Guest Post, Cynthia Hogue: On Ways of Bearing Witness to Animals in Poetry

On Ways of Bearing Witness to Animals in Poetry: The Examples of Gary Snyder and Emily Dickinson

a discursive poem-blog

bee on flower

 

Gary Snyder writes of how artists can “join in the defense of the planet and wild nature.

They can ‘bear witness’ because they have been given, as in fairy tales, two ‘magic gifts’:

 

One is ‘The mirror of truth.’ . . . The second is a ‘heart of compassion’ [that] extends to all

creatures and to the earth itself. . . .  Anciently this was a shamanistic role where the [shaman]

 

became one with a creature. Today, such a role is played by the writer[.] This could be called

‘speaking on behalf of nature’ in the ancient way” (Writers and the War against Nature, 63).

 

Is it the ancient way to call the animal a creature? Is “speaking on behalf of” to “speak for”?

Watching a bee struggle for purchase between “Firmament above” and “Firmament below”

 

by landing on a clover “plank,” Dickinson refrains from putting words in the bee’s mouth.

The plank is “Responsible to nought” and when the “Billows of Circumference” sweep away

 

the bee, the “Bumble Bee was not -” The speaker’s claims to know the bee, hence her careful

tracking of his fate, are belied by the limits of her powers of perception: she can see

 

but not hear him. She does not “bear witness” by speaking on behalf of or for the bee. She

dwells on the surface, reporting the bee’s perceivable movements. An empiricist in method,

 

the speaker adopts a phenomenological diction, and the poem tracks the human watching the

insect trying to find a place to weather the universe, the “Circumference,” which sweeps him

 

at last on his way. She thinks about what she knows she has seen, but not what it means to the

bee. “Freight of Wind” is one vowel tone away from “Fright,” but the latter word’s laden

 

with a human’s reaction to a strong wind. “Freight” is merely material, the wind’s weight.

The event is “harrowing,” but to whom? Nothing is wrung from the bee, no sound not least

 

“A wandering ‘Alas’ –“ The knowledge that the speaker claims, “a Bee I personally knew,”

is ambiguous. How does she “personally” know the bee? Because she watched him

 

“sinking in the sky”? What kind of knowledge is that? The speaker cannot access the bee’s

interiority but only her own. She neither projects her feelings onto the bee nor personifies him.

 

Dickinson feels along the surface of her encounter with the bee. She does not cross physical

paths with him. She doesn’t save and cannot quote him. She does not put a human face on him

 

(although she gives him a gendered pronoun). She supplies the occasion for an imaginative

“Alas” but she acknowledges the word’s status: She’s close enough to hear that she can’t hear.

 

The bee is “not”: not her, not a fellow, not a figure for the writer, not like a human. Not cute.

We do not “personally” know this bee by the poem’s end. That is what she bears witness to.

 

 

This poem-blog was inspired by the study Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, by Professor Ron Broglio in the Department of English at ASU, and the author thanks him as a pioneer in the field of literary animal studies. The Dickinson poem quoted is Fr1297.

Photo credit: Sylvain Gallais

Guest Blog Post, Cynthia Hogue: Thoughts on How Poetry Resists Suffering

Cynthia HogueFor Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), in tribute

Adrienne Rich, suffering from an excruciatingly painful and disabling disease, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, observed in her brief, haunting essay, “Voices from the air,” describing poetry’s peculiar relationship to suffering, “one property of poetic language [is] to engage with states that themselves would deprive us of language and reduce us to passive sufferers.” My opening sentence hesitates, interrupts itself, revises what I’ve just stated (or comments upon it), because I have previously had occasions to muse on poetry and suffering.  Not long ago, an anthology entitled Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability included a brief essay about my revised relationship to Rich’s poetry upon contracting the disease from which she had suffered since childhood.  I quoted her poetry and referred to poems and the essay I love, “Voices in the air,” which became, during my own most physically painful years, words that guided me away from a passivist, physical suffering that had silenced me and back to poetic language.  I guess a simpler way of putting it would be to say that she has inspired me—that she was a life saver (in the sense of the life of the mind)—for most of my adult life!

If one wrote much on Rich when she was alive, one came to realize that she read and personally gave (or denied) permission to quote.  To my relief, I was always granted permission, and it was clear that she remembered accounts of my own illness when we met a decade ago.  I recall her smile as she came into the lobby, moving slowly, but holding herself with the dignified posture of pain.  We sat next to each other by a fountain in the luxurious Scottsdale resort hotel where she was a featured reader and I was, of all accidents, her host at a local conference.  We did not need many words to reflect awareness of the cognitive dissonance of the fancy resort.  Rather worse for wear, our bodies not bathing-suit worthy, we shared the experience of remembering our bodies every single minute of our lives because of pain.  We spoke of other things.  I’m grateful for those moments of fellowship with this great poet and feminist activist.  But it lulled me.

My last exchange with Rich was a fitting reminder of her exacting, poetic and ethical standards.  The brief essay I wrote for Beauty Is a Verb profoundly irritated her.  Although she gave her permission for me to quote her, she wrote the Permissions Editor at Norton (not me) that she wished “Ms. Hogue could find a less reductive way of articulating my poetry’s importance to her” than claiming the following:

I have been moved by poetry that conveys the essential.  I live with, contemplate Adrienne Rich’s poems and essays about having rheumatoid arthritis (as it happens, the very disease I have).  I never took in the details until I was myself living them.  Rich reported news I had no way to understand, because it was about a body’s experience I did not share, and described the indescribable (pain).  (BIAV 307)

“To my knowledge,” Rich wrote the Permissions Editor, “I have never written ‘about’ having RA.”  I had been happy with this little essay until I received Rich’s cautionary email warning me that my expression was reducing her poetry to her illness.  When I went back to the essay, to my horror, all the “abouts” leapt out at me like so many pointing fingers!  Thus were Rich’s final words directed to me, some months before she died of the complications of RA.  After the ashamed shock receded, I acknowledged her great-hearted, hard-won, and rigorous empathy.   To honor her, I must re-vision (in Rich’s well-known definition: to see with new eyes) my own engagement not only with her language, but also with my own.

And I wanted to share my musings on this experience, because it is in the spirit of poetry’s verbal precision and conscious attentiveness that we all may participate more care-fully in helping to carry on her legacy, to convey some part of the Rich heritage of all she gave us. 

Guest Post, Cynthia Hogue: Some Notes on Sound in Poetry

Follow the music into sense.

Norman Dubie

 I have been thinking about the ways in which musical and verbal intelligences merge in a poem as compositional strategy, because I have wanted to understand how a poet “thinks” through the music of the poem, as distinct from stating a thought directly as an abstraction or translating it visually into imagery. What interests me is the way a poet puts sonorous “truths” in play. These “truths” are not always articulated thematically in the poem, but the poem’s music gives rise to them, in the musical supplement to signification that Northrup Frye called the “babble” of poetry.[1] The choric aspect of poetry supplements and complements poetic signification, in meaningful (if indeterminate) ways, with what I’ll call sound-thinking.

Music functions as an intellectual, even visionary element of poetry, putting into play something akin to a counter-intuitive logic.[2] A poet sees through words and thinks in song.  To give a brief example, consider Tess Gallagher’s elegiac poem, “Comeback,” in which we find resonant moments of words chosen for the aural effect, with semantic intonations rippling afterward like the wake of a boat.[3] What the reader is told is that—as the speaker remembers how her father “loved first light,” and would sit, exactly as the speaker of the poem is sitting in early morning with her cup of coffee looking out over the “Strait”— the speaker may be dying, like her father and her husband, of cancer. But any “certainty” in the poem comes not from direct statements, but in the music of the metaphor: “Light is sifting in/ like a gloam of certainty/ over the water” (emphasis added). Claims to knowing have no explanation, so of what can readers be certain, reading this poem?

I glom onto the word that draws our attention because of its antique music: “Gloam” goes etymologically back to OE, meaning twilight, not dawn, and darkness coming on, not the sun’s light growing brighter as it rises. The use of “gloam” at that moment in the poem is paradoxical. We are not aware of the paradox consciously, but our access to its insight is through the poem’s music. We register that insight subliminally, through the sound of the word, which is a vowel shift away from “Gloom” and “Glum” (as well as to the idiomatic “glom”). The word “gloam” suggests the other words, which are darker, moodier, and would spell out morosely the sense of feeling attached to life and contemplating losing it. The mournful music of long o’s punctuates the poem, where the poem also locates the speaker’s intuitive knOwing, withheld semantically but articulated musically.

I doubt that Gallagher thought of this as she wrote the first draft, or even paused to look up “gloam” in the OED, at least at first. Nevertheless, given the poet’s precision, I trust that “gloam” was retained deliberately during the process of revision. I speculate that while writing the first draft, Gallagher followed initially the aural insight residing in language itself, allowing associative connections to arise, trusting the inner ear to choose the right word for the poetic moment. She must have looked up “gloam” later when revising the poem, and at that time, was reminded that it denotes the exact opposite of how she uses it (dusk not dawn). Perhaps she then articulated to herself the kind of paradoxical logic the moment holds, the spell of sound tugging against the march of meaning. Perhaps she kept “gloam” because its presence is a door into the most profound level of meaning in the poem.

A poem is able not only to make something visible through language, to see through words, but also to make something audible cognitively, sound-thinking, as I’ve been calling it. The point I’m making inverts the notion that content determines form (pace Robert Creeley), and that is that content follows sound.


[1] See J.H. de Roder’s useful overview of Fryean “babble” and “doodle” in “Poetry: the Missing Link?”: “Northrop Frye in his monumental Anatomy of Criticism simply states that the basic constituents of poetry are BABBLE and DOODLE, going back to CHARM and RIDDLE. In Frye’s view, poems babble, they foreground prosodic features of language – such as sound and rhythm – and by doing so produce charm” (Frye 1957: 275-287; qtd. in de Roder;  http://webh01.ua.ac.be/apil/apil101/deroder.pdf).

[2] On the associated notion of “thinking/ singing,” see Hank Lazer, Lyric & Spirit (Richmond, CA Omnidawn, 2008), 185-204. As Lazer observes, there is a cognitive element which song both activates and enacts, and which we as readers only access by attending to the way music signifies in the poem.

[3] Tess Gallagher, “Comeback.” Dear Ghosts: Poem (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2006), 136.