The poetic blazon (or blazon).

Blason means “coat-of-arms” or “shield” in French. From French heraldry, blason translates as “the codified description of a coat of arms”

As a poetic genre or technique, blason (or blazon) comes to us from 16th century French poet Clement Marot, who penned a poem celebrating a particular woman by listing parts of her body which he then compared to incredible things. Although Marot’s blason anatomique set the standard for blazons to come, its roots come from medieval heraldry, with its iconic representations of families and their attributes. Heraldic devices represented the entire family, or, in some cases, knightly qualities (e.g., the pentangle in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight).

In the blazon, the physical traits of a female subject are catalogued, often in sonnet, sonnet sequence, or love lyric, and described by individual parts rather than the body as a whole, so parts of the body compared to gems, jewels, celestial bodies, sunrise, and various aesthetic glories. Gilded by ornate, eroticized, the "real" woman disappears, and her image is reconstructed according to the male poet's point of view, resulting in the recreation of an idealized woman who thus becomes his possession.

It is the poem that gives the man the woman of his dreams. And should it be otherwise? Shouldn’t the man possess the woman he has invented for his poem? Ethical aesthetics aside, one sees the blazon move into English through the influence of Petrarch, whose sonnet form thrived during the Elizabethan literary period. Edmund Spenser, for example, uses blason in his poem, “Epithalamion,” where

Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright,
Her forehead ivory white … 

The simile compares his subject’s eyes to shiny jewels; the describes her perfect forehead, etc. Spenser also used this technique in “Sonnet 64” from Amoretti, comparing each feature of the beloved woman to a flower. A whole garden in a woman’s body! A stunning tablecloth!

Sir Philip Sidney’s “Sonnet 91”, a Petrarchan sonnet from Astrophil and Stella, parodies the blazon by questioning singularity. Here, we find the speaker, Astrophil, missing his love, Stella, and warning her not be jealous if he sees or interacts with other beautiful women, since all he can see when he looks at them is her:

They please, I do confess; they please mine eyes,
But why? Because of you they models be,
Models such be wood globes of glist’ring skies.
Dear, therefore be not jealous over me,
If you hear that they seem my heart to move.
Not them, oh no, but you in them I love.

It’s a self-soothing parody of what the blazon idealizes, namely, a single beloved woman — though perhaps this isn’t clear to Astrophil, who uses pieces and body parts drawn from other women to keep himself from getting despondent with longing. All women lead back to you, Astrophil suggests.

Sidney published this sonnet in the 1580s, more than a century years after Martin Behaim, a German cartographer, made the oldest existing globe existing in 1450. In a line from the sonnet, Sydney compares the beauty of the women he sees to wooden globes, with painted constellations and planets — which, again, points back to the visual.

*

The male speaker's voice carried the 16th century "blason" poetic form, with its erotic declensions of female body parts — but one man’s sacred cherries may be another’s man scarlet marbles. Another convention: in its earliest forms, the blazon leaned on syllabics at the level of the line. The octosyllabic or decasyllabic verse often culminated in an epigraphic conclusion.

Thomas Campion’s use of blason is infamous — and visible in the illustration at the top.

“Her eyes like angels” would return in 1990’s pop and various porcelain motifs stored in curio-cabinets.

The contreblazon inverts the convention by describing “wrong” parts of the female body (as in the visual form at the top), and the antiblazon relies on negations and negatives to describe the female, as William Shakespeare did, insisting his mistress’ eyes were “nothing like the sun.”

In antiblazon, an individual woman is fragmented, but this division is done to describe reality, not to create (or sustain) an idealized portrait. Supposedly.

So what would happen if the female voice set her sights on the male body in blazon? Isn’t it subversively playful for a woman to narrate a blason, to bring it closer to a pastiche, to lay a tooth inside the heart of the erotic pulse driving the male gaze?

For a contemporary example in which the female speaker catalogues the male lover, read Camille Guthrie’s “My Boyfriend”. I suspect Jean Valentine uses a fair amount of blazon in her love poems, particularly “First Love” (more on this in another post, if time permits).

*

Cards on the table: what drew me to the blazon this week was a mystery which may be a misunderstanding, certainly a fascination in Louise Labe’s Love Sonnets and Elegies, edited and translated by Richard Sieburth for NYRB Imprints.

Controversies about Labe’s identity and authorship abound, but I incline towards the assessment of Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to middling Women, whose character, The Polar Bear, declares Labe: “A great poet, perhaps one of the greatest of all time.”

The pleasure of paradox formed an aesthetic, a flourishing field of paradoxical encomiums inspired by Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. The Venetian poet, Ortensio Lando, published a book of paradossi in Lyon around the same time as Labé. Sieburth defines the umbrella term, adoxography, as “an ancient rhetorical practice based on a wry, semi-satirical laudation of persons, objects, or states that are in themselves unworthy of praise—such as poverty, drunknenness, ugliness, blindness, stupidity, folly, or, as the case may be, woman.”

Louise Labe's "Sonnet II" incorporates the blazon, which translator Richard Sieburth takes to be "queered"  by the fact that the first two quatrains, the octave, are identical to those of a sonnet published two years later by Olivier de Magny in his own book of poems, Soupirs. de Magny was Labe’s former lover; they wrote together in Lyon. Francoise Rigolot suspects Labe and de Magny drafted the octave together “perhaps as a game or contesting the idiom of the Barthesian lover’s discourse of he day; then, in the sestet, the two went their separate ways.” Thus, the paratactic apostrophes could be his or hers.

These is Labe’s version of the sonnet. Now for de Magny’s, which I will pick up from the shared final line of the second quatrain:

O stuttering steps, O flames that burn too warm
O sweet errors, O thoughts of my soul
That, day and night, whirl me back and forth,

O you my eyes, no, not eyes but fountains,
O gods, O heavens, O humankind,
For the sake of God, be witness to my love.

Notice how de Magny placates all gods, all deities, moves from the minor gods to the major God, as capitalized in the last line. His poem is speaking to the sky, to the troubadour of abstraction, while Labe’s poem ends by addressing the lover, himself. Both endings reflect different levels of amatory commitment and agency: one by disclaiming emotions to the ether, the other by questioning the male’s commitment to desire and love.

Siebruth calls it “the perfect palimpsest of an androgynous poem.”

*

Another interesting connection between the language and the performance of the poems, which is to say, the formal tools and the parodic possibilities of embodiment, appears In Labé’s Sonnet XII, “Luth, compagnon de ma calamité” (“Lute, sounding board of my calamity”), where the poet-speaker describes composing the poem as a process in which she discovers the words while hunched over a lute, her tears dripping onto the instrument’s body.

Since members of the cultural elite were expected to demonstrate their vocal and instrumental skills in salon-like social events, artists like Labé may well have tried to maximize the impact of their new poems by performing them musically, not just reciting them.

The octave ends with “toning the major into a minor scale,” but major and minor scales as we know them, in the modern sense, had not been invented yet. The end-notes have Labe referencing whole tones and semitones, that practice of music ficta that required the feigning of pitches which lay outside the strict theoretical conventions of music recta. Sonnets may have been transposed into musical form for public performance, and this may have been more true for female poets than males at the time.

One must add to the list of Labe’s influences: the lyre a woman needed to play in order to be heard, the performance of convention to pacify the male poets on the scene. One must acknowledge a theme in her poems, namely, the resistance to crediting gods or invisible entities for love — an insistence on individual agency and responsibility for the heart’s hungers. One must give the poet, herself, the last word, in Sonnet 24:

No need to blame Vulcan if you’re on fire,
Nor Adonis to explain your desire:
Love alone decides when you lose your mind

Jack Gilbert, loosely.

1.

Would Jack Gilbert have rejoiced at being named the “poet-laureate of my life” for Elizabeth Gilbert?

I don’t know, but the question interests me. It interests me because what Elizabeth loves about Jack (in her own words) is what others have loved about Rainer Maria Rilke—the dedicated focus on commingling of joy, beauty and terror (not to mention the view of children as a curse in the writer’s life). Although part of me wishes to know nothing the poetry that undergirds Eat, Pray, Love or its endless cacophony of sequels and lifestyle products, the other part of me feels it holds a key that unlocks the cultural mood as The Secret unlocked the prior decade.

A different part of me is exhausted by the number of humans who fall off cliffs to catch the perfect travel-selfie in the species of journey that the Elizabeth Gilbert industry has propagated.

A fetal part of me accepts critiques wherein birthing a few kids is bad for the planet as the adult part of me sees planetary catastrophe in industry of navel-gazing travelogues and conspicuous-travel-media birthed by E. Gilbert Inc.

Is this because I envy it? Is my envy a critique about myself as individual or a critique of the culture which monetizes envy through aspirational production targets? Of course there is a mirror in anything I write when staring across this particular room….

2.

Maybe it’s the tone: a triumphalist redemptive positivity bestowed as a reward for living one’s life without worrying too much about what it asks of others. This tonal fool-hardiness, rooted in Americanism, is infectious, of course, as our COVID-denying tribes demonstrate in the past year of “just living” their (maskless) lives. And so I turn again to both Gilberts when wanting to speak of the man.

Elizabeth references Jack’s interview in The Paris Review, where he explains how the only time he was hospitalized was after falling 90 ft from a tree and breaking his spine. Why did he climb the tree? The poet says:

Showing off. I was with Linda and her father didn’t approve at all. I mean, he was resentful that I was bedding his daughter without any official rights. On Christmas Day we went up on his mountain to find a tree that would suit Linda. We were walking along and he was behaving himself. We kept walking until we came to these trees. He was crazy about nature. He said, You know, if you cut off the top of that tree—if you could cut just the top—the tree wouldn’t die, and it would make it a more attractive tree without that spindly, weak top. 

Being the bad guy with his lovely daughter, I immediately took the rope and saw and started climbing. I didn’t know anything about it. I knew a lot about apple trees because I’d spent time in an orchard. But not a forest. I was way up there. I climbed to the top, but I’m no fool—I tied myself to the trunk. I thought I would tug on the treetop until it snapped, except in the middle of doing this there was a big gust of wind that snapped the thing, and it fell on me and was pushing me down…. I was heroic about it, but my thighs gave way, and the rope too. I plummeted down, shearing off the branches. I was going so fast that the speed just butchered the tree. Luckily I landed on dirt.

Jack goes on to evoke a childhood memory of being 13 and living through the Great Depression in Pittsburgh:

During the day, my mother and father went into town, leaving my siblings and me all alone in this magnificent house, three stories high and no one there but us. We played on the roof, in the laundry chutes. It was extraordinarily dangerous. It was lovely, legendary. We owned that little world. In the back of the house were two orchards, one filled with peaches, the other with apples. We were always in the apple trees—frequently falling down.

In an interview with Gordon Lish (also referenced by Elizabeth Gilbert), Jack offers more insight into what he takes to be a lack of subject and inspiration in poetry peers. He laments the banality of life, or the dullness of poetry which takes its tone from ordinary survival and bourgeois comfort:

Isn’t a great part of poetry now being produced to support an established reputation? The poet is actually tired of poetry, but he must turn out poems to qualify for prizes, grants, and academic positions. What’s he going to do? He manufactures verse. And it’s a lot easier to deal with a small subject when you’re getting by on merely careful technique. And if he’s a man teaching at a university, as he probably is, and married to a wife he courted years ago, and has several quite healthy children…what’s he going to make his poems out of? He makes them out of books or he makes them out of the incidents of a normal, commonplace life. If he goes sailing off Long Island on Sunday afternoon and he wants to write a poem after dinner, he will probably write a poem about sailing off Long Island.

The solution, for both Gilberts, requires traveling to exotic places and landscapes where one cannot speak the local language in which people live what many might describe as ordinary lives. They aren’t committed to becoming part of the culture or learning the language or raising children in those countries—thus showing an actual emotional and literal investment in places that fascinate them.

It is lovely to breeze through for the postcard or the essay or the feature piece, and I don’t mean to disparage it as a mode so much as note how the mode, itself, is noncommittal and slightly inflected by histories of colonialism. It is okay to acknowledge this. I think Gilbert, himself, acknowledges it the posthumously-published conversation in American Poetry Review.

It is better to begin from acknowledgement than repudiation on a planet where the American footprint is so costly to other nations.

Photo source: Guggenheim Foundation.

3.

Which brings me to Jack Gilbert’s magnificent poem, “Thinking About Ecstasy”, where adjectives modify the subject in a way reminiscient of property ownership and national projection of power.

Notice the juxtapositions of violence, image, glass, sacralized female suffering, and pain:

Gradually he could hear her. Stop, she was saying,
stop! And found the bed full of glass,
his ankles bleeding, driven through the window
of her cupola. California summer. That was pleasure.
He knows about that: stained glass of the body
lit by our lovely chemistry and neural ghost.
Pleasure as fruit and pleasure as ambush. Excitement
a wind so powerful, we cannot find a shape for it,
so our apparatus cannot hold on to the brilliant
pleasure for long. Enjoyment is different.
It understands and keeps. The having of the having.
But ecstasy is a question. Doubling sensation
is merely arithmetic. If ecstasy means we are
taken over by something, we become an occupied
country, the audience to an intensity we are
only the proscenium for. The man does not want
to know rapture by standing outside himself.
He wants to know delight as the native land he is.

“Ecstasy is a question” I like to pose to mirrored ceilings over beds in motels that charge by the hour.

This is where I go in order to see what I want from the ecstatic, or how much I can afford to pay it.

It’s difficult to see what one wants if the gaze focuses on the desired rather than one’s relation to the desired.

It is humbling to realize what we crave is a form of power, and to witness ourselves in its expression, its verbiage, its rapt attention and actions.

4.

Everyone agrees that Jack Gilbert is a complicated poet—one who sought a form of lived authenticity which made space for error, for humanity, for risk—and most accept that his conception of humanity de-humanized other humans.

William Doreski reflects on the excavations in Gilbert’s poems:

Genuine honesties are hard to find because the world itself has concealed them. Gilbert’s best poems—and certainly he has his clunkers—require subtle and ironic readers to appreciate them. If that makes their essential honesty difficult, it is difficult in the way that Robert Frost (in “Directive”) required, “so the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved.”

Alex Dimitrov describes meeting Jack Gilbert at Linda Gregg’s place:

What comes to mind, as I type this now, is a moment months later (I would continue to go over to Linda’s apartment every two to three months and we’d do the usual thing: talk, drink, smoke for hours) when she said to me, “that day when you met Jack, that’s probably going to be the only time you see him. He’s not coming back to the East Coast.” But I also knew that what she meant was, he was dying.

Curtis Faville reads this hunger to “be close to lived experience” in Gilbert’s poems, and how it takes the shape of “incremental disagreements with expediency” to the point where “even language itself may seem an expedient” with respect to expressing emotions.

I can love Jack Gilbert’s poems while acknowledging that his choices are not available to me, and that the form this unavailability assumes is both iconic and blasphemous.

I can sit in the pew while wishing others had the time, ability, and funding to sit in the pew beside me, in the church of famous men.

Erik Satie's desiccated embryos.

1.

At this time in 1913, Erik Satie began composing Embryons Desséchés, a triptych for piano. He would finish it in two months, inspired by words for strange crustaceans discovered in his Larousse dictionary, using these words as entry-points for an ironic portrait of Classical musicians and pieces.

When asked about memorable images, Jorge Luis Borges remembered the tigers in illustrated versions of childhood encyclopedias better than “the eyes or the smile of a woman.”

2.

How Satie describes the piece in the introduction to the score:

This work is absolutely incomprehensible, even to me. Of a singular depth, it always amazes me. I wrote it in spite of myself, driven by destiny. Maybe I wanted to be humorous? It would not surprise me and would be quite in my way. However, I will have no mercy for they who would ignore. May they know it.

Holothuroids.

3.

The first dryed-up embryo, “D’Holothurie”, is about a sea cucumber observed in the Bay of Saint-Malo, and Satie parodies here a popular 1830 French song, Loisa Puget’s "Mon rocher de Saint-Malo", by using it as the second subject in the dominant, while keeping the accompaniment in the tonic. The parodic final cadence builds on Puget’s refrain before ending pompously and repeatedly in the wrong key, which Satie has made to sound like the right one.

The second embryo, “d’Edriopthalma,” focuses on a crustacean with immobile eyes. Rather than parodying the "celebrated Mazurka by Schubert", as written in the score, Satie actually pokes fun at the famous funeral march from Chopin's sonata Op.35, rendering the soaring trio melody flat, mundane, and un-Romantic. Elements of Chopin’s posthumous funeral march (1837, op.72 No. 2) also appear in this creature with immobile eyes.

The third embryo, “De Podohthalma”, another crustacean with eyes on slim stalks, eyes held apart from the rest of the body, quotes the refrain from Fiametta’s “Orang-utang Song” (in Edmund Audran’s operetta, La Mascotte, 1880), where the orang-utang puts on pants to become an official councillor, a legitimate member of the Court that poses no threat to the established members — because he agrees to wear the costume. Backstory here includes the French song "Good King Dagobert" ("has put his culottes on backwards..."), written in the eighteenth century to mock the figure of the King.

The final cadence, “Cadence obligee (de l’auteur), or mandatory cadence by the author, parodies the 23 "ad libitum" optional cadences, found in certain virtuoso romantic piano works, particularly the finale of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony.

Satie’s composition can be taken as a critique of over-emphatic closure and grandiose closing strategies in music composition, which reminds me of our own tendencies as poets to want to make the poem end in something immense, and how immensity often results in melodrama or tonal displacement.

4.

“The most challenging part of playing this piece by Satie is deciding on how to add timing. Satie doesn’t give us time signatures, so lots of this is left to the individual performer, including how much we want to parody the parodies.”

- My son on preparing to play Embryons Desséchés

5.

In 1991, Eliot Weinberger published an collage-essay, “Dreams from the Holothurians,” which traces the myth of Atlantis through the mouths of various explorers, politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, and thinkers across time.

There is no integument which connects one explanation to the other; Weinberger uses an exclamation — “Atlantis!”— to start each paragraph, and it is the word, itself, which, connects Mesoamerican myths to Herodotus:

Atlantis! Herodotus tells of a people in the west, the Atarantes, who have no names for individuals, and who curse the sun at noon for its heat. And west of them are the Atlantes, named for Mt. Atlas, which they call the Pillar of Heaven and whose peak is permanently hidden in the clouds. A people who eat no living thing, and never dream.

On and on we go through Francis Bacon etc. until Weinberger returns to the holothurians at the end, which is where the book, Outside Stories (New Directions) also ends, which is where, in a sense, the author begins.

6.

In a recent poem published in Sublunary Review, I used a tempo-marking which is more of a notation, from this piece by Satie to write a vestigial sonnet. “Pour charmer le gibier”. I also played with the translation of Satie’s marking — which the score translates as “to charm the victim”, and which I rendered as “to charm the game”.

As to why I translated the marking differently, moving from victim to game, perhaps this post helps to explain it. A piece without time signatures asks something different from the performer.

"Because he has a song": Charles Pinckney's "Lifeboat."

1.

Charles Pinckney’s sculpture, “Lifeboat” (1995), is a tribute to his mother.

The “Lifeboat” is also a tribute to the casket he designed for his mother, and the image of that casket passing through the center aisle of the church on its way to unfathomable shores.

Both casket and “Lifeboat” share ingredients: sterling silver, titanium, copper, bronze, brass, mild steel, cherry wood.

The inner lining is made from satin over paper form.

He explains the composition in this video.

The sculpture sits in the Birmingham Museum of Art, where it arrests me. Every time.

2.

The casket is a boat with four legs that resemble ladders. One wants to climb inside the boat which does not float, the boat which stands on the ground as if to repudiate floating.

The ladders in are a repudiation, as legs recuse themselves from walking when attached to a boat, an object that does not need them to get where it is going.

Pinckney’s “Lifeboat” is a metallurgical rejection.

Because the casket is behind a polycrystalline box, I can’t open it.

The metal chain dangles from the side, accessible only to the eyes.

I imagine the satin lining I could see if I could lift the lid.

To open the lifeboat: to see the mother. Is it the museum that makes that lifting impossible? The form, itself, suggests that opening would be natural.

The presence of the chain, the closed eye of the casket, the space inside the poem we cannot touch.

3.

Pinckney lives in Georgia. Primarily self-taught, he makes jewelry and small sculpture from metal, stones, wood, and bone.

His childhood “piece de resistance—a single chain link carved from a Popsicle stick.”

His method: “I arrange and rearrange into a composition until the piece feels balanced and exciting to me.” Each object wants to be revealed; and it communicates this through a language.

4.

Ada Limon, explaining that poetry isn’t an issue to fix or a problem to solve, quotes the ancient Chinese proverb (also quoted by Toni Morrison): “A bird sings not because he has an answer, but because he has a song.”

Once the bird’s song exists, it no longer belongs to the bird alone—it becomes part of the world where others bring their ears and lives and impressions to bear upon the hearing.

The casket is a boat. The casket sits in a museum where it accessible to the public. We see how much Pinckney loved his mother, and how the form of this love protects her from us.

4.

Jaswinder Bolina to the poet: “Your task is to arrange the words strangely in order to explain more clearly what happened.” Charles Pinckney on sculpture: “You have to release yourself from what your preconceptions are and let the thing dictate.”

The words strangely.

The words estranged from the wording, the aura that surrounds the latch.

The poem does not open the casket; the poem tells us the casket can be opened.

I am still circling around the tension between formal expectation and what the artist holds sacred.

5.

From that day forward. From that day, forward. The presence of a comma modifies what the poet asks of time. The absence makes the seam invisible. The seam is the space of asking in a poem. Each punctuation mark makes what is asked more specific.

What happens to a bird song when we score it?

6.

The bird song’s is part of the landscape. It sings whether or not we listen. You who know American Saturdays—know lawnmowers and barbecues bulldoze the song. Leaf blowers erase it and nothing else happens.

The bird does not fight to be heard over the din.

The poet must live with that.

The bind of singing: being ignored. The song’s risk is also it’s sky—it’s particular tenor.

Hoa Nyugen ends the poem, “Diệp Before Completion,”with this line:

“The past tense of sing is not singed”

No punctuation. No italics. We feel singed by the past tense, even though the poet explicitly states the opposite. The ear hears a fire.

The mind finds an ocean. An eye trying to lift it.

What is a lifeboat? “How long after chemotherapy can a DIEP flap be done?” What is the color of locked satin?

Poetics of time: Dates, calendars, metrics.

A house where I alone go calling
A name that silence and the walls give back to me
A strange house contained in my voice
Inhabited by the wind
I invent it, my hands draw a cloud
A heaven-bound ship above the forests

- Pierre Seghers

1.

My great-grandfather waits with my daughter for birds to sip water from a small iron bowl in the ruins of the Romanian Republic of Alabama.

The Republic is currently colonized by a cowboy stepfather from Texas and my mother’s outrageous ghost. I say outrageous because “outrage” is still uncomfortable when attached to female-gendered spirits in the South. Alabama’s ghosts are sad, unhappy, religious, hungry for statues and memorial plaques.

But the ghost of my mother just wants to live—to be alive for the flood of azaleas, the honeysuckle seasons, the hora-hungry dusk which crawls across porches at certain angles of light.

2.

The childhood home—the house or apartment—the site where first memories attach to sound and color—the land of daydreams and origins. This is the mind's first inhabitation, often the source of habits which estrange us from others, or which create a sense of family identity. 

Everything begins in that house: the one who raised us, the one where we first discovered that what adults said did not correspond with what we read in books, or heard from the chorus on floorboards.

You have probably guessed what I’m reading from the timbre of my nostalgia. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space explores the "value of inhabited space, the non-I that protects the I;" the most inhabited spaces being those which evoke "the notion of home," or which connect us to the child in a world of mysterious objects alongside the idyll of safety. For Bachelard,  the "land of motionless childhood, motionless the way all immemorial things are" which offers us access to the child mind, or the mind that lacks the options of moving, doing, and being independent in the world. 

"Our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost," Bachelard says, referring to time, or to the mind that experienced it before success and hierarchies intervened.

Childhood's time is unique in that it cannot be memorialized: it precedes memorialization.

Childhood time is the time outside time as we come to know it in the world. 

As for the home, it remains precious as a place for this peculiar temporality. The home protects and provides shelter for daydreaming. In the house, unlike the classroom, daydreaming is acceptable.

3.

The awkwardness of injuctions during National Poetry Month: to “make time” for poetry. As if time can be so easily stolen or created. And yet—on the page—it can.

I thought about the social constructions of time after receiving a poetry prompt from Kimberly Ann Southwick: "Repackage time--repackage decades or weeks or years--find a way to view time that is not standard or that is personal, that is a different way in."

"The calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery...." Gaston Bachelard writes.  There is a prompt in this: an opportunity to list the images that formulate the calendars of your life—it’s seasons, scents, sounds, recipes. Not the football calendar or the external divisions of time — I don't want to know the commercial or public as it was absorbed by the home—I am interested in the private, unique, and unusual. 

And how time is lineated in poetry, when considering the first home, or what it wants from us in its unique relations to time. And how Rene Char dreams in "a room that grew buoyant and, little by little, expanded into the vast stretches of travel." And how the room becomes the space which allows us to access all the loose tendrils in a mind, to bring them together somehow – not in study – but in amazement of simultaneity.  

That I sat inside the same stone chapel as Joan of Arc in a town named after fleas--and that I can sit there, alone, now, in the unsettlings of my head.

That Bachelard speaks to how localization nearly defies the precision of calendar dates and chronologies:

"Memory does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness..... To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding  history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates." 

That thing one must study and write in this….

4.

“In our daydreams, the house is large cradle,” Bachelard suggests. And this cradle cuts both ways—the cradle is also the poetic object tended by a mother, as in Jill Bialosky’s poem.

Daylight Savings

There was the hour
when raging with fever
they thrashed. The hour
when they called out in fright.
The hour when they fell asleep
against our bodies, the hour
when without us they might die.
The hour before school
and the hour after.
The hour when we buttered their toast
and made them meals
from the four important food groups—
what else could we do to insure they’d get strong and grow?
There was the hour where we were the spectators
at a recital, baseball game,
when they debuted in the school play.
There was the silent hour in the car
when they were angry. The hour
when they broke curfew. The hour
when we waited for the turn of the lock
knowing they were safe and we could finally
close our eyes and sleep. The hour
when they were hurt
or betrayed and there was nothing we could do
to ease the pain.
There was the hour
when we stood by their bedsides with ginger-ale
or juice until the fever broke. The hour
when we lost our temper and the hour
we were filled with regret. The hour
when we slapped their cheeks and held
our hand in wonder.
The hour when we wished for more.
The hour when their tall and strong bodies,
their newly formed curves and angles in their faces
and Adam’s apple surprised us—
who had they become?
Hours when we waited and waited.
When we rushed home from the office
or sat in their teacher’s classroom
awaiting the report of where they stumbled
and where they excelled, the hours
when they were without us, the precious hour
we did not want to lose each year
even if it meant another hour of daylight.

Here, Jill Bialosky uses the poem to recuperate time, leveraging that lost hour which occurs in the ordinary changing of clocks, and asking that hour to carry the velocity of intimacy, the private hours of watching children grow, nursing them through midnights, witnessing their individuality detach from the nest.

Bialosky accomplishes this in a two-page poem that builds momentum in one single long stanza, a refrain built around "the hours": The hour when....The hour before.... There was the hour... etc."

In this mundane recitation of particular effaced hours, time, itself, is rendered precious, a treasury of particular hours consumed by love for one's children. 

An hour is merely three twenty minute episodes and when you’ve recently been sucked into a new series, many hours will be divided up this way and lost in a haze of blue light and meaningless noise. Hours tend to creep away into the internet…

- Sarah Shabet on Bialosky’s “Daylight Savings”

5.

For Bachelard, the daydream is an inherently poetic mode which autovalorizes - "it derives direct pleasure from its own being." The sites which birthed daydreams are tinged with the hue of uncertainty, the vast plausibility of nostalgia, the strange resonances and mysteries. B. again:

Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the beings' stability -a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to 'suspend' its flight.

The house is "a geometry of echoes," and each room holds sound, light, smell, and color differently. To recapture the slant of light in that room. To recover the scents which linger on couches or curtains. To note how shelves increase or decrease echoes depending on what they hold. (Books muffle sound.)

Bachelard seeks the "timbre of voices" and "the resonance in each room" of what he calls the "sound house." In the old house, where we learned to listen, or first became aware of sound, the geometry of echoes abides as a music.  The house we are born in is "physically inscribed in us" through unconscious habits and beliefs; "The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands."

I wonder about the latch in my daughter’s hand—what she will remember from the house on the borders of the Romanian Republic of Alabama, where she inhabited a margin between a language and an intense, 100-foot magnolia.

"But if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality,” Bachelard reminds. “All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead."

So I bring the great-grandfather into her bird-dream… One day, when she is grown, when she is adult enough to repudiate everything I have given her, I hope she finds this photo on this website and wonders about the man whom her mother added to her reverie. A portrait which includes the invisible: the only witness I know to the Romanian Republic of Alabama.

"Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay"

A National Poetry Month morning exercise inspired entirely by Oliver de la Paz’s "Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay" (which you can also hear read by the poet at the link)—and by my incredible, gorgeous, brilliant son.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

*

1. Did your child lose acquired speech?

He has always been polylingual. I mean: he learned the language of puppies, cats, eagles, furred creatures he admired. The march of the penguins—his tears when the daddy penguin dropped the egg. The words moved from his mouth to his fingers, shimmering, twinkling, circling the brown curls of his head.

2. Did your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals?

He laughs with his whole body: it is as if the laugh lives inside him, inseparable from every nerve ending. A full-bodied laughter. He doesn’t point to things. Is this the question? What am I answering? He likes quiet. Unusual noises scare him. Football and fireworks scare him a lot. We try to leave town on those weekends.

3. Is your child’s voice louder than required?

I think I mentioned it is loud where we live. I never realized how loud lawnmowers and leafblowers could be, the endless screaming of inhuman machines. Given the surrounding sounds, his voice is very loud—his teachers say disruptive. My friends say: shouting. It is loud enough so he can hear himself speak over the noises in his head. My child’s voice is as loud as required. He could be a sportscaster, really.

He presses his invisible volume button when he needs to lower his voice in public spaces. The button is located right above his heart. Sometimes he presses it so intensely that he mutes himself.

4. Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?

He loves to sing. He sing-songs. He uses his voice to untangle the sounds inside a word from their shell. Did you realize each word has a shell around it? He opens each one carefully, slowly, with his mouth. And then he repacks it. He puts the soft sounds back into the hard shell. He will do this for hours. Often he uses his fingers and hands to help.

5. Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?

The toilet is connected to a series of underground pipes that swallow things. He has shown me this with a drawing. He puts toilet paper into the bowl and flushes with one hand over his ear, the other ear laying against his shoulder. It is true that the toilet paper disappears.

He started kindergarten late as a result. He was only fully potty-trained at six, and he will not use the school restroom. At home, he goes into the backyard, crouches near a tree to use the bathroom, the sparrows chairing overhead.

He cries and covers his ears when toilets flush. Always.

He says animals are his best friends. He trusts dogs and looks deep into their eyes. He does this even after one bites him on the ear and draws blood. I worry so much when people walk their dogs and he runs up to touch them. I worry those people don’t understand dogs are his best friends. I worry the dogs will hurt him again.

6. Does your child pull you around when he wants something?

He takes my hand to show me the ice cream. He stares at the freezer door until I open it. Then he looks directly at the ice cream and waits. The connection between our fingers which becomes a connected gaze is actually a blanket. We wrap ourselves in the blanket and eat birthday cake ice cream on the couch. Oh no—is that bad?

7. Does your child have difficulty expressing his needs and desires using gestures?

He takes my hand. He looks at things and waits. He crumples up on the floor when he is frustrated. After aligning all the ketchup and condiment bottles on the kitchen floor, he dances around them. Fingers twinkling. His eyes twinkle when his fingers twinkle in the air. The joy on his face is incredible—he knows what he needs to assemble it. He knows his joy’s patterns. The bottles, the trains arranged by color and size along the edge of a rug. His hands dancing, dancing.

8. Is there no spontaneous imitation of speech or communication from your child?

I don’t know what you mean. I know what he means. I know others don’t know what he means as I do not know what you mean by this question. Is this an answer? It feels like we aren’t communicating.

9. Does your child repeat words, parts of words, or tv commercials?

He repeats everything sing-songy. He loves vowels and fricatives. He repeats everything and takes it apart with such tenderness. Like a tiny monk studying the matins, the motion of music toward song. He chants a lot.

10. Does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)?

Yes! Yes! He’s been doing this more and I read in a book that repetition is how kids learn new words so I’m excited and hopeful about his vocabulary. He loves repeating alphabet flashcards. He does it by himself. He sits in his teddy chair and repeats flashcards for hours. And train words. And “Outside.” He says “Outside” thirteen times in a row when he wants to go swing. He sings it. He sings it and stares at the window.

11. Does your child have difficulty sustaining a conversation?

Not with himself. He has monologues. He meanders into new places with them. Twinkling places. But he won’t answer questions unless they are related to trains. Or bottles. Or whatever is fascinating him at that moment.

12. Does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pauses?

I don’t know. I mean, yes. I mean he recites what is happening in his mind as if I am not there. When he is finished, he crawls into my lap and repeats the word mommy. I mean a word is an island that protects him from all the other words and mean kids at school.

13. Does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)?

Yes. He was born egalitarian—he doesn’t he see status or authority or prestige or charisma. He loves puppies and penguins.

Last week, I had to leave work and get him from school because the principal said he was acting hysterically. In that office, he was so tiny, sitting in a large leather chair, his cheeks reddened, his eyes rimmed by tears. The principal said he disrespected a teacher and refused to apologize. He looked up at me, his lower lip trembling: “No, mommy, no. No no no. The teacher said dinosaurs were 2,000 years old. No no no mommy. The teacher lied. Lied lied lied.”

I took him home. He wouldn’t apologize until the teacher took back what she said. The teacher would not take it back. I’m not sure what will happen with school. I can’t differentiate between respect, apology, and fact.

14. Does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

He said I love you for the first time recently. He said it to a tiger at the zoo. He stared through the bars and said, “Tiger, I love you.” He was so happy. His fingers danced around his eyes.

Poetry and music: The dialogue

The sense of the line

Listening to my son practice piano has changed my sense of the poetic line. I think the ear and the mind can both discover poetry techniques from music composition. 

In a 1931 lecture, composer Arnold Schoenberg credited Mozart with teaching him "the art of unequal phrase lengths," or "the art of creating secondary ideas." From Bach, he learned "the art of inventing groups of notes such that they provide their own accompaniment" and "the art of creating the whole from a single kernel," namely the 12-tone revolution that develops from a single kernel that is both melody and accompaniment. 

Musical forms enacting structural return and improv

And once again it was June—mild, long, slowly fading evenings, evenings promising so much that no matter what you do with them, you always receive the impression of defeat, of wasted time. Nobody knows the best way to get through them. March straight ahead or maybe sit at home before a wide-open window so that the warm air, saturated in the sounds of summer, may permeate the room and mingle with books, ideas, metaphors, with our breath. No, but that’s not right either, it’s not possible. You can only mourn them, those unending evenings, mourn them when they pass, as the days grow shorter. They can’t be seized. Perhaps these long June evenings can only be perceived by way of regret, remembrance, nostalgia. They can’t be plumbed: you’d need to head for the park, one foot in front of the other, while sitting simultaneously on the terrace and listening to the voices of the city fall still as the last blackbirds sing … But that won’t do either. Birdsong has no form, no adagio, no allegro. In a detailed study of music, a certain philosopher once observed that “nightingales don’t listen to other nightingales sing,” only somewhat exalted people do. Hence you can only tear yourself away when you get bored (let’s be honest here). Whereas a musical composition, subject to the discipline of form, forestalls the moment of our boredom.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

Music is described as a form enacting return—structural return that relies on reprise, repetition, patterns, memory of earlier notes and melodies. A piece often begins with a statement and then returns later as ‘recapitulation,’ but with a different texture—the texture of evoking what has come before it. The bridge, or transition, mediates—to quote Daniel Berenbeim—the transition determines not only itself but what comes after it. 

This repetition and accumulation are made possible by hearing—where poetic language amplifies the valences through connotation and poetic language. To repeat a word in a poem is to attract others, to collect the dust a word gathers across time and line. I am thinking of the way mom said my name….. and how this changes on the page across stanzas.

In “Singing With the Taxi Driver: From Bollywood to Babylon,” Jay Prosser describes using music as “ a channel for returning forgotten pasts” as he writes the memoir of his mother’s family. Producing the memoir replicates Berenbeim’s composition strategy as Prosser begins with mother’s statement and then recapitulates it, which can reconfigure her self-concept and mediate “what comes after.” Where the eye distinguishes and discerns, the ear blends and connects—but what makes music so hard to express in words is what makes it such a fantastic vehicle for emotional life.  

Black poet Michael S. Harper borrows "black jazz man's improvisational worldview" and assumption that what he creates in the particular could be an accident, an improv, a reaction. See his poem "Corrected Review." Harper takes the artist's responsibility as activating, listening for the shifts and energizing the line through improvisation, thus moving the music forward. The improvisational worldview centers contingency while also building upon prior lines and riffs—it upcycles fragments.

First music & memories of displacement: From Teju Cole to Transtromer

The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preëxisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

Teju Cole, “Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Transtromer”

The ear has a 7 month advance on the eye in fetal development. The oceanic rolling of a womb is the first lull. The first music is always a memory of displacement. Music has a way of reinhabiting the lost homeland, the songs they carried: doinas.

As we begin in a womb, my thoughts on music and poetry return to an essay by Teju Cole—an essay which incubates, still, in my mind—where he describes his affinities, the lyres to which he returns, again and again, in fascination: Bach, Arvo Part and Tomas Transtromer.

In "C Major", Tomas Transtromer's narrator leaves his lover with the first snow:

Winter had come
while they were making love.

And the streets are altered by the joy: "All things around him on the way toward the note C."

In "Allegro", the narrator ends a "black day" by playing Haydn. And the sound changes the mind as the player shoves his hands into his "hadynpockets" and raises his "haydnflag" and language expands to hold the transformative power of music.

In notes to The Great Enigma, translator Robin Fulton approaches Transtromer's "lifelong interest in poems whose growth parallels musical development", and how this works as theme and variation in his poetry. Transtromer himself points to "The Journey's Formulae" as a "bagatelle, five lines perhaps.... terribly important." 

“Symmetry with deviation”

I see plants as slow-motion spontaneous gestures. They’re working according to a pattern, but they also have some spontaneity in how they grow. People who write about beauty often talk about symmetry being hardwired into our preferences. That’s not wrong, but symmetry by itself gets boring. What’s exciting, what’s pleasurable, is symmetry with deviation. And the fractal development of plants is endlessly attractive to me—the way they repeat themselves on different scales. It’s like music.

Rae Armantrout. Interview with Brian Reed, "The Art of Poetry, No. 106" Paris Review, Issue 231, Winter 2019

Jim Whiteside's fugues held loss together, or borrow the formal repetition of the fugue to recreate a sort of dialogue in motion. I thought about Mahler’s 5th Symphony played on a blade of grass when I reviewed Whiteside’s chapbook last year, and how he begins the book with a fugue.

In Latin (and in my homeland), the verb fuga means to run. Whiteside’s poems use running as a form of poetic motion, a movement that is both lyrical and essential to the questions of queer identity in many southern states.

Sometimes, the memory of him playing
runs backwards. The notes leave the room, return
to the end of his instrument, back to his body.

I also thought about Paul Celan's disruption of the fugue as a form, or rekindling of its nature in running to reconstruct the inability to run, the helplessness of Jews during the Shoah. The death fugue is one that cannot run. It begins, tries again, and falters. In Romania, it wasn’t even a fugue—it was titled as a “Tango”….

My forthcoming collection, Dor, uses the traditional music form of the doina to score dor for the voice, to render it as cross-temporal vocalization, an intimate localization.

The refrain and the lyric’s infinite “I”

Of feeling unattached to tense or personhood, Mark Strand says "it exists in an overriding infinity, out of time but responsive to time." I’m thinking of the word "Now" at the beginning of a line. And the lyric poem as one which "manifests musical properties, but one intended to be read or spoken, not sung." The tension in the lyric form links itself to musicality while holding it away, refusing it. 

Lorrie Moore suggested that "every marriage needs a refrain" when written. I think marriage is one of the most dangerous thickets to enter in a poem. A refrain can be ice or flame or countless spaces on the spectrum between two dissimilar states of matter, two separate objects. But maybe we aren't quite objects--maybe the poem exists to reveal how each of us is their own epiphany.

And passion is impossible to sustain as refrain. Someone has to die. Someone must Juliet the scene. On passion, I am mute. Only grief is as intense and consuming as sexual passion. Only grief can match the desperate pitch of that emotional climate. Since both love and loss occupied epics as well as elegies—since these forms are some of the earliest vessels for poetry—the role of the chorus and refrain tangles in questions of what our species needs from sound. The lullaby that soothes a child to sleep.

Notes on erasures

(inspired by Jason Myer’s tweet)

Erasure | əˈrāSHər |: a form wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains

I’m posting the links to the craft essays, reviews, and articles without citing them because time is a limited resource, and also, because there is something formally interesting in setting writers’ thoughts on a form in conversation.

SOLMAZ SHARIF: “Erasure means obliteration.
The Latin root of obliteration (ob- against and lit(t)era letter) means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.
Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.”

WILL CORDEIRO: “Kenneth Goldsmith argues that we don't need writers anymore, we need information processors (whether people or machines) who can navigate, rearrange, and index the overflowing cache of digital bits that already exists. For Goldsmith, there's a surfeit in the textual economy, with clickbait and automated systems generating hordes of new gobbledygook on auto-pilot. His solution is for us literati to switch focus from content to context. What matters isn't what a piece says but what we can say about it, he claims. The process of composition is more important than its results. Documents don't need to be glossed and interpreted; they need only to be interpolated and glazed.”

KATY DIDDEN: “I have worked on other erasures—in all cases, like this current project, they were collaborations with visual artists. I worked with my cousin, erasing texts about land in New York, from passages about the Algonquin tribe, to Whitman on the early Dutch presence in Brooklyn, to articles advocating for establishing tent cities on vacant land. These are also meant to reveal forgotten or violent histories in the settling of land and claiming of territory.”

NICK LANTZ: “I realized that the poem would itself be an interrogation, an almost abusive litany of questions. Though the poem of course reads against the backdrop our recent torture scandals and debates, its surreal turns free it of any particular time and place. The interrogator-protagonist who took shape ultimately interested me not for reasons of political ideology but for the way in which he exemplifies how even when we are privy to the most clandestine recesses of human behavior, we are still fundamentally shut out of true knowledge. No matter how many "questions" we ask, we cannot know everything.”

CECILY PARKS: “In an act of ultimate erasure, Dickinson asked that her poems be burned when she died. If you believe that Dickinson’s effacements were a noncompulsory, though not uncomplicated, choice, then the fact that her request was not granted—the poems were published—can seem like a further effacement, an excision made with a very sharp blade.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I then deleted language from the book, like a government censor blacking out words in a letter from an internal dissident.”

ISOBEL O’HARE: “I don't conceal the original words and allow them to sit beside the ones I've chosen to highlight, in greyed-out text.”

M. NOURBESE PHILIP: “Physically manipulating the text helped me in the process over the long run: the very fact of physically mutilating the text broke the spell that the completed text has on us. I use the word “mutilate” with great deliberation here since I was deeply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist enterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “Erasure is really, to me, a technique that orients one toward questions of word order. You have to find a sequence of words in the source text that works as a sentence of your own. So I’ve come to pay a lot more attention to grammatical construction, as a result of my work with erasure.”

TRAVIS MACDONALD: “The anarchist in me says: there are no rules or boundaries that should not be broken on principle. The author in me, admittedly, bristles at that notion and insists, intuitively, that there is no form without rules to define it. In any case, it is clear to me that if there are rules to this game, they are still being written. That being the case, I would say that the need for attribution lies entirely within the judgment of each erasurist’s individual moral code. In fact, the only rule I can think of worth following would be that the work should understand it’s own code/form and abide by it at all costs.”

DAVID DODD LEE: “….linearly, left to right, though on occasion I broke my own rules, and in such cases I might find a letter I needed to create a word in the line above the one I had just appropriated. This sometimes happened subconsciously. But I failed the erasure test. This became partly what Sky Booths is all about. I wanted so badly to create poems that would stand on their own I cheated.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I decided to close up the spaces between words in my erasure as a way of “covering my tracks.” I wanted to erasure the traces of my own erasure, I suppose. On one level, this was just a kind of Borgesian game—I wanted my reader to slowly discover that he or she was reading an erasure as they made their way through the book. But on another level I think there’s a politics behind those sorts of decisions.”

JANET HOLMES: “When my second book came out, appropriating portions of a diary my father wrote in the 1920s, an elder poet came up to me and dismissively said, “I suppose all we need to do now to write poems is to steal someone else’s writing.” It was an expression of the same kind of feeling: real poetry has no sources. That elder poet’s work is largely dependent upon classical mythology, but somehow that does not, in his mind, diminish it. Erasure work brings up questions like this and gives us a perspective from which to discuss them.”

ANGEL GARCIA: “Unlike erasing and black redaction, erasure using blank space allows us to create and converse with our own experiences. Around and inside those blank spaces we can reclaim and reappropriate. In the seemingly simple act of taking back the language of harm, from the language of harm, poets of color are able to make and insert new narra- tives of resilience. In this way, erasure too, becomes a form of code-switching with all its historical connotations. Erasure is language translated and retranslated. It makes meaning new. In this new language—code-switched (but not coded)—we are allowed to resist by expressing dissent. We are able to dismantle and deconstruct the official language. From the legacies of trauma, we can find power. Erasure is an assertion of that power. Erasure is recovery. Erasure is resistance. Erasure is resilience.”

JEANNIE VANASCO: “Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.
But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural. 
To erase is to leave something else behind.”

Erasures

“Reaching Guantamo” by Solmaz Sharif”

“The Dickinson Composites Series” by Jen Bervin

“Misdirection” by David Dodd Lee

“Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith

“Watershed” by Tracy K. Smith

“Archaeology, p. 28” by Vanessa Place

“Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple” by Robin Coste Lewis

“Lesson VIII: Map of North America” by Elizabeth Bradfield

“St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Otahuhu, Auckland” by Chloe Honum

by Nicole Sealey

“Poem In Which Words Have Been Left Out” by Charles Jensen

“Lines on a skull” by Ravi Shankar

Nonce erasure of Wikipedia English page by Wikipedia

Videos + Lectures

Mary Ruefle “On Erasure: Visual and Textual”

Robin Coste Lewis “The Race Within Erasure”

Erasure Prompts + Exercises

1. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Dear __________” from Emilia Phillips

2. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Love Poem Lost” from Emilia Phillips

3. “Illuminated Erasure Exercise” from B.J. Best and C. Cobusta

Writers on the legacy of Walt Whitman

At some point, most American kids will read a poem by Walt Whitman. For some, especially those living in small, rural towns, reading Whitman will open new doors, enabling them to inhabit their queerness, to repudiate heteronormativity in this country’s history.

Countless poets will discover their line, their formal permission, in Whitman’s odes. In 1961, James Wright will note that his poetry is drawing closer to Walt Whitman's - "using parallelism not as device of repetition but as an occasion for development" of vision, images proliferating from the one. Which is to say the song-like preacher voice of Whitman is being challenged or reconceived as a different sort of development, something other than a sonic device.

But anyone who reads and loves Whitman will eventually grapple with his legacy, or wander into his correspondence (available online). What follows is a brief (ongoing) compendium of brilliant writers who approach this in their own words, from their own angles.

Abdel-Moneim Ramadan, “Walt Whitman and Me: Notes on a Poetic Education”

Alexandre Ferrere, “Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences”

Alicia Ostriker, “Loving America and the Problem of Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Allen Ginsburg, “Taking a Walk Through Leaves of Grass”

Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman & the Class Struggle (PDF)

Ann Waldman, “The I Is Another”

Bethany Schneider, “Whitman’s Cane: Disability, Prosthesis, and Whitman’s Leaning Pose”

D. Graham Burnett, “Out From Behind This Mask”

D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman” chapter from Studies in Classical American Literature

David Baker, “Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief”

David Eberly, “A Serpent In the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara” (PDF)

David S. Wallace, “Why Should I Venerate?’ Walt Whitman at 200”

Don James McLaughlin, “Walt Whitman’s Gift”

CAConrad, “From Whitman to Walmart”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Magician’s Serpent: Race and the Tragedy of American Democracy” (PDF)

Eric Savoy, “Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, Henry James, and the Politics of Reception” (PDF)

Galway Kinnell, “Strong is your hold: My Encounters with Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, ed. Walt Whitman & the World (PDF) excellent resource on how non-american author have read Whitman in their own words & essays

George B. Hutchinson, “Langston Hughes and the ‘Other’ Whitman” (PDF)

George Santayana, “Walt Whitman: A Dialogue”

Gregory Woods, “Still On My Lips: Walt Whitman in Britain” (PDF)

Jeremy Lybarger, “Walt Whitman’s Boys”

Jericho Brown, “If God Is Love”

Joann P. Krieg, A Whitman Chronology (PDF)

Jose Marti, “El Poeta Walt Whitman” (PDF in Spanish)

Jorge Luis Borges, “Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy”

June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry”

Kazim Ali, “Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200”

Kenneth M. Price, “Love, War, and Revision in Whitman’s Blue Book” (PDF)

Kenneth M. Price, “Whitman in Blackface”

Kenneth M. Price, “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Whitmanian Comradeship”

Kenneth M. Price, “Transatlantic Homoerotic Whitman”

Kenneth M. Price, “Xenophobia, Religious Intolerance, and Whitman's Storybook Democracy”

Kenneth M. Price, “Passing, Fluidity, and American Identities”

Khaled Mattawa, “Whitman’s Democratic Vistas”

Langston Hughes, “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”

Lavelle Porter, “Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?”

Lina Gregerson, “The Self in the Poem: Walt Whitman in Washington”

Marina Irena Ramalho de Sousa Santos, “Atlantic Poets: ‘Discovery’ As Metaphor & Ideology” (PDF)

Mark Doty, “Our Sly Progenitor: Revisiting Walt Whitman”

Mark Edmondson, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy”

Mary Oliver, “My Friend, Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Matthew Zapruder, “Poem From Harm”

Michael Moon, “Rereading Whitman Under Pressure of AIDS: His Sex Radicalism and Ours” (PDF)

Nathanael O’Reilly, “Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass”

Nina Murray, “Walt Whitman in Russia: Three Love Affairs”

Peter O’Leary, “It Looks Quite Curious: Oppen’s Whitman”

Robert K. Martin, “Fetishizing America: David Hockney and Thom Gunn” (PDF)

Ronald Johnson, “Letters to Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Sahar Elmougy, “Towards A New Master Narrative of Trauma” (PDF)

Stanley Bill, “Translation As Talking to Oneself: Milosz Makes Whitman Speak” (PDF)

Susan Margaret Brown, “Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe” (PDF)

Thom Gunn, “Forays Against the Republic” (PDF)

Tom Sleigh, “One Way of Caring: The Limits of Whitman’s Vision”

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (PDF)

Thoughts on Ewa Lipska

1.

Ewa Lipska is usually considered a Polish poet. She was born in Krakow in 1945. She won the Koscielski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992) and the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993). Currently, she lives between Krakow and Vienna.

“Much of her work emerges out of the events of World War II, and interrogates social and political issues with a skeptical surrealism. Her most recent volumes—1999, Sklepy Zoologiczne (Pet Shops), Ja (I), Gdzie Indziej(Somewhere Else), and Drzazga (Splinter, 2006)—are influenced in particular by her friendships with Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.” [Words Without Borders]

2.

What I love about Lipska is her sensibility, the way she wants to let history make her cynical, and yet somehow the avenue of the poem, the motion itself, undercuts the cynicism. Lipska was close to Szymborska and Wiesenthal—she shares a birthplace, a certain sensibility—but sees herself as unaffiliated with any school or national boundary. Her rejection of nationalism is linked to the belief that art depends on fidelity to authentic experience rather than virtue signals.

In “Preface: The Absurdity of Beauty,” found at the beginning of A New Century (Northwestern University Press, 2009), Lipska asks if the poet who witnesses something terrible is allowed to "describe what took place so unexpectedly"--and how? Must it be a dictation of facts or a recreation of aura? Recounting an accident, the witness of it, Lipska attempts to discern the poet’s role in "the dictatorship of the moment" when "things conjoined irrevocably, a terror of fate and coincidence":

“May a poet take advantage of fate in such a situation and describe everything that took place so unexpectedly and suddenly? May he or she dictate to a typist the defenseless facts, add some details, empathize with the victim? To die on a sheet of paper playing the main part, at the same time avoiding compassion that leads to the inevitable corrosion of words? Whom to be in such a situation? An onlooker, a stray wanderer, an agitator? Can you hear the fear and uncertainty when I bend my head over a sheet of paper?”

This understanding of the poet as both riddle-maker and truth-seeker recurs in Lipska’s poetry, challenging the quality of reported truth or eyewitness accounts, revealing a less solid ontology than we might wish at a time when fake news costs so much.

3.

In “Four Notes on Ewa Lipska’s Poems,” Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska notes that Lipska “deeply mistrusts wena, a Polish term used mainly in highbrow literature” to describe moments of insight or revelation. For the poet, wena is just the vein carrying blood—it is neither god nor collective pronoun; neither kingdom nor nation. So what matters to the poet, if not the nation or the ego? Nowakowska says:

“Since artists mostly suffer from hubris and bravado, art does not matter much, unlike love, which is the most important factor conditioning human life and endowing it with meaning.”

Nowakowska also cites the recurrence of fate as a powerful mocking force in Lipska’s poetry, and I think this is true, but I also feel like Lipska’s focus on helplessness isn’t fatalism, or a worship of fatalist systems and their associated determinisms, but a general bow to uncertainty—to the reality of things happening outside our plans, systems, and social sciences.

4.

“Although Lipska is sometimes considered as part of the "New Wave" group of the 1970s, she distances herself from such associations, preferring to operate autonomously. Over the years, her mistrust of the language of her daily surroundings, for her a language of masks and lies, has grown. In response, Lipska has developed an inverted language, which is confrontational and frequently ominous. Her poems are lucid, and in few words, she puts forth her own reality with gentle irony. Fascinated by human behaviour, she strips away the false meaning of words…” [Poetry International]

According to Robin Davidson, Ewa Lipska describes her poetry as a sort of "skeptical surrealism, meaning she calls into question even the surrealists’ claim that images are purified of social or political motive, for any system of art may give rise to a fascist aesthetic.”

This irreverence for systems plays out in a sort of hermeticism, a gaze which looks forward while also looking back, a sort of historical rubber-necking gesture which loosens temporality in her poems. Her use of cliches in poetry--her rupturing of them to forge an individual voice--reclaims language from ruins somehow. 

What does Lipska do at the level of the line? What part of her work fascinates me? A few short comments, acknowledging that I do not know Polish, and so my thoughts on translation and poetics are limited by this formal constraint.

She mobilizes the energy of the short couplet and tercet with impeccable images and metaphors. This is fairly constant in her work, and I study the brisk syntax of her lines like butter on bread in a terrible forest.

She begins a poem in the key of refusenik, as in from “No One” translated by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

I agree to this landscape
which does not exist.

She interiorizes images associated with revolution, and lets them be altered by the motion into the body, as in “The New Century”:

We speak to each other in fireworks.
A groggy noun in the mouth.

She embraces the faux-pas of referring back to the title and explaining it in the final breaths of a poem—which, I have been told, is an amateur move in contemporary American poetics. See, for example, from “Number One”:

And so what
when love
a twig brushed by the wind
is always Number One
and leans toward us.

She ends the poem, “A Juicer,” in a single-word stanza with a period: “Yes.”

She works diaphoric metaphors for memory so well, so carefully, resisting simple equivocations, as one sees in “A Splinter” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove it
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

She flexes the short poem’s form in ways that both suggest cliche and undermine it. Here is the entirety of “Indiscretion” as translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Had she busied herself in time
with the systematic counting
of ship screws
it would not have come to this—
indecent acts of poetry.

She reexamines the idea of inheritance in the context of a barbaric European history—by dragging images through the poem, linking them to motions, anchoring them in dust—as one sees in “Helplessness.”

She brings divinity down to the earth of concurrent disasters which most gods and monsters want to stay above, as the longer poem, “Newton’s Orange”:

Now everything has become clearer.

God has admitted
to being only human.

5.

And yet I find some translations of Lipska preferable to others—for the way in which the seam of the poem is split. For example, “The Smells of Evil” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, keeps this critical couplet:

The valedictorian of the unenlightened star
gazing into the sky of hypocrisy.

But other parts of this translation feel less realized, less lush in their barrenness, than the translation by Susan Bassnett and Piotr Kuhiwczak shared below.

And here’s another Lipska poem by the same translators (which I found in my typed notes and need to source properly)…..

6.

And here’s Lipska’s “Dictation” in its entirety, with my clumsy apology for not being sure which translation this might be that I scribbled into my notebook…. Although many of her poems feel ars-like, “Dictation” does so on multiple levels, including the title—and I think this makes sense to anyone from former Eastern Bloc countries.

7.

And here is me, realizing my kids haven’t had lunch, and wanting to write more but also to end, to end, to end with Lipska’s words from the preface to A New Century, because they are instructive somehow—they speak both to our hunger for belonging and all the desperate, dehumanizing ideologies humans support in order to feel themselves part of something, kindred to a larger group of meaning and existence.

"The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap."

8.

2001

translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

2001, dear Mrs. Schubert, is not only the beginning
of the new century, but also the number of my imagination.
As you know, for some time now my fiction
has resented my flirting with reality,
consorting with useless time.
I therefore inform you that the dead season is coming,
which, as usual, I am spending
on the short-term list of missing persons.

Scythe: An essay on hunger, expectation, blackberries, and poetry

1.

It is early April when we stumble upon the white flowers, their long, thorned limbs, a hillside of tangled thickets, a brambled bliss. I see blackberries, the possibility.

The kids sit in tall grass and chew on clover. They sketch five-petalled flowers and small leaves in their notebooks. They date the page, add a location: Our Blackberry Patch. It is the youngest who names it. 

We are on private land, possibly trespassing a space so forlorn even our breaths seem loud, boisterous. Nevermind that we drove thirty minutes to get to a lot where we'd discover a path rambling round a hill and then through a small forest leading us here.

Forget that this expedition, like most, is unplanned, a source of stubbed toes and ankles swollen by fire ant bites, a glorious accident—all of it. 

For the rest of the month, we make this pilgrimage twice a week just to check if the berries are ready.

By the end of April, the flowers have vanished. The kids draw raw thorns. The temperature warms.

It is May when the tiny green fists appear--the first berry buds--thousands studding the hillside like rhinestone shrapnel. 

We go in expectation. We carry our backpacks, our water bottles, our notebooks, our hope-eyes, our just-in-case bags and baskets. We are ridiculous. This is the pilgrim's plight--to look the fool while raving towards magic. 

By mid-May, the berries have turned a soft pink, a mottled early-redness, the dim fuschia of a second-aunt's powder blush. We discuss the fleshy berry made of multiple drupes. No one mentions the hours we've spent packing, preparing, driving, hiking, listening to terrible radio, doing the same things over and over, in the same place, with the same scope--only to arrive at the not-yet berries. The poem is Our Blackberry Patch. It is overflowing with not-yet berries. It is eating me alive. 

2. 

"Paper head, I prefer you
because of your emptiness;
from within you any
word could still be said."

This stanza from Margaret Atwood's "Paper Bag"  lives in a poem about making masks.

We poets are, I suspect, continually making masks and waiting to find ourselves in them. Losing, sinking, stumbling, missing the party, forgetting the event, conspiring with the headache.

There is a hunger that keeps us folding paper, making pages, avoiding people who are doing important and constructive things with time. This hunger is the servant of fascination.

The blackberries first blooms.

3.

Mommy is doing her fascination, the middle daughter tells a friend. Mommy isn't available to drive. Mommy is very distracted, and this is evidence of bad mothering in certain circles that never liked Mommy anyway. 

Today it is pickles.

Please understand that the pickle is actually a cucumber in translated form (which means it has spiritual powers) but also a verb with the power to astonish things. Please do not underestimate the power of staring at pickles. I am here for the god in the image of pickling. 

Fascination is transgressive. It is unpopular, anti-social, divise. It is a waste of time and idle hands.

Yes, it is a damned sin to follow the mole rat into the darkness and wait. But there is no other way into it, this fascination thing--there is no fascination that doesn't risk being wrong, seeming stupid, losing something. There is the watching and the waiting. There is no formula, no fascination machine, just the mollusk on the rim of a sink. 

4.

Midnight passes without trumpets.

I am still awake on the back porch. I am here for the stalk-shaped word that must arrive so I can reap what the page wants from me. When it arrives, the word is a scythe. 

Unlike the visionary who assembles a system in which to find safety, unlike the ideologue who uses imagination to create a fixed outcome, a predictability, you, the poet, are discovering something different every time. It is elusive, slippery, less than a vision, this slow dance of courting the poem's possibility. 

Matthew Olzmann once said, of poeming,: "Novelty is not enough to sustain our interest." The reader needs to see how we make meaning an intriguing object. It is not enough to dress the Barbie in a silver space suit if one isn't willing to offer her a story, a context.

If the poet must lie, let it be for something marvelous chased to the hilt, something worthy of a scabbard. A blackberry pie.

5.

"A lyric poem is a created and instantly destroyed world," said Marina Tsvetaeva. It takes patience to build something that only exists for an instant. The poem is like the human, present in uniqueness for an instant.

Dear poet, this has never been a question of ability or skill. Clearly, you are not the best poet. You cannot be the best of anything without fudging, lying, ignoring, erasing. 

You are not a politician or an elected official of the Poetry Republic. You have zero constituents. A reader is only there for a minute. Instead, you are someone who can't stop obsessing over words. You cannot represent anyone except the longing. You, in your lonely, should know that. You cannot be representative. You can only be the pen holding the scythe, the pinch-marks on the porch. 

This is not about the book or the byline.

It is the thing under the thing in padded slippers.

6.

Now that I have the word, now that the scythe has appeared, I must save it for the poem.

I must find the perfect nest for it to ruin.

If I can't find a poem, I will leave it in the graveyard, or use it as a title for an essay about a word I did not want to lose and yet failed to use properly. 

7.

I fail words all the time. In my mind, I tend a graveyard for lost poems, their bones and fragments, the lyrics that never rose from the page or found a way to settle in stanzas. There are so many footballs there.

As for the living poems, I worry about their health and safety, their longevity, their lifespan--especially the nocturnal dwellers with their tiny button eyes and furrowed brows. I worry about their avoidance of light. 

"How many poems will we actually be able to recall at the moment of our death ... or at the moment just before? And will they console us, anymore than we might already be consoled? Remembering is the poison ... "

- Brandon Shimoda, "Winter Dwelling"

Maybe the poems barely matter. And yet, like Shimoda, I find the writing irresistible. Like the god I can't really believe. Like the hummingbird with the fastest heart on the planet who must work so hard to restart it every morning that it sometimes just dies in its sleep.

8.

The sea the sea. The bone the bone.
Both are inside me when I read the words.
The book lends my life from the library
Or my life is the book on loan.

[Dan Beachy-Quick, "Homeric Philosophies"]

I owe the scythe to fascination. 

When I say fascination, I mean the awe that consumes our attention. An interest so ravenous it won't stop before revising the mental landscape, before bringing a mollusk to bear on a deity or a divan. The interior is altered to make space for ardor.

I mean the secret obsessions writers hide from any eyes that aren't a page.

I mean the sacrament of offering a wilderness to the notebook's cathedral, and all the private profaning one must undertake to properly worship something. I mean the field guide I made to save every tree and weed in the yard. I mean the narratives cut from my children's nightmares.

I mean the friction between fracking and fucking on the tongue, how both exploit the subject, and how this is not dissimilar from the way a poet touches the fragile places. How touch and torch are so close, and how fracking and fucking are both relations, operations, excavations.

I mean the way love has bent my body like a top-heavy tulip.

I mean Egon Schiele, Stephen Sondheim, Arvo Part and ashes to ashes though not quite dust. I mean dust is too easy, too shut.

I mean the figure of black dresses that have covered me like a personal font across a time-line, a chronology of blackouts.

I mean amnesia, paradox, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, the sad, raving nihilists.

I mean every plant I've killed with neglect, every friend I've loved best after losing, every way in which I'm better at elegies than tending or caring.

9.

Jericho Brown reminds us often, sometimes with a crown of flowers on his head, that the poem asks impossible, intractable things of the poet. "The poem is a poem because it asks us to reconsider ourselves and what we hold dear." The poem relies on "our ability to create emotion in people who were numb may be the greatest of our abilities, since this is what poets throughout history have been hated for."

Poetry is a discipline of desire. I don't want to stop, and I don't want it to end, so I find ways to brick it into my life. The poem wants relentless fascination, dedication, and interest. This whole thing is an argument for fascination that carries a shovel and scythe in its trunk. I mean something I've never had, namely, the slow discipline of waiting, the habit of paying one's respects to the possible. 

I mean I'm not finished. The poem wants a monk.

10

The monks chant. Iambic di-meters keep demons from resting in their throats and causing trouble. "Brother, we must die," recites a Trappist before throwing a few spadefuls of dirt over his shoulder.

Every day, the monks dig their own graves. What seems like a warning is disciplined anticipation. 

I want to wait for the poem like the monk waits for death.

I let a monk pray for me.

I pay a monk to pray for my dead mother.

I buy pansies in season to please her.

The monk welcomes the sins of mankind onto his shoulders. He then coddles those sins, he caresses and nurses them with chants and complines. The monk believes his songs will make the sins better, his words may raise the dead. He says he prays to lighten the burden of love for mothers who must worry about children. He says he prays to make it easier on God who stays busy loving so many. The cool part is that God lets him inch a little closer with each prayer. Contemplio, he says, is constant--every act of every instant is dedicated and divine.

Closer, closer….

11.

Every act of every instant is an open hand or enchanted pine straw. This is a fact.

Another fact no one talks about is that "the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image."

Traci Brimhall wrote this is an essay about her mother's death, an essay which sits with grief and its attendant guilt, the faithful partner in mourning a mother. Using second-person to extend the realm of complicity, Brimhall accuses the daughter:

"Her death hurt you. Her suffering never did. If the lion is also a devil, unbutton your shirt and feed him."

I don't think we can appreciate our mothers enough while they are alive and still wanting the best for us, still being pushy and interfering in the icons we'd made of independence. Perhaps it is this exorbitant individualism that leaves us without rituals or proper forms of expiation. 

Roman kids had to sacrifice animals on an altar in order to restore the familial bond with parents after death. I should be grateful that all I need to do is pay the monks to bless the water and mutter vigorously. 

But: the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image.

The love is the chord is the rage is the weft. The loss is the theft. The child is what's left to carry the ashes. The essay is the poem that couldn't handle it. 

12. 

"Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue." Ocean Vuoung wrote this.

Ocean Vuong wrote an entire book about being a queer Vietnamese first generation immigrant, and this person--like the book--is a poem.

Poetry is the commitment one makes to longing. Poetry: this long love affair that competes with the rest.

And yet, every poem is the first one, every time is the first time, every verb is the first kiss, its spentness. All the awkward hesitation, curiosity, momentum, and suspense. It is erotic, this call to poem. 

The love poem takes what we imagine as threat or fulfillment and sits with it--the third thing that changes Eden. Lover, beloved, and that which came between them is what activates the poem and its longing. 

There is a love poem in that sidelong glance towards an unpleasant mother-in-law. There is a love poem in two-person tent crumpled in the trash bin. There is a beautiful, beautiful poem by Nicole Sealey called "Object Permanence":

There's a name for the animal
love makes of us, nomad, I think
like rain for the sound it makes.

13.

Our Blackberry Patch is the poem.

The pilgrims wait near the car, their backpacks solemn, the tingle of not-yet berries on their lips.

I am fascinated by what we’re doing, and what I’ll do anything to finish. What I love may be killing me. I’m not finished.

Poems for broken things

I can’t get over Carl Phillips’ “Dirt Being Dirt”. Here it is in its entirety:

Dirt Being Dirt

The orchard was on fire, but that didn’t stop him from slowly walking
straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have
foliaged—here, especially—his chest. Splashed by the moon,
it almost looks like the latest proof that, while decoration is hardly
ever necessary, it’s rarely meaningless: the tuxedo’s corsage,
fog when lit scatteredly, swift, from behind—swing of a torch, the lone
match, struck, then wind-shut…How far is instinct from a thing
like belief? Not far, apparently. At what point is believing so close
to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss,
finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding
the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.

In a note, Phillips says: “I think this poem is circling the idea of refusing to change the self, even when it’s understood as deeply flawed, given that we have to believe in something…”

I love the way the poem circles around the point where belief and knowledge converge into something that feels essential. And I love the short syntax of the final line, the command whose tone is almost reassuring or encouraging rather than distant. I think that tone is the most difficult to capture—the tone of a voice complicit in human intimacy, in the brokenness and resolve of that.

How is staying whole part of coexisting with one’s ongoing brokenness? Why is the temptation for redemption such a strong narrative trope in poetics, and how much more do we risk by refusing it? I don’t have answers. But here are more poems about broken things….

“What’s Broken” by Dorianne Laux

“Broken Things” by GC Waldrep

“Broken Things” by Sara Teasdale

“I Will Keep Broken Things” by Alice Walker

“The God of Broken Things” by Yusef Komunyakaa

“Ode to Broken Things” by Pablo Neruda

And then, as an adage, as a mantra: Carl Phillips’ “Gold Leaf”. One of my favorite poems to share with my teen son when he is dancing with despair. As one must in this world sometimes.

A handful of poems that fascinate me

This is not a list.

What resembles a list and walks like a list and talks like a list is actually a small, knotted knapsack that I need to imagine. Or a child’s hand.

My child’s hand or a knapsack I need to carry alongside the heavier baggage of adulting.

A mudpie-baker or a knapsack packed with a few poems I’m sneaking into the new year as both inspiration and a source of fascination.

Just a few of the poems I’ve been re-reading recently…. among so many bright, bright things, and not enough time or memory to share them all.

Not a list. Not the child itself. Not a constellation.

-

“World Parent” by Gboyega Odubanjo (Wildness)
For its entry-point, and the way stories of origin are always woven into stories of exile or immigration or displacement. For the profound and breathtaking alienation that is rooted, somehow—and still.
“All the Nigerian aunties and uncles are holidaying in Dubai.
They’re eating only Nigerian food and talking only to their drivers.
They’re posing as they give thanks, WhatsApp’ing everybody.”

“Altar Call” by Khaty Xiong (The Spectacle)
Because the way Khaty uses language toes the borderlands of sacred and profane and captivates me like an ash print on a child’s forehead, the mark left by others to give meaning to loss we still can’t inhabit. Which also bumps against the absence of homelands, Southeast Asian diasporas, and Hmong peoples.

“On Faith” by Shara Lessly (The Gettysburg Review)
For the soft pitch of the rhyme scheme & repetition…and the awe. “There is no map for how.”

“Polaroids of God From My Eleventh Summer” by Emily Borgmann (Waxwing)
”finally oh finally I prayed without assignment,
that morning the first time my head felt fit for my body,
what was done to it, the answer to prayer is
when you first know the size of your own pain, stop asking.”

“Moral Inventory” by Ruth Awad (Wildness)
” I once had a body
that wasn’t a body—it was a voice
in a god’s mouth. It was the holy vowel.
Oh, animal, I thank you.”

“Mixtape for My Twenties” by Phillip Metres (American Poetry Review)
Because who isn’t missing a cento of song lyrics from their 20’s as part of their corpus? And who else to give us such perfect permission to do it?

“Border Control Agent Will Not Complete His Shift” by Roy G. Guzmán (Hayden’s Ferry Review)
Because it broke things.

“The Poets Are Dying” by Brenda Shaughnessy (The New Yorker)
A model from seam to seam.

“Terms of Agreement” by Mary Biddinger (Sugarhouse Review)
”None of them knew I was surrounded by couch
cushions, regarding a sepia portrait of a cherished ex like it was newfound
// currency.”

“Indictment With Icarus” by Emily Skaja (Vinyl)
“ Hello you
are a vessel of vessels.
Hold your wings like the oars of a boat.”

“Science and Industry” by Randi Clemens (Pidgeonholes)
”In this exhibit, these walls,
this body: the unborn curl.
I trace my fingers along
them, the unspined, unheld,
unseeing behind viewing glass.”

“Origins of Violence” by Jenny George (from The Dream of Reason)
Because it is raw and pure in the most devastating way.

“Whiteness” by Michael Metiever (Sugarhouse Review)
For the challenge and its attendant complicity in the turn at the end. Powerful.

“this is a trans poem about swans” by Danielle Rose (Pidgeonholes)
 “this is a trans poem about swans & i desperately wish for it to be beautiful / but beauty does not escape & become a silent parking lot / in an emergency it cannot be trusted to shuffle quickly toward the nearest exit” 

And last but not least, I have been flummoxed over which poem to include from Sara Borjas’ formidable poetry collection, Heart Like A Window, Mouth Like A Cliff (Noemi Press). The whole book is a wonder of poeming, a beautiful beautiful unbidden glory. If you purchase a copy, you will not regret it. Not for a minute. I do not know the poet personally, and I’ve never met her, but if you purchase this book and decide to use it to teach a class, please find Sara on twitter and let her know. My opinion (and my fascination with this book) is rooted in nothing more extravagant than my life as a reader, lover of language, admirer of Pocha-Xicana poems. But if I have to choose a poem, I will choose the one that speaks for so many of us who cannot yet write this poem—and for the countless humans who will need to write this poem, or its sister, or its cousin.— “I See My Rapist’s Daughter” by Sara Borjas. From the aforementioned collection.

Poems I've been re-reading like lost religion

1. “Sonnet 31” by Katie Ford, selected by Ilya Kaminsky for Poetry Daily.

2. “The Laws of Motion” by Nikki Giovanni in Poetry. “The problem with love is not what we feel but what we / wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel / something. Just as publicity is not production: seduction / is not seductive”

3. “Pathology of Violence” by TJ Sandella in The Rupture. “it's what makes us human / isn't it”

4. “Wipe That Smile Off Your Aphasia” by Harryette Mullen. “as fax machine as one can imagine”

5. “Width of a Witch” by CA Conrad in The Volta. “the kind of children we deserve who rob us in our sleep / we never need to believe in anything again /  they take our car and money and head for the beach”

6. “Indiscretion” by Ewa Lipska, translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska for Words Without Borders.

7. “I Do Have A Seam” by Jamaal May.

8. “Would You Come Back?” by Nadia Tueni. “like a throat seized by cattle who devour a sunray”

9. “Work Boots: Still Life” by Jim Daniels in Poetry. “laces droop / like the arms of a new-hire / waiting to punch out.”

10. “The Minnesota Goodbye” by Ralph Pennel in Elm Leaves Journal. “You know what you’d say about black holes, how you don’t believe in dark matter, how what we’re not seeing is God, how God is always a choice we’re close to making.”

11. “Highbury Park” by Liz Berry. “I envy them, these lovers, dark pines between their knees”

12. “Dream Duets” by Matt Reeck in Conjunctions. “All manners of disguise failed to conceal the badger at the costume ball.”

13. “Hair” by Emily Jungmin Yoon in Evening Will Come. “like I have a reason / for being a color at some place & at some time / and there is a straight line between bad and goodness / on which I lay my unbeautiful body precariously.”

14. “Elegy in Translation” by Meg Day in Poetry. “Forgive me my deafness now for your name on others’ lips: / each mouth gathers then opens & I search for the wave”

15. “Jonathan Franzen Freedom” by Mark Baumer.

16. “Then” by Stephanie Ford in They Will Sew the Blue Sail. “our borrowed / stars go by and why,”

17. “Poem About Alabama” by Kirby Johnson in Gone Lawn. “I was asked if I liked Alabama and I said, yes I've masturbated everyday. I've danced alone in the dark heat of my room.”

18. “Instructions for Banishment” by Jon Sibley Williams in Figure 1. “I know regret is just another  form of lust.”

Open Letter to the Trustees of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad"

William A. Lowell, Esq.
Charles A. Cheever, Esq. 
Choate, Hall & Stewart
Two International Place
Boston, Massachusetts 02110

October 10, 2019

Dear Mr. Lowell and Mr. Cheever,

One of the greatest things about America is the fact that, as citizens, we pledge our allegiance not just to a flag but to a hope of a better future, to building that future over this country’s history of racism, enslavement of Black persons, and native erasure. Since recent years have demonstrated reactionary regress inspired by xenophobia and America-First mentalities, I am writing this letter in the hope that you will consider the legacy that the Amy Lowell Scholarship leaves by basing it's application criteria so intensely (and profusely) around defining "Americans" as those citizens who were "born here."

As a child of defectors who was born in Romania, my experience growing up in Alabama was that of being told no matter how much I learned, no matter how passionate my academic and intellectual engagement, I could not be President of this country. My thoughts on leadership didn’t matter. My citizenship, itself, reflected my second-class status. Meanwhile, my neo-Confederate friends could lead the Chambers of Commerce and state governments with an eye to the Presidency.

I've been inspired by the poetry community's dedication to human rights, equality, and justice, and I am concerned about the way that huge funding is still off-limits to poets who were not born here and yet have paid their lives, their tax dollars, and their dreams to this country.

The "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad" seems, on its surface, to be driven by considerations of merit. It asks for a poetry submission without focus on byline or academic background. It also states, clearly, "preference" will be "given to those of progressive literary tendencies". 

At no point does it ask about financial disability or previous travel (which would be appropriate questions if the intent of the scholarship was to reward untraveled Americans citizens without means to go abroad).

The application process is free and simple. All that is required is:

1. Two copies of the completed application. You may also, but need not, submit a 2 to 3 page curriculum vitae (again, two copies).

2. A sample of your poetry, consisting of either up to 40 typed pages (two copies) or two copies of a printed volume of your poetry and two copies of no more than 20 additional typed pages.

I don’t understand how a traveling scholarship intended to benefit underprivileged American poets doesn’t require any of the following: 1) a listing of their prior travels outside the country 2) a statement of their economic need 3) any evidence that they are better qualified to represent “Americans” than the sheer luck of being born here.

When I downloaded the application, I discovered that it asked for a birth certificate and that the primary information culled on that one sheet of paper had to do with where a citizen was born. As stated in your FAQ: 

"Any poet of American birth who is able and willing to spend one year outside the continent of North America. There is no age requirement, and there is no requirement that applicants be enrolled in a university or other education program. While many recent winners have been published poets, there is no requirement that applicants have previously published their work."

Past recipients of this fellowship include several of my favorite poets--writers whose work I cherish deeply. But past recipients reflect a very narrow view of “American”.

I believe that Amy Lowell would not be on the side of human beings who currently agitate to diminish the value and rights of naturalized US citizens and immigrants.

I believe that Amy Lowell would be disgusted by the Birther conspiracy around President Obama and its resonance in our popular culture. If I am wrong in these beliefs, Amy Lowell's poetic excellence would not be enough to enable me to overlook a definition of "American citizen" that excludes naturalized citizens.

At first, I considered suggesting a more appropriate title for this fellowship. Maybe it’s the title that feels jarring. For example, "The Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship for Native-Born Americans"--but that's the rub, isn't it? See, those who are actually native to America are not centered in this Fellowship. (I could be wrong, but it seems that fewer than 5% of awardees have a tribal affiliation.)

This Scholarship is not about First Peoples--it's about the people who replaced them. It's about the stories we tell about the country we can only honor through progress, restitution, and acknowledgement. Amy Lowell's efforts to portray the lives of First Americans in her posthumously-published Ballades for Sale reveals the way in which primitivist stereotypes can underlie even the most progressive intentions.

As a naturalized US citizen whose parents risked their lives (and me) to flee Ceausescu's dictatorship, I cannot accept the sort of nativism which makes that citizenship somehow inferior to that of those who did nothing to gain citizenship. Being born in the USA is enough of a privilege without institutionalizing this privilege in a poetry scholarship intended to preserve the legacy of a powerful female poet whose struggled to be accepted in a country that rejected her sexuality.

I don't believe that any law or wrong is immutable.

I don’t believe that any foundation cannot change. I don’t believe a will or a trust housed in a law firm cannot evolve or develop under changing social conditions.

I don't believe that we are hostage to bad ideas from the past unless we deliberately choose to replicate and extend those ideas into the future.

I understand--and was reminded when protesting President's Bush's war in Iraq with a son incubating in my womb--that standing for the GOOD in one's country, as opposed to the bad, may render one "un-American" in the mouths of those whose institutions depend on historic preservation. If we spent as much money caring as we do bombing, this world would be so different. So very, very different.

What I believe conspires with what I understand in hope.

I hope more for the legacy of the "Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Travelling Abroad". I hope more for how this “America” extends itself into the world. And I hope more--so much more--for this country.

Yours in poetry and hope,

Alina Stefanescu, minor writer

P. S. If this fellowship is modified to include all US citizens, I promise that I will not apply for it at any point in time. I want to be clear about my intentions—though I discovered this fellowship when looking for assistance, my hope is that fellow “second-class citizens'“ do not discover this and experience the nativist rejection (which already leaves deep scars in most naturalized citizens). I don’t want this for myself—I want it for what it means to be “American” at a time when that meaning is associated with anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, xenophobia, and committed disregard for human rights. I want it, also, for Amy Lowell’s legacy, which I know can be revised to include what we know now rather that to perpetuate ad-infinitum the cruelties and inequalities of the past.

Among the things poems have taught me: Yarn and the eternal life of chopsticks

1.

There are paintings I don’t need to see after reading an ekphrastic poem. Even though the analogy to film versions of books will not allow me to touch it, I am certain that the poem is all I need of the painting, the picture in my head so rich that any image would ruin it.

See Dan Ferrara’s “Shack, Peaked Hill Bars, Edwin Dickinson, 1955” in Cream City Review:

“the sun shines through a half pint of beer
throwing an amber shadow on a back rug where
a couple fucks to the wash of the Prussian blue sea.”

2.

Every half century, the “synchronous flowering of bamboo causes famine in parts of India.”

What plants do together can kill us. I learned this from Karen An-Hwei Lee’s poem, “Prayer for a Bamboo-Flowering Famine.”

3.

“The houses are haunted
By white nightgowns.”

Per Wallace Stevens. Forever.

4.

After a cremation ceremony in Japan, ashes are removed from the incinerators so the family can take turns “feeding” ashes to the urn with chopsticks.

How can I abandon this image offered in Derek Sheffield’s poem, “The World’s Other Side,” which thickens my understanding of the chopstick as a life-sustaining implement?

5.

Certain structures have stayed the same. See the first line of Anne Sexton’s poem, “Housewife”:

“Some women marry houses.”

Imagine Anne looking at the market for womanly home-making right now. I’ll be damned if there aren’t so many ways to become a house, to obsess over the details of organizing or tidiness, to poem the whole consumerist wreck.

6.

The thickest fascinations need to be studied. But first, they need to be rolled across the floor and admired like a ball of yarn in a cat’s paw to see which way the thickness unfurls. To discover the start of the string.

Alan Feldman assigns poets to write a poem that is all one long sentence, an experiment in stretched-out syntax. That’s how he wrote “In November”, published in Best American Poetry 2011.

For the long string, see also “Greed and Aggression” by Sharon Olds and “Apology to the Muse” by Alan Dugan.

What looks like the start of a poem might actually be the end once the ball stops rolling.

7.

“Crip poetics” opens an awareness to the body’s use and abuse in human space. By claiming the term “crip”—and defining it on her own terms—Barbara Hershey challenges ableism in poetic language and community. See Hershey’s poem, “etc.”, written after attending a lecture in which bell hooks listed an expansive, inclusive array of women intended to be representative, none of which was crippled. Hershey’s poem unfurls as a commentary on hooks’ lecture; the poet writes herself into the text.

“i am the etc. we are the etc.”

A lesson in the poetry of seeing one another whole.

8.

Everything we can imagine has an afterlife. I realized this after reading Michelle Bonezek’s “The Afterlife of Pennies.”

Why not write a poem titled “The Afterlife of [whatever you want here]”? Pick something you loved as a child or a teenager. Give it back a life.

9.

True love offers to hold the beloved’s scythe. See Erica Dawson’s “In Black and White”:

“A spade’s a spade. A plan

Can change. I love your pivot, covet
Your line, pin, point, arbor, and shaft:
And I can dig it. Feel that draft?
Come close. Now tell me how you love it.”

Wow.

10.

“Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple in a dance.”

Monica Youn’s poem, “Study of Two Figures: Pasiphaë/Sudo”, layers these markers in a slow monotone that destabilizes the foreground and empties all solid containers constructed to hold identity.

11.

Poetry taught me how to speak to a god. To say, as with Louise Gluck’s “Vespers”:

To imagine a god as "someone “who is immune to foreshadowing”.

12.

The secret life of dolls resembles our own. See Denise Duhamel’s “Kinky”:

“The night had begun with Barbie getting angry
at finding Ken’s blow up doll, folded and stuffed
under the couch.”

I’ve watched my daughters work through daily problems in their doll play. I’ve admired how Duhamel sustains this energy and potential through the entire Kinky collection—and how she infuses the secret life of our toys with hope and aspiration. How she renders them in our image.

Fugues as form in poetry

I’m fascinated, haunted, and provoked by the fugue form, and how it enables us to work around (and through) a poem’s texture.

Simply, a fugue is a piece of music that uses interwoven melodies based on a single musical idea. To compose a fugue is to involve a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (a musical theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and which recurs frequently in the course of the composition.

There’s some wicked, beautiful friction that develops between a traditional form like the fugue when used to carry nontraditional subject matter—a capacity to stir and jar the reader by overlaying sounds, musical effects, and impressions. There is the shadow of a whispered chorus, the power of subtle moves, the undertow of implications.

Music and lyric develop in tandem if you bring the breath of them into the same space, if you encourage them to converse with each other. I have a few ideas that only begin to scratch the surface of all possible poemings in this marvel…

1. Work the background baroque.

Fugues rose to prominence during the Baroque Period, ca. 1600-1750. They were based on an earlier idea from the Renaissance Period called imitative polyphony, where multiple singers would sing the same melody at different times. The melody of the first voice is replicated by subsequent voices.

The most strict form of this type of imitation is the canon. In a canon, the original melody is emulated precisely and without variant in every voice. "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" is a simple and well-known canon. I love thinking of nursery rhymes with all the bravado and established dignity of canonical forms.

The fugue is a more complicated version version of the imitative polyphonic form. It is less rigid and strict than the canon: different voices begin by imitating each other, but gradually diverge and become unique.

Another word for polyphony is counterpoint, meaning a style and method of writing polyphony that was used during the Baroque. When someone talks about counterpoint, they are talking about a specific type of polyphony. Often counterpoint and polyphony are used like synonyms (i.e. contrapuntal texture = polyphonic texture).

In a fugue, this idea that is passed around is called a subject.

Experiment with a baroque texture and language that juggles temporal spacing of a subject through repetition and homonymy. Don’t be afraid to occupy the margins or alter the white space by playing with diptych or triptych to amplify or juxtapose voices.

2. Develop episodic movements.

An alternate type of polyphony is non-imitative or free polyphony, which features distinct melodic lines overlapping. In a fugue, this is called an episode, and is used to transition to a new section and modulate keys. Free polyphony is common in traditional New Orleans jazz and in the early polyphony of the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods.

In the non-imitative polyphonic texture, independent voices are each unique and do not copy each other. "Hotter Than That" performed by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, is an example of New Orleans jazz that begins with a section of free polyphony followed by improvised solos (trumpet, clarinet, voice, then trombone).

Listen to this organ version of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor. Note the short episode that pops up around 1:10. Note how the sense of polyphony is also created through the usage of a countermelody laid over subject—you can hear this at almost any point in the piece where there are two overlapping parts.

3. Excavate the etymology.

There are so many layers to a word, beginning in origins and thickening into contemporary connotation. Fugue, for example, is borrowed from French fugue, from Italian fuga (“flight, ardor”), from Latin fuga (“ act of fleeing”), from fugere (“to flee”); compare Ancient Greek φυγή (phugḗ).

I used this juxtapositioning to build pressure into “Proper Fugue”, which flirted with the Romanian meaning of fugue, proximate to the Latin and Italian one. Consider the connotations of words like flying, running, wing in a fugue—and spend time in that word space to see what emerges.

4. Listen to a Bach piano fugue obsessively.

Listen to a piano fugue by Bach (preferable performed by Glenn Gould). Now listen to it again. Listen to this fugue on repeat while writing a poem about a room that three people just left. Create a sense of those persons still in the room—the relationships, the energy between them, their dissonances. Let the music alter your tonal range.

Alternately, edit a limp poem while listening to your Bach fugue on repeat. The repetitive listening is critical—it brings things up from the surface somehow, and expands the musical progression of the poem.

5. Study Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue”.

"Todesfuge" (translated into English as Death Fugue) is a German language poem written by the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is "among [Celan's] most well-known and often-anthologized poems". When Celan published it, he was criticized for its cadence and lyrical finesse by some who believed its beauty undercut the cruelty of the Shoah.

Read Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” and study how he works with the form. Write a Todesfugue on a topic that bears witness to contemporary horrors.

6. Explore the cognitive science of fugue states.

Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. It can be a facet of disassociative amnesia.

Borrowing from the psychiatric condition of fugue state, free-write a poem in which loss of memory tangles with loss of selfhood and identity to produce multi-tonal dynamics and unmoored voices in a poem. Aim to make it one long stanza (to challenge yourself to focus on your use of language rather than white space) or go the prose poem route.

7. Fugue through the fabulous.

Lewis Lapham: “To describe a woman as fabulous is to say she is nowhere to be seen.”

In this sense, fabulousness functions as an eraser—like black or white, it gives us little to imagine apart from personal connotation. It builds no tactics tension into description. Touch is notable for the difference it reveals—the surprise of wind lipping your nape. One could argue that someone who doesn’t feel the touch wasn’t touched in a meaningful or poetic sense.

A fugue about the fabulous—a “Fabulous X Fugue”—would use the polyphony of the fugue form and its flexibility to render something fabulous (and complex) without once whispering the F word.

8. Score the poem.

The line between a melody and a lyric depends on the presence of certain symbols, or musical notation. Familiarize yourself with the musical notations below. Learn how to hear them, see them, say them. Imagine how they take up space in a poem. Work them into slant rhymes.

Write a poem that uses the musical notations as a key. For example, a line could read:

I left him in > streetlights, the dim fold of dusk.

where “>” reads “diminuendo”. The challenge is to use these notations in a way that allows the poem to be read in two voices, where one reading corresponds with a blank for each symbol (assuming the reader lacks musical knowledge) and the other reading inserts the symbolized word.

If you’ve never wasted a weekend poring through Italian musical terms and matching them to pieces you love, make time. Sempre staccato, for example, means “always detached”. Isn’t that incredible? Can’t you feel its solemnity in the stanza, in the repetitions of a word or a syllable, in the frisklessness of it?

9 figures of speech which are not

1.

There is a moth that feeds on the tears of small birds. The moth visits the birds as they sleep. The moth lands on the sleeping bird’s head ever so gently before unfurling its proboscis and laying the tip just beneath the bird’s eyelid. But “to drink without waking the birds” is not yet a common expression or cliche. Is it a figure of speech?

And what do they dream, these birds whose tears are stolen?

2.

In September 2018, a biologist actually spotted the Gorgone macarea moth sitting on the neck of a black-chinned antbird in Brazil poised to drink the bird's tears. It was “the first time this behavior was reported in the country and only the third known case worldwide.”

Something we’ve never seen may be a miracle.

3.

“What do poets do? Slip
a wobbly syllable under

a microscope
so close to the lens
it cracks.”

- Martha Silano, “It was how a sentence” (AGNI)

4.

The difference between writing and willing isn’t always clear to me. Right now, for instance, I’m laying these thoughts down in my notebook for one reason, namely, to provide context for an event I want to see in the world. This event involves drawing attention to the first stanza of a poem by Rosmarie Waldrop:

“If, close to morning, you see the physical fact of language you may take a prophylactic
attitude. A figure of skating or speech. The scale is heavy flesh.”

5.

The heart cannot break. No matter how often we compare the heart to a breakable object, the human heart remains a quivering fist of pink jelly, a mass of pulsing tissue that is not quite machine.

Believe me when I tell you my heart busted wide as a cactus piñata after my mom’s sudden death. My heart was bat-broke open.

6.

The poem’s job is to make you believe it. If the heart can’t be broken, the poem’s job is to break the heart anyway.

There is nothing less forgivable than the poem who assumes it can speak of heartbreak without hurting anyone.

Or breaking things.

7.

I don’t know why hearts lie about breaking, but I read that moths and butterflies have also been observed feeding on the tears of crocodiles and turtles. They do this to obtain the salt which isn’t naturally available in nectar.

A moth drinking crocodile tears is a marvelous event in my head.

8.

In the poem that is an event, Rosmarie Waldrop lassos the dedication into the title: “The Material World (for Johanna Drucker)”. The poet is continuing a conversation with her friend and she wants to be sure we understand Johanna is not an afterthought but a part of the poem’s flesh.

Here’s what I can’t forget: the final phrase of the third stanza.

Which also happens to be the exact middle of the poem, something like it’s centerfold:

“Pressure just below the phrase level.”

9.

The bird dreamt of her single, unbreakable nest.