LEARNING FROM POETIC CLOSURE

In the 1980s while scholars were obsessed with theory, I was in a course of study, Japanese language and literature, that barely seemed touched by such heady stuff. Fortunately, one professor offered a graduate class designed to familiarize us with Barthes, Jameson, et al. The theory that impressed me most then—and that has influenced me ever since—was Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Poetic Closure (Chicago: University e of Chicago Press, 1968). The essence of her argument is stated at the very start of her book: “the conclusion of a poem has a special status in the process, for it is only at that point that the total pattern—the structural principles which we have been testing—is revealed.”

Why did this theory immediately appeal to me? For one thing, I’d found a critical approach that helped with my close readings of literary texts (and informed a paper I wrote on Yasunari Kawabata’s novella Snow Country). On a more personal level, I’d found a means to look at my own revision process. I was trying for endings that didn’t seal off a poem like a shut door. I wanted the last lines to resonate. Decades later, the theory has continued to affect me both personally and in my capacity as a writer, reader, and teacher.

When critiquing and revising, I find poetic closure to be a profoundly psychological and even physical means to assess a text. A clear example from Smith to distinguish termination from closure compares the ending of a telephone ring (we’re talking old-school phone!) with the conclusion of a song: “[We] tend to speak of conclusions when a sequence of events has a relatively high degree of structure, when, in other words, we can perceive these events as related to one another by some principle of organization or design that implies the existence of a definite termination point.” In other words, the telephone ring has no design, it just rings then stops. But a song does have repeated units that create an organizing principle. We can feel the repetition without thinking, that is, by sheer listening (at times, reverberations throughout the body). And because perception is experiential—in a visceral and not merely intellectual way—the design we perceive hits us to our animal core.

Depending as it does on intuiting through our senses, poetic senses a structure by experiencing the various kinds of repetition. “The sense of closure is a function of the perception of structure.” Obviously, the perception is not limited to sonic elements as in music. This theory demands that the whole body participate in a poem. (Does this also sound like the theory , “writing the body”?) For subsequent readings, the reader engages more cerebral activity.