It might help us to speak not only of what poetry can do, but of what it cannot do.
Seth Abramson is excited about what he calls meta-modernism:
I believe that poetry is on the cusp of something big—a sea change in which we begin to arc generatively toward other creative genres (most notably, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, music, and stand up comedy) rather than retreating farther still into the more obscure recesses of literary theory and those 1950s visual arts techniques now going by the misnomer “Conceptualism.” 1/3/14 Facebook
Abramson’s list of “other creative genres” leaves out the visual arts, which turns out to be part of the problem (1950s conceptualist techniques).
Two things must be said at this point.
First, pre-modern, pre-Painted Word, pre-Conceptual painting can be a great help to us here in terms of how the known, physical universe is depicted scientifically.
Second, Abramson’s “sea change” of meta-modernism (growing out of Modernism and post-Modernism’s eclectic freedoms) in its multi-genre mingling, calls to mind a passage from Da Vinci’s 500 year old argument, in which painting (not respected then as much as vocalized, self-praising poetry) is found vastly superior to poetry for ostentatiously simple reasons: painting can reveal harmony instantaneously, permanently, and uniquely, even to animals, whereas poetry must laboriously and slowly show a face, for instance, part by part, so that any united proportion is hopelessly dismembered.
Poetry does not imitate nature. It imitates spoken words.
Now listen to how modern and how like Abramson! Da Vinci sounds when discussing what poetry can do:
…the poet remains far behind the painter with respect to the representation of corporeal things, and, with respect to invisible things, he remains behind the musician.
But if the poet borrows assistance from the other sciences, he may be compared to those merchants at fairs who stock varied items made by different manufacturers. The poet does this when he borrows from other sciences, such as those of the orator, philosopher, cosmographer and suchlike, whose sciences are completely separate from that of the poet. Thus the poet becomes a broker, who gathers various persons together to conclude a deal. If you wish to discover the true office of the poet, you will find that he is nothing other than an accumulator of things stolen from various sciences, with which he fabricates a deceitful composition—or we may more fairly say a fictional composition. And in that he is free to make such fictions the poet parallels the painter, although this is the weakest part of painting.
Da Vinci’s poet as broker speech, if never met before, has to give the modern reader pause–Da Vinci’s poet as “accumulator of things stolen from various sciences” recalls every modern trope from the Cantos to collage, such that claims for “the new” by moderns are perhaps more mundane than people think; Abramson’s “poetry is on the cusp of something big” with “other creative genres,” depends, too, on Da Vinci’s formula, though of course we hate to rain on a poet’s parade.
More importantly, however: when Da Vinci says things like
Poet, your pen will be worn out before you have fully described something that the painter may present to you instantaneously using his science.
he is not hiding behind what Abramson calls the “recesses of literary theory” or “1950s visual arts techniques now going by the misnomer “Conceptualism.”
The physical universe and the manner in which poetry and painting are able to imitate it does not belong to speculative theory; it belongs to science, and poets would do well to understand it.
Poets cannot escape the eye and its expectations. The comparison with painting is not something the poet can brush aside; poets, painters, and their different mediums live in the same world and imitate the same things—but how differently!
As Da Vinci advises:
The only true office of the poet is to invent words for people who talk to each other. Only these words can he represent naturally to the sense of hearing because they are in themselves the natural things that are created by the human voice. But in all other respects he is bettered by the painter.
For a poet to close his ears to this will not help the poet at all. Even if Da Vinci the painter were merely bragging, it will profit the poet to wrestle with the whole notion of strengths and weaknesses of methods of imitation.
Most poets assume that words can do anything, and poetry is immune to material laws.
But is it?
