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Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric: The Poetry of Richard Brautigan

byJudith Johnson Sherwin?

Recently a poet, whose work I love and respect, said in a panel discussion that he did not want to be overwhelmed by a poem, he wanted the poem to sit back and let him do the work. I thought of Donne's "Batter my heart, three-personed God . . .," of Hopkins' elaborate rhythms and structures, and reflected that perhaps some of us, in a justifiable and historically necessary reaction against sentimentality and bad rhetoric, have become too narrowly defensive in our ways of encountering poetry.

Rhetoric has been condemned as the mother of lies, and as a result, many of us try to write unrhetorically. Yet—lies are, in a sense, fictions; fiction is something made or made-up; one of the ancient words for a poet is a maker. When we give up the element of fiction, lying, making something up, rhetoric, in our poetry, we may be forcing ourselves to do without something essential.

In fact, rhetoric is nothing more dangerous than the art of persuasion, and I cannot think of a poet who wants his poems to fail to persuade the reader of their validity. Some devices have been so overused that many of us avoid them. But the statement that one is using no rhetoric is, like Mark Antony's statement that he is no orator, in itself a rhetorical statement.

Here's a contemporary, non-rhetorical poem; let's see how it works and what rhetoric or anti-rhetoric it uses. The poem is by Richard Brautigan.

THIRD EYE
for Gary Snyder

There is a motorcycle
in New Mexico.

This poem certainly approaches the limits of what can be done with the implied statement that the poet is a man of plain speech and uses no rhetoric, that he will not presume to make any grand or sweeping statements, that he is going to let his poem speak plainly for itself. Those readers who perfer not to be overwhelmed by a poem should have a glorious time trying to overwhelm themselves. It looks as if we really will have to do all the work.

Let's do it. When you read that poem just now, what was your reaction? Maybe it was not too different from mine or from the reactions of the various classes I've tried it on. "What? Is that all? Who cares?" Something like that. The first time I encountered "The Third Eye," my mind made the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

I would argue that our reaction is part of the poem, as much a part of this poem as the printed text. If we assume the poet to be at least as intelligent a writer as we assume ourselves to be readers, he must have foreseen and chosen to use this reaction. Brautigan could have chosen to incorporate some form of reaction in the text: "There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico / nobody cares." If that were the text, the poem might be, among other things, a commentary on the indifference of the public to environmental problems. If instead, Brautigan had written the text as a dialogue between poet and reader ("There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico." / "Who cares?" or "So what") his format would have made us participate in the poem to the extent of answering the question with "Nobody cares" or "I certainly don't" or possibly even "I care."

By leaving out the "Who cares" altogether, Brautigan makes sure that we will supply something like it for ourselves, thus forcing us to become characters in the poem. This "Who cares" we fire back at Brautigan's motorcycle is, in effect, the reaction every poet has to overcome. Every poem must make us care, and every poet confronts, in every poem, the universal "so what" which Brautigan has made us supply for him. We, as uncaring audience have been forced to reject not only Brautigan's motorcycle but Brautigan's poem.

By dedicating the poem to a fellow poet, Brautigan has also reminded us that "poetry makes nothing happen." How much can a poem make us care? And when we react with some combination of indifference, skepticism, scorn, and mild amusement to the flatness and apparent silliness of this poem, we have become part of what the poem is about.

This two-line poem has already played with environmental pollution, public indifference, and the inability to make anything happen. Now let's examine the poem's title: THIRD EYE. The third eye is an oriental religious symbol of wisdom and spiritual insight. The poem is dedicated to Gary Snyder, a poet, an Orientalist, a scholar of religion and poetry, a student of Zen, and an environmentalist. In the light of the title and the dedication, we can no longer read the poem merely as a dramatic statement about pollution in New Mexico or about public indifference, whether to pollution or to poetry. I think we must read it as a Zen koan Brautigan is presenting to Snyder, and to us through Snyder. "There is a motorcycle / in New Mexico" is, first of all, and literally, a statement that something is present somewhere.

Let's look at the actual language of this statment. In Chinese poetry, which Snyder has translated, the poet does not make use of such linguistic structures as "I see a motorcycle" or "I hear a motorcycle." The Chinese poem that might be the equivalent of Brautigan's would, I've been told, go something like, "motorcycle . . . New Mexico." Translators who try to be faithful to the essentially egoless quality of Chinese linguistic structure use "there is" as the most neutral and accurate way to create an indiomatically acceptable English equivalent. So this text, as a simple statement of presence, does at least three things. It reminds us of a poetic and cultural tradition whose perceptual stances are completely different from ours in their lack of ego-centered linguistic forms. It reminds us of one possible answer (Snyder's) to our own cultural stance (a stance which has been responsible for bringing the motorcycle to New Mexico in the first place). And it asks us to meditate, neutrally and calmly, on the simple phenomenon of a motorcycle existing in New Mexico, a motorcycle as object, as image, as a thing occupying a given space. If either Gary Snyder or Richard Brautigan is a motorcycle owner or rider, additional elaborations are possible. And the fact that on the most immediate level, this poem is a put-on and a put-down of all our conventionally serious expectations as to the form in which a poem which does any of these things should be written simply returns us to the original rhetorical device by which the poem functions.

What will we find at the end of our motorcycle mediation? The poem is just beginning. Each of us will write this motorcycle poem of his own mind differently. Most poets, both of earlier generations and of our own, if they had written meditations on motorcycles, would not have failed to cover at least some of the territory Brautigan leaves to chance, to our good will and to our active participation in the process of creating the poem. Think of such possibilities as Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of a Motorcycle," Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a few Miles Inside New Mexico," Hopkins' "The Wreck of the Southwest," Bly's "The Motorcycle Mother Naked at Last," Olson's "I Maximus, to Hell's Angels," or Kinnell's "The Avenue Bearing the Initials of the Savage Skulls into the New World." Imagine the glorious complexity, the wealth of texture and image, of those poems. Maybe we should not regret that Brautigan is one poet whose work endorses the proposition that heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.

Brautigan's poem, if it works on us at all, works as rhetoric, by the conventional, contemporary claim that we have no rhetoric, and by the conventional, contemporary devices of bare, bald speech, and the inclusion of the audience's reaction as part of the script. If, however, the statement that we have no rhetoric is itself a rhetorical statement, if the poems are models either of passionate speech or of avoidance of passionate speech, can we believe that rhetoric is inconsistent or destroys the expression of emotion?

Is rhetoric, rightly used, a means by which we can discover or express what we feel, rather than a method of exaggerating or simulating emotion? Is technique a bar to feeling, either in making love or in making poetry? Is ornament a restriction from statement, or is it, as in much of Hopkins and Thomas, or in baroque music and architecture, part of the essential statement the work makes? Is an elaborate, vehement, or formally patterned statement automatically insincere, or can we also be sincere when we raise our voices, heighten our speech, and elaborate our forms? Is external form always a straitjacket imposed on a poem, or are traditional forms, sensitively explored, revelations of the intrinsic form a given poem may take to itself?

Creely has said that form is never more than an extension of content, and I agree, insofar as content can exist at all apart from the totality of the poem. But the converse may be equally true. Sometimes we find the content by means of the particular form. It seems valid to say that the particular small, tight line Creeley has used so consistently and with such effectiveness is as much a form which discloses to him what his poem is as it is an extension of a body of content or a way of seeing already arrived at, and I would guess that he might not object to his dictum being read both ways. For example, a poem from Pieces: "Such strangeness of mind I know / I cannot find there more / than what I know. / I am tired of purposes / intent that leads itself / back to its own disbelief. I want / nothing more of such brillance. . . ."

Clearly this poem, and its content, if that were separable from the form would be completely transformed, and completely impossible, if Creeley had not developed the particular bare, tentative, tight, retentive line that he uses here, and that is characteristic of so much of his work. Is that line not in itself a device, a form, a rhetoric, which has led him to discover what his poems are?

If the oppositions which have governed much of contemporary poetry are as much rhetorical devices and artifices of the critical and poetic intellect as the rhetoric from which they have tried to free us, then they are, of course, not necessary laws at all, but temporarily convenient assumptions. There is no need to fear being overwhelmed by a poem's energy or structure. Is the poem which batters our hearts less successful than the poem which starts a process and then backs off and forces us to complete it? Do we have, in an extreme case, to choose between Donne and Brautigan? Maybe most of us would choose Donne and some of us might choose Brautigan, but I hope that we would, after thinking it over, refuse to choose at all, and insist that we need not remain obdurately unresponsive to either.

I haven't raised these questions or discussed this very minimal motorcycle poem in such detail in order to commit what Diane Wakoski might have called a motorcycle poem betrayal, or to ask you which poem you'd prefer as your sole intellectual companion if you were stranded on an island for twenty years with nothing to read. Both Donne and Brautigan would give you something to think about and play with, as would Creeley; with all poets you'd have to do much of the work yourself.

Donne and Brautigan are both complex, both rhetorical, both subtle, both dramatic and demanding poets, capable of complex elaborations and resonances in our minds, (Donne clearly more so!). There is no such thing as a poem without rhetoric, just as there is no such thing as a poem without form. There is no such thing as an escape from rhetoric or an escape from form, an escape from what Frost called "The figure a poem makes." A poem has to make some figure whether the poet approves or not. Brautigan and Creeley have not escaped from device; Donne has not drowned out our own assenting voices in the vehement energy of his voice and his rhetoric. There is not such thing as a poem without some form or artifice, not such thing as a successful poem which does not, in some sense, overwhelm us, at least to the extent of absorbing our minds and our reading skills once we meet the poem seriously. We don't need to argue, as some American poets are doing now, for a return to rhetoric, structure, form, and artifice. Our poetry has never abandoned them.

St. Andrews Review? 22
1981: 55-59.



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