brenda hillman

On Song, Lyric, and Strings

1/ Whether song came before speech, we just don’t know. No one can tell from fossil jawbones whether the first sounds were humming or grunting. No matter the hegemony of first things; the human voice evolved while communicating for food, praise and sex, while conveying—mimetically and not—pleasurable repetitions of abstract sounds. Egyptians had orchestras. Psalms of David conjoined music and poetry. The first musical notation seems to have been in Sumeria in the ninth century B.C.E. Poems of Sappho were sung in public contests. Unitary chant in the medieval church, moving toward polyphony, juxtaposed sustained notes against descant, presaging modernist poetry that would capture rhythms of mental life and industrial labor. Twentieth century fragment began to represent intense subjectivity that sang beyond the genius of the sea.

2/ It’s hard to know what lyric means for post-romantics, post-symbolists, post-modernists and post-postmodernists. Lyric is an element in poetry, not a type, rendering human emotion in language; attention to subjective experience in a songlike fashion seems to be key in all definitions of lyric, and when “lyric” has been pitted against “epic” and “dramatic” forms, it has been mostly been thought of as short, though it isn’t always. Once lyric meant unbroken music, but since the nineteenth century, it may be broken. It cries out in singular, dialogic or in polyphonic protest. There is the question of the individual “singer,” not to mention the individual lyre or the famous problem of the solitary self—can’t live with it and can’t live with it. Since the twentieth century unseated all certainty, the lyric is rendered on torn, damaged or twisted strings. A lyric poet sings boldly and bluntly to the general populace or is visited quietly and obliquely by the distressed hero who needs an oracle.

3/ Soon after the millennium-change, I started working on a poem called “String Theory Sutra” which concerns itself with textile production, the industrial revolution, the present war in Iraq, and with lyric poetry and string theory. I’d been thinking about threadlike things while living in Berlin, a city about which David Clay Large has written, “No place has so dramatically captured the highs and lows of our human experience.” It was 2002; German TV showed shopkeepers in Palestine slamming their shutters as American-made Apache helicopters whirred overhead. At our U-Bahn stop, I’d hastily purchased a baseball cap without looking at the logo: CHAMPION USA; soon I began ripping the logo out thread by thread. My husband and I lived in a small apartment in which delicate threadlike music emanated from the petite refrigerator that bore the company name of “Bosch.” I thought about Hieronymus Bosch, who, like the small refrigerator, embodied hallucinatory mechanisms of devilish creation. The refrigerator’s glassy sounds were like a twenty-first century Aeolian harp plucked in rhythms transferred from the history of industry into the guts of laptops and cell-phones.

4/ Vocal cords aren’t cords but folds—double, not single. Gertrude Stein’s poly-grammatical sentences fold back on themselves. In lyrics, identity quests might be aided when the certainty of a rhythm is crossed with a question; Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody—who are you?” and Eminem’s line “I’m Slim Shady I’m the real Shady” have in common the fact that their speakers present contradictory riddles as deflections for saying who they think they are—Dickinson in iambic and Eminem in trochaic rap. Much pop music has this gnostic quality, making animate assertions about losing the self while finding it. To the complaint that contemporary poetry is too musically inaccessible, I’d note that the temporary difficulties of such poetry instruct us about possibilities of meaningful expression of the quotidian: in the thump of the rain on the squashed camellias, in the squeak of the microwave, in the thud of the heart when they hijacked the vote count, in the gasp coming from the beloved in the next chair. Mixes can be good; Faith Hill’s pantsuit is just too white.

5/ For the AWP panel called “Thinking in Song,” Hank Lazer asked all of us other panelists to consider how the music of a poem might become the guiding force for the poet’s thinking. Robert Duncan uses the word “romantic” to recall a process-oriented seeking of original song. A correspondence between the musical and philosophical elements in his poetry makes the cadence of the poem seem necessary. Along this line, Walter Benjamin’s mystical and difficult essay on Hölderlin engages the issue of a priori music. He notes that lyric poet brings into being a kind of “interpenetration of individual forms and their connectedness.” The poem realizes its nature in relationship in its initiating impulses, and becomes the situation for the expression of this unity; here he introduces the word das Gedichtete, translated as ‘the poetized’; it is “that which is poetically formed…In an ideal sense, it preexists each particular poem but is realized only in the poem’s creation.” Garcia Lorca’s duende comes to mind and Hopkins’ instress, as does Robert Frost’s famous notion of “the sound of sense”: “Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to […prove] this, …let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.” As “the poetized” is manifested (somewhat erotically) in its given situation, an infinite set of relationships of language allows the spirit and impulse to become large and active. What brings the poem its power is not unlike inspiration, the old concept that maps the poet’s alignment with musical and philosophical elements of an emotional event.

6/ Robert Kaufman, one of the best writers on the subject of contemporary lyric, recasts questions asked about lyric poetry by Adorno and Benjamin. Kaufman puts it thus: “How—with language alone as medium—to build a solid, convincing artistic structure out of something as evanescent as subjective song … How spontaneously yet rigorously, and with utmost concision, to make thought sing.” Subjectivity is brought outside. Kaufman notes, “Experiment is what makes the social available to aesthetic perception in the first place.” The very fact of making emotion songlike is a tension that cannot be resolved. The vision of the artist pushing material imagination into form: Yeats, HD, Duncan, Oppen.

American poets have been drawn to the poetries of Eastern Europe in part because the historic struggle of these writers affirms that the range of human expression stretches outside all conventional authority to legislate. Aesthetic grievances and debates in contemporary American writing might seem trivial in comparison with the struggles of some of these writers—Khlebnikov and the Russian Formalists, Kharms, Vvedensky and other Russian absurdist writers, free-verse experimentalist Dragomoshenko, Polish writers Herbert and Milosz, Hungarian Radnoti, and so many others. Current aesthetic quarrels and conversations between poets are real enough, and the aesthetically abstract or non-referential lyric poetry may have a different readership from poetry that announces its purposes in more narrative styles, but these issues should concern poets far less than keeping poetry alive in a culture of appalling greed, a culture that doesn’t read much of anything, a culture that does business as usual in a time of Enron and retributionist wars.

Lyric poetry is more like itself than it is like Enron. The contemporary lyric commits itself to earth and social issues; perhaps it does gather energy from an apparent sense of opposition between Romantic and Symbolist verse, but in fact, almost all lyric poets are beauty-mongers in some way, trying to refine the atmospherics taken predominantly from Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud. The dream and the literal increasingly to overlap as they did in 1840; the poet presses to an identity as a nonidentity, critiquing the culture as private artist. Most poets have made it to modernism in some way—whether through Eliot’s, Pound’s, Stein’s, Stevens’, or Williams’ versions of modernism—and approach their art with the benefits of Modernist concerns: that the mind is at work in ideas; that language is primary; that the world is troubled in its cities; that art, if not replacing God, gives Him a run for His money. The vocal cords are folds—double, not single.

7/ Does the brain’s hard-wiring make some words more musical to our ears? Our yard is full of juncos—why is the word “junco” less sonorous than, say, “monomania”? California environments—both human and non-human natures—call for vocabularies and syntax that are broken and open. When the so-called normal world is doing increasing environmental harm and eliminating species at a rapid rate, it is the poet’s job not to sing normal, comforting ditties. The music of lyric poetry brings a voice from a wilderness we do not understand, to expose acts of false authority for the ways they are dismaying to human and other earthly life. Its mind is a counterculture.

8/ While working with fingernail scissors to tear the USA CHAMPION insignia from the hat, to stop being associated with the USA in earshot of Bosch with strings of imaginary wildness, I heard sounds of the once-again new Berlin being built from east to west, a city that has had to forget so much in order to work for the collective mind and the value of the individual. In the city, a song that is lyric stays odd to survive. String theory: metaphorically perceived “threads” in matter, in which the singular participates in the general cloth not in an isolated way, but as people have made human cloth throughout history. Berlin was slow to democratize and the industrial revolution came in fits; it’s useless to speculate what a “good” capitalism or a “good” socialism would have been. The cranes that are rebuilding the downtown are a million times louder than the little Bosch. Can the lyric continue as necessarily as this sound of human creation? I find myself asking again how one can remain an ethical citizen through lyric poetry. Working on the “String Theory” poem later, I borrowed a stanza-look from squinting at my husband’s translations of Horace, hoping that a continuous two-column structure might give a sense of an industrial sewing machine going back and forth. They are our children, misguided Father Junipero Serra, living in California, wrote in a letter, making sure the native populace wore the blankets they wove. Then there was corduroy, polyester, cloth made of petroleum.

9/ The anti-song: flashback a few years to Katie Couric, America’s good girl, standing on a map of Iraq in her high heels talking to one of the Generals. Katie tries to show compassion for her guests, even when she interrupts them; her voice, the definitive commodified feminine. I depended on Katie’s voice a lot at one time to carry me through exhausted mornings getting kids ready for school before I went to work. Today, Katie is clucking while the General is saying: “Whether these people are going to the mattress or not, we aren’t sure about that.” I write this sentence in my journal because it is so strange. The “that” is not just imprecise, drowning the sentence by not having a remote antecedent, the implied “‘that”’ has no approximation to the dead people in Baghdad. I am wondering how the outlaw poetic sentence can address itself to the meandering sentence of official bad faith.
Then there are single diction moments on television, words co-opted for suspect actions: the word “embedded”—with its powerful second stress on “bed”—used by handsome David Bloom, who will die “embedded” with the troops, and a few weeks months later, Rumsfeld will announce that the war is “‘untidy.” The value and textures of music within a single word, and then the next word... Surely an appreciation for poetry—even the most anti-expressive computer-generated poem—has to do with the human love for repetition, consonance, assonance, off-rhyme, and other compressed musical features. For the AWP panel, Annie Finch asks about the physicality of the poem, “Is it possible for poetic sound to be a physical presence…?” Is the white space a music? There is an unaccountable synaesthesia experienced in the composition process.

10/ String theory posits that the initial formation of matter occurred as probabilities along a continuum, vibrations in relation to other vibrations, predictions of not really anythings. It all sounds very small; how do the little strings produce the pillowcase and the baseball cap. It is impossible for most of us to understand except metaphorically. When standard atomic theory, which postulates that the nucleus of the atom has things in it, expanded to include string theory, it came with new concepts of continuity, sometimes dainty concepts, like the development of the smile in painting. Matter as twisted strings in ten-dimensional space-time—lyric and not too specific. There is no structure in these extra dimensions. They could just as well be summer vacations with our families. According to astrophysicist Douglas Richstone, an expert in dark matter, as we search for unifying models we develop concepts no one yet understands.

When poetry registers the fact that humans suffer their fate, it often sings against singing, in the poetry of protest marked by despair—Celan, or Vallejo—wrenched verses like pine trees twisting to grow through pure granite. The language of authority makes necessary the torque of the lyric. Whether abstractly musical or expressive keening, poetic emotion makes things out of tension, as Adorno points out, singing into its very impossibility. Jacques Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, a work that influenced many poets in the 20th century, is one of my favorite books. He writes: “The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.”

11/ The care label on my hat has words from nations: Championship USA distributed by //Distribué par//Distribuito por //Distribuido da //Tilverkad für //Valmistutitaja, and so on.

12/ Beethoven’s first little violin rests in Bonn, Germany; the visitor considers with awe how such an object predicts the incomprehensible universe of the Late String Quartets from the coiled strings, made of gut, attached to honey-colored wood brought from the Black Forest. Not only are the little strings twisted, each has a varying number of fine blue lines where it is attached: 6 lines on the top string, 5 on the second, 9 on the third, and no lines on the last. Soft nicks in the wood, and the S and backward S made heavenly sounds for the little boy who would someday go deaf. The floor squeaks in Beethoven Haus, in the room where he was born. We are never without music. What brings us to art, to symbolic representation, are experiences of consciousness so rare but so common that this paradox might explode any star. While living in Germany, we saw, then heard, in thick woods, a nightingale. It is a plain brown bird, no dazzler, and true to Keats’s poem, its song intensified as soon as it disappeared into the bushes. The famous lyre of Orpheus had its sixth string missing; in the myth, the lyre is damaged by the Maenads who have the power to begin their weaving with the string. Let us write poems with the sixth string, the song that is just coming into being. Here is a short lyric by Barbara Guest (1920-2006) called ”The Brown Vest,” six short declarative sentences and fragments:

A robin’s nest being towed on the sidewalk.
Somewhere a compliment to his brown vest.
He is more lively than before.
In the future we must take him away from the sidewalk
and lend him the joy he expects.
Use earth colors, they build strong nests.
He combs his throat then locks the chapel
of the Goddess in his home.

Some of this material was presented at The Krakow Poetry Seminars, Krakow, Poland, 2002 and at the AWP Panel “Thinking in Song,” 2006, with Annie Finch, Elizabeth Frost, John Gery, Cynthia Hogue, and Hank Lazer, and Afaa Weaver.

 

Works Cited

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, trans. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, Harvard, 1996, p. 32

Robert Frost, “Getting the Sound of Sense,” in Poetry and Prose, edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Laurence Thompson, N.Y., Henry Holt, 1972

Robert Kaufman, “Lyric’s Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege” Modernist Cultures 1:2 (Winter 2005): 209-234, at http://www.js-modcult
.bham.ac.uk/editor/welcome.asp

Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1955

David Clay Large, Berlin, Basic Books, 2000, p xviii

Douglas Richstone, personal correspondence