Supernova Swing-Set: The Conscious and Unconscious at Play in Poetry
a manifesto of sorts by Jeremy Voigt
Between the conscious and the unconscious, the
mind has put up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway
between these two trees,
and it never winds down.
Angels, animals, humans insects by the million, also
the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.
Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a
servant for life.
After reading this Robert Bly translation of Kabir’s poem I came
to realize that it addresses an aspect of poetry I greatly admire and
one that I feel is lacking in our current poetic climate. This aspect
is a central wildness. One of the possibilities of poetry is a deep playfulness
of language and in turn of the mind. I want to propose an idea of the
supernova swing-set as a standard for poetry. Just as Emily Dickinson
spoke of her head being taken off in poetry’s presence and Keats’ insistence
on “negative capability” as necessary for poetry, I feel
I am completely in the presence of poetry when the poem is as Jane Hirshfield
would say “awake to its possibilities,” and swings between
language of the conscious mind and language of the unconscious.
Kabir’s poem both enacts and discusses the wildness I am referring
to. The first line of this poem is plain and direct. It is utterance
that is simple but assumes a level of understanding. Obviously, one
must accept or understand the difference between consciousness and
unconsciousness
before the lines make any sort of sense. When the conscious and the
unconscious work off of each other in poetry, energy is created, like
a swing. Each
movement feeds the velocity and dynamics of the other movement. The
first stanza describes this.
The second stanza claims that all earth creatures move between the “two
trees,” and describes the mind’s perpetual nature. I suppose
when the swing does wind down, it means a sort of death. Kabir is an
ecstatic religious poet and I am sure he is referring to his version
of a supreme being. But I think the same intensity and possibility also
resides within each human mind, and that “ages” can refer
to human years. In the final stanza, Kabir puts his image into motion
the swing has been set up, and now all the elements of the universe
are swinging. His choice to include an image of gestation is intriguing
to
me. It is a major leap from the list of elements that precedes it.
It is an image of continuation of consciousness, and it is also an
image
of inner landscape. The secret one growing a body is also cultivating
another consciousness. I think the image strengthens his idea that
everything is interconnected.
Kabir ends by saying that once he became aware of this massive
interplay within the mind, he was humbled by it. I think this is
writerly instruction.
Isn’t it important for writers to have humility before their art?
Such humility allows the writer to submit to the materials, and allow
the possibilities of language their interplay without human ego interfering.
As Pound said, “most poets fail not due to lack of talent, but
lack of character.” Kabir also implies that he has become obsessed
with the art of writing. He is a “servant for life.” It takes
a deep level of dedication and obsession to serve something for a lifetime.
This deep commitment displays itself in Kabir’s poetry, as I often
feel that his entire being went into the making of each poem. To be truly
obsessively-inspired, shouldn’t that be the desire of each poem?
The difference is writing major and minor poems. Major poems enter
the canon, and minor poems are like daily bread.
So much of the poetry I love varies widely in structure and diction,
but it uses those structures to evoke the vast possibilities of mind
on the page. Much of the poetry I dislike is talky, common sounding
and, to my ear, banal. Both the poetry I am attracted to and the
poetry I
am indifferent to may use similar diction and formal structures but
I think the difference lies in the intensity of the attempt. I demand
the
same level of intensity from what I read as Kabir’s fifteen
seconds of seeing the world swinging madly. This does not mean that
poems cannot
be fun, funny, or playful; on the contrary I think it demands that
they are, but they must also take themselves seriously.
A poem reaches levels of wild and serious intensity through focus.
In this sense I agree with Auden’s comment that poetry is “memorable
speech.” But ultimately I align myself more directly with William
Stafford’s amendment to Auden and define poetry as “considered
speech.” Poetry cannot simply be memorable (a good joke is memorable
but it is not a poem). I don’t like poems that sound like punch
lines. For example, Billy Collins’s poem “Paradelle for Susan” is
quite humorous. It mocks formal verse through its loony demands of
structure and resulting nonsense. I laughed the first time I heard
Collins read
the work and found it amusing, but for me it is not a poem. It is an
inside joke that ultimately over time falls flat. This is not to say
that poetry cannot be light or humorous, but I will argue for an inclusiveness
of mind on the page that brings some spark to the language so that
the words not only reverberate in the literal cognitive realm but remain
memorable in the subconscious too.
In contrast, the poem “Landscape of a Vomiting Multitude,” by
Garcia Lorca, is wildly entertaining and humorous as he describes a pier
of individuals all caught in a hysteria of puking. The basis of the humor
is not very sophisticated (it’s a bodily function joke) but Lorca
utilizes the subject matter to create a montage of phantasmagoric imagery.
The poem actually reminds me of the barf-o-rama from the Stephen King
film, “Stand By Me.” The difference is that Lorca includes
the reader with vivid images, exclamations, and surprising word choice.
The following is a description of feeling ill: “The graveyards,
yes, the graveyards / and the sorrow of the kitchens buried in sand /
the dead, pheasants and apples of another era, / pushing into our throat.” There
is a depth and intensity to these lines where one gets the feeling that
all of Lorca’s consciousness is concentrated on the poem, and
this allows him to pull things together in a unique and pleasing way.
Another way to describe the success of the Lorca poem is well teased
out in Robert Bly’s book Leaping Poetry. Bly says this movement “can
be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back
again” which becomes a more concentrated free association. The
difference here, as Bly points out, is that Lorca does not see association
as a poetic tool to use in his poems but uses association as his subject.
Even though Lorca is describing a “vomiting multitude,” his
true subject is the movement of his own mind. His subject is the supernova
swing-set arcing between the conscious and the unconscious. This fact
makes poems that seem wild, unpredictable, and completely weird both
accessible and rimmed with a sense of magic. I admire that trust in
the unconscious. The result is a sort of mystical intellectualism.
I like this balance of intelligence and mystery. Language itself
seems this way to me both practical and incomprehensible. Lorca’s poems
move from good to great because of his ability to utilize the straightforwardness
of the conscious mind and trust unconscious mystery enough to make them
his subject matter. Galway Kinnell said somewhere, “I want to go
so deeply into myself that I find the universal.” I think this
is precisely what Lorca and Kabir are doing. They are willing to ride
the swing through the mind with their eyes wide open and act as witness
to what they find there. This involves using the powers of the intellect
but also a form of faith, for lack of a better word, which Lorca called “duende,” or
the presence of death.
In his essay, “Theory and Function of the Duende,” Lorca
writes about the balance of conscious intelligence and the unconscious
fear of death ever present for humans, and in order to create poetry,
the writer must some times let go of his conscious self and be guided
by the swing of association. He writes,
Very often intellect is poetry’s enemy because it is
too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to
a throne
of sharp
edges and
makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly
be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall
on his head.
This is darkly comic, but useful. Lorca’s association is often
wild and unpredictable, which provides a great deal of pleasure. The
poem must remain haunted by the poet’s consciousness. Lorca says
also,
The magical quality of a poem consists in its being always possessed
by the duende, so that whoever beholds it is baptized with dark water.
I think this presence is the supernova swing-set, those fifteen seconds
of awe, and the keen observer who watches with humility sees it.
The problem with all of this is the human need for rationality. Poetry
in a sense argues against rationality simply because its lines refuse
to extend
to the end of the page. I think the work I admire does not refuse rationality
entirely but also does not want to live there. It swings from rational to
irrational. For me, poems that remain strictly in the rational space
of intellect end up
feeling like chopped up prose, and poems that reside in the irrational just
seem absurd. The movement between the two states of mind is more interesting
to me because I believe it is how people interpret the world. I know I am
constantly negotiating with my conscious and unconscious selves to
get through my day.
To translate this into art, one must be willing to get into the messy part
of the mind, the playful and the dark sections. When poetry swings between
the conscious and unconscious great things happen. Layers of meaning are
allowed in a small place. This interplay seems necessary in lyric
poetry, if it is
to have any ambition.
As Charles Simic points out in his essay “Negative Capability and Its
Children,” the individual poet and perhaps even the individual reader’s
perspective on language will determine the content of a poem. This is probably
true, and I should assert that I believe language to be a reflection of our
reality and not an escape from it, or as Simic says, language is the “expression
of a moment of attention,” not the “imaginative flight of our privileged
moment.” For me, this is where the best poems reside: in a moment
of wild attention.
I think most poems fail because they do not allow themselves the
play of concentrated language that is open to possibility. This
is not an argument against direct
utterance. Wild association differs from plain association in its speed.
It is the rapid bounding of the mind between cognitive states.
I think something
missing from American poetry is this wild attention.
Now, in a poem by Kabir or Lorca the swing between consciousnesses
can be much easier to see due to their leaping, either from one word
to
another or line
to line, or just through the momentum of the poem itself. The leap is the
aesthetic of these poets. A sense of wildness within language or
the imagination is the
hallmark of their work. This does not mean that such leaping is the only
way to tap the movement of the mind. In a sense I believe that what
gives poems
weight is a realistic capturing of the supernova swing. What is necessary
to bring a poem to life a deep sense of attentiveness or concentration,
as well
al time spent thinking about larger issues, and attention given to the world.
This consideration avoids the sense of a poem as punch-line regardless of
subject. This intensity, this ethereal feeling may be the subtext,
or what is left out
of the poem rather than what is left in the poem. This may appear in one
of Hopkins’ desolation sonnets or Neruda’s odes. The
result is good poetry despite technique or style.
The supernova swing can also appear in poems of direct utterance.
Deeper psychological issues can be probed with plain images and language.
There are several poets
good at this, William Stafford and Robert Bly come to mind, but my favorite
example of the moment is Louise Glück. Glück is perhaps the master
of simple speech and deep psychology. She is in terns dark, sardonic, funny,
and tormented. Take her poem from Ararat, titled “First Memory,”
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
Glück is a good example of some of these ideas as she is a veteran
of psychoanalysis and her poems probe the human consciousness. The opening
of this poem is an obvious reference to Jungian psychology and the myth
of the Fisher King. Interestingly, this myth is often used to define
masculine psychology, but Glück is one likely to turn such assumptions
on their head. As she lives to revenge herself, she is working to heal
the wound inflicted on her psyche and grow beyond it. The lesson in this
poem is essentially human: most of our pain comes from a place of vulnerability.
Pain does not mean the absence of love but the involved in loving someone
(or something) else. All her years of psychoanalysis (which she speaks
freely about in her book of essays Proofs and Theories) have prepared
Glück to write this nine line poem made up of everyday words shrouded
with the cognitive development of her whole life. There is no visible “leap” in
this poem, but the attention to the self and to thought is explicit.
The phrase “from the beginning of time” nods to some interconnectedness
in human development over the centuries. Her reference to myth connects
both to deep places of the human psyche as well as history. The final
epiphany, that pain can equal love, is not one discovered easily (or
within the nine lines). It is a leap of attention. Glück can embrace
this surface level contradiction as a deeper personal truth, because
she has done the work of attentiveness.
Donald Hall approaches the subject of the supernova swing in his
essay “Goatfoot,
Milktongue, Twinbird” where he discusses the origin of poetic form
in the human psyche. He offers up a definition of a poem as
human inside talking to human inside. It may also be reasonable
person talking to reasonable person, but if it is not inside
talking to inside, it is not
a poem. This inside speaks through the second language. It is the ancient
prong of carbon in the arc light. We all share more when we are
five years old than
when we are twenty-five; more at five minutes than at five years. The second
language allows poetry to be universal.
I think this is true across time and language. I can read one of
Hopkins’ “desolation
sonnets” written so long ago in England and feel a deep connection
with the isolation and depression he felt. I can also read sonnets
of Petrarch, poems by Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Neruda, Lorca,
Larkin, Rilke, Pound, Eliot and feel a connection beyond rational language.
Hopkins is a prime example of the second voice in action. He is able
to develop his interior voice mainly through his amazing use of sound
with plain words,
as well as his honest approach to his emotions. His desolation sonnets are
simultaneously beautiful and devastating. Hopkins has astounding dialogues
with his interior self. Take the first stanza of this sonnet for example:
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! What sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
Hopkins wakes up and turns the image on its head by saying he feels
loss in the night falling away and not joy in the light descending
on him. He continues to lament losing the meditative hours of night
where
he was able to explore his interior self, the sights his heart saw.
He knows such interior searching is vital, but it cannot continue
in light.
He must descend into darkness to have the dialogue he desires. This
is the voice of a man in search of a form of self-actualization.
In the
fifth line, he says that he can say what he has said from experience
but his descriptions are not accurate. He continues by revising the
first four lines. This precise movement is an example of the supernova
swing.
Hopkins is not after an explanation of plain facts but provides a portrait
of a human mind moving between a conscious and unconscious-self, searching
for understanding. While Kabir feels humility in his experience of
searching, Hopkins feels desolation, as if he were sending “dead” letters
to an absent individual. In the final stanza Hopkins attempts to explain
why he feels lost:
I am gall. I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
The answer he finds is that he is human. He describes almost perfectly
the human paradox Ernest Becker defines in his book The Denial of Death.
Becker says, “this is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly
in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping,
breath-gasping body.” Becker defines the human paradox as a condition
where humans a consciousness which allows them almost god-like imagination
and seemingly infinite freedom in that consciousness, but then humans
are trapped in the limits of an animal body. Hopkins’ bitter taste
is in the limits of his flesh, but his joy is the interior movements
of consciousness he can employ in dark meditative space. He condemns
individuals who do not experience what he describes in the first stanza
by saying that the lost are trapped in their “sweating selves” but
worse off because they do not experience the internal spiritual examination
of the first stanza. Poems with a central wildness guide readers into
paradox or mystery, straight into the muddiness of human thought, imagination,
and reality, and if not lend a sense of solidarity, then at least some
grounding to swing around.
I feel very much as Keats describes in one of his letters:
like a person without knowledge (and a hunger for it) who is falling
endlessly
and only by reading
and thinking and processing knowledge does that person obtain wings to
slow their descent. I think this is the great process of art: attention
and inquisitiveness leading to objects that attempt to make meaning out
of experience. It comes down to a little dumb luck and hard looking,
to plumb
depths of the mind toward passionate humility where obsession becomes art.
Comments, thoughts, reactions? E-mail me.