Language Driven Poetry
Richard Jackson
You have to imagine Dante, having escaped the horrors of the Inferno , as he stands on the shore of Purgatorio , still somewhat overconfident, and still somewhat confused. After all, he has just come from the bottom of Hell where time and space seem reversed, just passed Satan's dungeon tomb, has just looked Satan in the eye and had become "chilled and faint." Now, beside the huge mountain blown out of the land by Satan's fall, a bright light comes across the waters. That winding mountain of resentence seems impossible to climb. The light turns out to be an angel who pilots a ship of souls who have made it this far. When they disembark Dante recognizes a friend, Casella, a musician, and asks him for a song. What Casella sings holds everyone enthralled:"Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona" ("Love that speaks to me from inside my mind"). And why shouldn't Dante be enthralled by the song? After all, he wrote it, and did a whole analysis of it in his Convivio . The point is, Dante is enthralled by the sound of his own words and gets distracted from his purpose. It doesn't take long for Cato, the stern taskmaster of the place, to berate them all, and everyone scatters "like a flock of pigeons," the simile, especially in contrast to the noble wings of the angel, suggesting something about their lowliness and chaotic disorganization.
The scene is a characteristic one in the Commedia for Dante the poet once again satirizes Dante the pilgrim and main character of the poem for missing the point of the poem and getting enthralled with the sounds of words--whether they are of adulterers he mistakes for pure lovers as in the case of Paolo and Francesca, or irresponsible wanderers he mistakes for adventurers as in the case of Ulysses. About 500 years later another poet, Wordsworth, finds himself in a similar predicament in his poem "Resolution and Independence." Here's the scene:he's out walking one morning in the calm woods just after a violent night storm, and he's refreshed, ready to notice everything; he's put aside all memory of "the ways of men, so vain and melancholy" and is just going to observe. In the space of another stanza (IV), though, he's gotten depressed:"As high as we have mounted in delight / In our dejection do we sink as low." Then he's happy the next stanza, then sad the next. Why?-- he starts to think of "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty." Then he follows the language of this wildly out of control manic depressive self into a state where he remembers Chatterton, the boy suicide poet and ends up with the most melancholy lines of the poem:"We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness" (VII).
If those lines sound a little posed, if the rhymes jangle hopelessly, then I think you have heard it correctly. Think of what's happened:the poem has vacillated between storm and calm, joy and sorrow, clarity and madness-- and through it all the sensitive poet himself keeps us reminded of how much he feels:he feels, he says, because he is a sensitive, feeling, observing poet of deep emotion and sudden attentiveness to the world around him. But then what happens to our sensitive poet? He sees a man he first mistakes for a stone (IX) and then a sea beast-- we might believe the stone, though not from such and observant and feeling poet, but a sea-beast in the middle of the forest? Not! Okay, so he describes the man, tells him, in contradiction to what he was just moaning about that the day promises to be "glorious," then asks him what he does for a living. As soon as the leech gatherer starts to speak, Wordsworth notices the quality of his voice and style, only that he gathers leeches, then gets completely lost in the sound of the man's voice and loses track of the content in stanza XVI:"But now his voice to me was like a stream / Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide." In the next stanza he has to ask the man again what he did because he never heard a thing, and the man just smiles and repeats his story. What does Wordsworth do? he again gets carried away by the sound of the speech and imagines the man walking around the moor. At the end he praises the leech gatherer's firm mind and vows he'll always remember him.
But what is he going to remember? He hasn't heard a thing. On the one hand this is Wordsworth making fun of his own memory poems, his own sensitivity as a poet, his sort of mindless enjoyment of the sound of words. On the other hand, the firmness of the leech gatherer contrasts with the vacillation of Wordsworth, and the leech gatherer does suggest the qualities of humility, satisfaction with the solitary self, --resolution and independence--that the poet sometimes lacks. In fact he himself is like the leech gatherer who he described earlier in the poem as like a "cloud" which "heareth not the loud winds when they call." So what has happened here. The poem fails to do what it sets out to do and what it says it does on the thematic surface, and the satire is directed at actions on that level of memory and meaning. But the poem gathers something implicit in the resonance of images and echoes of observation, that is, in the undercurrents and flow of the language itself almost unknown to Wordsworth the character but certainly main point of the poem of Wordsworth the poet. In other words the real action of the poem is the action of the language that operates, one might say, in spite of the will of the character Wordsworth and as part of the imagination of Wordsworth the poet. In the end, the poem is both warning about the power of language and its music to mislead us, and describing its essential qualities in poetry as precisely that desire and ability to mislead. What the language does, in fact, is discover what the conscious mind could not see, but only sense, through the imagination. In his note to "The Thorn,"
Wordsworth clearly understands this essential power of language as sound and as physical thing as opposed to meaning and representation when he writes about "the interest which the mind attaches to words, not only as symbols, but as things, active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion."
The idea that the sound of words can mislead the poet runs throughout Dante's Commedia , of course, and indeed it is an idea that derives from classical times, extends throughout the Renaissance, through the Romantics as we have seen with Wordsworth, and even down to our own day. In fact, in La Vita Nuova (XXV), Dante asks several of Beatrice's friends how his poems measure up, and they tell him the poems are awful because they fail to communicate his love-- that their content is deficient. But behind that idea is also the notion that language itself, its pure sound, is what leads the poet on a journey of discovery about what he or she has to say in the first place, and that the failure is one of the music of language. Later in Purgatorio , he discusses his own new style of writing ("novo stile") with a poet from Lucca (Canto XXIV), a style he developed in reaction to that criticism in La Vita Nuova, and says that his language is now dictated by Love, that he merely finds a form for the language always already "dictated" to him by Love, to which the other poet replies that his own verse is too considered and planned. In our own day, Joseph Brodsky echoes this same idea when he writes:"what in the vernacular is called the voice of the Muse is, in reality, the dictate of language." And he goes on:"One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it is going to come out; and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since...often his thought carries him further than he reckoned." The idea echoes what Richard Hugo talks about in The Triggering Town when he describes the triggering subject as one that, for the poet, must be subverted by the "sound of words" that carries the poet and poem in unanticipated directions.
It is not a question here of arguing that poems are only about language, as some of the language poets argue, or that poems are most important for their themes as someone like Emerson tended to do. The point is simply that there is a tendency for poems to be primarily idea driven or language driven, and that the best poems are language driven, and the others tend to become propaganda, confession, or therapy. That does not mean that poems are best when they eschew ideas, only that the ideas in the better poems arise out of a play of language. In fact, without ideas poems would be only meaningless sound. As Seamus Heaney has written in The Redress Of Poetry :"Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things of this world." On the other hand, I suppose one could characterize the typical idea driven poem as one in which the connections and transitions are based upon links of concepts as in an essay, that they tend to rely on simply reporting memory in a rather unedited fashion, that they tend towards journalism, that the details are in the poem simply because they happened and not for any structural artistic reason, that the ultimate point of the poem tends to be that these things are important because they happened or happened to me and not because they have been transformed by language into a newly discovered whole. These poems I have in mind to criticize are poems of memory rather than imagination, of cliche rather than invention, narratives of past events rather than visions of possibility in language. They are static poems that report sensibility rather than poems of process that enact it.
The truth of the matter is that when I read a poem I care about the characters and events and ideas not because they happened but because an original and fresh engagement with language has led me to involve my own imagination with the play of metaphors and figures, syntax and rhythms, and that involvement has drawn me into the consciousness of the speaker, and so into her or his concerns. When I read Dante I can do so with great pleasure though disagree with much of the static dogma lurking behind it because the language involves me in a process of thinking and feeling where I can experience the doubts, hesitations, assertions, beliefs, suspicions, hopes and desires of his whole being as he faces a terrifying and bewildering set of events. As Earl Wasserman writes in The Subtler Language , what I have called an idea driven poem "directs us as modestly as possible to something outside itself," while a language driven poetry is real poetry "in which reference values are assimilated into the constitutive act of language; its primary purpose is to trap us in itself as an independent reality." So, for example, I can read Canto V of the Inferno and while I might disagree with the idea of having Minos assign the souls their places, and perhaps disagree in principle with the harsh sentence given to the adulterers, Paolo and Francesca, or to the idea of Hell in general, I can take delight in the way Dante the pilgrim is gradually seduced by language, and seduces us, and so the way in which Dante the poet must also have been seduced. At first he appropriately compares damned souls to starlings, ugly little pests of birds, then more dubiously to cranes, more graceful but not exactly noble, and then to doves, unbelievably and ironically an image of grace:the gradually better sounding similes put him in a faulty frame of mind that leads him to hear only the beautiful song of Francesca with its repeated and insistent "Amor." He is led to condone their sin that caused so much heartbreak in the same way the birds seem led along with their passive verbs:literally "borne," "driven," and "brought." The beauty and structure of the language in the Canto has carried the pilgrim -- and the reader-- to the point where we can understand how easy such a sin might be, how near own own fall into hell might be. This has happened because I as a reader have been caught up in an "independent reality" that is made up by certain vocabulary, rhythm and syntax that has discovered new relationships that I find interesting, original, and so challenging, engaging, involving. And I have been made aware both of the danger of that lure of language especially as Dante faints at the end abruptly pulling the rug out from under my experience, and the necessity of having language generate this imaginative action.
Talking about the Inferno has its limitations here because there is always the huge split between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim, with most of the attention going to the pilgrim, and my aim here is to try to describe the experience of writing from the poet's point of view. What happens when we turn to a lyric poem of Dante? The third poem in the Convivio, mentioned earlier, provides a clue. The Canzone begins:

Love that speaks to me from inside my mind,
With chaotic mindless passion for my lady,
Causes me to think of her in such a way
that my thoughts are diverted like the wind.
Love's speech is filled with sounds so blind
and sweet that my soul, which senses what he says,
exclaims:I no longer have the power or the way
to speak what I hear about my passion.

What happens here is that the inner language he hears is almost beyond his comprehension, and seemingly beyond his expression, yet it has a power, a reality as Earl Wasserman would say, of its own. he then goes on to suggest he will try to follow this language and "say in words the things that love can say." The poem then goes in to build an additive and intensifying structure moving from simple and obvious metaphors to more abstract and transcendental ones, from a concrete image of the sun to the God it suggests to the bliss his existence suggests to the "celestial virtue" that is behind that and the people who would enjoy it to a vision of Paradise-- a string of metaphors that tumble along a little path of linguistic connections in the Italian. But the language and the metaphors have gotten away from him--from his original view of their limitations-- and in the last stanza he has to stop and address the poem:

Canzone, it seems that you speak something contrary
to the speech that a sister muse of yours has said;
because this lady, that you have made into some humble maid,
she calls proud, and calls disdainful of any
love.

Dante gets around the discrepancy between the muses of Love and History by suggesting that history has only seen his beloved lady in a subjective way-- and he ends up siding with language and imagination over fact, for he tells the poem to go on, if apologetically, and continue to sing the lady's praises, continue to follow wherever the metaphors take it. The powerless language he sensed in stanza one has become a reality of its own:the poem finally, enacts, and is as much about this power of language as it is about love. I am reminded here of Wordsworth's notion in his "Essay on Epitaphs, III"-- "words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with:they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." What Dante, like Wordsworth, resists here is the notion that language only dresses up our words, that we have an idea or feeling or event that we then try to find words to describe. It is a fairly common assumption, especially among beginning writers and critics, but one that leads to a static gaze rather than imaginative vision, that leads to language as a counter-spirit that works against us when we do not follow its impulses wherever they may lead, even, as in the case here of Dante, to a vision of his beloved much at odds with his experience of her.
A generation later, Petrarch, writing a more earthy and diverse love poetry, his scattered rhymes ("rime sparse"), that seem less intent on achieving some conscious aim and so have less of the tension between thematic intent and linguistic variance. For Petrarch, the creative tension lies in the very notion of possibility, for his world, especially at the height of the Black Death, is filled with uncertainty, with shifting shapes and forms of feeling and idea, and so he creates a "shifting style" ("vario stile") to deal with the metamorphic world that confronts him and his beloved, Laura. Where Dante seems worried about the tension between intent and final meaning, Petrarch revels in it. His Rime 73, a canzone, is a good example. Desire for the calming effects of love forces him so speak, he says, but more than that, speech itself pushes him forward, enlightens him and he "melts in the sound of his own words like a man of ice in the sun." However, this speech undercuts his original hope for repose and calm and he is carried away to "continue these amorous notes." At least these words of love will lead to pity, he suggests, and goes on to explore an image for Laura's eyes. Finally, near the end, he suggests that if Love would unloosen his tongue he could say things so strange and wondrous that they would make the listener weep. he is no longer, he says, what he was at the beginning of the poem, for the wounds of love he has discovered where he hoped to find soothing effects have in a sense killed him, destroyed his former self. What he has discovered is the power of the poem to bring him to a realm almost beyond language. In the end, while he may be emotionally exhausted from speaking with the beloved, and while he ironically he thinks of the painful talk as "sweet," he is still willing to speak with language itself which has led him towards this self discovery. In his letter to his friend Tomasso da Messina, Petrarch writes:be careful not to let any of those things that you have plucked remain with you too long, for the bees would enjoy no glory if they did not transform those things they found into something that was better." Petrarch is the opportunist of the imagination, ready to use his shifting style to change course, to abandon his original ideas, -- his poems are always acts of discovery. Even when he acknowledges some tension between intent and what language delivers, his tone is more adaptable than Dante. His poem XLIX ("To His Words") is a good example, for instead of bemoaning his fate his castigates and accuses his own language only in the end to suggest that there is a solution in the language of the poem that lies beyond language, in sight and vision, in the unspoken:

I'm fed up with guarding the vague borders
your meanings desert for lies, my ungrateful words,
and still you begin your campaigns to try to purge
all emotion from my love, bringing me shame and surrender;
the more I send messengers to regain my honor
the more your envois seem detained, or lured
to some greater meanings, or have their senses blurred,
letters stolen, visions lost in the labyrinths of some dreamer.
My tears can't hear commands to make them halt,
but march on, picking up stray syllables along the way
or hiding in the roadside bushes in times of peace--
and these famous sighs, they mope around the tents, play
cards or dice with the malcontents always ready to find fault--
Only my eyes have phrases the heart can read and seize.

What Petrarch is getting at is a language beyond language:for him, the language of poetry is always in the impossible position of trying to say something beyond itself, and ironically it can only do so by exploring itself. This is precisely the situation Dante describes in Paradiso XXVI how Adam first speaks to him:

Sometimes an animal will tremble in its skin
and thus reveal its feelings from within
as he moves his own cover from inside.

And a little bit later Dante experiences the same sort of sense of the physicality of language itself, language and words as stuff, as texture, as beyond rational meaning, when he tries to describe his final vision of God:"my words have no more strength than does a babe / wetting its tongue, still at its mother's breast." Curiously what he has to do is forget, not simply because memory fails, or his tongue "lacks eloquence" to report what he saw, or that each instant brings "more forgetfulness,"-- the reason is that memory, the static past, interferes with imagination, vision, with his and our reexperiencing of the vision. He is, he says, like the "geometer trying to square the circle." All metaphors necessarily fail.
It is at this point, too, that we can begin to understand what Dante and Petrarch have been getting at in describing the language of poetry:the experience of poetry is the very process of poetry, the struggle of language to discover what is buried within itself rather than to simply report what happened to the poet or what he or she thought or felt. Brodsky describes this when he writes that the experience of poetry for the poet involves "the sensation of coming into direct contact with language, or more precisely, the sensation of immediately falling into dependence on it, on everything that has already been uttered, written, accomplished in it." This certainly explains why Dante, for instance, in La Vita Nuova , a little book that traces his love for Beatrice from physical to spiritual with a few backslidings along the way, intersperses the poems with commentaries on their structure, a diversion on language and metaphor, and why he generally pays more attention, finally, to the poetics of the poems rather than their themes (though today most teachers teach only the poems as themes divorced from the prose and not what the prose is trying to draw attention to, the primacy of language as a structure of thought).
In our own age Robert Frost is one of the poets who has articulated this aspect of language most clearly. One apocryphal story has Edward Thomas, the English poet, and Frost walking through the countryside:Frost shouts to a farmer in a distant field who cannot hear his words, and the farmer shouts back. Frost then tells Thomas that "the cadence of the answer was as clear as that of the question." For Frost, the "tones, pauses and rushes and intensities of sound are more revealing than the definition value of the words." In fact, Frost goes on to assert that "the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words.... I shall show the sentence sound saying all that the sentence conveys with little or no help from the meaning of the words." His own poem, "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same," actually a love poem to his mistress, Kay Morrison, enacts this notion. Frost describes, from Adam's point of view, how the birds, "hearing the daylong voice of Eve," have "added to their own an oversound, / Her tone of meaning but without the words." More than that her very being, given by that sound, that "tone of meaning," is "in their song" and "persists" into the surrounding "woods."
Sound as being, sound as self:it is language here, as gesture and music that creates its own lasting reality:"Never again would birds' song be the same," and never again would Eve, or Adam, or us. The process of creating the self through language is endless, as Petrarch knew in writing his 366 poems to Laura, and as Dante knew in writing about Beatrice first in the La Vita Nuova's 3 dozen or so poems, then in the Convivio . Curiously both poets attempted also to find a place for their love where the endless linguistic process would stop only to find that it can't, Petrarch in his Trionfi where Laura tells him she loves him, but also what he must do to gain a better self, and Dante in the Paradiso where Beatrice's visions for him are beyond words. This constant metamorphic quality is expressed, as we have seen, in Petrarch's shifting style, or as Frost said, in the shifting drama of words within a sentence. Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space :"the spiraled being who, from outside, appears to be a well-invested center, will never reach his center. The being of man is an unsettled being which all expression unsettles. In the reign of the imagination, an expression is hardly proposed, before being adds another expression, before it must be the being of another expression."
The process of language in the poem, then, leads to redefinition. One poem that enacts this is Richard Wilbur's "The Writer." The poem opens with a three stanza analogy--stolen ultimately from Petrarch-- of the writer, here his daughter, as a sort of sea captain "in the prow of the house," with her typewriter keys rattling "like a chain hauled over a gunwale." Then he waxes overly poetic:"the stuff / Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy." The figure has carried him to the sentimental because so forced and artificial:he has been forcing the language as Wordsworth warned, and the "counter spirit" of language subverts his poem. How can he save the poem, his vision, her? He resorts to silence, a pause, and criticizes his "thought and its easy figure." In fact the idea of thought carried by a figure of speech rather than the figure of speech revealing the thought is precisely the problem here. When she starts up again he almost falls back into the boat image with the pun on "strokes," but again resorts to the silence in contrast to his own prattle. It is from this silence, finally, that the poem naturally emerges and the images of passage and life also shift to their opposite, an image of death-- the bird trapped in the room being a traditional image for that. Once again, however, he could be stuck in a cliche, but he allows the image to progress in a more personal way, with no immediate intention of linking it up to any analogy, and gradually the story the language tells defines the emotion he has for his daughter. Her thoughts in writing, his own writing, too, is like that bird, which finally clears "the sill of the world." The poem, then, enacts a process of gradual definition, and self correction:the cliche of the opening is rejected for silence, a step back, and then an opposite image presents itself an is allowed to carry the poet to a more complex and unique analogy.
A different process of redefinition, more image oriented, occurs in Keats' "To Autumn." The poem opens with an overplus of sensual imagery-- even the sounds of the words, "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," cause the reader to say the words slowly, and the syntax with its anaphora based on the preposition "to," its sense of "more, / And still more," provide the sense of "o'er-brimmed" excess. In stanza two the images keep intensifying until there is no place for them to develop except a sense of indolence with Autumn personified and, like one of Breughel's drunken, pot-bellied farmers, "sitting careless on a granary floor." The image of the "hook" suggests not only the harvest but the grim reaper, though that is suppressed for a few lines until we sense that the indolence, the lack of activity, does indeed suggest death in the form of "the last oozings hours by hours." So the pattern of images, the language, has swept the poet to a point where excess of life has revealed a form of death-- another reversal of images as we saw in "The Writer." But on the other hand the poem itself is building a vocabulary where the two opposites are associated, and so in the last stanza, where the poet seems to be describing the barren landscape of death, of Winter that follows Autumn, the oxymoronic language could just as well describe Spring. For example, the "clouds bloom the soft-dying day," and the "stubble plains" have a "rosy hue," both images blending ends and beginnings. Moreover, the gnats are "borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies." The "full-grown lambs," of course, hold the opposite qualities in the term itself, an impossibility except in language. Finally, the crickets are singing, the birds are singing, and the swallows are "gathering" rather than dispersing as one would expect in describing an end. Simply by following the impulses of the language, by listening to the language as it develops, Keats is able to redefine time and mortality, to restructure his world, to create as Wasserman said, an "independent reality."
Cesare Pavese was one of the most narratively oriented lyric poets of the century, and what he called "image-narratives" present us, as Keats' poem did, with a further good example of how language drives the poem. In "Summer" he begins with a garden that is "bright," and the brightness is constituted by the color of the "dry grass" and the "light," a physical thing and an intangible thing, two elements that will continue to dictate how the poem evolves. Pavese uses the language as it unfolds in the poem in an imaginative way, allowing terms usually assigned to one object to be used for another. The light, not the heat, bakes the ground-- and yet, borrowing from the dry grass image and its sense of smell in the heat, he leaps to "The light smells of sea." That leads to the image of breath, then with the grass image, to hair, and so touch--and the hair holds, then, all these images of the garden:heat of passion, breath, light, in its "memory." The hair holding the memory of grass becomes metamorphosed into "remembered grass," another scene, really, where fruit drops, but that "thudding" is associated with "pulsing of the blood," the passion earlier. At this point the woman's whole head becomes the subject, as it exists in that air which holds the smell of hair and grass, and of fruit, too--and from the head he goes back immediately to another part of the head, the eyes, but then combines two elements from earlier to arrive at "heat of memory." The poem is starting to create a new vocabulary. The words in the third stanza are the words of the poem, but also what fills the air, and they fall like the fruit and "barely graze" the woman. When he then says that her face shines "like light from the sea" we remember how the "light smells of sea" and the image becomes one of synesthesia. In a moment the language pulls him in another direction:the words and their opposite, silence, are both like fruit, and so the silence in her face can "touch the heart with a soft / thud." The word "thud" here resonates with the notion of fruit dropping, words and silence, pulsing blood of passion, hurt (the graze). Now the language has developed a vocabulary where the conclusion can simply associate the images on the next plane:the falling fruit, bruised, and the graze, suggest pain, and the language of memory earlier combines to give us the sense that the silence is like "an old pain" that "still" persists. I have traced this poem in detail to suggest how the poet, letting the play of language dictate the progress of the images, arrives at an unexpected conclusion:what began as a description of a bright garden, almost edenic, ends with a sense of pain and loss.
The Slovene poet Tomaz Salamun describes this process of language in a recent interview:"The poet is a hunter, not an expresser. You express what you already have. The inexpressible is like the beast in the woods that the hunter always knows only by its tracks. The very fact that we can't describe it adequately now, searching as we are with various metaphors and similes, shows what a powerful thing it is, what attraction it has." On a more nuts and bolts level he says:"Basically, what I'm trying to do is -- with a word or phrase-- to catch the sacred seed of everything, what is at the center of the fruit, and open it up. The poem goes for the inexpressible, a kind of hidden God's space.... One word then gets carried to another word, tries to pry it open or hit its center, but it hits not at the middle but a side -- so there are ambiguities, too, the inexpressible." His poem, Birthdays," is a good example. The poem begins with images of his birthday presents-- a sort of random list that mixes concrete and abstract images, and the image of the mirror with its border of outdoor images already starts, with the idea of furlough, to give the poem an expansive feel. That expansiveness suggests an ease, like watching the movies, and while the image of Jean Harlow is funny at first, the more somber aspects come out in the generalization about lonely men, only to be undercut again with the bleach reference. From there the poem leaps to New York, another art world and a person he met there in a series of very quick associations linked simply by images:it is crucial that the links seem accidental, or not related to the essences of images. The army and New York, for instance, are linked only by population; Harlow and Rauschenberg by their two arts of cinema and painting. The Tatyana Grossman lines are all related to the notion of identity, and so link back to the idea of the birthday and mortality-- she in a sense doesn't exist because she doesn't have papers. He leaps from that, though, back to his apartment, to music, and to question even why he writes the poem. Of course, the images are working to reverberate off each other:the reference to Tommy suggests something about Tatyana's isolation, and also, we must now see under all this, to Salamun's own loneliness. After all, the only sentences in the present tense here are the lines about lonely men, the line "Everyone has gone to Long Island" and the last line-- all suggesting, uncovering, really, the poet's isolated and melancholy condition hiding under the pretense of comic, almost manic assertion. One wants to read the last line by borrowing from the other two present tense references:"maybe I am writing this because I am so lonely," though that would produce a sloppily sentimental ending. Instead, the progression of images hunts out, to use Salamun's own words, the inexpressible, profound sense of isolation. The freely associative language produces a freedom here that the poet's situation would otherwise deny.
Ironically, following the dictates of language, as Dante and Brodsky call them, leads to an imaginative freedom:the language of poetry gives us what Frost called a "momentary stay against confusion," against the evils of the world. The Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti, imprisoned three times in concentration camps under the Nazis, was certainly aware of such evil. His poem, "The Seventh Eclogue," was written to his wife from a camp in Serbia, begins with an assertion of the power of language to create an alternative world, to free itself and the poet from the camp:

Do you see the night, the wild oakwood fence lined with barbed wire,
and the barracks, so flimsy that the night swallowed them?
Slowly the eye passes the limits of captivity
and only the mind, the mind knows where the wire is.
You see, dear, this is how we set our imaginations free.
Dream, the beautiful savior, dissolves our broken bodies
and the prison camp leaves for home.

Still, despite the language's power, despite the heart's freedom, the poet is conscious that the wire around the camp is tight:he is conscious of the limits of imagination, but continues despite, or perhaps because of those limits. As the poem progresses he imagines his homeland, and in a sense that imagining makes it so present he begins to picture what it must be like-- the images keep expanding away from the camp as the language follows an associative progression. His own position is to try to imagine his freedom for a moment, even though the evil of the world surrounds him. He is writing a letter, after all, and his words are so inadequate as opposed to what his physical presence would be to his wife that they become a sort of prison themselves. That is why his very act of writing attempts to surmount language even as it is trapped in its physical nature:"I write poems the way I live, / in darkness, / blind, crossing the paper like a worm." What he means by blind is free, not guided by some ultimate goal, for that would remind him of the various strict rules and regulations by which he was forced to live:one word simply follows another in a natural, developing progression so that the poet discovers what possibilities lie before him through that unfolding.
In this state he waits for "a free, a human fate." By the end of the poem, he lies "on the plank, like a trapped animal, among worms," that last simile suggesting that he too has become like his dying words. In a sense he is already in the grave, but he makes one final leap of language by asking his wife to imagine where he is, how he is, so that in a way they meet beyond the daily existence of each of them, in a realm of imagination, of language beyond language:
The fleas
attack again and again, but the flies have quieted down.
Look it's evening, captivity is one day shorter.
And so is life. The camp sleeps. The moon shines
over the land and in its light the wires are tighter.
Through the window you can see the shadows of the armed guards
thrown on the wall, walking among the noises of the night.

The camp sleeps. Do you see it? Dreams fly.
frightened, someone wakes up. He grunts, then turns in the tight space
and sleeps again. His face shines. I sit up awake.
The taste of a half smoked cigarette in my mouth instead of the taste
of your kisses and the calmness of dreams doesn't come.
I can't die, I can't live without you now.

Now imagination and language in the figure of the moon sees only the reality, the tighter wires. And yet language has allowed the poet to escape enough so that the world is one of shadows cast on the walls and disembodied voices, disembodied language. In the barracks words have been replaced by a prisoner's grunts. This is a world of limited freedom, a world where the power of the imagination to escape fate is almost but not quite overcome by the facts of imprisonment:thus even the man grunting and indecipherable language in sleep is able to turn in his small space and his face "shines." In the end the poet can neither live nor die, be merely imprisoned or free, live in the imagination or reality, use words or not use them:his only hope is what goes beyond the words, continues their process of development and extension in the form of the letter, the dream he hopes his wife sees.
We might take a look at Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez in his poem, "Tomb of the Imagination" to extend for ourselves this sense of language. The poem describes how a stonemason "wanted, stone upon stone, / wall after wall, to raise an image to the wind, / to the unchaining wind of the future." What he tries to build is a structure beyond the physical limitations of his art, a "structure capable of the ethereal." As a result his "imagination lifted stones made of feathers, / walls made of birds." But these "wingbeats" of the imagination do not last long and he finally must resort to stone, to the elements of the limited physical world:"Stone by stone it weighs down and crushes / all it encloses, even a world of living desire." What the man is constructing, in effect, is "his own prison." What the poet constructs is a prison whose walls are the words, the very language he uses to build with:indeed, Hernandez was in prison as he wrote this poem, and the stones are in a real sense his words. What the words, the stones, can do is point towards something beyond that remains, like true freedom, always unattainable. And yet, because the stonemason has been able to use his imagination earlier, now "in his work / he and the wind were driven headlong" and if that wind and he are no longer "unchained" as he hoped in the beginning, there is at least some sense in which a measure of freedom has been achieved.
The language of imagination here is not a final state, it is not a thing merely achieved, but something one strives with and after:it becomes in the case of both Hernandez and Radnoti the motivating force of life. It provides a certain degree of freedom that, if imaginary, is also a kind of reality that must constantly, as I have suggested earlier, be built and rebuilt. The Slovene poet, Edvard Kocbek, in his little poem, "I'm Not Played Out," talks about the "dangerous game of words" that the poet undertakes. Poetry makes its world, it's freedom, out of the tools of the imagination, words. Thus, "Freedom is the terrible freedom of nothingness," he says, and sets the writer "apart, / hidden in the earth" as Hernandez's stonemason is. Kocbek understand the limits of imagination as an opportunity to keep imagining, to keep inventing a new language. He sees the limits of the imagination as a reponsibility to keep establishing his freedom through language. That is why he says he will always continue generating new words with a new freedom" "I will pronounce / unheard of words through aeons, perhaps through / all eternity...." One is reminded here of Petrarch's statement in Rime 170:"I have never been able to shape a word that is understood by anyone but me." What he is getting at is the way words go beyond us, always say more and less than what we thought they might say.
Perhaps the ultimate case along these lines is Wislawa Symborska's ironic "Unwritten Poem Reviewed" in which the poem is a commentary on a poem that exists beyond language. The poem itself is dictated by the format of a review and the references suggest an inordinate allegiance to theme in the manner of too many college literature professors. Only at the end does she mention "happy-go-lucky style / (a mixture of loftiness and common speech)" that would put the whole poem into question, subvert it. In concentrating so much on theme the poet subverts the notion of the primacy of theme, especially in the form of dogma, as the driving force in a poem, for this poem itself is making fun of the thematic interpretations a poem presents at the expense of the real force of the poem, the style. By fragmenting the descriptions theme and reference the poem the poem diminishes them in favor of the tone, the voice, the language that surrounds them.
Symborska is cleverly exploring the language beyond the language of the poem, yet also following the dictates of a language of critiques. In fact, the power of language to dictate to us derives from this very mystery of language, the notion of the unspoken that Dante appeals to at the end of the Paradiso. A more somber expression than Symborska's of this aspect of language appears in a poem, "What He Thought," by Heather McHugh which describes a meeting of a group of writers where one poet, quiet, seemingly conservative, tells the story of Giordano Bruno. This medieval thinker was burned at the stake in the Campo Dei Firoi in Rome for imagining the impossible, that life, for example, might exist on other planets. The poet describes how Bruno had an iron mask placed over his head so he would not incite the crowd to save him. And then the poet delivers his definition of poetry based upon this horrific scene of the burning thinker dying for freedom of thought:"Poetry is what he thought but did not say." It is the responsibility of the writer to keep freedom alive through the imagination, through language, to fight restraints upon freedom and restraints upon the imagination and upon language, whether in the form of something as overt as censorship or something as subtle as dogma, as a certain theme imposed upon the language rather than arising out of it. The writer's language, unique to her or him and their culture, is not merely a record, but a gesture always trying to escape itself, escape our human condition towards something universal even as it honors it in its particularity and uniqueness. The language of freedom is a language of silences beyond language, free of all constraints, something we can strive for but never achieve. If we fail to attempt that state, we fail not only ourselves but our world, in which case Kocbek's "freedom of nothingness" becomes merely nothingness, the death of both freedom and imagination.
Now I see my own language here pulling me to a few conclusions I did not anticipate even a few paragraphs ago. Today, in the light of how language is trapped and imprisoned by so many politicians, businessmen, journalists, advertisers and the like, that failure is the main danger threatening our various existences as unique cultures, that "nothingness" could imply our moral, social, spiritual, even our very literal, not simply linguistic, annihilation. Through our language we will create difference or be imprisoned by previous conceptions, we will be original or we will repeat the past-- poetically as well as socially, for the notion of following the dictates of language, of the ironic freedom it brings, is our best, most subversive weapon against the power structures that surround us. This is what Dante well knew in composing his Commedia with its savage attacks on his enemies. It is what Petrarch meant when he admonished his friend to "write neither in the style of one or another writer, but a style uniquely ours although gathered from a variety of sources." It is what Radnoti meant when he let his words follow one another across the page of his poem. Original style, original language, is freedom:it is that critical to our lives and histories. We will either be free though an imaginative language or we will simply disappear with the iron masks of our own dogma and preconceptions muffling our voices, our language.