This is a seminar paper I wrote for a class on American fiction. It does not go far enough in some places, but I like it as a beginning. I submitted it with several PhD applications as a sample of critical work.
December 7, 2011
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity” from Coney Island of the Mind has been “widely anthologized” (Dickey 735), but very little critical work has been done on it. Most of the literature that talks specifically about “Constantly risking absurdity” comes from educators, who discuss ways in which to use the poem as a teaching tool. Their primary interest in the poem comes from its central metaphor, which describes a poet as an “acrobat”. This reading is quite literal and obvious: Ferlinghetti’s poem specifically states that “the poet [is] like an acrobat,” and this is the figure that teachers expect their student readers to construct in their minds, which influences the use to which the poem is put. Critics have even understood the indefinite “poet” of the poem to represent Ferlinghetti himself: “Ferlinghetti defines the poet (himself) as a serious clown” (Kent 1251). This analysis, however, enters into the reading at too late a stage: that is, it assumes too much of the reading process and sets aside too many influences upon the figure that emerges from a reading of the poem. Those influences, when appropriately apprehended, can shake the figure root to bough.
The standard reading presumes many things, among them that Ferlinghetti is himself the speaker of the poem, that he is in fact identifying himself as a poet and that the figure being read hence applies to Ferlinghetti’s conception of himself. These presumptions do not emerge uncontested out of the reading process. Other suppositions might be made: other narrators might be assumed; other identifications might be read out of the language; and Ferlinghetti the extant human being might have nothing at all to do with any conception that arises in the reader’s mind. In this pursuit we can obviously eschew the author’s intention of any meaning for his poem--I might suggest that we forget the existence of the author entirely and treat the poem as a meaningful object in and of itself. In finding meaning, we must only look at what the poem says and ignore the process of its creation, including the guiding hand of the author. The only recourse that should be made to data or apprehension beyond the poem is to the shared understanding of language that makes communication and poetry possible in the first place. As Wimsatt and Beardsley say in “The Intentional Fallacy”, “The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge” (812).
Meaning emerges from the reader’s encounter with text. How else can a poem mean except by the understanding of language by a conscious mind. Janice Radway suggests that meaning emerges when “the reader actively attributes significance to signifiers on the basis of previously learned cultural codes” (qtd. in Rabinowitz 1048). It is strictly in the mind of the reader that meaning comes about, and this meaning arises from several sources. The first is the learned associations of language that Radway hints at: that is, those things, actions, and relationships that exist in the world to which words point--or to shared concepts, associations of ideas that can be accumulated under linguistic descriptors. Additionally, the arrangement of these signifiers within a learned linguistic syntax informs the reader of how these concrete and abstract associations are to be understood as relating to one another. And finally, supra-linguistic expectations of narrative, of fictive or story-telling modes, such as character or time or scene, bring together all of these associations into a complete apprehension of the figure of the poem. At that point, after its complete construction through the rudimentary processes, the reader can interpret the meaning of the emergent figure according to his expectations.
So it is that the reading of a poem cannot be blithely explicated as a mere metaphoric figure, “the poet [as] acrobat” in the case of Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity.” Such a figure might--or might not--emerge out of a far more delicate and complex process of meaning, that if examined will change our understanding and the implications of that figure. Ferlinghetti’s poet is no mere “acrobat”, but in fact something more. The poem does not merely explicate the poet as “like an acrobat” but serves to redefine both roles through its subtle linguistic arrangement. What emerges is far more complex than the cursory readings of previous critics. The figure may be summarized as “the poet [as] acrobat,” but the reader will understand that figure in a far more nuanced way.
One of the expectations of a reader entering into a text, into any linguistic object, is that it has a speaker. Artifacts of language cannot exist without a conscious, deliberate mind having produced them (see Michaels and Knapp, “Against Theory,” et al.). However, in fictive forms, we often disassociate the literal speaker from an implied speaker, narrator, or other invented person. “Constantly risking absurdity” does not use the pronoun “I”, and so does not concretely suggest a narrator, but we still automatically posit that someone created the arrangement of words. The usual assumption is that this creator was a man named Ferlinghetti who exists somewhere extant in the world, and in a perfectly reasonable way, that is obviously correct. However, most readers will never have met Ferlinghetti the man, and their only understanding of that man will arise from assumptions made based on this single piece of linguistic output. Those assumptions create an invented “Ferlinghetti” that exists only in the mind of the reader. So, when a critic says that “Ferlinghetti defines the poet (himself) as a serious clown” (Kent 1251), he is not referring to the real, walking-around Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but an imagined Ferlinghetti who exists merely and only in the critic’s mind as the sort of imagined person who would have arranged words in a way like the poem. Where and whether that imagined Ferlinghetti coincides with the extant Ferlinghetti is irrelevant—the two are by nature of their separate imaginings different. In this way, the assumed producer of the poem does not really exist and is only posited by the reader. In this way also, the meaning of the poem cannot look to its author--and since it seems to have no narrator, neither can it depend on a narrative device. We need only look at the apprehension of meaning that occurs in the mind of the reader.
Not only does “Constantly risking absurdity” make no reference to its author or any fictive narrator with the pronoun “I”, but it begins without an actor and suggests not concrete images but abstract concepts. The poem begins with an adjectival modifier built around the present participle “risking”, whose subject does not appear until line 6. This forces the reader to hold any concrete image of the imaginary actor in abeyance in lieu of mingled abstract concepts, creating a space of uncertainty in which he does not know the subject. Without an actor to perform the action of “risking”, the reader cannot imagine concrete action--or must hold that concrete action in abeyance--and must consider “risking” to denote a concept and interpret the participle as an idea, that of taking risk. Even the objects of the verb, “absurdity” and “death” are concepts rather than concrete, readily imaginable objects, and so far in the poem nothing has been introduced on which the reader can construct a figure.
This uncertainty is strengthened as the abstract concepts are given no time in which to exist, so that the reader must consider them to be eternal. The participle “risking” signals a verb with imperfective aspect--that is a continuous action, which is semantically reinforced with the adverb “constantly”. The concept of risk is thus suggested to be eternal and ever-repeating. The word “whenever”, which introduces the subordinate clause that follows, also reinforces the idea of continuous action, though here at last we begin to get a concrete image on which to tie these abstract ideas: “he performs.” The unanteceded pronoun again reinforces the space of uncertainty in which the reader does not know the subject of the poem, although the animate, masculine pronoun begins to shape in very broad terms the identity of the actor (English does allow for “he” in ungendered usage, however). All concrete pieces of the image are still withheld for a moment, in a holding pattern awaiting the arrival of the central actor, who finally arrives in line 6, at which point the reader’s concrete mental imagining can at last snap into place with the introduction of the “poet”.
But before we ever learn the actor’s identity in line six, we already know that he is “risking” and that he “performs”. The syntax of the first “sentence” of the poem allows the single denoted actor to be the subject of seven active verbs (some of which are participles). In this way, the description of the “poet [as] an acrobat” is not in what he is, but in what he does. The “poet like an acrobat” is “risking” and “balancing”, he “performs”, he “climbs”, he “paces”, while “balancing” and “performing”, but “without mistaking.” The two uses of “perform” are marked as distinct by the first being intransitive and the second transitive, its object specifying the kind of performance being given: “performing entrechats.”
The construction of the described actor, what is denoted as a “poet” who is “like an acrobat”, is given its shape through action, through verbs, rather than identifying nouns. But as the transitive form of “performing” shows, the poet’s action is often put against objects through the predicates of the clauses. Hence, the poet “climbs on rime” or “performs above the heads of his audience,” details that serve to specify the concrete image being constructed in the reader’s mind, on which he must hang the accumulation of abstractions. The image that is being built is timeless, resultant of the imperfective aspect introducing the poem that shapes our understanding of the present tense verbs that follow to be of habitual aspect and also therefore timeless. The mental image is not time-bound, does not necessarily occur in any particular order, but is an amalgamation of all described actions, like a quantum particle that exists in all possible locations at all possible times. According to Marilyn Ann Fontane, the visual layout of the poem mimics this action-centered definition of the poet: “Lines 6-8 form a visual staircase for the acrobat to climb to his I-beam” (107), the verb “climb” influencing the poem’s structure. Much of Fontane’s description of the layout is based on verbs: “lines 9-20...leap from one side of the arena to the other” (107, emphasis added).
In the second “sentence” of the poem (lines 19-27), the timeless verbs give way to static nouns. Here, the first verb is reduced to an apostrophe: the verb “is” attached to the pronoun “he”, which refers to “the poet”, the ruling noun. The verb “is” takes a noun as object, “realist”, and, as all forms of be merely represent statements of state, the comparison of nouns against nouns or adjectives, the described figure has no motion and no temporal significance. Rather than using a verb to describe stepping, e.g. something like “[he] steps and stands,” a gerund (a noun) is used in relationship with other nouns: “the taking of each stance or step.” “Advance” is used as a noun rather than a verb. All the active high theatrics of the first sentence have given way to a static manifestation. The lines are now dominated by nouns: “truth”, “perch”, “Beauty”, “[a] leap”. Set against the momentum of all the endless action of the first sentence, these static nouns suggest a potentiality, something that solidly exists but does not move. “Beauty” itself is a noun, the goal of the poet, and it alone is an actor and subject of the few verbs in this sentence: Beauty “stands and waits...to start.” The poet is subject of a single verb, “perceive”, which is only mentally active and his only interaction with “taut truth” and the static image.
The final sentence has no verb at all to give the subject, again the poet, action, but is in fact a fragment, made up only of subordinate clauses that modify the subject pronoun, “he”. Within the subordinate clauses, the poet is potentially active, but the incomplete sentence (reinforced with the modals “may or may not” in the subordinate) leaves uncertain his ultimate fate. The final image is again static but this incompleteness lends to its impact as potentiality: Beauty, referenced by the pronoun “her”, hangs “spreadeagled in the empty air” and the poet “may or may not catch her.” Temporally, all the sentences are suggestive of eternity: the first in the aspect of its verbs, the second in the stasis of its nouns, and the last in its incomplete moment. These shifts seem to be arranged to create a cumulative effect of expectation in the reader’s mind, so that he finishes the poem with a question to be answered, rather than the poem offering a definitive answer to a question it has posed. It may be that further reflection will offer that answer, but the immediate effect is not of finality but expectation.
There are throughout the poem several moments of uncertain meaning arising from the vocabulary employed. First, in the word “rime”, because of its spelling, we might misunderstand it initially to mean an icy crust (I did, at any rate). There may be a hesitation before comprehension, a moment of ambiguity before reflection (perhaps as the eyes press on) suggests “rhyme”. This, in addition to what Fontane pointed out as “mild...emphasis” (106) created by the “drop-line”, serves to make the reader hesitate on the word “rime”. A word just before a drop-line “is in the reader’s vision longer than if the two lines were printed together, but not as long as if the second line were farther left than the last words in the first. This creates a situation where [those words] receive...slightly less emphasis [than words that end a line]” (107). The archaic spelling of “rime” might be related to the misspelling of Charlie Chaplin’s name in its adjectival form on line 29, “charleychaplin”—or this might be a deliberate respelling because the ‘y’ is more pleasing to the eye. A similar emphasis is added to “Beauty” by its capitalization, or as Kent suggests, “The capitalization of ‘Beauty’ as contrasted with the poet as ‘a little charleychaplin man’ (no capitals) emphasizes the unworthiness of the poet” (Kent 1244).
These syntactic and structural constructions work together with the denotations of the words, the shared mental constructs signified by morphemes, to create an image in our minds, which we must in turn submit to a secondary process of meaning-making. Now that the image of the simultaneously active and static acrobat caught in an incomplete moment has emerged in our minds, we must ascertain what that image means as it pertains to the figure of the poem, the central metaphor seeded by the literal comparison on line 6, “the poet like an acrobat.” The actions described in the verbs are those taken by an acrobat, not literally by a poet, so that as we create our mental image, we place the acrobat in the place of the poet. Kent declares that “the use of circus imagery with its high wire acts...is excellent. [It] speaks about the excitement of life” (1251). This figure is “a cliché, but one rich in fabulous three ring connotations” (Kent 1244). But the central interest of the poem is not of course some insightful description of the work of an acrobat, but that comparison with a poet.
Peter Rabinowitz suggests that the appreciation of this figure by a reader is founded on an assumption of reader knowledge: “a community agreement that allows a discussion of a certain sort to take place by treating meanings in a particular way” (Rabinowitz 1044). It is the expected social conventions that a reader brings to bear upon those linguistically constructed imaginings that discover a further meaning beyond the literal, an explication of the figure. In “Constantly risking absurdity,” the assumed reader will understand the roles of the trapeze artist and the tight-rope walker; he will recognize who Charlie Chaplin is. He will note the “allusive bow to Keats’s Truth and Beauty” (Skau 84). Hence, when the poem equates the actions (through verbs) of the acrobat with the action of a poet, the reader will recognize that an acrobat “performs above the heads of his audience” and “climbs...to a high wire,” where he is “balancing...above a sea of faces.” It is in the divergences from the conventional image that the metaphorical figure begins to take shape. The high wire is “of his own making”--not the acrobat’s, but the poet’s. He balances on “eyebeams”, or as Edward Kent puts it, the poet wants “the audience (readers) to focus their ‘eyebeams’ on him” (1244). The poet “climbs on rime” rather than a rope ladder or other ascending device at the circus. While an acrobat “paces his way to the other side”, the poet moves “to the other side of day”.
The suggestive power of these figures arises from their closeness to a communally shared figure of the acrobat. “Eyebeams”, as Fontane points out, suggest “I-beams” used by acrobats. Kent proffers that the poet’s high wire “of his own making” reflects “the performer who rigs his own equipment” (1244). “Sleight of foot tricks,” which seems completely within the image of the acrobat, manages to bleed over into the description of the poet, as Michael Skau explains: “appropriate for the acrobat-on-a-high-wire image, but also for the poet performing his sleights of feet--metrical feet” (Skau 84).
The resulting figure is thus that of a timeless “poet [as] acrobat,” who must eternally perform and try but “may or may not catch” Beauty. R. P. Dickey offers a brief explanation of the overall image: “The poet as high-wire performer--as popular entertainer. He is...pathetic, likeable, and innocent--at the mercy of buffeting forces of society, and so forth. And yet, in this conceit, all eyes are upon him....dependen[t] on the audience” (Dickey 735-6). But Dickey takes issue with the image so created. He dislikes the kinds of poems written by Ferlinghetti and his peers, saying, “their poetry is not very good” (735), and in fact he seems to dislike most poetry: “indeed most poets in general are bad” (733). Dickey’s main complaint about “Constantly risking absurdity” is that “It doesn’t take much of a close reading to find, [...] midway in the performance, serious problems in the structure of the basic image” (736):
I take the “high wire of his own making” to mean surely that the poet’s truth comes from within, that it is of his own making--truth as subjective. But that he has to perceive “taut truth” before making a move suggests that the truth, the taut wire on which he performs, exists objectively as something prior to any (poetic) act of his own. (736)
In fact, “in the final trope...Ferlinghetti’s failure of imagination completes itself. [...] The ill-imagined, unthoughtout image of the wire itself is not enough; in the last image Ferlinghetti gives us an unintended bombastic absurdity with which the poem collapses.” This is the shift from the high-wire acrobat as poet to his “waiting to catch ‘Beauty’ in her ‘death-defying leap.’ He confuses a high-wire performer with a trapeze performer” (736). For Dickey, this is a “failure of the moral imagination.”
These criticisms may readily suggest themselves to those who take “[not] much of a close reading” of the poem, but a more careful reading exposes the fact that Dickey’s complaint arises from a not-close-enough reading. We’ve already seen that the poet is the actor of many verbs, and that his image is eternal, that is it does not progress temporally. In the same way, the poet/acrobat can easily shift roles: in fact, the reading itself suggests that he shifts roles as a feature of his existence. While Dickey’s reading might be suggested by Rabinowitz’s “community agreement” that tight-rope walkers are not trapeze artists, nor vice-versa, the reader at some point must set aside such presumptions and read what the poem actually says. Dickey explains the problem, “If the fellow performer attempted to leap and be caught by someone on a high wire it would not be a ‘death-defying’ leap, it would be suicidal” (736). But like “rime” and “charleychaplin”, this is the language the poem is made of. If, as Emerson suggested, the poet “use[s] defects and deformities to a sacred purpose” (390), which is “insight, [...] express[ing] itself by what is called Imagination” (392), the question to ask is not whether the image fits our expectations, our “community agreement”, but how might it challenge our suppositions. The poet as acrobat, as we have seen, is “constantly” acting, and Beauty’s final leap, as the poet strives to maybe catch her as the poem ends, hangs eternally uncertain in its outcome. The lack of progressive or narrative time suggests that all parts of the acrobat’s performance can exist simultaneously, again like some quantum particle, so that the poet, and the acrobat, can easily be both tight-rope walker and trapeze artist, to fulfill more than one role in the eternal and unchanging performance.
In the same way, although the poem might suggest two separate loci for the poet’s search for truth, it in fact expresses that truth must be found in both places. Truth exists, as Dickey suggests, “within” the poet at the same time that it can be found “objectively” outside the poet and “prior to any (poetic) act of his own.” In fact this disparity reflects the long history of artistic philosophy: does art look within the human mind or spirit for its object, or does it look outside in the world? If the poem suggests such a confusion, it is a reasonable one.
But I think our close reading can easily solve the dilemma. Whatever the philosophical answer, the poem wants to suggest that both answers are correct: truth can be found inside the poet and must be measured against the external world. Dickey is not wrong in reading the oppositions: he is only wrong in thinking this is a problem. He has not read closely enough. The “high wire of his own making” was described in the first sentence, the verb-dominated section, where the poet is most active; while the “taut truth” that the poet “must...perceive” is described in the noun-dominated second sentence, which describes a static state-defined world the poet must “perceive”. The active versus passive dichotomy is built into the very syntactic structures of the poem. Where the poet is active, he creates truth himself, finds it within himself. When he is merely a spectator, he must (with his only verb) “perceive” that truth in the world. The question to ask is not why the poem creates this horrible mistake, but how these two images work together.
The answer probably lies in the specific kinds of actions the poet/acrobat is able to take in the static, noun-dominated world. He makes his own high-wire, his own “taut truth”, which he must now “perceive”. In this way, the poem upstages another of Dickey’s criticisms of Ferlinghetti and his peers: “[Poets like Ferlinghetti believe they] don’t need much, if any, revision” (732), but Dickey insists that “technique is some kind of an analogue of the difficulties of truth; that it is nearly as hard to come by truth itself; that it involves the opposite of easy writing” (733). The poet/acrobat of “Constantly risking absurdity” seems to understand this. Even though he has made his own high wire, his own “taut truth”, he must examine it, adjust it, be sure of its soundness, “before the taking of each stance or step.”--even as the acrobat, having assembled his equipment, must take care in checking its maintenance as he moves about upon it.
We have seen in this analysis that examining the mere figure of “Constantly risking absurdity,” of the poet as acrobat, is not sufficient to understand the nuances of its meaning. A reader must also examine the syntactic and morphological patterns that give the figure its shape in the assembled image brought about in the reader’s mind. Each emergent feature that arises from the way in which the image has been put together impinges upon the realization of that figure. Were the verbs of the first sentence constructed in a passive form, or were the gerunds of the second sentence instead active verbs with perfective aspect, or had the final sentence a verb or predicate that completed it, the ultimate meaning of the figure would shift considerably, even if the general signifiers and their semantic relationships remained as much as possible in the same arrangement. One might imagine a parallel poem that uses a nearly identical figure of poet as acrobat and describes nearly identical actions and ideas, but creates a completely different effective meaning for the reader because of its syntax.
In this way, the meaning of a poem’s content is shaped and directed by its form: in fact, its ultimate meanings seem to derive directly from that form, while semantic denotation merely nudges it, influencing its ultimate expression only slightly. Susan Sontag suggests in “Against Interpretation” that “what is needed is a vocabulary--a descriptive, rather than prescriptive vocabulary--for forms” (Sontag 744). It seems to me that this grammatical examination of poetry might serve as the foundation for such a descriptive criticism. We cannot separate the literal figure of the poet as acrobat of “Constantly risking absurdity” from the manner of its construction. The morphemes, the layout, the syntax of its “sentences”, all of these things (and more) work in concert to create the poem’s final effect. Criticism like Dickey’s, that only skims over the surface of the meaning of the poem, can only misunderstand and misrepresent its meanings and so conflate its true shape with the apprehended meaning. Sontag suggests for art that “the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (745, emphasis in original).
It seems that through this cursory examination of linguistic form, of the syntax and grammar that guide the arrangement of the words serving to shape a reader’s semantic apprehension of the poem, we have moved closer to apprehending its complete effect. Sontag, describing the kind of criticism she would prefer to see, explains, “I am not saying that works of art are ineffable, that they cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What could criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?” (Sontag 744). Art--poetry--creates its effect in its totality, in the accumulation of all of its pieces, and therefore its effect can only be examined by examining every one of those pieces.
We have seen through this explication of Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity” that such sloppy content-only apprehension of meaning as Dickey’s is insufficient to a full appreciation of the poem’s “meaning”. Any act of criticism should not glance merely at the image that has been created in the reader’s mind but at the process by which that image arises. Because meaning arises from the reader’s encounter with text, whether it is created or “found” (Rabinowitz 1044), the explication of meaning must trace the process by which it emerges. Setting aside the process and examining only the end result, the image that has been created, “reading” only that image, will be insufficient. I hasten to add that this process will also be fruitful for work longer than Ferlinghetti’s brief poem, though for something such as a novel, the description will be enormous.
Works Cited
Dickey, R. P. “The New Genteel Tradition in American Poetry.” The Sewanee Review 80.4 (Fall 1974): 730-739. JSTOR. Web. 25 Nov. 2011.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” The Critical Tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 385-396. Print.
Fontane, Marilyn Ann. “Ferlinghetti’s CONSTANTLY RISKING ABSURDITY.” Explicator 59.2 (Winter 2001): 106-108. Web. 25 Nov. 2011.
Kent, Edward. “Daredevil Poetics: Ferlinghetti’s Definition of a Poet.” The English Journal 59.9 (Dec 1970): 1243-1244, 1251. JSTOR. Web. 25 Nov. 2011
Rabinowitz, Peter. “From Before Reading.” The Critical Tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1043-1057. Print
Skau, Michael. “Constantly Risking Absurdity”: The writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1989. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Critical Tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 740-745. Print.
Wimsatt, W. K. and Beardsley, Monroe C. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Critical Tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 811-818. Print.