Moxley's Moxie

The first time I read Jennifer Moxley's "Fragments of a Broken Poetics" was when it was published on the Poetry Daily website, under their prose feature which reprints pieces from other journals, in this case from Chicago Review, Spring 2010.

Yesterday I was reminded of the piece when listening to a lecture that Moxley gave at the University of Chicago in which she read the "Fragments" in its entirety (now that's a funny sentence!). (This lecture can also be downloaded on iTunes U under the University of Chicago's Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series.)

Moxley extensive musings about poetry and poetics have evolved into 50 fragments that brush against topics such as audience, semantics, imagination, authenticity, and others. Some fragments seem to contradict others. And the ones that stood out to me this time (pasted below) are undoubtedly not the ones that impressed me the most the last time I read this piece, inexhaustibility of the piece under repetition being a sign of good thinking and often also of good writing.

 from Fragments of a Broken Poetics

by Jennifer Moxley

III

A poet only needs one poem, a poem only one reader. Moving from singular to shared in this instance is a rudimentary economy. It is less affecting than a mortal kiss, more than a passing conversation. The poem will always provoke an acute desire to know its creator, "acute" because hopeless.

X

The poet who foregrounds the surface qualities of the word—sound, texture, look—must be especially scrupulous when building the poem's semantic foundation. Effects should enhance complexity, not replace it, otherwise they risk giving complexity, which already struggles to justify itself, a very bad name.

 

 

XVII

Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means.

XXVIII

Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience.

 

XLI

After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices.

Entitled to a Title

Yesterday I listened to a lecture entitled "If You Agree, Won't You Change the Title for Me?" given by poet Matthea Harvey at the University of Chicago in 2008. (The lecture is also available on iTunes U under the University of Chicago's Poem Present Reading and Lecture Series. You can download just the audio, or the video, which can be useful as Harvey uses examples of visual art to demonstrate the effectiveness of their titles.) (The title of the lecture, by the way, comes from a letter Wallace Stevens wrote to his publisher when reconsidering the title to one of his books.)

In helping students learn about the effectiveness of titles, Harvey cites psychological studies and reads Lewis Carroll. She also creates a taxonomy of title types, defining and giving examples of the following:

1) The Onramp: a title syntactically part of the first line of the poem.
2) The Spotlight: a title which highlights a line or image from the poem (often by repeating it).
3) The License Plate: a title which gives information about the poem, which may include who the speaker is, when or where the poem is located, the speaker's attitude towards the subject of the poem, etc. This category includes any title which exists to orient the reader.
4) The Greased Pig: a title which disorients the reader by evading connection with the poem (at first glance at least).
5) Helium: a title that may give information but more than that tries to increase the meaning of the poem. This type of poem tends to be very dependent on its title.
6) Not Wearing a Tie: an untitled poem, which Harvey points out has a much different effect now, given the history of untitle poems, than it did when it was first used.

The charming and well-researched lecture then gives way to a workshop atmosphere in which Harvey reads short poems to the students, and they attempt to title them. It's fun to listen to their attempts, try to come up with a title yourself, and then to hear the poets' own titles.

Near the end of this enjoyable lecture on the art of titling, Harvey cites books for further reading about ideas on titling poems, including Anne Ferry's The Title to the Poem (Stanford University Press). I really enjoy naming poems, so I'm definitely going to get a hold of this book. Enjoy the lecture: Harvey is a master at synthesizing divergent information into her theme, so even if you have no concerns about titles, you can still get a lot of pleasure from listening.