Seymour’s Fat Lady

One of the embarrassing things about freelancing is how out of step I am with the rest of society, especially sartorially. I have a tendency to think that I’m dressed up just because I’m, you know, *dressed*, and not in my robe. I went to a poetry reading today in a floral thermal shirt and a pair of cords and chucks, the uniform of the teenaged stoner, and sat next to row after row of sumptuously attired New Yorkers in furry boots, wool tights, and spiffy dresses, feeling like a chubby lumberjack.

I learned a new word today: ekphrastic. An ekphrastic poem is a poem that is based on or inspired by a painting.

The reading celebrated the inaugural book in my friends’ new poetry press. These are poets I love dearly, and whose work I find consistently engaging and challenging…but I didn’t get most of the poems in this book, which were all inspired by paintings. They seemed like the poetic equivalent of performance art, which puts a frame around a certain randomness of experience and, boxing it in that way, calls it art. Which to me seems cheating and not particularly artful, because the “art” in that case depends entirely on others’ observation. Which is physics–when an object behaves differently under observation than it normally would if it were unobserved.

The reading was interesting mostly in the way that it clarified my ideas about narrative poetry. The poets were most decidedly not writing narrative poems. In fact, only one poet addressed the challenge of how to tell a story while jettisoning traditional narrative elements. 

One poet went so far as to say that what she was doing was creating an “evocative language.” She said the goal of her poems was to “evoke something without attaching meaning to it.”

Okay, I might have a plodding Capricorn mind, devoid of the suppleness that allows much negative capability, but if you are conscious and possessed of five (in my case, six) senses, isn’t *all* experience evocative? And isn’t your response governed by something intrinsic and internal to you, rather than based on externals? So where is the necessity to order and create specific language or imagery to evoke something? 

You see a pigeon on the street and it evokes a response. That is not poetry. That is an image and an event existing by itself in space time.

I am addicted to stories of all kinds. I use stories as medicine, spellcraft, entertainment, palliatives, catalysts. Most of the gospels are parables, people! And that’s not accidental. We learn through stories. I require stories because they show relationships, because they depend on cause and effect, because they show risk and consequence, because they illuminate identity over time–the time element in particular highlights the ineffable qualities of identity, or else shows transcendence. The narrative is a chemical interaction.

Now, it needn’t be beginning, middle, end, and done. Fractured narratives work just as well as traditional ones. Even a lyric poem, in which the event is an intense emotional moment, or a persona poem, in which the event of the poem is the donning of a mask, inhabiting the cavern of the self–these all have some elements of narrative.

The paintings I like best either have story embedded in them or are so purely visual that I’m not sure they can be translated via the word. For example, I love those modern art canvases you see in doctors’ offices, in which the painting is a white canvas with a big red dot on it. That’s eye candy.