Ostranenie

So, bad job by me, both at celebrating National Poetry Month and its resorbed, smaller twin, National Poem in Your Pocket Day. I actually did celebrate each somewhat, but I only wrote about two (2) poems on this "weblog", down from four (4) last year. And, worst of all, I did not post anything at all on National P. in Your P. day itself. I meant to, but ha! as usual, things ganged way the hell agley once again.

I did manage to walk around with poems in my pocket yesterday, although again down from four to two. Last year, I spent the whole day basking in the glorious Williamstown, MA sun, handing out poems like it was my job. This year, I had to a) proctor a test and b) drive ten hours, round trip, to a courthouse in Fulton, New York, to contest a speeding ticket. On my way to the former, I realized that oh crap, I had been talking up National Poem in Your Pocket Day for over a month at the school where I sometimes subsitute teach, and that I had gotten as far as the donut store on my morning routine with zero (0) poems. So I wrote on napkins the two poems that I felt like I had the least chance of screwing up: Sion, by Cesarea Tinajero, and The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. You will, I've no doubt, remember Sion, the three-lines (not three-line; it's actually 0 words, three lines, and three squares) poem that is all that remains of the poetess Tinajero's work in the Savage Detectives. No one that I showed that one to seemed impressed.

The other one, I showed to my mother and asked her what she thought was the most important word in the poem. She voted for wheelbarrow, which does get top billing and is probably right and made me feel a little silly for asking the question in the first place, because my dissenting vote is that the most important word in the poem is "glazed". That is because every other word I have probably said in the last three days without thinking about it. From very cursory reading -- like, four pages in Eagleton's introduction to Literary Theory -- I am learnt that there are Russian formalists, and that they came up with an emphasis on a thing called "ostranenie", or defamiliarization. Said Shklovsky, consonant-endowed ringleader of the R. Formalists: "the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known...art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." Now, beyond the enigmatic sense conveyed by the first stanza of Williams's poem (depends for whom?), all of the energy is focused on the artfulness of that wheelbarrow -- and I contend that that energy has its crux in the word "glazed", the defamiliarizer. Read the poem with a workaday word like "wet" or even "soaked" for "glazed", and I think it fails to live up to its own first stanza. But as it stands, the poem is breathtaking: the one little syllable of ostranenie makes an entire scene into a piece of art.

Anyway, armed (or pocketed) with my two poems, I drove all the way out to Fulton, on the Thruway, through Rochester and Geneva and Syracuse and Utica, flipping through NPR stations as their signals faded; and my ticket was dismissed (hooray!); and I drove home along Route 5, listening to the Yankees win and to the Celtics lose, and I drove behind a west-moving, intermittent rainstorm. I had never driven all the way home on Route 5 before (it takes a really long time, but there is no toll), but most of Route 5 looks like most of Route everything else -- lots of box stores and fast food places and farms -- except that, I am not kidding, because of the storm I followed, absolutely everything was glazed/with rain water. For six hours of intermittent rain and a universal, unrelenting glaze, with my poem in my pocket, I was treated to two hundred miles of New York State Highway as an object of artfulness. It damn near made up for the Celtics losing.

So au revoir, National Poetry Month. Coming up: I am still plugging away at Proust, life-changingly, so more on him; much-belated final thoughts on Ms. Tinajero's book (so you all can post your final thoughts, too!); and the possibility of a National Short Story Month (get on it, Congress). Stay tuned!