History and poetry

History is about research and analysis, it clarifies and classifies, whereas poetry describes the mess that historians try to clear up. In illustrating the difference between history and poetry, the author excavates the 'historical influence' in his own poetry: The lessons and insights acquired from such diverse sources as Fernando Pessoa's "Autopsychography," Rilke's "The Panther," Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, Wallace Stevens's "A Clear Day and No Memories," and Swift's "A Satirical Elegy." He surmises that an ahistorical attitude may capture an artist's position in time more effectively than a conscious attempt to be historical. The author discusses the genesis of his new collection, Bastardi Puri, in Beirut, concluding that the city itself, like his poetry, exhibits the protean and elusive nature of history. ********** An archaeologist locates a site to unearth, classify and date artifacts. He digs up an Osiris or an Anubis. "Let sleeping dogs lie" is not his motto; he decides for them. In my work, it's up to the dogs; in that respect, historical references are no different from contemporary ones. Some dresses worn at Versailles were puce, a colour chosen to camouflage fleas. When history is invisible as Bourbon fleas, poems double as puce. There's no exhibiting past and present like identifiable thoroughbreds. They're parts of one mongrel, and sometimes parts are hard to separate. History's parts may be miscast, rewritten, simplified, manipulated or ignored. For every responsible archaeologist there are countless seams, subterfuges and acts of vandalism. Historians try to clear up the mess; poets describe it. A historian researches and analyzes, but, as Plato observes, a poet cannot explain what he is doing when composing--he's beside himself, impelled by Muses. (1) At the absurd end of the spectrum, a blind Muse leads the blind. An archaeologist is clinical and methodical. A poet doesn't catalogue the truths searched for; they form as memorable lines, not as data to be remembered. In some inexhaustible poems, lines gradually overshadow one another, and the friction lights up a pharos that shouldn't be translated back into words. It's often retroactive guesswork, if not wishful thinking, for a person to quote historical poets and argue that they influence him or her in a particular way. I like Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms, his ability to write as different authors in different styles that transcend any one personality. But if I try to use heteronyms, they turn into my divided and ruled satraps--the exercise is a dead end. For me, Pessoa's lesson lies elsewhere. In "Autopsychography," he goes backstage to explore the theatre an audience misses if it misunderstands the nature of performance: The poet is a faker. He Fakes it so completely, He even fakes he's suffering The pain he's really feeling. And they who read his writing Fully feel while reading Not that pain of his that's double, But theirs, completely fictional. So on its tracks goes round and round, To entertain the reason, That wound-up little train We call the heart of man. (2) Art is artifice. Pain is natural--writing about it isn't. A reader is left with fictional pain sealed off by sides of a Bermuda Triangle: the reader's real pain, the writer's real pain and the writer's faked pain. Pessoa shakes any equilibrium up into cubist planes, and this gives his work an energetic equanimity. My poem "The Breaking of Toys" pays homage to him. In that poem I say that we play with our lives, then break the toys. A poet plays to break. For Kafka, writing is an ice pick to break the frozen sea inside us. A pick lands on a writer's subjective and objective worlds, though where one world ends and the other begins is unclear--we're in the belly of another mongrel. In theory, we're free to go ape, contact prehistory. In practice, we negotiate many boundaries, beginning with the square roots of power relationships, what it means to gaze and be gazed at, to define and be defined. …