Poems and Dreams: the Minefield of Hermeneutics

Teaching what we do not understand

Sebastian Lockwood

How do we teach what we cannot understand? For all our research and knowledge the real understanding of Stonehenge eludes us: we are still blind about the feet of the elephant feeling our way in a great invisible cathedral. But having walked around the stones - seen their presence at dawn - felt the power and the way people are altered in their presence, we begin to know this image. As I circle the image of Stonehenge I do not understand and yet I know: I internalize.

So with a poem. I do not seek understanding as much as a way of knowing: intimately. And the most intimate knowledge of a poem is to have memorized it: now the poem lives within. But still I would hesitate to say I understand this poem.

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

When I type those famous lines of Emily Dickinson I did not look them up for I have them to memory and have recited them on a hundred different occasions in different circumstances. I know them. But do I understand them? No. And I do not wish to.

I did however look the lines up to be sure to catch Dickinson’s unique punctuation and capitalization: the understanding of which eludes all scholars.

For my purposes here I will say that to understand something; a painting, a symphony, a building, a car, a poem: is a linear, rational, logical and practical endeavor. To stand under. However to know any of these things is emotional, visceral, circular, personal and intuitive. That piece of art that we can call a classic retains a resistance: it does not give itself up to our understanding, but will allow us to know it. The simplest example here is that a Hall Mark card has almost no resistance, and we understand the message or the writer has failed, while Emily Dickinson retains enormous resistance and we may spend a lifetime seeking her true message.

When asked how he knew a great poem was a great poem, what the criteria were for greatness, Ezra Pound replied that he “knew” a great poem when the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

Let me take one moment here to look at this difference between knowing and understanding. In French we have the distinction between comprendre, which gives us comprehension or understanding: to comprehend – literally to be able to hold something: apprehend that poem before it gets away! Savoir, is to know, as with an idea. With connaitre we enter another realm of knowing that leads us to a connoisseur of poetry: one who knows. In Japanese Shiru is to know while rikaisuru is to understand and rikaisuru has to do with the eye, to “see” something while shiru is of the mind. In German wissen is knowing as knowledge, while kennen is to understand a person or place. Thus kennen gives us our “ken” as in Joyce’s Anabella Livia section of Finnegan’s Wake: Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it.

The Greeks place both knowing and understanding in the realm of the body. Here is how the Liddell-Scott dictionary defines them:

Nthanomai is to learn by hearsay, to hear tell, etc. manthanomai is

to learn by perceiving, to learn how to do something, to understand,

yignosko is to learn to know, perceive, mark, discern, distinguish, to

observe, form a judgment. Context often tells us a lot about how we

will translate these words into English and since they are some of the

most elusive concepts in either language no one for one equation will

ever work easily.

The Greeks located understanding, etc. in the chest, the stomach, or the bowels. They had no sense of the head and the brain. Their notion of thinking was tied up with the physical symptoms of reaction to anything, so depending upon the reaction, they chose the location.

This feels so right for the Greeks to have both knowing and understanding placed so firmly together in the body and from there to achieve judgment: yignosko. Ezra pound did not Judge the poem - he knew the poem was great because of a visceral reaction or impression - judgement returns to the realm of understanding.

So it is a difficult distinction, but for the sake of this argument, let us say that we can know a poem and we should resist the attempt to understand it.

One more linguistic note here - this word resists and resistance is used here to signify the depth and degree of imagery within a piece of art: The Mona Lisa has fascinating resistance through the imagery itself and the accretion of history and lore about the piece, while a Chuck Close portrait seeks to have almost no resistance.

So here is the problem for the teacher of poetry: to make known an art that demands resistance - that will not open itself to the student and make its parts manifest so that those parts can be listed in a paper or quiz in order to acquire the “A”.

I teach a two weekend course (Friday 5-10 and all day Saturday & Sunday) for teachers getting their MA in Creative Arts and Learning through Lesley College. Sadly, given the lack of attention to poetry in the curriculum, many of these teachers are coming to these course with more fear than they have for the other arts. Perhaps this fear is because somewhere in High School or College they were asked to explain a poem in order to prove that they had understood the poem. The students did their best at an impossible task and were often told, in so many words, that they got it wrong. Many students can recount the moment when the doors of poetry were closed to them by a teacher who held the great key to understanding and interpretation: they had strayed into the minefield of hermeneutics and lost a leg. Almost any group of twenty people can recount this experience. And so they approach the minefield once more, hope against hope that you as teacher will now at last reveal they key of understanding. What dismay when I say there is no rosetta stone here: that poems are as elusive as dreams and should be so.

I start my Friday night with introductions where I ask for specific details: the students relationship to poetry, a favorite walk and what wild animal they identify with. It is in their relationship to poetry that at least half the group will talk about the experience described above. I will return to the walk and the animal later. Once the introductions are done I read and pass out around ten poems: poems chosen for their increasing level of resistance. I always start with Seamus Heanies’ Digging.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

This is a poem of great onomatopoetic clarity. A poem that achieves power and force while at the same time being accessible due to the precision of the sounds and the familiarity of the unfamiliar. While few students have experience with what it is like to cut sod in Ireland in the twenties; the force and immediacy of the poem is such that the students feel safe: they “get it”. They know what it is to hold a potato in their hand, and so the line:

To scatter new potatoes that we picked

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

is full of the familiar. And yet do they understand? Is the whole hard world of the troubles - the pen rests snug as a gun - of that history torn sectarian world understood? No. And therein the beauty of a poem that is both available and resistant. Now gently we can say: see, not that hard.

I then move through a series of poets: Marge Piercy, Mary Oliver, May Sarton, Samuel Menashe, and poems of my own - with my own poems I can say that the author is here - ask away and I’ll see if we understand. Ofcourse the issue of understanding one’s own poetry is a whole complication in itself. I end with a poem by the great American imagist poet Charles Simic.

And now there is gnashing of teeth and feelings of betrayal: see, you did it to us, gave us a poem we can’t possibly understand and you sit there saying it is a great poem!

THE DEAD

They were like stones in the meadow

The sheep lick.

White stones like children in Sunday dress

Playing bride and groom.

We found a clockface with Roman numerals

In the old man’s overcoat pocket.

It was time for a bit of rain to fall.

He looked at the sky without recognizing it.

Your hands, mother, which made the old man disappear,

The Lord who saw over them.

His martyrs, pierced by arrows, have their eyes open.

“I put out the lights so their eyes won’t find me,” you said.

O dreams like shirttails vanishing in a windswept meadow,

And your hands like white mice, Mother.

Yes, I love this poem - I love the sound and imagery - but I do not “understand” it nor do I seek to. Rather I walk around it watching it like a building or an iceberg: how the light plays on it, how rewarding its many symmetries are and how many different thoughts and emotions are suggested each time I return to it. If I understood it there would be no reward in returning to it.

Who is the mother here? Why is mother capitalized in one place and not the other? What is it about “eyes” ? What is it about “hands”? The sheeplick as gravestone? The sheep lick as salt: now I talk about salt and all its implications as a substance that is both life and death, mythic and utterly real. And what of “shirtails vanishing in a windswept meadow”? Is this not dream imagery?

Half the students will approach the poem as detectives and attempt to explain what happened here: the mother killed the father and is hiding the event from the children. This is the attempt to understand. Then one lone voice will say: it feels like a dream.

Yes, how dream like these images are - and do we understand the dream? We know that in the dream there is an absolute reality - we know this, for if you are falling head first in the dream you know that when your face hits the sidewalk it will be as the cheese to the grater: we know this yet we do not understand it. Now I can pull the students about the fire of the poem and say let us circle here: let us know these images and then we will have something to say about them.

How do we talk about the poem as dream? In his book, Tracks in the Wilderness, Robby Bosnack, a Jungian trained therapist, gives an excellent guide as to how to know a dream yet not understand it. Having participated in two dream groups based on Bosnack’s method I will give a brief description of how it works and then how this method can be applied to the teaching of poetry.

The dream group will have 8 to 10 members and a group leader. A member of the group presents a dream, or a fragment of a dream. The members of the group do a quick round to say how the dream has effected them physically: some will have specific pains: chest, neck, head - some will fall asleep or experience a sense of elation or relief. These are useful indications as to the resistance and nature of the dream. Now the dreamer tells the dream a second time and while telling the dream the group asks a series of questions of the dreamer eliciting more and more detail For instance: when the car was drifting across the Harvard Bridge, what time of day was it? What was the light like? What were you wearing? What make of car? What is the interior like etc... If the questions are asked in the right way the dreamer is often able to offer an extraordinary level of detail that furnishes the dream: in this situation the dreamer is retelling the dream and experiencing lucid dreaming as they re-enter the absolute reality of that world.

Now the group must confer and decide where is the place of least resistance and where is the place of greatest resistance. For the third telling the group will lead the dreamer back into the dream at the place of least resistance and move towards the place of greatest resistance. For instance the group may say: lets start where you (the dreamer) are lying on the hill and watching the balls of fire in the air, then we will follow that procession of people until we come to the bridge by the convent. Then we will go under the bridge and find that person who is half stone and half flesh: that will be the place of greatest resistance. The dreamer will wake up, or come out of the dream when the resistance is too much, for instance, when the group asks the dreamer to be the person who is half stone and then look back at themselves.

This is a fingernail sketch: anyone interested in this method should read Bosnacks work and attend a dream group with a leader who is experienced in this method. When the group leaves the leader often has to pinch each member to make sure they are fully back in this world. I found this method to be extraordinarily refreshing: I would leave the sessions as though I had had the most wonderful sleep and full of renewed energy. The important point here is we never attempted to understand the dream: occasionally for fun we would run a pseudo Freudian analysis just to show how silly the attempts of understanding dreams are. Instead what we had achieved was a deep knowing of the dream. And so with poems. Take a famous “dream poem” Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn.

In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

This opening leads us in with little resistance: we hear the “stately” sound of the poem and imagine some “pleasure dome” and the river Aleph through those canyons beyond human comprehension and down to that “sunless” sea. From here the poem becomes ever more elusive and full of dream imagery until we reach the final lines, the place of greatest resistance:

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware, Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honeydew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of paradise.

This last image presents the destructive force of inspiration and imagination: the price of the muse. This is the Dionysian inspiration of The Bachae where bachants, women in the wild, will rip the animals apart and eat them raw. This is the place beyond limit, beyond boundary. We are within the impossible but absolute reality of the dream.

How do we teach this? Can I tell students that if they research the cult of Dionysus and read the Bachae that they will then understand this image? No. That research will lead to a deeper knowing as the references are elucidated. But to know this state of mind? What Coleridge has done here is to build an imagery until he can at last reveal that “holy state” as pure image. Best to let the image be and simply circle it: ask questions of it: allow its resistance while coming to deep sense of knowing.

Now let’s turn back to understanding. I understand a poem through the craft and internal mechanisms of the poem. That standing of the hair on the back of the neck can also be the instant recognition of an extraordinarily high level of craft. But just as with a wooden boat: it is not craft alone but the spirit that infuses the craft. The young pianist who has perfect technique understands Chopin: but will the player have the spirit to inform the music and give that performance that moves beyond craft and into the sublime? Let’s look again at Emily Dickinson.

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

We all know the light that comes in winter: the thin pale light that illuminates in a diffuse way: the feeling of sitting on a sofa in a winter room and that “slant” of light on the wall: this is a dream moment. And the word slant? Dickinson loves this word: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant. – So this certain Slant has a chilling Truth on these winter afternoons that “oppress” they bear down, there is a weight and this weight is “heft”. Dickinson here gives us a word of the hands where we feel the heft as an ax man feels the heft of the metal head in the shaft of Ash. But this is no ax, this is the heft of a Cathedral tune: the weight of those cathedral stones, their naometry their lythic light and weight. And how pleasing the rhyme between ....noons and tunes: that light has been joined with heft so now even the light bears down upon us.

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, ’tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

How often this last line has been misunderstood. Oh, there I go saying there is an understanding! Well here I do wish to move my student beyond the initial feeling that this is a morbid poem about depression and death. There is again the strange intensity of the landscape listening: we feel this in still winter when the world is too much with us. Shadows – hold there breath: – a frozen intensity. And then the relief, the letting out of the breath, with the words, “When it goes.” These are the words often missed by the student. They are too small: When it goes, and the student jumps to, ...on the look of death. But the line depends on hearing: when it goes ’tis like the ...distance.... This is death leaving: she has come so close that she has brushed her fingers on your cheek, held you in her stillness, but now she departs and you see her distance. She’s gone: the world breathes again. But in it’s inhaling we have seen, the look of death.

To read at this level is to move as far as possible into the image: to hold these words, to comprehend, and yes, there is a degree of understanding built up by one’s knowledge of the rest of Emily Dickinson’s writing and one’s own accretion of literary reference. However, the student can know the poem without that literary baggage train: the cannon. But with the baggage train comes a much deeper and more rewarding sense of knowing.

Now to return to the “walk” and “the wild animal” of the students introductions. Here we can look at how dreams, and the working of dreams, applies to creation: the “poesy” of poetry.

I will have asked this group, fearful as they are, to write poetry on the premise that we should always do what we teach. Now the person in the group who says that they have never written a poem and are quite sure that they never will - ask that person to describe their favorite walk. As she begins, “I love to walk in the woods....” I ask: Which woods? What are they called? At what time of year? What do you hear there? What do you smell? As she answers I write down the details and images she offers. When done, in my best poetry voice, I read back to her a detailed poem with cadence and imagery: look what a beautiful poem you wrote!

To do this we have engaged in the most basic lucid dreaming: we have returned to her knowing of her special wood and found the images and details to express that place. Now I ask her to associate this imagery with a feeling: joy, despair, reflection, mourning. Perhaps she took this walk with a parent she has lost: through that emotional association the poem now takes on a depth until, “ the shadows hold their breath.”

Not bad for a first poem. Now I ask the group to return to their chosen wild animal: no pets, no farm animals. I often get: whale, Dolphin, Giraffe, Raven, Owl (once a Sloth that produced a most wonderful Sloth poem) Raccoon, Otter etc... I ask the student to put themselves in the very being of this animal: see the world from the eyes, nose and mouth of your persona animal and write from that place. This is Saturday night and the poem due Sunday morning: I recommend a blitz in the encyclopedia and on the web - brainstorm all you’ve ever thought abut this animal then plunge in and be lucid: seek flow.

The next morning the whole bestiary arrives and we share the wild ones: each person takes on this spirit and delivers their persona dream image of themselves. Again, the questions elicit the detail that will give the poem resistance and move it beyond simplistic description of the animals exterior and move us into the interior image of the wild self.

We talk about how these animals arrived: some come that night on the drive home, others arrive over the evening meal - some at midnight or six in the morning - this allows us to talk about how writing happens for each person in different ways and at different times. If a student is blocked it can often be while the others are reading their poems that their own persona animal poem reveals itself. For the truly linear learner this is a hard concept and it requires talking about “flow” and how the mind works with creativity. Here I will talk about access to the creative part of the mind: in the shower, swimming, taking a walk, listening to Baroque music, the moment before sleep and the moment of waking - those times when the mind is uncluttered and lucid. I separate the “busy body” mind from the relaxed lucid mind and how that place of flow is so close to our dream mind. Creating is a waking dream. Flaubert talks in his letters about literally waking up from hours of writing amazed at where he’s been. Borges says that writing is guided dreaming (I see this on a coffee cup in a bookstore in daydream moment). Here I think it would be redundant to say that we know this but will never fully understand.

So have a swim or a walk, take a bath, doze and get a poem? No, that is merely the access to the lucid mind and begs the whole issue of craft. The poet is the one out there in the storm trying to be hit by lightning – and has the craft to get it down on paper. Teaching in Columbia Missouri I found myself wanting to run towards the tornado, curious to experience this natural wonder: luckily the students told me that now we should shelter in the bathroom where there are no windows - what regret: but still I have the image of that sickly green turning cloud and the eerie stillness. This produced a poem called, Raining Frogs, the last stanza reads:

Walking into that void in wonder

to be called back as the wind hit,

hide in the windowless bathroom

but I want to see, watch, witness

that sea spout serpent

braiding sky and earth

sucking up the frog pond

and letting the frogs rain down.

The point here is that experience, the lucid mind and inspiration, all lead to the perspiration of the work: the knowledge, and yes, understanding of the craft. I do understand craft: I do understand the many ways to make a sonnet just the way the boat builders understands the many ways to make a hull. But craft is only clay in the potters hand without the spirit of inspiration; and it is the recognition of that sweet spirit that we seek to teach first in the hope that the knowledge of craft will follow naturally. If I start by laboring metrics and form it would be like lecturing on the structures of Mozart before listening to the beauty.

For my students I want them first to experience the freedom and thrill of creation with words. Once that flow has been established it will be time enough to study craft.

I believe completely that that spirit of beauty is accessible from the earliest moment; that the pre-school and kindergarten teacher can read Dickinson, Shakespeare and Yeats to their pre-literate students and they will hear the beauty long before the horizon of understanding appears. In fact I think this essential. If these young students only hear Shell Silverstien (bless his heart) it would be like a meal where only desert is served. In fact we know that young students have a strange power of knowing great poetry: the best Haiku are often produced by students who are eight to ten years old who are in a purity of knowing. Students at an early age do not approach “great” literature as though it is a mountain to be understood but rather it is a new joy: a simple wonder of language. As Issay says:

Oh snail

climb mount Fuji

slowly, slowly

So we return to this difficult distinction: does my knowledge of craft help me understand Simic’s The Dead? Yes and no: it gives me a deeper love and respect for the achievement of the poem – but still not an understanding, but a far deeper knowing. I have internalized the poem: I have walked about it and looked at its many angles and felt its angle of repose. I have allowed myself to engage with the poem the way I engage with the telling of a friends dream: a new landscape to explore – to feel my way through. I have a visceral reaction that informs my intellectual opinion. I know it, and the hair stands up on the back of my neck.