How to Read D. H. Lawrence’s “Coming Awake”

(Audio recording) It is very hard to interpret D. H. Lawrence’s “Coming Awake” without a clear understanding of his notions of poetry as expressed in his 1919 essay, “The Poetry of the Present,” and a conceptual framework for Imagist Poetry and the Imagist Movement. 

How to Read D. H. Lawrence's "Coming Awake" 

https://youtu.be/88_RCATVnFY 

D. H. Lawrence begins by saying that we need a new kind of poetry because most of the genres of poetry currently used either propel the reader into a projection of the future, or pull them back into the a nostalgic past.  The problem with poetry that focuses on the future or the past is that it has to be perfect.

If you focus on the present, however, there is no idealizing gaze and there is no force-fitting a grandiose “message” or meaning. 

If you focus on the present, you tend to chronicle the concrete images and things that are happening around you. In that case, instead of being grandiose, you’ll be closely observant. 

By being in the moment, you can create a “poetry of the immediate present,” and it will capture a part of the present – like a still pictures from a video of reality. 

In addition, the poetry that captures what is happening in the present is, as Lawrence puts it, “like the wind,” and there is “a sheer appreciation of the instant moment.” He cites Walt Whitman as a wonderful purveyor of the “poetry of the present.” 

In contrast, for Lawrence, poetry that attempts to adhere to or conform to “any externally-applied law” would be “mere shackles and death.”  For this reason, he prefers free verse. 

So, if we apply this concept to “Coming Awake” (1916), it is possible to appreciate it as an example of “poetry of the present” which seeks to imbue the poetic space with a sense of immediacy and of heightened powers of the senses and observation, so that what poetry does for you is to intensify your experience of everyday life. It amplifies, intensifies, and magnifies everything you perceive with your waking and awakening mind.  

In “Coming Awake,” the poet’s observations are of minute, delicate details – ones often overlooked by the person whose mind is in the clouds or in a fog of the past. Lawrence begins by observing the characteristics and qualities of light that often go unnoticed: “lake-lights were quivering” and “sunshine swam in a shoal.” The personification encourages the reader to feel the elements of the poem because the language suggests a human body. 

The poet’s intense attention to tiny details makes the reader perceive it as though looking through a magnifying glass and seeing the “hairy, big bee” with “his body black fur.”  The bee “hung over the primulas” which are later described as “airy primulas.” Primulas are also known as primrose, and they consist of clusters of tiny petals and delicate little stamen. The sense of looking at everything as though it were magnified many times, and frozen in time is what the poet’s language has done for us.  It puts everything in super-sharp focus, freezes it in time, and then magnifies it. 

Thus, the process of awakening can be said to be akin to reading the poetry of the present which functions as a tool to bring everything into extremely sharp focus and to put the reader in the very center of what is being described. The result is an experience so intense that it could also be depicted as shrinking to the size of a bee or a primrose and walking around in the garden and observing a gigantic, hairy, furry bee buzzing loudly, triggering your senses into extreme awareness. 

The careful reader will see an influence of Zen Buddhist thought and the poetic ideas of the haiku and other minimalism. 

Lawrence’s concept of the “poetry of the present” is deeply democratic. It basically proposes that everyone can and should write poetry because it is a tactic for living a happier, fuller, more vibrant life. Anyone can write a poem, Lawrence might suggest. The key is to slow down, write observations, exaggerate the concrete details so they appear larger than life and generate an emotional response of joy, happiness, appreciation of life. 

Works Cited

Lawrence, D. H. “Coming Awake” in New Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/128/  .

Lawrence, D. H. “Preface: The Poetry of the Present,” in New Poems, 1919. In The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69403/the-poetry-of-the-present

Post-Postmodernism: Technocratic Cultures?

I don’t think we’ll ever completely separate ourselves from postmodernist notions. After all, some postmodernist ideas have been percolating around in discourses of consciousness and meaning-making processes at least since Dante’s 13^th-century Letter to Cangrande della Scalla in which the author (presumably Dante) discusses the fact that his work is polysemous. He expounds upon that notion and discusses four types of meanings which result in multiple strategies for interpreting texts.

Further, if postmodernist expanded the notion of “text” to include signs, natural phenomena, and more, well, we’ve had that in our consciousness ever since early Babylonian astrologers. In terms of creating patterns and developing codes / numerical strategies for text interpretations, we’ve certainly had that since Jewish gematria, and then also Kabbalistic practices.

This is not the place to develop a genealogy of postmodernist thoughts. I would love to do so, but I don’t want to deviate from the central idea, which is to say that for the last 10 or 20 years, theorists of all sorts have been attempting to declare postmodernism has declared officially “over” – and have proposed a wide array of alternative theories, many of which have to do with culture, technology, gender, and ethics.

There are aspects of postmodernist thought that I find very useful and I would not want to give them up. For example, I don’t want to give up some of the more interesting notions of reality and reality construction.

Perhaps it’s not productive to say that the world is completely an illusion, but it’s fun to think so. I also like the social constructivist ideas, especially when connected with power. For example, I have to say that I agree when Foucault and Baudrillard suggests prisons exist not only to enforce behavioral norms, but also to delude us into thinking that there is a “free” world and that “freedom” is an absolute, when in reality, there are all kinds of constraints to our freedom, beginning with language itself, and ending in behaviors, beliefs, and values that may be, in essence, coercive.

I think it is interesting that many of the new ideas of post-postmodernism have much to do with new technologies and the impact on identity (digital communities), selfhood (genetic engineering), privacy (Internet, surveillance, UAVs), communication (communications technologies), understanding the world (computing, Big Data), and more.

In fact, once one uses technology as the primum mobile of consciousness and global epistemological constructs, it’s easy to see how a next logical step would be a preferential shift to technocratic social organization, from individual communication to bodies politic. The implications could pretty scary. Technocracies are notoriously dehumanizing, especially when combined with command economies or oligopoly-tending capitalistic economies.

Here are a few recent ideas:

Pseudo-modernism / digimodernism: Digital technology can dismantle persistent postmodern issues such as “existential uncertainty” and “artistic anti-essentialism.” Kirby argues that the post-postmodern generation reverts to modernism, at least in the sense that there is a renewed belief in agency and in individual ability to influence others (by means of technology).  See Kirby (2009) Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture.

Automodernism:  Robert Samuels argues that new technology allow a new level of neutrality to emerge. At the same time, postmodernist identity “flux” is supplanted by new, hardened identity politics.

Complexism:  Philip Galanter has created a fusion of technology and the arts; it has been suggested that he echoes and updates the Russian and Italian Futurists (who were certainly pro-technology, with the idea that technology helps establish a coherent New World Order. Some of the enthusiasm died in WWI and in the early Soviet Union.

Hypermodernism:  Hypermodernism, coined in the 1990s, is a chaotic, high-intensity, fast-paced world of rapid and always evolving identity and social relationships. The hypermodern is not characterized by indeterminacy (as would the postmodernist world), but in quick moments of stasis, followed by discrete, lenticular “pods” of culture / socioeconomic / socio-political ontology.

Altermodernism: Nicolas Bourriaud embraces alterity and takes it further, suggesting that the creolization of our cultures in the global context will create a universal aesthetic. Multiculturism is worn out. The next stage is the “creole” (which will probably change, given the colonialist overtones implicit in the word itself.)

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References

Alighieri, Dante. Letter to Can Grande della Scala. Accessed November 13, 2013 http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/cangrande.english.html

Awet (2013). Other Post-Postmodernisms: A Glossary. Heterodoxia. April 2013. Accessed Nov 15, 2013. http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=896#more-896

Kirby, A.  (2009) Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. London, NY: Continuum Publishers.