Poetry and Emotion: With a Review from Frank Bidart's "Desire"

With a review of Frank Bidart's Desire Snow outside, heavy snow, the kind that falls straight down. It plasters itself noiselessly onto the street, flocks the top of tree branches, and rubs away the contours of curbs and fenceposts and garbage cans - a laundry all whites, pre-sorted, every muffled thing in its place. With little overt motion: across our city traffic must be at a crawl. Winter is no analogy for the emotional life. Snow filters through itself to make little drifts. Its movement takes the form of scantest shiftings. Even at their most static, emotions are quicker, more easily stirred. Emotion: a moving out, the OED says, a migration, a transference from one place to another. Meanwhile, our city slows in snow, and any moving out, any transfer demands increasing labor. A cat on the porch step crouches in a human footprint. All this lightsomeness camouflages its own gravity and inertia. Like lightsome poems, poems without an emotional life, poems without motion. Such poems can be, in the nomenclature of outer weather, a little wintry. Their lightsome surfaces disguise their leaden depths. Their details, in the absence of an emotional life, are mantlepiece details, details we admire for their not being disturbed and not disturbing us. Description uninformed by emotion lacks the disturbance of a narrative. I worry sometimes that writing workshops legislate against emotions because workshops are social constructions, and emotions, especially strong ones, do not facilitate social construction. They bring too much baggage, too much history to the table. On the other hand, the saddest defense of a bad poem is for the poet to say, but this is how I feel.... Chances are good that this claim is made for feelings the poet has because he has been coached by the culture into how to feel. And our feel-good, you-deserve-a-break-today culture locates the wellspring of authenticity in feeling. In an exhibitionistic culture feeling becomes its own justification. For the writer who defends his work on the basis that it remains faithful to the feelings of this writer, emotions can become a force of entrenchment rather than a moving outward. Still, as our culture commodifies "feelings," feelings themselves are not suspect, only the purveyors who pimp their product with fluffy ideas about feelings. Still, a poetry devoid of emotion is a little deathly. Emotional authenticity thrives on exchange, on expression, on pressing outward to where we see ourselves more clearly for seeing ourselves in a larger context. The nature of that exchange defines any poetics. I think them is a long-standing trend in poetics, beginning with the Romantic tradition, to see the relationship of form and emotion as a regulatory one. Under this paradigm form makes strong feelings possible, but only by directing emotions: form dignifies emotions by organizing them, and it does this by providing a container which moderately runneth over. Nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics run curiously parallel to twentieth-century cognitive theory, which bestows some dignity upon emotion by acknowledging that emotion is, in its higher reaches anyway, a lower-level cognition, a sort of wordless language, a language of neural impulses but a language even so. Feelings, the theory goes, are in need of high-level cognitions, of "cognitive control," of the psyche's managerial skills. Regulation, inhibition, and control are integral parts of emotion, and are found even in animals who, along with humans, are not only subject to emotional impulses, but endeavor to cope with them. The rash of recent psychology books on emotion holds that emotion, as a lower-level kind of cognition called "appraisal," is a relational and an interactional skill and not mere inner feeling. The emotion of fear, one such cognitive manifestation of appraisal, sends blood to the large skeletal muscles, such as those in the legs, making it easier to flee. Anger makes blood flow to the hands, making it easier to grasp a weapon or to strike at an enemy. …