The world of the painter is visual and so he is confined and directed by visual stimuli.  The world of the poet is verbal and so he is confined and directed by verbal stimuli.   What would happen if a poet could write like a painter?   What if a poet could gain verbal animation through description alone?

Between 1954 and 1962, the fledgling French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet tried it.  He broke away from the long tradition of French literary conventions, thought to add psychological depth and insight to description and narration, to write a set of short stories, not published until 1968, called Snapshots. 

In this slim volume, Robbe-Grillet wrote short stories with no story.   His work is strictly descriptive.   You read what amounts to a word description of a static scene.  Your job as reader is to make the picture move.  What direction you take it and what emotions and motivations you ascribe to the players in the scene creates your own dramatic resolution to the tension that Robbe-Grillet sets up for you in the snap. He opens the curtain.  You write the play. 

In point of fact, it’s hard to call these short stories since there is no story in them.  The critic David C. Rive jr. calls them “studies in literary objectivity and minimalism.”    Robbe-Grillet’s “prose is stripped down to a level that makes Hemingway seem rococo by comparison.”   But then he adds that Robbe-Grillet presents his pieces “coldly and objectively, yet they also reveal Robbe-Grillet's erotic obsessions and his skillfully concealed manipulation of the reader's point-of-view. Despite the author's professed desire to trust the reader, he often cunningly and covertly rigs the game so that the reader must engage in mental twists and turns to visualize such subtle complexities.”

It may not even be possible to write pure description without conveying any attitude or judgment on the things described   Since 1968, Robbe-Grillet has gone on to expand his experimental and avant-garde works, and the world of poetry has gone on to absorb the post-modern philosophy of minimalism, but it is very hard to find a poet who has taken description as far in poetry as Robbe-Grillet took it in prose fiction. 

Of course, all poetry uses description to some degree.  Haiku depends heavily on it.  Wallace Stevens uses description to focus our attention on the here and now, the particularities of time and place that stabilize our understanding of the philosophy behind events, but how often do you find a poet willing to show but not tell, really describe without characterizing?  It’s rare indeed.     It‘s hard to find poetry that is non-didactic, non-dramatic, non-lyrical, and non-narrative.  Some will say it isn’t even a poem if it contains nothing but description.   Are we asking too much of the reader to expect that whatever motivations, directions, or judgments associated with the piece be added after the writer is finished?

There are half-way efforts at pure description in poetry.   Wallace Steven’s Indian River comes close, but there is still an underlying philosophical direction he wishes to convey.  And then there’s Ezra Pound’s enigmatic In a Station of the Metro, but even that is controlled by an all-powerful metaphor. William Carlos Williams comes very close to pure description in his Red Wheelbarrow.

Untitled Haiku    by Basho  [seventeenth century Japanese haiku poet]

Even the woodpeckers

Have left it untouched,

This tiny cottage

In a summer grove.

indian river     by Wallace Stevens

the trade-wind jingles the rings in the nets around the racks
     by the docks on Indian River.
it is the same jingle of the water among the roots under the
     banks of the palmettoes,
it is the same jingle of the red-bird breasting the orange-
     trees out of the cedars.
yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu,
     nor on the nunnery beaches.

In a Station of the Metro     by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Red Wheelbarrow     by William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

I can cite a poem of my own, but even here I have insinuated value judgments about the flapper girl and her relationship with the other characters between the lines.

Soir Bleu  Dedicated to Edward Hopper      by Gary Lehmann

They’re drinking on a patio surrounded by a marble banister

itself surrounded by the sea.  Japanese lanterns pulse light into the scene.

A man in a tux is drinking wine while looking over his companion’s shoulder

at a clown with five red stripes painted in irregular patterns down his face.

A flapper girl in heavy rouge is looking down her nose at the clown.

She is leaning back against the marble banister to flatter her silhouette,

but neither the captain nor the sailor are paying her any attention.

A cigarette hangs from the clown’s mouth.  His red hat rests on the table.   

Knowing that we are always making judgments about what we perceive, I want readers to soak in the description of these people and this setting with an eye toward deciding what is going on for themselves.  I want readers to participate with me in writing the poem as it resides in their minds.

Description devoid of any other literary technique may not make the best poetry, but I feel like it has a voice which has not yet been heard very much.  Is it possible to raise pure description to the level of poetry?   I felt like it was worth giving it a try.   

I think, ultimately, it is extremely difficult to ask description unaided by any other literary technique to carry the entire the message of a poem.   As objective as we might want poetry to become in these post-modern days, I’m not clear in my own mind that minimalizing poetic speech in this way is at all wise.  Some might say this is because readers are too weak to be expected to participate in the imaginative act of creating a scene, while others may claim that it’s strictly a matter of cultural indoctrination. We expect writers to write and readers to read?  We’re unhappy when writers get out of the box we have created for them.   It’s a fact, nonetheless, that something very powerful resists the idea of pure description, though it has its admitted charms.

Robbe-Grillet’s critics have been many and while they praise his marvelous ambiguity and suggestive details, they universally feel lost in his world without any direction from the author.  Taking minimalism in the direction of excessive description may take the art out of the writing, for some.  We may decry didacticism in poetry, but we’re equally not prepared for poetry which refuses to impose any level of interpretative guidelines on the reader.