The poem as an Act

Poetry is. . . .   I've seen this unfinished sentence all my life in school and the answers usually range in the "poetry is a bunch of words, which have rhythm and is beautiful"  "Poetry is music" and "poetry is emotional."  It's a little different than "A poem is a meteor" "Poetry is not personal" "poetry is a means of redemption" "a poem is a pheasant." But I guess they are kind of similar too.

I was flipping through Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and Stevens has things to say about what poetry is or what it has to be: 

It must be abstract
It must change
It must give pleasure

"but play you must,/ a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,/ a tune upon the blue guitar/ of things exactly as they are."

I cheated and threw in some Blue Guitar.   

"but to impose is not to discover. To discover an order as of a season, to discover summer and know it, to discover winter and know it well, to find, not to impose, not to have reasoned at all."


We've had some discussions about seeing thing for what they are and my mind floats from getting it and not getting it. Right now, I'm in the getting, because it's something I remember from a previous class-- to impose is not to discover, which came up in the Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.  And I think we might have talked about it too. Stevens makes a distinction between people and poets, impositions and discoveries. A guy named Merle D. Brown talks about it in his book Wallace Stevens: the Poem as Act, and he says even though men and poets approach life in different ways, they kind of revolve around two things: change and feeling.

Merle says "fiction results from feeling." I took that as reaction. We create from our emotions- our desire. We may not always feel pleasure (not necessarily happiness) from a thing, but ordinary people can impose our desire for pleasure on something, while a poet looks deeper and finds the pleasure in the thing itself. It's imposition versus discovery, but both involve a kind of art. Change took Merle too long to explain, but I think he was saying that people are frightened of it and we try to stop it or control it with words, we seek to "impose orders to 'stop the whirlwind.'" Poets revel in change, but at the same time, they find themselves kind of stuck in repetition or permanence.  Or maybe not stuck, but they make an art of the patterns in changes or the changing patterns or something.  But I was thinking of this "change" in the romantic sense. And it took me here:

"Mutability," by William Wordsworth
From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail:
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time

Harmonium.  It's katabosis and anabosis.   Mrs. Alfred Uruguay. It's a seesaw.

In our discussion on Monday, I kept thinking of this toy. In its ascent and descent and in the very name.  "See" and "saw."   According to Wikipedia, the name comes from "a direct Anglicisation of the French ci-ça, meaning literally, this-that, seemingly attributable to the back-and-forth motion for which a seesaw is known." Neti, neti, except no not. I hope Wikipedia is telling the truth.

I never really liked these things (seesaws, not Wikipedia) when I was little, because my school's playground had really lame ones, but a few years back, I found a seesaw with a gigantic spring fulcrum and it was amazing, I mean my friend Emily and I got some serious height, but it's weird to think you could have so much fun on something that is so repetitive.  We go up and come back down over and over and over again. We know what's going to happen, but we're still excited to see the world from a new angle and then whoosh back down so we can launch again.  We see and then we saw and we do it again and the view is a little different each time.  There's a poetry to it. Or it is poetry, "the finding of a satisfaction, and may be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing, me seesawing.
The poem of the act of the mind"