Who Needs a Horse That Flies? Pt. II
Part I of this article can be found here.
Talking about poetry’s qualities and capabilities is never as good as letting poems speak for themselves. I have chosen a few examples, beginning with one of the most recognizable and going on from there.
We have all heard the truism that appearances can be deceptive. We may or may not accept that as true, but we can understand and accept it simply as an idea. We may nod yes or no, but such a response does not engage us totally. In a similar and more particular way we have heard that money is a solution to many, if not all, problems. In fact, so many think of money as a total solution that the “have-nots” come to envy the “haves” because they think that the “haves” have it all; they have everything. When one of the “haves” does something not in keeping with our expectation of how “haves” should behave, we are often stunned. We say, “Why did he or she do that?” The unsaid implication is that the person asking the question would not, if he or she were in a position of a “have,” do such a thing. These are quite common attitudes—the deception created by appearances and the assumption, especially in our society, that wealth is the ultimate desideratum and the ultimate answer. In a much-anthologized and well-known poem entitled “Richard Cory,” Edwin Arlington Robinson presents us with an ironic vision of a deeper reality behind what I have just summarized.
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement stared at him,
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked.
But still he fluttered pulses when he said, “Good morning,”
And he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace.
In fine we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light
And went without the meat and cursed the bread
And Richard Cory one calm summer night
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Carl Spitzweg, Der arme Poet (“The Poor Poet”) (1839)
The poem, i.e., the effect of this poem on us, will not let us retreat into abstraction or platitudes. All that I said in preface to the actual poem simply does not have the visceral effect that the poem has. The poem is what it describes. It presents, in the terse language of William Carlos Williams, the thing itself and not the idea of the thing. “No ideas but in things,” insisted Williams, which is another way of saying that the thing and the poem must be one and the same.
This is only as it should be. Ideas simply remain ideas unless and until they are embodied. The aforementioned poet and critic, Wendell Berry, not only supports Williams’s insistence but finds support in connection with the Incarnation—“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” As long as “the Word made flesh” was only an idea, it remained an abstraction. But once embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, it was unignorable. And the results speak and have spoken for themselves for centuries in the best and worst of ways.
It is in the world of the incarnate word that we find our true selves, and it is the imagination that takes us there. It is not what we see but what we imagine we see, hear what we imagine we hear, and so on through all the senses that we truly experience the world. It is probably what William Blake was emphatic about when he wrote: “We are led to believe a lie/When we see not through but with the eye.” Seeing through the eye is what gives us a true vision of what is there—the face behind the mask, the reality behind the appearance, the mystery that suddenly illuminates the ordinary and for a moment transforms it into something that is unforgettable.
Some years ago, I had a student who was also a registered nurse with supervisory responsibilities. Older and more mature than the others, she wrote the following single line when I asked the class to write what it feels like to be hopelessly disappointed. The nurse prefaced her response by saying that she found it impossible to stop feeling love for a man who no longer loved her. She wrote: “Love for me is like the bubble inside the glass stem of a wineglass—a defect.” Such a description is not only succinct but proves without any need for substantiation that less is more, poetically speaking. Likewise, I have always treasured Norman Mailer’s damning description of Georgia Governor Lester Maddox during the Civil Rights campaign in the South. Maddox distributed axe handles free of charge to recalcitrant white voters in Georgia so that they could use them to club black voters when they came to the voting booths—a practice he defended gleefully in his public appearances. Mailer, in a single sentence, captured the look and character of the man: “Governor Maddox has the face of a mean baby with glasses on it.”
In a different but related genre, the same succinctness and pith can be found in what is called proverbial literature. Such proverbs incline to poetry because they are often saying something much more profound that what they are literally saying, as in:
“Peace makes money, and money makes war.”
“I went into the shroud business; nobody died.”
“A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.”
“A peaceful mouse learned that kindness is wasted on the vicious.”
Short takes like these are not what we think of when we think of poetry, but they are poetic and memorable in nature because they spring from the imagination, from the visionary character of our sensibility. And that holds true even when we find it in what is customarily called prose. Here is a passage from a book of essays called Mortal Lessons by Richard Selzer, a professor and surgeon emeritus at Yale:
I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face
postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny
twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth,
has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon
had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh.
Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite
side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in evening
lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask
myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and
touch each other so generously, greedily? The young woman
speaks.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.”
She nods, and is silent. The young man smiles.
“I like it,” he says. “It is kind of cute.”
All at once I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my
gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful,
he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see
how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show
her that their kiss still works. I remember that the gods
appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath
and let the wonder in…
Simon Vouet, The Muses Urania and Calliope (1634), detail.
It is how Selzer poetically evokes the beauty of this moment that makes it heartbreakingly true and unforgettable. We cannot forget it even if we try.
I have chosen these examples to show that even in the most common day-to-day occurrences—a scene on a city street and a brief episode in a hospital—poetry can be seen and summoned by the words of a visionary writer. Perhaps that is why May Swenson, herself an excellent poet, was prompted to write in a now long since filed essay in the late Saturday Review that the poet was possibly the last generalist in a society like ours that may be placing too high a value on specialization. The usual specialist tends to see reality through the prison of his own specialty, and more often than not that is as far as he looks. The generalist is interested in everything. The poet is such a generalist, not in the sense of acknowledging that everything is of equal importance but affirming this importance by focusing on some small detail that reveals the essence of the moment to the rest of us.
Samuel Hazo is the founder of the International Poetry Forum, which he directed for 43 years. A National Book Award finalist and inaugural poet laureate of Pennsylvania, Hazo is the author of nearly 60 books, including his latest book of poetry, Becoming Done, and book of essays, Who Needs a Horse That Flies?: Essays on Poetry and Pretense, which is the source of this article.