Don't Muzzle the Ghazal

Poetry and Science, 2nd Post

The general direction of the posts on poetry and science is on their relationship as modes of knowing, of understanding, and expressing. This post, though, deals with science as a subject for poetry. First, for your pleasure, I propose David Lunde's ghazal. "Of Stars," which appeared in the fifth issue of The Ghazal Page for 2004. A Persian ghazal in form, "Of Stars" traces the human fascination with the night skies and their bright, dazzling inhabitants. ("Of stars," as you might expect, is the radif.)

Here are the first two shers of the poem, but you really should read the entire piece:

    The Milky Way swirls, a wizard's cloak of stars;
    Around we wheel on a slim spoke of stars.

    Honor that most clever, most sapient ancestor--
    When first he spoke, he spoke of stars.

"Of Stars" can be seen as a science fiction or speculative poem. The Science Fiction Poetry Association is devoted to the SF genre of poetry. The SFPA is an active organization, with a journal, prizes, and other avenues into SF poetry. Their Dwarf Star prize anthology for 2006 was edited by Deborah P. Kolodji, whose work has appeared on The Ghazal Page. Her ""Dark Matter" explores scientific imagery in an open ghazal form. Kolodji also has a poem — a cinquain — on Astropoetica. David Jalajel also has a poem scheduled for Astropoetica.

A cinquain is a five-line form invented by the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey in the early twentieth century. Deborah Kolodji is editor of Amaze: the Cinquain Journal.

Another genre of science-related poetry is "lab-lit," which I just learned about through a discussion list. The lab-lit site seems interested in fiction and factual prose, not poetry. It is worth your time to visit, with a serialized novel and other items.

Finally, from The Scientist magazine's Web site, here's an article that explores the questions:

"What good is science to poets? And what good is poetry to scientists?"

Those questions are close to the ones I want to explore further in posts on science and poetry.

Why Bother?

Why should I, you, or anyone else continue to write poetry? Haven't all the poems already been written? There are love poems, nature poems, narrative poems, and on and on. What do you and I and anyone else have to offer new in the way of theme or content or form?

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Emporia, Kansas, another undergrad and I shared our "poems" (ironic quotation marks). The other fellow — whose name I've forgotten — surprised and shocked me by saying that there was no point in writing poetry because everything possible had already been written. I don't know about him, but, for better or worse, I've continued to scribble verses.

In a sense, my friend was right: the world probably has enough love poems, nature poems, etc etc. So, if I write a love poem for my wife, as I've done many times, why should I bother? Why not find the appropriate lines in the Song of Songs which Is Solomon's, in William Carlos Williams' The Desert Music, or Cole Porter? If I'm feeling blue, why not listen to the blues rather than scribbling a verse about it?

What makes the poem I write today — that you write today — different from the hundreds of thousands of existing poems?

The difference is that that theme, that content, that form is embedded in this situation, in the moment(s) in which you write. In other words, I haven't written this to this woman before, nor has anyone else. It is the situation, the personal, cultural, and historical context that makes it worthwhile to keep writing poetry. It is, of course, possible that  I or  you or  someone else will write something radically new. Ezra Pound's adage, "Make it new," is always relevant if difficult to achieve. Falling short of the adage, as I surely do, I can at least write in my situation.

This entry was prompted by a point of Friedrich Nietzsche's. I've been reading The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, in which an unpublished early essay of Nietzsche's is quoted. Trained as a classical philologist, Nietzsche wrote that classicists could keep their field alive by keeping it connected to their lives: understanding of the past is always vital in the context of the present (p. 30, my paraphrase).

If you wish a label for my position in this post, it is — existentialist. That's a label that's really a refusal to be labeled. Just keep writing, okay?

The Role of Rules

What is the role of rules in art? Should the artist (poet, painter, musician) seek to adhere to a clearly defined, detailed set of rules? Should the artist ignore all rules and refuse to have anything to do with them?

The Ghazal Page has just published David Jalajel's "Rules for Writing Arabic Ghazals in English." This article puts together the essentials of David's previous articles on using Arabic forms for English ghazals, microrhyme in ghazals, and enjambment. These articles present detailed information about the meter, rhyme, lineation, and stanzas of Arabic ghazals. David gives examples of his own English ghazals using these features as well as some examples from historical poets.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche distinguishes the Apollonian and Dionysian types: the Apollonian values clarity, reason, order; the Dionysian values energy, intensity, spontaneity. These two, quite recognizable, attitudes may be found in poets' need for rules. The poet who needs rules, insists on them and on strict conformity to them, is Apollonian. The poet who despises rules, seeks open, organic forms, and finds rules stultifying is Dionysian.

This kind of dichotomy is very abstract: an extremely Dionysian poet, like Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsberg, will sometimes betray an interest in form and in rules; an Apollonian poet, like T. S. Eliot, will show moments of glowing spontaneity. Yes, this division is another version of the Classical vs. Romantic dichotomy and is equally superficial, yet the distinction is helpful as a starting point and as a caution to us not to make easy classifications of ourselves and others.

Me? I tire of the Dionysian "do your thing" attitude; I also tire of the Apollonian "submit to tradition" attitude. The poetry I return to includes work that tends toward either extreme, as well as work that doesn't fit these categories. People, language, and the world are too complex and subtle to be placed in one of two exclusive boxes.

Which Mind Are You In?

How do you write a poem? Where do you get your ideas? How do you know when a poem is finished?

Poets, artists, novelists get questions like these whenever the subject of creativity comes up. Several years ago, I wrote some FAQs giving my typical answers to such things. What follows here is a little more serious discussion.

It's commonplace to divide human mental capabilities into two sets: intellectual and creative, rational and imaginative, left-brain and right-brain, and on and on. Taking these divisions as mutually exclusive is a serious mistake: the two interact, influence each other, blur and blend. Still, there is some truth in the division. (The division is overly simple: we surely think, experience, imagine in more than two modes.)

I'm going to name the two modes analytical and intuitive. Almost any synonyms for these two terms will work, although with different connotations.

So: Which mind do you write poetry with? Both, you say? But you can't use both modes simultaneously — humans can't multitask in the strict sense of the word.

New questions: Which mind do you use most? Which mode do you start with?

If you're concerned about following the rules, if you scan carefully to make sure your meter is correct, if you rhyme according to a fixed scheme, if your rhymes are full rhymes and not half- or slant-rhymes, then, I'd say, the analytical mind dominates your critical process. You will find Edgar Allan Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," a mechanical, rationalized account of how he wrote "The Raven," to be convincing and inspiring. There's no role for the intuitive mode of thinking in Poe's account.

If, one the other hand, you simply start writing and go with the flow, casting aside any concern about form, rhyme, meter, and so on, then your intuitive mind dominates. You will find Jack Kerouac's "Spontaneous Bop Prosody" exhilarating and write all night long.

Which mind do you write in? Which do I? Is one better than the other? There'll be more comment on the "two-minds hypothesis" later on.

Poetry and Science, 1st Post

Why do I want to write about science and poetry? Those two fields of human creativity and discovery are important to me, and science is important to many people. Sadly, poetry doesn't seem to be as important to as many people as one would like. (Of course, lyrics to music are a genre of poetry and much more popular than written poetry. But that's another entry.)

Last year, I posted an entry about science and poetry in my blog. That was a preliminary statement that I'd planned to follow up with entries discussing the books by Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow) and Aldous Huxley (Literature and Science) that I mentioned. I still believe these are important books by important writers and plan to post on them in the near future. Huxley's book is out of print but can be ordered through a used book store.

My interest in the relationship between science and poetry may be connected with my having taught for forty year's at "Missouri's premier technological research university." Technology and science are, of course, different, if closely related, endeavors. One early discovery I made here was how many engineering students write poetry — usually love verses to girlfriends. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, when I was a freshman in high school, 13/14 years old, I wanted to be an engineer. I fooled with old radio sets, learned some basic equations, such as the one for figuring bhp (brake horsepower) from an automobile engine, things like that. What happened? I started writing poetry then, discovered Thoreau, Plato, and Bertrand Russell, the French Impressionists, Picasso, and never looked back at engineering.

I have always read about science — popularizing books like those by George Gamow or Arthur Eddington, somewhat more technical books by Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, and others. The phenomenological and existentialist philosophers address issues that are very important to me. For instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the differences between rational-scientific language and poetic is relevant to the relationship of science to poetry and, in fact, is not that much different from Huxley's much less technical discussion in Science and Literature.

That's enough abstractness for an afternoon with a temperature of 103 degrees F. or 40 degrees C. This isn't unprecedented weather for the Ozarks in August, but it may set a record.

Enjambment in Arabic Poetry

On The Ghazal Page, I've just posted an essay on enjambment in Arabic poetry by David Jalajel. This essay explains the ways in which Arabic poets have used enjambment between bayts (long lines) and at the caesura, the pause in the middle of the bayt. (The caesura is where there'd be a line-break if the bayt is presented as a couplet.

I hope you'll find this essay rewarding. I have.

My Poetics

I've just posted a page — link at the right — that contains my statement of my poetics. I hope you find it worthwhile. It's squarely in the American tradition of organic poetry, of the poetry of flow and the natural. I don't put myself in the same class as Thoreau, Whitman, Levertov, et al, but I do feel part of that tradition.