Real friends boss
the wind around.
A voice. An animal need.
Like if I stink
you do too.
If it’s just the sunlight
again, lie down with me.
—-Jordan Stempleman, “All Actually”
THE BOOKS
The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.
I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: "We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”
The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:
The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.
The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.
The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.
The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.
[Always, there is the music.]
M.’s hand, the Amtrak Crescent at night: “Map of the Falling Sky” by Songs Ohia.
THE PARTICULAR MOTION OF THE ARDOR-TRAIN
Notes from a station in Mississippi. The ghost of Captain Badass.
Seriousness, as a tone, works against sincerity in the poem. We can ‘speak’ of ardor, for example, in a way that takes itself seriously, and this act of taking seriously brackets ardor, and sets it apart formally. All that starched, buttoned-up ardor like a sad groom waiting at the head of that aisle for an idiom that trains wrong.
M. pours drinks as the night rolls past our train window.
(Brown eyes your pulse is getting hotter)
I feel most myself when moving, walking down a city sidewalk, whirring over old tracks, recognizing the music (and the muses) pushing me forward. Arduously. Stay in my head, I say to the rhythm. Linger longer, I say to the feeling. Don’t finish with me yet, I mutter to this beast that settles by the train window with M. on the other side of the table and Osip Mandelstam’s “Journey to Armenia” beside me.
Wheels on steel, rural houses and trees blurring together, sensation inflected by the velocity of Mandelstam's enthusiasm as he describes voice . . . What does it mean to “explode with ardor” for the minutes between one place and another? How does one notate the width of the instant, or measure the breadth of each tinny tick tick tick? All that white silk behind me, shredded by gravel and metal teeth.
GEARLESS IN THE GREEN CHASM
Tame the unruly with a list that instantiates the line moving towards a destination. Write this as if you will get somewhere. And then see where ‘it’ ends.
I crave coffee but we lack the appropriate gear.
Miriam pours into a small paper cup discovered near the sink. A post-toothbrushing cup for swizzling water. I shoot it quickly, racing the collapse of the paper, surprised that I lost this game I knew I was playing, this game I prepared for, the hot brown liquid seeping onto my forearm—-
—- and a constant chasm of green owns the air to my right.
Without announcement, the train halts abruptly amid the knees of various trees submerged in a swamp near Fosters, Alabama. Something nondescript prevents us from moving further. The trees are clear.
The blur has paused and now the view is a postcard. The red dirt roads of my youth are visible behind a tree grove and a bluster of white privet; their scent reaches me through the glass.
Not even glass can inoculate me, I say to my notebook. I speak in black ink to it.
What color is my voice when speaking to M.?
The way I know this swamp is all five senses, zero language.
M. and I chug soda and recollect wandering through Anais Nin’s words. When the train begins moving again, nothing is perturbed, nothing is ruined, nothing is jostled. The green blurs into a long seam beside us, a stitch on a map. A pattern emerges—-thirty breaths of tall pine forest followed by five breaths of massacred tree trunks, stacked in piles, denuded of branches and greenery, the bark flayed off. The tree slaughter is visible by train, though not from the highway.
“What are you thinking about?” The clouds are low in the sky, keeping the air humid. The red dirt rests like the rural’s handprint on the seat of a memory's pants.
Night in New Orleans; statues and shadows; “Steve Albini’s Blues” by Songs Ohio and Jason Molina.
THE FIRST PANEL OF THE MORNING
At the NOLA Poetry Festival, the first panel of the morning is titled "Poetry Recitation: Exploring the Intersection of Memory, Adaptation, and Place." Zach Savich talks about how reciting a poem removes the word from the technology of the page and draws it into presence, rendering the body part of the annunciation and intonation. The responsibility of speaking blends with the feeling of saying, and the annihilation of the intermediary involved, in reading rather than reciting.
“I’m with you in the recitation,” Savich says slowly, looking at the audience.
How to describe the feeling that eyes are trying to catch their breath?
I find myself italicizing Zach’s words when bringing them into text. Or using punctuation to intonate the intimacy of his statement, describing a moment that was revolutionary to him. He calls it a responsibility that the poet should “step into form” to inhabit it.
How does visuality on the page translate into audibility and sound in recitation? What sort of soundscape does each poem offer to us?
“The mass, the thousand masses”: the epigraph to Zach’s book. Sarah said she would recite it to herself, these little phrases that got stuck in her head and later became poems, “snippets.”
Jordan Stempleton recollects memorization as a traumatic experience similar to his bar mitzvah, in that he couldn't understand in that moment how he was being changed by it. “To be possessed by the text" is how possession differs.
“The narcissism of eye contact”: Nick Malone talks about where the poet’s gaze rests as he recites. Where is the poet looking? Where is the gaze located? Malone is interested in the moments where the recitation fails; he scavenges for the exact locations where the memory is lost. “Not about the place, but because of the page: harmonic with another, that cares.”
The act of reciting a poem posits a different relationship between the speaker and the subject, the poem and the expression, the saying and the being.
Someone mentions a recording of all the air and silences in John Ashbery's readings, and my pulse speeds up, thrilled by this possibility implicating an archive of breath alongside the impossibility of holding these breaths in place. The risk of vulnerability becomes less performative in this idea of presence.
Each recitation is different in that it exists in relation to the space and the audience: a queer relationality emerges in the poem as a saying shaped by the relationships emerging from sound. Being aware of those people around us, looking up at them from a sheet of paper, permits a more defensive sort of being-with, one where the performance gives us an excuse for not dissolving: the body “knows" what it will say so nothing is created anew in that space. Under those conditions, the way we measure a reading's success depends on assessing whether we performed it correctly, rather than how we were changed by it.
How does recitation alter one's relation to the poem itself? How is a word like full (which hovers close to fool when spoken) enunciated differently? How does it sound more fully when the "ll" is drawn out?
Carolina Ebeid's poems moved me to complete silence. I had to hold my own hand because there was so emotion flowing, pulsing, dancing through that space.
I sit found for adoption
by slightness and by light.
- Jordan Stempleman, “Unmoved”
You said I am an empty page to you
I once had all the words
I forgot all the words
The body burns away
- Jason Molina, “The Body Burns Away”