Self-Consciousness

Unlike riding a bike, with poetry,
     you never quite know how.
        -- PHOEBE MILLIKIN

    The gradual intrusion of self-consciousness is one inevitable side effect of an education in art.  To read ten poems, or a hundred, is one thing.  To read ten thousand is another.  As we internalize more of the tradition and become progressively less shielded by our ignorance, we realize how local our upbringing has been, how much there might be to know, and perhaps even, sigh, how limited our talent.  T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock comes to know that he is not Prince Hamlet; we must deal with the fact that we are not Eliot.  When a person takes the step toward learning more of craft and its history, more of artifice—when, for example, a person crosses the threshold of an MFA program—she chooses to end a childhood in artlessness.  She gives up some of their innocent infatuation, the naïveté, the adolescent grandiosity, maybe even some of the natural grace of the beginner. “They are good poets because they don’t know yet how hard it is to write a poem,” I have heard a teacher say, a bit tartly, of her beginning poetry class.
    This initiation into knowledge will infect the learner with the virus of self-consciousness.  As a consequence of learning of the existence of the poems of W.H. Auden, or Marianne Moore, or Louise Glück, your writing may suddenly seem horribly simplistic, crude as crayon drawings on Masonite.  Now the poem, even as your are making it, seems stiff, clumsy, and obvious.  Now you work may become, in compensation, coy and encoded.
    Yet that very knowledge, which can inhibit and choke, can also inspire and challenge.  Self-consciousness is the necessary border crossing of craft, skill, and even of poetic ambition.  Each of the following examples are visibly aware of, and creatively askew from, poetic normalities:

…The roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
        (FROM “BURNT NORTON,” T.S. ELIOT)

We were walking under some big trees—trees, you know what
      they look like.
                     (MARK FRANCONATTI)

I know that John Clare’s madness nature could not straighten.
                     (JON ANDERSON)

Look stranger, on this island now
The leaping light of your delight discovers,
                        (W. H. AUDEN)

    Self-consciousness in writing, as it does in life, open up a kind of delay between impulse and action, between thought and word.  That pause—as these examples show—offers the opportunity for calculated intensifications and angularities that would never occur in “natural,” uninformed speech.  Such special effects may be manifested in sound, as in Auden’s exaggerated alliterations, or in image, like Eliot’s cross-eyed figure for perceptual self-estrangement.  Similarly, the awkward syntax of Jon Anderson’s line recreates the psychological struggle it describes.
    Such special effects can deepen the texture and register of a poem.  So, one payoff for knowing conventions is the chance to redesign them, to invent the next generation of convention.  In Cynthia Huntington’s poem, “O California,” the poet grafts unexpected subject matter to the lofty tone and syntax of invocation.  Thus she pours new wine into old skins:

Oh falling, sinking, sliding-over-rooftops
moon of harvest orange, look down
into white caverns of immaculate garages
turned inside out by light, the glowing icicles,
lawnmowers and shimmering grasses
dewed by sprinklers whose iron blossoms
rise from the ground to spurt
and shower at our feet, oh moon, lean down
and tell me the meaning of money.

Huntington uses the antique rhetorical convention of apostrophe in her invocation and address to the moon.  This is a familiar enough poetic project: “Oh moon, look down and tell me!”  But what the moon sees has changed into unpoetic North American suburban paraphernalia.  And the unexpected noun-object this uncoiling sentence arrives at—money—ripples backward through the entire sentence, shocking the trope awake.  The poet’s savoir-faire has rescued us from an experience of aesthetic repetition and also achieved a tone both rapturous and ironic, self-mocking yet grave.  Money is, as we are now led to recognize, a serious and mysterious subject.  The poet has embedded new subject matter inside old poetic manners, and those manners have inherited force and shape.  The rhythmic, syntactical momentum of the sentence gathers and drives its full force into the wedge of the final surprising word.
    In other instances, awareness of the conventionality of certain subject matter necessitates a strategic approach to the topic.  In Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See…,” the speaker engineers an indirect route to his topic because the poem’s theme—human misery—is a jaded and overfamiliar one.  The poem begins by assuming the reassuringly civilized guise of a European art lecture:

In Goya’s greatest scene we seem to see
                       the people of the world
        exactly at the moment when
               they first attained the title of
                                                             ‘suffering humanity’
            They writhe upon the page
                                               in a veritable rage
                                                               of adversity

          Heaped up
               groaning with babies and bayonets
                                            under cement skies
            in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
                    bent statues bats wings and beaks
                                      slippery gibbets
                    cadavers and carnivorous cocks
            and all the final hollering monsters
                     of the
                        ‘imagination of disaster’
             they are so bloody real
                      it is as if they really still existed

  And they do

               Only the landscape is changed
····················································
  They are the same people
                                  only further from home
    on freeways fifty lanes wide
                      on a concrete continent
                                    spaced with bland billboards
             illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness

    Ultimately, Ferlinghetti wishes to describe, and to indict, the dehumanized landscape of civilized man.  But he is no naïve seventeen-year-old, caught up in the first flush of outrage and self-important righteousness: he wants to be passionate, but doesn’t want to lapse into literary or political cliché.  In order to make his drama compelling, he must escort the reader toward involvement by certain round-about advenues.
    This trip the reader goes on is a kind of disorientation and a kind of re-education.  Posing as an art historian is one of the poet’s many smart moves, but Ferlinghetti’s most brilliant repositioning might be the speaker’s ironic presentation of the phrase “suffering humanity” as if it were an exhausted advertising slogan.  It is language, not humanity, that is initially held up for our inspection by quotation marks.  Served up on the sardonic, distancing detachment of “they … attained the title,” the poet simultaneously invites us to dismiss the suffering referred to, while calling out attention to the jaded vocabulary of its traditional publicity.  In a moment, we recognize the worldliness of a speaker who has seen it all before, who resists sentiment and simplification.  Consequently, we extend some of our trust to him.  
    Yet this initial stance of measured detachment is immediately undermined by the lurid, violently crude descriptions of medieval suffering that follow, that force us to re-encounter the meaning of that same exhausted phrase, “suffering humanity.”  The sequencing  of the materials and the unfolding complexity of tone—from skepticism to sincerity, from knowing into feeling—gradually prepare us for the dramatic pivotal lines:

they are so bloody real
it is as if they still existed

And they do.

    The stage-by-stage progression of the discourse, from art history lecture to aghast spectatorship, from detachment to involvement, carries us along on its journey from the tragic past to an absurd modernity.  The theme of suffering humanity is updated into its contemporary version, as is our faith in art’s capacity to powerfully mirror life.  Ferlinghetti’s skillfully elliptical approach is an example of how self-consciousness, incorporated into a poem, can manage to freshly expose and penetrate a subject.
    Both the Huntington and Ferlinghetti poems exhibit a knowledge of poetical history, language, and manners and deploy it with ingenuity.  Ferlinghetti has to negotiate with his material in order to renew it.  Huntington’s more playful genetic engineering creates a poetical hybrid of old-high joined to low-new.
    Maybe the vocabulary of genetic is an appropate metaphor for this topic.  Self-consciousness in art is a little like the use of radiation in laboratory experiments; while it can produce truly valuable genetic variants, it can just as easily lead to frightening mutations.  Getting the dosage right is tricky.  Holding a microscope up to language, to meaning itself, there is the danger of falling through, down into the infinite space between words.
    The hinderedness of trying too hard, of watching yourself as you work, can afflict even a poet as masterful as Robert Hass.  Look as the opening of his poem “Spring Dawling,” a poem about the diffculty of writing:

A man thinks lilacs against white houses, having seen them in
the farm country south of Tacoma in April, and can’t find his
way to a sentence, a brushstroke carrying the energy of brush
and stroke

--as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast, 

and she, after the drive from the airport and a chat with her
mother and a shower, which is ritual cleansing and a passage
through water to mark transition,

had walked up the mountain on a summer evening.

    This brief excerpt provides instances of both the plus and the minus of self-consciousness.  In the first sentence, the speaker longs for the verbal naturalness of a brushstroke, “of brush and stroke.”  This deconstruction of both word and desire is clever, interesting, insightful, and to the point.  Only an alert, sophisticated, and hard-working artist would have looked inside that compound word, considered the physical gesture it refers to, discovered the double nature of those noun-verbs.  A moment like this, penetrating but not heavy-handed, is a good advertisement for savvy poetic intelligence.
    But the next moment in the poem show self-consciousness hyper-extended, entangled in a willfully ingenious simile.  The writer-speaker describes his situation of impoverished imagination “as if he were stranded on the aureole of the memory of a woman’s breast.”  This meta-double-decker image, meant to embody the main character’s labored creative struggle, is clever but cumbersome, conceptually arduous, and unintentionally show-offy.  It’s not that hyperextension of metaphor is bad aesthetics, or that excessiveness of any kind is problematic, but this sentence serves as an example of the overcalculated, the poet-who-knew-too-much.
    Self-consciousness often provokes an overexertion of cleverness.  But intelligence, when used well in a poem, never makes the reader feel less smart than the writer, or left behind.  Rather, it gives the reader the exhilarating pleasure of being smart in concert with the speaker.
    The goal of the healthy artist is not to be crippled by the weight of literacy, not intimidated into a kind of aesthetic conservatism, not to be engorged with fancy self-protective mannerisms, but to be selectively informed and empowered by knowledge.  This development of sensibility could be called the acquisition and use of taste.
    To learn what a poet needs to know is to become an initiate; that initiation imposes burdens as well as powers.  We have the obligation to make real poems, to contribute to the living, evolving heritage of poetry.  To make that contribution requires not just skill and desire, but a kind of discriminating insight into the deep structures of poetry.  This resourcefulness surely must spring from the union of learning and bold inventiveness. Finally, if our awareness of the great Past makes us self-consciously anxious, it is good to remember that Everything has not been done.  Possibility has not been exhausted.  More reality is being made at the reality factory every day, and new ways to handle it are being invented—language is a technology, after all.  Its adaptations are legion; its evolution is hardly over.

From Real Sofistikashun. Copyright 2006 by Tony Hoagland. All rights reserved.