Friday, April 10, 2009

History, Research, Ethics

I just had a sequence titled The Boke of Maneres published in Bathhouse: A Hypermedia Journal. You'll need Adobe Reader (or some other PDF reader) installed to see it. I'd like to spin my wheels for a moment on the subject of history, research, and ethics.

There are few excuses these days to dumb down history in a poem. The presence of search engines like Google means that if you read a poem and have no idea whatsoever who Sulla was, and why his reaching across the pomoerium was a big deal (and applicable to the US today), just plug those two terms into a Google search and spend three to an infinite number of minutes doing some research. The connotations may not resonate fully for you until you really get into the subject, but with the work I consider my most important, that's part of the point. You don't get to treat the poem as the endpoint of history. You treat the poem as a process through which to enter/view history.

This is slightly different than the traditional/Modernist stance we're used to. I rarely take history at face value. OcSerp is in large part about how history is filled with gaps, or rather wounds left by conquerors. It's also different because our access to history is different. It's at our fingertips, along with variations on the same. Official versions, conspiracy theories, repressed realities, it's all right there. We don't have the same excuse of obscurity that a generation ago did. Though we may not have the historical training of our literary ancestors, we can rectify that problem with greater ease.

That being said, there remains an ethical issue. Is it easier to abuse history (in the sense that Mairi uses it, per Sokol and Bricmont, in a Plumbline School post) because we have such easy access to its surface? I could pick on some friends and colleagues whose poetry I love, but engages history only at the most superficial level, say a farcical piece about Freud's love of cigars that nevertheless shows no real understanding of Freud's contributions, crap and otherwise, in a historical context? Or a poem about Genghis Khan's love life that uses conquest as a trope, but doesn't reveal any knowledge that distinguishes Genghis from any other conqueror? I'm making these up so as to not actually embarrass the real friends and colleagues, but the comments section may be fair game so long as we're all civil.

Your thoughts, dear readers? Am I asking too much if I expect that you'll do research based on a poem? Am I going about poetry a wrong way (not "the" as there is surely more than one wrong and right way) in general here?

NB: I'm working up a more formal version of this post to submit to Poets & Writers or somesuch as an article. If anybody contributes a particularly good question or answer or critique, I'll be sure to note as such should you be willing.

2 comments:

Sheila said...

Nice to see you over at Plumbline, and thanks for your attention to my site. As you've so kindly noted here, the question of how much work and attention a reader can really be expected to give to a poem is related, for me, to the 'pay-off'. If I'm going to understand it in the end I'm willing to go to some length, even keep turning it over and going back to it for years, but I think a poem owes the reader something in the way of what I called transparence in my post at Plumbline. I called my latest posting 'The Penny of his attention' which is a phrase of Larkin's, and I'm afraid a penny's worth of attention is what many readers are willing to give, leading one to wonder whether Joyce called his collection Pomes Pennyeach only because of their suspected cash value to his publisher and audience. But should a poet write to such an audience? I think not. I think you're absolutely right to expect a reader to be willing to press that search button and to give a poem more attention than the time it takes to read it.

JeFF Stumpo said...

Mairi, I'm also with you on transparency, though my version of transparency may vary from poem to poem. Or I might better call what I try to offer "pleasure." In a poem (thus far unpublished) called "Mirrors Killed the Barber," I go on at length about Charlemagne shaving and make reference to his allies in Baghdad. Now, that will catch a lot of people off guard, but the presentation of the poem is such that you don't need all the history to make sense of the poem. The pleasure is in the self-contained nature of the poem, with a door leading outside for more if you want. In The Boke of Maneres, you're going to have a lot of trouble with the narrative, such as it exists, without tracking down a lot of allusions. The poem cannot be all that transparent, but I tried to offer an aural pleasure to it, such that if it's read aloud, you'll find interesting sound combinations.

I think I see similar things happening in your own poems. In today's, we might not be familiar with the landscape you're describing, or with Hiroshige's work. But you describe the images well enough that we can nonetheless find a pleasure in reading. In an earlier poem of yours (TLS 5529 – 5 ), the technical language is not precisely explained, but there is a darkness/beauty to the language that makes something pleasurable of the terms themselves (I'm thinking in particularl here of "flow of synaptic proteins" which has a flowing rhythm and of "substantia nigra. His black substance." which doubles back on itself in the same line).