An Essay by Lew Welch
Sunday, Oct. 05, 2003 at 7:30 p.m.


THE BASIC TOOL IS SPEECH
by Lew Welch

Somewhere along the line the idea of compression and "Poetry" killed speech. For more than a hundred years the process took place, until, in our time, the bulk of poetry existed as black marks on paper, printed so that no line ever reached both margins, and referring to things so violently jostled together that only the very patientest re-reader could make any sense at all out of it.

All the squares made much of this situation, which doesn't make any difference at all. They are always dumbfounded by everything. What was sad was to see a great art being misunderstood even by the few who cared about it: at last counting, about 2,000 worldwide�perhaps a hundred of whom had any real command of English. I am talking about readers and enjoyers, not about poets. There are always fewer than 2,000 poets, worldwide, and lately the poets have been the worst offenders.

It was not altogether the poet's fault. It should have been, but his wise place in the scheme of things, always very tiny, was taken over by poets who never wrote poetry at all, being content instead to quarrel about methods of analyzing Melville, whether or not an empounded anti-Semite deserved a prize, or attempting to outdo one another praising a German short-story writer who expanded endlessly on similes ("man who lives entirely for his family is no more than an insect" etc.) to the stature of a raging seer.

These were the best we had at the time, and I do not deny them their very great gifts. The savage flights of mind they almost daily took would frighten many of the finest poem makers who ever lived. My complaint is: none of them wrote so much as a single first-rate thing. In any form. The reason is simple. They talked themselves out of speech.

I have a second complaint, a personal one. It really is not as personal, for me, myself, as it is for the many fine talents of my generation who are still laboring to "pack in meaning" according to the rules laid down by last generation's nonpoets. Certainly the criticism of Mr. [Cleanth] Brooks and his even more complicated friends was, for us, often more interesting than what they were dissecting. In a great many cases, they wrote better than Melville and to a man they outwrote Kafka, the champion.

The basic tool is speech. The highest use of speech is the undeviatingly honest portrayal of the war of the mind. Pound knew all about speech but spoke only about the skirmishes of the mind. The generation too knowing to allow itself to be "lost," the critical generation we have become finally too "bugged" not to outgrow, was less dedicated to literature than Pound and far more cowardly about the war of the mind. Pound, at least, did his hiding by aping the classic boom; our most recent literary forebears went entirely over to the enemy's camp by trying to explain what can only be made through presentation.

Gertrude Stein, who was never complicated enough for these people I have been putting down, was, naturally, on the side of the artist. To her, even Pound explained too much: "Ezra is the village explainer, which is all right if you are a village, if not, not."

This vigorous sentence brings us back to speech. We have speech and explaining and presentation. We also have this generation which isn't about to explain anything, and we have the last generation which, for a while, explained everything so well that nobody wrote anything at all.

Because the essential thing about really interesting writing is that it doesn't explain. It is not mystic or strange, either, it just can't be explained. Nothing that is as simple as it really is can be explained. I know nobody who is really in love who can explain why he married his wife.

Ask yourself why Juliet's parents are so sad. Why did Othello get jealous, and when he did, why did he get jealous enough to kill Desdemona?

This is why we love that story. He did get that jealous and he did kill that girl. Further, Iago kept shouting obscene things and needling everybody. Our pleasure is in this and this alone. No one can explain Iago, though 300 years of critics have tried�some of them, when failing, decided it was therefore a bad play. We may have varying degrees of sympathy with Iago, we feel it more for example if we ever had one of those fiercely close friendships with one of our own sex in high school and our friend started running around with and then married a girl. Think about the quarterback and the fullback on the high school football team�their fierce competition and never-apartness�I am not talking about fairies. This has to do with Iago and Othello and their long togetherness in war, but it does not explain anything.

I bring this up to show that anyone can get complicated about explaining, but that explaining never accounts for any thing. A thousand other Iagos might have behaved entirely differently with a thousand other different Othellos. The ex citing thing is, it happened just that way. It happened that way because Shakespeare invented it that way. All the explaining in the world does not change the story.

Perhaps everyone who insists on explaining things is really only furious at his inability to change something he knows will never change. I see this all the time at cocktail parties. Someone says "what you really mean is" . . . or "what you really think of me is" . . . and of course this doesn't change anything or prove anything. Most of all, it doesn't account for anything.

How are you going to account for the fact that Flem Snopes brought all those horses from Texas? Explain why the people in Frenchmen's Bend bought them even though they surely knew they'd never catch them. All you can do is guess at Faulkner's motive for putting that story together. He won't say, except by putting another story together. You might as well face it, you're stuck with that story, just as it is. All your guesses will be partial guesses and will in no way effect the certain delight that generations and generations of people will get from this and all the other great Faulkner stories.

The best way to attack the foregoing position is to think me simple-minded and let it go at that. I will instantly agree with you. But you ought to know I have been through all of the subtle schools you are likely to become lost in, and have studied them in just as subtle a way. The moment I realized there was nothing to this explaining it occurred to me how much we say "why" and "whether" and "should" and "ought to have been" and how little we bother with "what's what."

The artist is only interested in what's what. He finally learns not to care about "why what" or "whether what" or "should be what" or "ought to be what" or "was what." All he cares about is the undeviatingly honest presentation of what is on his mind. He presents the entire war of the mind, not just the skirmishes, and though it is literally true for him, complete for him, containing all for him, simple at last for him (and, I might say, for all his real readers), to the enemy it is "ambiguous."

It is not "ambiguous," it is simply all, literally, there. There is no such thing as a number of kinds of ambiguity, because the salient thing about all literature worth serious considera tion is that it is totally unambiguous.

Now, here we go directly into the oldest, most important argument of all. The poet has always insisted that what he wrote is literally true. The real readers of poetry agree with him. The critics, however, because of their trade and because they are stuck with the vague-making tools of Western disputative philosophy, must spend their time showing in what way the statements in a poem are not literally true.

Rimbaud said that everything he ever wrote was true, "literally and in all senses," thus brilliantly proving his point. Dylan Thomas quarreled with an interpretation by Edith Sit- well of one of his terribly crabbed, condensed passages. He said she should merely have taken his literal meaning and then proceeded to write another poem to show how literal the first passage was.

I am indebted to Elder Olson for this Thomas story:

Edith Sitwell, in a highly appreciative review, sought to interpret these lines:

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam.
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream�

and thereby not merely engaged herself in some controversy but provoked the following reproof from the poet himself:

"Miss Edith Sitwell's analysis . . . of the lines 'The atlas- eater with a jaw for news / Bit out the mandrake with to morrow's scream' seems to me a big vague. She says the lines refer to 'the violent speed and the sensation-loving, horror-loving craze of modern life.' She doesn't take the literal meaning: that a world-devouring ghost-creature bit out the horror of to-morrow from a gentleman's loins. A �jaw for news' is an obvious variation of a �nose for news,' and means that the mouth of the creature can taste already the horror that has not yet come, or can sense its coming, can thrust its tongue into news that has not yet been made, can savour the enormity of the progeny before the seed stirs, can realize the crumbling of dead flesh before the opening of the womb that delivers that flesh to to-morrow. What is this creature? It's the dog among the fairies, the rip and cur among the myths, the snapper at demons, the scarer of ghosts, the wizard's heel-chaser. This poem is a particular incident in a particular adventure, not a general, elliptical deprecation of this �horrible, crazy, speed-life.'" [Elder Olson: The Poetry of Dylan Thomas, 1954, p.3.]

In the poem, which poor Miss Sitwell so valiantly tries to defend and to paraphrase, the language is trying to carry a burden which one finally learns to be beyond its powers to carry. Language is speech, a dull tool at best. Anything other than speech (printed words on paper arranged so that, when sounded, there is a discernible musical pattern, for example) is a translation. Merely a translation. Even newspapers are translations. Even a tape recording is a translation because you miss the gestures and the face. What one must have the honesty and humbleness to say is: the poem cannot be under stood. It is badly written. It shows a faulty understanding of the limits of language. You can't cram in meaning that way. You have to give words time to tell the war of the mind, and they can only speak so much. Dylan Thomas admits this thunderously with his really beautiful, because literal, speech- like poem written afterwards.

I must instantly dispell all doubts and confusions about what I think of Dylan Thomas. His "Winter's Tale" and "Long- Legged Bait" are easily the finest lyric poems in English. They are absolutely literal: the far-out visions of a man of unimaginable powers of mind and language, visions perfectly presented, true, "literally and in all senses." They are perfect presentations. They sit like a rock in the middle of the room. Once heard (and you must hear them because poetry is a presentational art), they can no more be denied than a boulder on your living-room rug. Nor can they be "explained."

But it is foolish to argue against the obvious fact that Thomas frequently used language unfairly. He crammed things in beyond the point of language. Because language is speech, and poetry is speech translated, and words can only handle so much.

Now we have speech, our generation, the last generation, literalness, and presentation. Language is speech, the last generation talked themselves out of speech, the poet insists that everything he says is true, "literally and in all senses," and critics only talk about how the poem is not literal. We have also seen a very great poet become confused about language. Just as the critic becomes confused. This is where our generation comes in.

Ours is the first generation in America which could be cultured and unashamed. Eliot had to become a Briton. Hemingway just bowed out, thank God, because Scott Fitzgerald stayed here trying to play our games and was demolished.



Welch, Lew. "The Basic Tool is Speech." How I Work as a Poet & Other Essays. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1961. 92-98.


I'm listening to my fall mix-CD
I'm reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
I want to the couch

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