Meg Schoerke
Meg Schoerke is the author of Anatomical Venus, a book of poetry published by
Word Press 2004. Her poems have appeared on the websites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and
in two anthologies, the Academy of American Poets' New Voices and Poetry Daily:
366 Poems from the World's Most Popular Poetry Website. She has contributed poems and
reviews to journals such as The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and Hudson
Review. With Dana Gioia and David Mason, she co-edited Twentieth Century American
Poetry and Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry
(McGraw-Hill, 2003). She is an Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State
University, where she teaches courses in 19th and 20th century American poetry.
Statement of Poetics:
Because poetry draws its life from figures, in drafting a "statement of poetics"
I turn to other arts—painting and music—to find a way of articulating what I
seek in poetry. In What Painting Is, James Elkins argues that "painting is at
its best when it pushes toward transcendence but does not escape from itself" (191).
Using alchemy as his core analogy, he explains:
It may be that the human mind can only think of one aspect at a time: either a painting is what it represents, or it is a fabrication done on a flat surface. Or perhaps it is possible to think of both the surface and what seems to be behind it at once, in a ‘twofoldness’ of attention that takes in both equally. Like the [alchemists’ fabled Philosopher’s] Stone, genuinely entrancing painting wavers between the two possibilities. . . . When paint is compelling, it is uncanny: it hovers on the brink of impossibility, as if nothing that close to incorporeality could exist. Like the hypnotic red powder of the Stone, paint can reach a pitch of unnaturalness where it seems that it might lose every connection with the tubes and palettes where it began. That is the state that counts, and not the choice between fictive space and canvas, or between illusion and paint. It’s not the choice, but the narrowness of the gap: the incredible tension generated by something so infinitesimally near to perfection. (188)
Elkins’ alchemical analogy depends on the tension between paint—a material,
concrete medium—and the incorporeal realm—what he calls "fictive
space," or "illusion." Extending the figure to poetry poses problems, for
some readers may say that a writer’s medium, language, is also incorporeal (while
others may assert that poetry, although a "fictive space," explores human
experience, corporeal as well as incorporeal). Yet I think that poetry, more than any
other form of writing, exposes the physical qualities of words—not only their music,
but also their weight (lightness or heft)—and the architecture of sentences. But I
also think that pure abstraction in poetry is difficult, if not impossible, to
achieve—and not very interesting (especially when compared to abstraction in
painting).
The poetry I am most attracted to is, like the work of a painter such as Paul Cézanne,
both representational and non-representational. It provokes awareness of language—and
of the writing process—through expressive distortions of form (whether of traditional
form, or of whatever form the poet chooses to unfold as the poem develops), yet also
struggles toward articulating the complexities of human experience, and especially of
human feeling. Such poetry demands the kind of "twofoldness of attention" that
Elkins advocates, and achieves effects—particularly an emotional intensity—that
are "uncanny" in the root sense of that term. The Scottish meaning of
"can" (a variant of "ken") is "to know." Therefore,
"uncanny" means "unknown," or "something that cannot be
known." The tension Elkins describes arises from the conjunction of the unknown with
the known, the material realm of paint, and also of everyday things like a still
life’s apples and tables and teapots. Cézanne’s distortions, his refusals of
academic standards of perfection, oddly make his paintings feel all the more
"perfect" to me because they foreground the work’s imperfection (the gap
Elkins describes). In the same way that a jazz genius like Thelonious Monk can create
expressive dissonance and rhythmic deviations while playing a standard, Cézanne develops
expressive distortions in off-kilter representational paintings that draw attention to the
disparity between the elements of painting (paint, brush strokes, the line, basic shapes
like cones and circles) and the objects represented. All the while (as in good,
improvisatory jazz playing), the distortions suggest the consciousness’s changes over
time and the process of painting itself: the incremental revisions, both of sight and of
the hand, that the artist makes as he or she works (and an attentive viewer makes as she
looks at a finished piece). Likewise, for me certain poets (Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane,
Lorine Niedecker, the Marianne Moore of Observations—to name just a few)
provoke a similar "twofoldness of attention" that makes words and sentences seem
concrete, corporeal, yet also alien (uncanny, unknowable), and therefore evokes equally
"uncanny," yet recognizable, human experiences and emotions.
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