The Poetry Bug
by Brian R. Young
If poetry is contagious, then what exactly is being transmitted? Certainly some degree of meaning exists in every poem, but communication of meaning isn’t a goal worthy of the intricacy of poetry—there are much simpler ways to inform another person. The concept of opening someone’s skull and pouring stuff inside is a task more appropriate to surgeons and perhaps schoolteachers, but not to poets. There is a difference, however, between the clear transfer of meaning and engaging the reader. The former objectifies the reader as a receptacle; the latter is participatory—requiring the presence of the physical body and mind of the reader. It is important that a writer discover how to bring the reader along for the ride, to draw him or her entirely into the alternate reality or mode of perception of the poem. It is always an option for a reader, even if the argument is ‘perfectly constructed,’ to dodge its mighty persuasive power simply by covering their ears—by refusing to hear, to read, to let the thoughts enter their mind. As a graduate teacher pursuing an MFA, I related this to my composition students, but it holds true for any sort of writing. If a reader resists entirely, the door is closed. The stranger is locked out.
I don’t think that I could adequately discuss what I thought about poetics while I was in graduate school without including some of the readings from my seminar classes. Certain texts got into my system, and whenever I find myself attempting to explain what poetry can do, I return to them. This isn’t to say that I’ve completely made sense of their influence—simply that they have incorporated themselves into my aesthetic.
There’s a section of Chapter 20 from The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, in which she discusses rapture and her experience of being possessed by ‘God.’ This discussion echoes what I have come to think about the encounter of a poem—what it requires of those involved—writer and reader. She says: “For, happen what may, we must risk everything, and resign ourselves into the hands of God and go willingly wherever we are carried away, for we are in fact being carried away, whether we like it or no.”
The first part of this quotation suggests the demands of an encounter—one must be willing to risk everything. By composing, vocalizing, and reading one may find everything that they have constructed and maintained being challenged or questioned. One can never be sure what this encounter (with language, with a poem) will result in. Everything could change—the way you think of the world, or of your self, how you act, how you live. The second part of this quote “go willingly… whether we like it or no,” turns as it progresses away from a free decision to end with pre-determination. This move functions several ways. First, it emphasizes the impossibility of this situation—when one is ‘taken over’ by a poem, it becomes impossible to distinguish one’s will from what is happening. The reader must say ‘yes’ by entering into the exchange, but after that the poem carries its reader away. This process can’t be thought of as a choice, because what happens when we read precedes conscious choice—our brain connects with the words, reacts to all their textures and potential associations, attempts to create meaning and sense, even before we are aware of its proceedings.
A model that I think fits for describing the process of a poem is that of the virus. I first encountered the concept that “Language is a virus” while studying fiction by William S. Burroughs in a seminar class. To say, as SUNY Buffalo’s website, that “poetry is never about something, it is something” is to credit poetry with a vitality of its own. The virus model works, I think, precisely because it is only with great difficulty and debate that we say viruses are ‘alive.’ Certainly if they are alive it is not in a conventional sense. The poem, like a virus, infects us, gets into our body and our blood. Poetry is something that we live through, that we experience, that we survive. Poetry stays with us after we read it. It requires the presence of a host, or reader, to grow and replicate. Viruses replicate by cutting into a cell’s DNA and inserting their own, causing the cell to become the reproducer of the virus. This reminds me of what happens with a reader’s (mis)reading of a poem—not only is the reader changed, but the poem itself often changes in the interpretation, at least in terms of how it gets transmitted. Interpretation leads to variations on a theme as reader becomes creator. Art inspires art, both in terms of what it demands of the body before ‘understanding’ and what lingers after.
I don’t mean to imply that the poem on the page is dead. The poem itself represents the dormant stage of a virus—when it passes from host to host. Though the life process occurs when a poem is read, the form of the virus—the poem on the page—has everything to do with the reaction, the ‘sickness’ of the person who opens him or herself to it. To discuss the poem as a virus seems more than a little creepy and disturbing, especially because concepts of an encounter or a friendship often include nostalgic associations. The friendship or relationship or encounter that occurs between a reader and a writer, or a person and the subject matter, can be thought of as a friendship or alliance, but this should not signal that the process is comfortable or unchallenging. That is why I think the strangeness of a virus model is particularly effective.
What arises in this encounter isn’t a need to agree, or a warm and fuzzy affiliation. More is at stake than arriving at meaning, consensus, or assimilation. A virus makes you sick—your body has to develop antibodies to learn how to live with the presence of the virus. In a similar way, the stranger—the poem—makes your foundation of belief unstable by disrupting or challenging your constructions and beliefs. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of this encounter as a meeting of rivals—of selves, experiences, and modes of perception—which are differently assembled and resist, enflame, or bump up against each other. As I remember from another of my seminars, where we read Deleuze and Guatarri’s What is Philosophy?, “If we really want to say that philosophy originates with the Greeks, it is because the city, unlike the empire or state, invents the agon as the rule of a society of ‘friends’, of the community of free individuals as rivals.” We can’t discuss the encounter without including the struggle that always takes place.
What is significant here is that the chaos is allowed in, and what occurs isn’t capable of being summarized or neatly fit together. To think of the friends as opposites or binary doesn’t adequately describe the struggle—what happens is a shattering or a tearing apart. Instead of reinforcing the separation between self and other, this distinction becomes impossible, as ideas and devices start to pass through the boundaries of inside and outside, self and other. The virus attacks, the body counters, each folds into and absorbs the other.
The variability of this process may serve as a good model (or an excuse perhaps) for how I encountered many of the texts and poems that I read as an MFA student. I could be quite deliberate in my misreading—often in workshops I’d discuss a peer’s poem in terms of my vision for it – sometimes refusing to give up on a read even after the author had insisted that my view differed from his or her intentions. Often I envisioned what I would attempt with the poem—something ‘other’ than the author. I think this potential isn’t entirely removed from the poem itself. In fact, it is because of the evasiveness or slipperiness of language (as a teacher of mine often said) that such variations are possible. Poetry is like the most dangerous of viruses because it is constantly re-inventing itself—as soon as a ‘cure’ (an interpretation or definition) is designed, the virus can become something different than what the cure was designed for.
Workshops provide poets not only with a unique opportunity to actually hear how their potential audience might respond to the work, but also to engage, to struggle with, to resist, and to be resisted by this audience in an instance where both are present and actively engaged. I realize there are dangers inherent in a workshop—that some feel it tends towards homogeneity and assimilation—but I think that the dangers of this are at worst no more present than anywhere else where people passively read, passively engage, and absorb (which is everywhere). At best, and this was almost always my experience, aesthetics and individuals were not at all weakened or diluted—but crashed, met with, engaged, affected, and encouraged the growth and development of each other. Poems were written as challenges, and the challenges of poems were disrupted or turned against the challenger. Conversations between friends were uncomfortable, which was quite productive and beneficial.
