'Reminding Me How Art Should Astound'

I wouldn’t say art is obligated to astound us, though much of the best art does, of course, in the same sense that an adept magician astounds us. I’m a sucker for good magic and good writing. I like the sensation of being dazzled by skill. Dante astounds. So does another Italian, Slydini. Astound is a pleasurable verb. OED: “to shock with alarm, surprise, or wonder; to strike with amazement.” (Shock and strike are violent verbs, not always pleasant.)  Astound suggests something marvelous in the etymological sense, and may even obligate us to feel envy: “I couldn’t do that.” Two poems astounded me. The first, by Matthew Arnold, I found thanks to Mike Juster:

“Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,

Of what we say we feel – below the stream,

As light, of what we think we feel – there flows

With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,

The central stream of what we feel indeed.”

In five unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, Arnold glosses human nature. Some will hear a prescient echo of Freud but Arnold knew what Sophocles knew, that we are self-deceiving mysteries. Our vaunted self-knowledge is a flattering myth. I was astounded a second time on Monday by “Divertimento,” a poem by Aaron Poochigian, a master of verbal dynamics. In a single poem he comes up with “Bronze-age Now,” “looky-here wind turbine” and “just, like, freaking wow.”  This is a guy at home in his language. He revels in it, even while describing that thoroughly unlovable feature of the American landscape, the wind farm. Here’s the conclusion of Poochigian’s poem:

    

“Bravissimo for the kinetic sculpture

dangling upward from a snag of earth

while juggling, with acquiescent rapture,

three arms’ worth

“of gale-force wind. Oh yeah, I wanna be

that gleam with crazy feelers going round.

Thank you, Ohio, for reminding me

how Art should astound.”

This is English you want to chew and savor. It’s artful but not arty. No cheap poeticisms. Poochigian talks about his appetite for words in an interview at Able Muse:

  

“I push myself to be Shakespearean in my vocabulary—not just to know a lot of words from different registers and provenances but to use them, too, in making twenty-first-century art. Before the Modernists, poets were not supposed to mix registers within a single work, and whole categories of words were considered ‘unpoetic.’ Then came the great break-down of barriers, for better and worse, and here we are. I do consciously mix, within a single poem, words that traditionally shouldn’t go together. I do it for shock value, yes, but also to achieve some specific aesthetic end.”