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Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 273
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, September 13, 2010 - 09:57 am: | 
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In one of the workshop threads, I opined that I was pretty sure “personification…doesn’t work anymore. The whole thing [the poem in question] is too calculated, which leaves me distrusting.” Hana and Brion, in succeeding posts questioned my assertion. (The thread being cited is here: http://www.thealsopreview.com/cgi-bin/board-auth.cgi?lm=1284343115&file=/24/1804 .html.) Rather than hijack Robert’s workshop thread, I thought I’d expand on my admittedly offhand remarks here and invite other opinions.
I’ll preface my comments by acknowledging that they are sweeping generalizations, exceptions to which can be cited easily. I’m not writing a dissertation, simply “thinking out loud.” I also acknowledge that, as Williams wrote, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” It is artifice and artifact. But for me, the well-built machine transcends its mechanics, allows the reader to forget about the flywheel, gears, belts, and sparkplugs, and instead give himself up to the long or short journey on which the poem takes him. (And yes, I realize Williams’s observation and my elaboration are metaphors.) Too often, in my view, figurative language is used as a convenient way to make a point or develop a “topic” (neither of which is a good reason to write a poem). The reader can hear the wheels cranking and the teeth meshing. The figure calls attention to itself.
I’m not saying that there is no place in poetry for figurative language in general and personification in particular. Figurative language has the potential to be transformative, to make the ineffable perceptible, to surprise and delight. I think of Donne and Hopkins, who used conceits or metaphors to explore the nature of love and deity. I think, too, of Emily Dickinson, whose use of personification and other figures is perhaps the most exhausting of any modern poet (yes, I consider her modern). “Hope is the thing with feathers” comes immediately to mind, startling and wondrous.
Too often, though, figurative language becomes the easy way out—come up with an unusual comparison and build a poem around it. In such cases, the figure becomes an end in itself, teleologically self-fulfilling. For me, that’s not an interesting poem. I may concede its cleverness, its tidiness, but those aren’t qualities that I value highly in poetry. Another problem with figurative language—and in this case I refer to personification specifically—is that it often sentimentalizes. When human qualities are assigned to nonhuman things or abstract concepts, we are failing to explore them and understand them on their own terms. What Eliot termed the pathetic fallacy is one type of this epistemological bankruptcy (there’s a metaphor for you), and again, as with other figures, personification is too often a matter of taking the easy way out.
By way of contrast and example, I’ll cite work by Pound and H.D. to illustrate the distinction I see here. One might argue that Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is effectively a metaphor. The two-line poem presents two separate and starkly different imagistic fragments: faces in the train station and petals on a black bough. Here, though, there is no connective “like” for simile or verb of being for metaphoric equation. That is, the machinery of figurative language has been pulled from the poem in favor of a direct presentation of juxtaposed images. The reader is invited into the poem. It’s the old truism “show, don’t tell.” In H.D.’s early imagist poems (e.g., the “Sea Garden” poems), she apostrophizes nonhuman objects (the sea rose, trees, etc.). Apostrophe is technically a rhetorical technique rather than a form of figurative language, but when the nonhuman is apostrophized the effect is personification. But H.D.’s speaker addresses these objects not to humanize them or to imbue them with human qualities but rather to objectify them, to make them the “other” and present them to the reader directly. The emphasis is presentation, not description or explanation (again, showing, not telling).
I think finally that with figurative language as with modifiers, assonance, consonance, alliteration, all the available mechanics of language, the poet must be wary. All of these are too easy to use and too self-satisfying. Poets should be ruthless in assessing all of these techniques both in the writing and the revising. I say “in the writing,” because reliance on these can subvert the poem from its outset and not allow it to become what it needs to become. (I know that sounds mystical; all I mean is that I put process before product.)
Does anyone else have thoughts on this subject?
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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Robert Riche
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Username: Robert
Post Number: 531
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, September 13, 2010 - 10:47 am: |
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Everything can be overdone, including hard/fast rules that one may apply simply out of habit (or critical laziness). Your critique, for example, of my "Lady of the Lake" is so extreme that it ignores the poem that others praised so highly. But -- different strokes for different folks, I guess. (Now, there's an original idea). R. |
Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 275
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Monday, September 13, 2010 - 11:04 am: |
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I agree that everything can be overdone. And rules are meant to be broken. I don't mean to sound doctrinaire, which is why I tried to elaborate, perhaps unsuccessfully, my thinking on the topic.
(Not to be quarrelsome, Robert, but I wasn't the only one critical of "Lady of the Lake," and I think the other critics were saying essentially the same thing that I was. But you're right, the poem did receive high praise from CE and Trace, and you're right to value their opinions.)
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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Brion Berkshire
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Username: Ennuibrion
Post Number: 82
Registered: 05-2010
| | Posted on Monday, September 13, 2010 - 07:40 pm: |
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I want to point to Tate(James)'s poem An Eland in Retirement( I believe that is what it is called). (tried to find it on-line - no luck. It's from his book A Worshipful Company of Fletchers).
He very cleverly uses the personification and the fallacy of it and the fact that you know it's a fallacy to wondrous effect.
Let's take Pound's poem and turn it on its head.
Just invert the lines-
petals on a wet, black bough:
the apparition of these faces in the crowd
what have we done?
Isn't there an element of the absurd in pointing out that it's a fallacy to transfer human emotions to things and not point out that it's a fallacy as well to see any one thing in the aspect of another? Only the human draws the line between itself and the universe. Could not one argue that if he sees one thing as another that that is just as valid as any other mode of seeing? Wasn't that the goal of the French avant garde( Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, et al)? To alter ( altar?) the way in which one perceives?
Sure there's no easy way out. And sure one must always be wary. But it's not the fault of one device or another. It's only the lack in the poet.
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Patricia Wallace Jones
New member
Username: Pat_jones
Post Number: 304
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - 12:43 am: |
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I use it so often, Stephen...I know it must annoy you but I actually didn't know it did until now. : ) It's a fault often pointed out to me, but, as you know it is my style...it's the way I see things...the challenge, I think, is to use it well...not that I do, of course, but I do believe that rules can be broken. Just tonight at dinner, I said, "the ocean is putting on her autumn dress"...it's the way I see and think. Sometimes in response to crit recarding personification, I've tried to change/revise the poem...and it might be a better poem after I do, but it no longer feels like my poem. Does that make any sense?
I appreciate the thread because some feel so strongly about how bad it is to use and, as an occasional poet, I appear not to be able to give it up...or to cease loving it used well in others' poems.
Pat
(Message edited by Pat Jones on September 14, 2010)
One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors. ~Robert Graves~
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Billy Howell-Sinnard
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Username: Clifford_beaumont
Post Number: 189
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - 03:59 am: |
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Don't have anything to say about personification in particular, but I do get tired of people fixating on certain "in" poetry no-no's. Like "like" or "gerunds" or whatever happens to be considered by the "elite" to be passe, not good poetry. They just throw them out there most of the time just to be saying it without real regard for the poem because they've heard it on all the workshops. I read so many good poems by well-known poets who defy all these "rules". I understand that many novice poets don't use these techniques very well and need to understand their limits. And many of us who have been writing for a while can always go off the deep end and need rescuing from ourselves.
(Message edited by clifford beaumont on September 14, 2010)
Billy Howell-Sinnard
"Be patient with the unresolved in your heart."
- Rilke
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Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 276
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - 08:20 am: |
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I think we all agree that these devices have been and can be used effectively in poetry. I think we also agree that laziness is the poem's enemy. And I agree with Billy about "the rules" (which are often contradictory depending on who is invoking them): good poets know "the rules" and know when and how to break them.
My personal distrust of figurative language has less to do with rules and laziness than it has to do with what I think a poem is. I subscribe to Ed Dorn's assertion that "the poem is an instrument of intellection/thus a condition/of the simultaneous." I take that to mean that the poem is first of all a process with no telos in sight. That’s why I have little interest in writing to a topic, that is, writing “about” something. The “about” is to be discovered in the process. My assumption then is that the field that is the process of the poem is an expanse of perceptual data and other information to be surveyed. In short, the poem is in-formed from what’s “out there.” Figurative language, in my view, runs counter to what I want in writing (or reading) a poem, in that it forms what’s “out there” and clearly has an end in sight.
Finally, for me anyway, it’s not about right or wrong, excess or moderation, skill or ineptitude; rather, it’s a matter of aesthetics and epistemology, about which there will always be disagreement.
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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Mike Lane
New member
Username: Mike_lane
Post Number: 156
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - 08:10 am: |
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Hi all, an interesting topic.
I am going to quote some passages from Laurence Perrine and his book
LITERA-
TURE
Structure, Sound and Sense (Fifth Edition)
___________________________________________
The purpose (of a poem) may be to tell a story, to reveal human character, to impart a vivid impression of a scene, to express mood or an emotion, or to convey vividly some idea or attitude.
--From Chapter 5
Figurative Language 1
Metephor, Personification, Metonymy
On first examination, it might seem absurd to say one thing and mean another. But we all do it--and with good reason. We do it because we can say what we want to say more vividly and forcefully by figurative statement than we can by saying it directly. And we can say more by figurative statement than we can by literal statement. Figures of speech offer another way of adding extra dimensions to language.
Anyway, just my little offering,
Take care,
Mike |
Stephen Bunch
New member
Username: Stephen_bunch
Post Number: 277
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - 08:26 am: |
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Hi, Mike. As much as I liked Perrine's book as a classroom text back in my teaching days, I don't accept his premise because I don't consider poems (at least the ones I write and the ones that interest me as a reader) as having a purpose. I'm convinced, at this point anyway, that Kant had it right with his notion of art as being "purposive without purpose." My argument regarding figurative language finally comes down to that aesthetic and its teleology (or lack thereof).
"Entrapment is this society's sole activity...& only laughter can blow it to rags." (Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book III)
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Lisa Nickerson
New member
Username: Cvillelisa
Post Number: 125
Registered: 01-2010
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - 11:41 am: |
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Stephen
The figurative poems posted on the Poetry board have been, in my opinion, mostly cutesy, garbage and it isn't only because of figurative language. It is for me, more the lack of "ruthlessness" you speak of.
Ruthlessness is a damn fine word to describe a trait necessary for the process. I like it. I had a professor who always said "You want to be a poet? I feel sorry for the world."
I'm often told by people who know much more than I'll ever know after making such a brash comment as I did in my opening paragraph, "Poetry is a tree with many branches," I suppose it is and that is why these conversations are so interesting.
Enjoyed reading this discussion.
Best,
Lisa |
Bill Moss
New member
Username: Billmoss
Post Number: 6
Registered: 02-2011
| | Posted on Friday, February 25, 2011 - 08:30 am: |
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Hello. (And let's hear it for ruthlessness!)
I think the greatest problem with device is in writers' intentions: whether they're writing for method, or for message. The former seem to employ device as "proof of poem;" the latter, to enhance a piece's communication. That's not to say that there aren't skilled/lucky "hits" among the former, or unskilled/unlucky "misses" among the latter—but I see more constructive reward to addressing communicative difficulties than I do "critical lottery winning" assemblages. As an elementary school teacher (r.i.p.) pointed out, a billion monkeys at a billion keyboards for a billion years might write Hamlet or a great insight—but the first wouldn't be a work of Shakespeare, or the second, intrinsically insightful; they'd be accidents of a billion monkeys at a billion keyboards for a billion years. Who can enter into any kind of dialog with that?
As I've been harping in my critiques, tacking "poetic" or "literary" device onto a passage no more makes it poem or literature than nailing a horseshoe onto a dog makes it a horse. And yet, tortured dogs abound.
So as to keep spittle off my keyboard, I'll stop here.
Thanks,
Bill
(Message edited by billmoss on February 25, 2011) |
Bill Moss
New member
Username: Billmoss
Post Number: 7
Registered: 02-2011
| | Posted on Friday, February 25, 2011 - 08:33 am: |
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Accident. Sorry.
(Message edited by billmoss on February 25, 2011) |
Joseph Manley
New member
Username: Nearly
Post Number: 1
Registered: 05-2011
| | Posted on Monday, May 16, 2011 - 03:49 pm: |
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Hey there,
This is an interesting discussion. Despite it being several months old, I couldn't resist adding a few thoughts, since this is exactly the kind of thing I have been working with lately.
This may seem a bit extreme, but it would seem that a solution could be found in the use of certain metafictional techniques. This isn't to say that one should write a poem about writing a poem, but that by acknowledging the poem's status as literary construct within the poem, the author can cut away the suspension of disbelief entirely. This would allow readers (including those too jaded by the idea of mechanic to accept the effect attained by using device and technique) to simply look at the techniques as such, rather than pretending not to see them or being put in a situation where their feelings for the poem rely on pretending not to see the machinery behind the curtain.
The various uses and the effects that this would make possible may be too complicated for me to articulate properly. I hope that I am being as clear as I want to be, and apologize if this is difficult to read. I feel that it would allow the poem to become mimetic in its supposed release of all mimetic-pretense; meaning, when properly used, a poem could create verisimilitude simply by the misdirection of acknowledging its own artifice.
For a near-hypothetical example, I am working on a poem in which the speaker personnifies the poem itself and addresses it as a character. Ultimately, the poem becomes a sort of recursive character within itself. This opens a multitude of doors on several levels. The device is the poem and the poem is the device. This would seem one version of a compromise to the issue of device as an end versus poem itself as an end, as it has the potential to bind the two inseparably.
Of course, there may still be (and always will be) a problem if one can like or dislike a poem because of who wrote it, or the reason it was written. This seems more like a problem of going beyond the poem rather than an issue with the devices the poem uses, as the issue seems to be that one cannot value a poem that does not exist without purpose, and all devices are seen as means to attain a purpose.
Given the monkey example before, I think the discussion begs a quote from Robert Frost's "At Woodward's Gardens" to sum it up:
Who said it mattered
What monkeys did or didn't understand?
They might not understand a burning-glass.
They might not understand the sun itself.
It's knowing what to do with things that counts.
(Message edited by nearly on May 16, 2011) |
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