ABOVE/BELOW:
Susan Bee & Charles Bernstein, 2023
Establishment literary theory condones acknowledging and even experiencing the strange as long as we “return” to a consciousness that insists upon strangeness as an aberration, confirming the center as we have always known it. The radical poem carries estrangement to the core.
Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt that distances a theatre viewer from identification with a character or situation allows for awareness of a reality more complete than what one knows or even wants. Distance is important: the Russian modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva says that the words of a poem come from a long way off and that a poem is like a comet. Strangeness is the feeling of an encountering an object at a distance. But poetry intimates that that strangeness may actually be close up, which brings us back to the Romanticism of Novalis (ca. 1797): “The art of estranging in a given way, making a subject strange and yet familiar and alluring, this is romantic poetics.” He also said, referring to poetry, “Language is Delphi,” coming from the Pythian priestess spewing forth the strange vocables of the language of divinity.
How do we work our way from the familiar to the strange? Wordsworth addressed this difficult and crucial question, for poets and critics and educators, in the “Advertisement” to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads:
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favorable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.
Look at the position of maximal discomfort that the reader chooses to take in the presence of “strangeness and aukwardness” and also the genuine concern and empathy that the poet shows for his readers. Strangeness and alienation, a mental distancing, coming from expectations and “custom” (which elsewhere Wordsworth says lies on us “deep almost as frost”), contend with the immediate, proximate responses of the sensorium. Not uncommonly, a poet may “appropriate” a sentence or phrase famous to culture and rework it into strangeness that makes a newer, uncultural sense. See George Oppen’s estrangement of Shelley’s “the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world” into “the poet is the legislator of the unacknowledged world,” or Blake’s images that cut across the verbal expectations. This is the paradox of estrangement: it alienates on the one hand while simultaneously cuts through social and cultural defences. Thus, while poetry readings by establishment poets often put their listeners to sleep, those by avant-gardists typically stimulate the mind in unanticipated directions, provoke laughter, and usher in a sense of community: a cheerful dreaming together in a strange place.
Estrangement can show poetry’s peculiar commitment to democracy, which itself demands a paradigm shift from a world saturated with hierarchies. At the same time, poetry
“purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures us from the wonder of our being” (Shelley, Defence of Poetry). With Romanticism, the poetry of democracy occurs in the presence of one of poetry’s oldest functions, to present the real world as a wonder, a vision: the beauty of the goddess, the strength of the hero, all larger and more vivid than life.
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