If the post title is alien to you, I’m talking about the great T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

As a quick caveat before we get too deep, Eliot doesn’t directly say most of what I’m about to say, and in fact distrusted poets who told readers what to think. He generally didn’t cheerlead at all in his work, and found Romantic poetry and its push of “self” suspect. This is only one reading of the piece, and given how complicated Eliot can be, there are dozens if not hundreds more out there.

Due to its length, I’m going to pick a handful of passages that are important to understanding the poem and Eliot himself, but the entire poem is available from The Poetry Foundation here. Let’s dive right in.

Eliot starts the piece with an Italian epigraph from another storied classic, Dante’s Inferno. The epigraph, when translated, reads as follows:

”If I believed that my reply were made

To one who might return to the world above,

This flame would stand still, no longer flickering.

But since no one ever returns alive

From this abyss—if what I hear is true—

I answer you without fear of infamy.”

Eliot was a regular user of these complicated references (and in fact, this is why I didn’t choose my other favorite Eliot poem, “The Waste Land” as my top pick - it requires an incredible amount of cross-reference explanation that Eliot himself neglected to provide). He assumed, to some degree, that his readers would either be familiar with Dante’s Inferno enough to figure out the epigraph, or that they would seek it out and translate it.

Eliot’s poems are often rife with ambiguity, and he enjoyed that. As a modernist, Eliot felt the world was bereft of grand meaning; he wanted readers to see how modern life was becoming neurotic and impossibly divorced from human nature, frozen by social convention. At its absolute core, Prufrock is an indictment against precisely those things.

We can see this in the title character’s, presumably Prufrock’s, inner thoughts. The poem itself is essentially Prufrock having one long panic attack about whether he is making the right choices, whether he should continue to live his life through the same patterns he’s followed every other day or if he “dares to disturb the universe?”.

Early in the poem - the end of the first stanza - we can see Prufrock struggling with this idea already. Take the following lines (8-10):

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

Here, Prufrock suggests there is in his thoughts - and, by extension in the general thoughts of modern man, according to Eliot’s worldview - a dangling question over our heads, an overwhelming question, one that sets our thoughts racing and minds ablaze.

When Eliot says “An overwhelming question”, he doesn’t simply mean big. He means it in the traditional sense of the word. Much as the author Terry Pratchett points out, for example, that “elves are terrific. They beget terror.”, Eliot here means this question is paralyzing, debilitating, and causes the senses and minds of people who ponder it to be completely overwhelmed by anxiety.

Immediately, though, Prufrock decides to demur telling us what this question is. Eliot, however, begins to answer it through the following stanzas, showing Prufrock’s life through a series of repeating refrains and small, anxiety-ridden vignettes:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Prufrock’s demurring on answering the question doesn’t prevent us from getting hints as to what drives his mind. There are decisions that we make, and changes to ourselves, that can immediately slide back into status quo - or worse, into tragedy. And in this stanza, Prufrock says “there will be time / To wonder, “Do I dare?”, and “Do I dare?”. He continues to delay answering this overwhelming question, instead dedicating himself to propriety. After all, why would he bother doing anything else? It takes a mere second to overturn whatever his decision is, and that overturning is almost certainly out of his power.

Then we find this overwhelming question stated about as plainly as Eliot ever plainly states anything: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”

In this context, this question is itself an act of cowardice. Prufrock himself is not asking this as a means to provoke in himself some call to action. Indeed, he is throughout the course of the poem, trapped in an ever-repeating cycle of social ritual and inner torment. Throughout the piece, he refuses outright to “Disturb the universe”, remaining content to travel along the waves that carry him through life. With this, we come to the closing of the poem:

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Prufrock, now either an old man or imagining being an old man, has fully given in to his anxiety. He questions if he shall part his hair the same as ever. He questions if he shall enjoy the pleasure of eating a peach. Then, he imagines the magic of mermaids, their siren songs, their freedom over the waves and their beauty, only to immediately undercut it by being pulled from his pensive state by “human voices”, reminding him that he has given away his time to being swallowed by living the same way each day, forever, and that he will likely be unable to change, having either put it off until old age or settling himself into the idea of remaining as he is in his youth.

All in all, this poem is actually sort of miserable. Depending on the read, it’s either a guy with anxiety freaking out in his own head until he becomes convinced that he will never experience anything better or an old man regretting never doing anything different with his life and never experiencing more than day-in, day-out similarity.

So why do I like it so much?

Apart from Eliot’s masterful use of language throughout, I think it is because it is not often we as readers inhabit a pathetic character’s mind so completely. Prufrock is a character of misery, but by putting us into his mind allows us to reflect on our own lives, to ask ourselves the same question that paralyzes Prufrock: “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

While we watch Prufrock go through this - or imagining himself going through this - Eliot holds a mirror up to us. He shows us our own susceptibility to a life of propriety (much like Tolstoy does with Ivan Illyich) and of hesitation. The “overwhelming question” gets answered by Prufrock - and his answer is “No”. But for readers, the question remains open; it is up to us whether we choose to strive and struggle against meaninglessness (or diminished meaning) or whether we settling into a comfortable but unambitious life.

In its way, it seems almost Camusian. Two decades before our Algerian friend wrote about Sisyphus and plagues, Eliot is prodding us to be different from Prufrock. He is almost imploring us, through showing how weak Prufrock is, to stand out, to disturb the universe. He’s saying “Don’t wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. Dare to eat a peach. Seek the mermaids before the singing stops.”

It isn’t the language alone why I love this poem, but the personal challenge it proposes. Eliot is not known for being a provocateur, but here he is pointing his finger at us.

So, with that in mind…

What will you answer?

Thank you for joining me for the second part of this series. I’m looking forward to sharing more, and I hope you enjoyed my brief thoughts on Eliot. Next post, I’ll be discussing “Tyger, Tyger” by the illuminated William Blake - a madman or a prophet, depending on how you view him. Or perhaps, both. A man who built his own mythology, engraved all his own art into his books, saw angels in trees, and who was unapologetically imaginative and remarkably forward-thinking, Blake’s one of those fascinating Romantic period artists that has really captivated me. I hope he will captivate you as well!

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5.) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage - Lord Byron

 I have not loved the world, nor the world me,—
   But let us part fair foes; I do believe,
   Though I have found them not, that there may be
   Words which are things,—hopes which will not deceive,
   And virtues which are merciful, nor weave
   Snares for the failing:  I would also deem
   O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;
   That two, or one, are almost what they seem,—
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.

Source is Project Gutenberg’s website.

To begin with, one of the poems that truly got me into poetry - Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, with one of my favorite stanzas (CXIV; the other is CXIII, immediately preceding).

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage began as Byron writing of his travels as a young man, gallivanting about Europe as a nobleman did during the 1800s, using a “persona” - a fictional character whose identity the poet embodies - to show a jaded young man fleeing an ambiguous past. The first two cantos were published in 1812 and the latter two were later added in 1816 and 1818, giving Byron the opportunity to develop himself and his style. In Canto III, Byron’s own voice begins to show up, and he ultimately, halfway through the piece, subtly discards the mask.

Here, in this stanza (and the one immediately preceding), Byron sets himself as not simply a member of the world but as a member of the world apart from the world - Harold (and by extension Byron) is quite simply moving. He flees his unaccounted past in England and explores historical decline in the first two Cantos (Spain, Greece, and Venice were stops along Harold’s route). In this third Canto, he moves to the interior, and begins to discuss how despite his wandering, he’s come to the conclusion that, possibly, there exists a small handful of people who are truly good and virtuous, that goodness is possible and that happiness exists despite the misery of the pilgrimage.

More interestingly is that despite Byron’s soul searching and his drive to locate this goodness, this happiness that is no dream, is that he conspicuously leaves himself out of the pool of those who are possibly good. Traditionally, it would be expected for the hero to locate in himself some spark of delight or goodness, but instead here Byron actively declines to see himself as a good person; he is eschewing self-deception, and holding onto the honest voice he’s gained from his travels.

This is, perhaps, one of the first examples of a truly Byronic Hero - a brooding, intellectual, clever, and troubled sort who voices and attempts to embody his convictions (regardless of the consequences).

An interesting note is that, later angst aside, he begins the Canto itself with a dramatic exclamation of his daughter’s name, Ada. This loops back around in Stanza CXV, whereby having exhausted every reason for faith in people and finding them entirely wanting, Byron instead turns his eyes to a much less grand and much more personal source of hope - his daughter. While he didn’t know her especially well, he believed her to be a sort of tabula rasa. She was an infant connected to him, but unknown to him: unlike Waterloo, from his earlier travels, he has a direct personal connection to her but is not connected to her in a meaningful sense, primarily through words “which are things”. There is nothing for Ada to do to disappoint him as the world has, and therefore, she has the possibility of being that one good person he seeks, despite not ever meeting her during his lifetime. (Notably, Byron was deeply regretful of this.)

Aside: Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace (nee Byron) would eventually work with Charles Babbage on the concepts of early computing and is considered an instrumental figure in early computing machinery.

With all that out of the way, let me briefly explain why I love this piece. This canto - and particularly stanzas CXIII and CXIV, are the moments where the stereotypically dark and brooding Byron becomes instead something much more human. Though he is a figure surrounded by myths, is a Greek national hero, was beleaguered by scandal (in many cases justifiably), and was either a menace or a rapscallion in his day, depending on who was asked, underneath it all was first and foremost a man who never quite found a place and still kept wandering, kept thinking.

Byron buries himself in his poems. He expresses himself through intensive dramatic flair (such as in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” wherein he savages just about everyone he can think of - many of who he later befriended), but it is in Childe Harold where he lets his true self, somewhat guarded but honest, arise.

I find this such a fascinating poem because it is so human - the desires and fears that even the snarky, aristocratic Byron explores are those same ones that haunt us today: are there good people? What is happiness? What is any of this, really? Am I good? (Byron’s answer for himself is conspicuously absent, of course). These same themes - found all throughout poetry, of course, but which are particularly notable here - are the key to understanding both the mind of this notorious rake and troublemaker and to understanding how we relate to the world around us; even those legendary figures of times gone by were human and struggled with their place in the world. And sometimes, if they were lucky, would find some answers - in this case, as in so many cases, Byron found his answer not in history, but in the unknown potential of the future.

Thank you for joining me for the beginning of this series. I’m looking forward to sharing more, and I hope you enjoyed my brief thoughts on Byron! Next up is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Let us go then, you and I, and I will see you next post!

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Share The Non-Rehearsed Life by Thomas Hamil

This post is pretty link-heavy; as I wrote it, I realized a lot of it directly connects to ideas we’ve seen previously. If you’re up to speed on all of this stuff, don’t worry about clicking through, although some if it might be worth a skim if you’re hazy!

In the last post on White Space, I mentioned that reading a poem allows us to make a specific contract with the poet - we will give them our attention and focus and in exchange they will show us something new, allow us into their perspective in a way that briefly adjusts our perception to align more closely with theirs in a less-guarded manner. This, I think, is the crux of where poetry becomes different than those lists of mindfulness techniques. Mindfulness is self-driven; it comes from our stilling our perceptions even momentarily on ourselves and on the moment we are experiencing. That may mean settling and becoming aware of our thoughts during an argument or realizing that the guy passing you in a giant truck at 100mph may not be doing it to be an asshole - he may have a reason to do it and anyway he’s well past you by the time you bring the finger out to flip him off, so what’s the point really except to soothe your ego? There are countless other examples of this exact kind of mindfulness: awareness of the self in relation to the other.

Poetic attention, as I have discussed in the past, is fundamentally a different beast. Yes, it is the awareness of ourselves in relation to an object - such as the object of a particular poem (e.g. Keats’ grecian urn, or the pool players in “We Real Cool”, or Oppen’s deer in “Psalm”) or the object which we are writing about. However, this awareness of our own relationship is fundamentally mediated: for the reader, it is mediated by the poet and the work on the page or spoken aloud and how it is delivered, and for the poet, it is mediated by the work on the page and its construction, the craft and effort put into it. But in these cases, poetic attention is also awareness of the other in relation to ourselves.

What I mean by this is in Oppen’s “Psalm”, we align our attention to an experience that is fundamentally mediated by the poet and poem. When we read about Oppen’s observations, we are unable to fundamentally separate the poet’s thoughts from our own: we didn’t experience the deer, and so instead must occupy Oppen’s mind through his writing to get the same picture he saw.

White space, as I discussed in Part II, is one of the methods through which a poet can do this. The poet serves as an orchestral conductor of attention while the poem is being read and contemplated - they control the reader’s cadence and focus. But, more than a conductor, they are a door to the other.

By engrossing ourselves in poetry - in allowing our attention willingly to be diverted, very intentionally, through an agreed-upon relationship with the poet and poem, we open a door directly to the poet’s experience, which is to say to another person’s experience.

This is, in a way, the inverse of Debord’s Spectacle, which is both forced upon the person sans contract and totalizes the person to focus on themselves and their appearance to the exterior world, as opposed to their experience of it.

White space in poetry is unique among attention-diverting techniques in art. It is different than punctuation because it fundamentally changes the poem by existing (in that it changes the cadence and emphasis on words) and because it is one of the few creative acts that fundamentally relies on emptiness as opposed to creation. It is a contractually accepted pause: a reader reading poetry expects there to be a gap, a line break, unusual indentation.

Why, then, do we accept this in poetry, when we choose it, and not in daily life, where it directly affects our well-being and relationships with others?

I do think there is a way to answer this question, and it’s from our old friend Camus, way back in the early posts on this blog: we like a coherent narrative. Humans are driven in many ways by narrative and story - the stories we tell both ourselves and others as to who we are and who they are. We are our own main characters, and the world is scary - if we make ourselves known as a particular immovable, nonporous thing, we are a standing post against a shifting land. Of course, Camus argued this was not correct, that there are no grand narratives, and the strongest thing to do is to acknowledge that life is often difficult and frightening and pointless in many ways and that despite this, we should interact with each other with grace, with ease, with a joyful resistance to these facts knowing that we must do so to remain functional as people.

Of course, we can’t simply wait for gaps to resolve - we barely get a good picture of ourselves, and so our picture of the experience and thoughts of another will certainly be dubious in quality no matter how much both parties extend grace to each other towards understanding. Instead, we can choose to attend to meaning ourselves - to draw the best possible interpretation of their white spaces as best we can - in an honest, good faith attempt to not simply close a gap, but to do so charitably and with the appropriate amount of phenomenological humility.

If white space in a poem is a technique a poet uses to control attention and understanding, then in life it can be much the same thing: a gap or a pause we accept, because as people, we have them however much we resist them. In much the same way Oppen enacted a contract with you as a reader during the last post, I propose we extend the same focused attention to each other and to ourselves - as we approach our lives, it is possible to use the same possibility-but-not-promise of resolution, of intentionality, of shared attention to live as Camus suggests; each and every day we make a deal with ourselves and with the world as to how we are going to approach it, after all. By extending the same grace to others as we do to a poem’s white space - to the cadence changes and the breath adjustments and the stress on particular words or phrases - we can so too begin to understand ourselves and others; by choosing controlled poetic attention, we can stand on ever-shifting land, rather than be torn down as a still post.

Song this week: Private Visions of the World by Animals as Leaders.

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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Share The Non-Rehearsed Life by Thomas Hamil

As we talked about last week, white space is any space on the page that isn’t words. It’s what controls how we read a poem - we know to pause when we see a gap, whether it’s a line break with white space following between the end of one line and another or if it’s a strange indentation at the front of a line like in Oppen’s poem from last week.

It also controls our attentional flow. As we read, we are controlled by the hand of the poet towards a specific, focused attention to the subject of the poem - whatever it may be. As we talked about last week, Oppen’s control forces the slowing of the brain to process the gap between our expectation of the traditional construction of a poem and what he himself is doing on the page when he center-aligns the initial line of a stanza instead of left-aligning it.

As usual, this whole thing returns to the concept of attention. White space is a moment of controlling attention given to the reader by the poet - and which the reader voluntarily participates in. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be reading poetry; there’s a level of agreement that in reading a poem, the reader is in part allowing themselves to be led by the hand right up to the edge of the poem’s subject and then allowed to draw their own conclusions as to what the endgame of the piece is.

This applies beyond poetry like what Oppen offers; John Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, even with a very distinct object of a poem and Keats’ thoughts on it and what conclusions he draws from observing it being fairly direct, still relies on leading the reader of the piece to the object, allowing them to take it in regardless of Keats’ arguments one way or the other.

From the perspective of a poetry reader, we are agreeing to give our attention to the poet and their subject. This is a chosen action - it’s voluntary and contractual, even if it’s implied: the poet gets our time and attention, we get something back. Maybe it’s a beautiful rendition of the poet’s observations of a Grecian urn or maybe it’s their feelings about watching deer frolic; regardless, there is some payback for the reader.

White space is one of the methods by which we can appreciate that - the slowdown, the emphasis, the snap of attention to the front of the next line after the gap on the page. Trusting that a poet has a reason for constructing the poem the way they did is the mechanism by which white space works - that there is room for things to remain unresolved or unexplained, that there is something filling that gap (attention) even when it isn’t forced to be filled.

With that in mind, you’re probably saying: “Well, that’s all well and good, but how does it matter for how we live?”

To answer that, let us digress briefly to Guy Debord once more. Guy said that modern society has been claimed by what he called the “spectacle”, which is the idea that we live mediated by images, meaning we are not truly living but are instead curating who we are. At the end of his life, Debord himself believed that the spectacle had taken over society entirely; to him there was no escape.

Debord, essentially, said that instead of reading a poem with white space - gaps where we focus our attention in specific ways in the gaps, slow ourselves down, and so on - we are instead reading what amounts to a blockofcontinuoustextthatneverends and that the world itself is moving so fast that it is impossible to truly experience “self-authored white space”

While I generally agree with Debord’s diagnosis, I don’t think I agree with the conclusion. He is right to say that the spectacle has colonized our attention - that we live to curate rather than to live, and that it is nearly everywhere; he’s wrong that it is so totalized as to be inescapable.

When we read a poem, we are making that deal with the poet I mentioned earlier to allow our attention to be moved or controlled in a specific way by a specific person. This contract allows us to co-author a focused approach to the world, using the poet as a stepping stone - white space and line breaks alike both direct our attention in a specific way as discussed in the past couple of posts.

However…

What if instead of allowing the poet to do it, we instead allowed ourselves to do it?

Originally, I was anticipating this to be a two-parter, but it has spilled over the limit I expected it to and so I will have to continue this one next week with White Space Episode III: Revenge of the White Space (working title, final TBD).

In it, I’ll be exploring some of the methodology I try to implement to allow myself to better control my attention and why I think they work in concert with poetry.

Song this week: Russian Circles - Gnosis

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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Psalm

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—
That they are there!

                              Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

                              The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

                              Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

                              The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer   
Startle, and stare out.

You can see, of course, how Oppen works here. Each stanza has white space at the beginning, with the regular alignment of the other three lines following after a heavily indented single line.

As you read this poem, you probably find your eyes drawn first to the unusual line indentation first - slowing (even for a just second) for your brain to process the gap of “why is this to the side? Where do I start?” This pause is one of the more common functions of white space - it serves to slightly disorient the reader and to adjust where they focus their attention, to slow (again even slightly) to read this piece.

For Oppen, this is very intentional. Oppen himself was an objectivist. Objectivism in poetry, born from the imagist movement, says quite simply three things:

• The poem itself is an object of attention on which we choose to focus;

• the material for the poem is a single moment of attention on some object distilled into words;

• and that sincere attention and focus on the material of the poem is essential

The poetic objectivists are, in many ways, similar to the classical haiku, in that they are capturing a scene with tremendous focus. Unconstrained by the form of the haiku, some of the impartiality is lost - you can see Oppen being almost egregiously sincere about his admiration for the deer through his careful observation of them and his description of them.

Because Oppen’s poetics are so reliant on a focused attention, he employs white space strategically to convey that attention and cause the reader to experience the same attention to the deer as he himself did. In reading this poem, there is very nearly no separation between the reader’s experience of the deer and Oppen’s - to include, of course, Oppen’s focus as given through the unusual indentation.

Let us look now at another Oppen poem, “Myth of The Blaze”, once again provided by the Poetry Foundation. I have included specific sections of this piece below due to its length:

Myth of the Blaze

night – sky         bird’s         world
to know         to know         in my life to know

what I have said to myself

the dark to escape in brilliant highways   
of the night sky, finally   
why had they not

killed me why did they fire that warning   
wounding cannon only the one round I hold a
          superstition

(...)

because it is
impossible         the shack

on the coast

under the eaves
the rain barrel flooding

(...)

quick
in         the shack   
in the knife-cut
and the opaque

white

bread each side of the knife

Throughout this piece, you will note the white space in the middle and the gaps between some lines or clauses - for instance the gap between the word “opaque” and “white” and “bread”.

This is again done to control the reader’s attention, much like the line breaks I previously discussed. Both work in concert with each other to create a method of perception.

Reading this piece aloud, a reader would find themselves drawn naturally to include a somewhat dramatic pause between those words - slowing their speech to reflect that gap or break. Or, “the shack / on the coast / under the eaves / the rain barrel flooding”, where the words “on the coast” are quite literally by themselves, a coast of text jutting into the white space of the ocean of page. The shack, too, is separate from the earlier section of the line, practically reflecting its isolation. Then, “under the eaves” and “the rain barrel flooding” serve as a short line - insufficient eaves - and a longer line, the rain barrel itself flowing over.

It is Oppen’s deft use of white space that allows the reader to immerse themselves in the shack’s isolation, in the whiteness of the bread as it is cut. It is the guiding of attention that serves something akin to a Zen Buddhist guiding a pupil with a koan towards insight. And it is precisely this principle from which it is possible to draw an ethical implication regarding the concept of seeing the world and the other, and the experiences of the other, in a clear and unbiased manner.

This essay has, much like Part I of “Line Breaks and Enjambment” gone somewhat long - and so I am going to cut it here. Next post, I will articulate how white space and the method of perception it trains apply directly to our everyday lives.

Song this week is “Your dreams are my dreams” by Exxasens

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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In poetry, line breaks are a method of cultivating attention. Let’s take a look at “We Real Cool” again, once again using the copy from The Poetry Foundation.

We Real Cool

The Pool Players.

Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

In reading poetry, there is a particular cadence and direction that punctuation and enjambment/line breaks give - a pause at the end of a line, at a period. Even the individual selection of words and grammatical structures provide cadence, as I discussed here, regarding W.S. Merwin’s work.

As I mentioned in the previous post, ending the lines on “We” means Brooks is leaving the reader guessing as to what’s next - but also leaves them attentive. The reader doesn’t know what to expect next, because it is strange to dangle that “We” at the end of a line, and that propels them onward to the next. The cycle repeats until the reckoning with mortality.

This poem is a microcosm of attention to the person. You’ll note that almost no description is given of the atmosphere - there is no “the dim light of the pool hall” type language here. It’s colloquial, simple. The entire thing is about the actions - past and present and future - of these pool playing youths.

Each line break is a moment of refocusing attention too, from the action of the pool players (or their future) to the present “We”. The recentering “We” is what Brooks uses to pull the reader away from what Simone Weil called the “force” of assumption - that the subject of the poem is seven rough guys who made and continue to make dangerous choices - and to undercut the “affliction” of seeing them as solely the result of their choices.

In close-reading Brooks’ piece, it is difficult to miss that these pool players are real, human people. Regardless of what the previous experiences a reader may have had, they are humanized - especially through close reading. If we speed-read Brooks’ piece, we may end up with an entirely different (and unmoved, perhaps) takeaway; it’s by close reading that we can truly uncover the human beneath the image. Close reading allows us to take apart our assumptions of where the piece is going to go, of what the vernacular and casual style say, and to really look at the subject of the piece - young men grappling with danger and mortality.

Reading poetry with focused attention is precisely the tool that enables us to practice living with focused attention through Keats’ principle of “negative capability”, or the ability to sit in uncertainty towards the object of attention: the practice on the page translates directly to our practice in daily life - we are, after all, not only what we consume, but how we consume it. When we look at others with the same slow attentiveness we close-read any poem, we will begin to notice moments where we assume what the “next line” will be - filtered through our perception of the other person, rather than “letting the poem surprise us” with whatever it truly holds. Each interaction, each moment with another, is a process, unfolding between two processes - no different than a poem being written. Every time we begin to overwrite the other person with our own thoughts and ideas of what they may be like or say without them showing us, we are dismantling their next line, overwriting it with our own assumptions. This is Simone Weil’s “force” - the dehumanizing of another into an object or a label, reducing their humanity into “affliction”.

To Brooks, these pool players are the consequences of their choices, but they are also people capable of reflection, of acknowledging mortality, of putting up a deflective boisterous front, of understanding the trajectory of their lives. The pool players are more than simple caricatures - they are people, in this work, and Brooks’ steadfast refusal to reduce them to something less than human - to a cardboard cutout of a dangerous and endangered youth - is attention enacted.

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Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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The poet Gwendolyn Brooks, talking about rebellious youth in the late 1950s, wrote the poem “We Real Cool”, with the below provided courtesy of the Poetry Foundation:

We Real Cool
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Over ten lines, and in remarkably simple language, Brooks captures the lives of the pool players at the “Golden Shovel” - a doomed crew of young men who expect nothing but trouble and death. There’s a remarkable swagger through this poem where the voice of these pool-shooting guys comes through to explain their life philosophy.

That said, it is the construction of the piece that really sticks out to me. There’s a percussiveness in the single syllable word usage that gives a sort of swinging flow to it, but more notably is the enjambment.

Enjambment

In poetry, enjambment is the stopping of a line on something other than an end-stop - the idea of the line runs over to the beginning of the next line.

That means something that

looks sort of like this, where

the idea keeps going.

This is in contrast to an end-stopped line, where the line holds within it the completed idea:

That would look something like this.

Enjambment can happen for any number of reasons and with any number of intentions behind it - it could be that the poet thinks an idea is incomplete and naturally continues it to the next line. It could be that the poet is working in a specific formal constraint, and to ensure meter or rhyme, actively has to work across lines. And it may be - like in Brooks’ piece - the carrying of tension.

By ending each line on “We”, Brooks sets the reader up with a very unusual ending to her lines. Readers don’t anticipate to end a line at the very beginning of a thought. It is strange to our ears and eyes and mind to have an idea thrown to us incomplete. The enjambment allows Brooks to continue the percussive rhythm she uses throughout the piece, but it also forces the reader to keep going - “We what?” becomes the question. There’s an incredible tension built between that “We” and the silence dangling off the end, and to resolve it, the reader simply has to keep going. There is no other option.

Of course, the rebellious swagger that saturates the poem ends on a fatalistic note - “We / Die soon.” - and closes without continuance. After all, where is there to go beyond death for these men? There can be no enjambment for them - the idea of their lives ends just as the poem does.

End-Stops
Alexander Pope’s poem “An Essay on Man: Epistle I” (again, provided courtesy of the Poetry Foundation) is, frankly, the opposite of Brooks’ piece. Each and every line is end stopped:

An Essay on Man: Epistle I
Then say not man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;
Say rather, man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measur’d to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there?
The blest today is as completely so,
As who began a thousand years ago.

The clauses are polished off by a punctuation mark of some form - semicolons, periods, commas, so on. Some of them, even, are complete ideas, which refuse to leave the reader hanging. “His time a moment, and a point his space.” has no tension at the end - it ends with the equivalent of Pope pointing his finger in your face and exclaiming his point cleanly. The drive on, then, if not from tension, comes from the meter and rhyme instead. Part of this is simple excitement to see where Pope is going to go with the rhyme - “fault”/”ought”, for example, right out of the gate, is a satisfying rhyme that feels clever, and knowing that Pope intends to rhyme, it is natural our reader’s minds should be curious as to what he will do next.

The meter, too, which is iambic pentameter, lulls us naturally into a flow. The tension, in this case, seems nonexistent - it is a simple pulsing rhythm that locks the mind and eyes and ears comfortably into a pattern-seeking method and keeps us as readers forward-moving.

It is, functionally, the bass guitar in Pope’s rock and roll band - it’s in the background and you’ll miss it unless you’re looking for it, but it keeps the whole machine driving ahead.

It’s hard to say which tool, between the two, is more effective - and I think that may, in fact, be the wrong question. Instead, I think it’s more important to determine what engine a poem is using. Take Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (opening stanzas below, again from The Poetry Foundation):

The Destruction of Sennacherib
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

As opposed to Pope’s clean argument, the end-stopped lines here do provide tension; the opening clause about the Assyrian attack storms in, evocative and electric, but says little about the action - there’s a menacing quality to them that is not fully resolved. In this case, the end stop leaves us hanging, waiting for the attack to come. Then, it does, with the Angel of Death sweeping widely across the combatants and killing them en masse. Again, the form propels us - the fascination to see what happens next is drawn from Byron’s deft rhyming and meter - but also from the dangerous hanging-over-head quality of the end-stopped lines and completed clauses. Mechanically, it’s a far cry from Brooks’ ending on “We” and diving into the next beat of thought, but functionally? It’s equally effective.

As good poets, poetry-readers, and poetic thinkers, it is imperative we know even the most straightforward-seeming tools in our toolboxes. Some of the greatest works of art were created with the same simple brushes that still litter painting studios today, - and the same goes for poetry.

I could go on and on about this, without any sort of end-stop in sight, and so I’m going to call this one here. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little craft journey. Consider this a practical application of conceptual enjambment, if you will: next week, I’ll be carrying on this idea about how enjambment and end-stoppage work in relation to “verse ethics” - how they translate into ethical principles and how we can use these simple poetic tools in a way that will lead to a more ethical and attentive life!

Song this week has to be End of the Line by Metallica - naturally.

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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This is lighter, less philosophical and more personal - I think I’d be doing myself and Cricket a disservice by letting my time with him go uncommented on.

About two weeks ago, my wife and I brought Cricket home from the city. He’s pretty much the platonic ideal of a pigeon - round-bellied, little green patch under his neck, dull stare from looking directly into lightbulbs. He can’t fly very well, on account of a droopy wing, and has spent the past two weeks pooping all over his cage.

I love him tremendously.

On occasion, he produces a little feather from places unknown and wears it like a hat. He jingles a bell on his mirror and struts around flirting with his reflection.

At night, he gently coos until I say “Hi, Cricket!” and then he stops - behavior that, from my understanding, means he’s looking for his flock.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances well beyond my control, Cricket has to return to foster care in a couple days - the histamines won the day.

In two weeks, I spent a lot of time watching him hop around his cage, jumping from shelf to shelf, and confusedly blink at me. I wonder what is going through his head - probably not too much, honestly - as I drop sunflower seeds through the cage bars.

It’s strange how quickly I found myself attached, because I didn’t want a pigeon initially - I was ambivalent on getting another pet. He’s sitting behind me, gently cooing, as I write this up.

Each slow blink from him is a moment of his life I’ve gotten to be part of, and a moment of mine he’s gotten to live in. It’s a little moment of attention and I’m so happy to have been able to share my house with such a goof of a bird.

For Cricket, the Pigeon

You unexpected thing

winged rat orange claws

strutting on cardboard.

You bobble your head

click your beak along

to the rhythm

that beats in my

birdshit heart. How is it

that you’ve come here to me?

Take this moment. Blink

slow, tilt your head again.

The clock runs without

your small eyes on it.

Take your perch. Droop

your wing, tuck

your head down.

It’ll be alright.

Maybe it’ll be alright.

Song for this post is Devin Townsend’s “Secret Sciences”. - “Some will go / and some will stay.”

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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What I find most interesting about Merwin is how it is possible to draw so many differing meanings from his work, depending on how you read and focus on them. His pieces can be read, of course, as standalone, but also as biographical, as distillations of specific moments, and as pedagogical, intended to teach us how to live.

While I could expound on how poetic lines are vehicles for our perception to focus and shift around as the poem continues, I think it might be more useful to do a close reading of a specific Merwin poem to show this instead!

Before we continue, the poem today is from The Essential W.S. Merwin, edited by Michael Wiegers. I am going to be looking at “The Morning”, p. 315, originally appearing in Merwin’s 2016 book Garden Time. The attached link is provided by the Merwin Conservancy.

The poem begins with these first four lines:

”Would I love it this way if it could last
would I love it this way if it
were the whole sky the one heaven
or if I could believe that it belonged to me”

Beyond the intensive introspection presented in these opening lines, the striking lack of punctuation is doing important formal work here. If you were to read this piece aloud, you’d hear a substantial difference in the third line in particular, “were the whole sky the one heaven”, wherein the gap between “sky” and “the” would usually bear a comma.

In poetry, so often, our cadence is controlled. By this, I mean there are tools to adjust how one reads a particular line or sequence - a poet can deploy em-dashes, line breaks, commas, semicolons, periods, and indents (among countless others - my personal favorite being parentheticals) to focus a reader’s attention onto certain phrases or words.

Merwin, however, leaves this out. He seems to trust the reader and the reader’s ability to conjure commas and cadence controls in empty space - and trusts them to read with a focused attention on how the piece can and should sound as opposed as to how it directly appears on the page.

The poem continues some lines down:

"would I love it this way if I were somewhere else
or if I were younger for the first time
or if these very birds were not singing
or I could not hear them or see their trees
would I love it this way if I were in pain
red torment of body or gray void of grief
would I love it this way if I knew
that I would remember anything that is
here now anything anything”

Here, Merwin focuses his own attention on this particular morning - he looks at himself (“or if I were younger for the first time”), at the specific natural elements occurring "(“or if these very birds were not singing”). Then, he makes a strange aside to end the poem - inquiring if he would love the morning if he knew whether he would remember anything present at all. Merwin seems to comment on the inherent mundanity of the morning, whereby he is not tainted with feeling and asks if he would love it if his attention were elsewhere, or if some significant thing had occurred to make the morning stand out.

The repetition of unusual grammar in the last lines, I think, is worth noting - it is clear that, despite lacking punctuation, Merwin wants to draw attention to the moment of recognizing that the only memorial for this plain, simple morning is his own recognition of it. The repetition of anything three times changes the cadence away even without a comma to something wistful and a little sorrowful (by my read). The imagining of the specific birds and their absence too mirrors this moment of thoughtful, gentle sorrow that this still moment remains preserved only in poetry.

The overarching theme here, I believe, in this piece is not that Merwin necessarily is sad or thoughtful, but that he is attentive. This small morning moment of absolutely no stakes has so drawn in a man whose practice of attention caused him to immortalize “those very birds” and their trees, to appreciate and wonder about their being and absence and how it might influence him.

Merwin’s extension of attention to these small moments is not because he himself is a poet or is naturally tuned to being able to perceive them. It is, fundamentally, an expression of practiced attention. Merwin here is attentive to his perception of the moment, to his orientation to it, and to his own articulation of it.

This is a skill we can develop too. Through slowing down like Merwin, through trying to see those momentary mornings in a new light, we can better practice attention to ourselves, and extend that same practice to others.

In Buddhism, there is a concept and practice called metta. It translates, roughly, to loving-kindness, and is essentially attention filtered through a particular lens. The idea, in very simplistic terms, is to see others the same way Merwin saw his mornings here - to extend our capacity for love and well-wishes to ourselves and our immediate circle, then to neutral parties (“these very birds”), then beyond to those we dislike and the world at large entirely (“anything anything”).

There are so many ways to articulate the power of attention - but it is through example by which we, I think, stand the best path to learning. Merwin is, I hope you’ll agree, an excellent teacher.

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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In Part I, I discussed how “being attentive to the construction of that interaction, of what goes into it from our prior experiences that shapes the form and function of what we’re engaging with” can change how we actually interact. I don’t necessarily mean just being aware of our interactions and tendencies, but understanding why and how we interact that way.

In Buddhist thought, there is a concept called dependent origination. This is a pretty radical claim, although it sounds simple - it’s that no single thing springs forth on its own, but that any given moment is the procedural generation of every single moment in time before. It gets a lot deeper - there’s questions of free will, for instance, that arise from this and a whole Buddhist epistemology and teleology that come with it, but for our purposes, we’ll use the part of it that says nothing comes from nothing, everything comes from somewhere.

Take for instance, the following poem of mine, “Chanticleer”:

Chanticleer.

A drawing dawning arches

up to the apex of the sky.

The 88 stretches long and dry.

Cold winter. Cold asphalt.

Chanticleer.

A car horn parts a sea

of red Kia, a plate reads

“SEE YA”.

Burnt rubber.

Bumper on the median.

Chanticleer.

Birds on a fence.

Red barn, black roof.

Counting the mornings.

Roadside cross. Withered stalks.

Ambulance wail. Outlines of body-chalk.

Chanticleer.

Perching on the pillars.

Chin up, chest out. Yellow tape,

stretched around the car. Burnt rubber.

A cauterized morning. Cold asphalt.

For those unfamiliar with the Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer is a rooster present in that classic piece of literature. In constructing this poem, I drew from my prior life experiences, naturally, but my ability to draw from that imagery came from seeing that in person (or something like it), which in turn came from the circumstances occurring, which came from the driver of that Kia (or whatever car it was) making their decision to drive recklessly, which came from… well, I think you get the picture.

Anyway, it was in sitting down to write this poem - focusing on the sound of the horn in my mind, the birds on the barn roof, the smell of burnt rubber - that got me spinning my gears:

Am I, too, not guilty sometimes of driving like an ass? Perhaps not to the degree of our poetic object, here, but yes, regrettably, I am. In that moment of realization, that I am just as capable of driving like a lunatic but more often than not choose not to, that the poem revealed the human underneath the object of the poem. And my preconceptions (while that driver may have crashed because of their own error, overshooting their skill, or some other internal circumstance, they just as likely could be suffering a medical issue or something else) slipped into the background, letting me focus on what I saw without judgement or ego.

The moment of dwelling on the other person is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, with poetic attention.

We all, I think, can find different ways to hone poetic attention. Writing poetry and reading it in a focused manner, are just one way of many. But, I think, there’s something unique about poetry that sets it apart - and which makes it draw us closer to the baseline of care discussed by Graeber, which he considered our natural state.

I would invite you to see how you can use poetry - or writing or art in general - as a method of focusing your attention on what makes us human, on how to work “close to metal” and slip past those pesky preconceptions as you go about your day in small ways. If you slip, well, you can revise - that’s what poetic attention is all about.

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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Recently, I’ve been working on a writing sample for academic purposes and have had the pleasure of reading Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford. For someone interested in how poetry affects attention, Alford provides an excellent taxonomy of the various methods and means by which poetry circumvents our linguistic systems and how it changes how we relate to the world around us.

In the simplest terms, Alford suggests there are two kinds of poetic attention, which are interconnected: one, there is the literal form, which consists of those things which make poetry unique as an art - these are things like meter, use of symbolism, so on. The second kind is a mode of attention that functions “poetically” - or attention that focuses on what she describes as “poetic making” or “poiesis”, the “act of making […] which tak[es] place in the medium of attention”. Basically, this is the use of poetic craft in alignment with attention to adjust and alter language and therefore experience. (All quotes here from p. 8-9 of Forms of Poetic Attention)

Alford then discusses the subject and object qualities of a poem - the “attentional space” opened up by the poem itself, which is the aggregation of formal features of a poem that come together to create a specific effect on a reader. Likewise, the object is the completed poem which directs and commands our attention. (concepts/quote from p. 10 of Forms of Poetic Attention).

So what does this actually mean?

It sounds complex but I believe it’s relatively simple: reading or writing a poem means we have to pay special attention to how a poem is structured to get something from it. We can’t read a poem like prose, because the way a poem is written relies on certain pauses, breath patterns, breaks, and weight on words or clauses that prose does not necessarily always have in it.

As a means of testing this, take an animal you recognize - a dog you’re attached to, a tortoise in a cage, a bat or a capybara, whatever strikes your fancy. Write a paragraph about this animal’s qualities in a sensory way - what you see, what you feel or imagine it feels like when you touch it, how it moves, what sound it makes. Get creative with it.

Got it? Good.

Now, rewrite that paragraph and break it into lines - use those words again all the way through. The only thing you’ll change is where you start the next line. It doesn’t matter if they’re end stopped or broken up unevenly. Just do what feels natural there.

Then read the paragraph out loud. And do the same for the lined version.

You’ll see that there’s a fundamental change in how you deliver the second one - some words will feel and sound different, will be more isolated or interwoven.

This is what both kinds of poetic attention are: the attention paid to the making of the poem, and the attention paid to those small things which make poetry unique as an art form.

You may find yourself thinking “Well, that’s all well and good - but how does this connect to ethics and living?”

In the early days of ethical discourse, Aristotle proposed a system called virtue ethics. What he suggested is that virtue was something we cultivated over time, by choosing - consciously - the correctly proportioned response to certain situations and calibrating our ongoing self-construction to making that second nature.

I believe that poetic attention is a lot like that. It’s something we can choose, consciously, and use and apply daily. Each time we interact with each other, it is a shared experience - much like a poem is between a reader and a writer - and we can slow down our approach, consciously decide to see the other person differently than our knee-jerk experiences dictate.

The first method of poetic attention comes in here - that is, being attentive to the construction of that interaction, of what goes into it from our prior experiences that shapes the form and function of what we’re engaging with.

Because each poem is uniquely constructed (for example, Byron’s Darkness and Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different), it would be erroneous to assume that past experience can solely dictate how any given poem works. Even those sonnets which are of similar construction by good old Willy Shakes are functionally different.

The second form, the poetic attention of making, then comes into play. This is where we build a new poem - a new interaction, a new paradigm for interacting - from the ground up to best suit the situation.

That being said…

This post is running unexpectedly long and so this is going to be where I end it! Next week, I’ll be putting forward a handful of examples of how this works, and how this isn’t simply “virtue ethics by way of poetry”, but is instead saying something much bigger: that poetic attention is an ethical practice.

Thank you for joining me this week as we begin to get into the actual “practice” of “verse ethics”, and I hope you’ll be back next week to dig a little deeper into what it looks like brought to life.

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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As part of the event, both authors took questions - and it got my gears turning. This week, I want to talk about Christopher Buehlman’s commentary. Last week, I covered what Catriona Ward said, which was that, fundamentally, any good work of writing has a rainbow where the reader and writer meet halfway in collaboration.

Buehlman discussed a slightly different push-pull mechanic in writing, where the writer is pulled between revealing the world (what he called enlightening) and driving the work forward (which he called propelling). The idea is that, when putting pen to paper, there’s a certain balance between showing the reader with an outstretched hand how the world appears to you, the thing you’ve created, or pushing them forward through it so they can experience it themself.

Verse Ethics, contingent on the poetic process to function, of course feels this tension too. Early in this project, I discussed “spectacle” - Guy Debord’s principle that performance of one’s identity in socially legible ways is endemic to modern society, that authenticity is subsumed in favor of this performance. I also talked about, briefly, what Christopher Bollas calls “Normopathy”, which is the idea that we have subsidized interiority in favor of the exterior world.

In poetry, there’s oftentimes a blank space left between the reader and the poet. It is in this gap where the rainbow finds completion. That said, it’s also a problem in writing poetry to know where to leave that gap for the reader to fill. It is quite easy to simply sprawl across a page, to make some unusual associative leaps (“I’ll use this experience I had with my pet tortoise to talk about how we’re really all in cages!”) and then to look on the page and not trust the work itself to make it all connect (and then, much like this paragraph, keep going and over-explaining).

Trusting your reader is vitally important as a poet, because it’s the only way you can complete the rainbow without turning it into an arm-wrestling match with your poor reader. As a poet, accepting the principle that you can’t complete that rainbow alone is vitally important. That’s the “propulsion” aspect that Buehlman discussed - taking what you revealed (through “enlightening your reader” by the ink on the page) and sending them forward into the world with what you left out.

Admittedly, in real life, interactions will always leave blank spaces. There is always the opportunity for our interlocutors to fill in blanks - and we don’t control how those fill in. We are driven, through this knowledge, in many ways to fill the gaps ourselves - to stake unmoving positions, to position ourselves in fixed ways and with fixed identities, in hopes that we ourselves can fill those blanks for other people.

In poetry, those blanks are both intentional and unintentional. That could mean the use of white space, where there is a gap between words or lines to change the speed of perception or an intentional

witholding

of clean

conclusions

through the use of enjambment (line breaks). It could also mean leaving the reader hanging, not elaborating on something or being comfortable with the work itself to know it doesn’t need to announce itself. Louise Gluck, for instance, is an expert at this - her poetry shows just enough to leave readers hanging on for a resolution that may not necessarily come.

Verse Ethics suggests that completing Catriona’s Rainbow - resolving the Rainbow in Tension - is contingent on accepting that there will be gaps, there will be misunderstandings, there will be disagreements. These things are acceptable and expected parts of the poetic process, where situations don’t resolve cleanly, where people can’t reduce into simple points and are complex, multi-faceted. To complete the rainbow, to resolve that tension, we as the poets of our lives can simply move with these uncertainties as opposed to fighting them.

This doesn't mean everyone will meet you halfway. Spectacle doesn't disappear because you refuse it. But the practice of poetic living means you're at least not compounding the problem by over-explaining, over-performing, filling your own gaps defensively. And more importantly - it’s what helps you write the best poem you can; a life that’s yours.

This week’s track: Rainbow in the Dark, by the almighty DIO. How could I not put this in a two-parter about the reader-writer rainbow?

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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As part of the event, both authors took questions - and it got my gears turning. This week, I want to talk about Catriona Ward’s commentary, and then next week, if I remember, I’ll talk about what Buehlman said!

Catriona made the point that good literature - regardless of genre - exists on a sort of a rainbow. On one side of the rainbow, there is the reader. At the other, the writer. The reader reaches out across space and meets the writer halfway - and with that collaboration, the work becomes not an object belonging to the author or to the reader solely, but to the reader and the author and the world at large.

In Verse Ethics, where poetry and the poetic process is central to how to live, Catriona’s rainbow metaphor is, I think, quite apt. On one side of an interaction, there is me - with whatever it is that I have written, said, and done. On the other, there is you. We contain an idea of who we are and a conception of each other. When we come together - however it may be that we do - we do so in an incomplete picture.

In horror writing, oftentimes we are dealing with incompletes. The monster in the shadows, the uncanny, the preconception that the mad doctor is mad, rather than the protagonist hallucinating - all of this is based on an ontological position in which something is known and known to be not fully understood.

In contrast, in interacting personally, it is easy to slip into a position of relative proscribed certainty - a line of thinking where one party assumes something about the other and applies that unconsciously or subconsciously and runs with that. Think of this as some sort of light refracting object distorting the rainbow - you may get the colors, but the direction will be all awry. It’s relative, because the position is ascribed through a relational assumption, proscribed because it stems from past experiences (and distorts present ones through them) and certainty, because it replaces attentive presence with presupposed positioning.

So, why do we allow ourselves to sit in uncertainty in horror fiction, but fill in the gaps in real interactions - when it truly matters whether we are accurately seeing the other person, uncertainty and all? Is it lower stakes, because the story is words on a page? Is it because we don’t know how to sit in that uncertainty in reality? Is it that we lack “negative capability”, as Keats called it, or haven’t practiced that appropriately enough to make it a habit?

In part, it’s due to ego. The human mind is very devoted to its self-based ontology - its picture of reality is filtered through perception and through that perception, becomes heavily distorted. The results of these distortions are what create pseudo-forms, or incomplete pictures of ourselves that we give out to others, which results in the distortion of Catriona’s rainbow. It’s very difficult for us to attune our attention in a given moment to bypass that ego-driven perspective, to meet our fellow man at a baseline of care.

Verse ethics uses poetry as a basis for removing this block. In Zen traditions, there is something called a “koan” - you’ve probably heard one before even if you didn’t know it. This is something like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”, or “If a tree falls in the forest with nobody around, does it make a sound?” Koans function to shut off our logical, rational, ego-driven mind and open the perspective aperture up through associative thinking, unusual questioning, strange juxtapositions, and so on.

The mind that works alongside poetic principles does just that - it enables us to enter a world where the monster in the closet can be present without an answer, rather than the long coat, draped down from a hanger. The immediate answer (that the thing in the closet with a million teeth and tentacles is really there, or that our fellow man can be reduced to a simple set of labels) our brains jump to is something, I believe, we should be open to revising - for that will allow us to create Ward’s true rainbow, free of distortion, and to engage with the world in a more open, shared, compassionate way.

Next week, I’ll be exploring Buehlman’s commentary on his approach to worldbuilding - enlightening vs. propelling - to describe how this can look in practice.

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Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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Welcome back to the Non-Rehearsed Life. Today, as you have likely guessed, I’ll be discussing John Keats’ “Negative Capability” and what it means - both in poetry and beyond.

One of the key aspects of poetry is uncertainty. Living in figurative language, poets find ways to connect fragmentary thoughts and comparisons - describing things in unusual ways, then sending the work out onto the sea to be captained by a reader.

Part of the work of the poet is to adjust the map through which the reader sails the world through the use of strange, esoteric language and construction, to leave them sitting with a sense of wonder that they have just experienced the interiority of another - and to immerse themselves in the alien world of the poet.

Simply put, a poet - and a poem - must dwell in radical uncertainty. This is what John Keats called “negative capability”, describing it in a throwaway line in a letter to his brothers, and setting ablaze a discussion for generations of poets to contend with.

When Keats described the qualities of “Negative Capability”, he actually embodied it directly: he leaves us only with the 1817 letter wherein he describes sitting in uncertainty. There’s very little else Keats had to say about it directly. He does describe later, in 1818, the idea that a poet has “no fixed identity”, and that there is a concept wherein a maturing person moves from a lit room to a room full of “dark passages”, which is the beginning of real thinking, but ultimately, he doesn’t go too deeply into the thought.

Essentially, Keats’ idea of “Negative Capability” is relatively straightforward - that a true artist drifts from self-to-self in a process, that resolution is not demanded but may actually be the enemy, and that a mature person is able to sit comfortably in the uncertain darkness.

Think of Frost’s “Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The forest looms tall ahead of the speaker and his horse, and the snow floods the scene. There’s a house - the owner unspecified - and in the darkness, even the speaker’s horse seems baffled. Then, the speaker notes he has “promises to keep” and “miles to go before he sleeps”, never elucidating on what that means, on who owns the house, on why he’s stopping to watch the snow build in the woods.

There’s a level of discomfort generated in that poem from repetition, certainly, but there’s also a strange sense of peacefulness and resignation that the speaker has to walk through the darkness. Even as the reader never gets any explanation, the steady walk onwards continues into the darkness of the night.

The speaker in this is a perfect emulation of Keats’ “Negative Capability” - unknowing, comfortable enough in that to continue onwards, not walking towards the mailbox to see who owns the house or standing around debating internally what he should do.

In “verse ethics”, Negative Capability is central to living a life using poetic principles as a guide. The spectacle, as Debord called it, demands legibility - a fixed, readable self, dressed in labels and positions and oppositions. Roles - the very things that allegedly enable legibility - to Keats are flexional, and in his thinking, it’s actually psychologically mature to be able to adjust identity as needed to build an excellent life.

Often, we rush to define ourselves in modern life. This is an error - instead, we should train ourselves to sit in Keats’ dark corridors of Negative Capability.

We can do this through exposure to uncertainty through art and philosophy. Frost’s poem above, again, serves as a great guidepost.

Despite - or because of - the fact that we know nothing about him, the woods, or what’s happening, countless interpretations present themselves. What are his promises? What is he doing? Where is he? None of this is answered. He himself seems unsure of the area. Surrounded in vagueness, he trudges onwards. The reader of the poem is put into a net of uncertainties carried by the speaker. They’re left asking the questions and fishing for interpretations, forming their own thoughts and theories as they plod by the speaker and his tiny horse.

The ambiguity offered in poetry like Frost here, or in exposure to ideas that intellectually challenge us that we may have to sit uncomfortably with, is the first step to a true revision - in the poetic sense - of how we live. This may mean questioning long-held beliefs. It could also mean taking an accounting of who we are - and finding that underneath our put-on masks, our work-defined lives, our pre-rehearsed responses, we are not writing the best poem we can. Learning to sit in Keats’ negative capability is one of the keys to living a truly unrehearsed life, to taking craft principles from poetry and translating them to a living philosophy.

Instead of grasping irritably towards resolution, we can sit in darkness, and simply let our eyes adjust.

Song of the Week: Headstones - City of Ghosts: Sometimes all you have to do is stop pulling - just “let go of the rope” and buy into the uncertainty.

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Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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"Shipwright Poetics” is the term I’ve been using for it - and the principle is pretty straightforward: a poem, like a ship, needs three qualities: it has to be functional, elegant, and seaworthy. If the thing you’re floating out into the water isn’t functional, it isn’t a ship - it’ll sink if it can’t float. If it isn’t elegantly designed, it won’t cut across the water’s surface or draw attention - it’ll just be another fiberglass canoe. And if it isn’t seaworthy, nobody will trust it to carry them across an ocean.

In shipwright poetics, functionality is at the forefront. The idea of functional poetry is that a poem is designed by the poet to serve a purpose. That purpose, of course, varies widely as the content of the poem itself - maybe it’s designed to change the way you look at the world, or to immerse you in the poet’s lived experience, or to articulate a feeling in a new way. Regardless, the intentional placement of words and phrases is key here. If a poem is put together to express something, and you get instead nothing (or worse, the opposite message), then the poem isn’t “functional” - it’s simply ornamental.

To that end, one of the things I ask myself as I write and edit is “Is this phrase/word doing work?”. Each piece of a line, each line in a stanza, each stanza in a piece should be structural in bearing. A middle stanza should function as a crossbeam - something about it should contribute to the stanzas before and after it, whether that be momentum or contradiction or accumulation. If it’s there just to be there, it’s worth considering cutting that stanza, much in the way you’d chop the end of a board off if you outran your ship’s schematics by accident.

Secondly, the idea of elegance. This is embodied in the question “Is there a better way to say this?”. Poetry has been described as “the best words in the best order” (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and many others). When we write, it’s easy to let our ideas spill out and to become attached to them. This is an error of ego more than anything. The poem before us doesn’t demand we contort ourselves to write it, it simply wants to be written in the best way it can be. That may mean chopping off those non-functional bits from earlier during editing. It may mean noticing a board of the poem is creaky and loose and needs to be pulled up and replaced. That may mean admitting that we are sprawling in our writing and moving to compress it - after all, there’s a simple elegance to those old wooden ships.

An elegant poem is simple, even if it feels complicated - for instance, Dante’s Inferno is a piece of incredible structural and metrical simplicity, but the language is beautiful and controlled. This is elegance. Louise Gluck’s “The Wild Iris”, known for its austerity, is a different kind of structurally elegant - sharp, quiet, functional in implication.

This leads me to the final principle of Shipwright Poetics: seaworthiness. Poetry is an act of mutual trust. The reader trusts the poet to provide them a functional and elegant vehicle to take forwards, and the poet trusts the reader to appreciate that vehicle and not slam it into sharp rocks on the coast. This is the most complicated factor for poets, because we are giving up our work - our images, our choices in words, our well-arranged wood and sails - to the whims of the world at large.

Poetry is a game of withholding, of implication, of fragment. The moment a poet tells a reader what to think or how to feel, they give the game away. But at the same time, we have to trust that our readers are playing the same game, that they’re enjoying the slow, small glimpses behind the curtain without us flinging it back.

A poem is seaworthy when a reader can board it and recognize the craft that went into it - and can trust it to take them on a journey without the poet standing next to them, whispering in their ear as a guide. Whether it’s a schooner or a galleon, the shipwright doesn’t sit there and read the maps and charts - they simply make the boat.

These principles are, of course, transferrable to other genres too - you’ll see hyperindulgent fiction authors going on tangents for pages with no reason, biographers over-explaining how something felt without trusting the reader to inhabit it, filmmakers bloating their work with special effects and CGI when dialogue would do the trick.

When you write something this week - even just an email - I invite you to think of it in this light. After all, we should strive to build the best ships we can.

Song for this post is Iron Maiden’s “Ghost of the Navigator”: “Still my heart / calculate and pray.”

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Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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Hello, and welcome back to the Non-Rehearsed Life. This week, I’ve been reading Camus’ The Plague, a story of doing boring, straightforward work in the face of interminable terror. It’s appropriate, I think, given current events facing the country and the world at large. I’ve talked about Camus before, and how his concept of absurdity has influenced me and the Non-Rehearsed Life.

Part I - Historical Context

Written in 1947, shortly after the end of World War II, Camus’ The Plague is an answer to his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”. In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus diagnoses. In The Plague, he does something far sharper - he interrogates that diagnosis.

During World War II, Camus came to recognize that human horror stems from not evil, but instead from totalizing systems. To him, the violence perpetrated by authoritarian regimes across Europe stemmed from bureaucracy, from blind obedience, from abstraction, and from people buying into narratives (“historical necessity”, “national destiny”, and so on). Camus saw these narratives as exactly the kind that fueled empires and kingdoms and historical wars over the years, and believed that martyrdom, spectacle, and ideology were the exact poisons that tried to fill the gap left behind in modern society.

Camus also disbelieved in “necessitated suffering”, or systems suggesting that harm to others is necessary, and he disbelieved in the concept of innocence - that one could opt out of interconnected modern society. Instead, he believed the question to ask was “What am I refusing to add to this harm?”.

The Plague, of course, tells the story of a fictional instance of disease. But to Camus, it was both literal illness and extended metaphor: the plague is anything - any tragic event, any ideology, any mass casualty situation, any wide-ranging catastrophe - that leaves us asking “Why us? And what now?” It’s an implacable stripping-of-meaning, the kind that many of us in America are reckoning with after recent events in the Midwest, and the kind which has little in the way of clear answers.

As the plague rages, the citizens of Oran begin first by denying the catastrophe, knowing if they admit it is here, it will upend their comfortable lives. The town is sealed off after it becomes undeniable. Now trapped, the Oranites begin to ask “Why us? What now?”. Some try to escape, some try to exploit the chaos and death, and some remain focused on the problem in front of them - answering the question of “How do we care for each other in the midst of disaster?” Sanitation squads are formed, neighbors begin to care for one another despite the danger.

Part II - Today

In Camus’ Oran, the plague doesn’t claim everyone. As the situation develops, people begin to band together. Rieux quietly continues to treat patients each day, knowing huge swathes of them will die and that he himself is putting himself in grave danger through exposure. Another man, Tarrou, organizes sanitation squads that do very little to combat the plague - but that are doing something, however small it may be. And so too do others show up, not out of a compulsion of virtue, but because the chaos of the plague demands an answer.

Throughout all their interventions, there’s not any idea that they’re redeeming humanity or justifying suffering - it’s much simpler. They see that suffering exists and try to relieve it.

Solidarity to Camus is exactly this: it’s boring, dull work without any grand justification - because someone has to do it, and there are people who will. To Camus, it wasn’t a question of “are we human for banding together?”, but rather “does banding together against this absurd suffering make us less inhuman?” - and the answer was yes.

Today, we are exposed to new horrors daily. Regardless of our affiliations or attempts to avoid exposure, it’s almost guaranteed we will see something that makes us pause, makes our moral systems wince. Whether it’s an innocent person being killed on video on social media, a news report of climate catastrophe or this week’s humanitarian crisis overseas, we are all living through our own “plague”.

Camus doesn’t flinch through his novel. In it, even the people who would traditionally be spared by narrative causality suffer. Innocents die. People who do everything right still die. Exhaustion stacks, and stack quickly. But ultimately, the plague does pass - with Rieux noting that it can always return. Yet despite this, people continue to do everything in their power to help.

This is baseline care from verse ethics at its cleanest articulation. There’s no promise that anything will come from the application of care. There’s no promise that the work has meaning, that effort will show whatsoever, or that there will be some incredible positive outcome. But there is what humans do to each other in crisis that keeps them human. Even in the face of insurmountable odds. Especially, in fact, in the face of insurmountable odds.

There’s a type of person that Camus shows throughout this book: the type of person who shows up simply, nonperformatively, unrehearsedly, to care and to help the people around them. There’s no grandstanding - there’s simply dirty hands doing difficult, moral, caring, human work in a world that feels grotesque and impossible, because someone needs to do it.

Whatever “plague” you’re facing, however the world is coming to you, it’s possible to meet it as Rieux does - straight facing, committed to the care of others and of yourself, and without grand illusions. It’s honest.

And it’s unrehearsed.

Song for this post is: Bloodclock - Fleshgod Apocalypse. Written about a climbing accident, this song stays with the speaker dangling in uncertainty but refusing to give up.

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Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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“A dog can never tell you what she knows from the
smells of the world, but you know, watching her,
that you know
almost nothing.
- from Dog Songs, Mary Oliver

In my daily life, one of the great joys I’ve had has been watching my dogs. I’ve kept rough collies - full-sized Lassie dogs - for most of my adult life. My boys are going to be three this year, while my girl is seven.

In the mornings, one of my boys jumps into bed - he has without fail since he was a puppy - and starts by standing and orienting himself at my feet. Then, he bounds up and puts his 90 pound bulk on me, smothering me with puppy kisses. This was very endearing when he was a little teacup with Clydesdale hooves hinting at the behemoth he’d become. Now that he’s essentially a small horse, it remains the best way to wake up. Sometimes, to my deep shame, I push him gently out of my face to try and get extra sleep. When I do, he returns with sleepy determination minutes later - unperturbed, ready to shower me with attention and drive me from my sleep towards the day.

My other boy, who is a little smaller, has been riding the midwest winter. He loves to sit in the snow, to lie and absorb all the cold into the bottom of his coat and stare around the yard, smelling his way along the tracks of whatever small suburban animals poke through our yard overnight and listening to passing traffic on the other side of the small fence between him and a much wider world.

My girl is a different story. She gets up and moves when her brothers “wrassle” with her, as we call it - the playful, bouncy menacing that young dogs do to show love - and otherwise joyously waddles her senior self around the house, wagging at everything. Every new person is greeted with unabated joy, every new sound is met with an excited bark and wag.

The other day, I found myself lost in thought about what kind of person I am and who I want to be, and decided I want to be more like my dogs.

The three of them don’t suffer the vagaries of identity or questioning. They simply abide in their little lanes, allowing themselves to be curious, loving, warm, and relaxed. Not a thing they do is performance for anyone.

Each moment my dogs perk up is a moment they revise their little puppy poems. When my girl goes to bark and wag, there’s no thought of “am I a barker? A wagger?” or “Does this bark define me?”. There’s simply the doing in the moment, the moment passing, and the world continuing - and her continuing within it. She has no idea she’s revising - she’s simply existing as a dog.

I think there’s something to be said for letting go of our tight grasp on the big questions of roles, of identities, and meeting the moment with our ears perked and our tail in a comfortable low wag, with the same curious attention my boy in the yard tracks small squirrel prints across the snow.

"We're, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much."
- "How It Is With Us, And How It Is With Them" Dog Songs, Mary Oliver

If this post challenged you, made you think, or gave you a new perspective on something, I’d love it if you shared it or left a comment. It only takes a second - links below!

Thomas Hamil is a poet and writer from the Midwest, exploring life - without performance.

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