The Art of Naming

...As an example of the reflexive poet, Nemerov offers the parable of Narcissus, who is not only the archetype of self-love, but of man pondering his reflection in the microcosmic world of the pool ' Poetry is a means of contemplation," he says, and it produces objects which help people contemplate reality objects in the same class with ikons, mirrors, prayer-wheels, and those glass paperweights containing, say, shells, pebbles, fishhooks or feathers, common enough things which become uncommon by being sunken deep in a transparent medium...

...The Art of Naming Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics By Howard Nemeroy Rutgers 233 pp $10 00 Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell A poet-critic writing about poetry may move in either of two directions He can attempt to describe the elements that make up his own work, or he can generalize from the work of others In this new collection of essays Howard Nemerov, a former poetry critic for The New Leader, does both, often at once In "Polornius as Polonius" (which first appeared m this magazine) he explains one of his own poems, "Polonius Passing Through a Stage," a complex analysis of the conflict between growing up to be oneself and emulating one's father It is the table of a poet who wishes to be Shakespeare, would settle for being Hamlet, and ends up as Polonius The explication, in turn, is a comic reversal, a literary examination of a Freudian poem, casting light on the poetic process in general and Nemerov's in particular...

...In another essay, this one with a Freudian title-'Bottom's Dream The Likeness of Poems and Jokes" -Nemerov explores the compact nature of each, concluding "The real resemblance, the illuminating one, is that poems and jokes to succeed must do something decisive, which may seem to mean that their endings are somehow contained in their beginnings This of course is precisely the magical, illusionist, or religious character of art, which has customarily rested on the assumption that God in creating the world did something coherent although mysterious, and that therefore history, at the last great day, would be seen as 'like' a great drama ". Thus the similitude between the low form, jokes, and the (presumably) high form of poetry can be found in their common sacramental quality A mythologist might point out that poetry-as-liturgy and jokes as riddles, puns, or burlesque ceremonies have a common origin in religion The New Testament episode of The Mocking of Christ provides a well known example of this synthesis Nemerov also notes the ambiguous line between magic and trickery "Sacrament or con game...

...he asks of a great poem, answering, ' As impossible as unnecessary to decide ". Even the title pun, "Reflexions," is a reminder of how a single word can carry a diversity of meanings and functions The commonest use of "reflex' derives from its physiological sense, an automatic response, the very opposite of "reflection" or considered observation The word is further associated with reflexive verbs, things that we do to (or with) ourselves But if we take ourselves to the dictionary, we discover that "reflex" is cognative with "reflect," and that it may denote a reflected image, suggesting introspection...

...The subjects of contemplation, in other words, are not simply fishhooks or feathers "Poetry in the hands of the great masters constantly tends to a preoccupation with making statements about invisible mysteries by means of things visible, and poems, far from resting in nature as their end, use nature as a point from which they extrapolate darkly the nature of all things not visible or mediately knowable by reason Poetry is an art of naming, and this naming is done by story-telling and by metaphorical approximations and refinements ". Whether he is exploring the power of metaphor, examining such masters as Kenneth Burke or colleagues like James Dickey, or disparaging scientists who set computers to writing and dissecting poetry, Nemerov always displays his preoccupation with the endless revelations of language In a tribute to Thomas Mann, he characterizes beautifully the balance between intellect and instinctive delight "So much thoroughness, so much explicitness, so drastic an analysis 1 and at the end all is magic and mystery still ". Nemerov is happily free of dreary apocalyptic groaning about the present state of poetry "When the language and reality of newspapers does in fact replace serious poetry there are always excellent reasons for its doing so, the poetry that sustained the sense of civilization has probably formalized and hardened too far from what people say and think and feel to be how things are Something like that seems to have happened around 1800 in England, and again around the time of the First World War And yet, as if by miracle, great poets again arose to find or make a living language, a sweet and lofty style ". Since Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics is intended to bring us back to poetry, I will conclude with an image from Nemerov's own "To Clio, Muse of History" As with a dream interpreted by one still sleeping,/The interpretation is the next room of the dream These lines, addressing the relation between history and memory, recall Freud's observation that we reorder our dreams in interpreting them, which in turn recalls Prospero's reminder that "We are such stuff as dreams are made of " Similarly, Nemerov's reinterpretation of his Polonius poem can be seen as "the next room of the dream," illustrating the interrelation of a work and its explication It is criticism as art and art as criticism that Howard Nemerov has presented in this book for our reflection...