Bad poetry reading

On the strength of a book review, I recently bought a copy of David Hinton’s translations of the poetry of Du Fu, a late Tang Dynasty gentleman. “Gentleman” is, really, the best way to describe him – the poet, I mean; like most semi-wealthy Chinese men of the 8th century AD (wow, that’s an inappropriate calendar to use), he was an administrator with the late Tang dynasty imperial court, and as part of that, was expected to have mastered the poetic arts and to have a refined skill and taste in music, painting, and gardening. Interestingly, Chinese poetry was originally meant to be sung, but music was viewed as a differential art; no pop music in that era, I guess. To me, Du Fu – at least in translation – is an exceptional poet, although Chinese poetry, I’ve come to realise, is both written differently than Western poetry, and serves a different purpose in its local society as well.

I say “I’ve come to realise” for a reason: I have really, really enjoyed, over the past month, Du Fu’s poems as translated by Hinton, as well as the work of his contemporaries, even though in the past I have found Western poetry of any age to be, well, not that enjoyable. I feel horrifically embarrassed to admit to this, especially since I have an old friend whose two siblings are, improbably, professional poets – published and everything. Over the years I’ve sheepishly avoided the conversation where I’d be forced to admit that much of their work is impenetrable to me. It’s not to say that it’s incomprehensible: I can make out the words, and parse their meaning, and come to an opinion about whether I think it meets certain externally defined standards of quality. But if asked what do you think of this poem, Peter, I’d have to answer that I’m at a complete loss. Western poetry – whether it be John Donne, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Whitman, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and especially anyone from the 20th century, all of those chuckleheads who seemed to have affairs with one another, dump one another, and usually come to a bad end – I’d have to say leave me completely unaffected. I’d read it, and all the time I’d be thinking “blah blah – even Henry James can pull together prose with more engagement than this.” Every now and again in high school someone would recite an Emily Dickinson poem and it would make me pause for a moment, but then if the next thing up on stage were any random speech by Abraham Lincoln, or a snippet of Emerson or Thoreau, I’d be happy to move on. I’ve simply been unable to enjoy poetry in my own language – not for lack of trying.

But I had an epiphany in the past couple of weeks which, I think, might finally allow me to break through and start to read poetry in a new light. The breakthrough came not all at once, but in two distinct events in the last month. The first was getting the copy of Hinton’s Du Fu and, of course, reading it. Hinton translates from the old court Chinese characters in a way very different from that which I had grown accustomed to from my days when I fooled myself into thinking I could learn Chinese. Back then – late teens – I took courses in modern spoken and written Mandarin, which has nothing to do with the written characters of Tang and Song dynasty poets, and I read a lot of the standard texts of Chinese learning and a decent amount of poetry translated in English. The translations of the classic texts – the I Ching, Lao-tse, the Analects of Confucius – were each very different but the translators took care to preserve the purpose of each work in their conversion from the ancient works. I Ching, fundamentally, is a book of interpreting divine symbols: the version I read felt very similar to reading a New Age-y mystical take on astrology, which may have been unfortunate from an artistic perspective but was correct from the viewpoint of the translation mapping to the purpose of the original work. Analects, meanwhile, came across much as middle Warring States period version of The Prince by Machiavelli, mixed with the parts of Edith Wharton which gently explain to the reader the mores of post-Civil War Manhattan moneyed culture: again, spot on, well done translator.

The older poetry translations, though, tried to map the Chinese into the various forms of English poetry: rhyming verse, free verse, the short forms of Dickinson in some cases. It always fell flat, maybe partially because the English poems themselves were falling flat to my ear; thus, mapping to the verse of a Byron was never going to work. Hinton, though, does something quite different. Classical Chinese court poetry, after all, is inherently visual. Chinese ideograms are obviously pictures first, words second, but the ideograms also have interior meanings which are only accessed by understanding their substructures; the court poets were expected to be masters of these, and thus a well-constructed medium length poem – which might only have 80 characters – had interiorities of meaning that are difficult to convey in English script. I remember just enough Chinese to still understand this – enough so that when Hinton includes the Chinese script in his discussion of a poem, I can see what he’s trying to convey, and can even imagine that I might describe (“de-scribe” – what a great word in this context) a given character differently. For example he translated one character as “sky” which I would have naturally translated as “heaven” – and it occurred to me that elsewhere he translated a character as “soul” that, in the context of the poem, I would have chosen “personality”.

Hinton, though, also points out that the words in Chinese court poetry are intentionally un-grammatical – although they may have a singing quality to them, the lines or stanzas can’t be viewed as sentences in the way that the Shakespearean sonnets are, in fact, laced together, rhymed, and rhythmically bound bundles of also-bound meaning. Literal translations don’t make sense because the Chinese poems weren’t meant to be heard – or more accurately seen – as a meaningful declarative sentence or interrogatory. The ideographs were meant to create a visual form which paired with their individual meanings to construct an artform of the whole – and Hinton, almost magically, creates this in English, sometimes by playing with words on the page, by choosing a nuance of word that fits the line sizing better than maybe a more accurate alternative. He does so even though the physical dynamics of the page are fundamentally different: verso English read top down, left to right, page by page, turn by turn of the thumb and forefinger; Chinese read top down, right to left, scrolling out in infinity as the hand gently unrolls the silk. In that light, Du Fu now “feels” like the very good translations of the Analects and the Daode Jing: it feels like a work of art, not a work of English language poetry, but more like a written evocation of Caravaggio or Turner. Hinton writes Du Fu as if he’s doing his best to describe visual beauty to the blind, with kindness, with consideration – and using the best and only tool at his disposal, words – which is what Du Fu was exploring as well, in his characters painted, inked, on a scroll written when Dante was still five hundred years before conception.

That was only part one, though. The epiphany coalesced finally while sitting on my couch, writing a letter to a regulator describing why an annual financial filing was delayed. Sitting next to me, doing some homework, was my son’s friend, who is in fourth grade. He’s continuously puzzled as to what I do for a living – I’ve told him using the correct terms (“corporate structuring”, “finance and compliance”, “banking strategy”) but to a ten year old whose mother is a nurse and father is an electrician, those terms mean nothing. But for the first time, he saw what I did – which in his mind was enormously physical – and it was typing. “Oh,” he said, “you pound the keyboard all day.” That’s not an incorrect observation: the physical reality of my work consists of various forms of touching a keyboard. I asked him what he thought of that, and he said it was strange, so I had him read the regulatory notification I was typing. He was actually a bit spellbound, and read it to himself – lips moving slightly the way ten year olds tend to read difficult texts to themselves – and then said he didn’t understand any of it. I told him well, if I had looked at what his father does to electrical circuits and switches and the like, I’d also have no idea what to make of it, so it wasn’t really that different. He then told me his dad didn’t think I had a real job, to which I said his dad was more correct than not, but that society still compensated me well for whatever it is that I do, so by definition I’m doing something of value to other people, at least. He stared at me, and told me I’m weird, and went back to his homework.

The revelation here may be hard to discern, but bear with me. My son’s friend made me think about how I use words – and not just words, but symbols, signs – in two very different ways that simply make no sense to a ten year old, or his parents, or frankly to most anyone. First and foremost, I use them as catalysts for my own understanding. I write, and speak, and build mathematical models, and build graphs of functions, to help me ask the next question of my own theories, to prove them false and to point towards a potential truth, and to help me ask the next thing of the world. But I also use words to bridge the unbridgeable gap between myself and everyone else – or at least, I attempt to. The bridges I build are pontoons – floating, unstable, readily washed away – but that’s on purpose, because I’d much rather build another pontoon bridge somewhere else than pretend that the stone bridge of the imagination is solid and permanent. There is a subliterature of books from the Balkans on this theme – The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric, and The Three Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare – that I think have infected my intellectual consciousness. I don’t want a permanent bridge, but I do want to cross the waters. That concept, though, is a window into me: I am, I think, an engineer by inclination. And hence the failure in my frame of reference.

I should point out here that I learned to write on a typewriter – specifically, an early 1970s IBM Selectric I, the version before they introduced the correction tape so you had to type really well – and never looked back. I mean, I learned my alphabet with pen and paper, or rather pencil and paper, but I learned how to construct my thoughts into sentences, paragraphs, essays, and more, with mechanical assistance. It got to the point that by the time I was in high school, I could type much faster than I could write, and I pretty much gave up on handwriting completely. The ten year old sitting next to me on my couch was sort of amazed at how fast I can type, and I explained it to him, and he looked at me like I was a kind a freak – and indeed, that was part of the epiphany. I may be a freak, and my theory is that that “skill” of mine which creates my thoughts intermediated via the machine at some point fundamentally closed my ear to what poetry is as an art form – which is to say it is an art form. But that is not what writing is to me: a means of multifaceted exploration. I write to explore the lived experience; poets, I’m coming to realise, more often write to bring beauty to the articulated existence, and those are two very different goals. And, moreover, my experience of words is engineered, not crafted.

Because poets, of course, are artists. They have craft. Artists do not build bridges, nor do they put up drywall or change the wiring in houses or create spreadsheets. The good ones, certainly, are looking to create – or discover – beauty, and they vary merely by their choice of medium. As an engineer with an eye for beauty, I don’t wish to build things that are ugly, but my first instinct is to build. Artists, in my experience – and again, the good ones – don’t wish to find beauty in that which is unreal. The best, indeed, wish to join the ephemeral hand of beauty with the solidity of the real – but their first instinct drives them towards the beautiful. Poets have simply chosen words as their medium, instead of oil, or wood, or stone, or music or dance.

I think the block in my mind all along has been this subconscious association of words with engineering, with machinery, formed early in my six or seven year old mind, practicing touch typing in the sunroom of the house across the street from the ocean. My mom had set up the old Selectric in the corner, looking towards the backyard, and in the summer and the fall we’d open the windows and the ocean breeze would play with the softly diaphanous curtains, semi-transparent, while I’d sit, focused, hands on ASDF and ‘LKJ, practicing endless sentences but then starting to type my own thoughts, my own words, starting to bring my own mind to physical reality.

I’d do that for awhile and then stop, close the exercise book, and look around, and go out into the yard and play with the dog, or, carefully crossing the street, explore the tide pools and the rocks and run on the shingled beach. My words slowly became attached to the machine, even as my feet and my hands and my body stayed firmly in the world of the ocean and the yard, even as I stayed close to my dog.

Hinton, in Existence, talks about how the West bifurcates the mind and the body, but I think he oversells that notion. To be sure, the mind-body or soul-physical differentiation is a theme in Western philosophy and theology, but for him, the Chinese avoid that dichotomy, and I don’t think that’s the case at all. Rather, Chinese moral philosophy falls into a different trap – they fall on the other side of the razor, as it were – and in their conflation of the mind and body, they ignore entirely the fact that consciousness is a new thing, and is rightly differentiated from the universe’s creations which have preceded it. The West may fetishise the soul, but the Daoists try to deny the fact that it is an original thing. Our ability to discern ourselves – both as individuals and as beings linked to others; as part of a society but with a richer context for expression than a society can contain; as part of nature or the universe or whatever, but with an internal dialogue with that nature that seems to be unique – needs to be celebrated, even though it should not be idolised.

What struck me in reading Hinton, and then in picking up anew the quite fine poems of the Peterson siblings, and then returning actually to Dickinson, is that I had missed something fundamental about the role poetry plays in that discernment. Words do form something definitional about the human experience, and poetry thus is probably the most fundamentally human art form. Birds can decorate their nests, and if you watch crows construct their homes, you’ll quickly realise they have an eye for the baroque. Painting and sculpture are similar – my dog arranges objects in ways that are pleasing to her eye – and if you ever have a chance to watch some beavers in their pond, you’ll find that architecture is a medium of beauty for them as well as a means of construction. Even music is shared across species – thank you whales, thank you blue jays, thank you swans, please be quiet monkeys. But words, words, words are our unique human medium. And we can use them not only to create beauty, but also to build form and structure, to enable us to discover and explore. Many creatures use tools, and some even fashion new ones. Humans, though, create tools out of nothing, and those tools can create beauty in realms which never existed before the tools came into being so as to create it.

In that way, I think, Hinton’s view of the Chinese perspective misses the mark. The classical Chinese scholars struggled – just like the Greek and Roman theorists and theologians, just like the medieval scholastics, just like the Enlightenment folks and their forebears, and just like the existentialists and just like us today – with the way to bridge the mind and the body, the real and the unreal. The forms of words available to the Tang dynasty poets gave them maybe a leg up, in a way – they could write and paint at the same time – but that may also have held them back. Being forced into the purity of the medium – for words, that which has little recourse to the physical, except maybe in the instant of pen hitting paper, or finger making keystroke, but also in other forms, say sculpture, where the purity requires emptying the mind and allowing the hand to carve the stone, or in music, where Bach simply listens to the word of God and translates to organ, violin, and reed – is a kind of crucible for any artist. I finally understand the real admiration one should have for people who try to use words as art – even as I ask you all to appreciate how words can also be tools. I am, after all, an engineer at heart; thank you for bearing with me on a journey where I’m learning to write for beauty as well.

On that note, I’m feeling a little guilty that my son’s ten year old friend read a letter to the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance instead of something else – for example, Mark’s last essay. That was a missed opportunity…

In any event: I’m going to start reading some more poetry, and hopefully I won’t do so as clumsily and as poorly as I have in the past. For you readers out there: any suggestions are welcome. I’ve been in the woods for far too long so I’m not sure what I should be reading but, for a start, I’m going to check out some Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was born and did most of his writing just up the highway from here. I might as well start with something local – after all, this is where I learned how to write, too. Only he had a quill, and I had IBM. I have a lot of catching up to do.

_{Post script and dedication: I’d like to tip my hat to an old friend, Steven Penketh, for this essay. He’s one of those people who can drop an apropos stanza from Shelley or Shakespeare in the middle of a meeting about pork belly futures. I always envied him that ability, but after the past couple of weeks, I think I now appreciate him for it. SJP, I get it. Thanks for being patient with me.}