Pinks #25: A Finger That Breaks Out of Your Head
Why the writing of poetry comes back to the body
As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it.
Frank O’Hara
Much of the best advice about writing poetry has been expressed in terms of the body. This might seem paradoxical at first: poetry is the least embodied art, words plucked from the air, to be read in the head or aloud. But the simplicity of its medium means that poetry is also intensely embodied, because it only needs a body to happen. “I made it out of a mouthful of air”, said W.B. Yeats — and I remain confident that AI will never write a really memorable poem, because it doesn’t have a mouth:
Making poems with a mouthful of air isn’t just about sound, either — it’s about the whole feeling of communicating something across space from one body to another. Ben Lerner defines “poetry” with a story about “rolling [a] word around, as it were, on my tongue”:
I remember walking around as a child repeating a word I’d overheard, applying it wildly, and watching how, miraculously, I was rarely exactly wrong. If you are five and you point to a sycamore or an idle backhoe or a neighbor stooped over his garden or to images of these things on a television set and utter “vanish” or utter “varnish” you will never be only incorrect; if your parent or guardian is curious, she can find a meaning that makes you almost eerily prescient […] And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore— that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.
This describes the exact opposite of what Large Language Models are trained to do: for ChatGPT, the satisfying click is all. Liquefied language would rust its circuits.
I will swear to my dying day that an iambic pentameter is not what’s showing on the hospital heart monitor:
But I do think writing has a relationship to the body and its rhythms. I believe Gertrude Stein when she says:
Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is. I said I found this out first in listening to Basket my dog drinking. And anybody listening to any dog’s drinking will see what I mean.
Even Sir Philip Sidney’s inspirational quote, “Look in thy heart and write”, packs more of a punch when you remember it is framed by quill-chewing and head-slapping — the whole body involved in the marathon of a sonnet sequence:
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “Look in thy heart and write.”
T.S. Eliot went further, arguing that the heart “wasn’t deep enough […] one must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts”. Eliot the modernist is exaggerating for rhetorical effect here — but this does sound strangely like a list of the internal organs he fired up to write his poem “Journey of the Magi” (1927), which he claimed he did rapidly, drunk and on an empty stomach,
in three quarters of an hour after church time and before lunch one Sunday morning, with the assistance of half a bottle of Booth’s gin.
There are no physical descriptions of the South Korean poet Lee Seong-bok in Indeterminate Inflorescence (Allen Lane), a collection of 470 “notes from a poetry class” made by his students and translated by Anton Hur. But Lee’s programme for the would-be poet is all about cultivating an almost-physical attitude towards pen and page. Throwaway your theories, he seems to say, and be. “The brain is deliberate and social, but the hand is closer to desire and the unconscious. A poem is like a finger that breaks out of your head.” It’s easy to imagine the lecturer’s emphatic gestures.
Lee’s memorable sayings to his students often make the writer’s mind a body. Here are some of my favourites:
You can tell from just its first line whether a poem was written with the brain or the mouth. Say the lines out loud, prod them with your tongue. The content doesn’t matter at all. Or to be more accurate, only by writing with your mouth will your content shine.
Our hands always speak the truth. Trust your hands and write as fast as you can.
When playing the zither, you must press down lightly if you want a deep and soft tone. This lightness is more important than decorating your poem with fancy images.
You’ve seen slow-motion videos of a boxer’s face being crumpled by a punch. Or videos where a ball warps against a bat. If you can get your words to recreate that feeling, you can die and go to heaven right away.
Stick closer to one’s own body when writing. Like when dragging along a broken bicycle or moving a heavy jar of kimchi — holding such things loosely or at a distance will drain you of your strength.
Poetry must be written like a boxer boxed into the corner of a ring. When boxed in, use the tensile strength of the ropes to bounce back into the fight.
A wounded pinkie toe, that’s poetry.
NOTES
Indeterminate Inflorescence is published in the US by Sublunary Editions:
https://sublunaryeditions.com/products/indeterminate-inflorescence-lee-seong-bok
Lee Seong-bok’s poetry isn’t currently published in the UK, but these prose poems, translated by Yea Jung Park, give a flavour of its vivid physicality:
Sterling Sir, I’m happy to have found your work! Be well, Geraldine
Just a note to say it does look like Indeterminate Inflorescence is available in the UK (https://uk.bookshop.org/a/20/9780241728154) - I only checked because I was ordering myself a copy! Thanks for drawing it to my attention - sounds like something I'll really enjoy.