PZ Myers. 2004 Jun 29. That's my kind of poetry.... <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/thats_my_kind_of_poetry/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Tuesday, June 29, 2004
That's my kind of poetry...
You know, it just seems to me that poetry has a real deficiency of good juicy grisly bits, and it could be greatly improved by including more. All your Shelleys and Blakes and Longfellows and cummings and Dickinsons and Frosts and whatever go on and on about flowers and ladies with the vapors and urns and 'lend me two quid and I'll repay you by Friday' and so forth, but you can rip through volume after slim volume and find nary a mention of enzymatically lysed arthropod viscera. Occasionally they touch on a subject with some potential (for instance, whatshisname, Prince Namor or something, the fellow with the dead seagull around his neck—there was a situation with possibilities for lurid, pungent detail), but they always throw it away for some frippery like eternal verities or human emotion or the cunning line that makes you think.
Well, enough of that. Poets need to look at the movies to get an idea of what people really want. They want wisecracks punctuated with a kick to the 'nads. They want exploding automobiles. They want gratuitous scenes set in a strip club. They want giant mutant hamsters eating Poughkeepsie.
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Hmmm, I've been wondering whether I should get my own weblog, and this may be an argument in its favor: the opportunity to discourse authoritatively about everything. (Then again, maybe that's NOT such a great argument).
Frost actually wrote a pretty nifty sonnet about a spider (a white spider, holding a white butterfly, on a white heal-all flower). You won't care for the ending of course: Why, Frost asks, was there this conjunction of white? "What but design of darkness to appall/If design govern in a thing so small?"
Your point, if you actually have a serious point, is the tendency of a lot of poetry to avoid the more brutal side of things. There's something to that, but brutality isn't entirely absent. Go back, for example, to the Iliad, with its detailed description of men screaming, kicking, and chewing at the dirt after getting speared in the bladder or the guts.#: Posted by on 06/29 at 08:12 AM -
A white moth, not a butterfly. I've reached the age where it's positively hazardous to rely on my memory.
#: Posted by on 06/29 at 08:18 AM
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Oh, you haven't read enough Baudelaire! You won't find bug stuff (that I know of), but check out this (poorly translated, but still graphic) passage from "Voyage to Cythera":
"Ferocious birds, each perched on its own meal,
Were madly tearing at the thing that hung
And ripened; each, its filthy beak a drill,
Made little bleeding holes to root among.
The eyes were hollowed. Heavy guts cascading
Flowed like water halfway down the thighs;
The torturers, though gorged on these vile joys,
Had also put their beaks to use castrating
The corpse. A pack of dogs beneath its feet,
Their muzzles lifted, whirled around and snapped and gnawed;
One bigger beast amid this jealous lot
Looked like an executioner with his guard."
It goes on, and gets a even grosser. Ah, the poetic beauty of (human) carrion, and those wonderful scavenger birds. -
And don't forget Baudelaire's "Une charogne," a charming meditation on a rotting corpse. Decadence just isn't what it used to be.
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To deflect the discussion somewhat: poetry has often given magnificent expression to religious belief, less so to unbelief. For my money, one of the most beautiful, most moving poems about the rejection of religious faith is "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens. Here he takes several myths of paradise and stacks them up against the experience of an April day and the longing for evening and summer:
"There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings."
Clearly, April's green wins.#: Posted by on 06/29 at 08:57 AM -
Yes, you should definitely have a look at some of Beaudelaire's work. "The carrion" (1857) is one of my favourite (here is a good english translation http://home.earthlink.net/~rbilyou/carrion1.htm). It is replete with maggots, putrid smells, flies and decomposing flesh :
"Flies kept humming over the guts
from which a gleaming clot
of maggots poured to finish off
what scraps of flesh remained.
The tide of trembling vermin sank,
then bubbled up afresh
as if the carcass, drawing breath,
by their lives lived again."
Needless to say that huge parts of this poet's work were banned for nearly a century by the Catholic Church.It was also a huge favourite in my High School poetry class in the mid 60's !!#: Posted by on 06/29 at 09:12 AM -
And of course, let's not forget François Villon (1431-1463) with his graphic description of six hanged corpses in medieval France :
http://www.brindin.com/pfvilpe1.htm
Crows pecking at eyes and brain, sun bleaching the bones, rain washing them clean...everything is there.
This poem, written nearly 550 years ago, would definitely please Calvin !!#: Posted by on 06/29 at 09:46 AM -
PZ, you've clearly not read enough Swinburne. Atheism, lesbian sadomasochism, necrophilia...
No enzymatically lysed arthropod viscera, though.
May Kendall's "Lay of the Trilobite" does, at least, have a talking fossilized trilobite. (The hosting site has a large selection of poetry on scientific topics.) -
This is marvelous. I knew I'd just have to mention some peculiar poetry fetish here, and the artsy literate types would deluge me with examples.
So...what about the giant urbivorous hamster poetry, eh? -
I'd bet that PZ would actually like the ending to the Frost poem, since it's a classic rejoinder to the ID claim that we can detect the nature of the deity from the nature of, er, nature.
The last two lines--my favorite, in all of Frost's work--point out that if design is responsible for even the tiniest element of evil (the spider devouring the moth, ironically set on a "heal-all"), it is itself evil--"of darkness, to appall."#: Posted by Jim Anderson on 06/29 at 10:02 AM -
Interesting take on the Frost poem. I've generally read it as if Frost really believed there was a dark force guiding nature (which wouldn't please a muscular atheist like the Professor). Rereading it, I agree that it COULD mean only: if design is/were present here, it is/would be an evil design. That seems to me a little too tentative a conclusion for the rhetorical buildup of the previous lines, but I've been wrong before.
Here's the whole sonnet, so that others can make their own decision:
"I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small."
As to "artsy," that's a pejorative whose only denotative content seems to be "more into art that I am." Maybe it fits. I'll gladly accept being called literate; I'll assume, charitably, that the Professor is qualified to render a judgment on the subject.#: Posted by on 06/29 at 10:29 AM -
The poets you first mention, with the exception of cummings, stem from a common time and tradition. Aside from some of the examples given here of more modern (or post-modern) poets (the Yugo poet Charles Simic is one of my favorites, but there are hundreds of others ranging from the brilliantly ribald to the outright disgusting), some very established poets wrote about some pretty gross things. I'm thinking particularly of the birth of modern poetry in Walt Whitman, the intricate dissections of Eliot and Pound, and (how could we forget?) Poe.
In response to Aaron Baker, poetry found its greatest expression of "unbelief" in Larkin's "Church Going," where the protagonist speculates on how future generations will look at these strange, cross-shaped structures. An excerpt:
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
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To go off on another tangent about poetry: Frost was a modern master of the sonnet. Here, he gives us a sonnet in terza rima, the rhyme scheme of the Divine Comedy (a hyper-purist might say it's not a sonnet b/c of the rhyme scheme; I try not to associate with such people):
"I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain --and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night."#: Posted by on 06/29 at 11:02 AM -
OK, "Church Going" is good, too. I still prefer Stevens.
#: Posted by on 06/29 at 11:05 AM
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Here's where the artsy get fartsy. Aaron, do you mean "Frost" the author, or the speaker of that particular poem? I don't know if Frost's general body of work supports the claim of a dark force controlling nature--it seems that he's more of a naturalist in the literary sense (think of "Birches" or "Nothing Gold Can Stay"), with a dark, dark sense of humor ("Fire and Ice" or "In a Disused Graveyard"). That said, the beauty of poetry is that it affords multiple interpretations.
As to the "tentativeness of the conclusion"--I'd say it's justified by the dash after the question mark, which creates a literal, albeit brief, pause. I marvel at Frost's work, since he uses simplicity as a mask for complexity. (Take that, Dembski.) Direct, natural speech; profound, dark questions.
All hail the subjective!#: Posted by Jim Anderson on 06/29 at 11:07 AM -
Hey, Aaron, I thought it was obvious that everything I've said here, from my initial comment on, was made in a jesting tone.
And I just want to say that that Bau...Bo...Bode..whatever guy really rocks. I loved Cheech Wizard.
Seriously, there's some great stuff here. -
And let's not forget the inimitable Jim Dodge.
Amalgam of electric jelly,
constellated neural knots
in the briny binary soup,
as surely as stimulus prods response
brains are made to choose.
And through a major error in pattern recognition
or a significant cognitive fault,
the bullfrog's brain has selected
a two-pound rock
as the object of his rampant affection,
a rock (to my admittedly mammalian eye)
that neither resembles
nor even vaguely suggests
the female of his species.
#: Posted by Jim Anderson on 06/29 at 11:44 AM -
Hmmm, Frost the artist or the speaker? Not being anything like an expert on Frost's actual opinions (just an enthusiast for a lot of his work), I guess I'd play it safe and say I had thought the speaker was talking as if he took seriously the idea of a malign force behind nature.
I think, on looking at the poem further, that the poem may well not be the wholehearted "there's a God and he's the devil" message that I had initially seen, though I may not see the emphasis in quite the same way you do. In the poem, the speaker works himself up, marshalling his evidences as he does so, in a verbal crescendo to the ghastly, sinister conclusion, expressed as a rhetorical question: "What but design of darkness to appall?" Pretty ringing, eh? Then he pauses and says, in effect: "Ahem; that is, of course, if design governs in little things like this." So yeah, he IS undercutting his previous conclusion; but what a powerfully expressed conclusion it is! So is he really saying: I don't believe in design at all, because if I did I'd have to believe that God is the devil? Or is he saying something more like: what a horrible conclusion I've come to, if indeed I have to come to it? If those are the choices, I guess I lean toward the latter.
In floundering around like this, I've probably provided an object lesson in the advantage of devoting your life to the exact sciences.#: Posted by on 06/29 at 11:49 AM -
I hope the good Professor realizes that what I'm saying here, I'm saying in jest as well.
#: Posted by on 06/29 at 11:58 AM
- One my favorite things about Frost's poetry is his sly ironies like the one you point out. He regularly makes seemingly definitive statements only to undercut them in the next line. It's unfortunate that so many only know him as the author of "The Road Not Taken," itself a good example of his understated irony even if it's generally unnoticed.
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Other folks have chimed in on the grisly side of poetry--PZ, you might enjoy Walter Garstang's book <a href"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226284239/qid=1088539220/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-2104729-6639360?v=glance&s=books">Larval Forms</a>, written by a biologist, which is entirely verse about larval forms, most of them aquatic.
Some of hte science is no doubt dated#: Posted by Michael Snider on 06/29 at 02:01 PM -
That's Larval Forms
#: Posted by Michael Snider on 06/29 at 02:03 PM
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This may be off-topic, but didn't Darwin's grandpappy Erasmus write a great long poem explicating his theory of evolution? (This is all over my head; can't say if the poem has any 'good parts' for you morbid poetry fans.)
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Not evolution: the sex lives of plants. It was called The Botanic Garden, and in particular part II, The Loves of the Plants. It's interesting, if a bit, errm, florid. It's a strange mingling of classical allusion and plant taxonomy and anatomy that I understand is fascinating, if you have a background in both and can follow what he's saying.
I'm spotty in both so I had to rely on my imagination when I skimmed through it. -
A short one from Garstang:
The Ancestry of Vertebrates
Gill-slits, Tongue-bars, Synapticulae,
Endostyle and Notochord: all these you will agree
Mark the Protochordate from the fishes in the sea,
And tells alike for them and us our lowly pedigree.
Thyroid, Thymus, Subnotochordal Rod:
These we share with Lampreys, the Dogfish and the Cod,—
Relics of the food-trap that served our early meals,
And of Tongue-bars that multiplied the primal water-wheels.#: Posted by Michael Snider on 06/29 at 06:18 PM -
And there's Lucretius, though I don't recall that he does really gross-out stuff. But he's not all pretty-pretty Fotherington-Thomas hello clouds stuff, either.
"Poets need to look at the movies to get an idea of what people really want. They want wisecracks punctuated with a kick to the 'nads. They want exploding automobiles. They want gratuitous scenes set in a strip club. They want giant mutant hamsters eating Poughkeepsie."
Er - you seem to have people confused with men, there, PZ. At least, if I'm a representative sample of the other thing you do. I don't want none of those things. (Though, perversely, I also don't want touchy-feely stuff, or Nora Ephron characters bursting into tears at the very mention of some infinitely sappy maudlin chick flick of yore, or bilge like Notting Hill or Bridget Jones.) (Oops, off topic.)#: Posted by Ophelia Benson on 06/29 at 06:42 PM -
Actually, I don't want those things either. I'm mocking the monied mass-market bilge.
Well, except for the giant mutant hamsters. That was serious.
Michael: I'm going to have to find a copy of Garstang. This is the same familiar old embryologist, Walter Garstang? Wow. You learn something new every day. The kids are never going to forgive you if I start reciting paleobiological poetry at them on long road trips—it may be even more painful than accordion music. -
You need to read more Shakespeare. Baudy (a bow to Baudelaire) and violent. And really descriptive.
#: Posted by Courtney Ostaff on 06/29 at 07:22 PM
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Re: post 25. Ha! Found this on the internet:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.
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Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth century England, a man with a remarkable array of interests and pursuits. Erasmus Darwin was a respected physician, a well known poet, philosopher, botanist, and naturalist.
As a naturalist, he formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). He also presented his evolutionary ideas in verse, in particular in the posthumously published poem The Temple of Nature. Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming "one living filament". He wrestled with the question of how one species could evolve into another.
Still don't see any evidence of the "good stuff" in the poem, though.
PS: I still like the Frost poem about the spider.#: Posted by on 06/29 at 09:52 PM -
Erasmus Darwin was very cool. He was one of the lunar men - the radical free-thinking pro-reason pro-science guys like Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood.
#: Posted by Ophelia Benson on 06/30 at 04:10 PM