Reading Plato - 'Some Poems I love Best'
Jan. 20th, 2012 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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poetreePosted by jjhunter on behalf of Luisa A. Igloria.
For my second post, I'd like to offer a slightly reworked excerpt from a chapter I published on "Some Poems I Love Best" (in 7 x 10: World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets, ed. Alfred Yuson)--- this one a reading of Rick Barot's poem "Reading Plato".
I first read Rick Barot’s poem “Reading Plato,” from his book The Darker Fall which won the 2001 Kathryn Morton Poetry Prize from Sarabande Books, ten years ago when the poem was published in an issue of Poetry journal, and then again a few months after when “Reading Plato” appeared on the National Endowment for the Arts website (he was one of the poetry grant recipients then). I remember wondering if he might be Filipino or Filipino American—as it turns out he is, though this is not the most consequential thing about my ability to appreciate his work. Shortly after that I became friends with Rick through a Filipino American writers electronic listserve. Reading The Darker Fall, I was struck by the many images in it of bird trochees, phantasmal cities, light filtered through tea-water— the work of the invisible, like wind or color on prosaic surfaces so that they become both animate and intimate.
“Reading Plato” is the opening poem in the book, a reworking of the Platonic (some might say romantic) ideal of the absolute and no less a brave declaration of belief in the same. It begins in a closed vestibule of a train or bus or cab, on one of many mornings of being routinely ferried to the day’s appointed and mundane destinations. The way Barot invokes it, it might as well be the journey of the lost and the doomed, condemned to a life of repetition and despair—one from which the speaker is not excluded. It is “Reading Plato” that saves him, which gives him the ability to look beyond each superficial form and the name of each thing, to that world of transcendent and immanent Forms that these are attached to, as shadows are to their source of light.
There is, however, a subtle twist to Barot’s reading of Plato. In other words, the poet reads, but also revises; and it is in this revision that a redemptive vision might emerge. The Platonic texts, by positing the theory of Forms and privileging Beauty and Knowledge as superior ideals, thereby undermine the life of sensate experience. In Plato, genuine knowledge, true beauty, can never be experienced except in terms of their universal and absolute value—and who knows when these might finally be approached or appropriated? In Plato there is always a sense of the hierarchy of forms, and therefore of the deferment of insight; even having broken out of the cave of shadows, individuals must still struggle to reach the proper object of knowledge. But in Rick Barot’s poem, the poet honors the only life we know, every rough surface and edifice, every quaking scaffolding of it—and I am grateful. In his poem, the crudely carved hearts and lovers’ initials on bus windows, even the “noises and stinks” that are apparently “nothing to love” in an immigrant cabbie’s old New Delhi home, are signs of that transcendent ideal and destination that we have the right, he assures us, to hanker for.
That the poem is written in enjambed tercets is another way in which I experience this yoking of the Platonic ideal to the space of time-bound work, the space of the palpable and quotidian: as Alfred Corn observes, the tercet is one of those things that has been perceived as “an ‘unstable’ unit, lacking the evenly balanced support felt to be present in either the couplet or quatrain. Having only three lines to rest on makes the tercet roll forward into the next stanza and the next, rather like the continuous belted traction of a tank or earth-mover. Movement may be slow or headlong, but it is always forward, and thus tercets help draw the reader through long poems.”
The comparison to the traction of tanks and earth-movers is appropriate, especially since the image they conjure is so grittily earth-bound— whereas, as an example of a common expression of what is absolute or ideal, an aphorism or wise saying might find its more fitting formal complement in a balanced, rhyming couplet.
When from the ninth to the final tercet of “Reading Plato,” Barot turns to Socrates (Plato’s teacher and contemporary) for his description of “the lover’s wings spreading through the soul// like flames on a horizon,” it additionally becomes possible to think about the human predicament as bridged by acts of creative interpretation (surely no less rigorous and intelligent than acts of rational perception alone)— just as the teachings of Socrates were taken up by pupils like Plato and others, and just as they in turn formed a community of discourse which had the effect of elaborating on and extending the conversation from their century into ours. In the end, it is through the poem’s return to the conflicted space of the here and now, to the idea of work and application in human experience, that the Platonic absolutes and universals are also restored as inherent promise— the shape of the eternal already rising through the flesh of our scarred backs. Here is the complete poem:
READING PLATO
Rick Barot
I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched
into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,
or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to
love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead
opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was
leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,
so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat’s call at dawn or the face
reflected on a coffee machine’s chrome side,
the pencil’s curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor’s square
of afternoon light another page I couldn’t know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover’s wings spreading through the soul
like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much light
I think about, but the back’s skin cracking
to let each wing’s nub break through,
the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.
jjhunter on behalf of Luisa A. Igloria.For my second post, I'd like to offer a slightly reworked excerpt from a chapter I published on "Some Poems I Love Best" (in 7 x 10: World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets, ed. Alfred Yuson)--- this one a reading of Rick Barot's poem "Reading Plato".
I first read Rick Barot’s poem “Reading Plato,” from his book The Darker Fall which won the 2001 Kathryn Morton Poetry Prize from Sarabande Books, ten years ago when the poem was published in an issue of Poetry journal, and then again a few months after when “Reading Plato” appeared on the National Endowment for the Arts website (he was one of the poetry grant recipients then). I remember wondering if he might be Filipino or Filipino American—as it turns out he is, though this is not the most consequential thing about my ability to appreciate his work. Shortly after that I became friends with Rick through a Filipino American writers electronic listserve. Reading The Darker Fall, I was struck by the many images in it of bird trochees, phantasmal cities, light filtered through tea-water— the work of the invisible, like wind or color on prosaic surfaces so that they become both animate and intimate.
“Reading Plato” is the opening poem in the book, a reworking of the Platonic (some might say romantic) ideal of the absolute and no less a brave declaration of belief in the same. It begins in a closed vestibule of a train or bus or cab, on one of many mornings of being routinely ferried to the day’s appointed and mundane destinations. The way Barot invokes it, it might as well be the journey of the lost and the doomed, condemned to a life of repetition and despair—one from which the speaker is not excluded. It is “Reading Plato” that saves him, which gives him the ability to look beyond each superficial form and the name of each thing, to that world of transcendent and immanent Forms that these are attached to, as shadows are to their source of light.
There is, however, a subtle twist to Barot’s reading of Plato. In other words, the poet reads, but also revises; and it is in this revision that a redemptive vision might emerge. The Platonic texts, by positing the theory of Forms and privileging Beauty and Knowledge as superior ideals, thereby undermine the life of sensate experience. In Plato, genuine knowledge, true beauty, can never be experienced except in terms of their universal and absolute value—and who knows when these might finally be approached or appropriated? In Plato there is always a sense of the hierarchy of forms, and therefore of the deferment of insight; even having broken out of the cave of shadows, individuals must still struggle to reach the proper object of knowledge. But in Rick Barot’s poem, the poet honors the only life we know, every rough surface and edifice, every quaking scaffolding of it—and I am grateful. In his poem, the crudely carved hearts and lovers’ initials on bus windows, even the “noises and stinks” that are apparently “nothing to love” in an immigrant cabbie’s old New Delhi home, are signs of that transcendent ideal and destination that we have the right, he assures us, to hanker for.
That the poem is written in enjambed tercets is another way in which I experience this yoking of the Platonic ideal to the space of time-bound work, the space of the palpable and quotidian: as Alfred Corn observes, the tercet is one of those things that has been perceived as “an ‘unstable’ unit, lacking the evenly balanced support felt to be present in either the couplet or quatrain. Having only three lines to rest on makes the tercet roll forward into the next stanza and the next, rather like the continuous belted traction of a tank or earth-mover. Movement may be slow or headlong, but it is always forward, and thus tercets help draw the reader through long poems.”
The comparison to the traction of tanks and earth-movers is appropriate, especially since the image they conjure is so grittily earth-bound— whereas, as an example of a common expression of what is absolute or ideal, an aphorism or wise saying might find its more fitting formal complement in a balanced, rhyming couplet.
When from the ninth to the final tercet of “Reading Plato,” Barot turns to Socrates (Plato’s teacher and contemporary) for his description of “the lover’s wings spreading through the soul// like flames on a horizon,” it additionally becomes possible to think about the human predicament as bridged by acts of creative interpretation (surely no less rigorous and intelligent than acts of rational perception alone)— just as the teachings of Socrates were taken up by pupils like Plato and others, and just as they in turn formed a community of discourse which had the effect of elaborating on and extending the conversation from their century into ours. In the end, it is through the poem’s return to the conflicted space of the here and now, to the idea of work and application in human experience, that the Platonic absolutes and universals are also restored as inherent promise— the shape of the eternal already rising through the flesh of our scarred backs. Here is the complete poem:
READING PLATO
Rick Barot
I think about the mornings it saved me
to look at the hearts penknifed on the windows
of the bus, or at the initials scratched
into the plastic partition, in front of which
a cabbie went on about bread his father
would make, so hard you broke teeth on it,
or told one more story about the plumbing
in New Delhi buildings, villages to each floor,
his whole childhood in a building, nothing to
love but how much now he missed it, even
the noises and stinks he missed, the avenue
suddenly clear in front of us, the sky ahead
opaquely clean as a bottle’s bottom, each heart
and name a kind of ditty of hopefulness
because there was one you or another I was
leaving or going to, so many stalls of flowers
and fruit going past, figures earnest with
destination, even the city itself a heart,
so that when sidewalks quaked from trains
underneath, it seemed something to love,
like a harbor boat’s call at dawn or the face
reflected on a coffee machine’s chrome side,
the pencil’s curled shavings a litter
of questions on the floor, the floor’s square
of afternoon light another page I couldn’t know
myself by, as now, when Socrates describes
the lover’s wings spreading through the soul
like flames on a horizon, it isn’t so much light
I think about, but the back’s skin cracking
to let each wing’s nub break through,
the surprise of the first pain and the eventual
lightening, the blood on the feathers drying
as you begin to sense the use for them.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 04:03 pm (UTC)Oh, wow. What an extraordinary poem this is. Thank you so much for opening it up for us.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 05:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-18 06:11 pm (UTC)the work of the invisible, like wind or color on prosaic surfaces so that they become both animate and intimate.
This line in particular struck me. The work of the invisible is very Platonic in nature: shadows on a cave wall, the things we can only know through their images. I also like how Barton uses barrier images-- the plastic partition, the bottle's bottom, the bus window-- to locate himself in the world but not of it.