Poetry as Finding Through a Falling Away

A friend sent me an email asking for my thoughts on a disagreement between Jacques Maritain and Paul Claudel about the nature of poetic creation. It’s a disagreement about what poets do when they find words for what were once ineffable things—a disagreement over what power the poet wields, and what work a poem can do. My friend sent over the following quotation from Maritain’s essay, “Poetic Experience,” which encapsulates the question:

The poet is not, as Paul Claudel believes, a hierarch who “calls all things into being by giving each thing its inalienable and proper name.” The poet would rather be a child who tames things by giving them the name of his loves, and who creates with them a paradise. They tell him their names in riddles, he enters into their games, blind-folded, he plays with them the game of life and death.

The contrast between the two positions is stark: for the poet Claudel, as he is quoted here, the poet is a kind of alchemist or wizard, calling things into being by speaking their proper names. For Maritain, the philosopher who is skeptical of any metaphysical aspirations poetry might have, Claudel’s aspirations far overstate the case: the poet is a child at play, utterly serious and genuinely creating, yet incapable of transcending the rules that determine the play. The question was intriguing, and it helped me see something critical in a work of poetry by Anna Key, Notebook of Forgetting, that I edited and published through In the Wind Projects. The book poses a unique (to my knowledge) solution to the poetic antithesis offered by the either/or suggested by the quotation. It is an either/or endemic to modern and contemporary understandings of poetry, and one that I believe needs to be questioned going forward. So I’d like to draw this idea out of Key’s Notebook, and offer some thoughts about what becomes possible if we take it seriously.

Between Maritain and Claudel, Key takes a third path. For Claudel, it is in the poem that a thing comes to be, is truly known and is named, and the thingness of the thing lies in the poem. The poem is the thing insofar as it names the thing and in so naming calls it into being. There is something beautiful in this idea, but the danger in it is that it gives the poem a magic power that seems overstated—hence Maritain’s worry.

Paul Claudel

In general, I think that even if I give Claudel the benefit of the doubt and say that a poem gives a thing a true name, the being of the thing must be there in the world, independent of the existence of the poem. And I would say it can probably be grasped in many ways—not just one way. Through art, sure, but perhaps also philosophy, prayer, mystical vision, or a lived life. Poetry is not the only thing that leads us to the real.

Maritain goes to the opposite extreme, though, withdrawing the reach of the poem too deeply into itself: the poem becomes a game played in a remote paradise of poetic creation and is therefore cut off from reality. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s irrelevant to human life. Because the poem is venerable and articulate and complete, like the world, it can make visible, poetically, something that can be seen in reality, too. And it may be that seeing something in the poetry of a poem helps us to see something in the reality of the world. But Maritain keeps his gloves tight here—he’s not willing to venture that those two somethings are connected. The poem is the poem and the world is the world: whatever interaction those two things have is indirect at best.

There’s something attractive about Maritain’s view, but I don’t think it’s quite right. If poetry is only a game, then is it not like other games, like baseball or basketball or football? And are we not, in our reading and making of poetry, doing the same kinds of things that my family is doing when they watch football on the TV or play a pickup game in the back yard? Or is there something greater at work in the poem than there is in play—even the most genuine of play that emerges out of a child’s imaginative engagement with a world that is still new and unknown?

Jacques Maritain

For all of his sensibility, I think Maritain swings too far away from the Claudelian position that would overstate the (metaphysical-ontological) value of poetry, into a poetics in which poetry is trapped within the inevitably arbitrary rules of a game. Sure, it’s a game capable of being as beautiful as a last-second three-point shot to win a basketball game, able to hold all of our human longing against all of our human suffering, in a moment of utterly human triumph over the forces that would defeat us.

But while there’s a lot about this picture that’s compelling, I think the strengths manage to underscore the limitation: as I was writing out this description of the kind of beautiful poetry of a sporting event, I found myself writing the word “human” over and over again. This repetition isn’t just a rhetorical trope: what’s compelling about sport is precisely its humanity; what’s compelling about all games is the struggle of human against human, human against some natural limitation, human against some set of rules defining the possible. This concept of poetry never leaves the human realm. But if western culture has anything to give us (and not just western culture), it’s a sense that this isn’t the whole story: that poetry at its best can and does reach through the human to touch what lies beyond it.

There is a third way here, though, beyond, on one hand, Claudel’s position that poetry calls things into being by giving them their true name and, on the other, Maritain’s retort that instead poetry plays naming like a game that, however evocative, is yet cut off from any real specification in the world. This third way is less a synthesis of the ideas than an antithesis of them both, like a virtue is the antithesis of two opposing vices that are antithetical to one another, and it’s the central point of investigation in the beginning of Notebook of Forgetting.

Key’s poem’s “Tree (1)” directly addresses the question of just what naming does:

The tree has a thousand names and its true name is not in
   the book
Does the tree have a true name
And all of the names that are no longer
names that can live in the book
Their falling away is a falling of leaves
That nourish the tree that keeps growing

There’s an explicit resistance to the idea of naming as calling into being, an acknowledgment of the distance between the naming in the book and the “true name” of the tree, something that is “not in the book.” The poem echoes Maritain’s reservations about Claudel. But the names that aren’t true names aren’t cut off from the tree either, like Maritain’s. They’re still connected to the tree: through “falling away” they, in their dying, become fertile ground for the tree to take root and grow in. They “nourish the tree that keeps growing.” It’s an interesting move that cuts out a space in which the poem isn’t sealed up within itself but can reach out into the world. It’s an idea that is then developed in “Fall Away (1)” and “Fall Away (2) / Elegy for C.D. Wright,” which re-cast the falling away that happens in poetry in the context of the falling away that happens in death, in which everything that we imagine to be essential (what we call human, what is part of the game) is lost, but that thing that we aspire to (maybe we call it divine, what transcends the game) is not lost:

Poetry is a finding through a falling away.

All of the wrong not-quite-right accurate accurate
groping imprecise accurate clinical
descriptive searching

words fall away

on this side

(How often do we stop to think about how much falls
away when looking at the poem on the page? So much, so
incomprehensibly much—  

and yet, nothing is lost

In poetry everything falls away and nothing is lost

On a cold night in January she fell away
She fell away like a poem falls away,
falls away and is not lost
falls away and finds, falls away and is found
the poem falls away from experience.

What remains is the true word.

What’s different about this idea is that poetry does not call into being through naming: it finds. And, as is enacted through the crossings-out that are an essential feature of Notebook of Forgetting, it finds through un-naming even more than through naming: poetry, here, enables forgetting, the kind of forgetting we need to make possible a truer vision of a real that exists beyond the lines of the poem and beyond our habitual daily perception.

But then neither does it play a game of life and death within the hermeneutically sealed walls of its own existence. It manages to get beyond the merely human character of the game-concept of poetry, because it is a finding through a falling away, the falling away of those walls, a falling away in which the poem reaches beyond itself into the reality of the real. It’s a poetics that preserves the hope of the falling away of the human before the quiet voice of divine speech.

In the poetic moment, the voice of the condition of the possibility of being, speaking though creation, through being, reaches out to the poet in the writing of the poem, leaves a trace of speaking in the poetry of the poem, neither calling something into being nor capturing a thing of its own making. Instead, it lets something through: a true word, word of the Word, that in the purest of poetry is re-spoken by the poet. The first part of Notebook of Forgetting articulates the possibility of this something getting through, and “Tree (2)” wraps up the articulation of this possibility with a progression through a falling away. The poem begins with a radical un-naming of the tree in the beginning of the poem:

When I attend to the trees, right just
what strikes me is the staggering variety of ways of being  

xxxxxxxxxx
named by within this single word
any xxxxx by 

contained within this
incarnated by a single word: tree tree 

the way the leaf can hang or fall or cluster or 

even the thought of beginning to try to describe the leaf

                                                xxxxx words thoughts
                                                scattering
even the thought of the leaf makes me dizzy

what would it take, what word to would could describe the

is a kind of vertigo
It is a word so basic that it almost doesn’t have
a history, but circles circling around itself
                                                (tréow, trio, trio, tru
                                                dervo, daru, derwer, dru)

to settle for a moment (the way leaves
hang still) on ‘tree ‘in the word ‘tree ‘has not traveled
far from itself but has grown grows upward and outward
   with a
strong and wide, its roots in a single soil deep downward
   root.
deep

The poem, and indeed the first part of Notebook then gives way to a disordered reception of some barely audible word or sequence of words:

I needed the tree tonight to tell tell me it was burning
it was burning
it was burning, to reach speak out from within 

itself, belly full of fire, a word of

unconsuming consolation

I don’t didn’t want to lose what I feel felt
already going, the wave retreats so quickly
down the shore and what returns is not
the same wave and doesn’t go as far
the tree dark already
(it’s not possible to stop the earth from turn turning)… 

Finally, these disordered words are re-written in clear light at the end:

I needed the tree tonight to tell me
it was burning, I didn’t want to lose what felt
already going, it’s not possible not
possible to stop the earth from turning 

tree dark with night, sky gray and clouds like smoke,
tree dark with rain, wet dark running down its trunk
dark seeping into dark, dark roots—

What gets through, in getting through, does something that poetry couldn’t do on either Claudel’s model or Maritain’s, which remain resolutely enclosed within the human (whether it is the human voice that names and calls into being or the human voice at play): the poem allows a divine voice to enter into the human world, not just through the singular historical moments that begat revelation, but always and everywhere around us, with God speaking in and through the creation that he holds in being. As a result, for Key, some other thing is possible in poetry, through poetry, than just a human making or a human knowing. There’s the possible irruption of a greater force into human affairs, an intervention that clears the ground for a new and different kind of building in the life of the poet, a building attentive to a now audible divine whispering. What becomes possible is conversion. Which is precisely the beginning of the next stage of Notebook: poetry has begun by opening our ears to hear, and the work of conversion then begins with the next poem, “Conversion (1).”

Tom Break is an artist, writer, and co-founder of In the Wind Projects, publisher of Anna Key’s Notebook of Forgetting. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Dappled Things, and he is currently doing a writing residency with Genealogies of Modernity.