Reflections on Poetic Language

From Dobyns' chapter “Metaphor”:

A metaphor can exist to heighten just a small part of the poem or it can be the entire poem. To be successful, however, the metaphor must be functional rather than decorative, meaning it has to further the general intent of the poem and it must be necessary to the reader's understanding and involvement in the poem. Any decorative use of metaphor is basically rhetorical; the author is trying to convince the reader by what amounts to technical effects rather than by content.

Then, he writes:

Image without object is evocative but it is dead end. The image has no function without the object, while the purpose of the metaphor is to draw attention to the relationship between its parts.

Even a symbol must give a sense of what it symbolizes.

We go to art partly to learn about the world. In a metaphor, that world is represented by the object, while the comparison with the image gives us a new sense of that world.

Like Dobyns, I am not someone who believes in empty metaphors, in language games and images which sound and read and feel merely beautiful. I have blogged about it before, but I will state it here again, just so we have a context for this post: I don't believe beautiful language or grasp over the technicalities of a language can replace a complicated historical eye and a sociological imagination. Now, having stated that, it is interesting how in the workshop I am in right now, one of the things that I have been encountering is the teacher's feeling that I get drawn into beautiful language-play and images, without necessarily thinking about their meaning and content. She has been encouraging me to “clarify my meaning rather than obfuscating my meaning.” For example, these were the lines I had:

She had a name for me.

Long before, I, heaviness-wrapped,

knifed through her

entrails

innards

skin of her thigh

a presence of my own

a sting in red, green, blue and brown.

Now, this is a revised version of a poem, and the earlier version was like this:

She had a name for me. Long before she actually gave me birth.

A different one from that which the Head of the Clan announced

in the feast, and had later scrivened in the pages of the little maroon

book.

Her comment was:

We have lost the word “birth” in this description.

Now, replacing the word “birth” with images was a conscious choice. The word “birth” seemed too direct to me, not expressing enough about the complexities of the actual birthing process. So, I was trying to find something which would express the physical pain of the birthing process itself, the actual physical discomfort, the way a child is a responsibility, the gendered nature of that very responsibility, and how becoming a mother has historically meant loss of opportunities for women. Hence, the images “heaviness-wrapped”, of the child literally knifing through her mother's body. But then, a child is also a source of joy. Hence, the colors—green, blue and red. And why “sting”? Because this is a poem about a daughter's disappointment about her mother's acceptance of silence. This is not a poem that celebrates in nostalgic terms the mother-daughter relationship. It is not glorifying motherhood, so to say. And the daughter's criticism transforms her literally into a pest, seen from the mother's perspective. Hence, the use of the “sting.” In other words, I had used the images to convey the conflict-ridden nature of this relationship, the contradictory feelings about the birthing process. I don't think the word “birth” could have done it for me. In the first version, I was using that sentence more as a placeholder than anything else. And I don't know, my feeling is that, the images are specific enough to remind the reader that it is birth we are talking about: the innards, entrails, and especially the reference to the thigh.

In other words, the “object” of this passage is the birthing process.

Now, I do want to make it “clear” for the reader. But I don't want my poems to work as guide-books for my readers. I want them to work hard, ask questions aggressively, think through each of the images and feel them. So, I think, once again, I am bumping here against a very different understanding of what a poem is supposed to do, and what's the role of metaphors. Yes, to be honest, I am someone who is attracted towards the abstract, the surreal, the magical in my metaphors. In other words, I want to push the limits of reality in my metaphors rather than reifying the everyday in a photographic way. And when I ask for feedback, I want to see, if the metaphors I am using are being effective in that endeavor. But I don't think I am willing to let go of the metaphor--the magical in the metaphor, the abstract in the metaphor—in that way.

Because it is in that abstraction, in that ability to reach the magical, the surreal that I see the political work of poetry.