Eugenio Montejo / The White Workshop

From the home of Eugenio Montejo. Photo: Martha Viaña.

The White Workshop

By Eugenio Montejo
Translated by Peter Boyle

Eugenio Montejo / El taller blanco

Nowadays, anyone who feels drawn towards an apprenticeship in poetry, despite the many impediments which might dissuade them from it, whether for good or ill, can finally embark on their vocation by means of a poetry workshop. The experiment is something new among us but, as in many other cases, it can count on a large number of defenders and detractors. Though operating in a more or less identical form (i.e. the gathering together of a guide and a select dozen participants) poetry workshop can produce results as disparate as the groups of people they are made of. Much depends on the backgrounds and sensitivities of the participants, and above all, the fraternal cordial climate which can begin to develop through practice. That from the start each can distinguish their own voice in the chorus, that everyone sees the guide as persuasive interlocutor rather than hegemonic dictator, is doubtless a good point of departure. The habit of fertile discussion, the stimulus to work, mutual respect and everything which, to use an expression of Matthew Arnold’s, we could call “literary urbanity”, follow naturally from such a beginning.

For my part I don’t underestimate the usefulness of workshops, although I secretly feel skeptical about their results. I nourish the prejudice (somewhat romantic it’s true) that poetry like every art is a solitary passion. A multitude, as Simone Weil wisely advises, cannot even add up; a person needs to withdraw into solitude to execute this simple operation. For this reason maybe the title given by Schoenberg to his Memoirs strikes me as one of the most appropriate to sum up the meanderings of a life devoted to art, to any art: How to regain solitude. Only in isolation do we succeed in glimpsing the part of ourselves which is intransferible, and maybe, paradoxically, that is the only part worth communicating to others.     

I know that many would reply that in poetry, apart from innate gifts, there is the side of workmanship, strictly technical, common to other arts as to the modest labour of goldsmiths and handcraft makers. These are the so-called secrets of the trade, whose mastery is to a certain extent communicable. On the other hand, there are those who would remind me of Lautréamont´s well-known aphorism: poetry should be made by all. The vast body of folklore seems to confirm the triumph of such multiple anonymous contributions. In this process, words become polished by rolling back and forth between people, like stones in a river, and the ones which endure turn out in the end to be the ones most valued by the collective soul. All that is true, with the proviso that we don’t forget that at every instant there existed a real person, that they were never mere teams, however numerous we believe these makers to be. Yes, poetry should be made by all, but fatally written by one alone.

On the other hand, as far as there is a correspondence between poetry and an artisan’s methods of working, the secrets of the trade, that vast area which R. G. Collingwood analyses in this book The principle of art, it seems to me that it is to this field that people in a workshop can really usefully devote themselves. Given that we write in our own language, it is in this, principally, (i.e. through the creations which make up its traditions) that we can investigate the how of its intimate government; of the why and the when we can usefully learn not only in our own language but in however many other languages we master.

The word “workshop”, according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, has two accepted meanings, one concrete, the other figurative. The first refers to a place where an item of handwork is produced. The second refers to a school or scientific seminar where many people come together for common learning. The poetry workshop means both the first and the second. It is a workshop in both the literal and the figurative sense. There is an item of handwork as well as participation in a common apprenticeship. I, and those more or less of my age, never knew poetry workshops such as they exist today. We never had the fortune or misfortune of gathering together to initiate ourselves into the trade of poetry. Where, then, did we go to learn it? Others would reply, of course, with their personal stories of beginnings and influences. Personally, I have stated that I never assisted in any place where I gained the experience of this trade. That at least, because I believed it, is what I have repeated. I would like now to rectify this vain assertion. When I was a child, very much a child, I was intensely involved in one such place. I spent a lot of time in the white workshop.

It was a real workshop, just as it really was our daily bread. As a boy my father had learnt the trade of baker. He began, like any apprentice, sweeping up and lifting crates, and with the years he succeeded in becoming maestro de cuadra. Later he owned his own bakery, the workshop where I spent a large part of my infancy.  I don’t know how I could have previously overlooked what I owe for my art and my life to that room, to those men who ritually night after night would gather before the large tables to make bread. I am talking of an old bakery, the kind that doesn’t exist now, in a large house big enough to pile up wood, to store hundreds of sacks of flour and to place in position the straight trays where the massed dough slowly gained body during the night in front of the oven. These are ancient, almost medieval proceedings, slower and more complicated than those of today, but also more filled with mystic presences. The sense of progress has reduced this workshop to a small cubicle of electrical appliances where the task is simplified by mechanical means. Now there is no need for cartloads of wood with its penetrating resinous fragrance, nor is there flour piled up in numerous store rooms. Why? The oven instead of being a yawning chamber of red-hot bricks is now a high-voltage metallic rectangle. I wonder, could a boy of today learn something for his poetry in that enwalled pigsty? I don’t know. In the white workshop perhaps stayed fixed for me one of those mythic ambiences that Bachelard recreated to analyse the poetry of space. Flour is the essential substance which stores those years in my memory. Its whiteness contaminated everything: the fringe of your hair, the hands, the skin, but also things, gestures, words. Our house stood there like an igloo, the dwelling of an eskimo, under dense snow. For that reason, when years later in Paris for the first time I contemplated the quiet fall of snow, I didn’t show the usual amazement of a man of the tropics. That old friend was already known to me. I felt only a vague curiosity to verify by touch its smooth presence.

I am speaking of a real poetic apprenticeship, of techniques I still use in my nights of work, for I don’t want to weave metaphors around a simple memory. This very thing I’m saying, my nights, comes from there. The task of the bread makers was nocturnal like mine, accustomed to the late peaceful hours which make up for the oppressive heat of a midsummer day. Like them I’ve got used to the strangeness of the laborious vigil while around us everyone is asleep. And in the depths of night whiteness is doubly white. The moon is present on the walls, the wood, the tables, the caps of the workers. The learned and wise workers. There is the air of an operating theatre, the silent steps, the quick movements. It is no less than bread what is silently being made here, the bread they will ask for at dawn to take to hospitals, colleges, barracks, houses. What labour can share so much responsibility? Isn’t the same preoccupation as poetry?

The oven, which purifies all that, reddens whoever works there with its invigorating fire. Loaves of dough, once formed into a mass, are covered with a cloth and placed in large bowls like sleeping fish, until the moment comes when they are ready to be baked. How often, setting aside the first draft of a poem to revise it sometime later, I’ve felt I’m covering it myself with a cloth to decide its fate later on. And I have said nothing of those labourers, serene, serious, and tough, with their mythology of slums, of cheap liquor. Should I seek for the sacred further off in my life, paint human purity with a different face? Christ could change stones into bread, for that reason he was more like a carpenter, that beautiful workshop with its distinctive colour. For those men who never spoke to me of religion, perhaps because they were too religious, Christ was in the humility of flour and the redness of the fire that started burning at midnight.

From the white workshop I gained the sense of devotion to existence which I found so often in those masters of the nocturnal. The care due to the making of things, the brotherhood which is part of a common destiny, the search for a friendly wisdom which doesn’t lead us to lie to ourselves too much. How many times, looking at the books lined up before me, I’ve thought of the line of trays filled with bread. Can a word reach a page with more care, with more intimate attention than that given by those workers to what they produced? I would give anything sometimes to approximate to the perfect execution of their nightly workshops. To the white workshop I owe these and many other teachings which I value when I face the writing of a text.

Bread and words join in my imagination, made sacred by the same persistence. By night, sitting down in front of the empty page, I see in my lamp a halo of that ancient whiteness which has never abandoned me. I no longer see the bakers, it’s true, nor hear close by their fraternal chatter; the song of roosters is replaced by wailing sirens and the sound of taxis. The fury of the modern city has driven far away the things and the time of the white workshop. And yet the ritual of its nights survives in me. In each word I write, I feel the prolongation of the watch that gathered those humble artisans together.

Maybe if I had not been involved in its daily watches, if I had not been mixed up in the deep ceremonies of its labours, I would in any case have found something that fed my desire for poetry. The cry of Merlin would have always tempted me to follow its trail in the forest. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine where, if not there, I would have learned my word to recognise the sacred devotion of life. I jot down this last line and listen to the crackling of the wood, I watch the cloud of smoke spreading, the iconic faces coming and going through the room, the flour meticulously covering the memory of the white workshop.      

Eugenio Montejo (Caracas, 1938 - Valencia, Venezuela, 2008) was a poet, essayist, editor, and diplomat; his verse collections include: Élegos (1967); Muerte y Memoria (1972); Algunas Palabras (1976); Terredad (1978); Trópico Absoluto(1982); Alfabeto del Mundo (1986); Adiós al siglo XX (1992); Partitura de la cigarra (1999); Papiros amorosos (2002) y Fábula del escriba (2006). The majority of his essayistic work is collected in two volumes: La ventana oblicua (1974) and El taller blanco (1983). He also published many books under alternative names: El cuaderno de Blas Coll (1981);  Guitarra del horizonte (by Sergio Sandoval, 1991); El hacha de seda (by Tomás Linden; 1995); Chamario (by Eduardo Polo,  2004), and La caza del relámpago (by Lino Cervantes, 2006). Among other honors, we was awarded the National Literature Prize in 1998 and the Octavio Paz International Prize for Poetry and Essay in 2004. An important volume of critical writing has been published on his work, which boasts a significant number of re-editions, extensions, and anthological volumes in several countries and in various languages.

Peter Boyle is a Sydney-based poet and translator of poetry. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ghostspeaking which won the 2017 Kenneth Slessor Prize and was shortlisted for the Adelaide Festival Award for Poetry. A new book of poetry Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is due out in early 2019 from Vagabond Press.

As a translator of poetry from Spanish and French he has had seven books published. His translations of poetry by Eugenio Montejo, José Kozer, Marosa di Giorgio, Olga Orozco, and René Char, among others, have appeared in anthologies, magazines and journals in England, the United States and Australia. Recent books as a translator include Jasmine for Clementina Médici by Marosa di Giorgio, Three Poets from Argentina and Uruguay and Índole/Of Such A Nature by José Kozer. In 2013 Peter received the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Literary Translation. 

Peter has recently completed a Doctorate of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University, focusing on the relationship between the tradition of heteronymous poetry and poetry translation.

LALT

So the Song Remains / Cosmic Orientation and Landscape in the Poetry of Eugenio Montejo

Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo. Photo: Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza.

So the Song Remains: Cosmic Orientation and Landscape in the Poetry of Eugenio Montejo

by Luis Enrique Belmonte

Translated by Arthur Dixon

Para que el canto permanezca / Orientación cósmica y paisaje en la poesía de Eugenio Montejo

The civilizing character of the poetry of Eugenio Montejo, its constructive and binding desire, has a close relation to his cosmic vision of landscape.

Any inhabited territory becomes a cosmos. To give a territory cosmic orientation is to cosmicize it. It is impossible to civilize a territory, to imprint it with a truly human significance, if it has not been consecrated through its cosmic orientation. As Mircea Eliade says, “it is important to understand well that the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration: in organizing a space, the exemplary work of the gods is reiterated.”

Montejo’s poetry is the map of a cosmicized territory. The idea of a map leads us to the notion of spatial location, that is, to the orientatio, the active principle without which it would be impossible to inhabit a territory and provide it with a cosmic arrangement that fortifies it before chaos and separates it from the strange, homogeneous, and undifferentiated.

In order to cosmically orient ourselves, we must establish a center that serves as an intersection of four cardinal horizons. When a man pauses in his passage over empty ground and draws on the earth, with a stick, a circle around himself, establishing a fixed point, a center from which four cardinal horizons emerge, he is repeating an archaic act: the cosmicization of a territory. Another operation inherent in the cosmicization of space would be the configuration of a vertical axis or axis mundi, an opening toward the high and the low, a rupture of undifferentiated levels. In this way, the fixed center, the cardinal points, and the axis are fundamental principles in the construction of any humanized and civilized space. Cosmic orientation, order, fixedness, stability, realization.

Landscape in Montejo’s poetry is the terredad, the “earthdom,” of the world. Many have spoken of Montejian earthdom; I only wish to add that the earthdom of a space is determined by its cosmic orientation. Therefore, the earthdom of something or someone is given by its cosmicization, because earthdom is the cosmicized space. As we know, Terredad (1978) is a foundational book, a fixed “center” from which the four rivers or cardinal horizons of the Montejian map are plotted. Poetry of cosmic orientation, without a doubt, hence precisely its earthdom, a neologism coined by Montejo that, with the passage of time, will surely pass into more popular and extended use.

Through symbols, we access the cosmic dimension of our existence. Without symbolic representation and understanding, we could not grasp the experience of the cosmic. Primordial symbols of the cosmic dimension of earthly existence are: the number four (the four cardinal points, the four seasons of the year, the four ages of life, the four elements, the four kingdoms—mineral, vegetable, animal, human—the four psychic functions, etc.); the four temperaments of man; the quaternity (series of four); the square (idea of totality); the cube (the Earth); the square spiral (constructive and materialized energy); the cross (axis, ontological-spatial origin of temples and cities); the grid; the vertical monoliths (milestones, Hermes, totemic figures); or the archetype of the Father.

Montejo’s poetry accesses its cosmic orientation through certain concrete symbols of our earthdom, like the tree, the bird, the river, the lovers, the frog, the ox, Orpheus, the cassette of Orpheus, the stones, the doors, the buildings, the cock, the cicadas, the taxi, the lamp, the clock, the boats, the airplanes, the tropic, the alphabet, the palm trees. Note that, upon listing these elements, we assume that in Montejo’s poetry eartness has nothing to do with the telluric, nor with the homely, nor with the swamp. Earthdom does not exclude the foundling man, nor the city, nor the artefacts or essentials invented by civilization. Perhaps this is why, as Francisco José Cruz says, Montejo’s poetry is “demonstrable,” such that, upon entering in contact with it, we can have “certainty that we continue in the world.”

I would like to pause, as Francisco Rivera did before, on two symbols that, due to their power and efficacy, have the capacity to constellate and cosmically align the other Montejian elements. I am speaking of the tree and the bird. Both symbols, in a mysterious way, just like other more biological or tangible forms, are intimately related. The symbiotic relation between tree and bird is easily demonstrable. Trees serve as the seat of the birds, and birds spread the seeds of the trees, for example. But there is a less evident dynamism in the tree-bird relation that connects with a more mythical dimension, a point in illo tempore, at which tree and bird were united, at which sky and earth had not yet been separated.

The tree symbolizes the axis mundi, the ordering and orienting principle of what is above and what is below. In the Montejian landscape the tree has not been humanized, as many might be able to suggest upon hearing that in his poetry “the trees speak little,” or that they “spend their whole lives meditating,” or that “they come together in parks.” Instead of the humanization of the tree, the poetic operation that appears in Montejo’s poetry is the arborization of the human, such that man accesses his earthdom, his cosmic orientation, through the emotional and real connection with the tree, providing human experience with a cosmological status. The earthdom of man, therefore, does not belong exclusively to him, as it will only be cosmic if it is shared with the earthdom of the tree. Earthdom is always manifested in a we that links the human to the other natural kingdoms: stone, tree, birds, lovers. Montejo’s tree is, then, a space consecrated by its cosmic orientation, a space in which an intimate connection to the human appears, since only by virtue of human intelligence can a territory be constructed, organized, inhabited, cosmicized.

The other primordial symbol of the Montejian landscape is the bird, configured magnificently by that verse that says that the “earthdom of a bird is its song.” Because it is through song that the bird may access its cosmic orientation. The scale of sounds that is given off in the bird’s song leads us to a rupture with homogeneous space, lending it importance, establishing correspondences with other elements of the earthly and thereby founding, miraculously, its earthdom. The song links the bird to Orpheus, the frogs, the cock, the cicadas, and the men. But birds in Montejo’s landscape are not exotic, nor do they appear in a flock. They are rather solitary, fortified, foundling, city dwelling birds. If they were disbanded birds, for example, they would be more oriented toward chaos than toward the cosmos. And if they were exotic birds, it would be harder for them to blend into the surrounding space. Montejo’s birds are common birds. His favorite is the thrush, for example, although there are also sparrows, buntings, and mockingbirds, as well as other winged beings propitious for song, like crickets and cicadas, also closely tied to the tree and the forest.

Another interesting element of the Montejian bird is that its movement has a descending direction. It goes from the sky to the tree, not from the tree to the sky. Traditionally, the bird has been assimilated into myths of flight and ascension. Through the bird’s flight, man accesses a superior reality. A messenger between the sky and the earth, the ascending bird symbolizes the spiritualization of matter, its sublimation toward more elevated and indemonstrable spheres. Montejo’s bird, nonetheless, as Francisco Rivera says, “gives body and movement to a descending energy of condensation that, humble but obstinate, unites the poet with the earth.” I could add no more to what has so splendidly been said; I would only like to close with an association that could provide an additional turn of the screw in the question of landscape and that related to another of the great themes of Montejo’s poetry.

This is the ibis of the ancient Egyptians, mentioned tangentially in Montejo’s poetry and perhaps a little more strongly in his essays. The ibis is a real and mythical bird that has been linked to the Egyptian god Thoth, god of wisdom, of knowledge, of language, of writing and scribes. It is significant that the god Thoth has been represented, in ancient Egyptian art, with the body of a man and the head of an ibis, just as it is significant that the ibis comes to be manifested precisely in the head of the god Thoth, since the head is the site of human intelligence, the capacity to communicate and cosmically orient ourselves.

There are ethological theories that suggest that human language might have emerged from the imitation of birdsong. This leads us to point out the relation of the god Thot with logos, that is, with the cosmic intelligence manifested in all rational things, with the power of the mind expressed in speech, according to Plato, or with the word incarnate, hierophany or theophany, according to Christianity and other schools. Here is the alphabet of the world that concerned Montejo so much, the materialization of the spirit, the logos that descends and is imprinted upon the earth, making it more human and habitable. But the logos also has a more archaic and primitive connotation, if we consider its relation with the lunar light that illuminates the night and with the constructive principle that is actively placed before chaos and darkness. Without logos, there can be no cosmos. Montejo’s poetry is attended by the god Thoth and by logos. This is the source of its civic and civilizing character, its constructive and binding desire, its vocation of order and fixedness. To make the formless space more habitable. To remain in the earth by the song. So the song remains.

Luis Enrique Belmonte is a Venezuelan poet and prose writer. He graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela with a degree in medicine in 1996, acquired a further specialization in Clinical Psychiatry from the Universidad de los Andes in 2004, and completed complementary studies in Bioethics and History of Science in Barcelona, Spain. He has published the books Cuando me da por caracol, Cuerpo bajo lámpara, Inútil registro, Paso en falso, Salvar a los elefantes, Pasadizo: Poesía reunida 1994-2006, and Compañero paciente. His texts appear in Navegación de tres siglos, antología básica de la poesía venezolana 1826/2002 (Venezuela, 2003), El decir y el vértigo: Panorama de la poesía hispanoamericana reciente (Mexico, 2005), Una gravedad alegre: Antología de poesía hispanoamericana al siglo XXI (Spain, 2007), En-Obra: Antología de poesía venezolana (Venezuela, 2008), Cuerpo plural: Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea (Spain, 2010), Las palabras necesarias: Muestra antológica de poesía venezolana del siglo XX (Chile, 2010), and Exilios: Poesía latinoamericana del siglo XX (Venezuela, 2012). He has been awarded the Premio Fernando Paz Castillo (1996), the Premio Adonais (1998), and the Premio de la VI Bienal Mariano Picón Salas (2005). His poetry has been translated to English, Korean, German, Portuguese, and Arabic.

Arthur Dixon works as a translator and as Managing Editor of Latin American Literature Today. His translation of Andrés Felipe Solano’s “The Nameless Saints” (WLT, Sept. 2014) was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize, and his most recent project is a book-length translation of Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza’s Cuidados intensivos (see WLT, Sept. 2016).

LALT

Garrett Caples / Wittgenstein, a Memoir

Photo by Ian Crawford

Wittgenstein, a Memoir

How a teacher of philosophy turned one writer into a poet

By Garrett Caples

I came to poetry fairly late; that is, I was probably a senior in college before I could read it with anything like enthusiasm. This was a direct result of studying Wittgenstein with James Guetti, an eccentric, disgruntled professor of English at Rutgers University. Jim’s passions seemed to be gambling (horses, cards, dice), fishing, writing, and drinking. (A former football player at Amherst College, he also loved sports, but you didn’t bet on sports, because that was unsportsmanlike.) Yet somewhere along the way—after 1980, to judge by his published work—he added Wittgenstein to the mix of his obsessions, culminating in his 1993 book Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience, whose publication fortunately coincided with the period during which I studied with him. Would I have become a poet without encountering this man and, through him, Wittgenstein? I’m inclined to say no.

Wittgenstein, of course, wrote very little about literature and even less about poetry. His efforts were principally directed toward clearing up philosophical dilemmas brought about by linguistic confusions. Most often, these confusions result from misleading analogies between different meanings of the same word. This conviction is so strong throughout his later work it compels him to devote much attention to the word “meaning.” His most famous remark on the subject occurs in Philosophical Investigations:

For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
            And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.

The second half of this remark is misleading out of context, for the overall thrust of Wittgenstein’s discussion in this portion of the Investigations is against the picture of meaning as primarily a matter of names and things. Implicit here is a critique of Saussurean linguistics in making the signifier/signified model the paradigm of meaning. He’s not suggesting such a model is never an appropriate explanation of meaning, but rather that it only sometimes is. Naming is only one way we use words.

But as Guetti points out in relation to the first half of the remark quoted above, Wittgenstein’s sense of “use in the language” is more active than simply equating a name with its bearer:

It will soon become clear that “use” for Wittgenstein is a quite restrictive concept: it is “use in” specific verbal situations and exchanges and sequences, and “use” to do or to achieve something, “use” that always has consequences. It is this practical and purposive “use in the language” that becomes more and more unquestionably, as his arguments develop, the measure of meaning.
            But that observation still does not communicate the strength and even the severity of Wittgenstein’s formulation. For if “use in the language” is not, as we might initially have supposed, “all sorts of things,” then a great deal of verbal behavior—all such behavior, for example, that seems purposeless or inconsequential or, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “idling”—cannot be considered “meaningful.”

“The consequences of this exclusion,” Guetti continues, “are enormous for how we think about language, and especially for how we conceive linguistic process in literary studies.” Certainly they were for me. What Guetti writes above seems very simple, but in the context of literary studies—where interpretation of “meaning,” however defined or ill-defined, remains the prime directive—it is difficult to conceive of a more radical proposition. For it is tantamount to saying, among other things, that works of literature have no meaning; that is, the “meaning” we speak of in literature is different in kind from the meaning of a word or a sentence in the context of a purposeful, real-world exchange. In the latter, the use of words has consequences, in that it gives rise to action, whereas in literature—even literature that seeks to inspire readers to political action—words lack direct application. When we speak of “meaning” in relation to literature, we quite often mean something like “significance” or “point,” but when we speak of, say, the meaning of a line of poetry, or a phrase within a line, we mean something more like interpretation or paraphrase. And this is where confusion is liable to arise, for we can also interpret or paraphrase a meaningful expression. But the difference remains, for, absent a need for clarification, we can use a meaningful expression as is, and there are “measures of meaning” with such expressions—actions, consequences—that literature lacks.

One caveat: I should be clear that Wittgenstein doesn’t purport to have discovered the essence of meaning in any phenomenological sense. Philosophy for Wittgenstein at this point is dealing with words, not things. Yet too, he isn’t claiming to have found thereal meaning of “meaning.” Rather, he’s restricting the term for philosophical use. The active and purposeful sense of meaning is only one of the ways we use this word, and other ways of using the word aren’t incorrect. But these other uses are, again, different in kind from purposeful use, and the restriction of the word “meaning” to this latter sense is simply to avoid confusion with them.

Nonetheless, particularly in relation to poetry, Guetti’s remark struck me with the force of a revelation. Indeed, at the time, I probably did take it as something more like a phenomenological statement. But no matter: the idea of poetry as meaningless proved to be the key that unlocked the seemingly impenetrable mystery of the art. Previously, I felt “outside” of poetry; it seemed so full of meaning, but how, as a reader, could you know if you got this meaning, and how, as a writer, did you put it there? What Jim did for me was turn the problem not so much on its head as inside out. For where literary criticism tends to speak of meaning in poetry as internal, something to be “unpacked,” in Jim’s classes the poem was empty, its words reaching out to possible meanings, much as Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations during a series of remarks on “understanding”:

Hearing a word in a particular sense. How queer that there should be such a thing!
             Phrased like this, emphasized like this, heard in this way, this sentence is the first of a series in which a transition is made to thesesentences, pictures, actions.

This sounds very much like what occurs when you interpret the meaning of a line of poetry. You make a transition not to “actions,” as Jim pointed out, but definitely to “sentences” and “pictures” against whose backdrop a line of poetry might seem to take on a certain meaning. This is sometimes instructive and interesting to do, but at the same time it leads you away from the poem to other language that is not the poem. If you abandon the search for meaning, however, you’re more likely to stay with the poem, and this is the only way, finally, to learn how to understand poetry. And to “understand,” in the case of a poem, is not the same as to interpret its meaning, as Wittgenstein writes in one of his too-few remarks directly touching on poetry:

We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.)
             In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is only expressed by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)

To be sure, this remark is not limited to poetry; Wittgenstein is talking about understanding sentences generally. “Understanding a poem” here exemplifies those things we understand about sentences that specifically aren’t meanings of words, our comprehension of intonations and structures. Hence the analogy with a musical theme, which is all tones and structures without semantic values. The problem here is that our understanding of musical themes is difficult to articulate, precisely because meaning is not involved. “What is it all about?” Wittgenstein asks of a musical theme. “I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else that has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern).”  

One of Guetti’s strokes of genius was to link this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought to the poetics of a writer who could be no more out of fashion in contemporary considerations of poetry: Robert Frost. In a letter to his friend John T. Bartlett, Frost writes:

A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.
             You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but—it is bad for the clothes….
             The sentence-sounds are very definite entities…. They are as definite as words….
             They are apprehended by the ear…. The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously.

It seems to me, as it did to Jim, who quotes this passage at even greater length in his book, that Frost is speaking of the very thing Wittgenstein grapples with in his remarks on understanding sentences. When I consider now that Frost wrote this in 1914, as Wittgenstein was just beginning his pre-Tractatus manuscript Notes on Logic, it kinda blows my mind. As it was, Jim’s juxtaposition of Frost’s “sentence-sounds” with Wittgenstein turned my head around, not simply about poetry but about writing, period. When I began to write “compositions,” as they were characterized in third grade, I learned you didn’t write the way you spoke, and this is both true—think of how “nonwritten” a transcript of conversation reads—and suitable advice for an eight-year-old writer. At a certain point, however, it is false, and bad advice. Writing is not speech, but both use sentences, and thus sentence-sounds—which is to say that written sentences need to be sayable, not merely to be elegant or effective but simply to be understood. Sentence-sounds, in other words, aren’t meaning but are intimately bound up with our understanding of sentences.

In terms of poetry, what I gleaned from this juxtaposition of ideas was to follow the sentence over the line. The line had me psyched out. With a poet of rhyme and meter like Frost, the line can bully your mind into blank incomprehension, whereas his game is to play his sentences against his lines’ almost brutal regularity. With unrhymed poems of variable meter, the line retained for me an aura as a unit that it often doesn’t merit. I was looking for reasons where there were none; if a line or a line break is noteworthy, it will declare itself, but otherwise, it’s not worth worrying about. Following sentences, moreover, was never a problem for me, not since learning to diagram them in fifth grade under the perpetually furious tutelage of an Irish Catholic nun named Sister Timothy. Reading poetry was suddenly easy; I had the grammatical chops, and Frost’s concept of sentence-sounds attuned me to those spoken intonations that animated the grammar. And the meaninglessness of poetry had eliminated the intimidation factor, for instead of approaching it with the forlorn hope that I could access its meaning, I let the poem come to me. It’s not for me to figure out a poem’s meaning but rather for the poem to convince me it has one. Or not, because I don’t demand that it have a meaning. I assume the poem is meaningless unless it convinces me otherwise. This is a far preferable state of affairs.

•

Jim Guetti died of lung cancer in early 2007, several months shy of his 70th birthday. In a memoir he self-published on iUniverse in 2005 called Silver Kings, he reveals that a cancer specialist saw an ambiguous mark on an X-ray of his lungs and wanted to perform exploratory surgery, but Jim refused. He’d calculated the odds of the occurrence of the rare type of tumor the doctor thought could be there against the odds of dying during surgery and decided he didn’t like them. Considering he’d already survived colon cancer before I met him, I was shocked by this decision, although, at the same time, it was very much him, the gambler. I didn’t hear about his death until a couple of years afterward. We weren’t close and had fallen out of touch. The last time we’d spoken, I’d called him to get his address to mail him my first book of poems, probably around 2000. I was curious to see what he’d think of it, if he’d recognize any of his teaching in it, but I never heard back from him. I figured that meant he didn’t like the poems, which didn’t surprise me, as I knew what I was writing was pretty distant from the poetry he enjoyed, though it occurred to me after reading Silver Kingsthat he may have been dealing with the cancer by then and was too busy trying to stay alive. I’d wanted him to see the book because I felt like my whole process of becoming a poet began by reading Wittgenstein with him. Until recently, I was under the impression I didn’t actually start writing poetry until 1994, after I moved to California to enroll in the graduate English program at UC Berkeley. But not long after readingSilver Kings, I discovered a notebook filled with poems from my senior year at Rutgers. Not good poems, and few complete ones, but it seems like I started trying out things based on what I was learning in Jim’s classes fairly immediately.

Jim had vast reservoirs of bitterness. Though he’d had 30-odd years as a full professor at a major research university and written three books of criticism—he’s still sometimes cited in studies of Melville, Conrad, Faulkner, Chandler, and, indeed, Wittgenstein—he felt his career hadn’t gone the way he wanted. He didn’t like the way literary studies had gone. His one bid for literary glory—a novel about gambling calledAction (Dial, 1972) that still has a following among connoisseurs of the genre—was, he claimed, ripped off and made into a film called The Gambler (1974) starring James Caan. I can’t say whether or not this is true, but how many stories about gambling English professors who end up owing money to the mob are out there? Caan even looks rather like Jim does in his author photo for Action. (Jim was doubly offended because the film replaces horse racing with college basketball and, again, betting on sports was unsportsmanlike.) Still, despite his bitterness, he retained his enthusiasm for teaching. A surprising amount of Silver Kings is devoted to teaching, not so much about his own endeavors in the classroom as about those significant encounters in his life with teachers and coaches who helped him discover and develop abilities he hadn’t been aware he possessed. In the acknowledgments to Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience, Jim thanks two of his own professors at Amherst—Theodore Baird and Armour Craig—for their role in his development as a thinker and a writer, saying, “The best teaching lasts.” It does.

Excerpted from Retrievals, copyright 2014 by Garrett Caples. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.

Originally Published: October 29, 2014

POETRY