Mnemonic recall and gold in every grave

Charles A. Watson
ENG 206
Hirschfield Readings
April 15, 2015

Reflection on Jane Hirschfield’s Essays:
“Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” and “Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance”

Refrains, choruses, call and response, enchantments, the repetition of the final lines of a sonnet: all are methods of remembering verse and adding to our Western language. Though undocumented through printed word, a primitive language is built upon the same. In Hirschfield’s “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” I was presented with the history behind the mnemonic device, a critical tool for memory and my appreciation of language.

Mnemosyne (Remembrance), was the earliest born Greek goddess, mother of the Muses, and also of the poem (176). Through the mnemonic, a person learns to teach himself and construct a bank of intuitive clues and reminders that he no longer needs to think about, such as Every Good Boy Does Fine to learning a musical scale. This is important to visual, aural, tonal, and tactile processing and how we recall and remember. Taste, sound, smell—these remind us of joyous, melancholy, or even traumatic events in our life. Naturally, we gravitate to or retreat from them for various reasons. We can’t escape, like Odysseus’ men to the sirens. We can turn our back at the mere utterance of that which discomforts. It is our developed choice.

What was a person’s introduction to poetry and at what age? Who was the teacher, the enabler, who opened this fountain of sensory knowledge? Virtually all language emerges from metaphorical thinking (110). Thus, as linguists, poets, and readers, our gift at understanding and communicating is largely based on what we remember through symbolism and creating metaphors for our individual processing mind. Verse … is language put into the forms of remembrance (177).

One major lesson of infancy is “that what goes out of sight does not cease to exist” (177). Children learn to trust this instinct through signals and symbols—the smell of dinner cooking means that mom has gone around the corner and will return. The sound of running water, a washing machine, the car’s motor and exhaust system, a flat screen tv … cats, dogs, birds … shouting, banging, arguing. These are all actions that might occur when mom (or dad) is out of the room and, even though the other living being is gone for an unspecified time period, the self continues to exist because the self is sensing.

Sound is relative to the individual, subject to one’s individualized decoding, and shaped by one’s own memory and sensory experience. This becomes learning strategy—to think memorable thoughts—and to assemble into a mental form that itself will be an aid to memory. The most universal is the call and response of repetition within variation … with meter or rhyme.

Hirschfield claims that the poet’s gift comes through silence, exile and cunning (109), so the “rhapsode” can weave a story to a new audience. But it’s not his original idea and never was meant to be. It’s his mnemonic, his muscle memory, the cadence of his being borne from craft and study and human interaction. Like the vaudeville director, aged rock star, renowned news correspondent, the poet hopes to convey through the muse to new readers.

“The earth itself, in many traditions, is a sacred utterance, the singing of the gods” (179). I’m not sure if Hirschfield crafted this conversation starter on her own, but I will borrow it in the future. In setting up to untangle some works of Ezra pound, I found a marvelous example of a poet demonstrating an aesthetic quality through ritualistic fashion and demeanor for his muse, only to be rejected for the night, a day, a week, or just for that psychological hour of misunderstanding—that zone, perhaps, during which the muse is cast aside for the ego in crisis mode:

“            I had laid out just the right books,
I almost turned down the right pages.                                       5

Beauty is so rare a thing …
So few drink of my fountain.

So much barren regret!
So many hours wasted!”

( “Vilanelle: The Psychological Hour” [SOURCE])

I will remember this poem just as Pound sifted the mnemonic metaphor of “fountain” as an avenue for sharing of intellect and aesthetic. So often beauty is unnoticed because it was not contained or packaged in a refrain to be shared by more than one. Thus, by setting this phrase in italics, Pound gave it an eternal quality, like the choir of all life before us. Beauty is youth while the unfolding blossom is set to discover its role in spring’s fountain.

Hirschfield begins “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection” by describing the conscious intention to which a poet is related to a poem. “Virtually all language emerges from just such metaphorical thinking” (110). This craft requires silence, exile, and cunning—kind of like James Joyce’s character Stephen in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as he leaves Dublin for exile and to explore new aesthetic from somewhere else. We craft our aesthetic based on sensory experience: in the kitchen, the yard, sound recording studio, or science lab. The aesthetic provides an avenue for the poetic chemistry to percolate. Are these mixed metaphors? Hardly not. The essence of the study of poetry is not to become a poet, but to mix what we love and stew it into new forms.

Hirschfield, Jane. Entering the Mind of Poetry. “Poetry as a Vessel of Remembrance” and “Poetry and the Mind of Indirection.”