by Tony Hoagland

Lyric, Number 10

If history is full of nightmare, it is also full of poetry. A perfect example can be drawn from recent European history, in the story of the Prague Spring of 1968. When Soviet-bloc tanks rolled into Prague to repress the emerging Czechoslovakian democracy, they were unable to find the city center because partisans had taken the street signs and switched them all around. Milan Kundera tells this story in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

This sign-switching was a quintessentially poetic act—a heroic, improvisational playfulness with the truth in a moment of dire seriousness. The event even has the interpretive openness of a good poem, because it can be read in different ways. You could say that the partisans destabilized language to reflect the perversion of justice. Or perhaps they meant, metaphysically, "If you don't know where Prague is, no sign will tell you." Or perhaps they were saying, "The center will continue to be moved until your relation with the truth is correct." But what a story it is: As they were being invaded, knowing it would not save them, they made a delicious joke. It reminds us of the bravery and tragedy of the comedian—often a small man sticking a pin into a fat man's behind, just before being sat upon.

Poetry, entertainment and truth—they form an old romantic triangle, a menage a trois, intimate with and jealous of each other. Each is related to the others, but distinct. When anyone of them incorporates the other, the result approaches the third. For example, philosophers know that the resonance of their propositions depends on the crisp harmonic constructions of their language. Likewise, comedians know that the artistic ambitiousness of their 'Nork will be measured by how deeply they make contact with the hard truths of experience. And when poetry becomes too obsessed with cornering the truth, it is punished by losing its imagination. All three of these enterprises (poetry, philosophy and comedy) can be seen as modes of investigation and, at times, correctives for each other.

What comedy most frequently mocks in the world, and in human nature, is inelasticity. That's part of what Henri Bergson says in his (surprisingly arid) book Laughter. In a fluid, self-contradicting world, insistence and rigidity are laughable. This inflexibility includes such things as human pride, our liability to blind obedience, and our deep, existential tendency to live in expectation.

The poetic relationship to the world shares a lot with this rubbery aspect of comedy. It likes to expose the folly of rigidity. By demonstrating its own innate elasticity, poetry proves itself a legitimate witness of experience, and a trustworthy ally. The Tao Te Ching echoes this spiritual truth: "Whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever loves the Tao is supple and yielding, like a baby." With this principle in mind, we can validate and value poets as different from each other as William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery.

But poets—poets are a special case. Constitutionally poor fervent things, they are constantly tempted by the truth. They want it so badly! Thus they have to practice a programmatic suspicion, even a hostility, towm'ds the very thing they urgently desire. Poetry is both a disciple of and a doubter of truth. This skeptic, passive-aggressive, approach-and-withdrawal manner is what makes poetry distinctive. It trusts pursuit but mistrusts arrival, because, as we all know, truth moves around. It shapeshifts. In his supple "Dream Song 14," John Berryman both proposes and resists the poem's truth:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

Berryman's speaker begins with a declaration and then immediately goes to worrying away at it. Is life really boring? Is the speaker boring? Why must we not say so? With comical exaggeration, the speaker goes back and forth. It seems the poem must simultaneously tug and push in several directions at once: against the speaker's own bleak proposition, and also against the various authority figures (mom, high literature) who would prohibit such testimony.

The result of this scuffle is an enactment of the interestingness of the world. The earth is interesting: the sky flashing, the sea yearning, etc. . . . Similarly, the speaker himself does not seem lacking in Inner Resources. In fact, he proves his resilience and flexibility by acting out his rebellion against various prohibitions. Simply to look at the variety of pronouns in the poem demonstrates a certain flexibility of spirit: the We, the I, the It, the He and the She. The poem may not permanently alleviate the speaker's affliction of ennui, but it amply proves his resourcefulness.

It is not what a poet knows that is important, but how the poem travels through what it knows that is attractive and essential. Poetry is entertaining for how it moves the truth around, and for how it moves around the truth. In Frank O'Hara's poem "Autobiographia Literaria," the speaker proclaims one truth—I am a misfit, a miserable unhappy nerd—yet at the poem's end he shoves that truth aside and says, no, the real truth is: I am the center of all beauty:

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

At its conclusion, O'Hara's speaker commands us to imagine, and we can hear, in that exhortation, the fundamental Romantic premise that individual subjectivity trumps mere actuality. Exaggerations, parodic, sincere, or both, abound in "Autobiographia Literaria"—the grandiose tide being the first. The speaker's sad autobiography is itself Chaplinesque, exaggerating both pathos and triumph; yet we recognize the perennial truths inside the tale, the sadness of childhood, the rescuing power of art. Imagine.

Such is the relationship between poetry and truth—playful, suspicious, mocking, flirtatious, lustful, angry. Poetry is the trickster, the vandal that knocks down the gravestones in the cemetery of received wisdom. Then poetry digs up the grave to see if the truth is still alive down there. In the opening of "The Empress Rialto," a poem by Frederick Seidel, the speaker initially seems to be expressing a comic nostalgia for yesteryear, when language—and the life it named—were simpler:

Native Americans were still Indians
In the Saturday afternoon double features a minute ago,
War paint and feathers still bloomed from the brain stem
Of a brave. He strode from his hogan and wickiup and teepee and      wigwam
Into a politically correct text
A woman riffles through crossing Harvard Yard,
What used to be called a beautiful girl a minute ago
Rushing to an hour exam in Sever Hall.

Part satire, part nostalgia, part card trick, Seidel turns out to be making the very contemporary point that language is itself unreliable, that our versions of the real are as transitional, as evaporative, as our nomenclature. In its deeper reverberations, the poet also suggests our duplicities: his case-in-point, Native Americans, surely invokes the tragedies of American history that underlie the simple facts of the everyday—the extinctions which are immediately under the feet of a woman applying lipstick, or a man walking a dog. Devotion to the truth. Suspicion of the truth. Flexibility.

Like "The Empress Rialto," many of the poems we admire most are aimed directly at destabilizing versions of the truth, at holding up conventional assumptions for inspection and submitting them to a stress test. Such poetry is exciting because of its traffic with heresy and also because of its thrust towards revision—it corrects orthodox petrification. Thus, an intrinsic element in a poet's devotion to the truth is to undermine its fixity. The bigger or more sanctified the truth that a poem undertakes to challenge, and possibly topple, the more potentially substantial the poem is. "On the day I was born," says Vallejo, "God was sick." "Some good-for-nothing," says Akhmatova, "—who knows why?—made up the tale that love exists on earth."

Eastern European poets, for obvious historical reasons, are especially suspicious of official truths and often moved to sabotage them. Tadeusz Rózewicz's famous post-World-War-II poem "In the Middle of Life" may seem like an unlikely exemplar of poetic flexibility, or of entertainment. On its face, the poem is immensely sober. It features a speaker with a kind of metaphysical trauma, a human being in shock, trying to relearn the most elementary facts of civilization in a kind of ABC recitation. The element of pathos is strong:

After the end of the world
after my death
I found myself in the middle of life
I created myself
constructed life
people animals landscapes

this is a table I was saying
this is a table
on the table are lying bread a knife
the knife serves to cut the bread
people nourish themselves with bread
one should love man
I was learning by night and day
what one should love
I answered man
..........

I was sitting on the threshold of the house

that old woman who
is pulling a goat on a rope
is more necessary
and more precious
than the seven wonders of the world
whoever thinks and feels
that she is not necessary
he is guilty of genocide

this is a man
this is a tree this is bread

It might seem odd to call such a grave poem comical—trafficking as it does with the most serious truths of civilization. And yet there is a moment in "In the Middle of Life" that seems strategically sly, even a little outrageous, and as a consequence, entertaining. That moment is located in the middle passage, in which the speaker declares: "that old woman who / is pulling a goat on a rope / is more necessary / and more precious / than the seven wonders of the world / whoever thinks and feels / that she is not necessary / he is guilty of genocide."

Given the context—the genocides and purges of Eastern Europe—one can see that this rhetorical statement embodies a logic both lucid and legitimate. The road to Auschwitz, it has been said, was paved with indifference. And yet, the alert reader will ask: Is the old woman really more precious than the wonders of the world? Is the person who dismisses an old woman actually guilty of genocide? The poem uses our invested moralistic fervor to draw us into agreement with its hyperbolic assertion. It stretches us between our moral fervor and our sense of rational proportion. Consequently it places us upon that uneasy seesaw of ambiguity and mirth that readers of poetry love. Sly, serious and subversive, the poem is more admirable (and larger in stature) for the sanctity of the truths that it plays the devil with.

Even the very smallest of words and gestures inside a poem can be doing the infernal work of dislodging, or troubling and repositioning, a truth. Here is the first stanza of Czeslaw Milosz's powerful poem "Bypassing Rue Descartes," which describes the young poet's first arrival in Paris:

Bypassing rue Descartes
I descended towards the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world.

Perhaps there is something sneaky going on here, even in that small choice of nouns, barbarian. After all, to call the young Polish Milosz a barbarian is both true and ridiculous. From the point of view of Western Europe, it is true that a Polish youth might be considered a Philistine in Paris. It is also likely that he would perceive himself as a provincial outsider, a gawky hick. But if we look at the claims of the entire poem, we discover that the meditation turns on the pivot of that word "barbarian." The poem continues:

We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno and Bucharest,      Saigon and Marrakesh,
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by master and household together.

"Barbarian" is a barbed word caught under the skin of the poem. The speaker questions the relative values of Paris versus Lithuania, of the urban versus the rural, of sophistication versus piety. Ultimately the speaker aligns himself with the cosmic principles of nature, superstition and custom.

The poet and the comedian are charter members of the barbarian tradition; after all, the barbarian has inner resources forgotten by that other tribe, the cosmopolitans. In each of the poems discussed here, the poetic speaker has not entirely accepted the principles of decorum, the consensual self-esteeming premises of civilization. He or she believes in the truth, yet uneasily knows the sweet taste of a lie. Thus, the churlish poet is alert to the temptations of fraud, the roots of human ignorance and vanity that perpetually regenerate themselves in certainties. Here is Milosz again, in his poem "Throughout Our Lands," presenting a slightly more skeptical perspective on high European, perhaps even Parisian, culture:

If I had to tell what the world is for me
I would take a hamster or a hedgehog or a mole
and place him in a theater seat one evening
and, bringing my ear close to his humid snout,
would listen to what he says about the spotlights,
sounds of the music, and movements of the dance . . .

For contemporary American poets and their readers, it is a matter of widespread debate how tricky you have to be to write a poetry adequate to our postmodern situation or to being American inside this complicated moment of empire. We each find our place on that stylistic yardstick between standup comedy and Protestant sanctimony.

Telling yourself to get serious is a lifelong necessity for poets. But funny, too, is a serious weapon. The sneaky stratagem in poems, the wry and subversive, offers ways not just to amuse, but to penetrate consciousness.

The poet Dean Young says that a poem is an artificial wound that bleeds real blood. This figure comprehends something essential about the truth/craft paradox. Surely we readers encounter too many poems in which both the wound and the blood are artificial. The worst thing is the poem that has no wound, that smells like it has never been dipped in—and stained by—experience.

To be a good poet, to be a good comedian, perhaps even to be a good philosopher, the wound is essential. Wallace Stevens says that the poem is "the cry of an occasion." After that, we enter the terrain of execution, technique and style. The comedian and the poet are barbarians on the side of civilization. But to make a real poem, one may have to combine cruelty and laughter, cunning and sincerity, in the complex dialectic of a line, stanza or poem. One also has to figure out, again and again, which is more important than the other.

About the Author
Tony Hoagland won the 2005 Mark Twain Award for humor in American poetry from the Poetry Foundation. His books of poems include Donkey Gospel (Graywolf, 1998) and What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf, 2003). A book of craft essays, Real Sofistikashun (Graywolf), was published in October. He teaches at the University of Houston.

Lyric
Bloomington, Indiana

Editor: Mira Rosenthal
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