A Song of One's Own
by James McConkey
APR Fiction Writers on Poetry
The American Poetry Review
March/April 2005
About twenty-five years ago, I dreamed I was a poet. I remember that dream for the happiness it brought me, a happiness that carried over to my conscious mind upon awaking. And yet, unlike nearly all prose writers — for that matter, nearly everybody of my acquaintance — I had never, not even in my adolescence, tried to write a single poem.
One might think such a dream would have led me to experiment with poetry, to find out if I had talent in that genre. And yet I never have, maybe partly because I know of others who, turning to poetry late in their careers, wrote mere exercises, verses influenced by poems read when they were younger.
To be truthful, though, I've never believed I had the ability to be a poet. I lack the required verbal felicity; words may be my medium, but often the ones I want either don't exist or only are found after some difficult searching. Feelings, or so I judge from what I know about myself, precede thought, and influence its development; but thought can be expressed only in words. My memory is primarily visual: a present feeling engenders not words, but images of another kind. A writer's style has much to do with the shape, or rhythm, of his thoughts. Sometimes, the rhythm of my thought is longer than I want it to be — maybe because it requires so many words, many of them unsatisfactory without qualification, to communicate the feeling behind the image that memory has given me. These are at least some of the reasons I am not a poet.
Don't most of those who, like me, seem destined to seek some kind of creative expression — don't we eventually find the form most congenial to whatever abilities we have? Mine became a particular form of autobiographical prose — that form which James Olney, one of the most informed and perceptive literary scholars I know of, refers to as life-writing: too general a term but the best he could come up with for a kind of prose that traces back as far as Augustine. "Memoir" is inadequate to define it, for, though it is dependent upon memory, it seeks throughout life an understanding of the self — an improbable goal, since it puts the writer's own psyche in search of itself, and obviously requires even for partial fulfillment a sense of something beyond the searcher's grasp.
To describe the contemporary use of a traditional genre, I must depend on my own practice of it, as a writer wholly aware of his limitations in a field whose illustrious predecessors have influenced religion, philosophy, psychology, and literature. For me, life-writing has far more affinities with poetry — especially poetry from the Romantic period onward — than it does with fiction, for it dispenses with a time-bound narration or any kind of plot exterior to the actions of the mind; and, like poetry, it depends more on elusive feelings than on logic. Combinations made by memory are the basis of its progression from beginning to end; it is always, in every piece of writing, after a synthesis that can only be implied, for the consciousness — the memory-dependent mind — that seeks it is also the barrier that, in any but a provisional sense, stands in its way.
So if the dream a quarter-century ago suggests an unconscious wish to be the poet I never became, at least the form I did undertake is as close to poetry as my talents permit. Actually, it was a poem that an elementary school teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas brought to the attention of her class that introduced me to the pleasures that words can provide. That poem — Sidney Lanier's "The Song of the Chattahoochee" — gives nature, here a river, a voice. Perhaps only a child can experience the kind of delight I felt in discovering the ability of rhythm and rhyme, as well as of the sounds of vowels and consonants, to mimic the fast flow of the river from the hills ("I hurry amain to reach the plain,/ Run the rapid and leap the fall") to its later, more lethargic movement ("The willful waterweeds held me thrall.") It was such a revelation to me of how sound abets sense that I still remember the details of the room — the windows behind me, the fact that I and the other students were sitting not in a normal classroom with its individual desks but in a kind of seminar room in which we were grouped together around a large table. It was the discovery that mattered, little else, for though I remember the environment, I can't visualize either the teacher (whose name, alas, also escapes me) or any of my fellow students.
W. H. Auden once said something to the effect that people who want to be poets because they have something to say probably won't become poets, but those who want to be poets because they like fooling around with words might get their wish. "The Song of the Chattahoochee" represents a fooling around with words, even though the poem is held to a particular subject. (Lanier was also a professional musician and the author of an 1880 book on prosody that illustrates the interrelationships of poetry and music.)
As a recruit into the Army during the Second World War, I boarded a long train taking hundreds of new soldiers from Ohio to an undisclosed location for the basic infantry training intended to turn us into efficient and obedient combat soldiers. A pacifist by nature, I felt hopeless and lost during a two-day train ride that apparently was heading in a southerly direction, though none of us crowded together on the seats of my car could be sure even of that, for several times the train switched to tracks that took us in other directions. Wartime arouses a fear of spies and saboteurs; either military traffic had overloaded the tracks, or the train was taking evasive actions, similar to the ones used months later by the ships that took my infantry division to a landing at Cherbourg soon after the Normandy beachheads had been secured.
Half-drowsing in the train seat as dawn came, I looked out the window at a little sign before a trestle that identified the river it spanned. Its two words, Chattahoochee River, brought me immediately back to the Little Rock classroom, and gave me a bearing better than any compass could: not only did the sign locate me in Georgia, but I knew beyond doubt that, granted my survival, I would become a writer after the war ended. For the first time since I'd put on a uniform, I felt secure about the personal direction I would take. Poems — even though they may represent little more than words being used to please the ear — can have a lifelong effect on their readers.
Still, a person who likes fooling around with words can end up as a crossword puzzle adept, not a creative writer. (Of all the fiction writers I am aware of, only Vladimir Nabokov manages to make word play an art form, one that transcends itself: a unique game of deception designed to outwit Death and all other mean realities.) Surely the Poets and prose writers whose work, like Nabokov's, outlives them have something to tell us, even though they can't or won't say what it is. Whether their authors recognize it or not, what matters in such work belongs to the psyche we share with them, and is ultimately beyond the reach of words. Words came far more easily to the poet Archie Ammons, my talented colleague and friend for many years, than they ever have come to me, but the epigraph to his essay "A Poem Is a Walk" — originally written in 1967 for one of the rare speeches he gave — is a quotation from Lao-tse: "Nothing that can be said in words is worth saying."
Music, of course, is an art form separate from words, though it, like poetry and prose, has fluidity and progression — that is, it too is a narrative in time. Does music, at its best, reach what words never can?
The entire paragraph, like this opening sentence, is much like a poem in its awareness of sound and rhythm, in its dependence upon simile and metaphor to imply a relationship among memory, writing, and music. It says nothing about the nature of truth, only that writers of talent "are haunted by this confused remembrance of truths they have never known" and seek "to hear it distinctly, to write it down, to reproduce it, to sing it." Ultimately, memory fails, ending this search; some give up much earlier, from "a too ready self-approval" or other reasons. If this happens, the last sentence warns, suddenly turning from third person to second, "no one, not your own self even, will ever know the tune that beset you with its intangible, delightful rhythm."
Does an inborn sense of rhythm, accompanied by the desire for a song of one's own, underlie the creative process? I know my own creative urge came first while fooling around with tunes, not words. Walking home from grammar school, I heard these tunes in my head, and tried to reproduce them later on my Hohner Marine Band harmonica or on the pianos of relatives and friends. A couple of lessons with a dispirited violin teacher in a tiny and gloomy room of a downtown Little Rock office building, lessons arranged by my mother to encourage my musical abilities, caused me to give up the playing, on any kind of instrument, of the songs I continued to hear, whatever I might be doing; but still I sang myself hoarse throughout the rest of my childhood, having memorized the lyrics of the cheap songbooks found in everybody's house in those long ago days of the Great Depression.
Any direct statement, if one could be made, would destroy literature, which appeals to the imagination and to everything that cannot be said. A seemingly small poem about a clichéd subject — beer-drinking hunters in a country tavern, for example — can charm me by casting on it a new light that reveals the magic to be found even in a banality. Like troop trains and ships in wartime, literature can both surprise and enlighten me by its arrival at some unexpected terminal or harbor, its destination having been reached through the semblance of going somewhere else. Poetry in particular moves at a slant or tangent, taking advantage of the ambiguity of words, the various meanings to be found in them. Analogies are useful to it, because they are never exact.
The, vitality in poetry has much to do with its chameleon and shape-changing dexterity; admirers of it must be eclectic. Still, the individual poems that most move me are those that convince me of the integrity of the emotions they convey. With the advantages of hindsight, many critics today disparage Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" for, among other perceived defects, its sermonizing ("The sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full"), not realizing that such oratory, a vestige of a now-lost belief, is appropriate to it. The strength of its underlying emotions is apparent, every time I reread it — even though for me the loss of such belief carries none of the poem's immediacy. But "ignorant armies" continue to "clash by night," and my personal response to that kind of chaotic violence is identical to Arnold's call for the faith still to be found in intimate relationships: "Ah, love, let us be true/ To one another!"
Though "Dover Beach" belongs to the past, it remains a harbinger of the increasing difficulty to represent, through image or voice, the needs of the human psyche except through a personal longing for what has become absent in the exterior world. Reason alone has failed us; logic leads us to an expedient first step, and possibly to the final one that annihilates more than our species. John Ashbery bewildered me before I realized his words were bypassing the syntax of conventional meaning to suggest what lies beyond the reach of logic and thus can include both contradiction and what, to reason, is comical, patently absurd. His associations, which — though controlled — seem to reflect the flow of consciousness of a specific and well-stocked mind, are never elitist; they make me aware of our common humanity. For even in their unexpectedness, in their casual disregard of a more conventional order, Ashbery's juxtapositions are somehow as familiar to me as I assume they are to others. It is as if these juxtapositions represent the associations our subconscious minds constantly make, though we often reject them when they cross the threshold to conscious thought and communication. In any event, my own familiarity with such juxtapositions, odd at first glance though they seem, is reinforced by the clichés dropped in their midst. Ashbery's lines are often pure poetry, shimmering with unsaid meanings even in their dependence upon the easy phrases of ordinary speech.
To introduce an aphorism gleaned from a book of quotations, the ministers from my childhood would remark, "As the poet says," for all poets were as one to them, and maybe in a general way — one that includes a writer like me — those preachers were right, even about poets inimical to their concerns. A quotation was recently sent me, by email, from a composer I have never met about a poet I know nothing about. The composer, recently the recipient of a major award, believed the passage — a response by Octavio Paz to what lies within the sounds of that poet's words — applies to views to be found in my much different work as well as to his field of music. For Paz, "Hugo Ball's phonetic poetry reveals the religious nostalgia for a primal language preceding all languages.... Saying ceases to signify: it reveals realities that are unintelligible and untranslatable but not incomprehensible. It does not signify, yet at the same time it is impregnated with meaning."
To that, all that I can really say that might signify is this: We are born from nature and destined to return to it like all other living things, whether sentient or not. With the end of consciousness, we return to the nothing that is also everything, the unity — but also the silence — that creativity seeks in all of its manifold expressions.
The American Poetry Review
Editors:
Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Arthur Vogelsang
Associate Editor:
Elizabeth Scanlon
© 2005 by World Poetry, Inc.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by James McConkey:
The Telescope in the Parlor: Essays on Life and Literature — Hardcover
