This post contains the second half of an essay exploring the relationship between poetry and personal knowledge. If you haven’t yet, you might read the first half of the argument, first.
Tomorrow morning I leave for a 10-day residency on Whidbey Island, WA, with Seattle Pacific University’s M.F.A. in creative writing program. Follow me on Instagram for lots of ocean pics—or hold out for the full recap here, in a few weeks.
As always, thanks for reading:
Cameron
Poetry as coming-to-know
What might Professor Meek’s account of knowing illuminate about the acts of writing and reading verse poetry? Another way of phrasing it: how does the phenomenology of poetry relate to epistemology as Meek understands it?
For starters, we might simply see Meek’s account of knowing as a description of what poets are doing when they write poems: struggling with clues and intuitions to form a focal-pattern, however provisional, using the resources of experience and language (which are themselves clue-like). Writing a poem, in other words, is a struggle ordered toward meaning.
This is not exactly a novel idea; poetry has long been associated with revelation or insight. The notion of writing as a struggle toward knowledge, however, seems less explored. For instance, the Romantic ideal, proffered by Shelley and company, places all the emphasis on the moment of inspiration, which the poet exists to channel. “The poet is the person in whom these powers [of perception] are in balance,” writes Emerson in “The Poet,” “the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of” (Emerson 393).
In his classic Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield also identifies knowledge as one of the two “effects” of poetry, the other being pleasure. But here too, the emphasis is either the initial inspiration or the final poem, which stands as a sort of artifact by which readers may share in the poet's illumination. According to such views, poetry serves as a medium for dispensing knowledge already found. Meek, on the other hand, might impel us to consider the very process of writing poetry as a means of coming to know.
So might Scott Cairns, a contemporary poet whose work on poetics sheds light on this point of our discussion. In his essay “Elemental Confusion,” Professor Cairns draws a distinction between the poet who merely describes past events or insights in his work—what he calls a “denotative” practice—and the poet who seeks to generate new insight and meaning through the poem’s inception. Ultimately, Cairns wants poets to embrace the heuristics of their craft, to approach the empty page without rigid predeterminations about what they could (or should!) put down. Like a child learning an instrument, the poet must sit and struggle with the disparate “particulars” until some pattern of meaning reveals itself. “If all your work does is say what you already know, then that’s a pretty low bar,” Cairns said in a recent interview. “It’s not very ambitious to only want to say what you already know. It is more ambitious and more true to your calling to desire to find something meaningful to say.” And as we have seen, finding something meaningful is what Meek’s epistemology is all about.
Although, strictly speaking, epistemology is the study of knowledge, not meaning. A poet might ground a new poem in some profound metaphor, meaningful to himself and his readers, but how can we know this isn’t mere illusion—a contrivance of the sort that led Plato to banish poets from his ideal republic? How, in other words, do we know when we have made contact with reality? This is a difficult question. Polanyi suggested that contact with reality prompts us to “anticipate an indeterminate range of unexpected future confirmations of our knowledge derived from this contact” (Polanyi 124). The conviction that future experience will authenticate our new discovery is itself a sign that we’ve encountered the real. Why? Because contact with reality expands reality to us, and knowledge is always accompanied by ignorance of what we have yet to discover, but very well might. Meek puts it like this:
In the moment of profound integration, we experience a sense of the future possibilities, prospects, horizons of the things we have encountered. There are sides we cannot currently see, behaviors we suspect but could never predict, implications only some of which we can reason out, but which in their incompleteness may lead us to uncover new and transforming dimensions. We could in no way exhaustively list those possibilities. We can't even name them all. Yet they in their unnameableness confirm the rightness of our integration. (127)
When we gain a foothold at another shore of reality, we sense we must continue exploring the “unspecifiable future prospects” of the territory we have discovered (Meek 127).
Presumably, then, the same could be said for writing and reading poetry. A poem facilitates contact with reality not just when it offers a rich insight or metaphor, but when it promises more than it alone can offer—a generative and gratuitous vision of the world. Notably, this accords with Cairn’s thoughts on what constitutes genuinely poetic works, which he juxtaposes with the aforementioned denotative approach to writing. The poetic is “the presence and activity of inexhaustible, indeterminate enormity apprehended in a discreet space” (Cairns 15). All art can be poetic in this sense—a made thing capable of further making—including, of course, poetry. A good poem refuses to exist exclusively in the past, igniting within us a “responsive flight of the imagination” (Cairns 18). Poetry, like knowledge, like reality, is fecund.
Cairns does not spell out in precise terms how one might tell a denotative from a truly poetic work. After all, we cannot know what process a writer underwent to craft a poem. The best we can do is look for suggestive works, verse that promises indeterminate future manifestations of some sort. Taken as a whole, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” is a fine example of a collection of poems that cannot contain itself. One section from “East Coker” will serve our purpose. After an ornate passage on the seasons, flowers, and constellations, Eliot makes a surprising move:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry did not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? … (25-26)
This is a poem about struggle—struggle with the passing of time, with dashed expectations, and with Eliot’s own self-conscious (in)aptitudes as a poet. The passage evinces a mind at work, attempting to coordinate the dots of past, present, and future into a coherent picture. It remains a struggle, for one thing, because “The poetry did not matter,” but also because Eliot’s speaker must confront the evidently ephemeral “wisdom of age” as he attempts to make sense of his place in the passage of time.
As readers, attending to the intricacies of such a poem just is the epistemic act as Meek understands it. When we responsibly struggle with the work, we rely on clues to focus on a coherent pattern and submit to its reality, viz., to find footholds and continue on in our knowing endeavors. Or, as Eliot put it in “Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all out exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. (59)
As an act of coming-to-know, poetry can take up goodness, truth, and beauty simultaneously, which is to say, finally, that poetry can take us closer to being.
Works Cited
Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
Cairns, Scott. “It's Not a Poem until You Discover Something: An Interview with Scott Cairns.” The Rabbit Room, https://rabbitroom.com/2021/10/its-not-a-poem-until-you-discover-something-an-interview-with-scott-cairns/. Accessed November 14, 2022.
___________. “Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics.” Unpublished, 2005. Used by permission of the author.
Eliot, T.S. “ Four Quartets.” Mariner Books, 1971.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet” in The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Edited by Lawrence Buell. Modern Library, 2006.
Johnson, Dru. Scripture’s Knowing: A Companion to Biblical Epistemology. Cascade Books, 2015.
Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2008
Meek, Esther Lightcap. A Little Manual for Knowing. Cascade Books, 2014.
__________________. Longing to Know: The Philosophy of Knowledge for Ordinary People. Brazos Press, 2003.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. The University of Chicago Press. 1962.
Wiman, Christian. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith and the Faith of Art. FS&G, 2018.