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ОглавлениеArticle 1:Make another world, make this world otherwise.
1.1: Poetry Against Growth
One take on contemporary life sees technology as having displaced poetry, rendering it irrelevant or at best compensatory. On this view, we live in the information age, under the sign of Moore’s Law, and poetry, as Wittgenstein observed even before digital supplanted analog, “is not used in the language game of giving information.” Absence from popular culture confirms poetry’s reduction to insignificance. Gaming and film and television reach billions worldwide, and generate billions in revenue; poetry reaches a tiny, tenuous, negligible audience, and operates at a loss, propped up by patronage, burdening rather than bolstering economic growth.
Consider, though, this contrary view: technology’s influence makes poetry more urgent than ever, so urgent that it conditions the continued survival of the human species. Exclusion of poetry from popular culture symptomatizes not poetry’s illness but culture’s. Poetry is not dying for want of an audience; humanity is dying for want of poetry. In Charles Bernstein’s words, we suffer “not the lack of mass audience for any particular poet but the lack of poetic thinking as an activated potential for all people.” In fulfillment of that contrarian understanding, as a response to our want of poetry, I propose ethopoesis. The ethopoetic would recognize the urgency, even the necessity, of poetry, and envision a poetry adequate to this cultural need.
Technology and economy now enmesh the globe in ways, and to a degree, beyond precedent. Transportation has overcome regional limitations to the movement of goods; digital technology has overcome the limits distance once imposed on communication; corporations now enjoy worldwide market reach; resources from any region are accessible to exploitation by entities in distant regions; and so on. The economy has raced toward total globalization, but cultures and concepts of citizenship have lagged, remaining local and sectarian. Corporations have become thoroughly multinational, but political institutions remain stubbornly national; natural resources and manufactured products move easily from one place to another, but movement of humans is tightly restricted by nation al boundaries; those with capital find safety and security for their money more readily than those without capital can find safety and security for their persons; and so on.
This disparity between a global economy and local cultural and civic values has as one upshot structural violence: violence, as Paul Farmer puts it, perpetrated “by the strong against the weak, in complex social fields” in which “historically given” and “economically driven” conditions guarantee “that violent acts will ensue.” Political democracy cannot be had without economic democracy; cultural and civic values must also check, not only be checked by, economic forces. Farmer does not identify poetry as an ally, but poetry urges, and furthers, the revaluation for which he calls. Until we construct, and enact, a global culture and global citizenship, our global economy will only be destructive: exaggerating the disparity between rich and poor, exhausting resources and generating waste faster and faster, prompting ever more terrorism and war and genocide.
Among the many ways to articulate why this is so, Janet Dine’s is especially lucid. Capitalism, she affirms, in its essence is simple, and its primary tool, the contract, is functional and ethically sound. But “like any other human institution it [contract] can be corrupted,” and the dominant contractually-based institutions, namely multinational corporations (e.g. banks) and international financial institutions (e.g. the IMF), have been corrupted. In a market economy, commercial law ought to allocate risk, but, Dine observes, it has not done so equitably. Instead, both international and national laws, “written,” Dine reminds us, “mostly by wealthy élites,” have participated in creating poverty the results of which include: more than one in eight humans is undernourished; one in eight humans does not have access to safe drinking water; two in five do not have access to adequate sanitation. That combination of factors kills 1.4 million children every year (4,000 children every day, one child every 20 seconds). In creating laws about contracts, commercial law establishes rules defining and protecting property, regulating how it is acquired and disposed of, but Dine emphasizes that “property rights are not rights over things but, on the contrary, rights against other people,” specifically the right to exclude them. Laws constructed by and for those who already own property will pursue “the widest concept of property and freedom to trade” without regulatory control, inviting “accumulations of property without imposing countervailing responsibilities.”
Dine depicts the global economy as not merely out of step with, but dependent upon the suppression of, valid conceptions of global culture and citizenship. Such an exposition suggests a condition for any suitable response. To mitigate the structural violence of our economy, we need cultural and civic parameters able to stand up to, and to modify, economic activity. Without what I call here the “ethopoetic,” our attempts even to envision, much less to implement, such parameters cannot but be impoverished and futile. That impoverishment and futility is revealed by contrasting the medium of economic exchange with the medium of cultural and civic exchange. Along at least one vector, the contrast is stark. The medium of economic exchange, currency, homogenizes and distorts value. It makes everything fungible: by means of it, anything can be rendered equivalent to anything else. So many tons of rice equivalent to, and traded for, one automobile; so many hours of a person’s labor at a certain job for one month’s rent on an apartment. The medium of cultural exchange, language, recognizes value in its full variety and particularity. Its differentiating capacity enables it to resist and to limit fungibility, to preserve uniqueness from equivalence.
Currency performs its generalizing by substituting price for value, a substitution that erases any distinction between price and value. Currency, in other words, pretends that price just is value. Only in a medium other than currency can the substitution of price for value be challenged. Identifying language as such a medium grounds an apology for poetry, and proposes an ideal for poetry. That is, it explains why poetry is necessary and what poetry at its best might be.
In Lyric Philosophy, Jan Zwicky recognizes language’s capacity for challenging the substitution of price for value, by proposing a way of seeing that she calls “lyric comprehension,” which “does not distinguish between a thing’s being and that-it-is-valuable.” Lyric comprehension, by maintaining a thing’s being as integral to its valuation, contrasts with pricing, which performs its valuation by substituting a uniform measure for a thing’s being. Lyric comprehension opposes the economic comprehension manifest through currency. Zwicky extends this idea in Wisdom and Metaphor, invoking “ontological attention,” a sister to lyric comprehension, as “a response to particularity: this porch, this laundry basket, this day.” Because its object “cannot be substituted for, even when it is an object of considerable generality (‘the country’, ‘cheese’, ‘garage sales’),” ontological attention “is the antithesis of the attitude that regards things as ‘resources’, mere means to human ends.” That the object cannot be substituted for means that its value has been preserved in distinction from price, which makes anything substitutable for anything else. In contrast to the voracious equivalences imposed by price (a $1,000 porch = any hundred $10 laundry baskets), thisness insists that no porch can substitute for this basket, no basket for this porch. Such linguistic and literary comprehension pushes back against the homogenizing imposed by economic comprehension.
The capacity of language to retain the uniqueness of a thing as integral to its identity and the being of a thing as integral to its valuation, is a capacity, one we can realize effectively or not. Which suggests an ideal for poetry: to fully realize the particularizing capacity of language, its resistance to the economic substitution of price for value. The ideal receives elegant formulation in Wysława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize acceptance: “In daily speech,” she says, “we all use phrases such as ‘the ordinary world,’ ‘ordinary life,’ ‘the ordinary course of events.’” But in poetry, which realizes the particularizing capacity of language by weighing every word, “nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence.” In Szymborska’s terms, nothing is usual or normal; in Zwicky’s terms, nothing can be substituted for. Either way, poetry resists the global economy’s pressure to make anything substitutable for anything else, and thus to make everything susceptible to market exchange.
Technology and economy have changed our world, but they also have changed us. We live in different circumstances than ever before, and we ourselves are different. Humanist and posthumanist accounts concur in the assessment that our reach now exceeds our grasp, and that this exceeding is not the unqualified, heavenly good that Browning’s Andrea del Sarto sought.
Martha Nussbaum formulates the difference elegantly in her humanist manifesto Not for Profit. In our world, she declares, “people face one another across gulfs of geography, language, and nationality. More than at any time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.” Our most pressing problems are global, with no hope of solution “unless people once distant come together and cooperate in ways they have not before.” The global economy “has tied all of us to distant lives. Our simplest decisions as consumers affect the living standards of people in distant nations” and “put pressure on the global environment.” To some small extent, it was ever so. Hunter-gatherers pressured other species, and left a rubble of tools and shelters. A northerner’s cotton blouse in the antebellum U.S. subsidized the enslavement of an African-American on a plantation down south. The difference in degree, though, is now so great as to amount to a difference in kind. My shoes subsidize child labor in Singapore, the car I drive sanctions the circumstances in which female factory workers are routinely raped and killed at the U.S./Mexico border, my trash is dumped into a vast dead zone in the Pacific, and on and on. Nussbaum finds it irresponsible of us “to bury our heads in the sand, ignoring the many ways in which we influence, every day, the lives of distant people.” Until I reckon with that influence, my human interactions will be “mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain,” and I will continue to harm distant others.
If Nussbaum’s humanist manifesto emphasizes the synchronic extension of our reach, its expansion across space, Timothy Morton’s posthumanist manifesto Hyperobjects emphasizes the diachronic extension of our reach, its expansion across time. Morton distinguishes, as the fields through which our reach has come to extend, three timescales, “the horrifying, the terrifying, and the petrifying.” The horrifying is the scale of five hundred years, beyond the time of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII to the time of the events the play depicts, “historical” even to Shakespeare. Morton notes that I participate now in activities that will affect humans as far into the future as Henry VIII is in the past: “75 percent of global warming effects will persist until five hundred years from now.” As at the “horrifying” timescale, so at the “terrifying” timescale of thirty thousand years. This is the distance into the past of the Chauvet Cave paintings, yet my current actions will have effects that far into the future: 25 percent of the carbon compounds my car releases the next time I drive to the market will remain in the atmosphere thirty thousand years from now. Even at the timescale Morton calls the “petrifying,” my effects will linger: “7 percent of global warming effects will still be occurring,” and “form built structures (skyscrapers, overpasses, garnets for lasers, graphene, bricks)” will have created “a layer of geological strata.”
Morton’s point is that “the future hollows out the present.” Because it can be imagined, infinite duration — eternity — is forgiving. Because it can’t be imagined, time at the scales Morton considers, the time of “very large finitude” rather than of infinity, is unforgiving. Morton describes us as participating in the construction of “hyperobjects” such as global warming, the very large finitude of which starkly reveals the degree by which my reach exceeds my grasp. Even my most trivial-seeming decisions/actions affect others far into the horrifying, terrifying, and petrifying futures: “A Styrofoam cup will outlive me by over four hundred years.”
Changed circumstances and changed selves entail changed responsibilities. My indirect actions now are more potent than my direct actions; the unintended consequences of my actions always and necessarily exceed the intended consequences. The asymmetry between effect and control has switched. When others’ effects on me exceed my control (the old situation) the result is tragedy: my destruction looms. For the Greek tragedians, my agency is inadequate to my circumstances (a fact personified as Fate, Necessity, and so on): my effects are too small to fulfill my intentions. For us, now, my agency is overadequate: my effects are too large for my intentions to manage. Now that my effects on others exceed my control (the new situation) the result is disaster (war, climate change, structural violence): our destruction looms. The state in which contemporary technology and the contemporary global economy have placed us differs from the “state of nature” Hobbes depicts. In Hobbes, we are each threatened with destruction: any human might be destroyed. In current circumstances, we are all threatened with destruction: humanity might be destroyed. In Hobbes, the bind is the prisoners’ dilemma: we need a way to remove agency from the individual. Now the bind is Midas’s touch: we need a way to restrain the agency of the individual.
This inversion of the relationship between agency and volition invites a contrast between the ethopoesis I am advocating, and the prevailing cultural norm, which I’ll label ethotechne. Pairing Smokey Bear’s familiar “Only YOU can prevent forest fires” with the invented correlative “Only YOU can prevent global warming” will advance the contrast, because of a difference between the two admonitions. Intent on fulfilling the first admonition, I will diligently monitor my decisions and actions when I go camping this year, and as a result of that diligence I will cause no forest fires. There will be one forest fire less than otherwise there might have been. Even if I am equally intent on fulfilling the second admonition, though, there is no due diligence for me to perform. I can take measures to reduce my carbon footprint, but global warming will continue inexorably, not measurably or discernibly slowed. My part in forest fires differs from my part in global warming, and the difference between the two exemplifies the difference between ethotechne and ethopoesis.
In ethotechne, my intention governs my agency: I can, for example, cause a forest fire by myself. In contrast, in ethopoesis my intention does not govern (is not adequate to) my agency. I cannot cause global warming by myself. In the ethotechnical realm, intention and effect converge; in the ethopoetic realm, they diverge. Consequently, in the ethotechnical, teleological and deontological approaches to ethical concerns will tend to concur, and in the ethopoetic, they will tend to contrast. My having good intentions will suffice in relation to forest fires, because those intentions, since they govern my agency, will yield effects consonant with the intentions. My having good intentions will not suffice in relation to global warming, because, absent their governing my agency, effects consistent with them need not attend them. In ethotechne, my intention and agency relate to one another in such a way that I can decide not to cause a forest fire, but in ethopoesis, my intention and agency relate to one another differently: I cannot simply decide not to cause global warming.
Primary to ethotechne is occasion: I can start a forest fire only when I am on a camping trip, in the forest, not when I am at home in the city. In ethopoesis, though, conditions are primary. I live in a time period and within a human social arrangement in which hydrocarbons are the primary energy source, as a result of which carbon is being released into the atmosphere faster than it can be absorbed by natural processes. It is not a specific occasion on which I cause global warming; it’s the conditions in which I move and live that cause global warming. I might wake up one morning and decide that the time is right to set a forest fire. There is no occasion, though, for my bringing about global warming: I am engaged in doing so continually, not occasionally.
The forest fire can be described in a clear and adequate way by a simple causal chain. I decide to leave a campfire burning when I’m not watching it, or I carelessly throw a cigarette butt out the window of my car as I drive through Yellowstone; that action lights dry leaves on fire and that fire expands into a large area. I do one particular thing, from which follows another particular thing. In ethopoesis, though, the cause/effect relationship is not a simple causal chain, but a complex causal network. It’s not that I, or any single human, decided to burn hydrocarbons as a primary energy source, but that many things (the invention of the internal combustion engine, the mass production of motor vehicles, the burning of coal for energy, and so on), various decisions made by various people in various times and various circumstances, merge into a complex nexus of causes and effects, plural, that create the phenomenon we name global warming.
The simple cause/effect chain occurs locally. I light my cigarette in one place, and throw it out the window in one place. The fire begins in that place and spreads to a region continuous with that place. The event begins as, and remains, local. But in ethopoesis, the cause/effect nexus and the event or phenomenon is global. Though I am currently seated at my computer, drawing electricity, that electricity was produced somewhere else, and the emissions from the production of that electricity are being released not here in my home office, but where the energy was produced. The food that I eat is not itself, here at my dinner table, releasing hydrocarbons, but I purchased it at a grocery store, which got it from a distributor, which procured it from farms in Mexico, so it was shipped over great distance. Hydrocarbons were burned during the shipping, rather than at the moment of my meal, and released across that distance, rather than being released here. The effects of global warming don’t follow me around like the little rain cloud in a comic strip; they cloud the entire globe. The strengthened storms and higher temperatures might affect someone on the other side of the planet more directly than they affect me.
For ethotechnical concerns, a rule is adequate. For example, the rule not to leave campfires unattended is adequate, in contrast to the rule not to use fossil fuels. Or, again, the rule don’t put your elbows on the table is an adequate rule, in contrast to the rule be a good parent, which needs so much further interpretation and amplification that in an important sense it’s no help. It’s a good principle in that my children will be happier if I manage to fulfill it, but it’s no good at all in the sense that it offers me no guidance. In ethotechne there is an applicable rule that can be enacted; in ethopoesis, there is not. In this regard, the contrast between ethotechne and ethopoesis resembles that in Christian theology between law, which seeks to enumerate the rules that will be adequate to guide me through any and every occasion, and grace, which changes my condition.
The ethotechnical calls for a particular behavior. In relation to forests, I am called upon not to leave campfires unattended, and not to discard cigarette butts that I have not fully extinguished. The ethopoetic calls not for a particular behavior but for an altered, elevated personhood. My particular behavior of raking up leaves manually, rather than using a motorized leaf blower, may be positively inflected, but it is so minuscule as to be invisible, utterly ineffective. In the ethopoetic, my whole person is called into question, and called to involvement. If in ethotechne I am told “You must alter your behavior,” in ethopoesis I bear Rilke’s charge that “You must revise your life.”
In the ethotechnical, there is an interpretation of the given charge that makes my fulfilling that charge possible to me. Not so in the ethopoetic, where no interpretation of the charge would make it possible for me to fulfill it adequately and fully. I have never caused a forest fire, and I never will cause a forest fire. I will never leave a campfire unattended, nor will I ever throw an unextinguished cigarette butt out a car window. But I could not prevent global warming. It’s not that I am failing to do something that would prevent global warming, but that nothing I can do would prevent global warming. Global warming ought to be prevented, but no interpretation of that call results in its being possible for me to fulfill the call.
The ethotechnical offers itself in either/or terms. Either I have or I have not left a campfire unattended. Either I have or I have not thrown a cigarette butt out the window. The ethopoetic offers itself as a continuum. I might participate more actively or less actively in the creation of global warming. I might participate more self-consciously or less self-consciously, more reflectively or less reflectively. I might maximize my complicity in global warming, or minimize it. I might, for instance, regularly drive my very large SUV to and from the office or on long cross-country drives, which would increase my complicity, or I might walk to work or ride my bike, or take shared commuter transit, any of which would decrease my complicity.
The ethotechnical offers itself as, or purports to work by, summation. If all visitors to national parks in the United States next year follow Smokey’s advice, then the sum of those separate and individual decisions will be that no human-caused forest fires will occur. By contrast, matters of ethopoetic concern operate according to wholeness, a wholeness that exceeds summation. It is plausible to think that this year every human being might decide not to leave campfires unattended; it is not plausible to think that this year all humans will cease to burn fossil fuels. The greater the number of individuals who follow the appropriate rules, the smaller the number of forest fires caused by humans. In contrast, even the decisions by a great many people to stop using hydrocarbons would not stop the process of global warming. I might myself cut my carbon footprint to a tenth of its current size, and I might convince a thousand of my closest Facebook friends to do so also, but global warming would not cease as a result. A larger whole would have to be changed, rather than the sum of many individual parts changing, in order for that to happen.
Ethotechne is a matter of conscience: even insofar as it impacts others, it remains something that I do individually and am responsible for individually. Whether it does or does not affect other people, whether or not other people are aware of it, I am responsible. Even in a circumstance where no one else knows that I set the forest fire, I still am accountable for setting it. Ethopoesis is more like what Socrates resigns himself to in the Crito, a life formation inseparable from the larger human community, so that it is not a matter of individual conscience alone. Even though Socrates was condemned for something he didn’t do, the condemnation applies. He ought to accept the penalty imposed on him, because it is a part of, or is an effluence of, the whole in which his life has been and is enmeshed. The larger-than-himself, the entirety, is definitive, rather than he himself, the part. Socrates has an individual conscience, but it is not what governs in this matter.
In ethotechnical matters I am called on to obey. The rule not to leave campfires unattended describes something I should simply do. I am duty-bound to obey that principle. I am essentially passive in relation to it, and my obedience occurs, for all practical purposes, in isolation from anything else. The attribute required of me by the ethopoetic is something larger, that, not exhausted by obedience to a rule and not defined by its relation to a nation-state, includes my own judgment in relation to natural constraints, the judgments of others, and so on. I am in active, reciprocal, responsible relationship with global warming, a relationship inextricably linked to other aspects of my thought and life.
Louis Mackey’s distinction between a problem and a mystery applies here. A problem, he says, “can be solved. The terms in which it is stated define what will count as a solution. Confronted on a math test with a problem that cannot be solved, the student has every right to complain that it ‘isn’t really a problem.’” A mystery resembles a problem in being “an indeterminate situation that begs to be made determinate,” but, unlike a problem, “its indeterminacy is such that the description of the mystery does not specify conditions of resolution and closure.” A mystery “cannot be fully described. Faced with a mystery, you can never be sure what will count as a solution, or even that there is one.” The ethotechnical offers itself to us in the form of a problem, the ethopoetic in the form of a mystery. As a result, in the ethotechnical there is a solution available, at least potentially or in principle, but the ethopoetic, because it is a mystery, is not offered in terms of problem and solution. Confronted with a problem, I can discover (or in principle I can discover, or I seek to discover) a solution. How do I keep from causing forest fires?, I ask myself. Oh, I see: I’ll thoroughly douse my campfire before I leave my campsite, and carefully stub out each of my cigarette butts. I need only act in a manner adequate to an occasion. Confronted with a mystery, though, I cannot simply find the right switch to flip. No occasion offers itself; I and my conditions must be remade. When I ask how I can keep from causing global warming, I must imagine an alternative self and alternative conditions.
In relation to forest fires I ought to exercise my capacity for what the Greeks called techne, but in relation to global warming techne is inadequate, and I ought to draw on my capacity for what they called poesis. The techne/poesis distinction in Greek bears some resemblance to the craft/art distinction in English, and indeed “techne” is often translated “craft.” The invocation of the capacity for poesis offers at last a succinct way to state the case toward which all along this exploration has aimed. The Greek word techne is of course the etymological root of the English word technology, and poesis the root of poetry. The understanding of contemporary life I seek to contest, the one which holds that technology has displaced poetry, takes for granted that everything can be treated as a problem. If that were true, then indeed techne is the appropriate means for addressing our concerns, and it is right that technology, as a useful aid to problem-solving, should displace poetry. If, however, as I contend, the most pressing current concerns of humankind (such as global warming) and the perennial concerns of humankind (such as war) and the most important concerns of human individuals (such as love) are not problems but mysteries, then our greater need is not technology but poetry, and the increased prominence of technology in contemporary society is deceptive, masking the continuing greater importance of poetry.
1.2: Poetry Against Poems
As commonly conceived, craft orients poetry by and toward better, but the counterconception I propose, “metacraft,” recognizes also the possibility of orienting poetry by and toward otherwise.
I take the former conception as prevalent enough to count as common sense. Asked why she was teaching a workshop on craft, a poet likely would reply that such a workshop would help her students become better poets. Asked why he was taking a workshop on craft, a student likely would reply that he was seeking to write better poetry. Either might add of course. It seems obvious, even self-evident. But that common-sense conception of craft takes for granted that writing poetry is a skill, acquired by approximating a given standard, and achieved by realizing in poems that standard. To hone my craft is to make my poetry more poetic, to make my poems look more like poems.
That common-sense conception of craft, though, makes poetry inherently conservative, by definition the preservation of structure already in place: to approximate a given standard is to approximate a given standard, to reproduce a status quo, reinforce an establishment. Besides, it does not account for all the phenomena. Paradise Lost, say, does “look like poetry”: presented with an unidentified reproduction of a page from Paradise Lost, in a context that created no prior expectation that poetry would be presented, any contemporary reader of English would recognize it immediately as poetry. But presented with, say, page 115 of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which simply lists names of pharmaceutical companies, or with page 45 of Jena Osman’s The Network, which gives a chart tracing several seemingly unrelated English words back to a common Latin root, or with pages 56 and 57 of Lisa Fishman’s Flower Cart, which offer a photoreproduction of two pages from a workbook called “Trees I Have Seen,” partially filled in with handwriting dated 1910, the same reader of English would be unlikely to identify it as poetry. Without context, the reader might call the Rankine page a list, the Osman a chart, and the Fishman a photocopy, but probably would not call any of the three poetry until offered cues such as surrounding pages from the book, or the book’s self-identification as poetry.
By “metacraft,” I mean to name and describe a sense of craft that accommodates both Milton and Rankine and Osman and Fishman, a sense that recognizes both poetry’s capacity to fulfill existing standards and to contest those standards. The common-sense conception of craft is realized by making one’s poetry look more like poetry; metacraft adds the possibility of making one’s poetry look less like poetry.
In On Ethics and Economics, Amartya Sen suggests that “economics has had two rather different origins,” one concerned primarily with “ethics” and the other primarily “with what may be called ‘engineering.’” The two traditions, he says, focus on different questions. The ethics-related tradition asks about human motivation (posing such questions as “How should one live?”) and about social achievement (posing such questions as “What is the good for humans?”). The engineering-related tradition, in contrast, takes its ends as given, and seeks only “to find the appropriate means to serve them.” Sen affirms the value of both traditions, but in his own work he gives more emphasis to the ethics-related tradition because “the nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished” by keeping the two traditions separate and focusing almost exclusively on the engineering tradition. There is an analogy to be drawn, in connection with craft in writing. It would be typical to take for granted that in the study and practice of craft, the point is for us as poets to get better at what we do. But that assumes that what we do is a given, and the only relevant aim is to do that given thing better than we are doing it already; and that corresponds to what Sen calls the engineering-related tradition. Here I highlight the additional possibility, the one corresponding to Sen’s ethicsrelated tradition: in it we might seek to write not better than before but other than before. In a chess camp or a basketball camp, rather than an MFA program, exclusive attention to the engineering-related tradition might be warranted: there would be no point in considering whether next time, instead of trying to checkmate my opponent’s king, I should try to arrange my own pieces into a pretty diamond shape on the board, or in weighing whether, instead of trying to get the ball through the hoop, I ought to see how many cars in a row I could roll the ball under in the parking lot. In chess or in basketball, doing better what we were doing really would be the only meaningful possibility.
But writing is not chess or basketball, and in this respect at least, writing is not like chess or basketball. In writing, it is legitimate to seek to fulfill received standards, but also to ask after the available or possible standards, with the prospect left open that, upon deliberation, I might elect and enact standards that differ from those that previously I took as given. To quote Sen once more, this time from The Idea of Justice: “We can not only assess our decisions, given our objectives and values; we can also scrutinize the critical sustainability of these objectives and values themselves.”
One might distinguish, then, between two approaches to reflection on poetry. An ethics-related approach would ask about poetry’s motivations (posing such questions as “What ought a poem achieve?”) and about poetry’s effects (posing such questions as “What is a poem about?,” meaning both “What is a poem up to?” and “What is a poem speaking of?”). An engineering-related approach would ask after the techniques and processes that transform “normal” language into “poetic” language, prose into poetry. Those approaches host different questions about craft. The ethics-related approach suggests questioning along the lines of “What can I do now, that I could not do before?” The engineering-related approach suggests such questioning as “How can I do better what I am doing?” Sen believes that economics has been impoverished by keeping the ethics-related and engineering-related traditions separate and attending almost exclusively to the engineering tradition; analogously, poetry has been impoverished by keeping the two approaches separate and devoting much more attention to the engineering approach. Emphasis on the engineering approach shows itself in the unanimity, the givenness, of the sense that the point of an MFA program would be to help us as poets get better at what we do. But both approaches have validity. Both are necessary.
Another way to get at this point would be to assert that in the teaching of craft one ought to push students toward not writing better poems. The formulation is willfully perverse, but I mean by it that any concept of “better” presupposes an ideal. There may be enterprises for which the ideal is settled, such as chess and basketball, but poetry is not one of those enterprises. It’s why poetry matters more than basketball or chess: in poetry, the ideal is not given, but ever at stake. In our critical reception of works of art, we often acknowledge the variability of ideals. If, for example, I were to ask a cinephile which is the better movie, Taxi Driver or Standard Operating Procedure, she surely would respond, rightly, that the two films are trying to do very different things. You can’t say which is better until you specify what you mean by “better.” But our willingness to describe what we are doing in an MFA as “learning to write better poems” is analogous to asking which movie is better; it is an engineering approach that needs in complement an ethics approach.
If by “craft” we typically denote something analogous to Sen’s engineering-related approach (an attempt to internalize, and to replicate in our work, given poetic ideals and techniques), then it seems to me valuable to supplement “craft” with “metacraft” (a self-conscious questioning of ideals and techniques that keeps open, rather than foreclosing, the issue of what poetry is and what it might be and do). Let “metacraft” designate such a poetic practice, one in which ideals and techniques are not given once and for all, but remain ever at stake in the poem and for the poet.
In an essay, Robert Creeley reports having been told once by John Frederick Nims “a lovely story” about another poet’s having been asked, after a reading, “that next to last poem you read — was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?” The anecdote is funny because it reveals the limitations of (by reducing to absurdity) a certain understanding of what a “real poem” is. The questioner probably conceived of a “real poem” in terms given by what someone with formal education in literature might name “canonicity”: a poem, on such an account, is a literary artifact that has been preserved, and has had conferred on it cultural status of a sort that exacts reverence, because it was written by an historical figure long dead, and since deemed by relevant authorities (textbooks, teachers) deserving of the honorific “Poet.” Creeley and Nims could share a laugh over the story because their ideas of a “real poem” resembled one another more than either one resembled the idea of a “real poem” held by the questioner in the story. And Creeley can count on our laughing with him, because he can reasonably assume that any reader of his essays will think of a “real poem” in terms more like his own and Nims’s than like the questioner’s.
But.
If I grant the questioner his conception of a “real poem,” then the question stops being a false dilemma: something that “you just made up yourself” in fact couldn’t be a real poem. Consequently, far from being funny or absurd, it would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate to ask a reader which kind of thing he had just read. Similarly, if I don’t grant Creeley his conception of a “real poem,” it becomes clear that Creeley does have a conception, one that, no less than the questioner’s, has limitations. Creeley’s conception, too, picks out certain things as poems, and not others; it affords poetry certain powers but denies it others. Then the rub: once I recognize that Creeley’s conception of a “real poem” is a conception, not the conception, I see that my conception, too, is a conception.
This realization suggests that working at my craft might take the form of refining my craft (doing even better what I am doing), but it also might take the form of renewing my craft (doing differently what I have been doing). That is, the recognition that my conception of a “real poem” is a conception, not the conception, invites me to ask (even obliges me to ask) what possibilities are opened (and what ones closed) if I adopt another conception. In Sen’s terms, it invites me to add an ethics approach to my study and my practice of poetry, not confine myself exclusively to an engineering approach. Recognition that my conception of poetry is a conception urges me to complement my attention to and pursuit of craft with attention to and pursuit of metacraft.
George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things offers a construct that helps toward this aim. Lakoff speaks of “idealized cognitive models” (ICMs), structures by means of which we organize our knowledge. ICMs function in a given human context, but do not correspond to preexisting realities. The concept of a “weekend,” for example, “requires a notion of a work week of five days followed by a break of two days, superimposed on the seven-day calendar,” but this reveals that it is idealized, not “real,” since “seven-day weeks do not exist objectively in nature.” Lakoff further distinguishes “cluster models,” in which “a number of cognitive models combine to form a complex cluster that is psychologically more basic than the models taken individually.” An example is “mother.” One would think that for so important a concept we would be able to “give clear necessary and sufficient conditions” that would “fit all the cases and apply equally to all of them.” But in fact no possible definition can “cover the full range of cases,” because “mother” employs various ICMs, including such divergent models as: the birth model (the mother is “the person who gives birth”); the genetic model (the mother is “the female who contributes the genetic material”); the nurturance model (the mother is “the female adult who nurtures and raises a child”); the marital model (the mother is “the wife of the father”); and the genealogical model (the mother is “the closest female ancestor”). So if, say, I was adopted by one woman, who died soon after, and raised by the woman who raised her, then the birth model identifies one person as my mother, the marital model picks out another, and the nurturance model yet another.
Lakoff goes on to point out that “when the cluster of models that jointly characterize a concept diverge, there is still a strong pull to view one as the most important.” The model construed as most important, the “privileged model,” often needs qualification, as when we find ourselves needing to describe someone as a “stepmother, surrogate mother, adoptive mother, foster mother, biological mother,” etc., which happens when the various models don’t converge. Lakoff’s point is that “the concept mother is not clearly defined, once and for all, in terms of common necessary and sufficient conditions. There need be no necessary and sufficient conditions for motherhood shared by… biological mothers, donor mothers…, surrogate mothers…, adoptive mothers, unwed mothers who give their children up for adoption, and stepmothers.” I propose that “poetry,” like “mother,” is a “cluster model,” and that the availability of widely varied privileged models for poetry, combined with the impossibility of giving necessary and sufficient conditions that cover all cases of poetry, makes a practice of metacraft incumbent on all of us who write poetry.
Recognizing poetry as a cluster model, and consequently recognizing the variety of privileged models available, helps explain the Creeley anecdote: Creeley and Nims, one sees, privileged one model, and the questioner privileged another. Recognizing poetry as a cluster model also means that no model of poetry is validated by correspondence with some real and eternal Platonic ideal: to reiterate Lakoff’s words, “the concept [poem] is not clearly defined, once and for all, in terms of common necessary and sufficient conditions.” No one’s model is right unconditionally or universally. Not Creeley’s, not Helen Vendler’s or Paul Muldoon’s, not yours, not mine. Creeley and Nims can laugh together at the questioner because they privilege the same model, but not because their model is the “right” or “true” model. Recognizing poetry as a “cluster model” reveals that what is at stake in my writing poetry is not only how robustly I realize my privileged model of “a real poem” (i.e. how I write), but also which model I privilege (i.e. what I write).
No cognitive model of poetry is more widely accepted than that based on a contrast between prose, presented “continuously” on the page, and poetry, broken into lines. This “lineation model” shows up in ways as varied as the familiar joke about converting prose into poetry by expanding the margins, and J. V. Cunningham’s assertion that “as prose is written in sentences, without significant lineation, so poetry is written in sentences and lines.” However common this model may be, though, it is not comprehensive. To note one obvious exception, there is by now a long tradition of the “prose poem,” whose very name indicates both its claim to be poetry and its refusal to privilege the cognitive model that would make lineation definitive of poetry. History, too, says that the lineation model can’t be comprehensive, and was not always privileged. Recall that the Iliad and the Odyssey, those most canonical of canonical poems, were composed orally, by illiterate singers. Our sense of line is orthographic: a line for us is a typographical convention, something that, even if it represents something metrical, is realized as something fundamentally visual, something that occurs on the page, in writing. If our sense of lineation were not orthographic, our jokes about composing poetry by expanding the margins would make no sense. But the Homeric singers could not have been thinking in such terms. The “line” for them was aural, not visual, and oral, not written; it was metrical, with no orthographic aspect at all. Homeric singers didn’t make a contrast between poetry and prose, so such a contrast couldn’t have been the model for Homeric poetry.
That has everything to do with the Claudia Rankine book. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is printed as prose, but the book is tagged for marketing purposes ambiguously as “lyric essay / poetry.” It couldn’t have been written if Rankine had accepted as her model for poetry the contrast between poetry and prose. The page referred to above, the list of pharmaceutical companies, defies the lineation model. Yet lists have value for us, including potential emotional value: the most obvious example of a list laden with emotional value is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which simply lists names. Rankine’s list turns out to be a list of the “thirty-nine drug companies [that] filed suit in order to prevent South Africa’s manufacture of generic AIDS drugs,” a suit that attempts to enforce the companies’ claim to own, as “intellectual property,” antiretrovirals, thus protecting their own profits, though doing so would entail the deaths of millions of people, the great majority of “the five million South Africans infected by the HIV virus.” Rankine laments in the poem that “it is not possible to communicate how useless, how much like a skin-sack of uselessness I felt.” The list of pharmaceutical companies comes close to communicating that, though. When I face the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I understand the irrecoverable loss of thousands of lives of individual human persons in a different way than before, with an emotional immediacy that my general awareness of the fact of those deaths does not possess; similarly, when I see Rankine’s list of pharmaceutical companies, I understand her uselessness because I recognize it as my own uselessness in the face of, and my complicity in the fact of, colonialist plunder of material wealth and scorn for human life. I understand my uselessness and complicity in a different way than before, with far greater immediacy. If we do not wish for that possibility to be excluded from poetry, then we cannot accept as given or fixed the lineation model as our way of thinking of poetry.
The lineation model is inadequate, but what about the model Aristotle proposes in the Poetics? He specifically states that the lineation model won’t do: “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse.” Even in verse, Herodotus still would be history, and the difference between history and poetry “consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be,” which makes poetry “more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” Call this the “algebraic model.” If the lineation model establishes parameters for poetry by differentiating it from prose, the algebraic model constructs poetry by differentiating it from history. History documents the facts, accounting for what actually occurred. Poetry portrays the necessities and principles that underlie the facts, accounting for what did not in fact occur but might have, and may yet. Poetry’s contrast with history resembles algebra’s contrast with arithmetic. The arithmetic equation 2 + 2 = 4 tells me that the two bananas I had today for breakfast and the two I had yesterday total four bananas. The algebraic equation x + .02x = y tells me how much any salary would be after a two percent raise. It is hypothetical, in the logical form of material implication: if a particular thing happens in particular conditions, then the result will be such-and-such. It tells me that if I made $100,000 last year and got a two-percent raise, I’d make $102,000 this year; and it tells me that, even though I didn’t make $100,000 last year, and I didn’t get any raise.
This “algebraic model” gives a way of finding King Lear, a play about events that never happened, and persons who never existed, more edifying than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a history of events that did happen and were performed by persons who did exist. Or again, of finding The Waste Land, though Eliot’s characters were invented, more edifying than Democracy in America, though Tocqueville’s characters were “real people.” Yet, for all its virtues, the algebraic model cannot be all things to all poems. Where, to name one instance, would the Divine Comedy, with its many “real people,” even people of Dante’s personal acquaintance, fit in this scheme?
Jena Osman could hardly have included in The Network the etymology charts of which the page referred to above is an instance, if she accepted Aristotle’s model as her own. Osman wants to include in her book, and to emphasize, the factuality of language. As she herself formulates things on the first page of her book, “Rather than invent a world, I want a different means to understand this one. I follow Cecilia Vicuña’s instruction to use an etymological dictionary: ‘To enter words in order to see.’” Osman’s book enacts a premise formulated in this way by Jan Zwicky: “Few words are capsized on the surface of language, subject to every redefining breeze. Most, though they have drifted, are nonetheless anchored, their meanings holding out for centuries.” Words, though they change, do not change randomly, so any word contains in itself a form of history, is itself a kind of history. It is this history that Osman seeks to access, and to make available to a reader willing to wonder how Wall Street came to have the power it does over our country and over our lives.
Etymologies are forms of association, to which Osman adds other forms, such as maps and chronologies. Forms of association invite further association, as for example when Osman gives a chronology, listing various events in the order of their occurrence, identifying them by the year of their occurrence, and ending with this event:
1920: A horse and buggy loaded with dynamite explodes in front of the J.P. Morgan Bank, killing 40 people. Although the perpetrators are never identified, the event fuels suspicion of immigrants and anarchists and builds support for the deportation of foreigners. Wall Street and the financial markets become a patriotic symbol; questioning the economic system becomes anti-American. The Washington Post calls the bombing “an act of war… The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.”
Because chains of association ask to be continued, Osman does not have to tell her readers to note the points of analogy between this event and the events of 9/11. Simply offering it as the last item in a chronology invites continuation of the chronology with the association to that later event. But the association is between historical events. Osman’s poetry bases itself in, and purports to present, history. Aristotle’s privileged model of poetry as a contrast to history doesn’t cover this case; Osman must have had some other privileged model in mind when she was writing her book.
A third common cognitive model is proposed by Shakespeare’s Theseus in the familiar speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” The lunatic sees devils everywhere, the lover sees beauties everywhere. The frenzied poet sees what isn’t there: “as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The model Theseus offers is exciting enough, bordering as it does on sex and madness. Poetry, his model would have it, is poetry not by contrast with prose, as in the lineation model, or with history, as in the algebraic model, but with reason. Call this the “fantastic model.” In it, poetry is the discursive result of seeing things. The lunatic imagines things that aren’t there, but fails to make and maintain a distinction between things that aren’t there and things that are. The lover sees one thing, the beloved, as he or she is not. The poet experiences the same press of imagination as the lunatic or the lover, but records it, displays it to others in words. Poetry records fantasy, the seeing of unreality in place of reality.
Like the lineation model and the algebraic model, the fantastic model, according to which the poet is animated, even overwhelmed, by her hyperactive imagination, enjoys currency in popular culture, but Lisa Fishman could not have written Flower Cart if she had accepted it. Fishman opens her book, not with something she imagined, but with something she found. The first full page of her book contains not a single word she herself wrote: it’s a photocopy, reproducing a 1916 letter from F. J. Sievers, the Superintendent of the Milwaukee County School of Agriculture and Domestic Economy, to Mr. C. E. McLenegan of the Public Library in Milwaukee, describing the results of tests performed on a sample of corn sent by McLenegan. Fishman is not transcending “cool reason” by means of her own “shaping fantasies.” She is, if anything, applying cool reason to a decidedly non-fantastic document. Fishman’s poetry does not begin in “aery nothing,” but in fully material somethings. About the items reproduced in Flower Cart, such as the fieldbook about trees and the 1916 letter about corn, Fishman claims that she did not have “an intention or purpose or ‘project’ in mind” for them. Instead, she “transcribed and/or materially reproduced [them] after years of living with them and feeling in contact with them in ways not clear to myself,” including them in the book as an attempt “to understand why they became necessary to me, how they were functioning, what they have to do, for me, with writing or with the possibility of writing.” Flower Cart is not imagined by bodying forth “forms of things unknown.” Fishman has found things, and seeks in her poetry to prevent them from becoming unknown.
How I conceive of poetry (what I think poetry is) will go a long way toward determining what I can and cannot do in my poems. By keeping “live” the question of how to conceive of poetry, my practice of poetry will have not only the technical aspect we name “craft,” which asks “What means will help me achieve my ends?,” but also a conceptual aspect I have here named “metacraft,” which asks “What ends might I, or ought I, embrace?” As exemplified by the ways Rankine, Osman, and Fishman realize in their poetry possibilities not available to the most common models of poetry, a practice of metacraft (my reconsidering what I think a “real poem” is) might, no less than a practice of craft (increased mastery of anaphora or metonymy, say), create for my poetry possibilities not previously available to me, expanding the range of what I can “just make up myself.”
