(For Amy Fletcher)<\/p>\n
The poet,<\/em><\/p>\n Admired for his earnest habit of calling<\/em><\/p>\n The sun the sun. . . .<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014W.H. Auden, \u201cIn Praise of Limestone\u201d<\/p>\n All writing should aspire to the condition of poetry. <\/p>\n The condition of poetry: I\u2019m not talking about poetry\u2019s reputation for being difficult or roundabout or cagey, or about poetry\u2019s affinity for metaphor and wordplay, for riddles and puzzles and puns. And, sadly, I\u2019m not talking about poetic rhythm and the music of words. <\/p>\n Poetry and prose have each their own distinctive gifts that writers ignore at the reader\u2019s peril. But in the epigraph above, Auden identifies a fundamental poetic pursuit that all earnest writers share: the desire above all to be accurate, to say the thing that\u2019s true. In all our writing, poetry or prose, we strive to call the sun by its right name. <\/p>\n Auden knew that poetry sometimes seems less than accurate, that poets often call the sun anything but. A quick turn through Dante\u2019s poetry (as if any turn through Dante could be quick) shows the sun called by many names other than simply \u201cthe sun.\u201d Either Dante calls it by one of its classical mythological names\u2014Apollo or Phoebus or Helios\u2014or he refers to it periphrastically as \u201cthe greatest minister of nature\u201d or \u201cthe lamp of the world\u201d or \u201cthe chariot of the light,\u201d etc. <\/p>\n And when Dante does call something \u201cthe sun,\u201d he\u2019s often talking not about the sun, but about something else\u2014either his beloved Beatrice or God. This is another earnest habit of poets: to name something with metaphors. <\/p>\n Or with puns: in Hamlet<\/em>, when Claudius asks the young prince why his mood seems so dark, Hamlet retorts with a pun on his filial sentiments: \u201cNot so, my Lord, I am too much in the sun<\/em>.\u201d <\/p>\n How are such poetic devices accurate ways to name the sun? I think that it all depends on the degree of accuracy we\u2019re looking for. Just as the \u201cright\u201d name of the sun depends on what language you\u2019re speaking, it also depends on the genre of your writing, the idiom, and the purpose. <\/p>\n Poetic idioms change from age to age, from culture to culture, and poetry can take many forms, from an analytical overview of the human condition (Alexander Pope\u2019s \u201cEssay on Man\u201d) to a medieval dirty joke ostensibly about a rooster (the anonymous \u201cI have a gentle cock\u201d). But the one constant we see in poetry is the poet\u2019s search for a different kind of accuracy, a kind of hyper-accuracy. <\/p>\n The notorious difficulty of poems arises from poetry\u2019s attempt to achieve this hyper-accuracy, to create a name that is less static and more fluid, more vital. In the last poem published during his lifetime, \u201cEpilogue,\u201d American poet Robert Lowell writes:<\/p>\n We are poor passing facts,<\/p>\n warned by that to give<\/p>\n each figure in the photograph<\/p>\n his living name.<\/p>\n Sounds good, but what, exactly, is a \u201cliving name,\u201d and how does it differ from, say, Barney or Sylvia or Sam? And why does Lowell make it sound so imperative? <\/p>\n Maybe a \u201cliving\u201d name is one that is itself alive and changing: changing with the changing nature of a thing that changes even as we try to name it: a name that shifts beneath us and around us like the earth and sky. We have a name for that kind of name. We call it poetry.<\/p>\n The language poets use, with all its literary devices and tropes, chases an accuracy that acknowledges that things are never as static as the names we give them. Poets try to name things in ways that reshape and sometimes disturb how we apprehend our lives.<\/p>\n German philosopher Martin Heidegger defines two ways of looking at something, a hammer, for instance: we can look at it and describe it (and name it) by some analytical process. This thing has a head and a claw and a handle and a grip; let\u2019s call it a hammer. <\/p>\n Or we can pick it up and use it. And as we use it skillfully, Heidegger says, an interesting thing happens: the thing itself disappears into the task at hand. We no longer focus on the hammer but on the hammering, on the nails-being-hammered-in. This \u201cdisappearing into the process\u201d sounds to me like the accuracy poetry tries to discover. <\/p>\n Elsewhere in the poem \u201cEpilogue,\u201d Lowell implores himself:<\/p>\n Pray for the grace of accuracy <\/p>\n Vermeer gave to the sun\u2019s illumination<\/p>\n stealing like the tide across a map<\/p>\n to his girl solid with yearning.<\/p>\n Lowell doesn\u2019t call the sun the sun; he names it in action: an \u201cillumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.\u201d Now that\u2019s accuracy\u2014a name for the sun that we can see and hear and feel commingling with our eyes and the image of the girl. This kind of accuracy names the sun by the role that sunlight plays in creating the beautiful, in creating beauty. That sounds to me awfully close to a definition of God. Maybe Dante\u2019s metaphor hits the nail on the head. <\/p>\n So, about that analytical report you\u2019re writing at work right now: it\u2019s probably not the place to go all existential and poetic on your reader. Readers have other expectations from environmental analyses and the like. But you share with poets the struggle to craft a piece of writing that is true, that elucidates the subject as accurately as possible, with no word or phrase that doesn\u2019t help get you where you want to go. <\/p>\n Poetry in good working condition uses all its linguistic resources as intelligently as possible to express the many things we turn to poetry for: to evoke a sensation or tell a story or say a prayer; to recount a common experience that\u2019s hard to apprehend or to recall a moment too ephemeral to be lost\u2014all those things immune to our more prosaic consultations. <\/p>\n And when our prose is in good working condition, it too uses all the appropriate linguistic resources to communicate in clear, concise language the things we turn to expository prose for\u2014an understanding of logical relations, causality, consequence. To say a thing clearly, succinctly, and accurately: for most of our writing, that\u2019s poetry enough. <\/p>\n \u2022 Jim Hale can be contacted at jimhale821@gmail.com or through his website, https:\/\/www.jimhalewriting.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (For Amy Fletcher) The poet, Admired for his earnest habit of calling The sun the sun. . . . \u2014W.H. Auden, \u201cIn Praise of Limestone\u201d All writing should aspire to the condition of poetry. The condition of poetry: I\u2019m not talking about poetry\u2019s reputation for being difficult or roundabout or cagey, or about poetry\u2019s affinity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-13421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13421"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=13421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}