Karl Elder on Language Poetry and More

Poet Karl Elder spoke with us about language poetry, the "sense in nonsense," poetry's metaphysical dimension, and more. You can read our conversation below.

Karl Elder is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, Phobophobia, A Man in Pieces, The Geocryptogrammatist's Pocket Compendium of the United States, The Minimalist's How-to Handbook, and Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums. His poetry has won a Pushcart Prize and other awards and has been featured in the Best American Poetry Series.

A Conversation with Karl Elder

Creative Writing Now: In an essay published on the Wisconsin Humanities Council website, you have criticized language poetry and the "aesthetic of chance." To what do you attribute the popularity of this aesthetic?

Karl Elder: It’s difficult work, trying to be innovative (I’ve said it elsewhere: a poem is a poem, in part, because it’s unlike any other poem) and anticipating the needs of an audience (even if the audience shall consist solely of the poet’s own ears), and I believe there are far too many public displays of attempts made with half a heart, there being so much psychic energy required. I actually had two aesthetic modes in mind when I wrote the remark to which your question refers, and I suppose I yoked them in the essay because I view both as passive, the poet like a weathervane, pointing without will, wherever the wind wants. It may be that, as Wallace Stevens said, the true subject of poetry is poetry, but it sure as shot is not simply language, nor is that noble endeavor, the poem, governed by luck. In the grand scheme of the universe, human beings choose or die; they exercise volition, assuming they’re grownups. On another scale, so do poets.

Now, on the other hand, when Marcel Duchamp laid a urinal on its back and called it art, it was art. Some of what made Duchamp an important artist is that he had sense not to overdo it, except when reinforcing for a time his divinely minimalist concept of “readymades.” But for my mind there’s no way that concept has the power of, for example, his painting called Nude Descending a Staircase, which is far from self-referential, unlike language poetry. Language poetry, in general, is like all other language poetry; it’s not so much abstract as it is failure of the poet to abstract. As art, poetry is founded not upon technique—rock-solid or not—but upon multi-layered platforms, such as human experience, role-playing, the number of associations and depth of emotion the chosen words “in the right order” have the power to evoke, etc. There’s not a whole heck of a lot of emotion induced from staring at an algebraic formula, which is flatly a symbol of a function sans values.

Your question tempted me at first to explain my aversion to both language poetry and the aesthetics of chance by using the analogy of the hive—workers and queen. (Oh, the buzzing from one direction and the drone in another!) But that trope won’t soap, that picture won’t develop, except to convey that, in order to realize potential, a poet must become her own boss as well as be industrious—obsessed, in fact.

Ok, so think factory: a maker (the poet) climbs from labor to management. She needs a variety of experience—janitor, foreman, quality control inspector, forklift operator, sweeper, production accountant, say—in order to be the best she can be. If she passively accepts her station on the line, she has capitulated to chance while not having a gossamer-garbed angel’s chance in hell of controlling her own fate. (Uh, by the way, I’m not what one might call a feminist; I’m an egalitarian libertarian who can’t stand among other ills the morally corrupt notion that all art is equal in stature.) And if you’d care for a contemporary example outside the realm of poetry of my kind of angel, complete with a spiritual compass (that in the case of her story wobbles, there being no true North) and of what I believe to be great art, see the film Winter’s Bone. It’s a hero’s lesson in heroism, but it speaks masterfully of an intangible reality made real—and I’m not talking about the illusion of film or “the magic of movie making”—through tangible imagery. “Reality is only the base,” Stevens also said. “But it is the base.” Imagine playing draw poker and standing pat with each hand. Eventually you’d be saying, “What happened to my chips?” Later, but not much later, you lose.

Creative Writing Now: In the same essay, you refer to the value of the irrational in poetry, when used correctly -- when it is "the right kind of crazy." Could you talk more about this? Could you talk about the role of play, wordplay, humor, serendipity in your poetry?

Karl Elder: So that following a mid-day trip my wife and I do not have a crabby grandchild on our hands, in order to keep him, a three-year-old, awake in his car seat, I sing his favorite songs, but with a twist: Old MacDonald had a farm—G.I., G.I. Joe. “NOOOO,” he guffaws and then giggles, meaning, of course, “That’s irrational.” Children seem to know intuitively that whacky language is not crazy so much as it is craziness, and should they happen to grow into contemplative adults, craziness may become, for instance, something as serious and challenging as the irrationality of The Book of Job, subject the poem is to interpretation that the divine is revealed only in questions for which there are no answers. Another thought—paradox is a form of irrationality; nevertheless, we “understand” it. And once upon a long time, it was irrational to speak of the earth as round. Yet how prompt our conversion. Human evolution has well outfitted the brain for sea change in an ocean of eons to come, we hope.

Revisiting my Poetry Daily essay, “The Sense in Nonsense,” I see that it speaks sparingly not of the “right” kind of crazy in poems but the “good” kind. The difference in my mind is such that I have little to say about the “good”—it being subject to taste—while I welcome a chance here to explore the “right” kind of crazy in poets themselves. I’m moved (perhaps due to that psychological phenomenon known as projection) to view said behavior as compulsive, though hardly neurotic, especially when I think of “strangeness” as a common characteristic of the finest literature I’ve encountered.

Derived from my own habits, for example, is a semi-conscious refusal to break from a state of awe, drawn to the shy mask of the universe, and I’m not talking about star-gazing necessarily, though, heaven knows, I’ve spent a lot of time behind our two-story house, using it to block a street light, with toilet paper tubes for binoculars. The cardboard works remarkably well to impede peripheral illumination, enhancing the contrast: a studded, concave, black pincushion overhead mostly obscured by the tops of birch, basswood, ash, and a monstrous, hydra-like, 300-years-old oak—the trees’ leaves also of help as, gradually, my dilating pupils multiply the number of stars, magnifying the depth—felt turning into velour and, eventually, velvet.

Should I happen to have been revising on those nights—I hesitate to say “composing” because I spend so little time with initial drafts relative to the ensuing work—I invariably take my cerebral toys and their backdrop of celestial afterimages to bed with me, often dead tired, a zombie’s insomnia self-induced. It’s quite a mild state of paranoia, I suppose, in that the awe about which I speak previously is not that I feel diminished; no, it’s ongoing ontological wonder manifest in myriad scenarios, how it is that one’s consciousness, being such a magnanimous gift, so huge relative to awareness in an owl, say, or a mouse, or a mite, is squandered—in that a life, subjectively and objectively speaking, is but a flicker in the dark, a tick in time.

While the edge of sleep may serve like a lab where the bare text of poetry is conjured, serendipity, the fortuitous melding of associations, occurs in wakefulness. One does not play well half asleep. Neither does one there willfully crack jokes, an engaging ancillary thought being that humor (and surely wit) has come to be observed by neuroscientists as stimulating attentiveness in others. No wonder the greatest theory of poetry out of the twentieth century of which I’m aware, The Necessary Angel, surfaced from the watchful mind of a poet with tremendous affinity for comedy, though Stevens, even at his most jubilant moments, is hardly what one might these days call LOL. After all, the direction he took is a path in deep shade, if not darkness, that all serious poets must enter: the future and its name, whether it be bad or good, for there is no poetry if there is nothing to push through or back against, and that includes in the most fundamental sense the blank page. “Remember,” I sometimes address students along with myself, “poets were the original fictionists.” We know all about fiction—no friction, no fiction—and though it may not appear to be so on the surface, a poem’s gestation being more mysterious, there is always tension (sometimes both obvious and latent) in the poem, precipitated by tension in the mind that makes the poem, no matter how small or how menacing or how pleasant the emotion. As an illustration of what I mean by tension, here’s one of my own very early poems, a piece in celebration, a tribute, whatever surprise therein being, I must admit, the mildest bit of wit:

  Snowplow
     for W.C.W.

  The blade
  scrapes sparks.

  How unlike
  the snow.

Now, because my work has evolved through modes progressively more formal and expansive than that of the little piece above, far be it from me to serve as a channel for reductionism in order to echo the illustration, but while I was typing “Snowplow,” one of my students, Ben Endres, as if the muse’s messenger, dropped off with two other pieces for next week’s workshop his

  One Line Poem

  This is not
  one of those

Maybe Ben’s been in my office when I was showing-off my inscribed copy of William Matthews’s An Oar in the Old Water. Looking like an elongated book of matches, it includes

  Premature Ejaculation

  I’m sorry this poem’s already finished.

Surely at this moment even the most priggish reader of “Premature Ejaculation” wears, at the very least, a residual smile. If not, one would think that among this essay’s audience is the next thing to a robot. Still, there are degrees of appreciation in response to tension in poetry and, thus, to this poem. If a reader has a vocabulary extensive enough to perceive the double meaning in ejaculation (the word like a sterile anti-pun in the context of “premature” shifting to an ante-pun when the piece is done), he or she sees and is quickly seized by even more tautly-wound tension. That’s what wordplay can earn a poet and his or her audience—a lingering, reserved seriousness in the midst of wonder at the power of language, for which in the long run is a life become incrementally rich.

Suddenly I’m reminded of Dorothy Parker’s response in a game to use on the spot the word horticulture, creatively, in a sentence: “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” Likewise, you, the poet, can do only so much. An editor once wrote that she was able to discern some of the wordplay in a long poem of mine only after having proofread it several times. Almost reflexively, perhaps in defense of the intense labor poured into that poem, came a hint of irritation, but with an empty can of tomato soup in my hand, I experienced her remark as a boon—no bane: “She understands that instead of water you prepared it with milk, Elder.” Besides, a poet must take heart; I mean, while there is no wire to trip the trigger in a reader’s head, one has control over infinitely more important joy to be had, and that is the quality act of dwelling at play itself.

Creative Writing Now: In an essay in the Beloit Poetry Journal Forum, you describe poems as multi-dimensional art objects -- although a poem exists in two dimensions on the page, you explain, it has another, metaphysical, dimension. Could you further describe this metaphysical dimension? How might it differ in poetry from prose?

Karl Elder:

Here’s the most important portion of that to which you refer, I see:

I sometimes think of poems as possessing both an ecto- and an endo- skeleton—the latter metaphysical—poetry then seemingly a phenomenon as much like sculpture as painting. Oh, it’s two-dimensional on paper, all right, but multi-dimensional in the formulation and in its readers’ apprehension of that latent energy before them.

To conceive of “the poem” as a two dimensional art object, similar to a painting or photograph, as I imagine, for example, some of William Carlos Williams’ short work invokes in young or inexperienced readers of poetry—despite W.C.W.’s famous reference to poems as “machines made of words”—is to see what is possible in poetry (its power to affect in the most sublime sense) sucked through a vanishing point like a trashed screen on an iPhone. A problem I have with Williams, by the way, is his insistence upon adherence to idiom. It’s not that it’s impossible to make poems with common language; the trouble is that vernacular is comparatively static. Should one dwell on that frequency, hearing how stuff is said rather than testing how it may be said with verve, there’s tendency to become a chronicler or recorder at the expense of innovation and, from the point of view of one’s audience, of the opportunity to see in stereo. I mean, let’s face it, offshoots of the mode in question—the list poem, for instance, though it may embody refrain as a legitimate technique that serves as a superstructure—are inherently inferior subgenres simply because they are relatively shy of imagination. I sense irony in all of this. Williams is universally considered left of center on the spectrum, leaning heavily toward a more “democratic” poem, while his nemesis, the poet whose “elitist” poetry he despised, T. S. Eliot, is, aesthetically speaking, retrospectively and in fact, the true progressive by way of craft.

The mind of the generator as well as the beholder of good poetry dwells at the center of concentric circles, each of 360 degrees infinitely divisible. A trope more applicable to the finest work might be that the mind operates as if it sits dead center of a sphere with an exponentially infinite number of points encompassing it. When I think of the greatest poems I’ve encountered, I think of the poems themselves, impossible that it is to explain their effect for as much as a nanosecond. Attempts to identify the power of such a poem by uncovering the poet’s tools, thingamajigs or stratagems, are degenerative and futile, like squinting at gold to see the atoms. On the other hand, one can capture for a time what masterpoems have in common. We know that when the piece is read holistically, the effect is real but unstable and, in a sense, undulating: one moment, say, a cube in a sphere and, in the next, a sphere in a cube. Maybe a wordless poem would serve here just as well to explain what in perpetuity can’t be explained. How about one called “Metaphysical Cubism”?

If poetry is like chess, prose is like checkers. Now, I’m not disparaging prose; never once did I defeat my maternal grandfather, the man after whom I am named, at checkers. Yet, in the act of composing this very sentence as well as in recollection of writing prose—essays, short stories, and two novels—I am aware that for the sake of my own satisfaction prose is a mere anteroom to the palatial interiors, a yet-to-be uncovered cave in all its glistening passageways. Often the initial draft of a poem is cast in prose, I concede, but the poet in me wants more than the writer in me can deliver.

Yes, when you’ve been to the mountaintop, no matter how briefly, having experienced its rarified air, poetry is like chess, prose is like checkers. Literary theorists of the early part of the last century talked of the difference between practical language and poetic devices, both of which are integrated into the poem. There’s an obvious difference in their function, prose being subservient, a means to an end, while the devices serve as ends in themselves—arresting a reader, making progress difficult not for difficulty’s sake but to spawn new perception. A most memorable compliment I received as a poet came only a couple of years ago from my mentor of forty years—Lucien Stryk. Responding in a letter to my The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook, he wrote, “Karl, you see things no one has ever seen before.” It’s not what I’ve seen that’s important to me ultimately; it’s the fact that I’ve seen them and that the will to do so potentially serves as a model and perhaps even inspiration for others to realize their capacity for unique perception and a richer imagination. As I said in an interview a few years ago,

Hearing [poetry], reading it, and creating it are all exercise for development of the imagination. Now, so are other arts and endeavors. But there are none that are either as portable or as efficient as poetry because of its inherent characteristic that requires of the forebrain to make its own pictures in order to experience it, which partially explains poetry’s ubiquitousness among the species, especially with respect to education of the child and the necessity of passing the baton—cultural myths—from generation to generation. And what is education if not an attempt to equip persons with imagination and experience for the sake of the capacity to anticipate, to solve problems of survival on one hand and, on the other, to make a life worth living? That which has arrived to make us the dominant species on earth, imagination, the ability to see into the future and thereby avert threats to our existence, comes hand in hand with the curse of the knowledge of our own demise. As for the poet, his or her role in such a scheme is therefore adaptive, ranging from the voice of an angel to the canary in the mine. The poet’s responsibility is the will to sing.

There’s good reason why so many poets are struck by John Donne and his ilk. Those seventeenth century English bards, with more passion than most moderns, appropriated with a passion what the students of Aristotle hammered out as being the central quality of poetry in The Poetics (only recently did I discover it was not Aristotle alone who produced what we refer to as his theory)—metaphor or, more specifically, thanks to the inventiveness of the old masters in question, conceit. Whatever the trope, a seasoned reader intuitively understands that what transports him or her to a higher plane of consciousness is wrapped in sentience. Assuming familiarity with the language in which the art object is cast, be it that which is material or abstract but a thing experienced in space through time, and excluding incantatory effect via repetition, there needs be brevity, hyper efficiency of language, which by its nature facilitates perception. Why, then, are shorter poems not more valuable than longer ones? It is for the same reason that there is inherent in language types of trope—from symbol or icon (barely temporal) to conceit (temporal)—meaning there are facets of reality and/or experience which require more time to render and to apprehend than others. It is an understanding such as this that points to the difference between poetry and prose. Both are valuable in that they serve different temperaments and moods. It’s just that the truly well-off among the world know the human spends life not in dollars and cents but in minutes and moments.

Back to the importance of sentience, however, effect, and the expansion of imagination and consciousness—it is the prose writer’s obligation to tell, to inform, even to instruct, but it is the poet’s charge to suggest. It’s the difference between Ayn Rand and Howard Roark. The poet would rather work like Roark than like Rand. The poet would rather make than talk, addressing the right and left lobes of the brain rather than the left alone.

Conversation about Language Poetry - Next Steps

Did you enjoy this conversation about language poetry and "the sense in nonsense?" You might also be interested in our conversation with literary critic Mark Athitakis about trends in American fiction and book reviewing, or our interview with novelist Hal Duncan about speculative fiction.

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