Importance of being wrong part 2

The Importance of Being Wrong — Part 2

Importance of being wrong part 2

What fascinates me about Aristotle, in his writings on natural science, is the wonderful mistakes he made. He asserted that men have more teeth than women. In those days before the scientific method he did not bother, presumably, to ask his wife to open her mouth and take a count. (Or perhaps he did but Pythias had lost a few.) He asserted that if two objects of unequal weight are dropped, the heavy one will fall faster than the light one — a notion so obvious that for the next 2,000 years no one questioned it until Galileo climbed that leaning tower in Pisa and dropped two balls of different weights. They fell together.

In all our endeavors, the arts and sciences as well as the daily business of living, we need to stop thinking of error as failure. Mutation carries that negative connotation of failure (albino mammals and two-headed babies are mutants). But mutation is not a mistake. Without it there would be no variation, and without variety there would be nothing for natural selection to operate on, no pathway by which a species can survive through its fittest variants.

Pronouncements of what works and what does not work in poetry, judgments of good art and bad are of course the business of the community of critics: academics, reviewers, your readers, your peers. The folks who just reviewed your manuscript. Of this group Yeats spoke for many a writer when he published “The Scholars” in 1915.

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s depair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All know what other people think;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

“Wrong” is related to “risk.” Artists today understand so well the taking of risk that their distinction comes in spotting it first, not taking it first. To see it is to take it. But no one wants to be in error, to be “wrong.” Daring is good, failure is bad. Except that failure is good, too. Any good poet knows, in writing a poem, that to play it safe is to be dead on arrival.

John Bar

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John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

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The Importance of Being Wrong — Part 2 Read More »

John Barr with arms crossed

The Importance of Being Wrong — Part 1

Poetry’s main chance, it seems to me, the best of its possible futures, lies in not being buffaloed.

John Barr with arms crossed

You have just returned from a workshop in which your poems, the manuscript of a first book, were the subject of discussion. It was a summit meeting of eyeglasses, cleared throats, and nodded assents. One of your associates called the work “a visit to the secret corners of the lesser earth,” and congratulated you on “your ability to import unhappiness from the farthest quarters.” Another, however, noted “a predominance of pedantry.” Yet another dismissed it as “a lot of tranquil gossip.” Your advisor, however, was enthusiastic. The poems put him in mind of “the latest trends in barbiturates.” Taken as a whole “they perfect the poem as an artistic fly-by.” He commended you on the logical order of your manuscript, which was put together “in a way that hog callers can understand.” Back home, you must now consider what to do with this advice and who, after all, is to be the authority on what you write.

Poetry’s main chance, it seems to me, the best of its possible futures, lies in not being buffaloed. There are so many who would tell us what to do, who would keep us on the short leash of their disapproval. The problem, to borrow a line on Aristotle, is to get the better of the misologists and eristics. There is a part of us that will not be owned. It is that part which the poet must recognize, accommodate, nurture.

Poetry needs to be incorrect. It needs to use the wrong fork. It needs to live in harm’s way. (Poems are not harmless.) It accosts us on the streets. It offers to wash our windshields. It has criminal instincts and should be ranked with shoplifting and other petty crime. Are poets crazy? At least they are in touch with craziness. I think of the figure of the poet as a man or woman in a dump, holding a broken lamp — a white porcelain fracture of the made. I think of poets as standing in a rest room staring into the opposing mirrors; their business is this parliament of images. Imagination, starting where understanding stops, goes where understanding has not been and cannot go.

John with his granddaughter

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Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is, so far as I know, the only published collection of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.

Bird sitting on tall stems

Bird Voice In The Halls Of 5 A.M.

theebro    eebro                            eebro

In the mild dark
the radiator is with difficulty white.

eebaw               eebaw

The syllables vary like a signature.

kohl           kohl          kohl

A new voice tries
the uvular, diphthong
of its particularity.
Fricative, apocope, an insectic click
join the tuning symphony. 

Again the chance
to go forth on the soft lawn,
to take, like my sprinkler,
differing angles to the ground,

to the    Aw               Aw
of a bitumen crow in hemlock
give jambo, the greeting in Swahili,

to each      each   chip chik                             epeleeklaw

                                                    chaw

Reply in the lingua franca  tjonn      tjohn.

Terripan looking around

Terrapin

Last night we used him for a centerpiece.
Pet Rock. Rubbleman. Sepulcher Sam.
Our Brobdingnagian wit fazed him
not a bit. The wonder is that life informs
the carapace (big black and pumpkin chips),
the legs that tractor earth’s unevenness,
the serpentine head, at all.
Only the eye—and it a slit of semiprecious
light—looks other than conglomerate.

Having no place for shelf life
we keep him casually corralled
(Does he go snow-blind in the sink?),
include him in what we do.
But the household god steadfastly will not eat
our offerings of parsley, meat;
for hours holds head extended or a claw
as if reverted to his quarried
origins, the living rock.

Perhaps he’s trying to hibernate
in a winter our warmth will not provide.
Or refuses, always, to respond
for reasons of turtle dignity.
Or fears to be soup, or hopes to lithify
remembering how good it was in the Jurassic.
The life within withdrawn, he’s comatose—
or raptly attends some call we cannot hear.

Clearly we're tuned to different frequencies:
the elder species and the parvenu.
Today you put him out for air
in the turtletight backyard, returned
to find him–Allakhazam–not there.
And as he was elsewhere when among us,
now he is a presence in his absence.

John Barr

John Barr sitting at his desk in his studio

How Should a Poem End?

John Barr sitting at his desk in his studio

A narrative poem, whether an epic as long as the Odyssey or an ancient ballad like Sir Patrick Spens, has a tale to tell. And when the tale is told, it stops. The progress of a lyric poem is quite different. Robert Frost describes it memorably in “The Figure a Poem Makes.”

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked on once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: It will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

And he says of such a poem:

It has denoument. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the first mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

It is of that surprise I want to speak, and how that surprise can engage its reader in a partnership. In “Meeting the British” Paul Muldoon (himself a great admirer of Frost) describes a meeting between a Native American and British soldiers who have come to suppress tribal uprisings during Pontiac’s War (1763).

Meeting the British

We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streams coming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C’est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

See how the poem keeps on going after the surprise in that last line? The poem is finished but the reader’s mind must continue beyond that line to realize the British intent and to watch a dark world open. The reader has become a participant — a partner — in the work of the poem. And it is that personal engagement, when the reader is no longer reading but enters the poem as a participant, that will stick in the reader’s mind, perhaps forever.

I call this a Wiley Coyote ending. Wiley races after the Roadrunner to the edge of the cliff — and keeps on going. After running several steps on thin air he halts, looks at us, looks down, and plummets. The last line of a lyric poem should carry us beyond the poem’s end to plummet into thin air.

John smiling and holding his dogs

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The Reader Completes the Poem

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Recently I realized that when a poet has finished writing a poem, the poem is still not complete. The poem’s act of completion is when someone else reads it. And so I wrote this poem.

The Book

There is no Frigate like a Book
to take us Lands away.
Emily Dickinson

I find you in these sunless stacks.
Your poems might be uncommonly fine —
but your pages darken to brittleness
and you’ve never been checked out. Unless
your anchor’s weighed and you proceed
to find the harbor of another’s mind,
nothing will come of the cargo in your hold.
I stand in the gloom of the unread, and read.

A reader brings a poem to life. Without readers a poem cannot be more than an act of self expression. Poetry is about communication. Billy Joel once said that when he goes on tour (he was speaking about his legendary 1987 tour in the USSR), performing his songs makes them live again — not just for his audience but for himself as well. It’s the same for a poem. When I learn that someone has read one of my poems, I go back and read it again. Strange as this may sound, the poem carries fresh energy, it’s more alive to me because of that reader.

Every poem implies its audience, and the intended readers are not always the same. When Melville wrote, “Call me Ishmael”; when Whitman wrote, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume”; when Frost, in the first poem of his first book, said, “You come too”; when Baudelaire wrote, “Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”; each was addressing a reader but not the same reader. Wouldn’t it be great if we could ask these poets to describe who in their imagination was sitting across the table, listening as they wrote? Who were they writing to — and for? Each of these writers seemed to make transforming assumptions about his readers and address them in a new way. Their direct address was somehow made more direct. It held, succeeded and literature was changed.

P.S. I’ll be writing in a future post about the role of rhyme in a formal poem. But “The Book” is a good example of what I call “customized rhyme.” By that I mean, instead of a standardized rhyme scheme — such as a quatrain or limerick which serves to “package” the poem — the customized rhyme scheme illustrates and supports the argument the poem is making. The rhymes in “The Book” are: abaa/cbcc. The first b (“fine”) has to wait for its mate (“mind”) until the poem’s journey has succeeded.

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The Permanence of Poetry

John sitting in a wooden chair

They may be the oldest books in your library, having come down from your mother or father or a favorite aunt. They are different from the Stephen King paperbacks, the Danielle Steel romances, the flotsam and jetsam of books from past elections. Bound in limp leather and printed on the best paper, they may be inscribed for a graduation or wedding. If, in the age of Kindle, the shelves in your library come to be empty save for a single, plastic e-book, then the books I’m talking about will be the most likely to remain in their place of honor on your shelves.

Why is it, when we want to make a gift in fellowship, love or celebration, that the single gift we choose to make is so often a book of poetry? I think it’s because poetry’s great pursuit is permanence. The work of the poet is to make poems that will last forever, in a world where nothing lasts forever. And this the poet does by making a poem that is perfect within its own four corners. The occasion of the poem, its actual subject, may be the slightest thing.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
Oh how that glittering taketh me.

We still read these lines, 350 years after they were published, because Robert Herrick captured a moment, like a fly in amber, with the arresting perfection of which art is capable.

But there is a further reason, beyond its accomplishment as art, that poetry can be imperishable. Poetry deals in human emotion and human wisdom. This kind of knowledge doesn’t change or become outmoded with time, because human nature is a constant throughout the history of our kind. Not so with scientific knowledge. Ptolemy was supplanted by Copernicus; Newton by Einstein. But the love that shook Shakespeare in the sonnets is the same love we feel today. Ditto for the anger of Achilles or the knowledge of death in Emily Dickinson. Once said, and said with the perfection of their art, the great poets speak for all of us who follow.

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What is a Poem?

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Welcome, and thanks for stopping by. These occasional short essays, of which this is the first, hope to show that poetry is that rare place in contemporary experience where legitimate magic can still happen.

So, what is a poem? Allow me to riff. It arises out of the ordinary, out of the gravitation in whose haul we daily live. It seeks out and consumes the otherness in matter, for in all poetry there is an otherness. A poem can be angry — pugnacious, mean-spirited (call it the vinegar proxy). It can also be an affirmation, an expression of love through fresh perception, a descant on the world.

A poem is a pursuit of local perfection, as unrelenting as a telephone number in its need to be exact. But if it merely records, even with exquisite sensitivity, it is no more than camera film. A poem is a report from deep in the mind: a report on the human condition, a profit and loss statement of the spirit. Like a bill of lading, it documents a cargo and its journey, which is the slow migration of a soul.

The poem and its subject are like the random alliance of an acorn and the ground on which it falls. Wherever it looks, the poem gathers the earth into its hands. It grows like Aristotle’s definition of a riddle: “a song in crooked words beyond intelligence.”

A poem is a celebration, like a turbulence of cut flowers. A poem is a village breathing by its own set of rules. A poem exists in its tension like the Hindenburg: a hydrogen bubble waiting to see if it finds its self in flame.

A poem is like a mariner’s compass, swinging
with slow recoveries until,
to the pull of a distant absolute
responding, the knowledge in its atoms,
overshooting each time less — lightly
but persistently on this one point —
settles on what it true.

Then in three degrees of freedom
it points the way. Coins and watches,
our rolls and recoveries
do not dispel its equilibrium.
Housed in a binnacle, lit from below,
its amber radiance includes the helmsman’s face.

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Iron’s Keeping is a story in poems that tells of my coming of age as a U.S. Navy officer by going to sea in a voyage that took me around the world. It is, so far as I know, the only published collection of poems about the Naval experience in the Vietnam War.

power lines and towers with sunset in the distance

The Power & Light Company

Under the Used and Useful Principle
a public utility may charge customers
only for assets that are used and useful
in providing service to those who pay for it:
power plants, transmission lines, the sum total
of what it takes to deliver power and light.

Most of those with needs for power and light
in their lives work from a different principle.
Power—prerogative with impunity—is total
by nature, not a thing to sell to customers.
Those who gain it keep it. Having it
befits them, whether used or useful.

Light, on the other hand, is useful
when it gives illumination; think how light
reflecting off the moon reveals it, renders it.
Whether gaining and keeping is the principle
or giving is, matters to customers.
The one’s cost, the other’s benefit is total.

Can those receiving service unbundle the total,
choosing the light, which is nothing if not useful,
but not the power which is not for sale to customers
in any case? Does having the light
without the power offend some principle
of commerce? If so, are we compelled to honor it?

We know from history, which is replete with it,
that power abhors what it can’t control: total
antipathy portends the death of principle.
If we take only the light, can it be useful
without the power? If not, of what use is the light?
That is the quandary for customers.

And face it, our lot is to be customers:
Something received, things taken in return for it.
Light without power or power without light.
How do we keep the dark from turning total
when we ourselves would be the used and useful?
When giving our lives a purpose is the principle?

Caveat emptor, customers. The game is total,
your lives for it: You will be used if you are useful.
But as to power and light, let light be principal.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal

photo of plant monstera photo

Monstera

I know it's in the nature of wonder not to last,
but wonder now at your tactile vigilance,
the quality of attention in this new leaf–
how, learning of light, it unfolds and contorts
in the slow acrobatics of your kind.

I am impressed by your tolerance for neglect.
Latitudes removed from your Latin roots.
you're spared the hazards of the rainforest
if not the usual affronts to household plants–
overwatered or, worse, left waterless.

You're old enough to have followed the neighbor boys
to war and back, but unlike them you self-renew
and never know old age. Had Ponce de León,
when he lay down to die, only known
Eternal Youth bloomed just above his head!

Given modicums of soil, water, air,
new meristems will never cease to grow–
and death for you need never come.
In a world without end you can arabesque,
flourish forever as a species of one.

Which makes my duties for your sustenance
less the chore of an inconstant gardener
than of a monk bringing to the temple
quantities of driest sandalwood
that the fire of fires may never die.

By John Barr/from Dante in China