Greg Zeck Poetry

Sound vs. sense: the poet’s mind

Poets are interested in language, is that a surprise? In the way language works, its twists and turns, its quirks and oddities, its strengths and its obscurities, its absurdities.

In the sounds of words, their musicality, no matter how opposed to sense the music may be.

Words, after all, are a social contract and contact. We agree that cat is “a small domesticated carnivore, Felis domestica or F. catus, bred in a number of varieties.” That nose is “the part of the face or facial region in humans and certain animals that contains the nostrils and the organs of smell….” And that faith is, among other things, “a system of religious belief” (all definitions from www.dictionary.com).

But what happens in the poet’s brain that urges him to reinforce and yet at the same time break out of convention?

There’s the play of the sound of words, for one thing, as I say above. Play is pleasure, it’s not duty. Play is erotic, if sublimated eros.

Let me give an example from my musings today, if you can call them that.

I was at the gym, exercising, when I had to get back into my locker. But there was someone sitting in front of it, blocking my access, someone I had never seen before. I asked, politely enough, if I could reach the lock on the locker, that “fat lock,” I called it, suddenly, for the shackle of the lock I use is so fat that it’s hard to get it through the hole in the locker handle.

“Fat lock!” I said again to the stranger. “Is that something like a fetlock, which is something a horse has?”

Fetlock Injury in Horses — Yes, indeed, it’s a fetlock. Right down there near the ground.

Hell, he didn’t know, and I didn’t either at the moment. It’s one of those words, fetlock, that you probably don’t know unless you’ve been around horses. And, if you know it once, as I once did, you may forget it. Or know it only imprecisely.

But the dictionary knows, and keeps on knowing, as I soon realized: fetlock, “a projection bearing a tuft of hair on the back of the leg above the hoof of a horse or similar animal…. the tuft of hair itself” (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary).

Shortly afterward, back on the gym floor, I approached one of the leg machines I use frequently, but it bore a sign saying “Out of Order.” Maybe because of the equine exchange with the stranger, I read it as “Out of Ordure.” Oh, horse shit! I moved on to another machine.

And when my wife texted me, as I was finishing the workout, “Don’t forget the broth” (for I was to pick up turkey broth for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day feast), I assured her I was on the task. “I am the broth,” I responded, “the truth, and the light.”

To veer from horse droppings to bible verses, however twisted, may be the sign of a twisted mind. Or a mind twisted away from duty, anyway; convention; and consecutive logical thought, even the logic of simple transactions. Would you please pick up some broth? Oh, bother, sister, brother! My brain has detoured me once again.

The mind is distracted, deserts the task at hand, the duty. But comes up, nevertheless, with some interesting diversions, or divertimenti, or beginnings.

No, these crazy phrases are not a poem. But may be the start of one. Of something other than an order fulfillment, at any rate.

More sweat, no sweat

Sweating it out — Even sweat is no sweat when work is play. Image: Jeff Lipsky.

To continue sweating over what may be the beginning of a poem, a new poem, maybe an ekphrastic poem (done in imitation of another objet d’art).

To continue sweating, and yet swearing it’s no sweat, it’s fun. At least that’s how I find playing with language, and playing is the essence of the game. It’s form more than content, especially at the start, and form creates the content that is.

“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” said T. S. Eliot, another crucial modernist. But what words, what words we talking here?

Our own, we would hope, even when interfused with those of the poet we are imitating. For if imitation is flattery it also may mean flattening, drowning in another’s voice.

So taking up, carefully, consciously, playfully, where we left off:

Yet what he said who knew? He was poet,
after all, not executive, not poohbah
of the boardroom. He wrote,
he did not underwrite. He took,
he did not undertake. He was
focused, not schizwit.

This is pretty tight but, sure, frankly imitative of Stevens: especially poohbah and schizwit. If this is a tribute, an ekphrasis, that’s one thing. But it if means to launch out, rocket like, from the gantry of another’s voice, that may be something else altogether. Will these words, launched, in other words, find their own orbit?

To this end, let’s play around with what we have, taking out the Stevensian effects:

Yet what he said who knew?
He was poet, after all, not
executive. He would not
sit godlike at the head,
executing policy,
throwing thunderbolts,
but enforce it. He would
write, not underwrite.
Take, not undertake,
the letter of the law,
and when he left
the office for his
home, walking
back the three
miles he had
trod that
morning,
the letters
formed in
glory, in
full words,
and he wore
them like the
helmet of the sun
god that
he was.

Well, good gods, I have gotten ahead of myself here, you see. Forgotten that I was to shape the sestet into another sestet. Got wordy, perhaps, adding ideas but not yet shaping them.

Proof if anything that I may be in the early stages of development. But let that be as it may. I can always go back, recursively, you see, and press and mold these words into six-line stanzas if that’s that they seem to want or warrant.

But now merely letting some ideas play, along with the nascent shapes and sounds of the words. Here it’s the idea that Stevens didn’t want to be too much a businessman or lawyer, though he was that gladly during the workday. From what I surmise in the Brazeau book (see yesterday’s post), he would sometimes fiddle around with words in the office, even have his secretary type up a few lines, and then he’d stash ’em in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk.

But as I’m fooling around here I’m operating under poetic license, with no oath of fidelity to the letter of the law or the law itself.

The office was one realm for Stevens, an earthly realm. The home, and the walk home, were another, a celestial realm, a place of resting from work and wrestling with the angel of the word, a place of contemplation (aside too from the wife, with whom Stevens did not share a bed or bedroom for many years, for poetry was his muse, his mistress, you see).

As a matter of course, to make the process clearer, I take early versions of a poem, early drafts, and print them up as I go along. Let them rest and breathe on the desk a day or two. Fiddle with them with my pencil, crossing out certain words or phrases, asking questions. And then waiting for the next, I hope clearer, vision of the whole when I come back the next day and have at it.

So let’s see what will happen tomorrow, shall we? Or what already has?

The dictionary and poetry

Frank O'Hara — Frank O’Hara, 1926–1966, was in the habit of tossing around scraps of poetry. Some were found in his chest of drawers after his death.

Got a message from a friend who was having trouble with the poems in my 2nd volume, Lost & Found: Poems Found All Around. He appeared to question why he had to consult the dictionary and look up words. Like most people who don’t read much poetry and are not practiced at reading it, he would probably not consider consulting a dictionary to be a lot of fun.

In a recent book, Why Poetry, however, Matthew Zapruder suggests that the dictionary is exactly what you should consult when you read poetry. If you don’t know a word, look it up, he says, for what you need in poetry first of all is the literal sense of the word. When you understand the individual words, the poem will make more sense, at first a literal sense, then perhaps something more. Only then will you be able to connect the denotations of words with connotations or connections.

The more of the surface of the poem you understand, and perhaps discuss with others, the more of the depths of the poem and the interconnectedness of the parts of a poem you will understand. And not just understand but feel and be affected by.

Let’s look at a few unusual words from a sample poem in Lost & Found, and see how this poem may model how poetry makes more sense when you understand the individual words and how they work together.

Poem I’ve Been Hoarding in a Drawer
Thinking of Frank O’Hara

Sure, socks, tees, and bikini briefs cohabit
in this fine and private place, grave of a sere
and obscure drawer. And when scraps of poetry
also, stray spraints or scats, pack of street mutts,
anoesis of barks, sniffs, scratches, are found here
one day, after I am gone, stuff I hid away, a dusty
cluster of what might have been, and perhaps was,
back in the day: okay, okay, okay.

The title, first, makes use of the operative verb hoard. Is this a pirate’s treasure we’re talking about? Whoa, now! Before we jump to metaphoric conclusions, let’s define hoard in its most familiar, literal sense. To hoard is to stow or hide something away, yes? To store something up and save it from consumption, maybe against a rainy day, maybe against our fears that sooner or later we’ll have nothing at all left in our hands.

If we hoard something in a drawer, we’re saving or keeping it against use or consumption. In this case it’s both underwear (“socks, tees, and bikini briefs”) and a poem, this poem, that are being hoarded. A strange combo to hoard in a drawer, to be sure.

Then comes a series of unusual, and maybe unfamiliar, words: sere, a rather archaic word for dry; spraints, which means otter feces, and scats, animal feces in general; and anoesis, “a state of mind consisting of pure sensation or emotion without cognitive content” (dictionary.com), which with the modifying phrase “of barks, sniffs, scratches,” suggests some kind of doggy mentation at a pretty basic animal level.

So, the situation is a bit strange, or strained, or not exactly realistic or literal. We have underwear in a drawer and also scraps of poetry, maybe unfinished or unpolished poems. And these unlike objects coexist and somehow belong in, or have been filed in, the same place (by the poet). The phrase fine and private place is an allusion to a 17th century seduction poem, familiar to students of poetry if not the general public, by Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” where the poet says as he nears the climax of his seductive pitch:

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell is in a hurry to get it on with his mistress, and she’s still resisting. He admonishes her to do it, do it now, before they’re both dead and can feel nothing at all.

The poet of “Poem I’ve Been Hoarding in a Drawer” is not pleading with a lady, but making something of an erotic connection between the hidden contents of a drawer — intimate garments like underwear, that is, and intimate feelings contained in poems. For isn’t that one of the things that poems do best? Talk honestly about things most of us keep to ourselves, perhaps forever, never uttering, never getting off our chests and out of our hearts? True, this particular poet, in this particular poem, has hid poems away: perhaps he doubts the wisdom of presenting them to the world. He’d be opening himself to the cold gaze of the world of duty, service, subservience, convention, it could be.

But in the end, at the end of the poem, he seems to be resigned to the eventual discovery of these poems, these feelings,

stuff I hid away, a dusty
cluster of what might have been, and perhaps was,
back in the day: okay, okay, okay.

Whatever intimates he might have worn, or intimate feelings he might have had, pinned to his sleeve, worn on his face, or tucked out of sight, they are all gone now, you see, except, for this poem (and others like it).

Now I may seem to be making something more ingenious out of the poem than it ever consciously was. I swear that when I wrote it, I did not start or proceed from a rational outline or moral thesis. The poem simply came to me, pretty quickly, and I relied, as often happens, at least as much on sound as on sense. The origins were not much more than anoesis, believe me: scratching, sniffing, barking.

Poets are suckers for sounds. (They have not been weaned perhaps from these oral pleasures and onto the hard, dry facts of the working world.) In the mouths of poets, words are musical and magical things, even dream things, as Zapruder also suggests. But in the end words also must make sense.

In the minds of readers, especially those who do a little homework, as with the dictionary, sound and sense can merge to make a wondrous and affecting experience. Given a bit of time and effort, poetry will make more sense than the brevity of a piece like “Hoarding” might suggest. But poetry will never appeal to readers the way a page-turning novel does. They are completely different creatures, and if poetry requires time, study, patience it can repay us a thousand times for our efforts.

Words and deeds

The other night — actually three nights — I watched the Netflix documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door about the Colorado man, Chris Watts, who killed his pregnant wife and two baby daughters in the summer of 2019. It took me three nights not because the film was so long but because it was so painful.

Watts worked for Anadarko, the oil and gas exploration company, and the night his wife returned to him from an out-of-town conference he had sex with her and then confessed he no longer loved her. He was working out like a maniac, chiseling his body for the sake of his ego and his new GF and chiseling his wife in the bargain, as he adamantly denied he was interested in anybody else. He was making love to her that last night, he was fessing up that he did not love her, and then he strangled her in the bed.

Chris Watts' wife and daughters — From left, Bella Watts, Celeste Watts and Shanann Watts. – The Colorado Bureau of Investigation via AP.

He took the wife’s body to his truck and packed in the two girls, three and four years old also, who were crying and asking what was wrong with mommy. He drove to a worksite and laid the wife’s body on the ground, then strangled both girls, the younger, then the older, and threw the bodies into an oil storage tank.

You see what I mean? This is hideous and incomprehensible.

One of the lines that struck me in the film is one of the little girls skipping and singing, “I love school!”

But her father hadn’t learned much. He was a liar, in short. He was quieter than his wife, Shanann, who was passionate and frantically needed to be loved. She would text her girlfriends about Chris’s indifference and his lack of interest in her. She would hope to be lucky, that night, she would tell her friends, but Chris was not interested.

He was interested in working out, which he would do in lieu of talking to her or leveling with her or doing things with the family. He would bite his tongue till the blood roiled and keep his feelings to himself.

After the murders he told investigators, when he began to break, that his wife had strangled the girls, so he strangled her. That wasn’t true, of course.

He denied he had an extramarital love interest. And that wasn’t true.

Even his friends knew something was wrong. He was ordinarily such a calm, or should we say repressed, character, and here he was in the presence of investigators, in his house at first, acting weirdly nervous.

Wouldn’t you?

The wife doesn’t come across in the film as a very sympathetic figure — too needy and wheedling. But that’s no reason to kill her, as witnesses say. Why not simply leave her and the girls? Go with the GF and create a new life?

There was something darkly, demoniacally compelling, though.

“Every time I think about it, I’m just like, did I know I was going to do that before I got on top of her?” he told investigators. “It just felt like there was already something in my mind that was implanted that I was gonna do it and when I woke up that morning it was gonna happen and I had no control over it.”

This despite his apparent, or overt, Christianity. Chris Watts and his wife both hailed from North Carolina, part of the Bible Belt, and Watts’ father could not believe his son had committed murder. “In my heart,” he told ABC News, “I know he didn’t kill those girls.” After all, he “knows the Bible inside and out.”

But you can say one thing and do another, yes? You’ll see famous liars even in the Bible: Satan, St. Peter, Judas Iscariot.

You’ll see liars in Dostoevsky and other authors of the modern condition.

There’s love and marriage, and then there’s murder.

There’s saying one and doing something else.

There’s crime and, of course, there’s punishment, and Chris Watts is in prison for the rest of his life, where he will have ample time to cogitate his words and deeds.