In attempting to get beyond the paradigm of “emotions recollected in tranquility,” which seems to be what conceptual poetry in its widest sense is trying to do, I’ve been increasingly drawn to models of poetry as revealing something about the way we think and even expanding our perspectives or patterns of thought. And while it’s important to avoid the trap of embracing cognitive neuroscience and neuroaesthetics as directly applicable holistic theories, in short, as replacement paradigms, I am interested in what these emerging fields will eventually have to say about the way that poetry thinks differently from other modes of language and how those differences might be used.

In thinking on ekphrasis, I continually run up against the question of why—what is it good for? I tend to think the arts have functions—they teach us, they enable us, they create concrete changes in our perceptions and thus in our abilities that can improve our lives. My thinking on this has been influenced in part by the work of Semir Zeki, a scientist in neuroaesthetics who argues that the visual arts, particularly painting, train us to see constants and to gradually develop overall perceptual continuity. In the evolution of both the species and the individual the creation and perception of art has reinforced the recognition of meaningful patterns and helped suppress distraction by ones that are not.

What are the parallels in poetry? And while there very well might be none, there is, nonetheless, something to be gained by considering the similarities and differences in the development of painting and poetry since the emergence of the avant-garde at the turn of the last century.

Though the world has changed enormously, from a neurological perspective, the visual fields we’re asked to see and to “read” haven’t changed all that much—a meadow with moving grass in front of trees against a blue sky is as much a matter of elements forming patterns in motion figuring against a ground as is a crowd of people moving along a sidewalk beneath a city skyline or even, in some respects, as the type and images that shift across a computer screen. All demand that we make figure/ground distinctions, that we recognize patterns based on similarity and contrast, hold several in our heads at one time, and grasp their mutual dependence or independence.

Though the basic dynamics may not have importantly changed, what has changed dramatically in the arts of the past 100 years is subject matter—and it’s not so much what the subject is that interests me here (though that too has changed), but its role in the work of art, be it painting or poem.

Subject matter is in many ways a mask; it’s there to mask more deeply operative structural elements, such as rhythm, parallelism, and juxtaposition. Masks are famously very complex affairs—their purpose is not only to hide but also to entice; they work on a push-pull principle that creates desire through suggestion and delay. A mask is something made to be passed through; its purpose is to slow us down, to make us aware of what we’re doing: that we are passing through, and thus, that we’re heading into something else, that our attention should sharpen, that we should beware. Subject matter functions the same way, luring us into more core structural issues with our senses heightened—luring us into the real subject, which is motion, how the world’s appearances are constructed by the dynamic relationships of their elements.

Increasingly, the visual arts and some poetry have worked to distill subject matter so that core structural elements and their dynamics are laid bare or at least made much more apparent. The visual arts, however, have been more successful at this than poetry, and in part, it’s because, after a very promising start, epitomized by Gertrude Stein, who recognized something in cubism’s geometric and perspectival shifts that she was also doing in writing, poetry took a turn which confused distillation with simplification. Simplified language reduced the evidence of underlying dynamics revealed through rhythm, echo, juxtaposition, etc. and angled instead toward speech-based language that equated “simpler” with both “clearer” and “truer.” I have all those terms in quotes because they’re particularly bottomless ones, and it was precisely through taking them as not bottomless that the primacy of such language as art could be advanced. Such simplified language relies much more heavily on subject matter to the point that subject matter in poetry has been allowed to take over, so that it no longer functions correctly as a mask; it no longer draws us toward core dynamic elements; instead, it has replaced them, so that the very elements to which art attunes us have been washed out.

A poetry dominated by subject matter does not result in work that exalts its surface, as one might expect, but rather slathers a distracting layer of false accuracy over it. There are many exceptions to such work throughout the 20th century; however, the mainstream of American poetry has continually downplayed the sonic bones of the medium, thus downplaying the very elements that constitute the aesthetic: the elements that shift attention from an immediate instance to dynamic principles that allow a given instance to have meaning, whether meaning is defined as having a relation to a larger frame or having an impact on the perceiver.

Central to these principles is rhythm, which Craig Dworkin touches on in his discussion of “interval” in Kenny Goldsmith’s work: “the collapse of distances into equal measures, and the differences and repetitions subsequently legible.” It is to bring time into the work, not as simple duration but as active occupation. The fact that no actual event, object, or utterance can exactly fit a pre-determined rhythm guarantees that the system that is the poem or the painting can never fall into homogeneity. Particularity is itself the clinamen that thwarts that possibility.

While poetry, as an art that necessarily takes place in time, might be expected to show a much more nuanced treatment of these dynamics, it is 20th visual arts that have more frequently struck a balance that allows this essential and compelling play to show through, and as for the question of what ekphrasis can do: it can be poetry in the act of analyzing how the visual arts have accomplished this.

I’d like to go now to a series of images and look at them with a focus on how underlying dynamics such as rhythm, parallelism, and juxtaposition show on the surface, and as such, show a unifying principle between very different subjects as if the underlying structure of a street scene could be the same as that of a still life of pears or a stormy seascape.

I’d like to suggest that the similarities between these principles in painting and in poetry are not metaphorical, but that visual rhythm requires some of the same mental processes that aural rhythm does and that the pattern recognition in both can play the same role of attuning our senses to crucial patterns in the outside world, creating a relevance that participates in meaning.

(Followed by several slides . . .)

Home | email

University of Arizona Poetry Center | 1508 East Helen Street (At Vine Avenue) |Tucson , AZ 85721-0150
Phone: 520-626-3765 | Fax: 520-621-5566 | email: poetry@email.arizona.edu