When asked what sort of poetry I write and read, I am often unsure what to say. How could there be any one response? The landscape of poetry is rich, expansive, and timeless. I read from multiple time periods and styles, and follow the work of internationally recognized poets and emerging writers alike. And as for what I write, it depends on what I’ve read, how I’m feeling, and what spills out at random during a creative flow state.
There is, however, a feeling I consistently come away with after revisiting many of my favorite poems. Over time, it has become the heart of what I create as well. In a 1998 lecture of the same name, Fanny Howe referred to the sensation as bewilderment: “an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.”
Rachel Mennies adds to Howe’s original point in the essay Less Than Certain, exploring bewildering poems through a pedagogical lens. Mennies suggests that students (or anyone else reading poetry, for that matter) must learn to always leave space for the uncertain when approaching a poem.
Even established lifelong poets will never be able to fully decipher the “meaning” of every poem. Fulfilling encounters with difficult poems require one to read on an aesthetic level rather than an intellectual one, and to allow oneself to sit with any confusion that may arise.
In that essay, Mennies shares an anecdote wherein a student of hers was confused by the imagery in Chen Chen’s “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” (which I analyzed in a letter a few weeks ago, read it here). She took this confusion as an opportunity to teach students not to place so much focus on what an image “means,” and instead “to embrace that not everything in a poem can ever be understood, even by its author.”
John Keats articulated a similar point with his theory of Negative Capability in 1817. Although poets will endlessly debate whether or not “Beauty overcomes every other consideration,” as Keats suggested, we can all agree that our negative capability is potentially the most useful tool when writing and reading. The simple ability to accept the negative (as in void, nothingness, mystery, etc.) makes it so that we aren’t concerned with whether we’ve read a poem right or wrong, but that we have accepted and appreciated the challenges it presents.
Sometimes, poems appear nonsensical on the surface— rife with disjointed images, non sequitur phrases, sudden tonal/perspective shifts, and other bewildering elements. “Prismr of Love” by Sophia Dahlin exemplifies this nicely. The first few minimalistic stanzas convey the image of a lizard sunning itself:
I am all a lizard
plated muscle
adjusts and I like
I lick it
I like sunlight
deliberate
From there, however, the original image fades, offering its place in the foreground to increasingly complex yet fleeting ideas:
my darling
whole lion
one wonders why am I
mugged or mugger
again my wallet sucks
my holes have holes halve
Alongside whatever the poem suggests “one wonders,” I wonder at this point whether the lizard is still the speaker, or if the lizard was a metaphor all along, and if not, why does a lizard have a wallet, and why is its darling a “whole lion”?
It is important to me that bewildering poems do not lack a connection to craft, even as they lack a tangible connection to reality. Just as a reader should possess a working knowledge of poetic form in order to achieve negative capability, a poet should know which rules they are breaking, even if they aren’t exactly sure why.
At the end of “Prismr of Love,” Dahlin completes the cycle, making a satisfying return to the original lizard image.
till the summer fluster us
I let my rock
flex its muscle
which gleamy muscle’s
me
The skewed grammatical structure of “which gleamy muscle’s / me” makes for a delicious ending phrase. It’s a neat little conclusion; a glorious where-are-they-now for the images introduced at the poem’s inception.
Other times, plain language and clarity of image create a sly sense of bewilderment. Take for example the famous poem “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, which simply reads:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The words themselves are down-to-earth, yet the image seems deceptively straightforward. Could it be that the speaker is simply apologizing for eating someone else’s food? And if so, what makes that an event worth immortalizing in a poem?
I can imagine the high school English class annotations surrounding this poem’s text: notes about what other terrible act the “plums” must be a stand-in for, speculation around the speaker’s sincerity when he asks for forgiveness at the end, and so forth. But neither those questions nor their answers are what cross my mind when I revisit this poem.
I am interested in the fact that the action of having eaten precedes the image of the plums, and that said plums are not described in detail until the very end. I am interested in the way sounds play off of one another, plain language enjambed by natural pauses and breath. I am interested in what goes without saying, the “negative” which surrounds and informs each word of the poem.
By perceiving the poem as a work of art, not a story or riddle, I am able to derive joy from my bewilderment.
Friends, thank you for reading. If you’re a poet or someone familiar with poetry, I hope you were able to connect with some of my interpretations. If you’re not as familiar, I hope this offered some guidance as to how to locate that elusive excitement in almost any poem you read. I deeply believe that the academic poetic canon has needlessly pushed tons of people away from poetry by making it seem intimidating and difficult. I say, let that intimidation become anticipation! Let it draw you in rather than scare you off!
And with that being said, I have many more thoughts on this subject which I will gladly dive into in future letters. I’m so excited already to write more about this specific type of engagement with poems.
Anyhow, the best line I read this week was this entire stanza from “Ghosts” by Henry Dumas: “Last nite we made two shadows disrobe, / and we sat beside the fire / where the moon had watched over us / the nites before, / and we—you and I—fleshed each other.”
My favorite line that I wrote was: “Learning how slow we can hurry when hand is in hand.” I’m currently in a love poem phase for no apparent reason, so enjoy that.
Until next time, good luck and godspeed.
<3 Bee