neruda's poems, one experiences the same subtle distancing of the writer's persona from the writer himself. It is this unique ability that contributed to Neruda's profound influence and breadth.

I have been invited to include here my own 'ars poetica' poem, and I do so somewhat reluctantly, not wanting to follow Moore and Neruda, but rather to take my place, as William Wordsworth so aptly described the landscape of poetic ego and poetry in his sonnet: "If thou indeed derive thy light from heaven...", among the minors. Here I am grateful to assume the comfortable identity of a local poet, one that 'burns,/ Like an untended watch-fire, on the ridge/ Of some dark mountain..."

That said, I would like to end this discussion with my own 'ars poetica' poem--the piece I feel best defines a personal theory as well as encompassing certain ideals. If I have been successful, this poem maintains the form of a free verse poem, is minimalist in structure, and avoids the pitfalls of didacticism. In metaphoric terms it may reveal my belief in the poem as reliquary. Poems, whatever their form, should be approached quietly and reverently, with an eye and ear open to the emotional wealth any well-wrought artistic work contains.

Tic Douloureux

The trigger is sensation.

The violin's a dirty animal.
I want you to take away the suddenness.
Pain up the side of my head.
I'll have my teeth extracted one by one.
See if it makes any difference.
Rehearse for the real.
Be either present or absent.
I'll let my fingers drum ebony.
Thinking makes it worse.
I'll take the beat inside myself
and feel it up the center of my body.
A string through my head.
Imagine a hand pierced through the center by a wire.
I won't refer to Jesus or the crucifixion.
No blood in this exercise.
Let the hand move freely up and down this wire.
I'll wipe my nose when the bow
comes toward my face.
My head itches during the Vitali.
Lightning finds a way to enter the earth.
It's a pity music rises and falls.
Hide these bolts in a rock.
Insects carve sand trails as they enter the crab's eyes.
The thing of death is the animal knows when it's happening.
Leave a relic.
Any kind of pain.

Judith Skillman, from "Storm," Blue Begonia Press, 1998

The Writing Life: Letting Go
As it appeared on the Centrum Experience website

The weighty matter of subject matter seems always to hang in the balance for poets. Do we choose our subject, or does our subject matter choose us? Do we choose where we are going, or do we need to let go and let it take us where it wants to go?

This question was first posed to me by my editor Jim Bodeen. I sat with that conundrum for nearly a year—who or what dictates subject matter at any given time?—turning it over, and over, in my head.

Indeed, in the poems I was working on during a recent residency I thought I was writing about time. In the privacy of my mind a whole sequence of poems was coming together—though only one had been written yet—like a deck of cards being shuffled in slow motion. A magician holds a deck of cards; makes them into a perfect fan; asks me to pick one card, memorize it, return it.
The card I had memorized was “Temporal Studies.” It had the term “Schrödinger’s Cat” puzzled into the design on the back of the deck, and, on the face of a few cards sat vague notions of physics concepts I learned as the child of a solar physicist through osmosis. The problem is, I don’t know a wit about physics or math. Or, for that matter, about relativity. In a file sat other possible poem titles: The Always, The Instant, The Hour, The Once.

But back at home, sitting at my desk, I realized time wasn’t really my “subject matter.” Perhaps, I came to discover, I was really trying to write about something else. Perhaps Narcissus. I had printed out some preliminary “takes” on Narcissus. I attempted to explain this in a reply to an editor:

The myth/archetype of drowning (suicide) for love of self seems ripe for exploration. I’m also trying to write about altruism vs. sacrifice and the fine line between the two, as in war… I’ve written a few pieces so far, and hope also to bring in the Greek and Roman myths as appropriations/mirrors for one another.

These images will hopefully weave through what I picture as a long poem: mirrors, water, glass, the muses, marble, Paris, Narcissus, and other characters from myths of both ancient cultures: Jupiter, Venus, Daphne, and the feminine models for beauty — Aphrodite, Helen Psyche, Venus, Greek versions vs. their Roman counterparts. I’ll be doing “soft” research (so named by David Kirby) rather than encyclopedic work.

I’m hoping the sacrifice mode/medium might lend itself to some political, albeit subtle, discussions of war and my total bafflement about war as an individual will abate since obviously it’s been w/ the human race since the beginning and will, most likely, be our endgame…

A week later, I had written nothing whatsoever about Narcissus, though I had started a file which contained a poem about Rome, and the first line was “Rome, you bastard…” It was indeed a horrible start for a would-be poem.

With only one bad stanza in the hopper, I remembered Bodeen’s koan. Do we, as poets, choose our subject, or does our subject matter choose us? It made me uncomfortable once again. I’d felt the muse had been rather stingy while I was creating my poems about time. I was on track, yes. I was writing between ten and twenty pages a day; but frankly, were they worth working on as poems? I suspected the answer was a vehement no, even as I wished it were yes.

It came to me—through discomfort, through that question asked by my editor— that there wasn’t a place for outlines in poetry. Why, anyway, did I care so much about rounding out the notion of my “current work” with long-range, over-arching statements of thematic purpose? Wouldn’t it be better to simply offer myself up, in sacrificial form, arms spread-eagled over the dais, or, with a bent knee and a begging bowl, as a dear friend once said she had, asking God to give her a poem after a particularly dry spell.

Would it be so bad not to write for a few weeks, to get to the point where I felt so driven I had to write or else I could not sleep, as was my recurrent state and status for the two decades from 1980–2000, while raising three children? Those years of chronic insomnia had indeed taught me the total humility that I had better show the muse, whatever or whomever s/he was. For what sharp teeth this muse possessed, and ultimately how little s/he cared for my physical, emotional, and mental welfare.

Perhaps this was a lesson I needed to learn, and learn again. It was Bodeen, who, seeing before him the persona of the Poet—i.e., a poet with the smugness of finding a cause worthy of writing and then going about the business of writing a manuscript around that cause—detected a lack of honesty.

His query ultimately reveals the chink in the armor of a writer’s life built on the pretensions of “going about the business of verse-writing,” rather than allowing, or remaining open to, certain obsessions, obsessions that might lead a writer toward original verse that wants to be written.

It followed that there must be more to the problem of discovering one’s subject matter than encyclopedic research, tangential flashes of light sent out from the one of the nine muses, or the mood of one’s personal juju bag. There must be more to the writer’s vocation than a simple desire to avoid a case of writer’s block. To get at the gist of things—no ideas but in things—a writer must allow him or herself the privilege of exploring those images, issues, and ideas that appeal to the writer’s own sensibilities. As Richard Hugo noted, in The Triggering Town,

“It doesn’t bother me that the word “stone” appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that “wind” and “gray” appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable.”

In fact, it is precisely this exploration of those words, memories, sensory and other forms of images that may dictate most clearly the direction for new work. In paying attention to what one is drawn to, the writer comes closer to the elusive nature of association; the subconscious, Jungian archetypes; and all manner of “good stuff,” for lack of a better term, that leads to a strong poem.

Perhaps, in the end, the best we can do as writers is to play the game—a variation on hide and seek—we learned as children: Warmer/Colder. Most of us can remember looking for an object in the house or the yard. The lucky one who hid the desirable object would offer clues in the form of “warmer, warmer, no—cold, colder…” The willing victim would stop in her tracks, back step, and wait to hear the words again: “Warm, warmer, aha, warmer—hot, hotter, hottest…” until you would lay your hands on the buried treasure and say, Got it. —Judith Skillman