Here is some of the greatest, most practical advice I’ve heard on how to start reading poetry: “A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A.”
These lines come from Robert Frost’s brief essay “The Prerequisites,” on first encountering and not understanding — not fully — an Emerson poem. Some 50 years later, “the poem turned up again” and lo, it made more sense, “all but two lines of it.” The working and thinking we do in a lifetime equips us, but even toward the end of life, we’ll never be perfectly equipped, so we might as well get comfortable with partial understanding.
The worldview this suggests is as freeing as believing in fate. It teaches trust and patience, since any poem has things to show us about the others. My A, B, C and D will be different from yours, so there’s an element of chance in the sequence — an opportunity for luck. Recently, reading “Some Lines Written in Clare Priory Yard,” by G.C. Waldrep, I recognized a Heidegger reference: “I am,/in these moments, at the center of the world worlding.” I might have passed right over it — or registered only the vague sense of déjà vu that is common while reading, as there are only so many words available for wording — had I not just been reading Srikanth Reddy’s “The Unsignificant,” which includes, in a lecture on wonder, this quote from Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things that are at hand. … The world worlds.”
In Frostian reading, serendipitous coincidence cannot be avoided. Charles Wright once wrote of Ezra Pound: “I remember how it began for me with ‘The Cantos.’ It was one word, dodici.” This word, the Italian for 12, in the first of Pound’s cantos he read, referred to a well-known restaurant in Verona, where Wright was living at the time. “If I can understand this one,” he thought, “maybe the others can be tracked down too.” These are necessary moments in a reader’s education, where dumb luck makes us smarter — it outsmarts erudition.
According to the scholar Earl Miner, “The test for [allusion] is that it is a phenomenon some reader or readers may fail to observe.” He does not say allusion itself is a test, but the misread floats over the sentence like an optical illusion. I remember, as a student, it felt like a test, when I was reading or more properly looking at modernist poetry and understanding nothing, because I didn’t know what it would mean to understand a text like “The Waste Land” without constant recourse to the endnotes; they were annoyingly irresistible. Rather, Miner is making a distinction about intent. Allusion is, unlike intertextuality, deliberate, and, unlike plagiarism, meant to be recognized. It presumes “a community of knowledge,” a phrase I like for its fellow feeling. I like to think that people who have read the same poems — my A may be your B — are friends of a kind, across any distance, before and after death.
I’m interested in how we decide what is and isn’t deliberate in a work of art — even when the work is our own. Miner writes that “intertextuality is involuntary” — perhaps, like a twitch. An intentional reference might and possibly must contain additional layers of reference, unknown to us, forgotten or not yet discovered. I can’t think of a better example than a meme I saw many years ago, an image of a hissing cat with a text overlay reading I MYSELF AM HELL. The joke was, it’s a Lowell-cat. That’s surely Robert Lowell’s most recognizable line (from “Skunk Hour”), but he added only the “I.” The rest is straight from “Paradise Lost.”
Waldrep’s “world worlding” is a classic allusion, of the “if you know you know” sort. Its diametrical opposite might be the epigraph, the upfront citation, not relegated to footnote or endnote and often in italics — a phenomenon no one could fail to observe. It’s more inclusive than an uncited reference, and might even feel more benevolent, a kind of blessing on the poem. But some poems can’t quite bear the weight of an epigraph, which often seems more suited to the scale of a book. A book with lots of epigraphs on individual poems can feel like a house where every interior room has an ornate door knocker.
My group chat has a recurring debate about epigraphs, and during one of its iterations, a novelist friend said that epigraphs should simply be put into the book: not as front matter, but in the book itself. I thought that was brilliant — an internal epigraph — and such a nice way to describe a move I keep seeing in contemporary poetry, a move I’ve liked every time I’ve seen it, which sits somewhere between the door knocker epigraph and the elusive uncited allusion. Here’s an example, in a poem called “Nicholson Baker & I,” from Catherine Barnett’s book “Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space”: “‘Open the second shutter/so that more light may come in,’/said Goethe on his deathbed.”
That could easily have served as an epigraph. But there, it would interrupt the flow from the title to the poem’s first stanza and sentence, which is: “At dinner I was seated next to him,/with whom I might have fallen in love/were he not married and living in Maine.” In the next stanza, Nicholson Baker asks the poet, “What’s your favorite anthology?” (Poetry may be fiction, but let’s pretend this is true.) The rest of the poem is the story of the rest of their evening, interpolated with the poet’s associations and preoccupations; her father is dying on the other coast, we learn, in the 17th stanza. We learn Goethe’s last words in the 19th. This, I feel sure, is the better time to receive them, in the poem’s own Frostian sequence.
In other iterations, the poet-persona simply mentions something they’ve read, in a humble, offhand way. Take these lines from the middle of “In the Middle of My Life,” a poem in Jennifer Chang’s recent collection “An Authentic Life”:
Writing
has no voice
because voice is a metaphor,
I know, having read “How
Poems Get Made.” Longenbach
calls it a “perceiving
sensibility” that lets us pretend.
She quotes a little more from James Longenbach’s book (“someone is talking/to us, ‘a wish/for visceral immediacy’”), then veers off for a page and a half, so that when, in the final stanza, she quotes him again, she can do it implicitly: “Do you hear that? The wish/for such visceral immediacy.” Now the voice is all her own, like Satan’s words made Lowell’s.
And like that, I share some of the poem’s knowledge, the better to read all the other poems ever written.
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