Sappho's Triangles: Or, the Lyric Third Party

Dickinson, Ashbery, O'Hara, Freud et al

A lot of us assume that a poem, a lyric poem, is where a poet (speaker) addresses someone in particular. Especially in love poetry, another bulky category both synonymous and not synonymous with lyric poetry, traditionally speaking, there is—as in the elegy—this strong sense that, ultimately, Someone is Speaking and Someone is Spoken To. That’s the bottom line. You can think of it as the post office model: letter sender, letter receiver, with the poem as the message in the bottle. Two poems below play with this idea openly. The first is by Emily Dickinson (441), written in the 1860s.

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty

Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me

Here’s another poem, that plays with this sense of Poem as Address. It’s by John Ashbery and it’s called “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” first published in the collection Shadow Train in 1980 (where all the poems are written in quatrains):

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

If you push the poem as letter-conceit, as both of these poems do, too far—quickly something else starts to emerge. Typically one might imagine the relationship between speaker and addressee, poet as reader, as a line like this:

I think the most beautiful definition I have ever read is Plato’s definition of a line. He called it a point that flows. Or, as Dickinson puts it, imagining eternity: “Forever—is composed of Nows—” In Dickinson and Ashbery, the poem fluctuates across immense scales. In the first, the poem speaks to the World (an impossibly large announcement, usually reserved for politicians and preachers). In the second, the poem speaks to just one person, on the most intimate scale imaginable: psst, it’s you, the reader, hi.

You could think of this as “open-ended” address, since each reader may be that intended, which is come to think of it potentially the world, and therefore as large and unruly as Dickinson’s world. What Ashbery once called in reference to his own poems as “one-size-fits-all” confessional poetry. And yet, the point is there’s stubborn intimacy. How can intimacy be open-ended, though? Well, think of advertising and marketing (“gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters,” the first of those words calling to mind locomotion and steamboats, even). Somehow, across billions of dollars and corporate anomie, one is called to, manipulatively, sure, but still, there’s an appeal. And you better believe it’s intimate since it’s trying to insidiously incept your bungled brain, the conscious self’s barbed perimeter.

What’s interesting in both of these poems is how they finally fold themselves in another direction, seemingly away from the straight (no pun intended) line. To Dickinson, whose “simple News” is an anti-Christian correction of “the Good News,” we witness her supplanting the idea of Another World (Heaven) with this one: the majesty of godless creation. (Which French mystic said: There is another world, it’s this one?) Still, it’s really an ambiguous ending. And BTW: you, reader, who are the World, please judge tenderly of me, the poet. Quickly, there are a bunch of lines happening here: