For a long time we have believed that the arts are mere accessories in the project of knowledge. Though art may enrich and glorify our lives, many still feel only science can reveal truth. This equivalence of science with truth has existed for so long because science itself has been so vital in shaping modern life. All the infrastructure that surrounds us, from roads and buildings to satellites and mobile phones is the result of our science.  From the moment our ancestors sat down to wonder, to figure out their world, they were practicing science. The arts were for leisure time; they were pleasant, perhaps even important, but certainly not necessary. But modern history has changed these conditions. Science has brought comfort, but also death and destruction. Even as it has made our lives better it has also made them more complex. Yet our perception of science as the exclusive progenitor of truth has remained. Among respectable intellectual circles, art is still seen as a profession for neer-do-wells and muddle heads, and art itself as a topic for after dinner conversation, as if it were a sport or a species of politics. Science, on the other hand, is viewed as serious work—profitable, useful, and most of all true. But seeing science as the wellspring of truth, as many are still wont to do, excuses its more parlous aspects.

I am not proposing to get rid of science or indeed to deny its importance in our lives. Rather, I want to show that art, and in particular poetry, deserves serious consideration as being important in revealing truth. Such a change in mindset can help us to deal with a world whose physical and social aspects are constantly changing, and pull us out of the rigid intellectual conformity that scientific thinking demands. For by associating truth exclusively with science we form a world-view that blinds us to science’s limitations. All that is good in the world comes to be associated with this world-view, while evil becomes assoicated with every other.

The primary guardians of the scientific world-view are philosophers. To most of us, these people are terribly remote academics scribbling obsure treatises on irrelvant subjects. Certainly, there is some truth to this perception—most of don’t read monographs on Schopenhauer along with our morning paper. Nevertheless, how we form our view of the world determines much of how we behave, and the nature of philosophy, its tendency to take all of knowledge as its object of study, gives it an influence far beyond what one might expect. Indeed, because philosophy takes as its central concern questions of language, specifically with how we understand the world through the medium of language, it is the quintessential subject for determining world-views. It is widely, indeed almost universally, accepted that to understand the world we must understand how we use language.

The Scientific World View

The scientific world-view has a rather inflexible view of language. In its perspective language is a tool which serves to convey human requests, commands, or practical information; language has no expressive function. Determining the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to understanding the logical form of the sentence. A sentence whose logical form can be deciphered e.g. “A chair is for sitting,” is meaningful, whereas one whose logic is contradictory e.g. “The floor is over my head,” is considered meaningless, and therefore not worth talking about. Even in the most flexible interpretations, language still is seen by these analytic philosophers as essentially functional (designed to do something) and governed by precise rules. The task of philosophy, according to their interpretation, is to elucidate the ways in which we are misled by linguistic and grammatical ambiguities into misunderstanding the true logical form of a sentence. Once this is done, so the theory goes, all philosophical problems go away.

Analytic philosophy is the handmaiden of science. It justifies and defends the methodology of science against its detractors. Accordingly analytic philosophy supports a scientific world-view that sees sentences as very similar to equations, and that views the world as a series of problems suceptible to a solution.  After all, science has been hugely successful in improving our lives; its predictive power has been demonstrated in case after case. It is therefore normal that it would have a considerable influence on our world-views and on philosophy. But any system of thought can be pushed too far, can be asked to explain matters that are beyond its scope. This is what has happened with science. Its method of reasoning is extremely useful for a wide variety of problems dealing with the physical world. From a strictly philosophical point of view, analytic philosophy is useful for providing a conceptual underpinning for the discoveries of modern science.

But many scientists and practitioners of this philosophy, understandably delighted at the influence of their disciplines, have gone overboard in their exuberance. They have tried to apply analytic concepts of language to all aspects of human relations. Though some statements, such as those that require the performance of an action or a concrete response can validly be dealt with through logical analysis, there is a whole range of what might be called emotive statements— sentences that express emotion, whose intention makes proper logical analysis impossible. Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.

Groundwork for a Poetic Metaphysics

Emotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world. Nevertheless, they absolutely cannot be dealt with analytically. Indeed, much trouble is caused by the false claim of rationalists that such irrational statements don’t really say anything. It leads to the false conclusion that expressive language is incapable of expressing anything worthy of a solution. This kind of attitude only makes the problem worse. Emotive statements understandably perplex traditional philosophers for philosophers have always been wedded to rationality. If a philosophical problem has no obviouly rational solutions, philosophers feel that their only option is to deny that there is any problem. They seem totally incapable of accepting the importance of the non-rational in human life.

But is there room for a non-rational component in our search for truth? Most philosophical analyses would begin by searching for what we have in common in our perception. If you and I stare at a box, we can probably come to some sort of agreement about size, color, shape, and other purely physical attributes. Most philosophical analyses assume that you and I are perceiving the same thing. There is, however, no particular reason to believe this assumption, for beyond the purely physical attributes, our indiviudal experience of a box may be totally different. Perhaps at some time in your past, you were locked in a box similar to the one we are discussing, and so for you boxes are an unpleasant reminder of that former experience, while for me boxes remain merely containers. When you see a box you begin to shiver, your knees shake, and you turn away in disgust. Since our experience of the object is totally different, the way in which we interact with this object will also be different. Though functionally you and I may use the box for identical purposes—storing things—our actual experience of the box remains colored by our individual experience with this object.

What applies to objects here also applies to persons and situations, i.e. to all lived life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any two people who are exposed to identical phenomena will experience the same phenomena. The histories of the two people will be different and so the meaning of the experience, whatever it may be, will also be different. The individuals may not be able to express this difference; they may not even be aware of the difference, but because of different histories, it will be there. Granted, there will be some overlap in how the experience is described; common sense argues for common ground and is necessary for scientific analysis, but it is false to automatically assume, as science and analytic philosophy do, that similarity equals equivalence.

Language

Language is the mirror of our experience. We learn the word table by being exposed to the thing; we learn happiness and sadness by being exposed to them. But again, while you and I may be able to agree on a thing called table, and about many of its attributes, our actual experience of tables will be quite different. So though we may have the same dictionary meaning for the word table, there will be elements of meaning we have as individuals, that won’t be part of any dictionary meaning. And though the dictionary meaning may be close enough to communicate and to do scientific work, it is manifestly false to say that such a definition is in any way true.

The way in which we use the word truth is the key to understanding how we use language. If we use truth in a merely analytical and objective sense then all the things that conform to truth, and all the meanings of words will also be analytical and objective. Conversely, if we take truth to be individual or subjective, then conformity to truth will have that character instead. A commonsense evaluation of truth, however, should lead us to an intermediate position—most phenomena have some obejctive level of truth and some subjective level of truth.  It is true that we can agree that the table is black, but it isn’t black at all times or from all angles. As a practical matter the table may appear black, but subjectively it sometimes isn’t. And the character of the word truth here is the character of all other words as well—they contain both an obejctive and a subjective part. Of course, philosophy has long paid attention only to the objective part while assuming the subjective part either doesn’t exist or isn’t important. But we see now that philosophy has been in error for a long time.

If the meaning of words is partly subjectively determined, then all larger syntactical structures will also have some subjective component. Since words are the foundation of sentences, subjective words make for subjective sentences which make for subjective writing. The fact that people interpret texts in different ways is the surest sign of this phenomenon. What we must break is the old habit that sees truth only as what is common between people. Truth is really composed of a considerable level of agreement about our perceptions with some essential element of disagreement.

Poetry in the Service of Truth

The function of art is simple enough—to remind us that truth is always partially subjective. Art does do this, and if it did this alone, it would still have enormous value in a society subjected to the juggernaut of scientfic thinking, but art does more by actually creating or manifesting subjective truth. What we see and know objectively is often obvious, whereas the subjective is equally vital, but often unknown or hidden. It is the function of art, and in particular of poetry, to bring to our consciousness that which is hidden, the element of truth that is forgotten in our passion for analysis. Poetry keeps the mind awake because it forces us to examine our linguistic presuppositions. It is the art of language par excellence because it focuses its effects less on individuals or on action than on how we construe meaning. It takes the philosopher’s analytic project and turns it on its head—philosophical problems are not the result of a failure to perceive the correct logical structure, but are rather a result of the failure to see the limits of analysis. The poem then, forces us to confront the reality that not all statements can be logically analyzed, and in so doing, it brings forth the truth, which had been hidden or mistakenly assumed to be found by the analytic philosophers.

Poetry is uniquely suited to the exposition of truth. If we communicate about and understand our world in a primarily linguistic fashion, then poetry automatically becomes an important means to achieve this end. The poem takes the language and logic of the analysts and twists them around so that sentences retain meaning but cease to be amenable to logical analysis. To take just one example well known to philosophers: Silent green dreams sleep furiously. Logically of course, this sentence has no meaning since dreams do not sleep. Yet it would be equally false to say that the sentence is meaningless; rather it has a meaning whose meaning cannot be explained logically. But it is indubitably false to say that if this sentence can’t be explained logically then it has no meaning; that itself is illogical. When a sentence cannot be explained logically then that is all that can be concluded. The genius of the poem is that it opens up our notions of what “makes sense” to something beyond the merely analytical.  Logic is confining and restricting; it deals well with those parts of the world where we agree, but it is incapable of explaining  our sudden wild flights of fancy, our inspirations, our loves. The poem as a work of art is free to throw out the conventions of logic, or at least to reinterpret them in the service of truth.

Poetry completes our true picture of the world. Science is there to sketch the broad outlines, to show us what the world is like in general for most people most of the time. But poetry gives us the proper picture, brings the world into focus, and lets us see that what we thought was the absolute truth was in fact just the merest outline, the shadow of the real. A true picture of our world includes both science and poetry. One, science, sketches the figure, the other, poetry, gives it mass, shape and presence. Only together do they form truth.

But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average – all of which is to say that it’s far more difficult to isolate “great poetry” than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We’re forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses.

From David Orr: New York Times 11/13/2005

Dan Chiasson

Natural History 

Note, for example, the recent success of Dan Chiasson whose recent book Natural History is being lauded in poetry circles. Dan first “broke out” with a selection of poems in The New Yorker on “emerging poets.” His first book–well reviewed–was published by a good university press–University of Chicago. Natural History is from Knopf, perhaps the best commercial poetry press in North America.

Now Dan writes a good line, even quite a good line, but I’m not convinced that he’s a Wallace Stevens, for example. What Dan does seem to have (and forgive me if I’m letting my jealousy show just a tad) is simplicity. I mean by this that the poem easily gives up its meaning and emotion. Dan’s poems are never hard. They are great value-for-your-money poems. They are rarely long, generally unpretentious, and often clever–important qualities for readers who don’t generally like poetry.

Budget Travel Through Space and Time

by Albert Goldbarth

The latest book by the American poet Albert Goldbarth is called Budget Travel Through Space and Time. Let’s imagine then for a moment that you are a traveler come on some cheap spaceflight to the planet earth, and you happen to have learned English on your faraway habitation. Your assignment from the poobah of your homeworld is to return with one relic that represents the state of mind on Earth. At a loss at first at the complexity of your assignment, you ultimately decide to sample the literature of English-speaking North America to understand what these aliens are thinking and feeling. Imagine further that you don’t know anything about North American literary history; you understand language well but not recent culture, and in the bookstore you’ve discreetly entered you come across Goldbarth’s book. Intrigued by the coincidence of the title you begin to read. What observations would you draw? What would your colleagues think of your choice?

Preoccupied, as you no doubt would be, with language, the first thing you would notice would be the very different levels of diction in Goldbarth’s book. When you saw words like “jiffy,” “gumption,” and “crackerjack,” you might wonder how they could easily co-exist in the same poem with other bits of more literary language. Later, when you ran into “vomit” and “upchuck” only a few lines apart you might begin to wonder who this fellow was, and whether he was choosing his words carefully or was simply throwing them at you in a random fashion, hoping one or two might stick in your memory or in your craw. And the variety of words would not be limited to their diction—there would be made up words: “telecyberfiber,” or “fooming, ” intentional misspellings such as “schpritzer,” or “dishabille,” and words from various disciplines like “leukemia,” “zero-gees,” and “REM,” all occurring in the same poem. Goldbarth, you would quickly conclude, is an intellectual omnivore. Anyone who in a poem called “Tuvalu,” could manage to insert epigraphs from the 15th century French poet François Villon and a contemporary periodical like USA Today was bound to be someone interested in how language and ideas, high culture and low culture interact. And essentially all of the other poems in Budget Travel you would discover follow a similar pattern.

The poems often have little to do with their titles, for they quickly veer off into other concerns. So a poem with a great title like “A Gesture Made in the Martian Wastes” ends up being about the history of sci-fi, the power of imagination, the difficulty of being sixteen, and a story a Vietnam veteran told Goldbarth the night before he wrote the poem, and not very much at all about Mars or gesturing or wastes. So if you thought that a poem had to be about something particular, a Goldbarth poem would leave you speechless. “What are his poems about?” the poobah might ask. “Well, er, uh, everything” you’d have to reply. And thereby perhaps also nothing. A Goldbarth poem can contain: a footnote consisting of an eighty-eight digit number, a check off list of items with permission to add to the list, a dash nearly an inch-and-a-half long, and several pages of prose on the English painter JMW Turner. Admittedly there is no mathematics or html code in Budget Travel, but if the book had been longer…

Goldbarth, you might well think to yourself, is entertaining. Where else after all, but in a poem called “Washington’s Ovens, Adames’ Letters,” might you read about “the favored dish of the emperor Vitellius,” that “combined such delicacies as pheasant brains, pike livers, peacock hearts, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt.” While such information won’t make you a million in the stock market, who knows whether the question of the Emperor’s favorite dish might not appear in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit? (Yes, that bit of North American culture has gotten to your homeworld!)

Though Goldbarth is clearly smart and has evidently spent at least as much time in a library poring over fraying leather tomes as he has watching TV, the question nagging at your consciousness might well be—“but is he moving? Does his poetry make my heart race or my pulse skip a beat?” There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but if you were me, the answer would be no. Clever? Yes. Innovative? Perhaps. Moving? Not a bit of it. Now if you were coming from far, far away you might be severely disappointed at mere cleverness. If, however, you kept wandering around the poetry section of the bookstore (assuming of course they had one) and you read other poetry books you could very well begin to hit your head in exasperation. For many other poets you would discover were neither moving nor clever. Goldbarth, at least was not one of those…Maybe the poobah would be pleased.

Mercury

by Phillis Levin

Damn the reviewer’s objectivity; Phillis Levin is a friend of mine. As so often in these situations, it turned out we had someone in common—a Canadian expatriate photographer living in Italy. Last summer, as I lay naked soaking up the sun in Sardinia, this photographer said that she knew a poet called Phillis Levin, who was living in Rome for a year. Somehow I knew the name, and as I racked my sun-addled brain, I recalled that a year earlier I had heard her read at KGB Bar. She was tall and slim, with skin white as a new tooth. She quoted philosophers and as I remember had some knowledge of the classics. But quoting is not a sign of anything; any moron can quote. Still, I had thought her poetry quite good; she was interested in ideas, always an auspicious sign. I met her in Rome. She swept down the stairs like a winged Greek goddess, and I was sure at the time I was in love. Still, as I spent time with her, I found something very nineteenth-century about her. She seemed gaunt yet oddly sensual; she reminded me of how one might imagine Emily Dickinson, with the same austerity; though with a quite different kind of poetry.

My life at that time was at a critical juncture. I was in love with an Italian woman and I wondered why I was so attracted to Europe and to this woman. Phillis urged me to write about my conundrum. I did it, and felt better. On my last day in Rome we went to see a fabulous Sebastiano Salgado photography show. We saw so many suffering faces in those pictures, so many lives unlike our own silly, privileged ones. I found Phillis remarkable that day. Of course, I returned to New York and left Phillis behind. She was working on an anthology, about sonnets I believe. That was in August. Now it’s April, and Phillis’s new book Mercury has just come out from Penguin. It’s a deceptive book: many of the poems seem light, almost frail. Often they speak quietly. Yet like a silk curtain, what they reveal is often shadowy. The whole substance of the poems is often discovered only by parting the curtain, by carefully penetrating the surface of the words.

I like poems about ideas. There’s a reason for this. Most poems for me are too personal or too sweet; they’re rehashings of bad nature poems or transcribed sessions from a visit with the therapist. Sometimes, as with Ashbery and a few others, the poems can avoid ideas yet still be terrific, as if some light were shining through them. But most poets throw words around with little sense of direction or of purpose. They want to discuss an experience, but they structure that experience in an entirely personal way and fail to create any shared elements. Phillis’s work is altogether different. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t like everything she does. But Mercury is definitely a buy and hold. Her work here is as clear as winter rain puddles, and as quiet as breakfast with a hermit.

One of the nice qualities of her work, is that it bears rereading. A poem which at first blush has one meaning, turns out to also have another meaning. It is these multiple levels of signifying that makes Mercury interesting. Take for example, the opening poem “Part.” On the surface this appears to be essentially a definitional poem. Phillis looks at the multitude of things the word part means. It would seem at first that this poem is a purely analytical study of a word. Yet note the word she has chosen: part. Phillis says: Also a piece, a section, as in/Part of me is here, part of me/Is missing, an essential portion… Now the poem begins to look like either an examination of the poet’s psychology, or a love poem. The very fact that both are possible is a testament to the poem’s complexity. Perhaps they are equally true: her lover has left her because some essential part of her is missing; she misses love, yet cannot love because she is somehow incomplete.

This conflict between intimacy and closeness on one hand and analytical distance on the other seems to be a recurring part of Mercury. In the poem “Conversation in an Empty Room” she sets forth an imaginary dialogue, but without quotations or any obvious sign that the speaker has changed. We might assume it’s a true dialogue, but it may also be the internal dialogue we all carry on inside our heads. Again, it’s important to look at the title: logically speaking a room remains empty until someone enters it. So logically, if anything is happening in an empty room, it is no longer empty. The conversation then, it at once there and not there, in the room and not. This kind of contradiction again plays with the idea of a connection with an other that is somehow faulty, or fatally flawed, so that the conversation that should have taken place, never quite does.“Mercury,” the title poem of the collection, seems equally concerned with parting and joining. Mercury, as anyone knows who has seen it rolling about a surface has, because of its relatively high specific gravity, a tendency to form little balls like liquid ball-bearings. Beyond this, mercury can split and rejoin almost infinitely without any external signs of disturbance; it simply reforms into its liquid ball-bearing shape. Unlike the human heart, it can merge and be sundered without damage or effect. Though Phillis’s poem here is rather more personal, and so to my mind less powerful than other poems in the collection, still she finds in the experience of disturbing the element a powerful metaphor for the contradictions of her own condition.

The last poem “A Meditation on A and The” though perhaps not directly about her, still carries forth the duality she has established between distance and closeness. Phillis shows how our use of articles influences how we think. A she notes is only used for singulars whereas the is used both for singulars and plurals. She also deftly notes how intimacy is bound up with the; we talk about “a chair,” in the abstract, but a particular chair that we sit in becomes “the chair.” Even more intimate she slyly suggests, and “the chair” becomes “thee chair”. These to my mind are the most elegant poems in the collection: they push me to reconsider my world view; they alter, even if slightly, my perspective on the world. Unfortunately, many of the poems in the middle seem like filler. They are the kind of sweet personal history poems that everyone writes and many seem to love. But the purpose of a poem is not to reveal the poet’s soul, but to push the mind to light. When Phillis holds strongly to ideas and to abstract principles she can work wonders.

At the launch party for the book, a very beautiful woman said to me: “If you have to question whether something is beautiful, then it is beautiful.” And what if I’m sure it is beautiful, like Phillis’s book; what then?

C. Durning Carroll