from "No One's Voice: Notes on Beauty, Language and Artistic Creation"
by Alta Ifland
“In the air, that’s where your root is,
there in the air.”
—Paul Celan
These notes are occasioned by the publication of my volume of prose poems, Voice of Ice, which could be said to belong to several esthetic traditions, the closest probably being Baudelaire’s petits poèmes en prose. Baudelaire’s prose poems are literally short stories—they have a narrative line and characters—with a moral or a twist at the end, which makes them similar to prose fables. Some might call this genre “short shorts,” an expression I personally dislike, as it casts a quantitative, prosaic dimension upon the texture of words. A “little poem in prose” is not quite the same as a “short short story.” Other poems in this collection are image-centered rather than narrative, but even in these poems the description of the gazed-upon object (whether the ocean or the sky or a fictive space) is intertwined with the reflection triggered by that image.
Reflecting Beauty
If there is an esthetic vision behind these poems it is a vision that refuses to separate reflection from beauty. This separation often manifested in contemporary poetry, which reflects the poet’s ideology, is an artificial one and is a function of where poetry originates these days: academia, the workshop or one’s room.
To put it very briefly, those who write a “reflective” poetry—usually characterized as “postmodern” or “language” poets—reject the idea of beauty as poetry’s “goal” (if such a word can be used in relation to poetry), while, on the other hand, those who write a more lyrical kind of poetry very rarely seem to reflect on the images they are describing. It is as if thinking were separated from sensual perception—insofar as beauty is something that comes from outside and is perceived with our senses (I am paraphrasing here Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty). I find this extremely puzzling, and if the subscribers to the ideology of lyricism have at least an excuse—they don’t claim to “think” but rather to “experience” (incidentally, the divorce between “thinking” and “experiencing” doesn’t exist in other esthetic traditions; to give one example: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the greatest contemporary French philosophers, who is also a poet and writer, is the author of a book on Paul Celan titled Poetry as Experience. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, authentic poetry is pensante—i.e. “reflective,” “thinking,” “philosophical”—while being at the same time an “experience” because it is lived and felt.)—I find no explanation for the subscribers to the opposite ideology. How can thinking—serious, focused, articulated thinking—even begin to take place if one cannot recognize beauty? To recognize beauty means to look at something outside of yourself—another person, an artifact or something in nature—and to be able to exclude that something from the neutral background against which it stands by conferring on it an exceptionality that the rest of the world (other persons or other objects) doesn’t have. It means to be able to focus, to look attentively and to see in a way we normally don’t when we don’t pay enough attention. It is not by accident that lovers often understand each other simply by looking at each other. Looking at an object in a way that makes it truly visible doesn’t involve just our senses, it also involves our capacity for understanding, that is, our judgment.
On the other hand, those who write poetry that attempts to be “beautiful,” either by purposefully using “poetic” language or by praising beauty, often have a naïve vision of the poetic or the beautiful, as if these were synonymous with the idea of adornment. Or else, they may describe a beautiful landscape or interior or building or even a dramatic scene, and give a mimetic representation of it, a representation that might be “beautiful” in a technical sort of way, but once you are done reading, you are often left with the feeling that something is lacking. This descriptive or image-centered kind of poetry, which is conceptually related to representational painting, can certainly be “good poetry” if, as in good paintings, it succeeds in taking you beyond the literal surface. And when it does, it is because the poet (or the painter) had a vision in his mind, an idea of the world that was consequently sublimated into a particular representation.
[continues in TrenchArt: Parapet]
Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice is available from Les Figues Press.