Credit goes to: 霽溪.
Poetry has never been my forte. My AP Literature experience with poetry last year was quite a bummer: a poem either degenerate into fragmented meters, syntaxes, or rhymes, or assemble together into an indecipherable murmur, vainly conveying messages. Back then, I could readily literature terminologies, but independently understanding a poem was beyond my expectation.
The culprit, as I once identified, was the barrier. The language barrier distanced me from the erudite dictions—strenuously resolving to the dictionary eventually discouraged my pursue. Adding insult to injuries, the subtle nature of poetry pushed me another step further from enjoying this art form. Connotation, deeply rooted in the cultural context specific to one group of people, was almost impossible to decipher for an outsider. Once the subtleties assemble into a poem, in which every diction and every syntax are arranged under much deliberation, I could only gape with gnawing frustration. The barrier between poetry and me wouldn’t be deconstructed, thought I.
That was before meeting Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn. An extremely well-versed collection of her literature analysis to forty-three “best poems,” this book is resonating from the preface. Instead of filling her book with a daunting academical tone, Paglia states that her book aims for “the general audience.” No poetry jargons, no unexplained social contexts, only her perfuse passion for poetry. Needless to say, reading her analysis is like savoring a grand British afternoon tea.
But the first moment she reconnected me with the distant realm of poetry was when she claimed in the preface, “The best route into poetry is through the dictionary. (xvii)” According to Paglia, the accumulation of language sensitivity and the final condensation of expression comes from the original source—dictionary. It was then that I discovered how nuances, far from being a natural talent, could be cultivated via practice. My confidence was then rekindled.
An overarching theme in the preface is the mission of poetry as an independent art form. What defines a good poem? What can a good poem bring us? Paglia’s answer is the connection with the popular vocabulary, the physical throbs the words bring to the body, and the emotional expressiveness. According to her, poetry, through erudite and sometimes daunting, shall not be removed from the popular voices. Irrationally pursuing the archaic vocabulary not only distances the audience but also will create an esoteric mix of voices. Good poems should bring people a moment of explosive understanding, either through emotions or through rational senses.
Like philosophy, poetry is a contemplative form, but unlike philosophy, poetry subliminally manipulates the body and triggers its nerve impulses, the muscle tremors of sensation and speech. (xiv)
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Poetry does not simply reconfirm gender or group identity; it develops imagination and feeds the soul. (xivii)
Break, Blow, Burn is a great textbook guiding curious pursuers into the realm of poetry. From syntaxes to dictions, Paglia gives an analysis thorough enough to be understood. Every cultural connotation is cited with an explanation, even the poet’s cultural background is incorporated into the passages. We can say that Paglia is a faithful custodian of the masterpieces: the entire background knowledge and interpretation of one poem are all diligently presented, all we readers need to do is to gape in awe and digest.
However, if the book ends here, it would be no more different than any other well-crafted textbook—faithfully presenting information and diligently conveying facts. This book stands out in a way that it is more contemplative than normal textbooks like Campbell’s Biology or Vander’s Human Physiology. In Break, Blow, Burn, the voice of Paglia is unusually strong. She is not simply appraising the poem (of which she has done pretty well)—she takes the liberty of expanding on the theme of the poem to convey her understanding of art, conflicts, and humanities. It is her own voice lamenting the annihilating power of nature in Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and her own voice recapturing the despair in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Somehow through analyzing poems, she manages to examine—poem by poem—the ultimate mission of poetry. Is it venting all the hoarded emotions? Is it being beautiful for beauty’s sake? Is it tugging the heartstring because of genuine sensitivity? She doesn’t offer an absolute answer (as if any will ever exist!), but her examination can still provide us with some insights.
To discuss the mission of poetry, the first step is to understand the role of the poet in poetry production. Poets assemble words into sentences, sentences into stanzas, until the final combination gives readers the chills of emotions. Like William Wordsworth once said, “Poets pick out the sublime from normal lives.” In the eyes of poets, placid lives can be filled by outbursts of artistic inspirations, and they are the ones to capture the scene, condense it into words, and spread them with readers.
Art is natural, but poets do the sorting. William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” pictures the image of a red wheelbarrow glazing in the rain, with a group of chickens chirping nearby. The static idyllic picture can have multiple meanings: the sudden discovery of beauty in the next corner, the art of focusing on the “right” object at the “right” time, and the harmonious juxtaposition of the quiet (“a red wheel / barrow”) and the sound (“the white / chickens”). For Williams, the wheelbarrow is similar to the role of a poet, collecting and transporting the beauty from one place to another, meanwhile being able to tell the sublime from the backdrop.
Sometimes when the art is hidden deep, the poets turn the prosaic into poetry. In Paul Blackburn’s “The Once-Over,” the storyline is as simple as a car-load of metropolitan outcasts scrutinizing a young blond. However, the rendering of such a depiction readily delivers Blackburn’s central theme: the surge of lust and despondency under the brittle surface of urban life. Blackburn is a virtuoso in the using of lists. The three lists given in the poem—a list of all the boarding passengers, a list of the blond’s appearance, and a list of the young man’s actions—are precise and succinct in a manner that each object broadens an aspect of perception. A careful analysis of the listed objects not only clarifies the theme of the poem, but also shows how Blackburn can condense his ideas in such few words. Although what he pictures is not peculiar, the way he concentrates his lists and how he phrases his words achieve to create a strong, coherent central theme for readers.
To sum it up, poets transform normal scenes with their graceful manipulation of language to convey themes. Although sometimes poets write poems for certain audiences, poetry itself can have healing powers for its creators. Art can be a form of salvation, monument, even weapon.
Poets are probably the last group to yield to any form of restrains stymieing imaginations. Such clashes between surging passion and restrains—be them social conventions, bleak cosmopolitan debris, or ongoing materialism—catalyst dissatisfactions and (hopefully!) great poems. In Wallace Stevens’s “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock,” there is a subtle clash between the “white night-gowns” (conservatism and social pressure) and the imagination, as embodied by the colorful gowns, seductive beads, and the crazy tiger-hunting sailor. Sternly I believe that Stevens is the sailor dreaming of tigers in red weather, though Stevens’s tiger might be free expression of art in his social context. Unable to straightforwardly address his dissatisfaction, Stevens has to conceal his emotions in a well-crafted poem, by which he manages to vent his pathos. In this sense, poetry is Stevens’s microphone-like salvation.
Beyond self-helping, poetry can also set monuments for significant personal or social episodes. The most touching poem in Break, Blow, Burn is Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.” Protesting her childhood trauma perpetuated by her oppressive father, Plath uses this poem to demonstrate her eventual yet belated outburst of anger and protest. In her glaring sentences, readers can see how her trauma gradually led her to self-denial (“And a love of the rack and the screw / And I said I do, I do”) and near-demise (“At twenty I tried to die”). This poetry is probably dedicated to Plath’s shadowed life as a monument of her struggles to survive under oppressions, but just as Paglia points out, “her best poem belongs to her father; Father and daughter are locked in the psychic struggle for eternity. (176)” Poetry became a funeral monument for both Plath and her father. Similarly, poetry can document the collective trauma of one society. Normal Russell’s “Tornado” depicts a family’s near-death experience escaping the sweeping tornado. Unlike media broadcasts, poetry captures the subtle moment of humans losing their fragile dignity in the face of a destructing nature. The subtle reaction is brought about by an accumulation of transient details: the collapse of their wardrobe (which stands for the collapse of their mortal collection of wealth), their holding hands in a shelter, and more. It is these details that transforms the static news reports into tangible emotions tracking the terror in the fave of disasters. Here, poetry is a societal monument.
Even, poetry can be a weapon. The strongest weapon proudly possessed by poets is language. They wear this emblem in their powerful diction, in their flaming syntax, in every design possible, until the turmoil—the initiating emotion that prompts them into crafting this poem—is thoroughly eclipsed by their words. One such example is Wanda Coleman’s “Wanda Why Aren’t You Dead,” in which Coleman faithfully and diligently documents the verbal attacks she has shouldered since born—her complexion, her social status, her looks, her weight, everything about her. Several lines are almost firing, “if i were you were you were you” “i’m sorry didn’t remember that that that / that that that was so important to you” “wanda wanda wanda i wonder / why ain’t you dead.” I can almost see her forcefully swallowing tears behind these jammed grammar. But only one sentence has intact grammar, which happens to be the only sentence not from her peers’ attack: the title. The transition from “ain’t” to “aren’t” is her response to the past menaces, demonstrating that she is back on her feet with her powerful poetry. To Coleman, poetry is her weapon against her memory being bullied and later abused.
Why do people need poetry in this world of gaudy entertainment? Poetry is analogous to vegetables. Granting no stable supply of calories, vegetables can be excluded if one were to cross the desert. But to live long, to live healthy? Vegetables is not an accessory but a must-have. Without poetry, one can live a carefree life, exempted from the doubts and fears of strenuous thinking and intense sensations. However, once the sensations are savored, one can hardly forget the way that iridescent poems torching fires in the soul. Though the world is like a kaleidoscope of thumping changes, what has profoundly moved us—the sincere collection of emotions—remains unchanged. One of such collection is poetry.
One can only live that long and experience that much. In less that a century, the flesh will perish, regardless of how many unfulfilled dying wishes the flesh owner pockets. But poetry is a window for us to experience the past, the emotions, and the dreamt future—the despair of chimney sweepers in industrial London, the ultimate dominance of human vestige by nature, the crying of fettered female, and more. Readers get to savor these experience which, in normal cases, would exceed their own scope of space and time.
Also, different from prose or play, poetry is compact and experimental in its own fascinating ways. Themes are not offered in the first sentence—everything can use a little digging. Cramming the entire “atmosphere” into several lines of words requires sophisticated deliberation: the “feelings” can be hidden in an unusual syntax, a fresh diction, or, like postmodernism, an entirely new way of expression. Demystifying these hidden treasures is a process that is complicated enough to have the words imprinted on the memory, until one day the themes and emotions become the readers’ own possessions.
Poetry is not my forte, but nor is it exclusive! With a little help (like that of Paglia’s Break Blow Burn), we can all share the fun.
