Now that I have some perspective, I will venture a guess as to why my juvenalia, my proto-writing, my initial stumbling-around-in-the-darks, suck. My audience for most of that stuff was myself, so I wrote it for myself. I didn't even read much poetry, just listened to The Doors and read Morrison's drivel, mostly, bought some of the classics every once in a while out of some knowledge that there was something about writing I didn't quite understand yet, something I wasn't doing quite right. Among many things, I had no idea of image.
I stumbled onto T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" late into my college career. I still can't get past that second stanza. Lines 19 - 30.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
What a whallop! I can still hear Morrison drunkenly almost-whispering these lines. The call to follow the speaker, specifically out into the desert, sure, okay, it's hip, it's a Morrisonism, but then Eliot does something Morrison could only hope to chance upon.
That turn in the last line. It both surprises the reader and shifts the tone by varying the sentence structure from the previous long multi-liners into this quick subject-verb-object roundhouse while introducing the abstraction (FEAR!) that Eliot has been writing around for the entire stanza. And this all occurs in a way that concretizes the abstraction by showing us where, via an image, to look for that fear. Dang. I think this image of "fear in a handful of dust" resounds throughout the poem because fear exists here as a permutation of the stanza's dominant image (stone). Wow. That's crafty. I didn't understand the poem like this when I read it as an undergrad, but that is how I understand it imagistically now. It also jives with the post-modern impulse (though Eliot was a modernist) of the ultimate unintelligibility of experience (for you know only / a heap of broken images).
I still haven't wrapped my head around what the whole poem means, but at least here, we certainly get a sense of a narrator who wants to show the world (Son of man) that things are falling apart, and we should fear that apart-falling, though it may be inevitable to avoid because it is the way of things as demonstrated by all this desiccated, wanting imagery of the natural world. Considering that the poem is in the present tense and is called "The Waste Land," we may already be here.
To accurately analyze the meaning of the larger poem, though, I'd have to throw every element of the whole gigantic 5-part behemoth against itself, which is outside the scope of this blog. I wanted here to draw attention to image, and how a single line can recolor everything that preceded it.
Eliot is not a poet I particularly enjoy, as in I rarely find myself curling up in my papasan chair with anything T. S. wrote, mostly because he's frustrating. He's so damn allusive, always reminding me that I haven't read enough Greek myth, that I am basically monolingual, and that I am part of the easily-criticizable contemporary readership--I don't have the patience to go through The Waste Land bit by bit to figure out what it means. I like poems that make me feel. I privilege the ride. This section made my eyes bulge and my temples buzz, both great things that I wish my poetry could do more of. I blame that last line's effect on the setup to it, and my fetish for the American West (I moved to Flagstaff a year ago for my MA), and his consistency of image, where everything in the stanza is lacking in some way.
So the lesson I take from Eliot is to wield image with precision, and to know your audience. I understand his to be academics. I still dig the poem, but I don't read the whole thing from first line of section 1 to last line of section 5 ever. If the poem is indeed an attack on the state of the academy (when it was published in 1922) or on literature or the literate in general, maybe he should have written an essay about it instead.
Then again, I'm not T. S. Eliot. But we aren't so different, he and I. T. S. was a St. Louisan, like I was. He left for the East Coast, then to London. I left for a small farming town in MO (Kirksville, if it matters, which odds are it doesn't), then to the desert. That, if anything, should say a lot about our different aesthetics. Eliot was a poet of the head. I prefer people with hearts.
A video I found about Eliot, where St. Louis tries to claim him, despite the fact hat he moved as far east as he could, and then he moved even further east and north.
http://livingstlouis.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/living-st-louis-video-ts-eliot/
"Eliot left St. Louis, but St. Louis never completely left him." A clever turn of phrase. My animosity for St. Louis, having spent the first 18 years of my life there, and the next 8 returning for holidays and the occasional wild weekend or Mardi Gras celebration, arises for many reasons, but mostly because, to quote my friend Tom Mildenberger, "St. Louis is a hating city."
St. Louis does not support its local awesomes. Dave Weckl, amazing drummer, rising jazz star in the 80s, now a blip on nobody's radar. Chuck Berry, one of the pioneers of the rock n roll sound (Johnny B. Goode, anyone? that's Mr. Berry) runs a bar out of The Loop, but I didn't find out about this until I had left town for years. Remember The Urge? They were a ska-core band in the mid-90s, on MTV after MTV became a mouthpiece for the industry, had famous guests on their second album, and then what? They disappeared after their third album, despite excessive radio play. St. Louis had moved on to Nelly. That's right. We invented Pop-Rap. I apologize. The drummer joined a killer Pink Floyd tribute band, El Monstero, the singer travels around Missouri doing solo gigs, dunno about everyone else. Nelly spends a lot of time at Harrahs.
Note what happened to Eliot's home: empty of furniture, a contemporary fridge, cheaply-hung picture on a chain. Note how St. Louis does not celebrate the author of what has been called the most important poem of the 20th century except with a few placques in obscure locations. Note how the video doesn't even reach much of a conclusion except that T. S. left and eventually returned to St. Louis, saying he liked being from there but not why (Eliot says he liked the proximity to the river...which you can get from any of the hundreds of cities built upon its banks), how the lady at the garden party says St. Louis imagery is in his early poetry but never gives us examples. If I still cared to improve St. Louis, I would write angry letters to the T. S. Eliot Society (the hosts of the garden party) to get up on their T. S. presence in his birth city considering how influential they themselves say it is, but I am content to let St. Louis do its old safe thing. I have moved on.
St. Louis is neat, how it's both Northern and Southern, a cultural crossroads, an old trade hub that decided to invest in barges instead of the railroad due to our affinity for the river. The trains went north, to Chicago, and south, to Louisiana. Shucks.
I should appreciate Eliot more, I think, due to the whole between-ness aspect of his identity. I appreciate it when the divisions between things are not clear, when there is "and" instead of "or," when we acknowledge that things are not so cut and dry. Where language reveals its limitations and our unspoken desires for order where we wish there was more. Contradictions are interesting--they point out where language and the ideas that inform the words fail us. But I haven't encountered this in his poetry.
Then he writes something like "Little Gidding" and he again convinces me to give him another chance.
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
-J
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