Over at Montevidayo, Carina Finn says some interesting things about the idea of mastery which I think you should go read. In her post, Carina identifies two different but complementary models of mastery: the traditional model (apprentice/journeyman/master) and the “fuck it” model.

This is what I got when I searched “master” in Google images.

The first model is what we typically think of when we think about the way higher education works. We enter into a specialized field relatively devoid of knowledge. We then study, work hard, take classes, publish papers, get mentors, etc etc, in order to gain the proper knowledge and capital to move on to the next phase, which is presumably some sort of practicing mastery. In this model, Carina defines mastery as “a level of technical proficiency at which one has full facility with the tools, but what is made with the tools is constantly changing.” Which I don’t necessarily disagree with, but I do have some problems, For example, in poetry, what are the tools we need to master? Line break? Metaphor? Which tools do I need to employ and learn to become a master? Meter? Rhyme? Which is to say, the tools necessary to enter into mastery are themselves chosen and ranked by masters past. It’s a hierarchy, a potentially taste-making regime (as Johannes points out in the comments section). I think the obvious answer to my issue is that all of these skills (tools, abilities, whatever) are equally important and must all therefore be learned and mastered to some degree. Which I guess is fine, but maybe a bit unrealistic.

Another compounding factor on this is something I already alluded to. There is a level of control inherent to any discussion of mastery. Carina points it out in her post:

So last night at the date-y bar we were talking about dominance and Mastery, the sex-/class-/colonial-ist implications of saying “I know how to do this so let me show you.” The other girls thought Mastery was definitively bad, implied a power imbalance impossible to right except maybe in the case of the dominant sexual submissive, and that situation is obviously fraught.

Note:  This is part 2 of the Archiving Poetry Series.  I’m currently working on a project about documentary poetry and its connection to the materialization of ghosts in media, which means I’ve been working with the concept of the “archive” a great deal lately.  As a way of thinking through the many ways the idea of the archive affects poetry throughout time, I plan to regularly post various theoretical or practical inquiries of the how the archive works in poems here on The Actuary over the next several weeks.  This week looks at Susan Howe, communication failure, and the desire for doubles.

The idealistic view toward poetry is that it’s trying to communicate something.  I am not sure I buy into that model.  Poetry encompasses so many things and is practiced by so many individuals that to say what its genre aims are is both reductive and embarrassing for those who try to do so.  That being said, I think that the most interesting poetry somehow “speaks,” though not of reflection or emotion as the word “communication” might indicate.  Rather, it is a transference: of mood or atmosphere or machination.  My favorite poetry is the kind that is more about firing the nerve endings rather than the brain stem.  Poetry is not interesting when it’s trying to make me ruminate on an intelligible world.  Rather, it’s about engaging my senses so that I think I have participated in a thing that I cannot possibly know through an engagement with the writer’s senses.  It’s a type of telepathy in some ways, although one that is mediated completely by personal experience and memory.  In Olivia Cronk’s Skin Horse, for example, there is no clear communication of theme or character or even setting.  It’s all mood, all foreboding.  It bears no real experience to my own life but when I read it, I feel somehow as if it reflects the times I’ve watched pick-ups shuttle down driveways and felt despair.  Through its darkness and always ellipsed desires, it gets closer to the feeling of walking across sidewalk cracks in a dead town more accurately than if Cronk literally told a story about walking across sidewalk cracks.  This is the closest we can ever really hope to come to communication.

While reading John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, I felt that he hit the nail on the head when speaking of the way real communication is a constant failure.  Communication is impossible, but that doesn’t mean our attempts to communicate are necessarily failures onto themselves.  Rather, the failures are in some ways the most interesting part.  The running theme of Peters’s book is that rather than communicating, we are simply reading traces: reading written works, hearing recorded voices, talking over a telephone wire, et cetera.  As Peters succinctly puts it: “To interact with another person could now mean to read media traces” (142).  In the end, to attempt true communication is to attempt speaking with the dead.  “The people who so blithely dream of a robust encounter between two sovereign souls forget the harsher, more uncanny fact that all communication via media of transmission or recording…is ultimately indistinguishable from communication with the dead” (176).  This concept fascinates when played through not just literal communication (say, telling a person about a sandwich you ate today), but through the desire for emotional or intellectual communication, which is what we talk about when we talk about communicating through poetry.  Is that, too, simply speaking to the dead?