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.

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