The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination - Softcover

Phillips, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555976816 ISBN 13: 9781555976811

Verlag: Graywolf Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing

In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. "I think it's largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making," Phillips writes. "I think it has something to do with revision—how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well."

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Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Silverchest and Double Shadow, and a collection of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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The Art of Daring

Risk, Restlessness, Imagination

By Carl Phillips

GRAYWOLF PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Carl Phillips
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55597-681-1

Contents

Preface, xi, 
Restlessness, 
Little Gods of Making, 5, 
On Restlessness, 33, 
Beautiful Dreamer, 55, 
Poetry, Love, and Mercy, 73, 
Penetration, 
Which One's the World?, 95, 
Heaven and Earth, 103, 
Daring, 
Foliage, 115, 

CHAPTER 1

Little Gods of Making

A friend tells me we are, all of US, little gods of making, here on earth to make some part of us we can leave behind, a way of translating making into made—made as a kind of death, or closure, to the act of making. It's as if the trajectory of art were necessarily that of life itself, with art having perhaps more resonance than the body-in-death. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say there's a different resonance, since the body-in-death has its own haunting, unforgettable, and often unbearable qualities, from which we walk away at last not unchanged.

"It's a human need, to give to shapelessness a form." So I said once, in an earlier poem, referring specifically to the human impulse to make something concrete out of an abstraction like love—hence, relationships, the various configurations of making a life with someone else. But while it may be true that humans deal with the particular shapelessness of abstractions, the impulse to give or make form is evident throughout the natural world. Out of the general shapelessness of straw and thread, for example, birds fashion a nest, the form of the nest designed to accommodate the bird's body and the bodies that will also live there later. Animals tend toward social forms—coyotes into packs, fish into schools, making out of the directionless (because unassigned) individual body a community of bodies, each given a place in the social order, all for the purpose of survival—which is to say that the motivation, instinctively, is to again accommodate the body, by protecting it. Form, shape—these may be our only way, finally, of making sense of the world around us. And the body may be the one form, finally, from which we begin, each time, our knowing. This makes sense, given that we are born into form—each of us is a former shapelessness that acquired physical form, and the general impulse is to create forms that will accommodate the protection of that ur-form, as it were, the body.

Houses, societies—these accommodate the physical protection of the body. Art, I would like to suggest, accommodates the psychic/psychological protection of the body—something required specifically by humans (as opposed to coyotes, birds, fish) because of that self-consciousness that is unique to human beings, our ability to be aware of such things as mortality, and to think in terms of ethics and of moral valence ...

There's a yard that I've walked my dog past for years—we'd stop each day and wait for the dog tied up there to notice us, come toward us, and then do the brief sniff-and-greet that dogs do. That dog died last winter, but all this past summer, whenever we walked past that yard, my dog would stop, look into the empty yard, wag her tail—then we'd move on. This may be memory, on my dog's part, but not recognition exactly, and certainly not grief. Nor does passing the yard conjure in the dog any loose meditation on loss, animal awareness of it, or of regret. That's the beauty of being an animal, and the sometime curse of being a human being. It's a curse, though, that is catalyst, too, for the making of art.

* * *

Here is a poem by Louise Bogan, called "Night":

    The cold remote islands
    And the blue estuaries
    Where what breathes, breathes
    The restless wind of the inlets,
    And what drinks, drinks
    The incoming tide;

    Where shell and weed
    Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
    And the clear nights of stars
    Swing their lights westward
    To set behind the land;

    Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
    Renews itself forever;
    Where, again on cloudless nights,
    The water reflects
    The firmament's partial setting;

    —O remember
    In your narrowing dark hours
    That more things move
    Than blood in the heart.

What I've always admired most immediately in this poem is its camera work, the way in which the reader's eye is so carefully controlled. In stanza one, it's as if we're looking straight out, into a remoteness whose inhabitants are unspecifiable, "what breathes," "what drinks" With stanza two, we get the specifics of shell and weed, assignable to the shore, and the stars, assignable to sky; which is to say, we have moved from looking out, and are now directed downward to the shore and sea, then upward to the night sky, and then—by the anticipation of the stars' setting—back to the land they will set behind. The same movements occur in stanza three—downward to the rocks, upward to the sky (implied by "cloudless"), downward to the water, then upward, via reflection, to the firmament (and again, the mention of "setting," to imply the horizon of land). In the course of three stanzas, we look into a generality of world, only to learn that what appears general has its specific zones of earth, sea, and sky, which—when we look more repeatedly (are made to do so, in stanza three)—seem the fixed and timeless points around and within which all else "merely" occurs, then ceases to do so. This recognition is the trigger for the camera's final move—the camera, which has looked out into the physical, natural world, swings to an interior that is human, metaphysical, self-reflective, and too often forgetful of and/or resistant to the self's relative irrelevance within the world it inhabits and the limitedness of the self's existence, as we see the ongoing, cyclical interaction of the sea, earth, and sky juxtaposed with the "narrowing dark hours" that characterize human life.

Camera work is one level at which Bogan's poem can be seen as an enactment of the mind passing from mere observation to a kind of curiosity that in turn leads to closer observation, which then leads to understanding. What gets understood is sobering. Also disturbing. Also strangely comforting: to understand one's transience in the world—one's irrelevance to it—can be a way to begin assigning less weight to our various crises, whether those of triumph or defeat; and from here, the diminishment both of arrogance and of self-pity becomes possible.

This doesn't change how disturbing it also is, to recognize that we will die, while the world will continue, utterly indifferent to our having existed. The difficulty of reaching this understanding gets enacted in the syntax of Bogan's poem. To begin with, the first three stanzas are all part of what turns out to be a single, incomplete sentence. We're led to believe there will be resolution; subordinate clauses create anticipation—we anticipate a governing sentence...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Graywolf Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1555976816
• ISBN 13: 9781555976811
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 142
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar