Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
our work, given poetic ideals and techniques), then it seems to me valuable to supplement “craft” with “metacraft” (a self-conscious questioning of ideals and techniques that keeps open, rather than foreclosing, the issue of what poetry is and what it might be and do). Let “metacraft” designate such a poetic practice, one in which ideals and techniques are not given once and for all, but remain ever at stake in the poem and for the poet.
In an essay, Robert Creeley reports having been told once by John Frederick Nims “a lovely story” about another poet’s having been asked, after a reading, “that next to last poem you read — was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?” The anecdote is funny because it reveals the limitations of (by reducing to absurdity) a certain understanding of what a “real poem” is. The questioner probably conceived of a “real poem” in terms given by what someone with formal education in literature might name “canonicity”: a poem, on such an account, is a literary artifact that has been preserved, and has had conferred on it cultural status of a sort that exacts reverence, because it was written by an historical figure long dead, and since deemed by relevant authorities (textbooks, teachers) deserving of the honorific “Poet.” Creeley and Nims could share a laugh over the story because their ideas of a “real poem” resembled one another more than either one resembled the idea of a “real poem” held by the questioner in the story. And Creeley can count on our laughing with him, because he can reasonably assume that any reader of his essays will think of a “real poem” in terms more like his own and Nims’s than like the questioner’s.
But.
If I grant the questioner his conception of a “real poem,” then the question stops being a false dilemma: something that “you just made up yourself” in fact couldn’t be a real poem. Consequently, far from being funny or absurd, it would be perfectly reasonable and appropriate to ask a reader which kind of thing he had just read. Similarly, if I don’t grant Creeley his conception of a “real poem,” it becomes clear that Creeley does have a conception, one that, no less than the questioner’s, has limitations. Creeley’s conception, too, picks out certain things as poems, and not others; it affords poetry certain powers but denies it others. Then the rub: once I recognize that Creeley’s conception of a “real poem” is a conception, not the conception, I see that my conception, too, is a conception.
This realization suggests that working at my craft might take the form of refining my craft (doing even better what I am doing), but it also might take the form of renewing my craft (doing differently what I have been doing). That is, the recognition that my conception of a “real poem” is a conception, not the conception, invites me to ask (even obliges me to ask) what possibilities are opened (and what ones closed) if I adopt another conception. In Sen’s terms, it invites me to add an ethics approach to my study and my practice of poetry, not confine myself exclusively to an engineering approach. Recognition that my conception of poetry is a conception urges me to complement my attention to and pursuit of craft with attention to and pursuit of metacraft.
George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things offers a construct that helps toward this aim. Lakoff speaks of “idealized cognitive models” (ICMs), structures by means of which we organize our knowledge. ICMs function in a given human context, but do not correspond to preexisting realities. The concept of a “weekend,” for example, “requires a notion of a work week of five days followed by a break of two days, superimposed on the seven-day calendar,” but this reveals that it is idealized, not “real,” since “seven-day weeks do not exist objectively in nature.” Lakoff further distinguishes “cluster models,” in which “a number of cognitive models combine to form a complex cluster that is psychologically more basic than the models taken individually.” An example is “mother.” One would think that for so important a concept we would be able to “give clear necessary and sufficient conditions” that would “fit all the cases and apply equally to all of them.” But in fact no possible definition can “cover the full range of cases,” because “mother” employs various ICMs, including such divergent models as: the birth model (the mother is “the person who gives birth”); the genetic model (the mother is “the female who contributes the genetic material”); the nurturance model (the mother is “the female adult who nurtures and raises a child”); the marital model (the mother is “the wife of the father”); and the genealogical model (the mother is “the closest female ancestor”). So if, say, I was adopted by one woman, who died soon after, and raised by the woman who raised her, then the birth model identifies one person as my mother, the marital model picks out another, and the nurturance model yet another.
Lakoff goes on to point out that “when the cluster of models that jointly characterize a concept diverge, there is still a strong pull to view one as the most important.” The model construed as most important, the “privileged model,” often needs qualification, as when we find ourselves needing to describe someone as a “stepmother, surrogate mother, adoptive mother, foster mother, biological mother,” etc., which happens when the various models don’t converge. Lakoff’s point is that “the concept mother is not clearly defined, once and for all, in terms of common necessary and sufficient conditions. There need be no necessary and sufficient conditions for motherhood shared by… biological mothers, donor mothers…, surrogate mothers…, adoptive mothers, unwed mothers who give their children up for adoption, and stepmothers.” I propose that “poetry,” like “mother,” is a “cluster model,” and that the availability of widely varied privileged models for poetry, combined with the impossibility of giving necessary and sufficient conditions that cover all cases of poetry, makes a practice of metacraft incumbent on all of us who write poetry.
Recognizing poetry as a cluster model, and consequently recognizing the variety of privileged models available, helps explain the Creeley anecdote: Creeley and Nims, one sees, privileged one model, and the questioner privileged another. Recognizing poetry as a cluster model also means that no model of poetry is validated by correspondence with some real and eternal Platonic ideal: to reiterate Lakoff’s words, “the concept [poem] is not clearly defined, once and for all, in terms of common necessary and sufficient conditions.” No one’s model is right unconditionally or universally. Not Creeley’s, not Helen Vendler’s or Paul Muldoon’s, not yours, not mine. Creeley and Nims can laugh together at the questioner because they privilege the same model, but not because their model is the “right” or “true” model. Recognizing poetry as a “cluster model” reveals that what is at stake in my writing poetry is not only how robustly I realize my privileged model of “a real poem” (i.e. how I write), but also which model I privilege (i.e. what I write).
No cognitive model of poetry is more widely accepted than that based on a contrast between prose, presented “continuously” on the page, and poetry, broken into lines. This “lineation model” shows up in ways as varied as the familiar joke about converting prose into poetry by expanding the margins, and J. V. Cunningham’s assertion that “as prose is written in sentences, without significant lineation, so poetry is written in sentences and lines.” However common this model may be, though, it is not comprehensive. To note one obvious exception, there is by now a long tradition of the “prose poem,” whose very name indicates both its claim to be poetry and its refusal to privilege the cognitive model that would make lineation definitive of poetry. History, too, says that the lineation model can’t be comprehensive, and was not always privileged. Recall that the Iliad and the Odyssey, those most canonical of canonical poems, were composed orally, by illiterate singers. Our sense of line is orthographic: a line for us is a typographical convention, something that, even if it represents something metrical, is realized as something fundamentally visual, something that occurs on the page, in writing. If our sense of lineation were not orthographic, our jokes about composing poetry by expanding the margins would make no sense. But the Homeric singers could not have been thinking in such terms. The “line” for them was aural, not visual, and oral, not written; it was metrical, with no orthographic aspect at all. Homeric singers didn’t make a contrast between poetry and prose, so such a contrast couldn’t have been the model for Homeric poetry.