In his great piece on Philip Whalen, Travis Nichols excerpts a beautiful mess from a Whalen poem, and then comments:
Many poets would instinctively cut the opacity and the interiority out of this poem in favor of straight imagery and profundity. They would skim the “pure and lucid wisdom of the Buddha” off the top and leave the rest to rot. And for good reason. It’s terrifying to see someone purposefully leave all of it in–no one would accept such a submission!–but by doing so, and by addressing the struggle between private thought and public expression as the major theme of his work, Whalen’s poetry shines.
So true! It seems a habit of an overly workshopped mind to cut to the elevated and profound and “leave the rest to rot.” In a fiction workshop I attended last year, Chris Bachelder made the case that workshops have the unfortunate tendency to remove bumps. But some works are bumpy, and should remain that way. Excising such bumps takes away the work’s singularity.
Whalen’s poems are full of bumps. One finds them even in very short poems. Here’s “Old Age Echoes”:
Lately I’ve seen myself
As fat naked waddling baby
All alone in the yard
Bright flowers
Silver lawnmower blades
Big dog approaching (friendly?)
Berries
What are fears or dangers?
I imagine that, were this poem subjected to a workshop, an earnest, crosseyed workshopper would ask, “What are the berries doing here? I don’t think the poem needs berries.” The crosseyed poet would have a point: what the berries are doing thematically–a safe and pretty counterpoint to the poem’s dangers–has already been done by the “bright flowers” three lines above. But, in my imagined scenario, this workshopper does not have the last word. A fierce monk walks into the classroom and whacks the crosseyed poet across the back with a stick. Numerous times. His eyes uncross, and he says with relief: “Oh yes, those berries are correct in that location. The phenomenal world contains berries. Keep the berries.” The berries are no longer inessential repetition. Seen differently, they become vital, assymetrical bumps.
Jack Kerouac made this case in different terms in his “Statement on Poetics” in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology: “Add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason, since reason can never win out, because poetry is NOT a science.”
In Whalen and Kerouac’s case, the choice to include berries, bumps, and alluvials has to do to with the aesthetics of zen. Nichols writes: “In his book Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968), Thomas Merton compares the true Zen artist’s mind to a mirror, a reflective surface that does not strive for meaning or poetic beauty.” The choice to include berries, then, could be the result of an attempt to mirror the phenomenal world without intentions of beauty or meaning. Reality has berries, poem has berries.