Read an Excerpt
De/Compositions
101 Good Poems Gone Wrong
By W.D. Snodgrass Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2001 W.D. Snodgrass
All right reserved. ISBN: 1-55597-317-5
Chapter One
During the 1930s, the British poet and critic William Empson was teaching English Renaissance Literature at a commune school in China. When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the whole school, teacher and students together, fled on foot, hiking over the mountains and holding classes as they went. Empson, noted for a prodigious memory, had no textbook with him and so taught his classes, including the texts, from memory. When he came to John Donne - with whose work he was slightly less familiar than, say, that of Milton - he occasionally had trouble recalling Donne's text and, here and there, made up a word or two, even a line, to fill out the original. After some weeks, he noticed that one of the boys at the back of the group was busy writing and went back to see why. To his astonishment, he found the boy had brought his own book and was canceling passages of the original to write in Empson's improvisations.
Empson sometimes told this story on himself; we will probably never know whether he then provided the class with corrections of the "de/compositions" he and his student had jointly produced, much less whether he discussed the relative merits of Donne's version against his own. I suspect that if Empson forgot any part of a fine poem that would be one of least crucial, least meaningful elements.
Just the opposite, when I taught the reading or speaking of poems, I often found the best way to do that was to deliberately alter the most memorable, most crucial aspects. After reading the poem aloud to fix it in the class's hearing, I'd get a student to read with me. Since the de/compositions usually match line by line, he or she would read a line of the original; I'd follow with my ersatz version. When we'd finished, I'd ask what was the most scandalous thing I'd done to the poem. The natural urge to find one's teacher wrong usually provoked lively exchanges, bringing the students into close contact with the true text. With a little nudging, this could reveal how local excellences interconnected to form a basic structure. Often, my "direction" of the class lay only in a half-joking defense of my version or in an attack on some aspect of the original, meant to rally their support and grasp of that text. Not infrequently, one of my students claimed to prefer the de/composed version. It was sometimes hard not to answer this, but instead to let the discussion disperse it. Students with nerve enough to say what they really thought (not what they thought I wanted to hear) are too great an asset to be embarrassed or intimidated. Often enough, those "dead wrong" students would go on to make startling leaps, working toward their own discoveries, not waiting to hear what was " right." Besides, learning to change one's mind may be half an education.
While putting this collection together, I found that my de/compositions fell naturally into five sections according to the particular excellence I was trying to dissolve or drive out. Not surprisingly, this proved to be related to the ways that the language of poems tends to differ from that of instructions, arguments, or prose discourse generally: I. Abstract & General vs. Concrete & Specific
II. Undercurrents
III. The Singular Voice
IV. Metrics & Music
V. Structure & Climax
The first section deals with a problem particularly troublesome to my students, many of whom were young poets. When we discuss poems, we quite properly tend toward abstract terms: freedom, love, humanity, etc. This might suggest that the poem's business is to offer summations and solutions, to present a generally applicable "message." Such interpretative terms are indeed a part, but only a part, of the minds we aim to record.
My second section deals with the way that a poem's meaning often lies beneath its prose or "dictionary" sense; since it is found in implication and suggestion, so demanding sensitive interpretation. The third section acknowledges that a poet's voice may convey a recognizable identity, though this may or may not relate directly to the author's known or supposed qualities. In any case, the more familiar we are with the work or a particular poet, the more meaning we are likely to derive from his/her individual works.
The fourth section continues the pursuit of significance and intensity below the poem's conscious surface into its music and rhythm. Obviously, we derive some kinds of meaning from the movement and music of language, although this may lie in areas of emotion and impulsion well beneath our conscious and intellectual awareness. The fifth and final section investigates how words and phrases nourish and enrich each other, so building the poem's shape and structure.
Although the book's sections are defined by these qualities, it has often proven impossible to impair one effect without affecting others as well. In the Commentary at the end of each section, I've suggested how I see the relation between each poem and it's de/composition. This is intended only to suggest a useful jumping-off point in the unlikely event that none suggests itself; it does not mean to conclude discussion or to give any final or exclusive interpretation. Dealing with something so rich and strange as a poem, there is no guarantee (not even, perhaps, a desirability) that different readers find identical answers. Poems are not only produced by individual sensibilities; they are also received and interpreted by individuals. The better the poem, the more likely it is not only to carry its "maker's mark" but also to accept a multiplicity of readings. There do seem to be times when we can agree that a specific interpretation is merely wrong; the number of right readings may be limited only by the number of possible readers.
Often, my de/compositions are easier to understand than the originals - usually because there is less to understand in them. It is also easier to tie up an animal whose blood has been drained; creatures not subject to taxidermy are less easily corralled, more likely to yield surprises both pleasant and shocking. Many of the de/compositions render a poem's denotative or dictionary sense while stripping away connotations, suggestions, the inflections of living beings. Without the intuitive, less conscious, and intellectual elements, this de/composed "literal" or "surface" meaning often yields roughly what you'd get if the poem were translated into a second language, then translated back. For a reader with an inquiring mind - not too ready to take answers where questions are still possible - the poem may offer opportunities for lifelong discoveries.
I have not always resisted the temptation to make my versions comical. As W. H. Auden noted, there are few things funnier than bad poems. Athletes, watching a film of a past game or race, no doubt laugh at their opponents' blunders - even at their own. Works of art, however, have an added problem: the rules always change because no two situations are the same. What we learn about one poem may yield no general principle for others (including any poems that the students may be writing). Just so, chess players study the games of the masters even though that exact situation will probably never exist again for them to face. Instead we are trying to learn how one mind faced a particular situation, and perhaps to temper our own minds toward others' possibilities. In any case, the deliberate failures of my versions, even when amusing, should not distract anyone from the real subject: the abiding successes of the real poems.
I am laying out a game, then, that provokes readers (alone or in a group) to ask what makes fine poems fine. Enriching our responses can be a long process but that may be one of the best things about it. You can't get rich quick; the chance to get rich gradually - perhaps lifelong - may be worth more.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from De/Compositions by W.D. Snodgrass Copyright © 2001 by W.D. Snodgrass . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
