On Naive and Sentimental Poetics: an Introduction, with Reference to Rachel Blau DuPlessis
I don’t know how to write about poetry. That’s where I begin. I write poems, but I’ve never been what’s called a “poet-critic.” And I do write something resembling scholarship, but my scholarly work has never been about poetry. So, I write and, of course, I read. I respond to poems. But it’s never been clear to me what forms my responses might take.
I felt, I think, inchoately for the most part, that the only way properly to respond to a poem is to write a poem. My criticism of a poem, my analysis of a poem, my “take” on a poem – whether direct or oblique – would be another poem. My feeling, which I never exactly articulated until I started this project, is that a poem creates a language that requires response in something akin to that same language, and not some other language. Jonathan Kramnik, in an engaging new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, writes that what distinguishes analysis in literature from analysis in science and the social sciences is that in literary study the object of analysis is of the same stuff as the mode of the analysis. Scientific study applies empirical observations and mathematical forms and models to objects that are physical, non-symbolic — that is, to some part of the physical world. Social sciences use methods of broad analysis, sometimes theoretical, sometimes quantitative, to study aggregates of data that represent portions of social reality. The mode is different from the object. But literary analysis uses language to study artefacts of language, a fact that, for Kramnik, has profound methodological and epistemological consequences. I feel something like this, but even more so, in my attempts to say something about poetry. I have no other language but language with which to write about an object made of language — and in this case, a very particular use of language that is part of particular histories of which I too am part.
There is a universal language. It’s called language.
I want to read naked. But there can be no naked reading. One is always clothed in some garment. You bring what you bring; it’s not possible to come to the poem empty. Such readers as “enter the new world naked, aware of nothing save that they enter” can’t really exist, except as figures of a poet’s – or reader’s — imagination. Every reading of spring still remembers winter. Williams and Eliot must converge in their hermeneutic seasons. So there. Now I’m dressed.
In Friedrich Schiller’s famous and peculiar essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” he does not define these terms in our contemporary senses. “Naive” derives from the Latin for “native” or “natural.” The Naive poet would possess some unmediated, pre-reflective relation to the natural world. “Sentimental,” conversely, implies self-reflection, a focus on emotion and interiority. Poetry, for Schiller, in its origins is naive. The naive poet crashes past all artifice and convention. In the Naive poet there is no self-consciousness. The mastery of craft seems absolute, and yet there is no craft, there is only substance, unallayed, like Nature itself. The Naive poet is the Wild Child of poetry. Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy” is the naive poet; Wordsworth the sentimental poet.
In a modern age, Schiller goes on to say, there can be no Naive Poets. Self-consciousness is the dominant feature of a modern mind. Knowledge of the world and the representation of the world are now products of reflection, not of primary relation. Poetry written from this outlook is Sentimental. It is beautiful, profound, moving, astonishingly great; but it is always belated; always a perception or idea or feeling in relation to its object (or, indeed, to the poet as subject).
Schiller wrote that all poets “will either be or they will seek lost nature.” But only the Naive poet can either be or find it. The Sentimental poet will always still seek, but never finally arrive. Orpheus was the original: the Naive Poet whom all subsequent poets could only imitate.
If there can be Naive and Sentimental poetry, what about naive and sentimental poetics? Is it possible to engage with poetry – that is, to read it – -in ways that are naive in Schiller’s sense: not artificial, imported, translated, or contrived … but direct, essential, without circumlocution, contextualization, history, or hermeneutics? How can I do that – form a relationship with a poem that is analogous to the way Schiller’s Naive Poet forms a relationship with Nature? Clearly, that can’t be done. So, how can I do it? How do I respond to a poem innocently – with both true love and undisguised malice, as the poem may elicit?!
I want a poetics that is reflective, that knows as much as I know, and yet is able to enter and merge with the poem, dance with its language, then emerge in new language that still is engaged with, melded with the original language. To be primary and secondary at the same time. Back to Schiller: to both “be and seek.”
So, back in fall 2022, as some of these ideas were starting to percolate, my copy of Mark Scroggins’ collected poems, Damage: Poems 1988-2022, arrived. (And I thought, “Collected”?! How is Mark old enough to publish a collected poems?) A couple days later, just as I’m starting into Mark’s book, what arrives but Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Selected Poems, 1980-2020. (And I thought, why not “Collected”?) And meanwhile, I’ve got Susan Schultz’s Lilith Walks, her thing about walking her dog during the Trump era, that I started but hadn’t finished. And then her Meditations comes out. Soon I’m corresponding with Margie Cronin and she sends me a half dozen books from Australia. Then I get a couple of books from Billie Chernicoff, who wrote a blurb for my then new Obvious and Worthless Poems. And already Mark’s Zion Offramp is out or soon to come out. Norman Finkelstein’s new Pascal Wanderlust volume is out. And all these poets are friends, some older, some newer, or at least friendly to me, if not full-fledged friends that I’ve already “grappled to my soul with hoops of steel,” etc. But all of them, I love their poems. I want to read them. I want to read them with full openness, or full/open emptiness.
So, I’m trying to read them concurrently. And I think, that’s how one always reads poetry. Even if you’re only reading one poet or one poem, you read the one and then have somewhere in mind all the others that the single one points out toward. They run together – concurrent. Both Mark and Rachel insist that you read more than one because of their allusiveness, the presence – quoted directly or hinted at – of other poets in their poems. To enter a poem is to enter the history of that poem. And that’s true even, or maybe especially, when a poem is less than clear on its own history. That’s often the sign of a bad poem – the unconscious borrowing or imitating that shows up like a sort of ketchup stain that the poet is unaware of. It’s right there on your shirt, idiot. On the other hand, if a poet is too much in control of his or her poetic navigation, the poem may lack vibrancy – though how does one determine that? And I also realize, as I’m reading Mark’s and Rachel’s poems, that I don’t understand them – that there’s much in the poems that I don’t understand. I read with pleasure while knowing that I’m only getting part and missing much.
I started first writing about Mark’s Collected. Some of that writing appeared recently in Jacket 2. And then I bounced back to Rachel.
Eurydice is the poet who fails to return. Or Eurydice is not a poet; she is silent. But Rachel returns to Euridice and pulls her back into the world – pulls what cannot be pulled, since there’s no substance to grab onto. The poetry of Orpheus, that we possess — according to myth the greatest of all poets, who could charm enchant make peaceful and persuade wild beasts and the King of the Underworld. Song and verse were one for Orpheus. No “upper limit music” for him. It was all music, but also all sense, all meaning; material semantic beauty sensuous ethics; the single and the numerous; ecstasy and form. We have the “Orphics.” But we have no “Eurydics.” One side of a story of gender, of desire, of power; the other side silent/silenced. Even to look at her makes her invisible. All of Rachel’s poetry and critical/theoretical writing has been “Eurydics.” Here is Eurydice speaking of Orpheus:
Songs are his,
melody like a great linked chain.
Touch is his,
outlining the edge of my dance.
The poem is first-person. It is essential that Eurydice speak, that her voice be conjured from silent millennia. Is she not a goddess? Was she not? And then Orpheus and his team made her the suffering girl. Was she not, in her origins, Enheduana, the great Sumerian priestess of Inana – the first poet to give herself a name. Not Orpheus. The great shard of poetry already had cut into the real. Language had jumped the metaphysical synapse between subjectivity and stuff, and others, and the social and cosmic environs. And the whole organism came alive. But that was Enheduana, poet of war and fertility, caught up in palace rivalries, disgrace, revenge, daughter and mother and poet. Orpheus was the overweening son; Eurydice the silent daughter.
And Rachel? Author of The Pink Guitar… Things certainly are changed, they are not what they are.
The voice shifts in the final section, and the tense. “She will take shape and sprout.” Take shape; make shape. She will make herself be born. The poem becomes prophecy – becomes orphic, or properly eurydic. We should note that we actually possess no poems of Orpheus. The so-called “Orphics” are obvious forgeries. I don’t say this simply because Orpheus was mythical. The Ophics aren’t very good, thus couldn’t possibly be his, mythical or not. A brilliant profound forgery makes itself authentic. The god, through language, establishes provenance. Eurydice will sprout, produce seeds; in her cave, underworld, her womb will disseminate – not just ovulate. We have nothing from Orpheus – neither poems nor children. Poets, look to your mother! The river of eggs and semen that will populate your poems all come from her!
great head, the cave large inside it
great limbs of a giant woman
great cunt, fragrant, opening
seeds of Eurydice.
And then I bounced – bounced back to Scroggins, went to the beach, wrote a book review of a scholarly book on literatures of plague–back to Rachel in focused distraction, looking for her instrument.
And that was her question too! “And could I change the instrument …” she wrote in “The Pink Guitar.” And she wrote, “I am not finding a voice, I am losing one.”
Eurydice did not make a sound. This is partly because she had no body. But there were other reasons.
Orpheus, I believe, mostly played the lyre.
The next key word, after “Eurydics,” is midrash, another kind of voice, of many voices. Again, in “The Pink Guitar” she wrote:
It is a voice, it is, in fact, voices – and from where. If I said “midrash,” it would have some cultural charm, although Hebrew was Greek to me, and Greek was a botch, and it did have something to do with “my father.” But by midrash I mean the possibility of continuous chains of interpretation, thinking into the relations of things. It’s like when you open a catch-all drawer and everything there including your hand, and your gesture, mean something, has some history, of its making, and of its being there. A focused catch-all. Where the production of meanings is, if not continuous, so interconnected that one has the sense of, the illusion of, the “whole” of life being activated, and raised to realizations and power. Thru language.
From Draft 64: “Content-Transfer-Encoding:/ quoted-printable Blank Rachel …” From Draft 48, “Speaking midrash in a mid-rush.”
All her poems are Eurydics. And all are midrash, but midrash to go – “mid-rush.” The rabbis at the table all night expanding, interpellating. Rachel in the kitchen, listening, expanding, interpellating. Eurydice drifting through trees, absorbent, echoing, emitting. Rachel died giving birth, but she spoke to Joseph as he interpreted dreams in Egypt.
And then I was distracted.
My writing has no basis; other than my own personal response as a poet. How do I read so as to derive something that I need?
How do I get what I need from a poem? (Not knowing what I need?!).
July 4, 2023 I’m moving back to Rachel now. Months later. I’m in a rented house near a beach. Carolina Beach, near Wilmington NC. Great house, beautiful beach. My wife and I are here for a couple of weeks – beach and work. I brought my poetry books with me. Rachel, some Margie Cronin, a Billie Chernicoff, and Oppen’s new Collected. Diane’s poems on my computer. Also the Ben Lerner The Hatred of Poetry, I want to look at that again. Maybe. Maybe not.
I was most recently distracted by wanting to review a book on literatures of plague: Preexisting Conditions by Samuel Weber. I taught a course on lit of plague, and Weber’s book covers about half the stuff on my syllabus, missed a few (Shelley’s Last Man, most notably) and added a few (an amazing letter by Martin Luther on why Christians should not flee a city that had been infected by plague). And of course I have my own book manuscript, my Journal of the Plague Months … apparently another of my exemplars of the Unpublishable Genre; perhaps this work is one of these as well. I generally don’t like writing reviews – this whole project on responding to poetry is signal of my not wanting to write reviews – but I felt I had things to say in response to Weber’s openings, so I ended up spending a couple of weeks on it and writing something much longer than a book review – pretty much the length of an academic essay.
And now it’s difficult to get my mind reset toward responding to poetry. How will I manage it? Perhaps pick up a book … See what I find? I’ve read the selections from Drafts a few times now. Can I write about them yet? Do I need to re-read The Pink Guitar, which I had started but then got distracted.
I was reading a lot of Margie Cronin’s poems, and I’ll write about them at some point.
I met Margie Cronin’s sister, Jeanette, in New York, where she performed in a one-woman play that she wrote. She brought more books from Margie, from Australia. The play was really good, by the way. She’s very talented, and I liked her.
You see what I’m up against.
Jen and I bicycled to the beach this morning and swam for maybe an hour. Pretty glorious. Then came back, made breakfast. Then tried to make a dinner reservation at a restaurant up in Wilmington. Today is July 4; we want to go up there, have dinner, see the fireworks along the river. But, of course, no restaurant has any tables open. Then my daughter Teya phoned from music camp; just wanted to chat while waiting in lunch line; and complain about a few things, now I forget what. OK. At my other daughter’s camp, they don’t allow any devices. Hannah is allowed to phone once or twice a week from a camp land line. Jen and I write letters to our daughters.
My mind is made of air. It’s 1:45 in the afternoon.
I can’t begin.
“A woman writer is a marked marker,” she writes. Yes, I recognize this. Why does her work mark me? I’m looking for a new instrument, and this seems to be the instrument. I can’t write like her, but she shows a way toward reinvention. That, to me, is the mark. Her feminism is crucial to her project though feminism per se is not crucial to my project. But something adjacent is; a cultural energy – a moral-political-formal projecting and arranging. Her Jewishness is linked to her feminism. I take more the Jewishness, but I recognize the link.
Orpheus, Rilke, Stevens: “Into this scene gallumphs the female artist, hauling a different colored ‘lyre, guitar, or mandolin.’” Rachel is a giant, a monster. There is no door frame her work will fit through. The movers have to leave the furniture outside and call a carpenter. The house of poetry must be rebuilt. “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” wrote cousin Walt.
I keep coming back to chronology. I need it. The first “Eurydice” is dated 1973-74. The essays in The Pink Guitar begin in 1978, completed in 1989. The first Draft, 1991. Drafts is the work she is moving toward. How do I know this? Because once she gets there, she stays there for 20 years. But the first several Drafts are not there yet. She’s getting a sense of the terrain, of how to do this particular kind of living-in-writing, and vice versa.
“Write poetries. Write writings, write readings, write drafts. Write critical several selves to dissolve the bounded idea of the self” (“Otherhow” in The Pink Guitar).
That’s right, but tendentious? … that whole “critique of lyric,” the lyric self/lyric “I.” Who or what does the dissolving? You do! Rachel does. Poetries, writings, readings, drafts. That’s the meat of it, the protein. Once you realize that it’s not a question of “dissolving” some posited fictional singular self, but of realizing that your mind is a dialogue. You hear voices and “subject positions,” you’re alive, you’re in the world, you’re apprehending, reading, seeing, trying to understand, witness to outrages, cruelty, oppression, stupidity, desolation, all of that; and all the other stuff. Dailiness, food, love, contentment, delight. You, yourself, as self, are permeable. It’s not that you need to dissolve the boundary; it’s more that you kind of don’t have one that’s so clear or permanent. You’re only covered with skin, after all. What you see and experience changes you. What you hear and read changes your voice and your understanding. Every relationship you enter produces some shift in your spirit, some expansion, some panic, some courage. All the stuff about the “lyric I” and the necessary “critique” of it is so fucking tiresome. Poets who write so narrowly that they merit such critique are just lousy poets. But sometimes they’re good poets and the critic is missing something in that “lyric” that’s more varied and variable that it may appear — at least to that critic.
At the same time, not to overstate it either way … There is that neural, experiential binding. There is memory and there is the proprioceptive, kinesthetic sense of one’s own physical being in the world – one’s symmetries, one’s weight and relation to the physical earth and gravity; one’s immersion in a culture, histories, symbols, the holds of language. We all have an “I,” but we’ve earned it. It’s not that the “lyric” is impossible or even outmoded. It’s just that it has, somehow, to show the labor of the “I.” Or hide it, but leave a signature. “Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” Or: “Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?”
Don’t think Foucault, in the sense that the subject is necessarily ideologically disciplined so that the dominant ideology will emerge in his every utterance and there is no escape from ideology, hegemony, the iron cage of whatever. Think Bakhtin – there is a ruling ideology, but it is not, is never, total. There always are gaps, conflicts, different voices striving within every utterance; dialects, dialogues, dialectics, differences, shoving and shouting, Caliban learning to curse, the maelstrom of the singular in the one plural ocean. That’s what’s happening. The poet has to find it, because it’s there. Whatever theoretical bits are needed to justify the process will take care of themselves. In fact, they aren’t needed. If you learn (that is, teach yourself) to write – in the fullest sense – you’ll find it. In “Otherhow”:
“Propose somehow a work, the work, a work, the work, a work otherhow of enormous dailiness and crossing. All the ‘tickets’ and the writing. Poems ‘like’ essays: situated, breathless, passionate, multiple, critical. A work of entering the social force of language…”
There, in 1985, Rachel is figuring it out. She’s getting it in theory. But the first actual Drafts don’t have it, haven’t found it. They’re “drafts,” in the rough sense, not yet open to the full friction of language, stuff, (large contradictory) self, voices, events, history, history of poetry, goofiness (a quality that the still-serious – as poet/intellectual – Rachel will soon embrace and put to effect).
“Friction” is a word that Samuel Weber uses in his book on plague literatures (Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague) to designate the ways that texts embody and dramatize the contrary pressures of contemporary events, memories, language usages, genres, psychic states, histories, inventions, trains of thought and roadblocks to thought, metaphors and the fighting through metaphors as with axes through a forest. “Friction” is kin to Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony, but in a frictional text, the stress is more on the conflicts and violence amid the voices and noises. They roughly rub. In polyphonic music, whether from the renaissance or in jazz, the voices (vocal or instrumental) soar and descend past and through each other and the convergences are points of harmony or gorgeous dissonance. Cadences and conclusions are indefinitely deferred. Phone means both voice and sound. It may have direct semantic value, or may not.
In poetry, everything has semantic value. Including nonsense, including broken syntax, disjunction of all kinds, including disruptions and disavowals of meaning (“Mean something! … Ah, that’s a good one!” wrote Beckett in Endgame). To introduce noise into the composition is the gesture of introducing noise. To introduce chance is the gesture of introducing chance. Gesture is intentional; meaning encrusts itself onto the gesture.
All signals signify. But they may not mean what you think they will mean when you send them. And verbal signs cannot be stripped of their meanings, their contexts, the histories of their meanings. They cannot. Or, sure, you can do it, but the meanings come back. They scamper back, determinate and indeterminate, rubbing and colliding.
There
Is
No
Verbal
Island.
And why would you want to go there?
There is always meaning. There is always intention. There is always agency. There is always a subject. It’s just that these terms are more complicated than their theoretical caricatures. Why? Well, that’s complicated. The one complication is needed to explain the other. “The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion synaptic connections. There are more neurons in a single human brain than stars in the milky way!” (Colon-Ramos Lab, Yale University). There’s that, for starters. “Neuroplasticity”: that is, your experience actually changes you, changes how your brain is structured. “Path Dependency”: a piece of political science jargon that means history. Things have causes and they have consequences … And causes and consequences have contexts and intricacies; and the exact ways these transpire are not easy to discern. The reason for this difficulty is in part because you yourself are inside the process, and it is working on you as well.
This is obvious, of course; obvious to say. Not at all obvious to apprehend, or to write.
Then in 1984-85, Rachel wrote “Writing.” This, for me, is where her poems activate, become truly active. Different voices or places of awareness are marked in space. She tries a neat trick (that she never does again) of writing some of the voices/perspectives in hand-writing (approximated in the published form–you get the idea, though it’s not actually her cursive script). The work deals less by way of “theme.” Parallels; intersections; adjacencies. The poems consist of shifting and sustaining/lingering/moving acts of attention thought perception response moments of boredom energy urgent gradual now intending you gifts observed flight.
The poems are improvised? composed? I don’t know. Both. Like all poetry. Like Stein’s “continuous present”? Somewhat, yes, but more clicks on the compass, a clock with more excavation:
Imbedding some extruding some the interplay between
selection, imbedding, and loss. Some few words, chosen, and why; but are also
chosen from, once the day was awash in pinpricks, a pull in the back
muscle, overlay and no experience. No experience because all. Say.
Saw. Operations. Addictions. And no shadow and it was dark within
this icy one knows brightness all disappearing all intense
writing what; does it save it? “diaristic” in impulse, but
unbargained, imponderable. Over written. Written then over written,
over ridden, the selection is one thing, this (the globule, clot) another.
Different plans and different pictures.
Most poetry something–
imagery, structure.
uneven pictures patterns,
irregular blocks, a rebus
trued, held in a rose-pink
border
Dreaming I’m crying
it’s she’s crying.
This is a complete section, a good introduction. It gives a sense of what Rachel is setting out to do. “diaristic’ in impulse”– yes, for sure, but “unbargained, imponderable.” “No experience because all.” Yes, exactly. Where/what is it? How do you write it, over-ride it? And then, how do you negotiate what doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, has no fit “(the globule, clot)”? … “Different plans and different pictures.” And finally, yet, and altogether, there is dream/loss/ extrusion/sorrow… a misplacing: “Dreaming I’m crying/ it’s she’s crying.” The character in the poem. Is her. To the reader, “I” is always “she.” To the writer, “she” is sometimes “I”. But that becomes true for the reader too, sometimes. At what points do you, reading, enter the feeling, or does it find you?
I read passages like this and think, Yes, exactly. That’s it. And that’s why I love R’s poetry. It’s right. It stakes things out. “… the gigantic/ swollen viviparous rivers …” Yes, I know that, have always known that; just never thought of it.
pattern up
hole in the
house
crests, its opposite
touching hard and fast
disperse
thick places
bound to violent narratives.
pitter pity
they poke a
little nest
How do I not know this? This irregular balance, this careless precise obscurity and opening, this meaning(ful)(less) activity and energy. A few pages later: “Acts of attention?/ what an angle you make/ on acts of inattention.” And this from “… the intersecting of strongly acknowledged yet/ loosely defined materials with an ‘I’ who is the hidden/ subject and object of each of these verbs.” “Acts of attention”: on what? And each act of attention is contingent and in relation–at some “angle”– to other acts of inattention. The swollen river gives birth, but once its new babies swim to the bank, one must pay attention to them as the river flows past. An ecstatic procedure, but in a mode of care and attention, not of ecstasy. Not sublime. Sometimes sublime? “Sublimity” as one mode among many.
And this is a different kind of obscurity. Not an obscurity of reference (as, say, in Mark Scroggins or Geoffrey Hill) or of invented myth as in Duncan or Mackey … just an obscurity of, this is how the words go; go with them. But what do they mean? We know the answer to that: They mean what they say.
In the Drafts, there will be more reference and citation, but she explains most of these in footnotes, for those who want to know. And one should want to know. The Drafts extend and deepen the conversations begun in “Writing.”
But where is Eurydice in all this? Has her silent journey, disappearance, and revival been forgotten? She was just beginning to find her voice, and now all polyphony has broken loose!
But don’t you know? This is what she intended all along.
Didn’t Rachel write, “I am not finding a voice, I am losing one”?
Am I not again implying a teleology to Rachel’s career? That the Drafts were latent/implied all along in the early Eurydics and then, more directly, in “Writing”? Have we not relegated telos to the ash pits of contingency, the tool of Whigs and crude Hegelians? Hayden White argued that all narrative was ideological because its end was contained in its opening; it wore its assumptions and premises on its sleeve and could not cast off the meanings and values that created it. Gary Saul Morson, in response, argued that the true essence of narrative was actually its lack of determination. The narrative moment was the place in the story when the action could genuinely go in several directions, and so narrative is contingency. White assumed a monologic character for narrative. Morson, drawing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, emphasized the multiple. Narrative contains conflict–including that in the author’s mind–and it’s impossible finally to determine what fact moves the plot toward one or another conclusion, or toward any recognizable conclusion. Stories end, books end, lives end; but the “viviparous river” flows on and spews always new offspring.
Say then that Rachel’s career is a story.