Reginald Gibbons on Lezama Lima

“THE MUSIC OF POETRY”Source: Center for the Writing Arts | Northwestern University---

My friend and former teacher, James Irby, provides an analysis of a poem by the Cuban poet and writer José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) at the web site La Habana Elegante (http://www.habanaelegante.com/Spring_Summer_2010/Dicha_Irby.html).  The poem is Lezama Lima’s “Oda a Julián del Casal,” a Cuban poet (1863-1893) who for his poetic innovations must have appealed to Lezama Lima, himself one of the most original writers of post-revolutionary Cuba—and one who suffered for his dissent from the Cuban regime.

(The text of the poem and a recording of it by Lezama Lima himself are at the the audio and video archive site La Palabra Virtual, http://www.palabravirtual.com/index.php?ir=ver_voz1.php&wid=565&p=Jos%E9%20Lezama%20Lima&t=Oda%20a%20Juli%E1n%20del%20Casal&o=Jos%E9%20Lezama%20Lima

In Irby’s introductory paragraphs, he writes of the poem’s “use of certain verbal motifs that recur and undergo variations or recombinations, some of them to return in hauntingly musical patterns—either single words or whole phrases—that extend [...] over the entire poem.  (By ‘musical’ here, I don’t mean ‘pleasant in sound’ but rather ‘rich in modulated semantic resonances.’)  For example, the motif of the color green….”

The wonderfully compact phrase “rich in modulated semantic resonances” makes me think of T. S. Eliot’s definition of “the music of poetry” in his essay of that title (in On Poetry and Poets).  Eliot writes that “the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning” (21); “it would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought to be melodious” (24); he states that his “purpose here is to insist that a ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it” (26); and “I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure” (32).

A crucial link between music and meaning is implied by Eliot this way: “the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist” (23).  The sounds of language—the music of poetry—can produce a meaning of words that lies beyond the definitions of the words—not a specialized or technical meaning but a meaning that concerns the truth of our inner lives.  The truth, insofar as we can grasp it, of both our lived experience and our imagination.  So that we will not recur within ourselves to a ready-made truth or falsehood that is easier for us to make use of.  And this is what makes the music of poetry most interesting—when it produces meaning, when it moves thought and feeling forward, when it isn’t simply making them “pleasant in sound.”

Eliot’s essay is dated 1942, and Lezama Lima’s poem was written in 1963; that is, the first in the midst of bitterest, destructive wartime and suffering—and the second in the early years of a revolution that would sweep out a corrupt regime, reform education, distribute social services, and all too soon would begin imprisoning dissenters and homosexuals and replacing capitalist economic social strata with Communist ones…  Apart from the historical and temperamental and artistic differences between these two poets, there are the differences among poets who now, as in those times, for aesthetic reasons would disagree with Eliot or prefer to use a poetic manner very different from Lezama’s.  Altogether, the variety of poetic approaches to language is enormous.  Nevertheless it’s hard for me to find a more fruitful starting place than Eliot’s essay (even though it’s not a thorough consideration of the topic) if I want to think about what the “music” of poetry is and about how to read it and how to read for it, and how to write from inside, or alongside, or on the backs of, musical elements of language and poetry.  (I can’t find the right metaphor for how this works; and only a metaphor is going to be able to suggest the idea).  This is Eliot’s “frontier,” where the relationship of words and meaning is elusive and may be musical, or rather where the musicality of language is what brings the elusive meaning into view.)  (Sorry—another metaphor.)

One of the ways in which language proliferates connotations and poetry proliferates meaning is through what Irby calls language that is “rich in modulated semantic resonances”—which is implied in Eliot’s comments about the music of structure and the music of the secondary meanings of words.  The music of poetry—like music itself, which is “the art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, rhythm, and timbre” (American Heritage College Dictionary)—includes (among other things) repetition that adds meaning each time it occurs.  Each time, the repetition is also a variation: of a sound (in which case two words containing similar sounds can also, at best, be linked in thought), of a linguistic rhythm, of a word-root, of a syntactic feature or gesture, and of a word itself.  (Irby analyzes, among other things, Lezama’s use of particular repeated words that keep accumulating more and more meaning; everyone who reads poetry with poetic attention is used to noticing repetitions of this and other kinds—they’re part of the sheer pleasure of reading, of feeling one is being led with the richness of the poetic use of language into thoughts, emotions, perceptions, arguments, connections….)

But poets don’t all play the same instrument, nor have the same sense of melody or rhythm or harmony (all these are metaphors), or even the same musical (poetic) scales (and that’s another).  So the music of poetry produces, like language itself, an infinite number of possibilities, of new relationships between words and ideas and feelings.  This is true even of poetry of the past and the deep past, because this aspect of poetry is ancient and apparently universal, and also because every reader’s individual encounters with poems of any place or time are events in that reader’s experience and history as a reader, as someone who listens to language for the sake of everything that can be found there, and who then adds each such experience to his or her repertoire of response.

~~~

Recently a doctoral student in neurolinguistics wrote to ask me if I could suggest to her any readings about how, from a literary point of view, connotation works.  (She is researching how beginning readers have trouble picking up the connotations of words, and why—so she can help design more effective ways of teaching literacy.)  “Connotation” would be the same as, or a portion of, Eliot’s “secondary meanings of words.”  In communicating with her, I was reminded for the thousandth time that what I take for granted in the experience of reading—because I have been reading poetry for so long—can remain hidden from, or rather, as yet undisclosed to (an important distinction!), those who are not used to reading for precisely the ways in which poetry, as opposed to more utilitarian utterances, makes meaning.

This is true even for those who are themselves highly educated in other ways of meaning-making that are almost entirely “representational” (or “referential” or “ideational”).  And it’s a very old story—in the best sense, in that the poetic ways of making meaning are as old as language itself.  But life since the industrial revolution has greatly changed our relationship to language, and continues to do so.  It has drained away some of our experiential and mostly unconscious responsiveness to language, because as we grow up in a media culture like that of the U. S., we lack the experience of learning how to listen to “poetry” in the largest sense.  And I am convinced that such experience depends on hearing living voices talk and sing and tell stories and recite poems, even bad ones, and on reading for oneself.  Meanwhile, the experience of hearing the electronically transmitted voice often—maybe not always—can’t give us what we need if we are to hear language fully.  There might even be some sort of disconnect in us, because of our evolution as linguistic beings, between our evolved abilities with language and our processing of language we receive through electronic media.  Certainly there’s a marked failure in us of reality-testing with regard to mediated language—this seems proven by political talk and absurd entertainment.

Why should that be?  Is it because in our formation there’s such a huge amount of forced language training that conditions our language abilities (which means a conditioning of our ability to think) by means of advertising, popular media, political discourse, and other saturations of our shared language-world?  We get very little exposure to language that has been intuited and worked (really, it’s both) to utmost meaningfulness for the sake of thought and feeling; instead, it’s for the sake of persuasion and of the fashions in ready-made ideas and emotions.

We’re vulnerable to this.  We experience a deep human necessity for the “interpersonal” function of language: the ways in which, simply by talking and listening, we simply are with each other.  In everyday life, we are all affected by some of the potent but often unnoticed meaning-making techniques of rhetoric—techniques that poetry sometimes uses, too.   We can’t help responding, most often unconsciously, to them.  They are used against us—in commercial and political speech, and in all too much of the American genius for turning news into a sorry kind of entertainment for the sake of the pleasures, sad to say, of opinion, grievance, fear, gullibility, and harangues aimed at our impulse to submit; and to stimulate our need to belong to a group; we also have an ugly fascination with the suffering and death of others when it is presented as spectacle (whether the scale is intimate or the spectacle is elaborate).  Film of murder, sex porn of bondage and pain, big-screen torture, “horror,” mayhem and death.  (Does an appetite for film horror suggest that something’s wrong with the response to real horror?)

The argument for permitting all of that is free speech, which I take very seriously.  But free speech is not in itself a path to freedom of mind, that is, freedom of thought and feeling.  And I suppose I have been cataloging, above, the opposite of a kind of freedom of thought and feeling such as I chase after in the music of poetry.

Poetry, and certain kinds of fiction and drama, too—these are where the luxury of languageis: in a meaningfulness not only of human expression but also of the expressiveness itself, the “music of poetry,” and what I would dare to call a kind of human freedom in such complex meaningfulness.  It’s the music of poetry that creates an opening amidst the rigidities of opinion, the hysteria of news “cycles,” the authority of fear and punishment, the mesmerizing spectacle of violence, the seductiveness of  trend and fashion, the perennial danger of giving too much power to those who would like to limit ours, and who may say anything to get it.

The impulse to make art, and the impulse to respond to it, may have begun, millennia ago, in belief and submission, but also began in thanks, meditation, celebration, and mourning.  (Something in the techniques of poetry allows it, like music, to be used sometimes in the service of horrible causes; but this is rare enough, and can be thought through.)

Poetry has always been one of the sources of linguistic invention; the antiquity of its inventiveness is precisely what brings us back inside the creative spaces of language and helps us move away from the distractions of language that works by narrowing our feelings and ideas.

It’s a measure, in me, of the intense political insanity of our times, the incessant whipping of ignorance toward anger at what it doesn’t want to believe, the free-form denial of fact, the flaunting of reason—it’s a measure, in me, of all that, that I hear myself thinking that I need to account for every kind of hateful use of language, even as I am trying to look at a use of language that is creative, pleasurable, complex, in which words may fail “though meanings still exist.”

Lezama Lima’s poem to Julián del Casal begins, “Déjenlo, verdeante, que se vuelva.”

It’s a musical line: the repeated sound of the consonant “v,” the repeated sounds of the vowel “e”, the two verbs neither of which is indicative (the imperative, “Déjenlo,” and the subjunctive “vuelva”).  It is an intensely grammatical line, so to speak.  And something in the repeated sounds and in the verbs enacts a great urgency.  “Let him come back while greening” that is, while either becoming green (metaphorically, of course) or turning something else green, like plants in the spring.  Let him come back as if bringing with him his own force of spring—perhaps a metaphor for his returning at the height of his creativity, or at the height of his personal charisma, or both.  As if his force of green could be as renewable as a season.  The ideas of “green” and “returning” are linked by the repeated “v” in the two words “verdeante” and “vuelva.”  The line combines their meaning and thus transfers the unfailing return of spring to the unfailing return… not of a man who is dead (we wouldn’t accept that) but of the idea of poetry, the urgency of it, the meaning-making it accomplishes.

And as happens in poetry, which is a repository of thought about itself as well as about us and the world, the poem now enacts something it does not mention, which is that when the ode to Julián del Casal is read or heard, then Lezama Lima too comes back in his greenness.  It’s important to listen to Casal—and to Lezama Lima’s words about Casal.  Yes, let him come back!  Let the Cuban poets be heard…  making music that will outlive them and their worlds.  Well, that’s a commonplace, I suppose.  Yet for myself, I can’t measure how precious it is to be able to stand inside music of poetry, and how amazing it is that we can do so for centuries and millenia after a poet has died.

~ ~ ~

Footnote: James Irby, whose piece on Lezama Lima led me to write this little essay, long ago directed my undergraduate senior thesis on the great first novel of Miguel Ángel Asturias, El señor presidente(1933, but not published until 1946), which is a satire on dictatorship, in the form of a surrealist/anthropological/linguistic carnival of horror, dark humor, suffering and anger.  (I just did a quick online check, and it seems that the only translation into English may be, even now, the horrifically bad one published many years ago by Frances Partridge.  Don’t bother with it, if you can’t read Spanish.  It ignores just about everything important about the language and vision of the book, and thus misrepresents the whole gesture of this work, which responds to indigenous culture and is a tremendously inventive way of responding to history.  It too is filled, unlike most novels, with the music of poetry.)