Dancing Five Ways

Though I am a head taller than my wife, her legs are the same length as mine. Her body type—high-waisted with legs that go on forever—is characteristic of dancers. When my wife dances, her hips, knees, elbows, hands and shoulders move at the same time, sometimes circling, shimmying, and swaying, in perfect synch with rock or R&B music. I once asked what she called this style of dancing, and she said: “Dancing five Ways.”

A poem also can dance five ways. A poem has its own music and can change point of view as it moves. Sometimes, poems bring in dimensions of history and myth, or take the reader from land to sea, or inside to the outside, or from a social or anthropological observation to something more personally pointed, or to a song.

Stanley Kunitz’s “Proteus” is ostensibly about the ancient sea god who is supposedly in charge of all sea beasts. In mythology, Proteus represents the ocean’s changeable nature and the movement of water.

At midday he rose on schedule from the flood
to stretch his limbs on the kelp-strewn shelf
of rock where he could soak his bones
in the drippings of the sun
and watch, bemused, the monsters of the deep,
who were his sacred charge,
humping and snorting at their brutish games.

He was not envious of their rampant blood,
nor had he bargained for this keeper’s role.
Their origins were buried in his past,
lost syllables in a language of forgetting.
Perhaps they were his misbegotten brood
conceived by night in another age, but why
should he be vexed, as in his wanton prime
by buzzing guilts and blames, that cloud of flies?
His burden was to see the future plain.

On shore, he knew, under the beetling crags
lurked bands of marauders in their painted skins,
waiting for him to lapse into a drowse,
when they would pounce upon him in repose
and pin him down, compelling him
to rip the sweating membrane from the void
and practice his excruciating art.

He was the world’s supreme illusionist,
taught by necessity how to melt his cage,
slipping at will through his adversaries’ grasp
by self-denial, displaying one by one
his famous repertoire of shifting forms,
from line and serpent to fire and waterfall.
But now he was heavy in his heart, and languid,
sensing the time had come to leave his flock.
Must he prepare himself once more for the test?
He could not recollect the secret codes
that gave him access to his other lives.

Half-listening to the plashing of the oars
a dissembled chorus from the sea,
he shut his dimming eyes
and did not stir. These were the dreaded boatmen
racing to his side, and these their hairy hands.
He heard barbaric voices crying, “Prophesy!”          

--Stanley Kunitz, “Proteus” from Passing Through: The Later Poems,
New and Selected, pp. 156-157, (Norton, 1995).

The poem begins with an almost comic tableau. An amphibious geezer is on a vacation or a bender, rising on schedule at midday floodtime, finding a rocky ledge to “soak his bones in the drippings of the sun.” Nonplussed by the sea beasts he rules, he keeps a bemused distance like a man on holiday while his creatures frolic in their element. But each new stanza reveals more disturbing truths. Proteus, the world-class illusionist, must be forced into his role. At first he takes on the persona of a reluctant parent in charge of unruly children he wants no part of. And then we see how his unique talents are a burden he must perform under duress. He is being tracked by “bands of marauders in their painted skins,/waiting for him to lapse…” The prophet has no control over his own fate, the contortionist has to be bound to use his skill. The oars come for him to make him suffer through a new vision.

As human beings we all know how difficult it is to change ourselves. We balk at the suggestion. You might as well send an army in to force us to go through the transformations that help our growth. But this is also Stanley Kunitz writing in his late 80s, describing as if looking over a lifetime what the poet gives for his art. The poet takes on mythical characteristics to reveal what Kunitz once said was the impetus for the poem—to show how the poet must go through the “desperate transformations of the self,” become the mythologies for the reader to know, and is the shape shifter who takes on every form and role back to innocence. The constant changing comes at a high cost, his art accomplished reluctantly and spasmodically as a drunk might vomit. “As Proteus I can write it because I am delivered into the body of the myth. And this is what is so painful and so difficult about poetry,” Kunitz said.

In another poem, “Poetry of Departures,” Philip Larkin gives a name to the spasmodic disruption and the desperate transformations of the self. Larkin calls it the “audacious, purifying, elemental move.”

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off.
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move
And they are right, I think
We all hate home
And having to be there.
I detest my room.
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order.
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me lushed and stirred
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, I he did?
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swear the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books, china, a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

—Philip Larkin, “Poetry of Departures,” from “Poetry of Departures,”
Collected Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), page 85.

Larkin takes us on an unsteady ride through a private argument with himself. It starts as hearsay about someone else who has dramatically transformed his life, then shifts to self-attack, the narrator confessing how much he detests the elements of his life—the room, its specially chosen junk, the bed. Driving down the road, he shifts again, this time at an intersection where half-remembered cliches from adventure flicks (that contrast with the mundane acts of his dull, self-contained life) enter his mindstreet like merging traffic. Then she undid her dress or Take that you bastard.

The piece itself is about movement and change, what it’s like to break a pattern or even move in reverse: “Such a deliberate step backwards.” Recognizing that his life is not vascular and living but has solidified into an object that is reprehensibly perfect, Larkin puts his car in park and locks the door.

The poem goes from 0 to 50 and back to 0 in no time. The piece is a case of reckless self-endangerment that reminds me of the brief spin Charles Miller took with W.H. Auden the first time Auden drove in America. The moment is described with gusto in Auden: An American Friendship (Scribners, 1983), a sideman’s tale of life on the road with the famous musician:

… The Pontiac, which we ever called the green Pontiac, had a perfect engine, tight steering, and a “newfangled” gear shift mounted on the steering column. Neither of us suspected that this “first car” would be Wystan’s only car in America.

Wystan said, “Come! Let’s take a drive and get a bit to eat at that new Route 12 roadhouse started, and I noticed that Wystan’s mastery of the Pontiac was impressionistic rather than mechanical, partly due to his shortsightedness. “Do you think this motor might do, hmmm, a hundred?” Wystan cried out, swooping through college town traffic toward the Detroit highway. I pointed out to him that the Pontiac speedometer dial registered only as high as ninety-five, wherewith Wystan floored the accelerator and we were soon doing ninety-five on the lethal three-lane Route 12, until he steered thrillingly to the left across two lanes to skid into the roadhouse parking lot in a glorious cloud of dust, testing and proving the brakes.

Poets, for all their insight, are often near- or rear-sighted. They can see only through their own special lens in ways where objects may appear closer than they really are. In many of Larkin’s poems, nothing happens; yet we strap ourselves in for his neurotic shiftings through virtual countryside, sizing up the flora and fauna to indicate what’s wanting in himself and the world, typically up- and down-shifting on his dissatisfied holidays through the fragile psyche of our times.

Consider the movement in “The Building,” which is a kind of meditation on form and what form conjures in the viewer.

The poem begins with pure physical description of the building in all its eeriness, a comb of light amidst ancient streets as old as the breath of forgotten years, and the strange cars at the front of the vine-strewn structure that opens to a frightening odor:

Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see
All around its close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sight out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keeps drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well the creepers hangs a frightening smell.

This is a cinematic treatment, like the establishing shot of a movie, and suddenly we pan inside this place, with the paperbacks and the cost of tea and strangers reading magazines, the faces restless and resigned: “What’s going on here? We ask ourselves and are rewarded with a tip: “Every few minutes comes some kind of nurse/To fetch someone away.” The word “cough” clinches it: The building is a hospital, the cars are ambulances, and the smell is the unclean washings of ammonia-soaked bacteria and infection that remind us of the sickness and death that no amount of smell can mask and no amount of cleanser can suds away. 

The building is described in terms of the wrong it contains—like a jail cell that speaks of all its guests who are innocent and guilty and who’s future will be what it is. The hospital is a holding pen between living and dying where people at the vague age of uncertainty about their future stare into the face of their new awareness of bodily failure. The building will outlast the flesh (us). Its very size tells us that we are nothing, finite, passing. The reality is silencing:

They’re quiet. To realize
This new thing held in common makes them quiet
For beyond these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off,
And harder to return from.

And now the building is more than a physical space, it is an elevator shuttle of souls, a transport, perhaps from this life to mysteries far away. Then there is another shift. The poem with cinematic suddenness moves from the inside the building to the exterior view. We see the bricks, the pipes, passersby, traffic, a church, the signs of life: “Short terraced streets/Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch/their separates from the cleaners.”

This is the building’s opposite, yet it still echoes the loneliness and separateness of the hospital, as if death was contagious or what it is: part-and-parcel of living. The words “separates” is most remarkable here. It re-evokes the separateness of people in the hospital and our separation from our own sense of destiny. But it also connotes the cheapness of what is storebought—that which can be mechanically cleaned and is easily replaceable.

And then another change. Here the piece turns to song. Larkin reaches beyond visual imagination to sing from a deep reservoir that collects inside the grief of watching about the thin line between life and death, hope and despair, consciousness and dream, the separate self and the other.

O world,
Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here! And so, unreal
A touching dream to which we all are lulled             
But wake from separately. In it, conceits
And self-protecting ignorance congeal
To carry life, collapsing only when

Called to these corridors (for now once more
The nurse beckons.) Each gets up and goes
At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four,
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above—women, men
Old young; crude facets of the only coin
This place accepts.

And here we reach the melting point, for the meaning of this building and our journey through it is made clear and held before us like an x-ray.

All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end.
And somewhere like this. This is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals, nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With weak, wasteful, propitiatory flowers.

—Philip Larkin, “The Building,” High Windows (Faber and Faber,1974), pp. 18-20.

“The Building” dances with movement across many dimensions—from dimestore mystery to clarity and new speculation; from the solid world to the lucent and unknown; from the social to the separately personal; from the now to the beyond.

In the virtual reality that is writing, effective movement mirrors the states of anthropological and psychological understandings of human change. Anthropologists tell us that our movement through life is made meaningful and easier through our contact with society—the initiation into the group the repetition of ritual and stories that transmit the tribe’s values, and the various rites of passage that are part of our life’s arc and, in their own way, constantly renew us. Psychologists have much to say about how we can self-propel desired changes. We can create a new behavior (quitting smoking and drinking, rising earlier) that will lead to shifts in cognition and feeling that make us different. Shifts in how we think can do the same, leading to new emotions and perhaps the desired new behavior. Or some deep feeling or experience causes us to do something different and think in new ways.

In writing these anthropological and psychological notions have clear analogues. Poetry at its best is an anthropological artifact. It expresses the experience of living at a key moment of passage and has much to say about the structure and unwritten rules of society and how the tribe manifests its point of view. Larkin’s poem is, in fact, the anthropology of the hospital as way station and edifice against dying, with its priests and attendants (“the nurse”) and all its rituals (the cups of coffee, the disappearance into secret rooms) and its amulets (“weak, wasteful, propitiatory flowers”).

Similarly, poems are psychological studies as well, where changes in stasis result from clear manipulations of the three psychological factors mentioned above: cognition: (how a piece sees and hears and becomes aware through its language); emotion (how a piece feels through its color, mood, echo, and tone); and behavior (how the language moves along its circuit.) The poet often alters these factors as simply as a driver adjusts the rpms of the engine, pulls in the clutch, or floors the gas pedal.

Richard Wilbur shows us another way that poetry moves—like water itself—in “The Beautiful Changes.”

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

—Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes,” New and Selected Poems,
page 392 (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1988)

For poetry at its finest is lithe and liquid. The field, viewed through the eyes of love, is a lake with love’s shadow. The poem takes on different meanings in multiple ways at once, pivoting around changes in the same words used as different parts of speech--“beautiful,” the adjective or “the beautiful” noun, and changing “change”—the ultimate verb of our lives—from verb to noun. The small typically unnoticed things once seen anew make the leaf leafier. The poem calls us to look again at what is real and how art more effectively than life captures wonder. And the poem is all the more beautiful because the changes are not a performance but s kind poet’s kind gift to the reader, who can be changed by it.

As a rule for poets, I would offer five ways that they can make poetry dance.

Like the ladder of love described by Plato in the Symposium, the five ways move from physical to the appreciation of beauty in the abstract.

The first way is spatial—the movement with gravity and harmony with the world. This includes all description of the solid world as caught by inside-outside movement of the writer as camera and by sound and representation of the world caught in the words.

The second way is the movement of surprise the voice of truth that penetrates the rock, that breaks the stillness and changes mood.      

The third way is the movement from the social to the personal, public to private that penetrates inside the reader.

The fourth way is the movement toward understanding, of the writer or creator learning from his material and transforming the movement into a symbol or concept, and for the reader or viewer, an understanding of the concept like the figure of a dance.

The fifth way is movement preserved and captured in memory, across the dimensions of time and spirt that captures the movement of the spirit on and above the human plane

While it is not always the case, the more ways a poem moves, the more ways we can be moved by it. Multiplicities of perspective created through the movement of the lens, the embodiment of the poet as myth, the anthropology of place, the audacious move, the wonder of close watching, the poem moving to its melting point… These are not simply techniques to discover and exploit. They allow the poet to capture what Kunitz called “the soul’s journey,” and speak directly to the reader’s highest desires, imagination, self-concept and world-view. The dynamism of movement through the beautiful or unwanted changes of life, image, and language offer the reader not only a richer aesthetic experience but more connection to their own life’s spasmodic, unwanted or self-willed changes, and more reason to read—and read again.