Bedtime Metaphysics
A philosophical nocturne by Morri Creech.
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In the throes of fantastical hopes as an aspiring poet, one might easily think to oneself: “If only I could get into such-and-such journal, or win such-and-such prize, or receive such-and-such fellowship, I’d really have it made– then I would truly be embarked on the S.S. Parnassus toward the horizons of immortality! As for all those well-decorated, well-published poets whom no one that I know respects or cares about, what are they to me? My work will stick, because it is actually good. I just need the industry bonafides to give me a chance!”
Following such thoughts, to examine the career of a reasonably successful poet that one admires can be a sobering experience. Our poet for today, Morri Creech, is just such a case. Morri Creech is an uncommonly good poet. Shockingly, he has been recognized as such by the literary establishment, which usually avoids good poetry like the plague. Creech has received both NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships; he has been published in Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, and many other top journals; in 2014, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Just last year, he won the Rattle Poetry Prize, worth $15,000. Short of winning that Pulitzer, teaching at an Ivy League, becoming Poet Laureate, reading at an inauguration, acquiring an editorship at The New Yorker, getting some swanky deal with FSG, or going back in time and graduating from Iowa, there is little else Creech could do to establish himself as a poet in the literary-industrial complex of contemporary America. We should all hope to do so well.
And yet, outside of a discerning coterie, few people know who he is. Unless you, dear reader or listener, are highly involved in the formal poetry scene, his name is probably new to you too. And this is not only a recognized but an actually good poet we’re talking about here! Is it any wonder that younger poets are desperately turning to self-publication on Substack, pursuing some slim chance of virality over the defunct promises of the establishment? As a Zillennial, I find myself caught in medias res, using half my willpower to submit poems to journals and the other half to force myself to be active on social media. I respect the judgement neither of the Instapoetry-gobbling masses nor the vast inane that is the publishing hivemind, and yet I must seek my readers somehow.
Versecraft is not a project focused on promoting my own poetry, but it is intimately connected to that pursuit insofar as my mission is, in some small way, to reform the taste of our age, molding a culture in which the sort of readers I desire exist and the sort of writing I value is admired by others. In a larger sense, Versecraft is about justice: doing justice to the critical capabilities of readers’ minds, the artistry of good writers, and most of all, to the merit of great poetry. I cannot hope to make the poetry of Morri Creech or Matthew Buckley Smith or Edgar Bowers famous, but I can celebrate it as it deserves to be celebrated, and thereby promote the canon that I wish to see in the world. I would like to thank you, dear listeners and readers, for being part of this project– when social media is barbarous and the poetry establishment is philistine, impotent, and nigh-irrelevant, we must search for our civilizing influences elsewhere, and that elsewhere, I hope, is here.
Well, enough moaning. Let’s look at a good poem by a good poet. Or is it a poem? Stay tuned. It’s called “Bedtime Metaphysics,” and was originally published in one of the few truly good journals, 32 Poems. This work, incidentally, also provides the title for Creech’s upcoming poetry collection, so it is fair to say that it is a significant piece for Creech himself. Like much of his work, it has an undertow of the surreal, but whereas in many of his poems surreality pervades the entire mise en scène, here, surreal imagery is in service to a relatively sober meditation upon the actual strangeness of reality. I am attracted to this lyric not only because it is philosophically serious and interesting, but because it is written in a higher register than most contemporary poems, or most poems of Creech’s for that matter. While I would not call it a grand style, it is certainly a bold, vivid, and dignified middle style, suitable to its subject matter. The lyric goes like this:
Bedtime Metaphysics
A nightgown of wind, say, its hem dragged
across the frostbitten grass by whoever wore it
in the unsolvable night, in the depth of cold,
and stars like snowflakes blown from some
cosmic alp at whose foot the clouds scattered
beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark,
the ends of evening having come unstitched,
raveling back to the glimmer of the thimble,
the tailor’s needle poised to thread the hour
into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor . . .
Knowing one always puzzles at the universe,
what lucence, what far combustion of gases,
what confusion of shapes beyond the maples
arranged themselves as meaning in the mind?
The tenor is wily and full of shadows, sister.
It can’t quite be compared before it changes
again to the same old bewildering certainties
to which everything gets reduced in the end—
the hours themselves, say, or the honest stars,
a nightgown frayed to the emptiness of air.
This twenty-line piece is organized into ten couplets, and if you are looking at it on the page, you will see that the lines all look to be of a remarkably similar length. Therefore, despite the fact that we do not hear a consistent meter in our ears, we should examine further. When we do, we find that the vast majority of the lines have a syllable count between 11 and 13, and that fourteen out of twenty lines contain five strong speech stresses. We also observe that most lines are dominated by rising rhythms– iambic and anapestic motions. This, then, is a lyric in which we might well detect what Eliot called the “ghost of a pentameter,” and is an example of the gray area that is possible between poetry and prose. While there is not a set sonic pattern at work, there are still certain sonic parameters observed which give the suggestion of verse. Arguably, it is just as if not more difficult to successfully write in this gray area than in strict iambic pentameter. After all, one must be constantly aware of what one is doing rhythmically in order to preserve the intended ghostly effect. While it may seem that this way of writing would be a good choice for amateurs seeking to ease their way into writing iambic pentameter, it is in fact a method that can only be pulled off by a highly refined ear, and should only be attempted once strict metrical composition has been mastered. I suspect that Eliot and Pound would actually agree with me on this, but of course, like all things enmeshed in matter and entropy, human beings are inclined to take the path of least resistance, which is how we got to the prosaic circus which dares to call itself poetry today.
Let us now go back and read the first half of the lyric again, which conveniently trails off into an ellipsis…
A nightgown of wind, say, its hem dragged
across the frostbitten grass by whoever wore it
in the unsolvable night, in the depth of cold,
and stars like snowflakes blown from some
cosmic alp at whose foot the clouds scattered
beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark,
the ends of evening having come unstitched,
raveling back to the glimmer of the thimble,
the tailor’s needle poised to thread the hour
into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor . . .
We begin immediately with a metaphor: “a nightgown of wind, say.” The “say” is important, because it indicates that Creech is giving us this metaphor as an example of “bedtime metaphysics.” Already, the speaker has implicitly made an interesting claim– namely, that when we use figurative language, we are practicing metaphysics. When we describe the wind as a nightgown, we are not merely conjuring up a whimsical image, but imbuing the wind with the quality of a diaphanous nightgown and all the associations that come with it: sleepiness, coziness, vulnerability. These become, in the mind, part of the wind’s essence. Creech is taking a page out of Wallace Stevens’s book: if our experience of the world is entirely mental, the imagination is properly a kind of demiurge, legitimately able to create and affect the reality we perceive. The meaning of “bedtime metaphysics” is therefore twofold: it refers both to metaphysical ruminations conducted at bedtime, and also to the act of imbuing reality with what we might call “bedtimeyness,” like the comparison of the wind to a nightgown.
The grass is “frostbitten,” and we will later get the phrases “depths of cold,” and “stars like snowflakes.” Creech is creating a frigid atmosphere to complement the darkness of the setting: cold and dark are, after all, the conditions most alien to the human being, which is a warm-blooded, light-reliant creature, and the conditions most representative of the vast majority of the universe, the cold and dark abyss of space. If we were to give physical qualities to the “Big Other,” the cosmic mystery opposed to and beyond human ken, coldness and darkness would be two of them. Metaphysics of course is an attempt to confront and describe this icy, shadowy mystery: objective reality in itself, or what Creech calls the “unsolvable night,” resistant to any attempts to make the numinous luminous. Perhaps Creech would agree with Dickinson that if we are going to tell the truth of things, we shall best succeed if we “tell it slant,” through the metaphysics of metaphor. Only through a certain amount of conceptual legerdemain and indirection can we make any progress in solving what is unsolvable to the rational mind, imaginatively intuiting what we cannot argue or articulate.
We then shift into the genuinely grand and mythological with a mighty simile: “stars like snowflakes blown from some/cosmic alp.” With the comparison of stars to snowflakes, the imagery of cold continues, but the themes of ephemerality and vastness are also introduced: though stars are enormous conflagrations of gas that may burn for millions, billions, or even trillions of years, from the prospect of eternity they melt away as swiftly as snowflakes. The stars are humbled not only temporally but spatially, as they are conceived as blowing into the firmament from something exponentially larger: a “cosmic alp.”
Second only to trees, mountains are often viewed by the world’s religions as totems of the axis mundi: the center and spine of the cosmos which connects the celestial, terrestrial, and chthonic worlds. Mt. Meru, Mt. Olympus, Mt. Fuji, Mt. Kailash, and even Mt. Sinai are examples of such holy, symbolic mountains. We have here emblems of cosmic order: the mountainous pillar which upholds reality, the axis mundi, and the stars like snowflakes, famous for their mathematical beauty. And yet, these are quickly followed by images of disorder. When we think of “clouds scattering,” we typically think of emerging into a greater clarity, but here, their parting reveals only “the magnitude and chaos of the dark.” Creech seems to want to evoke sublimity in two seemingly contrary ways: through the grandeur of a deep order beyond all things, and also through the terror of the senseless, entropic abyss. Perhaps, like the medieval theologian Nicholas of Cusa, he seeks to suggest a coincidentia oppositorum, a unity of opposites in the ultimate truth of things.
There is a sly clue to this interpretation in the third couplet. We begin with a semi-apocalyptic image of disorder: the ends of evening have become unstitched. As often in poetry, we can read the word “ends” both in the sense of terminal points and in the sense of purposes. Evening has given way to night– the veil of daylight has become unstitched, giving way to sight of the unadulterated void; yet also, the speaker’s purposes– the ends he wished to pursue in the evening– have become lost in contemplation of the night sky. The mind cowers before the immense darkness. The word “unstitched” may also remind us of the moirai, the Fates of Greek mythology, who spin, measure, and eventually cut the threads of human lives. The perceived dissolution of reality is a reminder of the dissolution that is mortality.
Then, however, Creech gives us a very interesting word: “raveling.” The word “ravel” is a contronym– a word that means both one thing and its opposite. To ravel means both to tangle and to untangle– in many cases, “raveling” and “unraveling” mean the same thing. Thus, Creech gives us a linguistic example of the unity of opposites he alluded to earlier. The fabric of evening regresses to “the glimmer of the thimble,” but whether this backward movement constitutes a disordering or a return to order is ambiguous. Incidentally, the unusual image of the thimble appears to be a favorite of Creech’s, and also appears in his Rattle Prize-winning poem, “An Ordinary Childhood.”
In any case, we ravel back not only to the thimble but a tailor and his needle. One might suspect that this tailor, he who weaves the heavens and human purpose, would be God Himself, but no– he is the poet, “poised to thread the hour/into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor.” Calling back once again to Stevens, Creech paints the poet as a sort of demiurge. After his metaphysics of objective reality unravels– or, perhaps, gets all tangled up– before the grandeur and horror of a night both meteorological and spiritual, the poet creates his own reality, mentally binding together nature, memory, imagination, and sublime feeling through “the reconciliations of metaphor.” Here again we see, if not the unity of opposites, the weaving of disparate concepts together through figuration– a figuration which always enacts a kind of transfiguration, a recreation of the world in Man’s image, a fabrication that a strange, self-conscious being like him can feel comfortable wearing.
Let us now go back and read through the poem all the way through:
Bedtime Metaphysics
A nightgown of wind, say, its hem dragged
across the frostbitten grass by whoever wore it
in the unsolvable night, in the depth of cold,
and stars like snowflakes blown from some
cosmic alp at whose foot the clouds scattered
beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark,
the ends of evening having come unstitched,
raveling back to the glimmer of the thimble,
the tailor’s needle poised to thread the hour
into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor . . .
Knowing one always puzzles at the universe,
what lucence, what far combustion of gases,
what confusion of shapes beyond the maples
arranged themselves as meaning in the mind?
The tenor is wily and full of shadows, sister.
It can’t quite be compared before it changes
again to the same old bewildering certainties
to which everything gets reduced in the end—
the hours themselves, say, or the honest stars,
a nightgown frayed to the emptiness of air.
The poet does not only, as he says, “puzzle at the universe,” but puzzles at the workings of his own mind. He ponders the stars– combustions of gases– which are a confusion of shapes not only because they are so far away but because he has literally con-fused the shapes of stars and snowflakes together, conceptually arranging them in a way that is meaningful for him. What is the source of the stimuli that his mind feels the need to respond to? Why does his mind respond as it does? What is actually confusing about all this, and why does he insist on confusing it further? These, like the night sky itself, are mysteries. Poetic activity, while perhaps existentially understandable, is itself a great mystery, as miraculous and inexplicable a biological phenomenon as the fact that we respond to rhythmically structured sounds the way we do.
That these great mysteries lie “beyond the maples” may be significant. We recall the existential selve oscura or “dark wood” of Dante, which the poet must pass beyond in order to understand the nature of things. And yet these trees are maple trees– that is, they are sweet trees. Perhaps this is the point: we must pass beyond the sweet security of our naive conceptions and post-hoc rationalizations in order to truly grapple with reality. Poetry is not about slathering the world in a saccharine, syrupy glaze– what we might call “romanticizing” in the worst sense of the word– it is about heroically making sense of an inexplicable, often cold world through the powers of imagination. This does not mean lying to ourselves about what exists or succumbing to some kind of irreal psychosis, but using our minds to baptize the world in symbolic meaning, rendering it sacred to ourselves by making resonant connections between things, identifying beautiful patterns. This essential activity can be accomplished through the dogma and rituals of religion and the investigations of philosophy, but most intimately and idiosyncratically through poetic creation.
To those unfamiliar with New Critical terminology, the fifteenth line may seem puzzling. When did Pavarotti enter the chat? But that’s not the kind of tenor we’re talking about. Creech’s lyric has covered quite a bit of ground, but one of its primary occupations has been the issue of metaphorical thinking. A metaphor consists of two parts: what I.A. Richards called the “tenor” and the “vehicle.” The tenor is the meaning which the metaphor carries; the vehicle, of course, is the image that carries it. If I say, “That man is a snake!” the image of the snake is the vehicle, while the tenor is the implied accusation that the man is deceitful and sinister. When the speaker warns that the tenor is “wily and full of shadows,” he is saying that our metaphors are often less exact and reliable than we might like to believe. We may conjure up suggestive images, in poems or elsewhere, with the assumption that they refer to something concrete, but in reality, it may actually be hard to pin down exactly what we mean. Meaning is slippery, fluid, shadowy, and the relationship between tenor and vehicle is not always entirely clear or cut-and-dry. Even if metaphor assists us in making sense of the world, we should not place too much epistemic confidence in its ability to give us truth. Of course, to say that the tenor is “full of shadows” is itself to make a metaphor, and I too have been using metaphors throughout this explanation– “slippery,” “clear,” “cut-and-dry.” They are inescapable.
The reference to the speaker’s “sister” strikes me as the only false note in this lyric. To me, the use of the word “sister” here feels either jarringly folksy or jarringly sassy, and the speaker’s voice has been neither of these heretofore. If instead we interpret this move as the introduction of a literal sister or other woman as a character, this also feels baffling and unnecessary, though perhaps Creech has in mind Wordsworth’s sudden address to his sister in the middle of “Tintern Abbey.”
Creech concludes by clarifying his warning about metaphor, claiming that figuration always swiftly collapses back into the literal–nearly as soon as an imaginative comparison is made, the physical world begins to reassert itself as brute fact. The star is a star, the nightgown is a nightgown. I wonder, perhaps, if this lyric was conceived as a response to Matthew Buckley Smith’s “Poem Without Metaphors.” This brutally factual world is, paradoxically, one of “bewildering certainties.” Physical things are certain by dint of their sensory and phenomenological consistency in our lives, and yet they do not make any more sense to us for all of that– they are bewildering. It is partly to escape this bewilderment that we seek refuge in the realm of metaphor, but the solace is fleeting. Unlike Stevens, who Romantically reveled in the power of imagination, Creech is much more uncertain– he is too sad and wise to assent to the idea that we can ever fully inhabit the world we create for ourselves, necessary as it is. Ultimately, we are not conquerors but nomads, wandering through the desert of existence, setting up our flimsy camps night after night, poem after poem, trembling and singing beneath the stars.
Before we end today, I have a few important announcements for those of you interested in my own poetry. First of all, I just created a small anthology of my recently published poems, entitled “The Blumovian Review,” which you can check out on my Substack and at a link in the show notes. There’s quite a lot there, and there’s a lot of variety, so I hope you enjoy it. Secondly, I am deeply grateful to announce that I will be releasing a chapbook later this year, a sonnet crown entitled “The Necklace of Harmonia,” which follows the tragic history of the Theban royal line from Cadmus to Creon. This is no ordinary chapbook, however, but a work of art in its own right: it is being handcrafted with original illustrations by the lovely Fiona Spring at her letterpress, Lettre Sauvage, in a limited run. It will be the first true Blumovian collector’s item. We’re hoping to have a release party for the chapbook at the upcoming ALSCW Conference at Johns Hopkins in October, so I will provide more information when I have it. Finally– and I know this cat has already been somewhat out of the bag– I am very proud to announce that my first full collection, Against Oblivion, will be coming out with Measure Press next year. Stay tuned for more updates.
And now, with all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this lyric one last time, as an old friend:
Bedtime Metaphysics
A nightgown of wind, say, its hem dragged
across the frostbitten grass by whoever wore it
in the unsolvable night, in the depth of cold,
and stars like snowflakes blown from some
cosmic alp at whose foot the clouds scattered
beneath the magnitude and chaos of the dark,
the ends of evening having come unstitched,
raveling back to the glimmer of the thimble,
the tailor’s needle poised to thread the hour
into figure, the reconciliations of metaphor . . .
Knowing one always puzzles at the universe,
what lucence, what far combustion of gases,
what confusion of shapes beyond the maples
arranged themselves as meaning in the mind?
The tenor is wily and full of shadows, sister.
It can’t quite be compared before it changes
again to the same old bewildering certainties
to which everything gets reduced in the end—
the hours themselves, say, or the honest stars,
a nightgown frayed to the emptiness of air.