Eric Lisenbey, “David” (2020). Courtesy of David Woo.

From an essay at the Poetry Foundation:

When Susan Sontag visited Hanoi in 1968 to show her opposition to the Vietnam War, she noted the literal-mindedness of her hosts’ language, of everyone speaking “in simple declarative sentences. All discourse either expository or interrogative.” She recorded in her journal what a life without metaphor was like—“It’s monochromatic here”—and despaired that the revolution was “betrayed by its language.” The opacity of the Vietnamese led her to this observation, sympathetic yet little different from the usual reductiveness that amounts to racist othering:

I felt my consciousness included theirs, or could—but theirs could never include mine. And I thought with despair that I was lost to what I most admired. My consciousness is too complex, it has known too great a variety of pleasures.

If finding someone literal-minded is an occasion to celebrate the complexity of one’s own mind, it is also an accusation that can summon the most extreme aspects of consciousness. Fred Moten speaks of Kant’s “fantastical generation of blackness,” which is deployed as “inoculation,” leading to “critical neglect,” because this “is how generation comes to seem the same—little literalist objects who, having chosen not to object, sign on as privileged beholders […]” The contempt in the phrase “little literalist objects” indicates that literal-mindedness is one of the few intellectual deficiencies that can muster a metaphorical power commensurate with our worst beliefs, like racism.

Because the notion of the literal is fundamental in our aesthetic and cultural understandings, we often perceive consciousness itself—its complexity, its privileges—as saturated in the dichotomy of literal and figurative. We tend to conflate the figurative with thoughtfulness and variegation, and the literal with obtuseness and monochrome dullness, like the “literal-minded” suitors in Louise Glück’s “Ithaca,” who cannot see that Penelope is living in a figurative world created by imagining Odysseus’ return..

Gerald Maa: There is a strange communion in reading these poems. The poetry does not feel completely like a soliloquy overheard, as John Stuart Mill famously characterized it. Rather, the poems feel as if spoken sotto voce, an intimate conversation between two amidst the din of the greater public. What is the hope for and from the reader of these poems? 

David Woo: I like intimacy as a desideratum of the poetic impulse. My work may be “a call in the midst of the crowd,” but it is far from being “orotund sweeping and final.” Our times are too diminished for anything but sotto voce confidences to neighbor, friend, lover, and stranger. And yet I don’t hear a dialogue, imagined or hoped for, when I’m writing a poem. A long time ago the first poem that I ever published appeared in The New Yorker and, in my innocence, I thought I would receive some sophisticated feedback from my readers. The only piece of fan mail that the magazine forwarded to me was a note from a teenage girl. It was written in purple pen and all the dots over the i’s were little hearts. It was very sweet and kind, but it wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I write as best I can and send my work into the world. I no longer hope for anything in return. And even if I could, it would be futile to control any response. “It must be abstract, it must change, it must give pleasure,” Wallace Stevens famously said. I’d go with the second and third if I had a supervillain’s power of mind control. But I don’t.

For the rest of this conversation, go here.

This piece originally appeared in Ruben Quesada’s Poetry Today series for The Kenyon Review online:

INTRODUCTION

I often think of something Czeslaw Milosz once said, that you become a kind of silkworm when you write. With each poem, you spin a thread out of yourself, constructing a cocoon that envelops you and hardens into a “crystalline structure,” until you shed it and begin anew. In this way writing poetry becomes a matter of spinning—and emerging from—cocoon after cocoon, dwelling after dwelling, and each poem becomes something exterior, even alien to the self, the little rooms that you’ve left behind. I believe that the life of poetry is continual habitation and transfiguration, continual emergence into a world altered by the singular fabric that you’ve spun from your soul. The question of a poet’s work becomes: how do you find the sustenance to keep fabricating your silk? I’ve heard much advice about the art of writing over the years, but two simple and obvious notions guide me: to seek a range of experiences in day-to-day life and to be passionate about reading literature. With Emily Dickinson as the luminous example, we do not need to travel long distances or break personal records for numbers of followers, but we should possess an intimate awareness of others and perhaps the reciprocal sense that, during our lives, another person has taken our profound measure. We read widely among our contemporaries and those from the distant past, of many cultures, not to flaunt our knowledge but because we want to find out how the best poets approached the mechanics of transforming experience into words, partly to avoid repeating them, partly to learn the multitude of ways in which it has been done. While all accomplished writers are well-read, there is no absolute correlation between erudition and the quality of the work, so it’s important that reading remain a source of knowledge, a personal tool for obtaining wisdom, and a pleasure, not an obligation. What you want most is to earn for yourself an understanding of what sustains your art.

MUST READ

The Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) wrote work of a sublime, melancholy beauty. He was a shy, anguished, difficult man, but he summoned the courage to be open about his homosexuality at a time (the 1930s) when it was nearly unheard of to do so, not only in Spain but the rest of the world. His work has increasingly appeared in English versions, but he’s still mostly unknown here, and his collected work, compiled in a single volume in successive editions like Leaves of Grass, has yet to find a complete translation. A few leading American poetry websites don’t carry biographies of him even though he is arguably as important to Hispanophone culture as someone like Auden is to Anglophone culture. I felt such an affinity with Cernuda—the pained eloquence of his spiritual uncertainties, the elegant restraint of his losses in love and exile—that I learned some Spanish in order to see him more clearly and to make a version of one of his poems, which, in turn, became one of the two title pieces for my book Divine Fire. “Now let the light enter in,” the poem implores. “Open the doors.” I hope one day some gifted, sensitive translator will open the doors completely to Cernuda’s Reality and Desire so that the whole of his career—from his early surrealism to his later work chronicling the alienation of exile—can be brought to light here.

POETRY’S POTENTIAL

“Then we all went to eat at a Chinese café,” Roberto Bolaño wrote of a group of young poets in The Savage Detectives, “and we walked and talked about literature until three in the morning. We were all in complete agreement that Mexican poetry must be transformed.” The youthful energy that Bolaño was celebrating, the sense that a poet could do anything and that poetry could change the world itself, is an openness to life that most poets find a place in their hearts to preserve throughout their careers. Certainly, if only for a moment, I would return to the prelapsarian era when I was certain I could be all poets at once: the raw and the cooked, the classicist and the experimentalist, the public citizen and the private lyricist of consciousness. I would magically make poetry the best vehicle for interpreting the meaning of life and for righting the injustices in the world. I would create a readership that ranged far outside the circles of career-centered practitioners, an audience of non-poets that felt poetry’s dazzling effects and changed under its influence. But, as Layli Long Soldier says, “I feel most responsible to the orderly sentence: conveyor of thought.” Trying to convey thought (and feeling) as I write, I don’t juggle many other components. The act of writing feels exterior to the self, to motivation, while what flows down the page remains an extension of consciousness. The poem that I am composing usually doesn’t address any particular reader who might be changed by my work, just as the words I say to myself in my mind aren’t spoken to an unseen interlocutor but simply emanate in soliloquy. Even when the content of a poem seems autobiographical, it rarely conforms to an actual memory. And when I’m aware that a poem is trying to become something—lyrical, narrative, political—it often strays into some other category.

In The Savage Detectives, the tragedy of Bolaño’s romanticized vision of literary ambition was the extent to which these poets of such great promise and energy succumbed to the vicissitudes of life and never achieved the freedom to write. And yet the wonder of his work, there and in 2666, is that the liveliness of the prose itself belies the sorrows it delineates. While poetry may begin with a youthful ambition to become a vessel for everything, including social and political change, the countervailing power of an artist’s specificity and style is what grants a poem the strength to move the reader and actually effect an alteration of consciousness, which in the end is all the change writing can enact anyway.

ABOUT Divine Fire 

Unlike my first book, which was divided into sections, I ended up structuring this collection as one continual, sinuous movement. As I performed the standard poet’s maneuver of spreading pages on the floor, I saw a story emerging, one that moved from the intimacies of private life, of love and personal loss, to the wider world, to subjects like the struggles of immigrants in the southwest, the interior of racial consciousness, and an unnamed catastrophe that could be global warming or the pandemic, to something wider still but more interior, the search for meaning in the sacred and transcendent. After this spiritual journey, the book wandered into what felt like a post-apocalyptic state, a kind of decrescendo or decompression where I rehearsed a kaleidoscope of styles, comic, ironic, searching, as if recognizing the human limits of the prophetic and the sublime. The book closes with a broken prophecy of worldly and spiritual aspiration (“The Death of the Man Who Was a God”) and a warning about spiritual accidie (the second “Divine Fire” poem), as though I were stumbling upon a landscape at the other side of meaning, one whose design all of us are even now seeding and planting ourselves.

I would love to leave readers with a sense of a life lived among them, humanly proximate as well as alien in a way that mediates difference into the telling surprise. I want to offer a lyrical moment full of the sensations and resistances and embattled and embraced perceptions that make a real moment both miraculously lived as well as eternally departed. I would like to extend a beetling edifice of meaning over the sun in a reader’s eyes, that the shadow might be a respite from its debilitating radiance as well as an opacity to be seen through to the light. If I’m mischievous, I want to be nothing to readers that they don’t want me to be and everything that I am not but could be if I were truly the something they believe I am. I want to be a pleasure to most readers, and the kind of ludic equivocation to the rest that leads them to smile afterwards on the landing in the stairwell. And if I am a force for the good things in life, I want it to seem accidental, because persuasion and eloquence depend on an illusion of fortuity, and because readers will always be conspirators in the happy accident of my writing.

(2021)

If the lyrical mode of the poems in Henri Cole’s Blizzard is something “elegant, libidinous, austere”—as one poem characterizes Cole’s own personality—the great subject to which Cole returns is desire itself, the desire that directs our actions and libidos, that guides all of life, separating those who act and are actionable, the truly alive, from those who exist in the futile compulsions that end in decay and death. He may think that desire becomes “coffin liquor,” as “To the Oversoul” puts it, but he persists in creating an art disabused of illusions and made astringent by the losses of experience. In Blizzard, his tenth collection, the frustrated idealist’s need to write about this living desire is inseparable from the erotic impulse that guides a poet to perfect the work. “I rewrite to be read,” he says in “At the Grave of Robert Lowell,” “though I feel shame acknowledging it.”

The shame arises, in part, from a sense of the tastelessness of worldly ambition, of seeking fame and human connection from an art form that Lowell himself, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, said, “hardly seems to exist.” A straightforward seriousness about one’s desire for posterity would probably garner laughter from the socially distanced audiences seeking solace and meaning at a Zoom poetry reading today. And if the larger desire of which this ambition is a part—the open-hearted, Whitmanian affirmation of the life force—is no longer poetically plausible, what then? Blizzard can be read as a series of answers to such a question, a contrarious flame of artistic strategies that burns with the old desire for veracity and sense—“If I want the truth, I must seek it out”—but does so only indirectly, when the abashed poet looks at the fire askant….

For the rest of the review, see the summer 2021 issue of The Georgia Review.