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[J. D. McClatchy]

INTRO

A Critical is a combination article/critique/interview/conversation.  It’s intended to be a dynamic exchange between questioner and author, where through mutual exploration a better, richer understanding  of the author’s art can evolve.  The point of departure often will be one poem the maker has chosen for me to analyze. I bother to invent the new form “Critical” because I want from the beginning for the interview not to be a typical interview, where the author is running about in a maze of questions as simply a test subject for the interviewer and the public at large.  I’d like for the Critical to be intrinsically engaging and beneficial for the two involved as well—critical in the sense of crucial as well as critique. 

I hope this will involve honest modesty not only between the author and me, but before the Art of Poetry itself, which should humble us all.  I think in general I’m a good reader, but I certainly make mistakes and want to be corrected on them.  In general, authors have been very pleased with my struggles to understand their work.  Peter Davison told me that I saw things in his poetry he thought would never be seen outside his own office.  In a FAQ in the future, I’ll offer tips on how to approach a poem, how to help a poem to release its complex perfumes, how to take in their essential nature of scents and sense. 

Poems are complex living organisms. (When Emily Dickinson presented a selection of poems to an editor, she wanted to know if they “breathed.”)  Well, they do if a sensitive reader admits them.  Almost as if the author provides one lung and the reader another.

As Galway Kinnell says in a collection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs,

It is a modern assumption that there is a key to every poem and the author has it.  The trouble is that I don’t believe this.  I happen to think that the author may be the last one to know what his work is about.  I’ve often noticed that the more I like a poem I’ve written, the less sure I am that I can explicate it.

I also believe the poet is not always the best judge.  In Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” the two philosopher critics argued that the author’s intentions can never be truly fathomed.  The author may lie, for instance, in order to put his work in the best light or for camouflage.  Or the author might create directly out of the fertile subconscious, not aware fully what is happening.  My hunch is this is usually what happens.  Then an interviewer comes along with a satchel of windy questions and the poet has no clue how to answer them.  So we make things up.  As Marvin Bell delightfully said, “We poets pretend to know a lot more than we actually do.”

The job of the creator is to create, not to explain. 

Daniel Dennett, in his fine work, Consciousness Explained, posited a Multiple Drafts model of consciousness.  There’s really no such thing as a singular consciousness, a homunculus hunched in the pituitary gland, for instance, as Descartes would have it, but a multiple weave of thought processes that explore multiple countries in the brain, where our Uncle Charlie lived, what a plum tastes like, or a date, and how we smashed blueberries in our hands one summer afternoon, or how we mispronounced spectator one day and were ashamed.  The We, the conscious I, has no idea this is going on, except for the residues in our poems.

A poem is the finest distillation of who we really are. 

It’s an art to bring a poem into the light of common day understanding.  It’s always unfair to the vast untranslatable life of the poem itself, but can serve its function of guiding the reader a little closer. As John Ciardi warned:  never mistake the analysis for the poem itself.  It’s only a way back into the poem.

When I write a poem I have no idea what I’m doing. Sometimes there’s a ghostly awareness, but no more than that.  It’s only when I return to the real world of everyday thinking that I can be more analytical. 

I was chatting with T. Coraghessan Boyle at a function to honor the Antioch Review and mentioned that I was impressed with his meaningful use of names in his short story “Hope Rise.”  “For instance,” I said, “The amphibian expert Wassersug is obviously derived from Wasser, German for water, but less obviously from sug, a species of fish-louse parasite, according to the OED.”  He pulled out a pad and started taking notes.  Laughing, we both agreed that even when an author doesn’t intend something, we should always claim we do. 

My funniest experience with this was in a classroom critique of a first draft of my novel in verse.  The main character is drunk to the point of fantasizing a golden ship floating and wobbling on the smoke of a bar, The Mary Celeste.  Still mourning and guilty after his pregnant wife’s death in a train accident, he’s slurring and orders a “Harpy Wallbanger.”  Most of the class thought this was brilliant, not only illustrating his marred speech patterns, but activating a subtle reference to the loathsome harpies of Greco-Roman myth who extract vengeance on the Thracian king Phineus for his ill-treatment of his children.  One of the brighter explicators, who’d obviously had a class in Greek mythology recently, leaned back in his chair and explained that originally the Harpies were tomb figures and were possibly conceived of as ghosts.  AND they were wind spirits and since the title of my novel’s The Color of the Wind . . .  I interrupted them finally and said, “Folks!  It was a typo.”  Now, did my subconscious intend this?  I don’t know, but I’d like to think so. 

Then there’s the case of works of art where the conscious mind conducts and seems fully in control.  Valdimir Nabokov scoffed at the notion of his characters taking over and dictating the course of the novel:

My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel which I dislike; and anyway it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

Nabokov often liked to prick interviewer’s expectations and perversely pretend ignorance of literary devices in his work.  Once he quipped:

During my years of teaching literature at Cornell and elsewhere I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience [elsewhere he speaks of the precision] of poetry. As an artist and scholar I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam.

But this doesn’t mean there are no such things as symbols.  Look how the last sentence progresses from abstractions to concretions, which serve, in a secondary way of course, as symbols!  Delicious!  This is an author in complete command of his resources who knows exactly what he’s doing.

What treacherous waters are the waters of interpretation.  What bare-foot boys are we who wade into its sharky waters. And we risk losing all our toes more frequently than we do hauling the prize of true enlightenment back to the shore.  Here, I’ll attempt it.  With what success, you may decide for yourself.