How Do We Communicate?

I'm currently in my fifth month of unemployment. The challenges and the stress of that unemployment are manifesting themselves in increasingly ugly ways. One manifestation has been an experience I think I probably share with a lot of people: knots of anxious frustration with no obvious outlet are incorporated into myself as anger and combativeness. In the moments I'm least proud of, this combativeness has been pointed at my partner of nearly a decade, (a wonderful, beautiful person and a fantastic photographer), Stephanie. Frustration about my personal circumstances become useless argument in which I externalize my issues with inferiority by claiming that the degrading thoughts I have about myself are actually the thoughts she has about me. Certainly that's problematic in itself. It's sort of tangential to what I want to talk about, here. The other phenomenon that is quite real, and quite apparent when I start my useless sparing, is that she and I speak at different levels, or utilizing differing value systems. (So, terms like "unprepared," or "want" or "need" are weighted differently depending on which of us is using the term, and what the larger context is).

At risk of revealing personality flaws in myself, I'll acknowledge that this happens to me in another, less complicated, sphere: on the internet! I argue, as I've mentioned here before, with Aunts and Uncles, friends, and the friends of friends, or completely anonymous people. Don't pretend you're immune. Or, if you are, please, for my sake, don't let me know how annoying I've become. Many of the arguments are political, and are more or less in the tone of most of the political debates that happen in the United States: "Neo Fascist!" "Socialist!" "See you at Thanksgiving."

Being outside of an academic setting, I'm out of practice in the cool, measured format of (most) of those conversations, and I'm thrown back into the fray, as it were. I'm making a concerted effort to change that, to attempt to convince through the reasonable presentation of understood (or misunderstood) facts when available, and (ideally) appealing to shared principles when they're not. I probably wouldn't be, if I hadn't seen this exchange on youtube a while back:




What you witness here is astounding in two ways: 1) It shows exactly how degraded media coverage is in this country (oops! This was on CBC - Canadian TV... the general sentiment still stands, though), especially as other networks pick up on and employ fox-style "reporting" tactics (as if Glenn Beck pretending to douse someone with gasoline is reporting, rather than psuedo-pornographic fear mongering ) and 2) Therein, you observe an impressive intellect disregarding the clearly unnecessary personal attacks as Hedges drives through to get his point across with absolute aplomb.

It got me thinking about communication, and the problems of communication in life and (of course) in poetry. I think that, in a lot of ways, all anyone wants if to be effectively communicative. The different systems I was talking about, above, are equally at play in our art and poetry. That's why, I think, in the work of many writers and poets, a reader can sense worry about communication and dialogue. Poets, particularly, are always worried about their own obscurity and the lack of attention paid to their work. It's not a modern problem, though. Roy Harvey Pearce, in a book that really shows its age, particularly in its deployment of gender pronouns, talks about poetry's relationship to communication in the United States:

"For the achievement of American poetry is a good measure of the ahcievement of American culture as a whole. The poet's particlar relation to his culture -- his self-imposed obligation to make the best possible use of the language he is given -- is such as to put him at the center of the web of communications which give his culture its characteristic style and spirit (pg 3)."

But, later, in The Continuity of American Poetry, in an example of the absolute worst of poetic "culture," states his "rule" for the production of good poetry:

"The rule is this: that the poet who would reach the great audiece had, willy-nilly, to cut himself down to its size. Such a cutting down does not imply only a falling below the standards of high art; it implies also the production of an art in some respects different in kind from high art, and to be judged and valued accordingly (pg 246)."

Pearce is playing fast and loose with the poetic tradition, trying to show that it's both central to American life and communication, and isolated from that life by, in its proper form, remaining a "high art," that would need to be "cut down to size" to become popular. All of this, too, in defense of the necessary obscurity of poetic culture, which, Pearce feels, is where it thrives. How poetry envisions itself as communication is in part due to its recognition of itself as an obscure art, and partly due to the sensibilities of individual poets. This is  Li-young Lee, (the best pessimist in the US) in his poem, "Sweet Peace in Time:"

                               "I said, 'We should give up/ trying to be understood./ It's too late in the world for dialogue (pg 31)."

In this poem, from his 2008 book, Behind My Eyes, Lee imagines a speaker relating to us (and thus forcing us to consider that even the speaker's reporting might be skewed by his own perspective) a conversation between his self and a woman only identified as "she." The mournful tone of the poem will be recognizable to anyone who's read Lee, before. This stanza, though, I read as a challenge, not merely to other writers and poets, but to all people. It says you have to figure out a way to be communicative. It dovetails neatly with my earlier evocation of Zizek's Living in the End Times in its nod to the idea that catastrophic, apocalyptic, things are happening in the world. For my own part, moments of overlap (between art and life) like these are exactly what I love so much about literature, poetry, photography: these are means of communication that can approach something like the "universal." It comes as no surprise to any lover of books that recent studies show that a good relationship with literature helps develop the human ability for empathy.

It may be imperfect, but it may also be all we have. I don't pretend that poetry will save the world, especially because the language of poetry is often seen to be so specialized and outside of the purview of ones life. In the rural town I grew up in, it's very unlikely that I'd be able to talk about US conflicts by invoking The Wasteland, or Wilfred Owen's incredible war poetry. Too much cultural pressure, too much fear that poetry is somehow feminine, that one risks their masculinity in reading it (even the sentence I've written just now is rife with some of the assumptions that would need to be made to maintain this tortured logic... maybe another post...). But, just because people aren't generally attendent to their poets, doesn't mean their poets aren't attendent to them. In 20th Century Pleasures, Robert Hass argues the rhythms and stresses of a poetic line metaphorically invoke the content of that line, so that he is able to say of a Gary Snyder poem about two friends parting ways on a mountain trail:

"The variation comes in the one three-stress phrase and in the set of three two-stress phrases. The paired phrases with a pause inbetween insist on twoness, on the separateness of the two friends (pg 129)."

The central line he's discussing looks like this (with Hass' emphases added): "HIKED up the MOUNtainside     a MILE in the AIR". So, there is, he argues, a metaphoricity in the rhythmic system of the Snyder poem: that stresses are so consistently paired, and then, later, deployed differently, suggests the pairing of the friends, and then their separation, adding emphasis to the content of the poem. I'm not sure I find the position persuasive, but it's certainly intriguing. It also illustrates something about what I'm saying, here: with all of the various systems of communication simultaneously in play, how does communication happen? Maybe something like the collapse of one communicative system into another really does happen, as Hass suggests. I've mentioned him before, because of my admiration of the way he sees the political and the real situations of the world at work in poetry:

"I have it in mind that, during the Vietnam war, one of the inventions of American technology was a small antipersonnel bomb that contained sharp fragments of plastic which, having torn through the flesh and lodged in the body, could not be found by an X-ray. Often I just think about the fact that some person created it. At other times I have thought about the fact that the bomb works on people just the way the rhythms of poetry do (133)."

Either way, it seems to me that our responsibility is to resist the speaker in Lee's poem, to resist giving up on dialogue, and to investigate how we communicate the way Hass does: with earnestness, with honesty, and with an ear for how what we communicate communicates. I want to continue thinking about what poetry means as a type of communication, and how it means. The examples I've used here are interesting, I hope, to people interested in poetry and in communication. The three thinkers/poets I've quoted (Hass, Lee, Pearce) each write to communicate to the reader something about poetry and its place in their respective lives. The variatious and multifaceted ways each of them evokes poetry to their own ends speaks to me about communication, generally. If Pearce is right about the central role of poetry in American cultural life, and Hass is right about the many levels on which poetry speaks to us, I hope Lee's lines find their place: they frustrate and challenge us, and make us contemplate the dire circumstances under which any dialogue happens, now.

 Here's hoping we communicate better in the new year.

... To that end, have I ever told you about the poetry vlog I'm part of? Project videobard? We put videos up on youtube every day of the week. Check it out!