Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
translated “craft.” The invocation of the capacity for poesis offers at last a succinct way to state the case toward which all along this exploration has aimed. The Greek word techne is of course the etymological root of the English word technology, and poesis the root of poetry. The understanding of contemporary life I seek to contest, the one which holds that technology has displaced poetry, takes for granted that everything can be treated as a problem. If that were true, then indeed techne is the appropriate means for addressing our concerns, and it is right that technology, as a useful aid to problem-solving, should displace poetry. If, however, as I contend, the most pressing current concerns of humankind (such as global warming) and the perennial concerns of humankind (such as war) and the most important concerns of human individuals (such as love) are not problems but mysteries, then our greater need is not technology but poetry, and the increased prominence of technology in contemporary society is deceptive, masking the continuing greater importance of poetry.
1.2: Poetry Against Poems
As commonly conceived, craft orients poetry by and toward better, but the counterconception I propose, “metacraft,” recognizes also the possibility of orienting poetry by and toward otherwise.
I take the former conception as prevalent enough to count as common sense. Asked why she was teaching a workshop on craft, a poet likely would reply that such a workshop would help her students become better poets. Asked why he was taking a workshop on craft, a student likely would reply that he was seeking to write better poetry. Either might add of course. It seems obvious, even self-evident. But that common-sense conception of craft takes for granted that writing poetry is a skill, acquired by approximating a given standard, and achieved by realizing in poems that standard. To hone my craft is to make my poetry more poetic, to make my poems look more like poems.
That common-sense conception of craft, though, makes poetry inherently conservative, by definition the preservation of structure already in place: to approximate a given standard is to approximate a given standard, to reproduce a status quo, reinforce an establishment. Besides, it does not account for all the phenomena. Paradise Lost, say, does “look like poetry”: presented with an unidentified reproduction of a page from Paradise Lost, in a context that created no prior expectation that poetry would be presented, any contemporary reader of English would recognize it immediately as poetry. But presented with, say, page 115 of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which simply lists names of pharmaceutical companies, or with page 45 of Jena Osman’s The Network, which gives a chart tracing several seemingly unrelated English words back to a common Latin root, or with pages 56 and 57 of Lisa Fishman’s Flower Cart, which offer a photoreproduction of two pages from a workbook called “Trees I Have Seen,” partially filled in with handwriting dated 1910, the same reader of English would be unlikely to identify it as poetry. Without context, the reader might call the Rankine page a list, the Osman a chart, and the Fishman a photocopy, but probably would not call any of the three poetry until offered cues such as surrounding pages from the book, or the book’s self-identification as poetry.
By “metacraft,” I mean to name and describe a sense of craft that accommodates both Milton and Rankine and Osman and Fishman, a sense that recognizes both poetry’s capacity to fulfill existing standards and to contest those standards. The common-sense conception of craft is realized by making one’s poetry look more like poetry; metacraft adds the possibility of making one’s poetry look less like poetry.
In On Ethics and Economics, Amartya Sen suggests that “economics has had two rather different origins,” one concerned primarily with “ethics” and the other primarily “with what may be called ‘engineering.’” The two traditions, he says, focus on different questions. The ethics-related tradition asks about human motivation (posing such questions as “How should one live?”) and about social achievement (posing such questions as “What is the good for humans?”). The engineering-related tradition, in contrast, takes its ends as given, and seeks only “to find the appropriate means to serve them.” Sen affirms the value of both traditions, but in his own work he gives more emphasis to the ethics-related tradition because “the nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished” by keeping the two traditions separate and focusing almost exclusively on the engineering tradition. There is an analogy to be drawn, in connection with craft in writing. It would be typical to take for granted that in the study and practice of craft, the point is for us as poets to get better at what we do. But that assumes that what we do is a given, and the only relevant aim is to do that given thing better than we are doing it already; and that corresponds to what Sen calls the engineering-related tradition. Here I highlight the additional possibility, the one corresponding to Sen’s ethicsrelated tradition: in it we might seek to write not better than before but other than before. In a chess camp or a basketball camp, rather than an MFA program, exclusive attention to the engineering-related tradition might be warranted: there would be no point in considering whether next time, instead of trying to checkmate my opponent’s king, I should try to arrange my own pieces into a pretty diamond shape on the board, or in weighing whether, instead of trying to get the ball through the hoop, I ought to see how many cars in a row I could roll the ball under in the parking lot. In chess or in basketball, doing better what we were doing really would be the only meaningful possibility.
But writing is not chess or basketball, and in this respect at least, writing is not like chess or basketball. In writing, it is legitimate to seek to fulfill received standards, but also to ask after the available or possible standards, with the prospect left open that, upon deliberation, I might elect and enact standards that differ from those that previously I took as given. To quote Sen once more, this time from The Idea of Justice: “We can not only assess our decisions, given our objectives and values; we can also scrutinize the critical sustainability of these objectives and values themselves.”
One might distinguish, then, between two approaches to reflection on poetry. An ethics-related approach would ask about poetry’s motivations (posing such questions as “What ought a poem achieve?”) and about poetry’s effects (posing such questions as “What is a poem about?,” meaning both “What is a poem up to?” and “What is a poem speaking of?”). An engineering-related approach would ask after the techniques and processes that transform “normal” language into “poetic” language, prose into poetry. Those approaches host different questions about craft. The ethics-related approach suggests questioning along the lines of “What can I do now, that I could not do before?” The engineering-related approach suggests such questioning as “How can I do better what I am doing?” Sen believes that economics has been impoverished by keeping the ethics-related and engineering-related traditions separate and attending almost exclusively to the engineering tradition; analogously, poetry has been impoverished by keeping the two approaches separate and devoting much more attention to the engineering approach. Emphasis on the engineering approach shows itself in the unanimity, the givenness, of the sense that the point of an MFA program would be to help us as poets get better at what we do. But both approaches have validity. Both are necessary.
Another way to get at this point would be to assert that in the teaching of craft one ought to push students toward not writing better poems. The formulation is willfully perverse, but I mean by it that any concept of “better” presupposes an ideal. There may be enterprises for which the ideal is settled, such as chess and basketball, but poetry is not one of those enterprises. It’s why poetry matters more than basketball or chess: in poetry, the ideal is not given, but ever at stake. In our critical reception of works of art, we often acknowledge the variability of ideals. If, for example, I were to ask a cinephile which is the better movie, Taxi Driver or Standard Operating Procedure, she surely would respond, rightly, that the two films are trying to do very different things. You can’t say which is better until you specify what you mean by “better.” But our willingness to describe what we are doing in an MFA as “learning to write better poems” is analogous to asking which movie is better; it is an