Three versions of a paragraph

In my Intensive Composition course this morning, I gave the students an exercise that I took from Thomas Basbøll: they had 27 minutes to write one paragraph of no more than 200 words on a passage of their choice from Simon Armitage's poem "The Shout" (video below):

We went out

into the school yard together, me and the boy

whose name and face

I don't remember. We were testing the range

of the human voice:

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm

from across the divide to signal back

that the sound had carried.

He called from over the park — I lifted an arm.

Out of bounds,

he yelled from the end of the road,

from the foot of the hill,

from beyond the look-out post of Fretwell's Farm —

I lifted an arm.

He left town, went on to be twenty years dead

with a gunshot hole

in the roof of his mouth, in Western Australia.

Boy with the name and face I don't remember,

you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you.

The Universal Home Doctor, 2002

(The poem is also the title poem of Armitage's American selected poems from 2005)

I did the exercise myself, too. The first time I tried this exercise in November, we were working on Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," and I had enough time in the 27 minutes to do three versions (see below). This time I was able to do three versions as well.

One feature of the development of the versions is how they begin. The first begins with a descriptive introduction to the passage, but the second and the third take material from the end of the first and second versions, respectively, and use that material to introduce the passage more analytically than descriptively. I have not edited the versions beyond what I wrote in those 27 minutes.

Version 1
In the experiment described in "The Shout", two boys take advantage of the difference between the speed of sound and speed of light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

If the signals (a shout and a gesture; one acoustic, the other visual) that the two boys pass to each other both reach their destination, then the two boys are still within "range / of the human voice" from each other. Since sound is significantly slower than light, the shout will take more time to reach the other boy than the gesture will. The sound "carries," but the arm signal "carries" even faster. The experiment depends on this distinction to work: if at some point the shouting boy cannot be heard anymore, then the two boys will still be in sight of each other. They expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they expect "the range / of the human voice" to be less than the range of human vision.

Version 2

In the experiment, two boys take advantage of the difference between the speeds of sound and light to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

There are two signals here: not only the shout but also the speaker's gesture in return. The former is acoustic, the latter visual. As long as these signals both reach their destination, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". As sound is slower than light, the shout takes more time to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other; that is, they implicitly assume that "the range / of the human voice" is less than the range of human vision, while also assuming that the voice's range is best measured by shouting.

Version 3

The experiment the two boys devise depends on an implicit assumption: that the loudest voice possible is necessary to "test the range / of the human voice":

he had to shout for all he was worth,

I had to raise an arm
from across the divide to signal back
that the sound had carried.

But there are two signals here, one loud and one silent: not only the shout (a matter of sound), but also the speaker's gesture in return (a matter of vision). As long as these signals both reach their recipients, the two boys are still within "the range / of the human voice". Sound is slower than light, so the shout takes longer to "carry" than the gesture, even though the boy shouts as loud as he can ("for all he was worth"). The sound "carries," but the gesture "carries" faster. The experiment depends on this distinction: the two boys expect the "divide" to always be small enough for them to still see each other. That is, they not only assume that shouting will measure the voice's range, but also expect that range to be less than the range of human vision.

*

In the course of the semester, I'll be doing this exercise with the students six more times, on poems by Adrienne Rich, Rob A. Mackenzie, Katy Evans-Bush, Andrea Cohen, Don Paterson, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Here's Armitage reading "The Shout":



*

And here are the three versions of the Dickinson paragraph (as I wrote them in November, without further editing):


Version 1
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker pass by as they ride along in Death's "Carriage":

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age (in this, it is reminiscent of the riddle of the Sphinx). The stages of life are bound together with the anaphora of "We passed" that begins the first, third, and fourth lines; the phrase is used transitively here, but its repetition opens up the possibility of reading it intransitively as a euphemism for death as well: "we passed" in the sense of "we died." This play of the transitive and intransitive is mirrored in the enjambment of the phrase containing the verb "strove" between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, the children's "striving" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of both play ("At Recess") and struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Thus, the two verbs in the stanza, "passed" and "strove," are both made ambiguous by the poem's form: "passed" refers to both death and the passage of life; "strove" refers to both work and play.

*
Version 2
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" describes the scenery that Death and the speaker see as they ride along in Death's "Carriage." The stanza contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated at the beginning of lines one, three, and four) and "strove," which is emphasized by its enjambed position at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" follows the course of human life from childhood to adulthood to old age; the anaphora links those stages while also drawing attention to the isolated phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself. Thus, the anaphora connects the passage of human life and the passing of human life into one figure of "riding with Death." This formal construction of an ambiguity is repeated in the enjambment between the first and second lines of the stanza: read by itself, "Children strove" points toward their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" is now a matter of play ("At Recess") as well as playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Just as "passed" refers to both death and the course of life, "strove" refers to both work and play—and both of these ambiguities are created by the poem's form.

*
Version 3
The third stanza of "Because I could not stop for Death" contains only two verbs, "passed" (anaphorically repeated in lines one, three, and four) and "strove," in an enjambment at the end of line 1:

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

From the "School" to the "Fields" to the "Setting Sun," the scene "we pass" figures human life from childhood to adulthood to old age. The anaphora links those stages while also isolating the phrase "we passed" as a euphemism for death itself; the passing of human life is thus contained in the passage of human life. The enjambment with "strove" repeats this formal construction of an ambiguity: read by itself at the end of the first line, "Children strove" refers to their efforts to learn at school; read with the next line, the "striving" becomes a matter of play ("At Recess") and of playful struggle (the wrestling implied by "in the Ring"). Again, one perspective is embedded in another, contradictory perspective; here, the striving of work is contained in the striving of childhood play.

The Sixth Daily Poem Project, Week Six Call for Votes

THE SIXTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK SIX

Here are the poems to vote for in the sixth week of the sixth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 5, to Sunday, April 11):

April 11: A Fisheries Scientist And His Father, The Preacher, Gather Salmon , by Peter Munro
April 10: The Burthen of the Mystery Indeed, by Maurice Manning
April 9: Returning to the Land of 1,000 Dances, by Sandra Beasley
April 8: Fifth Avenue in Early Spring, by Philip Schultz (vote only on the first poem)
April 7: The Hereafter, by Andrew Hudgins
April 6: Winter's Tale, by Maxine Kumin
April 5: The Rain at Sea, by Don Paterson

HOW TO VOTE: You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog (or as a comment to my Facebook link to this call for votes). If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments on my blog). If you want to vote anonymously, that's okay, but please choose some sort of pseudonym so I can keep track of different votes by anonymous voters. I will post comments as they come in.

Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SATURDAY, APRIL 17! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results (which I will do by Sunday, April 18, at the latest).

Feel free to pass on this call for votes to anyone who might be interested!

The winner of week one was Trick, by Sam Willetts.
The winner of week two was Ecclesiastes, by Khaled Mattawa.
The winner of week three was To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage, by Eduardo C. Corral.
The winner of week four was In the Men's Room at the Café Provence, by F. D. Reeve.
The winner of week five was The Bus Driver, by Hédi Kaddour, tr. Marilyn Hacker.

Phantom

In this passage from Don Paterson's "Phantom" (from his collection Rain), the "it" at the beginning refers to "matter":

It made an eye to look at its fine home,
but there, within its home, it saw its death;
and so it made a self to look at death,
but then within the self it saw its death;
and so it made a soul to look at self,
but then within the soul it saw its death;
and so it made a god to look at soul,
and god could not see death within the soul,
for god was death. In making death its god
the eye had lost its home in finding it.
We find this everywhere the eye appears.
Were this design, this would have been the flaw. (57)

For proponents of "intelligent design," the eye is evidence of design in nature; they argue that the eye's "irreducible complexity" is proof that it cannot be the product of a process of natural selection of random mutations. This passage from Paterson, then, provides both a narrative of the evolution of religious belief (eye-home-self-soul-god; a sequence motivated by the eye's awareness of death) and a critique of intelligent design: "Were this design ..." The eye is not evidence of design but counterevidence. (Before I go on about the poem, I should add that the eye is a bad example as evidence of "intelligent design": the evolutionary steps that lead to the eye are well-documented.)

Now the fact that this argument or narrative appears in a poem (and not an essay) is enough to make its claims a little bit unstable; claims made in literary texts are of a different order than those made in scientific or philosophical texts (Literary Theory 101). But this passage is rendered even more unstable than usual by the context it appears in: it is the third of three italicized stanzas that conclude the sixth section of Paterson's seven-part "Phantom." The first stanza of the section introduces the speaker of the italicized material (I am italicizing this because that's what I do with quotations in blog posts):

For one whole year, when I lay down, the eye
looked through my mind uninterruptedly
and I knew a peace like nothing breathing should.
I was the no one that I was in the dark womb.
One night when I was lying in dark meditation
the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not spoke to me
in silence from its black and ashless blaze
in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet.
It had lost his lightness and his gentleness
and took on that plain cadence he would use
when he read out from the Iliad or the Táin. (56)

In the poem's overall arc, then, the passage I began with is spoken by "the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not" "in the voice of Michael Donaghy" to the speaker of the whole sequence. Donaghy's voice continues to speak in the poem's next (and final) section, where that voice refers to the poem's overall speaker as "Donno." Thus, the poem's conceit is that the italicized passages are spoken by a version of God (not "I Am That I Am" but "I Am That I Am Not") in the voice of a deceased poet (Donaghy) to the poet who is writing the poem ("Donno," presumably meant to be Paterson himself, in spite of Literary Theory 101).

Beyond that, the passage I began with is dismissed both by the voice of Donaghy and by "Donno." Donaghy's voice begins the final section by saying, "Donno, I can't keep this bullshit up" (58). And after the italics have gone on for another two pages, "Donno" interrupts the speech (again, these italics are mine, to mark the quotation):

He went on with his speech, but soon the eye
had turned on him once more, and I'd no wish
to hear him take that tone with me again. (59)

Thus, the wonderful passage on the eye's metaphorical evolution into a godhead is implicitly called into question (or even repudiated) in at least three ways: first, it is spoken by a godlike figure, the "I-Am-That-I-Am-Not," who, in keeping with the negation in his name, denies himself while also asserting himself at the same time (in the "I Am" and in the very presence of his words). Secondly, the voice of Donaghy dismisses the eye passage as "bullshit." Finally, "Donno" refuses to listen further when Donaghy's voice returns to that tone later in his speech.

As a result, the poem cannot be reduced to a contribution to a critique of intelligent design. Instead, it presents an expository argument in a context that allows it to be fully developed in an extended conceit, while also not allowing the argument to take over the poem. I love that poetic negation of intelligent design, but I also have to finally admit that what makes the poem compelling is not this vivid, rhetorically powerful passage but how it problematizes its own power by framing the passage so intriguingly. As an evolutionist, I want that argument to be made, but as a reader of poetry, I revel in how that argument becomes one facet of the whole poem's exploration (not resolution) of the issues it raises.

Two Trees

"Two Trees," the first poem in Don Paterson's Rain, begins with a stanza describing how one Don Miguel grafts an orange tree and a lemon tree together. Then, in a second stanza, "the man who bought the house" splits the two grafted trees apart. A series of negatives follows, climaxing with how the two separated trees did not "strain ... to face / the other's empty, intricate embrace." The poem the explains these negations in the couplet that concludes the second stanza and, with it, the poem itself:

They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

If that's the case, then the attraction of this poem lies not in how it extends a potential metaphor for the reader to play around with, but rather in how it teases the reader by apparently offering an extended metaphor before taking it back. This is not the expansion of the usual extended metaphor, which seems to offer such a tremendous range of interpretations, all of them plausible—with the pleasure lying in the poem's surplus of possibilities. Instead, this poem's effect is a matter of diminuition, a playful retreat from the extravagance and excess of extended metaphor (while still partaking of the pleasures of that excess before retreating from them).

TWO TREES

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides, and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Miguel's patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled roots to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

The Sensation of Writing

George Szirtes has some interesting thoughts on the "sensation of writing" (partly in response to Don Paterson's essay on "the lyric principle" in the latest Poetry Review). At the end of his post, GS writes:

"I would like to open this line of thought to others and invite any poets reading this to send me their account of the sensation of writing. Keep it honest, keep it simple. As simple as it will go, at any rate."

So I thought I'd spread the word on GS's interesting call for ideas.

Here's my take on it, at least today's. It involves three quotations:

1. In a profile in the New Yorker back in the 1990s, David Mamet said something like this: "Writing is the only thing that stops the thinking, you know. It's the only way to turn off all that dreadful noise in there." I've always loved that line, as it perfectly captures one sensation I have when writing: that it fully occupies my otherwise utterly restless mind, turning off even the almost endless musical soundtrack that plays in the back of my head (picking up on whatever I happen to have heard most recently, whether it be the music of a commercial, the theme song to a children's program I watched with my kids, or Thelonious Monk). [If anybody who reads this has the complete New Yorker in electronic form, can you try to find that profile of Mamet for me and check his precise words?)

2. One of my touchstones for a long time has been Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I": "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." I recognize myself less in my own writing than in the writing of others (as all these quotations suggest), but in the act of writing, there is even a third person present: not the one who will later have written, and not the name that attaches itself to what that one will later have written, but the one who is writing. The one whose mind is quiet?

3. In Anna Karenina, Levin mows: "The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when it was not his arms which swung the scythe but the scythe which seemed to mow of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, as though by magic, without a thought being given to it, the work did itself regularly and carefully. Those were the most blessed moments." The "most blessed moments" in creative work are those moments when the mind is quiet, the self disappears, and the work does itself, "regularly and carefully."

Okay, I did not "keep it simple," George, but it is honest! :-)

Addendum:

And then there is the sensation of not-writing, or between-writing:

AFTERMATH

Another journey underway,
the painter on the foredeck of
the overloaded ferryboat
sees, past the sea wall and out
over the straits, the aftermath
of sunlight from behind the clouds,
a brighter form of rain. The harbor
opposite moves from blur into focus
as the ferry moves, its wake
first spray in the painter's face.
Light and cloud and mist: what is
to be captured on canvas. He'll hold
the brush in the air the way the ship,
sailing without a sail, hangs
before it falls again down on
the waves. Behind him, every stroke
he's ever painted; the unpainted
before him, this passage from one harbor
to another, the ferry rolling,
with every breaker, deeper down
in what is, what will have been.

(The Reader 16; Cabinet d'Amateur)