On Poetry and the Limits of Language

Poetry nestles itself in the margins of language, speaking what words normally cannot speak. A good poem challenges language to say new and surprising things, or to make new and surprising connections that conventional prose struggles to communicate.

How does a poem achieve this? Let’s take a closer look.

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Close Study: “Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan” by Robert Hass

Retrieved here.

This gorgeous, lush poem interrogates not only beauty, but the ways language represents beauty. But before I get to that, let’s just sit inside this wonderful piece for a moment. There is so much fantastic imagery: the opposition of drought and juice; the “hot / slow-motion” of an August morning; the juice-stained beard. And the line “Our ears are stoppered / in the bee-hum” is ridiculously beautiful. I lose my mind every time I read this piece. Even on days that are cold and snowy, this poem makes me sweat with summer.

Onto the craft of things. You might not know who Jacques Lacan is. In brief, he was a French psychoanalyst who used Freud’s theories of the mind to talk about language—particularly, the (in)ability of language to express what it represents, how words circle around that which they try to speak. To Lacan, the human unconscious is structured like language itself, and we are constantly chasing after language to express what we mean. Additionally, Lacan believed that human desire was impossible to satisfy. Since we always desire to express ourselves in language, he presents a Sisyphean conundrum: language will always try, and fail, to represent what it intends to represent. And we will, too. (I’m paraphrasing, of course, and Lacan’s theories are rife with disagreement among his most ardent supporters.)

Now, why am I getting into post-structuralist theories of language? First, because this poem is doing so, too. Second, because as poets, we have a vested interest in pushing the boundaries of language.

Certain insertions in the poem comment on Lacan’s theories. “subject and object / and the mediation of desire” are direct mentions of Lacanian ideas—specifically, what I just mentioned about the unreachability of desire.

But what I’m most drawn to is the last stanza, the image of Charlie’s beard stained purple by the word “juice.” Why might the speaker say Charlie’s beard is stained by a word? Perhaps the day in this poem is so perfect that the subject and object are one—in this brief moment, a desire is met completely, and language fully speaks what it seeks to represent. Or perhaps the lines between word and meaning become hazy in the summertime heat.

And then that last line. How should we read it? On the literal level, Charlie is getting a bigger pot to carry more blackberries. But, on the symbolic level, a larger pot creates more space to fill—a new desire to meet. As a result, this poem is both telling a beautiful story, filled with simple, vibrant imagery, while also representing Lacan’s theories in a fascinatingly subtle way.

As poets, we are constantly chasing after language. We want to push it, break it, even torture it to get close to what we mean. This might mean playing with form, writing in multiple languages, inventing impossible metaphors, or simply embodying post-structural theories of language itself. In essence, we are not only writing words, we are trying to stain our readers with the words themselves.

Craft Perspective: “Saying the Ineffable: Poetry and the Language of Silence” by Maria Popova

Read it here, in The Marginalian.

Popova’s brief essay points towards something similar as Robert Hass does: poetry’s capability to speak the unspeakable.

Despite the infinite ways to combine words in the English language, it has countless gaps. We have plenty of feelings and experiences that are difficult to communicate, that seem to elude language no matter how much we try to wield it.

Enter poetry. How many times have you read a poem that expressed something so precisely, you couldn’t think of a better way to say it?

Of course, I can only speak for myself. Here are a few lines of poetry I’ve read recently that gutted me, changed me, and expressed something so perfectly I re-fell in love with the English language:

• “I am laughing so hard I can hardly bear / having been born.” — “Admit It” by Jim Moore
• “Why don’t we lie down together, wing-bones touching? You look like someone I used to love, only colder.” — “Pareidolia” by Kim Addonizio
• “You soften the fright away with syllable after syllable of your hand.” — “Summer” by Chen Chen

Or, take the opening line from Jack Gilbert’s poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”, which is a little too on the nose:

When I read a line of poetry that stuns me, it’s because I know that line has almost touched the thing it’s trying to speak. Such moments are so rare, so powerful, they change me in ways both knowable and unknowable. With any luck, our poetry will have that effect on someone else.