Plasma Pool

The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water—breast to breast
With the duplicity:
“The other one!”
—W. C. Arensberg, “Voyage À L’Infini”

The attitude to notice, however, is that poetry
is a somewhat arcane and private discourse,
whose meanings reside in hints and suggestions;
it is clear, earlier, that he regards “duplicity”
to be at the heart of poetry.
—Ken Fields on Arensberg, “Past Masters” (1970)

Arensberg’s thought about duplicity is only half-correct. The poet who wishes to be a good one has two options: he can straightforwardly lie, or he can obliquely tell the truth. The intention to duplicity in toto is unnecessary; what is required is the concept of the limited audience, the small group able to uncover the sign drawn into dust and add the remaining lines that signal your meeting. To meet on the ground of lyric is always clandestine; that is the source of its intimacy.

The concept that poetry does (or should) speak to the world at large is ridiculous and false. (That said, of course, an obscurantist attitude as entrenched as that of the High Modernists, coupled with the horrors of the Second World War, has driven poetry into a position in which it is worse than misunderstood: it is irrelevant.) It has never been the task of lyric to convey universal truth to a universal audience: that is religion’s self-appointed role, and one we could do without.

Poets want things. There is a degree to which this notion runs counter to that of the common reader of poetry (provided such a thing anymore exists: let us say instead dull, or lazy, or naive). Perhaps this is due to precisely the notion that Arensberg (among others) articulates. The poet is a good liar or a master of equivocation and obliquity or he is not a poet, or at least a very poor one. I would challenge you to uncover a poet who is neither a liar nor an obfuscator. One could argue this obliquity a sign of cowardice, but it is more accurate generally to think of it as encrypted utterance accesible only to those with the proper key—and those are they who have what the poet wants.

On the subject of limited and particular audiences, Keats makes an excellent example, for he is the golden boy of Romanticism, that most golden and seemingly naive of poetic eras. For all his awkward beauty, he wanted to live and write aesthetic luxury: those of his contemporaries who sensed that desire felt threatened and were hostile; those who did not have been fond supporters; those who understood (the 19th century’s great aesthetes) leapt upon that truth and made him their own, with the result that they ruined him for all those valiantly and deliberately naive readers of the last century. But Keats lied as much as any, and a lie taken for truth becomes irony. So we find him here at the beginning of this century yet well-loved (relative to those other poets) and little understood.

Other examples are not of particular necessity here, except, perhaps, to take an iconic love poem of the 19th century—Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”—by way of example for the oblique truth-telling model of poetry. Arnold is not even always a good poet, let alone a great one, but he was a great and problematic thinker. The poem was mocked in the 20th century for its apparent combination of naivete (”ah, love, let us be true to one another!”) and near-perfect arrogance (the remarkable silence of the supposed beloved, the awkwardness of Arnold’s out-loud musings), as in—

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

—to which Anthony Hecht responds in “The Dover Bitch,” speaking up for that apparently silenced lover—

And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that.

But something in the poem held our attention for long enough (it was declared the most-printed poem in English, but no longer), despite these killing accusations. The conflict resolves neatly enough if we consider Arnold’s case one of oblique truth-telling: it is only by figuring an alternate version of the other—such as the one to which one writes a letter—and then musing a poem out as if dictating that letter that he can communicate at all. His stiltedness is only the formality of correspondence, rather than a mangled form of speech.

But pure untrammeled communication is not poetry, in any case, and falls outside the scope of our interest. If the point of art is communication, as some have claimed, the old vagueness must be qualified: lyric poetry at least is communication with a limited audience. During the Renaissance, poetry was the prestige genre; the forms of lyric have always been a form or privilege; and it is not its necessity to be accessible to all. For that task we have certain prose forms.

Privileged as it may be, however, it is by this distance from utilitarian forms that the poet institutes himself as the hacker par excellence of literary form; as such, he is a threat to the established order. (Not that others mayn’t; but to the poet, living as he does closer to language than others—he is under no obligation to tell a story, or oblige anyone at all—language is intimately available for experimentation/hacking.) To make new language meaningful—and the concomitant newness of vision, of thought, that is linguistic innovation’s raison d’être—is the task of the poet.

What he gains from that experimentation—what he wants, and from whom—is entirely his prerogative. Like all hackers, he will have to make his place outside of the established system: that is, he will become a skillful liar, if he isn’t one already. And his truth (for how else will he sufficiently indicate his desires to their objects?) will always be oblique.