Poe, Pullman, and Poetics

 

During my last year at the library system I worked for, I served as the teen rep. While we didn't always score literary content for programming, last January we were able to host an event commemorating Edgar Allan Poe's birthday. By some curious twist of fate (or sprinkling of Dust?), Youth Services was providing free copies of "The Raven and Other Poems," slim though comprehensive volumes of Poe. 

These editions also happened to contain a four page introduction written by Philip Pullman. 

As it is Halloween, it seemed fitting to indulge the poetic impulses of this blog one more time. Especially when one has the haunted and haunting lyrics of an Edgar Allan Poe to work with. But most importantly for those of us interested in building the Republic, it provides a nice bookend for my last post, dripping as it was with Pullman and poetics. 

I very much wanted to share some excerpts from the introduction, as it provides some sublime insights into how Pullman writes and thinks and feels, as well as crafting a magnificent lens (or amber spyglass, if you will), through which to fully read and engage with poetry. 

Appropriately written in the "bleak December" of 1999, Pullman offers not simply a short introduction to Poe - his works, his biography, and so on - but a way in which to expertly savor his poetry. Of course, all the titles present in every English 101 syllabus are on display here - "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and Pullman's own favorite, "the strange and unforgettable 'Ulalume'." He conjures up Poe's "weird and intense world" while framing his particular portrait of him, accurately highlighting the "half-horror" and "half-ecstasy" that pervades both his poetry and prose. 

Of course, Pullman being Pullman, his brief intro ensures the stage is properly set with all the properly evocative imagery - spirits flitting in the corner of the eye, floorboards creaking, tree limbs ominously scrapping the window panes, and just the slightest hint of the raven's ridiculously unsettling cry of "Nevermore."

He admits he envies the reader who is about to set sail on their maiden voyage into the shadowy, rhyming twilight of Poe's country. "I hope you read it when you're alone, at night," he tells the reader. "I hope your flesh creeps and your skin crawls and the blood turns to ice in your veins." 

Yet again, Pullman being Pullman, he is not content to stop there. Instead, he shapes another of the infinite windows through which to truly see and feel and experience poetry. He is insistent the words on the page should become something more significant than just said words. 

"I hadn't expected the power of the verse," he admits upon first reading "The Raven," cataloging his immediate sensations as though they were yesterday. "I hadn't expected to find my heart pounding, my fingers tapping, my whole body as excited by the rhythms of the words as by the rhythms of rock 'n' roll or jazz." 

Then Pullman leans in a little closer, and lets the reader in on a critical secret in the reading of poetry, a secret I may never have discovered without him. With all the grace of conscience of one of his fictitious daemons, he sagely advises the reader to take the book, march a fair distance away from everyone else, and read Poe aloud in solitude. One may do so in a whisper, he explains, but it is vital that breath actually pass between the lips. Then the previously latent vitality becomes physical as well as mental, and that brings it all singing to life. 

"Read them with your mouth and your ears as well as your eyes," Pullman teaches us. "That's the only way to feel the extraordinary brilliance of the sound-patterns, the rhymes that lace the lines together." In other words, to truly experience that dread rapping and tapping at the chamber door. 

Poe and what can only be his Daemon

By PakstraX on DeviantArt

On a personal note, I admit reading poetry aloud wasn't anything I would have naturally gravitated toward. Still, it is philosophically fitting that Pullman would key into this. Remember, one of the overarching themes of His Dark Materials is the union of spirit and matter - not the liberation of one from the other, but the synthesis of the two to form a whole (perhaps even "holy"?} person. There is something truly profound in taking a purely intellectual activity and then melding it with the physical, enabling a once mental exercise to be felt firsthand in your bones. 

Like many a Jordan Scholar or Librarian, I admittedly have often had a tendency to live too much in my head, and not fully savor or appreciate the richness of the natural world around me. Remember the rebel angels in The Subtle Knife were dumbfounded that human beings with their remarkably sensitive and aware bodies weren't in a kind of physical ecstasy all the time. So when I made it a point to start reading poetry aloud, the mouthed phrases and melodies took on a new, revitalized reality. 

Some months ago during the pandemic, I found myself sitting beside Stone Mountain Lake. Seldom without a bookbag, I finished off a small volume of Romantic poetry I had been patiently working my way through. Only this time, I was quietly speaking the sonnets and odes of Shelley and Keats aloud, which opened up a new dimension of sound and melody. And the physical response was tangible and real. 

Though I'd read "To a Skylark" or "Bright Star" countless times before, on this occasion, it was a bodily experience as well. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My breathing appreciably changed. My eyes veered close to tears several times. I even sat differently. 

And that is often my experience now, and it can be borderline electric. 

The next point Pullman makes in his introduction to Poe's conqueror worms, cities in the sea, and other inspired, haunting imagery, is about a poem's meaning. Namely, don't allow yourself to be bogged down in what the language and lines mean. The magic of Poe's work does not lie in knowing what a balm is, or who exactly Lenore or Helen were, or where Gilead can be found on a map. It is the tangible feeling the poems evoke and bring to life that is much nearer to their point and purpose. 

"As a matter of fact," Pullman notes, "Worrying about what poetry means takes most of the fun out of it." A teacher of many years, he goes on to criticize the way poetry is often taught. As if it is some sort of prisoner of war that must be tortured and interrogated until it offers up its secrets. Poetry to Pullman is not some kind of foreign language that requires translation until "the whole experience is a torment."

For one, this process as often belabored in schools inevitably short circuits the visceral, even sensual, poetic experience waxed lyrical about a few paragraphs ago. It reduces the embodied, implicit nature of a poem - and lots of works of art - to a frog in a biology class, one that has been cut and dissected, its internal organs poked and prodded and put on display for all to see. As Wordsworth astutely observed in "The Tables Turned", "We murder to dissect," the object of dissection having once been a vital, living entity. 

Pullman clearly does not want us to fall into the same trap with poetry, approaching it with scalpels and white coats, and confining it to sterile lab rooms. The process of poetry is not solely a mental or intellectual or academic exercise - it should have a heartbeat and a life and a tangibility all its own. 

"And that you're allowed simply to say it to yourself and relish the taste and the shape and the color of these mysterious sounds," Pullman says, "Is the key to all of poetry, not just Poe's. And the truly strange thing is that when you do that, it communicates anyway."

 

For me, that was another striking yet unexpected truth. The sounds and rhythms and patterns often communicate beautifully when read aloud, almost independent of whatever meaning or inspiration originally framed them. When Pullman happened upon poetry as a teenager, he didn't necessarily "understand" it, replete as it was with unfamiliar language and endless classical allusions. But he still fell in love with it and, while I personally adore analyzing books and movies and such, the holistic experience of them all has to come first. Then the poetry properly becomes a spell, an incantation, a form of magic. 

And for a long-winded Halloween post, that is perhaps as good a place as any to stop. If anyone has read this far down and is still interested in this train of thought, I highly recommend checking out this video at about the twenty-one minute mark. Here Pullman masterfully elucidates more on his relationship to poetry. 

And if anyone is interested in more spooky reading from Pullman, might I recommend the short though memorable fairy tale Clockwork, or the HDM-inspired e- or audiobook, The Collectors. 

As for Poe, I can inevitably and somewhat predictably leave you with only one video:

Happy Halloween 

and 

Stay Dusty My Friends 

#PhilipPullman  #EdgarAllanPoe  #HisDarkMaterials  #Poetry