A Poetry of Two Minds

by Sherod Santos

In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them.In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man.

These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment.

With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2000

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can’t think, off the top of my head, of the last time a work asked for so much thoughtful engagement, a request I was happy to meet given the commensurate reward (I might have said “demanded” instead of “asked” had I been unwilling to meet it, and may well not have acceded); the result is a book that almost forcibly slow one down, as if to practice the optimal speed for approaching poetry. Sherod Santos is a well-attuned, sensitive, reflective reader, already fluent in some theories and ideas that have come to prominence since but were hardly in the mainstream at the time of publication, sometimes in now-familiar language and sometimes having beaten latecomers to the development of a specific language to discuss his ideas. I found myself so sympathetic to the way he writes, his technique and the examples of his arguments (ones which in most cases would not have occurred to me), his deployment of etymology and literary references. Santos, so engaging in his approach and precise in his thought, artfully explores the poetic process, so artfully that it feels neither like exegesis or pedagogy, sometimes through mythical narratives themselves artful in their uses of metaphorical arguments, sometimes through lives, sometimes through specific poems, and invokes philosophers often, though as if to suggest not a philosophy of poetry but poetry as a philosophy.

That poetry should be the subject and not the object, philosophically, is fitting, as a central through-line of Santos’s in A Poetry of Two Minds—and the most compelling one, though there is stiff competition—similarly suggests the centrality of the poem itself in poetry, QQQ. Though this could sound like a light ideal, Santos’s defense of it is anything but, and is instead a rigorous explication and not imbued with poetry itself as one might expect of a poet, as if he did not want to use the art itself to tautologically assert its own importance; as a result, it comes across as a sophisticated, specialized update of the death-of-the-author argument. The idea that a given poem has an essence and identity of its own allows for Santos to make interesting cases for the other inherent qualities of a poem that help to define it as germ—a will, an instinct, and an intuition, matching that of the poet who will later divine the poem from his consciousness, as suggested by a compelling recurring idea of the poem as dreamlike, in that its source is found in the conscious and subconscious but needs to be interpreted—perhaps inaccurately or incompletely—in order to be relayed and translated to the real world in any form, even if imperfect (which may necessarily be the case, given the traversal between planes); thus, the poem, being a translation of sorts, is released out of the poet’s control and influenced by externalities, launched into no known paradigm like a traveller on a journey with no specified destination.

Not least among the externalities to be encountered are readers, who sit at the other end of the poem as seesaw. Just as the poet’s will bows to the essence of a poem, my reading is that the case that Santos touches on, but mostly leaves implicit, is that the reader meets it in a similar way, in a process that mirrors the poet’s discovery and distillation of the preexisting conceit. In the way that a poem’s significance synthesizes form and content into a unique expression, shaped in its particulars by the emotions of the poet, the amount of time spent in contemplation, the degree of compression into text, and so on, the process of refraction that occurs is mirrored in the process of reading, with the poem explicating its own process of creation so that as its core expression is reverse-engineered by the reader in a way inherently affected by his own leanings and background, the poem as understood by the reader remains as fundamentally the essence of the poem itself as the poem as understood by the poet, because the will of the reader towards interpretation, like the will of the poet towards distortion, is overridden by the impulsive recognition of the truth within.

The primacy of poems themselves are the key here, and while they can reliably be understood by virtue of retaining their essence, by definition, through any efforts by writer or reader to impose their own wills or desires upon the text, they can also reliably not be understood in full (in another persistent motif, Santos presents a pleasing conception of obscurity as a protection of the essence of a poem, allowing the poet to reveal himself in ways he otherwise wouldn’t only because he thinks that he remains disguised). Just as there is no clear destination for a given poem, there is no clear point of departure, either; a poem starts by fleeing the poet’s intentions and ends unable to find full purchase in the reader, and thus acts like a buffer, repelling in turn the poet and the reader, who approach the poem not asymptotically but in a progression matched by the poem’s equivalent progression along the same vector, maintaining a tantalizing and unchanging distance, the unknowability that captivates the poet enough to try to capture it and captivates the reader enough to draw them in, and back, the mystery at the core lending an enduring power and appeal, the irresistible invitation to engagement that seems to define great poetry. But the self-governing primacy of the poem should not suggest that no work is required on the part of the writer or reader—indeed, in situations where such is the case, lesser efforts inevitably result, the transparent evidence of a lack of tension at any point in the process. Instead, the excitement of worthy poetry is in its inexhaustibility, its ability to reward responsiveness, even as it comes no closer to being solved, reduced, or depleted. A Poetry of Two Minds did much to inform me as a reader (of poetry and in general) as well as as a writer, even if only of prose, and leaves me a more responsive and better reader, and one better equipped to encounter more poetry (and excited to do so!).

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Satisfying. 5/09