Dead Kitten Poetics Pt. 5: Beating a Dead Kitten

I come neither to bury nor to praise Mary Oliver. Her kitten poem is just a handy and fairly neutral example, as far as I'm concerned. What interest me are larger questions of poetic valuation and evaluation, which I've discussed here before.

Just to be clear: my "adequate/inadequate" scale a couple posts back does not refer to the measurement of the value of a poem, but of the degree of technical craft (again, craft being narrowly defined as a familiar set of mechanically "workshoppable" skills such as meter, lineation, rhyme, etc.) required to qualify a poem as "finished." Different poems are obviously situated at all imaginable points along a potentially infinite (and indeterminate) continuum of value judgments. My point is that craft execution can be evaluated only in terms of its adequacy or inadequacy in the specific context of the particular demands which a given poem makes of craft--or more accurately, though it can be evaluated on a more nuanced level, such evaluation is effectively arbitrary, evincing a myopically pointless concern with superfluous detail.

To be sure, there are readers who measure poetic value solely in terms of craft so defined, who believe that a successful poem is one which manages to convey a paraphraseable meaning (preferably a meaning decided upon in advance of the act of composition) in conformance with a set of predetermined prosodic rules. The smoother the meter, the cleverer the rhymes, the stricter the avoidance of cliches, and the more economy with which the (accessible) meaning is articulated, the better the poem. If that is all one asks of a poem, then good craft + clear meaning = good poetry.

I acknowledge that many great poems have been composed according to an aesthetic in which craft is of the highest importance. In such cases, the "adequate" mark is simply set higher on the scale. Even here, anything below adequate is simply inadequate, no matter how much skill is involved in it. An example might be a Greek ode in an intricate quantitative measure: if one foot is marred, the entire production suffers (unless one subscribes to an aesthetic in which a minute amount of imperfection actually adds value, as with some textiles, glasswork, etc.).

But imagine being in a workshop and trying to carry over the criteria used in such a specialized emphasis on this particular kind of craft to poems by, say, Linh Dinh or Stephanie Young. What would that even entail? No one on a committee appointed to police their verse for craft-correctness would ever be able to agree whether line breaks should have gone here or there, or whether a particular image is effective or not. The standards for determining these kinds of things are not always articulable outside a nebulous and often fractally diffuse "originary" scene of authorial invention.

This is not to say that craft is completely irrelevant to meaningful evaluation of Mary Oliver's poem. Look, I can mess it up royally just by changing the line breaks:

More
amazed than
anything I took
the perfectly black stillborn kitten with the one large
eye in the
center of its small forehead from the house
cat's bed
and buried it in a
field behind
the house.

But it would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of this patently perverse jumble that every possible reordering of the lines has a correspondingly hierarchizable position on some virtual chart. The following alterations, I would argue, have a virtually negligible effect on the poem's craft-adequacy.

More amazed than anything
I took the perfectly black stillborn kitten
with the one large eye in the center
of its small forehead
from the house cat's bed
and buried it
in a field behind the house.

If you believe that they do change the adequacy level, I would further argue that it is only because you are already familiar with the original line breaks, and have naturalized them in your consciousness, and/or that your opinion is too idiosyncratic to serve as a meaningful guide, since any number of other readers are likely to have differing opinions with just as little basis in any objective criteria for judgment (beyond, say, "it just has a better flow that way").

Dead Kitten Poetics Pt. 4: Cat & Mouse

I don't disagree with any of this. In answer to the question whether the "successful" phone commercial is "unimpeachable," absolutely yes--on the level of craft, where craft is narrowly defined as a certain mechanical facility with formal elements, resulting in the effect desired by the crafter, especially upon a specified audience. Does that make it "good art"? Absolutely not.

Is this interesting? Maybe not. All I want to argue really is that when someone writes a poem like "The Kitten," no amount of craft adjustment is going to make it "better" in the way we really want it to be better. The only "improvement" would be to write a completely different poem.

This is not to say that a poem in this vein can't be bad on a craft level as well. What I want to resist is the notion of a steady craft-continuum from good to bad, a continuum along which there are infinite points in an unbroken line of qualitative evaluability. So instead of the following model:

AWFUL > BAD > NOT SO BAD > OK > GOOD > REALLY GOOD > TERRIFIC

I would propose the following:

INADEQUATE / ADEQUATE

In other words, formal craft either does its job or it doesn't, where its "job" is understood to be the adequate bolstering of an articulable poetic objective.

Furthermore, craft need only be barely adequate in order to fulfill its function in a completely satisfactory manner. Let's switch from cats to mice. Here is John Clare's sonnet (arguably a sonnet, anyway) from the 1830's, "Mouse's Nest":

I found a ball of grass among the hay
And proged it as I passed and went away
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned again and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun

Grammatically, rhythmically, rhetorically, this is a mess. It could be said with some justice that Clare, in a technical sense, doesn't know "how to put one word in front of another." It is laden with redundancies (e.g., "passed and went away," "so odd and so grotesque," multiple ands) that clearly exist primarily to fill out the pentameter line. The rhymes are naive and often forced. With the exception of the tenth line, the meter is crudely regular and stiff (the tenth line's irregularity is just crudely stiff). The phrasing and images are frequently laughable ("hoped to catch the bird," "hanging at her teats," "the young ones squeaked," etc.). And yet none of this, it seems to me, is what we respond to in the poem as a whole--or if it is, we respond to it in a way that converts what would otherwise be vices to virtues. The hempen homespun quality of the verse is not merely a quaint rustic affection; it is a powerful trace of Clare's immediacy of perception and reflection. Imagine what would happen to this poem if it had fallen into the hands of nineteenth-century "workshoppers"! One might decide that the couplet structure is inadequate to the formal potential of the sonnet, and install an intricate Petrarchan rhyme scheme in its place. Another might object to the repetitive conjunctions and polish Clare's grammar into an Etonian suavity of subordinated clauses. Still another might Bowdlerize "teats" into "breast," or remove the scene of mammary attachment entirely on the grounds of decorum. All these decisions, within the framework of period taste and poetics, would be eminently reasonable--and from our point of view, disastrous.

Dead Kitten Poetics Pt. 3: Unworkshopability

Let's make this perfectly clear: I don't think Mary Oliver's "The Kitten" is a great poem. It embodies the sameness and drabness of the aesthetic that informs way too much contemporary poetry (and sadly, this is true though the poem is over twenty years old). It takes potshots at an easy target: making people feel melancholy about a dead one-eyed kitten, and showing the sensitivity of the speaker who appreciates that maybe even this poor little stillborn freak has some place in the grand scheme of things, or whatever. Or, more generously: showing the subtly ironic perspective of the speaker who points out the poignant tension between the idea of the earth as a benevolent, generative force, and the reality of what its "dark seed" has produced, a reality to which the "reckless blossoms" symbolizing cruelly nihilistic fertility are emblematically linked. The latter reading at least gives a little existential shiver in addition to a lump in the throat.

That said, I'm more convinced than ever that the poem is relatively unimpeachable on the level of "workshop craft." That is, the only response I could give in good conscience to a student who presented me with this poem in a workshop would be either "looks like you're done" or "give up poetry and go home."

Several bloggers, since I started blogging about this, have ventured to offer examples of how further "workshopping" might improve the poem. Two have written fairly long and ambitious posts of this sort: one is the anonymous Scoplaw poet, and another is Tony Tost. In both cases, the "pimping" only serves to reinforce my sense that whatever is wrong with the poem has little or nothing to do with the mechanics of line breaks, argumentative structure, metaphoric figuration, etc. Tony, for example, decides that it would be an improvement for some reason if the speaker spoke directly to the kitten! In heaven's name, why? Then you just have some lady talking to a dead cat, saying things like "you were real."

Tony also proposes that a weakness of the original is its repetition in the third stanza of the fact stated in the first stanza that the speaker buried the cat (it is also more or less repeated in the final stanza, though Tony doesn't bring this up). But this is one of the things that gives the poem whatever structure it has: the first stanza states what the speaker has done, the second stanza presents an alternative possibility to what she has done, the third repeats what she has actually done (adding some details in the process), and the final stanza combines a statement that the speaker has made the right choice with another reiteration of the act itself (this time refined into a more abstract gesture of "giv[ing] it back." We can highlight the chief repetitive strains of the poem by condensing it as follows:

1. I took the kitten and buried it in a field

2. I suppose I could have given it to a museum

3. But instead I took it out into the field and opened the earth and put it back

4. I think I did right to go out alone and give it back

Embedded as they are in other textual details, these strains provide the barest incantatory scaffolding that repeats the main movement of the poem twice: a. what I did plus ethical consideration; b. what I did plus ethical consideration. As a counterpoint to this primary repetitive structure, the third stanza distinguishes itself from the other three with its own concentrated cluster of repetitions:

and
and
saying,
saying,    infinitely inventive,
saying,

I'm not claiming that these patterns are especially remarkable, that they are comparable to the intricate numerological orderings of Renaissance odes, or anything like that. But they do form a functional skeleton that gives the monologue a rudimentary shape beyond mere lineated prose. Tony's revisions, like the Scoplaw poet's, dissolve that shape and render the poem as a whole even more banal than it was to begin with. Other little alterations that Tony performs--changing "More amazed than anything" to "Mostly I was amazed," leaving out "the house cat's bed," shifting "peacefully" so that it modifies "cover the place" instead of "give it back," etc.--all do similar violence to Oliver's structural/rhetorical blueprint. The poem's participial first line modifies essentially every action that follows, whereas Tony's single sentence, a stanza in itself, simply establishes a static condition. By omitting the step of removing the kitten from its mother's bed, Tony loses the poignant domesticity of the funereal process. And there is little point in saying that the speaker covered the grave with leaves "peacefully"; the idea is that the speaker has opted to inter the kitten quietly in the earth rather than sensationalistically making a big noise by calling the papers or museum.

I don't think Tony's failure to improve the poem reflects poorly on his own craft; I think it shows that Oliver knew what she was doing when she wrote it, and that her sense of craft is fully enough developed on her own terms that no one else can second-guess her. If we think the poem is bad, it's not because she didn't know how to write it; it's because we think she shouldn't have written it in the first place.

Far more successful are the various parodies that have popped up in my comment boxes, since they aren't trying to "improve" the original; they're examples of poetry that the authors of the parodies would rather be reading (and writing). Drew's is my favorite, and I hope he won't mind if I transplant it from the comment box to full view in this post:

Soft Animal

I had written some simple piano
for a dead Cyclops kitty burial.
You do not have to feel dead to feel things.
A dance recital depraved.
You do not have to stare from your giant cyclops-kitty eye
Ass going on naked, harrowing,
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
This also is called "Draped Profile."
You only have to let the soft animal of your dead cyclops kitty body
love what it loves.
Distinguish the feel. "Pronounce it."
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
So hard to shovel, so soft to fall
White, red, pale red
Meanwhile the dead Cyclops kitties and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscape of Great Barrington, MA,
Over the prairies and the deep trees,
Toenails working fulltime against the mountains and the rivers
with little or no health insurance.
Meanwhile dead Cyclops kitties, high in the clean blue air,
are handling home again.
Years of closed doors, whoever you are,
No matter how lonely,
The world is offing itself in your imagination,
Blood's standing a fossil orange,
More feeler than hand. It shakes,
Calls to you like a dead Cyclops kitty,
Staring at your most inward thoughts
Announcing your place in the family of things.
The spotlight settles.
The kitty's Cyclops eye is myself.

Dead Kitten Poetics Pt. 2: Ineptitude?

A lot of substantive replies in the comment box to my last post: too many to respond to in full at the moment, but it's interesting that Drew's remarks there in particular are simultaneously most resonant with my own response to the poem and representative of many of the positions specifically vis a vis craft that I wanted (and still want) to argue are untenable.

I'm still not convinced that what Drew and many others find "irritating and ridiculous" about the poem is really an index of anything that could objectively be termed "ineptitude" on Oliver's part. Drew feels that Oliver is operating on bad faith, that the entire text is a shallow ploy to get the reader to think the poet is deep and sensitive. Whether this is true or not (and how does one demonstrate the truth or falsity of such a claim?), my problem is that I don't see the step that can lead us directly from this charge, or from the following observation that the poem is "corny-sounding," to the accusation that Oliver "hasn't the slightest idea how to put one word in front of another," or that "the metaphors don't work." Drew seems to mean something other by this than simply that he does not appreciate the poem: he implies a quantifiable mechanical deficit on the poet's part (in another comment, he uses the word "ineptitude"). That is, he implies that Oliver literally doesn't have basis syntactic competence, that her metaphors are literally incoherent. Maybe he doesn't really mean this, but if that is the case, this is a perfect example of the way in which dissatisfaction with a poem's general raison d'etre can slide into a hazy use of craft-based terminology.

Drew says: "These are not the result of a generic 'bad craft,' the bad craft is the result of an attitude towards reality, and toward the role of the poet. What's truly 'bad' about the poem is its manipulative and vain attitude toward communication." There is a bit of a shell-game going on here. First, he invokes the specter of bad craft by denouncing Oliver's supposedly awkward syntax and inert metaphors. Then he says that these defects are not actually indices of Oliver's craft ineptitude at all, but rather that her "attitude toward reality" and toward her own "role" as poet have somehow "resulted" in bad craft. But then isn't her craft the problem on one level after all? My suspicion here is not that Drew has failed to give coherent expression to his idea, but--more radically--that there is no idea there to give expression to. When we dislike what we believe a poet or poem stands for, too often we convince ourselves that on that basis alone we may assert that the poet's "craft" is lacking. But craft can only be measured, ultimately, according to the frame of craft-reference to which the poet appeals in deploying a particular style. In Oliver's case, this frame is a standard monologic model of late twentieth-century lyric, built around a slightly elevated version of colloquial speech/thought. We can either embrace or reject this framework, but on its own terms, it is as valid a template for formal praxis as any, and Oliver's application of its principles, unless I am missing something, "fails" in no obvious way.

Drew continues:

The problem isn't that the poem is sentimental, it's that the sentiments the poet is ostensibly trying to activate and address are actually being evaded, or you could say, they are being exploited, and in their place we have a kind of pitch to think kind thoughts about the speaker. I am being presented (poorly) with a fake, "idealized" self. My feeling is that the poem represses information about life and experience toward this end.

On what grounds can it be said that Oliver's "fake, 'idealized' self" (even granted that it is indeed such a sham) is presented to us "poorly"? As I said before, the charge of emotional dishonesty is a whole other issue, and one whose proof or refutation does not partake of the measurable "evidence" attending issues of technical craft. Certainly it is a vice we can imagine manifesting itself in visible gestures, like a poker player's "tell" or a liar's facial tic. But is it really possible to apply this concept to textual phenomena like syntax and verbal metaphor? Perhaps. But is this what Drew is claiming? If so, some more detailed analysis is necessary. And if not, we have here the same sleight-of-hand (not that I think Drew is being intentionally misleading) that we saw before, in which ethical failings are suddenly and mysteriously seen to be supplanted by mechanical ineptitude.

In acknowledgment of the fact that legions of readers consider Oliver's poem both deeply moving and technically well-wrought, Drew comments:

I see it as a kind of psychic vampiric gesture, one done with such spectacular ineptitude and obliviousness that I'm amazed it's successful. I can only guess that the feelings possibly stirred by the invocation of the scene are more powerful than the uses the poet has planned for them, and that it is actually the invocation of the scene the readers are looking for, regardless of how it's done, or to what end?

I'm willing to entertain part of Drew's argument here, simply because it's just too depressingly ridiculous not to be somewhat true: that there are some readers who want so badly to be poetically saddened by the thought of burying a dead one-eyed kitten that they will applaud any shabby apparatus that offers them such a spectacle. What I still don't accept is that Drew has in any tangible way demonstrated Oliver's "spectacular ineptitude and obliviousness." He has simply asserted it to be the case. He does this most passionately and compellingly in this statement:

The overall impact of the language here--the energy and movement of the syntax and vocabulary all seem dramatically separated from the themes, images, thinking in the poem--everything about the vocabulary and syntax screams out to me that they are being forced into the service of a formulaic attempt at provoking a predetermined emotional response. And I can acutely feel the language resisting these shackles.

I don't doubt that Drew does feel this as acutely as he says; he just hasn't shown it. He is, in my opinion, one of the poets of this generation who is most sensitively attuned to the emotional nuances of language, as well as to the ways in which those nuances may be grotesquely tweaked for a variety of effects ranging from poignancy to slapstick. And while I may agree with most of his broad claims about Oliver's poetic inertia (though I do also still find this particular poem moving in spite of myself), even he has not convinced me that this inertia can be related meaningfully to her syntactic and figurative competence--i.e., her command of certain familiar strains of technical craft.