Thoughts on Czesław Miłosz and the Maxim of "Show, Don't Tell"
I am taking a creative writing class at Pasadena City College, and while I have received some good feedback regarding my poems it is difficult to really grow when a majority of the students are prose writers. Short stories, novels. Even a book on copyrighting (which seems very useful).
Granted, they have provided me with the insights of years of experience--the average age seems to be above 30--and I'm pretty sure there's a poem out there about how youth and old age go great together. (Maybe I'm thinking about cougars or silver foxes.) But it's hard to sit through someone reading their short story for 40 minutes and have my reading and the resultant critique take up about 10 minutes.
Then there are differences in stylistic points of view--nay, views on the raison d'être for writing in general. For instance, "show, don't tell" is a great maxim for short story writers or novelists, but it doesn't necessarily have to apply to EVERY SINGLE POEM EVER. To take that further, that maxim doesn't have to apply to novels, either--read any of Milan Kundera's works or anything Victorian and jaunts down philosophical / autobiographical paths abound.
Then there's Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet / Nobel Laureate. Much of his work in Second Space (his last collection of poems) is reflective rather than descriptive, filled with the wisdom of decades of life and loss.
For instance, the first half of "To Spite Nature":
Many misfortunes resulted from my belief in God,
Which was a part of my notion of the splendor of man.
Man, not withstanding his animal nature,
should have had a spiritual life of great richness,
Should have been directed in his behavior
by motives considered noble and sublime.
He earned respect by becoming a near-angel.
Or a couplet from "I Should Now":
When I think of this, I need an immortal Witness
so that he alone knows and remembers.
And this incredibly powerful stanza from his long poem, "Apprentice":
Human beings should approach, trembling and with reverance,
That deepest arcanum, the union of a man and a woman.
It is an unveiling of the incomprehensible
Love of the Creator for creation.
And the loss of that memory by the twentieth century was unlucky.
They changed the Song of Songs into a sexual game. *
The chronology of sexuality and religion, and then the transformation (if any) from religion to the "sexual game" of the twentieth century is something I would like to study if I had the time.
But--that is getting away from the point of this entry, which is to say that poetry doesn't need to be descriptive to be reflective, nor does it have to be descriptive at all. Though I should be well-advised to go the way of Miłosz and actually live a little first.
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* But the Song of Songs as a sexual game is better than Paul Celan's evocation of this book of the Bible in his terrifying work, "Death Fugue" (Todesfuge), where "the ashen hair" of the Shulamith (the female lover in the Song of Songs) is juxtaposed against the ashes of the concentration camps. Love debased into a game of pleasure seems, to me, better than the impossibility of love at all.
Granted, they have provided me with the insights of years of experience--the average age seems to be above 30--and I'm pretty sure there's a poem out there about how youth and old age go great together. (Maybe I'm thinking about cougars or silver foxes.) But it's hard to sit through someone reading their short story for 40 minutes and have my reading and the resultant critique take up about 10 minutes.
Then there are differences in stylistic points of view--nay, views on the raison d'être for writing in general. For instance, "show, don't tell" is a great maxim for short story writers or novelists, but it doesn't necessarily have to apply to EVERY SINGLE POEM EVER. To take that further, that maxim doesn't have to apply to novels, either--read any of Milan Kundera's works or anything Victorian and jaunts down philosophical / autobiographical paths abound.
Then there's Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet / Nobel Laureate. Much of his work in Second Space (his last collection of poems) is reflective rather than descriptive, filled with the wisdom of decades of life and loss.
For instance, the first half of "To Spite Nature":
Many misfortunes resulted from my belief in God,
Which was a part of my notion of the splendor of man.
Man, not withstanding his animal nature,
should have had a spiritual life of great richness,
Should have been directed in his behavior
by motives considered noble and sublime.
He earned respect by becoming a near-angel.
Or a couplet from "I Should Now":
When I think of this, I need an immortal Witness
so that he alone knows and remembers.
And this incredibly powerful stanza from his long poem, "Apprentice":
Human beings should approach, trembling and with reverance,
That deepest arcanum, the union of a man and a woman.
It is an unveiling of the incomprehensible
Love of the Creator for creation.
And the loss of that memory by the twentieth century was unlucky.
They changed the Song of Songs into a sexual game. *
The chronology of sexuality and religion, and then the transformation (if any) from religion to the "sexual game" of the twentieth century is something I would like to study if I had the time.
But--that is getting away from the point of this entry, which is to say that poetry doesn't need to be descriptive to be reflective, nor does it have to be descriptive at all. Though I should be well-advised to go the way of Miłosz and actually live a little first.
________________________________
* But the Song of Songs as a sexual game is better than Paul Celan's evocation of this book of the Bible in his terrifying work, "Death Fugue" (Todesfuge), where "the ashen hair" of the Shulamith (the female lover in the Song of Songs) is juxtaposed against the ashes of the concentration camps. Love debased into a game of pleasure seems, to me, better than the impossibility of love at all.