Well, I’m just a modern guy.
--Iggy Pop
As should be pretty well integrated into your mindset by now, Modernity resists and actively works against that which is perceived as Traditional. We’ve talked about that in terms of cultural and certain kinds of cultural productions, but let’s try to how that works in literature—specifically poetry.
The Traditional poetry that our particular Modernist context works against tends to:
- Have a fairly well-defined, even rigid, rhythm and structure. To put it another way, it has a beat, and often rhymes. This reflects the origins of poetry in pre-print storytelling, when a regular beat and rhyming words made it easier for storytellers to remember a story, since the story could not be physically and permanently written down.
- More importantly, reveal some Grand Truth. Even now, we tend to believe that good or great literature ennobles us and makes us better people (blithely ignoring that many writers and likely more readers have been disturbed, even vile people, apparently unaffected by the nobility that is literature). The role of the Poet, in this case, was to act as a kind of priest, mediating between readers and some Grand Truth. The Poet, then, was imbued with an almost sacred duty to cut through the crap of every day existence and lead us to some finer place and thought.
If you take a look at the following poem, you can see those two points working in the poem. The poem is called “Excelsior,” written by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1841:
The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!
In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!
"Try not the Pass!" the old man said:
"Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!
"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!"
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!
"Beware the pine-tree's withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!"
This was the peasant's last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
Excelsior!
At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
Excelsior!
A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!
There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
Excelsior!
In this poem the rhythm is steady, the rhyming is constant and dependable (so dependable that Longfellow uses tortured syntax in places to make sure everything stays on beat), and the message is clear: one must not let the petty, common fears and desires of life (including sex) distract one from a grander goal, even if that goal leads to death.In other words, there is something greater than the here-and-now. One can almost see grade school children reciting this at some God-awful after-school recital, because it’s Inspirational.
Modernists, as you might imagine, would have multiple problems with this poem. For one thing, the obsession for a steady cadence and regular rhyme meant that the poem had little relationship to the way humans actually spoke. Vernacular speech patterns were important to Modernist poets, which make sense in light of Modernism’s penchant for thumbing its nose at elitist conventions and the rules that bind us to particular actions. One can, in fact, see this resistance to conventional poetic language and rhythm in two revolutionary American poets from the 19th century: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Both serve as precursors to Modernist American poetry, which again emphasizes that Modernism developed; it did not appear out of thin air. What’s more significant is the Modernist resistance to Meaning—that a poem is supposed to mean something, to reveal something that will make sense of the seeming chaos of existence. Well, as Nietzsche would point out, that Meaning isn’t out there for us to grab; it’s something we create to keep us from confronting the fundamental meaninglessness of existence. Take, for example, Pound’s poem. First of all, the brevity of the poem suggests immediately that we’re going to get an early 20th century version of a sound bite: something without context, without introduction or reflection, a moment in time.
A helpful way to think of the poem is to think of it as a snapshot, a fixed instant in time, and one in which we have no idea what happened before or after. All we have is that moment. And what of that moment? Does it lead to some grand revelation, some definitive comment about the human condition? No. It gives way to a personal impression. And that’s all. What matters is the poet’s image—carefully chosen, carefully constructed, but still only an image. If we want to make meaning of that, that’s our business—Pound just drops the photo in our laps.
Stein’s poem can reveal just how resistant to Meaning American Modernist poetry could be. My guess is that many of you who read this reacted by thinking “What the heck does this mean? It makes no sense whatsoever. My dog could’ve written a better poem just drooling on the keyboard.” Maybe. But the problem isn’t with Stein, it’s with your pre-conceived notions of what a poem is supposed to do. What Stein is simply remind us of is that a poem is composed of words, and words have no intrinsic value or meaning. (Note that I say no intrinsic value or meaning. Obviously we associate certain things with certain words. But words don’t represent a pre-existing reality; words create reality. I will likely use another blog post to explain that little beauty.) Stein reminds us just how fragile reality is, since we build it on language. It can be helpful to think of Stein as free-associating in this poem; it can also be helpful to just enjoy the sounds of the words, rather than worry what they all mean.
| Confused by Stein? Maybe this might help as a point of reference: Miss Susie had a steamboat the steamboat had a bell Miss Susie went to heaven the steamboat went to Hello operator please give me number nine and if you disconnect me I'll kick you from behind the refrigerator there was a piece of glass Miss Susie sat upon it and cut her little ask me no more questions tell me no more lies the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the park Miss Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the dark is like a movie a movie's like a show a show is like a tv screen and that is all i know i know my ma i know i know my pa i know i know my sister with the 80 acre alligator bra |
Now your turn for the other three poems. Here are some questions/issues for you to consider:
The Red Wheelbarrow
Simple question: what makes this a poem? We call it one, and it shows up in anthologies as a poem, but look at the poem this way:
So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
Reads just like an ordinary prose sentence, doesn’t it? Yet we call it a poem. So it seems we may need to speculate on how poetry is being re-defined. To look at this another way, think about this. When I was at Giant Eagle, the self-checkout machine told me “After scanning, move your mushrooms to the end
of the belt for bagging.” Or,
After scanning
Move
Your mush
rooms
To the end of
The belt
For bagging.So am I now a poet?
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
Again, the question is simple: how would you read this, literally? As I mentioned earlier, poetry is rooted in spoken performance (a value still persistent today,
even in such cutting-edge events as poetry slams), and reciting poetry is a time-honored tradition. So how would you recite this? And as with “The Red Wheelbarrow,”
the larger question is what does this tell us about the way poetry was being re-defined?
The Cat and the Saxophone
Same question as with the cummings poem.While reciting this poem may seem more straightforward, look closely at the poem. How many voices are there?
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