How the Lines Enchant

A metaphrastic recasts prose as poetry, or vice versa. My novel, Pianist Lost, is a metaphrastic. Meaning is protected in the transition between forms.

Language is a struggle between the unspoken and the well-spoken, between the authentic and the overblown, between the stretched metaphor and the simplistic equivalence, between the prosaic and the poetaster, the rhymester, between the acclaimed philistine and the unnoticed word boy.

Nothing is more successful at communication than “Love Me Tender” or “What a Wonderful World,” “Summer Lovin’” or “Love Love Me Do.” On the other hand, Auden’s “Lullaby,” “Lay your sleeping head, my love, on my faithless arm,” Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Frost’s “Birches” address broader facets of the human mind and heart.

Lovers in their small winter cabins have their own rhythms, their own daily transitions between language that is commendably aspirational and everyday clichés that fall short of lifelong enormities. Love may be celebrated by routines, but lovers are puppets of more cosmic strings that infuse the diurnal with the transcendent, even if casual photos don’t reveal the immeasurable synapses.

Modern poetry wants to masquerade as colloquial, while squirrelling away deeper codes, the holograms and broken fragments of half-forgotten rhymes that transfigured our youth, that attracted us to poetry in the first place.

Poetry struggles to be relevant but also recidivist, immortal longings hidden under throw pillows. I hope for methexis, reading between the lines, the metaphrastic vivisection where the message happens as the sun transitions to the green flash in the back of the eye, as Goethe used to paint pictures whose intent was to create a complementary coloration on the retina, or as composers write music beyond our hearing on a synthesizer which creates a hearable piece from its undertones. Words or pictures that are hors de combat, which are always there if you want to look for them, but otherwise remain discreetly in the offing, just below the horizon.

Cathy says of this poem: Words suggest meanings more than meanings suggest words.

Poems for me start with inarticulate feelings, which I try to surround with a comfortable quilt of words, words which vaguely surmise, surview, guess at what I feel. Gradually I assemble this bouillabaisse into a collage which stumbles towards feelings, and then I eliminate any outliers which might disrupt those feelings. Then I see if any logic, order, sense might be salvaged from my assemblage, so the shell of the beast might be attractive, the way decorator crabs fit themselves out with deep sea found art. As long as my gewgaws don’t detract from the feeling, I keep them. Attempts to crowd meaning into the poem always feel alien.

My Jesuitical training (the Salesian Order was also complicit) at Stepinac High School made me want each poem, when I was younger, to have a moral, to rush to a conclusion. I gradually broke away from that, in an attempt to service the core sensations which were the true catalysts for it.

I had met Fulton J. Sheen when I recited his essay, “The Thunder of Trappist Silence,” to him from memory.

I read his meditations, as well as those of Juan de la Cruz, whose Noche Obscura, the dark night of the soul, described my own confrontations with belief, and tied in with Nabokov’s Camera Obscura (published as Laughter in the Dark in the States), and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, his meditation on time, meditation, and loss. While Nabokov probed wittily and perversely into the dark underside of the butterfly’s wing, Barthes was much darker in discussing photography and how it related to the bright upper side of the wing. Both Barthes and Nabokov discussed the irony of seeing the world through reflections, which led to my own reflection photos, which seemed more accurate than straight-on views of things.

Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
- Pale Fire, lines 7 - 12

Memory jumbles up objects, as does poetry, so reflections had the aleatory, random disorder that suited my thoughts: I didn’t have time to organize them into an Augustinian afterthought.

I was also influenced by Joanathan Miller’s book, On Reflection. Miller was a medical doctor, but also organized museum shows on photography and was a member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy group, who continued British humor after Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Neddy Secombe in The Goon Show. I have to mention Peter Sellers’ What’s New Pussycat?, Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow, and Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom, by Charles Beauclerk, as the bookends of my education.

Evening in the Palace of Reason, by James R. Gaines, helped me understand the transition between the theocracy of J. S. Bach and the Enlightenment of reason represented by Frederick the Great. The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams, discusses how the myths of the urban-rural divide and the city as a capitalist “dark mirror,” the place of lost innocence, were perpetuated by the novels, poetry, and essays of English writers, especially Dickens and Hardy.

Other meditations which drew me to the poetry of belief were the mysticism of St. Teresa of Avila. Her “ecstatic consciousness” is just the half-awake drugged trance in which I often write, although I have to fight off my tendencies to too much lucidity. Both Augustine of Hippo and Saint Augustine found their way to goodness through what Donne calls “the seven sleepers’ den.”

I knew Francis Cardinal Spellman through my grandfather, who was made a papal knight by him for his work building churches, rectories, and schools for the Catholic Diocese of New York. My grandfather asked Cardinal Spellman if I could study organ with Charles Courboin, then the organist of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Courboin adopted me as his assistant, and let me play occasional Sunday masses on the big organ, whose bellows had to be pumped by another assistant, resulting in a delay between pushing the keys and hearing what you’d created. If you fudged a note, you wouldn’t know it for a second or two. I was a sloppy player, but my sins were written in the sky by that organ, which was replaced several years afterwards. The new organ no doubt had to be reconsecrated after my desecrations with the old one.

St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer was my mantra since I was seven:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace:
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;…

Now that we are spending time in the Crete Senesi just below Siena, I feel I’ve returned to the mysticism of St. Catherine of Siena and The Dialogue of Divine Providence as well.

So I hope there is a mystic tradition behind my writing. Writing worships the world, and the forces that create it and keep it in existence. Scientific discoveries add to the meditations of the early astronomers; the musica celestis of Pythagoras underlies my music as well as my concept of the universe: we are creatures of frequency.

Cathy on this poem:

[My wife Cathy has been my major and only critic, helper, and co-creator throughout the life of all of my poems. Her sensibility partially overrides my juvenilia.]

Cathy: So much of this has multiple meanings: geologic and historic marking on the earth, but the poet’s marking on the paper. The text and the poet’s markings act in parallel in a very unstated way.

That gives me the chance to fill in those blanks between the two metaphors, between the writer and the earth, between the vision of the past through the poet’s mind, through the poet’s words.

What is the actual past? This is a poem, so every image of the earth, the lines, the historic, geologic and human interventions in the earth are being captured by the very poet who is drawing me into this powerful metaphor where the written word and the story of history become both merged and in dialogue with each other, and then I’m in that story, because I’m that reader who has been captured by this particular poem and has been asked to believe its story as it plays with those senses of reality.

The poet wakes in the “incandescent rage” which is dawn. The poet wakes; but who has been telling us this whole story but the poet? The poem turns on itself in a way that’s very Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The words and the meaning are an eternal circle of the creation of meaning; neither one is going to bow to the other; they feed each other, time after time.

The way I envision Peter’s brain, it’s so crowded with words and meanings and the subtle parts of words that are attached to other words and their meanings, some in clear and major ways, others, not, and some through sound—it’s like one of those refrigerator magnet things where all the word are there and they have wonderful electric pulses that go between them.

Thinking about Merrill’s poem “Nightgown”—he uses very deep logic to reach emotion. I think what Peter does, he uses the richness of all of the language that sits in his mind so naturally to come together like a pointillist painter would use color, to come together in his almost atomic way. The words become atomized, and then they recreate the story, the sensation, the emotion, the logic, because of their incredible power inside Peter’s mind.