Memory as memorial of what might be

In her Hudson Review article, Emily Grosholz recounts the work of some of her favourite poets. Most are male as befits the title of the article, Masculine Poetics: Works, Days and Cars. The female poets mentioned are more than mere foils. But, the focus of the review is on the poetry of select males writing in English.

What is repeatedly emphasized is the instantiation of memory. Memory may well be personal and intimate. Yet, such poetry need not disclose the poet in the present or in the presence of contemporaries. Still, embodiment is important. A person, place or process is encountered, engaged or ensconced in memory, which becomes memorial. 

Apart from the mention of a cover illustration, this is all done through words. Words evoke images. Sometimes these are powerful visions that rise up from the ground like the dead prophet, Samuel, before proud Saul at the behest of the Witch of Endor. A witch who was much surprised by her deft feat. Will our words bring a blessing or a curse? Will they comfort or discomfit?

Images called forth by words, whether written or spoken. Yet, images bear themselves forth in film. The word is not master in this medium. We can struggle to frame a film’s obvious meaning in words. Charles Saunders Peirce, the American philosopher, often saw what he was thinking without being able to say what he thought. We can see what we mean or feel through film. This is done with or without words.

Grosholtz lauded her poets’ ability to move beyond the empirical. The empirical can bind us to what is or has been, merely. A sign can open us up to the necessary and the possible that are both yet to be. The vagueness that often accompanies the activity of a sign is like a doorway leading us from the prison of what is; it is a threshold to what could be.

The poetics of masculinity, the imitation of the moral action of men, does not merely inform us of what is. It can transform us into being what we could be. What do John Wayne and John Ford disclose to us through film? That is the question to be asked and, tentatively, answered many times in this blog.

As an earnest, let me suggest that this understanding of the poetics of masculinity helps to clarify a puzzling discourse at the end of Fort Apache. The portrayal of Colonel Thursday, as gallant in defeat, provides a meaningful context for those who continue to do their duty at the margins of society. What is being discussed is not really a painting of what was empirically. Instead, it is a memorial of what could be and, indeed, what is being embodied by those who remain and remember.

Grosholz, E. (2006) Masculine Poetics: Works, days and cars. The Hudson Review. 56(3):500-508.