Good and Poor Poetry in Denise Levertov

It is remarkable to me whenever I find poor poetry in a well known poet, and I find it necessary to counter it with the poet's good work. It makes for a good juxtaposition to point out talent and flaws in the poet, and extensively, the editor.

What stands out and what we are to learn from here, mainly, is the poet's choice of subject matter. Two poems, "Why Me?" and "Moon Tiger," are taken from Levertov's Relearning the Alphabet, New Directions 1970. First, the good:

Why Me?

No reason: hyacinthine, ordinary,
extraordinary, creature:

on your two legs, running,
the grey brain above
transmitting its poetry---

just that you are, man, someone,
wings at your heels, the gods sent

to tell me.

Here we see good use of the power of poetry, metaphor: the "wings at your heels" simultaneously accents "on your two legs running," and refers to Talaria, winged sandals which symbolizes the messenger god Hermes. The poet asks herself "Why Me," that is, why am I a poet and in answer we get the poem: a description of the poet's mode but "No reason." And also in answer we get the ethos of modern poetry with its fast-paced thoughts "running." "the grey brain above" has a detached connotation and seems out-of-place and puzzling. The line "transmitting its poetry---" is stating the obvious and could perhaps be tossed. Overall, a short yet meaningful poem. 

Second, the poor:

Moon Tiger

        The moon tiger.
        In the room, here.
        It came in, it is
        prowling sleekly
        under and over
        the twin beds.
        See its small head,
        silver smooth,
        hear the pad of its
        large feet. Look,
        its white stripes
        in the light that slid
        through the jalousies.
        It is sniffing our
        clothes, its cold nose
        nudges our bodies.
        The beds are narrow,
        but I'm coming in with you.


There's enough sentimentality here to cry a river and name it the Moon Tigres. The poet is lying in bed at night watching her cat do what cats do. Her appreciation of her cat maybe worth writing a poem but is best kept between her and the cat, or the desktop and her drawer. The best we take from the poem is the poet's craft of successfully convincing the open-minded reader, for at least half the poem, that the moon tiger is actually a tiger. We learn nothing further, and learning is key to good poetry. It is why people keep picking it up again and again.

T.S.

The Insight of IMAGINATIONS, by William Carlos Williams

I finished reading today IMAGINATIONS by William Carlos Williams and wanted to sum up what I found. W.C.W. places a great amount of emphasis on the imagination, which powers knowledge and intelligence. Poetry works with the imagination, science knowledge and philosophy intelligence. Found in Williams's prose is explanation of this and in his poetry, examples. The prose passages below are taken from "Spring and All".

"It is the imagination on which reality rides---It is the imagination---It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization."

I believe that here he is defining the separation between mind and body. He goes on:

"It is for this reason that I've always placed art first and esteemed it over science---in spite of everything."

Dr. Williams practiced medicine professionally for decades while writing prolifically published work. This circumstance gave him extraordinary insight to an unique matter. He further explains:

"Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality---Poetry"

"The force" here is refered to the imagination. Taking facts and putting them into play is art, and Williams's medium is poetry. He also acknowledges in "Spring and All" the importance of the other artistic mediums painting, scuplturing and music. Science and philosphy are very enlightening, but what of it if it be stagnat, still? The next excerpt is personal to me:

"In other times---men counted it a tragedy to be dislocated from sense---Today boys are sent with dullest faith to technical schools of all sorts---broken, bruised"

Ill prepared, I dropped out of tech college my sophmore year. In my twenites I experienced a decade-long torrent of constant explosive emotions. I later went back to college to earn a degree in the Arts in order to control them, lest I wrecked my life. I am an engineering technicaian now, and my unique experiences with the Arts and Sciences have come full circle, and therefore Williams's work interests me greatly. He speaks further on modern boys:

"few escape whole---slaughter. This is not civilization but stupidity---Before entering knowledge the integrity of the imagination---"

I believe what he is talking about here is a student's head being view as an empty vessel to be filled with factual knowledge without the experience to move it. This touches on the idea of craft versus art. As a young man, my manual drafting skills could draw any classical facade in three dimensions yet fail to light upon the acanthas leaves of Corinthian columns, everlasting life.

Catholic Humanity

While reading William Carlos Williams's Imaginations a parallel of Catholic humanity struck me between his piece of criticism of James Joyce's style and Carl Jung's addressing the Holy Ghost of Protestantism in Answer to Job. Here Williams and Jung are quoted, repectively:

"Joyce is to be discovered a catholic in his style then in something because of its divine humanity. Down, down it goes from priesthood into the slime as the church goes. The Catholic Church has always been unclean in its fingers and aloof in the head. Joyce's style consonant with this has nowhere the inhumanity of the scientific or protestant or pagan essayist. There is nowhere the coldly dressed formal language, the correct collar of such gentlemen seeking perhaps an English reputation."

"It[Protestantism] is obviously out of touch with the tremendous archetypal happenings in the psyche of the individual and the masses, and with the symbols which are intended to compensate the truly apocalyptic world situation today. It seems to have succumbed to a species of rationalistic historicism and to have lost any understanding of the Holy Ghost who works in the hidden places of the soul. It can therefore neither understand nor admit a further revalation of the divine drama."

They are both making point that Catholicism approaches the spirit or soul with humanity than Protestantism and irreligious. Williams says this to at least artistic thinking while Jung points out this to at least ethics. However, the commonality here is that Protestants and the irreligous use science to kind of THINK their way through the human soul rather than to FEEL their way through, and to support their way of thinking systematically with historical facts by deduced theory rather than feeling sporadically what they know to be right and true, that is, that faith is more rooted in the heart than in the mind. THINKING your way is a typical old-style German ethos drawn from perhaps the historicly rich German philosphers. It is drab yet rational, like an inornate yet tasteful Luthern church in the Midwest.

T.S.

Threshold in Malcolm Gladwell's BLINK

A lie can really probe the conscious. Whether we actually know that we are lying or not is where ignorance and intelligence separate and a threshold exists. Yes, we can figure out a level of ignorance from reading Malcolm Gladwell's blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Simply, intelligence is to know something and ignorance is not to know something, and where the threshold lies between the two varies. Gladwell finds a threshold in a group of people but doesn't acknowledge it as being a tilting point for ignorance/intelligence, rather he points out that the threshold is simply an undetected sense operating at the unconscious level. But if you read the experiment below one will find that the only unconscious thing happening here is the people not realizing that they are lying.

While attempting to explain the subconscious to the layman, Gladwell confuses the subconscious for bold ignorance in chapter two "The Locked Door" where he cites a psychological experiment to support his argument that the subconscious drives intuitive thinking:

"Many years ago, the psychologist Norman R. F. Maier hung two long ropes from the ceiling of a room that was filled with all kinds of different tools, objects, and furniture. The ropes were far enough apart that if you held the end of one rope, you couldn't get close enough to grab hold of the other rope. Everyone who came into the room was asked the same question: How many different ways can you come up with for tying the ends of those two ropes together? There are four possible solutions to this problem. One is to stretch one rope as far as possible toward the other, anchor it to an object, such as a chair, and then go and get the second rope. Another is to take a third length, such as an extensaha! and came up with the pendulum solution. But when Maier asked all those people to describe how they figured it out, only one of them gave the right reason. As Maier wrote: 'They made such statements as: "It just dawned on me"; "It was the only thing left"; "I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it"; "Perhaps a course in physics suggested it to me"; "I tried to think of a way to get the cord over here, and the only way was to make it swing over." A professor of Psychology reported as follows: "Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees.; The idea appeared simultaneously with the solutions. The idea appeared complete."
ion cord, and tie it to the end of one or the ropes so that it will be long enough to reach the other rope. A third strategy is to grab one rope in one hand and use an implement, such as a long pole, to pull the other rope toward you. What Maier found is that most people figured out those three solutions pretty easily. But the fourth solution---to swing one rope back and forth like pendulum and then grab hold of the other rope---occurred to only a few people. The rest were stumped. Maier let them sit and stew for ten minutes and then, without saying anything, he walked across the room toward the window and casually brushed one of the ropes, setting it in motion back and forth. Sure enough, after he did that, most people suddenly said

"Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It's just that Maier's hint was so subtle that it was picked up on only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier's subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one." 

If Maier's subjects weren't lying, then it is because they are unaware or unconscious of the fact that Maier simply gave the answer away. The subjects claimed (passively) that swinging the rope was their original idea and therefore forego any credit to Maier. Yet Gladwell suggests that the subjects "picked up on" the swinging rope on "an unconscious level." Unconscious by Gladwell is correct, that is, not knowing where the idea came from; but it is not from the subconscious which Gladwell insists. Un- meaning not and sub- meaning under, conscious or aware of where the swinging rope came from, the subjects didn't know and thus it renders them ignorant. Adding insult to injury is each subject taking credit for the idea suggested by Maier. 

There is no way to definitely determine what goes on inside a person's subconscious, especially from a second person point-of-view. The only thing perhaps generated and exhibited by a subconscious here is each subject's ability to create an unwarranted explanation as to how they came up with the idea. (This is a fascinating subject worth exploring alone). But because they were able to create an explanation on their own, using their imagination, each subject proved that they knew what they were comprehending and therefore chose to lie. Had any one of the subjects simply said "The idea hit me when psychologist Maier brushed the rope into a swing" and gave credit where credit was due, then, and only then, do we know that the subjects are not lying. 

To put it short: either the subjects were ignorant of their lying or they lied intentionally or arrogantly. Every instance of deviance from rational thought can be classified as either ignorance or arrogance. The difference is whether the person actually knows, and where that knowing lands is the threshold.