Week 3 - February 18
In
Praise of Description! In Praise of the Resonant Particular –
Perillo, Oliver, Rogers, Raby, Goodrich
Lorca
Intelligence, give me
the exact name of things
…I want my word to be
the thing itself
created by my soul a second time.
So that those who do not know them
can go to the things through me,
all those who have forgotten them
can go to the things through me….
Intelligence, give me
the exact name, and your name
and theirs and mine, for things!
Field Work
in the Resonant Particular
- Doty
“Description”
–one vast conjugation/ of the verb/to shine.”
description as illumination/ as imagination/ as transubstantiation/as
metamorphosis
“ Green Crab’s Shell” – Not exactly green/closer
to bronze…”
“Pipistrele” – “the fleeting contraption…little
Victorian handbag”
- Willard
Spiegelman: How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in
Contemporary Poetry
“Does
the ‘I’ always interfere with, interrupt, or color
the seeing “eye?”
“We must do away with all explanation, and description
alone must take it’s place” (Wittgenstein qtd. in
Spiegelman)
“I look and look/As though I could be saved by simply looking”
( Anthony Hecht qtd. in Spigelman.
“Looking saves, but it also seduces.”
“Description is revelation. It is not/The thing described,
nor false facsimile.” Stevens
“the theory of description matters most…” especially
to those “for whom the word is the making of the world.”
Wallace Stevens
Perception> Description>Perception
only once you’ve described what you’ve perceived do
you perceive it and perceive there’s more to describe
Perception<>Imagination<>Perception Imagination<>Description<>Imagination
(you have to imagine there’s something to perceive
Field work
in the resonant particular and the surprise of language
and practice in revisiting/resisting the lure of the poetical
for the following
the Mary Oliver poems, identify the lure of the poetical
especially at the poem’s end --- and “lure” implies
the seductiveness
of the language at the end – it seems so right, so poetic
–
“August” (3)
“Mushrooms” (4)
“Lightning” (7-8)
“Moles” (10-11)
“Vultures” (37-38)
“The Snakes” (48)
“May” 53)
“The Fish” (56)
“Little Sister Pond” (64-66)
“The Honey Tree” (81)
“In Blackwater Woods” (82-83)
Field Work
with Lucia Perillo “If I were a gull….But you are not
gull” – “Ground-truthing
A. Inseminating
the Elephant – Lucia Perillo
i. “Breaking
News”
“the world has not lost the consolation of its old pain”
ii. “Notes from My Apprenticeship” (8)
“roll up your sleeve/plunge your arm in” (2) vs
“see what little of yourself you own”(4-5)
vs. “immortal…mistress of the poison worm”(6)
iii. “Transcendentalism” -- “the eyeball’s
heavy, riding in the bow” (7)
iv. “For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive
in Ohio “State” (9)
B. I’ve
Heard the Vultures Singing --gulls, bats, birdsong, vultures
pages from Perillo
i. “If
I were a gull….But you are not gull” (16)
ii. “how oblivious I am. To kinglets, siskins, widgeons:
to all the common birds I’ve missed (18)
“So I tell myself: Okay have an experience. Two ravens
swing by…This is my experience: to hear the ravens croak.
To hear iii. the slow, sporadic way they say the word grok.
(81)
iv. “trying to imagine bat-ness. I beam my thoughts into
the sky, listening for an echo.”
Assignment:
try to imagine _______-ness – you fill in the blank and beam
your thoughts.
“hibernaculum – this new word puts me into a heightened
sensory state” (108)
Assignment:
pick a Latinate word –maybe one to do with the natural world
– that sends you into a heightened sensory state.
“ I want the bats to be in some percentage rabid, some percentage
dangerous.” (113)
“The bats hunt low on the water, but every now and again
looking through my binoculars, I’ll see one silhouetted by
the moon’s low orange wafer…For one moment the bones
hang motionless caught as if by strobe-light. The body saying,
however briefly, Here I am.”
Assignment:
study something in “nature” till you know what it’s
saying
“Ground-truthing is what biologists call entering an environment
and actually surveying
what is there via the senses…” (164)
“Then it starts to seem by listening for their songs I’m
causing birds to appear.” (173)
transcribing bird song by diagram(159/162), phonetics(163), translation
(166)
“more than a tape will tell you” (165)
“can’t find a match in our crude human words” (167)
“Evanescence, it seems, is a universally quality of birdsong”(171)
Assignment:
invent a bird, its habitat, its song (transcribed by diagram,
phonetics, and English translation
“I can find no entry for vulture on the definitive tape,
no song or call or chatter or whinny or drum.” (176)
…”if
soul is too hokey/for all the misty goo inside us” (Elephant
79-80)
Small Workshop:
identify what you are pulled to in each other poems, what might
need work,
and then consider where the language might be more surprising
and a resonant particular might be added.
For the following
poems from Elizabeth Raby and Pattiann Rogers
find a surprise in the language and a resonant particular
then compose a Field Guide entry for something in the poem: “From
the Garden of Earthly Delights”
Raby: “Collaterals”
Raby: “Sojourner”
Raby: “Rabbits”
Raby: “Hummingbird Wars”
Rogers: “For Stephen Drawing Birds”
Rogers: “Suppose Your Father Was a Redbird”
Rogers: “The Rites of Passage”
Rogers: “Eating Death:”
Rogers: “Berry Renaissance “
Rogers: “Apple Disciples”
Possible
exercises:
inspired by Rogers” Berry renaissance”
engage in an act of immersion and
render that in a poem
“Quail”
– “I’d like to believe something more/than chance
ensures what will survive”
“Five Feathers” “Not a bad evening. Not a bad life.”
