In his book The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo gives, more or less, the following advice to poets: leave your hometown. Drive to some other town. Learn little or nothing about that town, but reside in it until you feel a sense of emotional ownership, until it is meaningful to you (triggering) but without requiring your loyalty — i.e. you still feel free to misrepresent, edit, euphonize, or ignore details about the new town. After this process, you can write a poem “about” the new town in which your deepest loyalty is to the poem’s language.
Hugo theorizes that the reason this system works, and it does work, is because the information we get from experiencing something in our hometown is multilayered, challenging, shifting (what really happened in the abandoned lot when we were twelve, whether our parents had a drinking problem or not) — the information we get from experiencing something interpretable but unknown is subliminal, condensed, and fixed (think: the shape of a grain silo, the smell of the streets). The use of fixed information frees us to make art of it, rather than performing acts of analysis in which the subject matter dominates. Today’s materials will extend his ideas past small American towns: we’re headed towards a Triggering Turf.
I would put it this way: our actions, in many cases, have a stated purpose. We put frameworks of cause and effect on top of our experience, and although we monkey with the frameworks all the time, they’re legible to us and we can sometimes make a good faith attempt to say why we act as we do. We think that the things that happen in our town happen for a reason. Art, on the other hand, is purposive in the abstract. It feels like it has a point, a direction, a goal — but we don’t always really know what it is. This is why certain things are good at triggering poems — dreams, for example, overheard conversations, or patterns in the waves. In these towns, we don’t know the reason that things are as they are: so we, as poets, provide it. Because we invent it, we can bend it into chorus with the music of our language.
The conundrum this idea causes — the idea that there is an overintimacy with subject matter that imperils poetry — is a big deal for me, because I struggle with feelings of responsibility to accurately and meaningfully represent Chinese culture and literature, which I both study and write about. When most poets go to work, Ezra Pound is considered a genius — when I go to work, he’s considered to be deeply confused about China. Under this influence, I tend to come across cultural material that no longer strikes me as a fun set of playthings, but instead as months of backbreaking labor with a dictionary, a series of difficult phone calls, a moral responsibility to create an accurate picture of another culture, etc. But you don’t have that sense of responsibility, and that’s a good thing. Accordingly, I’m going to share some materials from and about China, but they’re not intended to educate anybody about the country: I mean it, don’t learn anything. Forget that any of the following came from China in the first place.
One of the things that I was shocked and dismayed to learn during my education in classical Chinese was that the Analects, the Dao De Jing, and the Art of War represent a tiny fraction of interesting and important ancient texts. If you want to read work that is less philosophical and more vibrant, you should be looking at the Yi Jing, the Book of Changes, which is a divinatory book designed to be used with sticks or coins. You throw the sticks down, examine their orientation, and their pattern leads you to several passages in the book. One of the better sites for ancient texts has an automated version that casts the sticks for you, and brings up the passages from the Yi Jing that your virtual sticks indicate. My hexagram today is abundance, lightning above, fire below: “The hexagram pictures a period of advanced civilization. However, the fact that development has reached a peak suggests that this extraordinary condition of abundance cannot be maintained permanently.” So we’d better move on as quickly as possible before the peak ebbs.
English-language poets tend to be familiar with Li Bai, Du Fu, and Tang poetry in general (to me, the best American example of this is Frank Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival, which is both intimately educated about Du Fu’s poetry and a thoughtful intervention in contemporary US politics) — Tang painting, however, gets considerably shorter shrift. I particularly like the monsters of Wu Daozi:
Another detail from the same painting is here, and much more here. The above painting is part of the rich interplay between Buddhism and Daoism in China during the Tang (a spread that inspired much period poetry, as well) — like the Book of Changes, it was made with a set of purposes in mind, whether to illustrate religious stories and win converts, to sell on the open market in art- and money-rich Chang’an, or to advance the technique of Chinese brushpainting. At the same time, though, it has a craft to it — purposiveness — that is not a direct effect of the purpose of the work, and that we can experience even without knowing anything about Wu Daozi, the Tang or Chang’an. Richard Hugo tells us that we can see this purposive patterning — he calls them ‘givens’ — even better from the perspective of a certain amount of innocence.
Another thousand years forward, more or less, and we can put our finger even more firmly on that simultaneous experience of innocence and triggering. China has a long tradition of folk tales, and one of the most famous collections of folk tales is the Tales of Liaozhai, which were beloved by Kafka, a writer who didn’t have too much other interaction with Chinese culture. But when you read the tales, you can see their appeal:
A DWARF
IN the reign of K’ang Hsi, there was a magician who carried about with him a wooden box, in which he had a dwarf not much more than a foot in height. When people gave him money he would open the box and bid the little creature come out. The dwarf would then sing a song and go in again. Arriving one day at Yeh, the magistrate there seized the box, and taking it into his yamen asked the dwarf whence he came. At first he dared not reply, but on being pressed told the magistrate everything. He said he belonged to a respectable family, and that once when returning home from school he was stupefied by the magician, who gave him some drug which made his limbs shrink, and then took him about to exhibit to people. The magistrate was very angry, and had the magician beheaded, himself taking charge of the dwarf. He was subsequently very anxious to get him cured, but unable to obtain the proper prescription.
The rest of the stories are translated here. Regardless of their culture of origin, folk tales get at what I think is one of the fundamental engines of art: I heard this story, I can’t forget it, but I can’t explain to you what it means or give you a synopsis. I just have to tell you the story. What is it that I like about “A Dwarf”? How weird it is (kidnapped and magically shrunk)? How normal (the police always end up getting involved; a good doctor is hard to find)? How normally, weirdly sad and anticlimactic it is (and as it turns out, there was nothing to do about it, and the kid was a dwarf forever)? I don’t know — but I feel driven to reproduce the story. Even finding out that this story had a clear purpose in its original context (now likely lost to time, considering its oral origin) wouldn’t make it considerably less affecting.
That observation, now that I write it down, is comforting to me — perhaps there are ways to access the unknown that don’t depend on willful innocence or ignorance, and perhaps we can have purpose — a goal — at the same time as we have purposive, free-ranging, dwarf-in-a-box mystery. To put it in Hugo’s terms, even if you do feel responsible for the town you show up in, even if you want to get the details right, you won’t ever learn yourself out of your job as poet: past what you can know, the possibility always exists that there will be a large enough and fluid enough mystery that you can make it sing.
So I guess that means that today, you inherit the lightning above: flip through the images and stories, play around, have that brief, triggering experience that feels disconnected from the context of its origin. Meanwhile, I’ll hunker down here in the basement with Pulleyblank and my dictionaries, and feed the fire like that.
At least until next week, when I will be offering you: Indie Scansion.