New York Diary

Of Blogging

There is only one poem about poetry that is any good.

If that.

I waffle; today I find that it is pointed and well-wrought; today again I find that it is empty or hollow.

Here I am thinking of Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica. It starts with an apparent contradiction, saying that poetry should be "mute," "dumb, "silent," and, finally, "wordless." Taken on their own, of course, these sentiments would be baffling--but from the start we are also given the better alternative to loud and wordy poetry (even if it takes a while to understand that fact). For MacLeish, a poem's power is in its palpability, its ability to show, not tell. Indeed, he says straight out, first line, "A poem should be palpable..." but it's only in the final section of the poem that his meaning comes clear: no poet should write the "history of grief," but should rather show grief with "an empty door and a maple leaf." No poem should say "I love you," but should instead speak of "the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea."

And this is precisely the problem with Ars Poetica and all other poems about poetry. Ars Poetica is indeed a pretty good poem (especially its semantically-complicated second section, actually, which I haven't even touched on here)--but MacLeish, like every other poet on poetry that I've read, is unable to take his own advice when writing about poetry itself. If poetry should make its point palpably, should show and not tell, then his explicit exhortations are of an inferior sort. To be sure, they're far better than the incredible self-indulgence of Wislawa Szymborska or the ridiculousness of Naoshi Koriyama's A Loaf of Poetry. (Note to Koriyama and numerous others: metaphors do not a compelling allegory make. It is not enough to write, with Billy Collins, about the horrors of "torturing a confession out of" a poem; there is no torture, and no confession, and we all know that what is stake here is the meaning of the work. By happy contrast, when Shelley reflects on the brevity of human life and dominant civilization, we are meant to believe that there is an actual Ozymandias, that there are statuary remnants in the desert, and that the moral is the metaphor and the palpable image the reality--and not vice versa.) Somehow, even very great poets seem to lose themselves once they take on the subject of poetry itself, and their literary efforts inevitably fall short. It is not cleverly self-referential to write about verse in verse if the verse is no good in the first place.

This leads me to today's rumination. Do I blog more when more interesting things are happening to me, because I have more to say? Or less, because I have less time for this virtual world when fully engaged in the real world?

I suspect that I fall into a third category altogether. I write a post, generally speaking, when I feel like I have an interesting idea or observation--but surprisingly, this does not appear to me to be particularly correlated with doing interesting things in life. Of late I've noticed, in fact, that the more often I go out, the more often I drink Belgian beer on Friday nights and go on urban treasure hunts on Saturdays, the LESS often I seem to engage with interesting ideas (which you'd think would be more forthcoming as I do more varied and interesting things). Is this a comment on my friends? Our conversations? The (less analytical?) way I'm coming to look at and live in the world? Maybe just the way in which I am more settled in my reasonably boring job? Or what?

I feel like I'm losing my sharpness, and my blog seems to me to be a chronicle of this. When I fail to post, it is not because I'm doing something else (which I think is the stereotype), but because I feel at a loss for anything to say.

End of self-indulgence. Back to normalcy now.

posted by Skay @ 11:55 PM