Poetry Blog 2: Artifacts

Lately I have been trying to educate myself on philosophy. In this process, I have been instructed again and again to start at "the beginning", because philosophy is seen as a sort of conversation, a series of responses to one's forebears.

I do not believe this is the case with the poetry. For while philosophy aspires to understand reality, something assumed to be of essentially one particular nature, poetry seeks to understand the self - a concept that is as much characterized by internal disagreement as individual variation.

The idea of Marvell -> MacLeish -> Strand being a "conversation" is intriguing to me precisely because it simultaneously reminds me of the nature of philosophy, and reminds me of the ways in which philosophy and poetry differ.

The basic structure of the chain, I suppose, is the most "conversational" aspect - Marvell writes a poem, and then (300 years later) MacLeish responds, rather directly. In turn, Strand (from the next century) responds to MacLeish.

But it is the nature of the "conversational" pieces that strikes me as so fundamentally different. Each of the works - even MacLeish's metatemporal parable - are intensely personal. Marvell writes directly to a lover (whether real or imagined it does not matter) with a language that we suspect only he could produce: "by the tide / of Humber" is a reference to a local river in England, not some great crucible of civilization. And yet, Marvell crystallizes this personal understanding into something that is digestible, if only partially, to people centuries later. Not entirely figuratively, Marvell places himself upon the page, becoming an artifact.

This artifact then becomes a part of the world, of some world. This is why the title of "You, Andrew Marvell" is so interesting - it is an address to a non-human entity, using a human name. For the Andrew Marvell referenced is not the poet himself, but the artifact he became. MacLeish absorbed this artifact, and it became a part - apparently a central part - of the material formula which made up his own understanding of time, one markedly different from Marvell's but nonetheless containing it - "to feel how swift how secretly / the shadow of the night comes on..." required that MacLeish "make [the sun] run," however impermanently.

Thus the essence of each poet passes through the next. Strand makes the process more visible, by writing explicitly about it in prose, but nonetheless participates in the process. He admits as much when he says, "It is hard for me to separate my development as a reader of poems from my career as a poet." Indeed, it must be hard, if not impossible, for every poet, whose every poem is the product of every other poem they have read. Even in this essay, Strand digests and reinterprets a poem through the lens of Mark Strand - or rather, all that makes up Mark Strand - and the artifact which he creates through this lens of Strand will in turn be digested and reinterpreted through mine and a million others'. Some may name these components of their work, others will let them remain secretive. All will contribute to the process, building and recreating and changing the past like a great Hegelian conch shell.