`The Decisive Aspect of Things'

“I wonder where all of the carefully observed objects have gone in poetry – the willingness to let a poem hinge on the decisive aspect of things.”

That’s the poet Ron Slate in his review of Francis Ponge’s Mute Objects of Expression, posing a question I’ve asked myself, and not just of poetry. The taste is personal. I enjoy the work of writers who render creation – objects, yes, but cats, clouds, flowers, beaches, barns and children, too. It’s a measure of their engagement with the world and their attentiveness even to familiar detail. Paradoxically, devotion to the appearance of the physical world, to “the decisive aspect of things,” is a spiritual impulse. Hopkins’ “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon” is more than a bird but it is a bird.

Louise Bogan shared this devotion. After reading Updike’s Rabbit, Run in 1960, the poet and longtime poetry critic for The New Yorker wrote to a friend: “And the flashes of weather and of the `American scene’: drugstores, highways, main streets, factories, used car lots!” For once, I endorse the use of an exclamation point. Updike, at his best, is a superb observer of objects. In A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, editor Mary Kinzie includes a selection from Bogan’s journals, “The Time of Day.” It begins with a passage from Thoreau’s journal, dated Feb. 5, 1855, that Bogan transcribed into her own in 1933:

“In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or characters of the day, as it affects our feelings. That which was so important at the time cannot be unimportant to remember.”

Thoreau’s caveat – “in a few words” – is critical. My father was the world’s worst storyteller. He had no sense of pacing or of his listeners’ patience. Every story, even a retelling of the route he followed to a friend’s house, was hobbled by needless detailing of wrong turns, sights seen and unseen, and estimates of gas consumption. Bogan’s detail selection is generous but judicious. In a journal entry from 1934 she writes:

“The month, the time of day; children are coming indoors from roads bordered by orchards heavy with apples, into rooms with looped-back curtains, and old mirrors. Among the dahlias and asters of the lots gardens, their mothers pull the dried clothes from the line, reaching their arms above their heads so that their cotton dresses under the shawl thrown about their shoulders are pulled tightly upward from the thin apron string binding their waists. The wind rattles the lattice over the wellhead; the house smells of freshly baked bread. It is already dark; the month goes on; the apples will be gathered tomorrow.

“The age when one looks at the date on pennies, watches people’s eyes and mouths, believes that something marvelous may go on in a shuttered house.”

No fuzzy impressionism, vague generalities or Thomas Wolfe windiness -- only particulars, with feeling. This is from Bogan’s journal of 1932:

“The early darkness in September comes as the most blessed relief in the year. Pale green celery tops sprout out of bags in the delivery boys’ carts and a mottled light falls over the shady side of the street, reflected from the windows in high buildings. Early morning in September.”

This is Edward Hopper in prose. In a 1951 poem Bogan writes of a catalpa tree: “Only the long pods remained; the tree was drained like a sieve.” This is precise, not precious, because catalpa pods resemble green beans washed in a sieve or colander. In “The Dragonfly” (1961) she describes the insect as “made of almost nothing / But of enough / To be great eyes / And diaphanous double vans.” Entomologists tell us 90 percent of a dragonfly’s brain is devoted to visual perception – like an ideal poet’s.

Not surprisingly, Slate wrote about A Poet’s Prose last year, and reproduces an early Bogan essay, “The Springs of Poetry,” omitted by Kinzie from her collection. In it, she refers to Yeats’ late work as “poems terribly beautiful, in which the hazy adverbial quality has no place, built of sentences reduced to the bones of noun, verb, and preposition.” Precision is somehow reliant on concision. We’re back to Thoreau’s “in a few words.”

I bought a new dress shirt on Thursday, and as I removed it from the plastic wrapper and detached the label and its loop of string from a button, I found myself looking forward to pulling out the pins with their egg-shaped heads, the cardboard backing, the folded sheet of tissue paper and the cardboard collar giving crisp form to the fabric – all the familiar details of a mundane and beautiful collection of objects. Let me borrow something else from Slate -- a passage about Ponge from Italo Calvino’s Why Read the Classics?:

“Taking the most humble object, the most everyday action, and trying to consider it afresh, abandoning every habit of perception, and describing it without any verbal mechanism that has been worn by use. And all this, not for some reason extraneous to the fact in itself (for, say, symbolism, ideology or aesthetics), but solely in order to reestablish a relationship with things as things."