SubscribeNovember 23rd, 2011
shape, space and meaning in poetry
This post responds to Qunqun’s query in the comments on an earlier post (obsess a lot? November 21).
The class talks about white space and its impact on meaning. One of the things about white space is that it can be a passive space, its shape completely determined by the text. In this example the white space is determined by the characters. The space, as the text says, makes meaning possible but it doesn’t actively provide meaning in and of itself.
Imagine “30 spokes” presented differently – in some way that would create white space that represents the insight of the poem.
As for my bitty, the exercise in the class asked us to create a poem in which the white space was considered as important as the text. There are many ways to do that of course but this is the one that I took to class.
This kind of poetry is not my natural metier but there is much to be learnt from attention to what is not normally seen.
November 21st, 2011
obsess a lot?
I’m taking a short (4-week) course on space and silence in poetry. I think I told you about it last week. Tonight was week 2 of 4.
You may have noticed significantly less posts here in the last week. Blame it on the course.
As in most short courses, this one is intensive. I tend to be a slow writer and it can take me a week just to get a seed of poem planted – and months to get it to a stage where I consider it blooming. But last week we had to write 2 new poems and figure out how to utilize space on a page in order for the energy of the poem to adequately express itself in spatial terms.
And I do not naturally think in visual terms.
So I spent the week obsessing. I’d go to sleep thinking in shapes, in architectural volumes, about public space, foreground and background. About how ASL utilizes signing space. Trying to translate signing space into sign space. 3D into 2D. Maybe 4D into 2D since one needs to consider velocity as an aspect of meaning in ASL.
And now I have to do the same again, except this time I have to also have a sense of where it is going – as if were a project, a suite of poems, a larger space, a collection of related smaller spaces. Pay as much attention to negative space as I do the positive space and the actual words.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh
I may go mad.
November 21st, 2011
Esta Spalding, a poem
Anchoress, A Poem by Esta Spalding came to me as a gift. (Thanks!)
It is a poem, but it is also a story. A love story, the book describes Helen after she is dead.
Helen, I’m drowning. If I lie down in darkness will you come, if I lie down in rain will you rescue me, arrive with torches to dry my skin, tell me again the things that mattered? Across the table, the candle brightening your face, how I looked to you, sad, you said, your hands on my hands, I want to argue with you again, hear you say, I have that bone to pick with you, love or politics or too many spices in your arms till morning.
It begins like this. And while the form breaks open,
In a cave so dark they touch to see, Manon is born. Beside the Dordogne River, smell of fresh water seeps through dust into the narrow slit in the cliff behind the neighbour's house. We climb here when we can. Movement is dangerous. Through the last months of the occupation the neighbours carry bread, a bowl with whatever water is not lost to the hillside, they bring fruit, mashed for the baby who cannot see the bright colour, can only taste vividness.
the poem/book remains as easy to read as prose. It’s lovely.
November 16th, 2011
try this
I’m assuming most of you don’t know ASL well enough to follow much of what is being said in this performance. So if that’s the case, try this. Mute your system and just watch them. Not just their hands, but all of them. How they move, how they use space and their bodies in space. See what you get. Write down somethings about how they feel, what they are communicating to you.
Then turn up your volume.
I bet the sound track isn’t too much of a surprise.
November 16th, 2011
poetry and revelation
I started taking a short poetry class on story and silence. There only 4 classes and I’ve been to one, and already worth the money (only $200) I paid to take it.
But there was this thing on the first night, a thing that has me thinking.
We each have to do a mini project for the class and so spoke to what we thought we might do – where our work evokes silence, for example, and how to get that on a page. It came to my turn / I felt such resistance. My story is interesting I suppose. All these disparate elements come into my poetry—ASL, Salish, the idea of verb-centered reality/language, synesthesia, witchcraft, atheism, academia, philosophy – essentially where Mary surfaces is in the interstices between those various stones in my experience. I feel a bit like grass growing up through the cracks in a cobble stone road. It is such a hard thing to explain—do you know what smuckum is or táqwu and how that might fit with the wyrd—and part of the reason why I haven’t sought publication until recently. I always feel like I am being difficult on purpose. As if by trying to talk about what it means to experience the world like Mary is posturing – centre-staging.
One time a person said, well why don’t you just say it and the thing is I just had, and what I had said had not been understood, not heard. This is not a complaint. Not at all. It’s just an observation that I speak from a really different place some of the time. I know lots of you know this feeling because we all have different pasts, different feelings, different ways of understanding. But imagine that you are the only deaf person in a world of the hearing. And you try to use your voice, you know what you want to say, and they know what they want to hear…but how could you, as the deaf person, get what it means to be deaf across to someone? I mean ASL is fundamentally different from voiced languages because it uses space in ways voiced languages cannot. There are important parts of ASL communication that cannot be translated into voiced languages.
But more importantly, does the difficulty of “translation” say anything at all about what it means to be deaf? To be hearing? To be a Salish speaker (which I am not, although it is definitely one of my “cobbles”) or an English speaker (which I am). Not really. But it is still an issue that takes so much effort on both sides that it is hardly done. We all have our cobble stones which guide where we can sprout but when the layout of the stones is very, very different, and when none of us realize just how different, communication can be a precarious affair.
My response to the danger and difficulty is to not talk about it much and to learn as much about normative society as I can – so I can pass (no, other people do not hear blue hisses). I do speak to my experience here of course, or at least sometimes. But not in public. I’d rather make something up. Something simple and clearly of the norm. But for this class I didn’t because poetry matters to me. And I felt horrible. Like I was trying to brag around about who I am. yech. Bottom line – I don’t do autobiography. Writing a memoir feels like the worst idea in the world.
Still, all this got me thinking about ASL again, about how sign space is used and how to translate sign space (not ASL signs but the active space that a signer uses to communicate) into paper space. We are to write 2 new poems exploring a “companion” poet’s use of spatial/sound signifies to code or organize the paper-space to reflect sound space. I did have a paper poet I was going to use, but thought I’d use a deaf person’s poem I saw happen on a Portland street instead. Figuring out how I might use what I saw in the production of a poem about living life from the verb’s point of view is turning out to be rather fun. Now the question will be if anyone else will be able to connect with it.
Regardless of that though, the exploration will make my poetry stretch, and that is what the course was designed to do. So discomfort aside, it’ll do.
November 15th, 2011
awesome / deaf poetry for the hearing
November 13th, 2011
obsessions
The last couple of weeks I have been getting obsessed with the tasks involved in preparing a poetry manuscript. There are days when I find myself spending 12 hours or more reading, ordering, summarizing, analyzing, writing. I dream it. Wake up to think no that poem is not right next to that other one.
I haven’t been serious about poetry for all that long, although—like everyone else—I have poems from my youth. But, based on a dream (yes, on a dream) I decided to work at it. With my last years’ illness, that work has been sporadic, but I have reached a point now where the work I have put in has transformed by poetry from really, really awful to well that’s not bad. My ultimate goal, perhaps pie-in-the-sky, is to write a really, really good poem. In the meantime, I decided to try and get a few poems published, and if that worked out, to try for a book.
As a consequence I have been writing, editing, writing. I’ve been consolidating old material, most of it just in the don’t show anyone folder. But there have been a few seeds that still had life. I’ve been reworking those and one just got accepted to a forthcoming issue (35.1) of Room. I’ve been sending out stuff every month, and while literary magazines are on the whole very slow to respond, some responses have started coming back in. So far, no submission has been entirely rejected; if not all that I sent, something of each submission package has been accepted. That’s so totally amazing.
Next: a book. Right?
Gawds!
I’ve been thinking about it for months with anxiety being the biggest result. Then I went online and asked google – how organize poetry manuscript and found this article. I am sooooo not going to print out all those poems but the idea is great so I created a spreadsheet instead and started rounding up everything into one file on my external hard drive (for security sake). I’m not to the bottom of the OK to send out pile yet and I had no idea I had written that much. I am quite pleased with myself really.
I have columns for main image, ones for dominant theme, mood/theme, setting. It has been valuable to go in and read everything all over again, thinking about what it has to say as a poem, what mood it evokes then committing it all to digi-dots. At this point I definitely have enough for a chapbook, but probably not for a whole book. Yet I do have at least a dozen more poems that are in the this needs work but it has something to it pile. I’m no where near as prolific as some writers I know; I’m pretty slow at some things. Having said this, probably the main component of my personality is tenacity. It’s not always well directed but in this case I rather think it is. Yeah me!
The only down side is that everything else in my life is getting pushed to the margins. That’s how it is with obsessions. I do wonder how long it will last, but I’ll just keep riding it and see what comes out of it.
November 8th, 2011
Holderlin and Benn / poems
A friend sent me a copy of this Holderlin poem today. I’ve been thinking about this idea, the fullness of experience, the intensity of a moment fully experienced. It only seems to come when judgement is sleeping, when what ever is, is simply here. Do you find that?
A single summer grant me, great powers, and
A single autumn for fully ripened song
That, sated with the sweetness of my
Playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
Right cannot repose in the nether world.
But once what I am bent on, what is
Holy, my poetry is accomplished,
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows' world!
I shall be satisfied, though my lyre will not
Accompany me down there. Once I
Lived like the gods, and more is not needed.
It’s a lovely poem but still there is a sense in Holderlin of the “there” – the place that is not “here” and I react poorly to such a suggestion. For me, the shadows do not need to come since they are already here. At least that’s my sense of a moment completely experienced. There is the ping ping ping of living but there is also the silence between.
As much as I appreciate Holderlin, I prefer Benn’s morgue poems.
Here are two of my favourites.
Little Aster A drowned beer-hauler was heaved onto the slab. Someone had wedged a lavender aster between his teeth. As I reached through the chest under the skin with a long knife to cut out the tongue and palate I must have bumped the flower, for it slid into the brain lying alongside. I packed it into the chest cavity with the sawdust as we sewed up. Drink your fill in that vase! Rest in peace, little aster!
A Fine Childhood The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds looked so chewed up. When we broke open the torso, the esophagus was so full of holes. Finally in a bower under the diaphragm we found a nest of young rats. One little sister rat lay dead. The others were living off liver and kidney, drinking the cold blood and enjoying a fine childhood. And fine and fast was their death too: we threw the whole bunch into water. Oh, how those little snouts squeaked!
Got to appreciate the shadows too. It’s as if to appreciate the moment, one must walk with the shadow in one hand and the light in the other.
November 7th, 2011
science and poetry / Adam Dickinson
One of the poets I heard read at the recent poetry conference was Adam Dickinson. After that session I went to the book table (s) and bought his Cartography and Walking and Kingdom, Phylum. The poem I am going to post here is from the second book.
But before I let Adam take over the page, I just want to say that I’ve noticed a surge of interest in poets about the scientific and an interest in finding the places where the poetic impulse and the scientific one meet.
In an interview, Dickinson has this to say in response to Rob McLennan’s question:
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My work is about adjacency, about standing in relation to questions of order and disorder, identity and decomposition (as opposed to assuming a discrete position in concluding such questions). I am fascinated by the prospects of using poetry as an alternative form of engagement with questions traditionally associated with the domain of scientific analysis. The reliance in scientific discourse on images and metaphors (what is the atom if not a metaphor? What is evolution if not a narrative?) is a wonderful enactment of the plurality of resources required to think through fundamental questions of materiality and temporality, and, ultimately, ethics, identity, and community. I am also increasingly interested in aleatory poetics and treated texts as a way of inviting the environment into the authorship of the poem. So much ecological poetry is written by humans. I am very intrigued by inviting the weather or other organisms into the text through the interventions of chance-based procedures. I am also an academic, so my research interests in ethics and postmodernism also figure into the poetics underlying some of my compositions.
There’s even a Centre for Poetry and Science. And an e-zine / Poetry and Science. I find I have hope that there may be some conceptual change come out of such a coupling of human selves and minds.
Upper Pleistocene In the beginning, heaven was divided from earth, night from day, sea from dry land. I watch dark birds fly south like collapsed roofs, like wide-open mouths. I watch them leave the city of split streets, the poplar branches leaning away from each other. Maybe in the beginning He saw that it was good, but it wasn't. You are born, limbs grow away from you, leave home. All the king's horses, all the king's men. Look creation says, your body has split: arms, legs, fingers. Bones of the inner ear may have evolved from the jaws of snakes that crept up to make listening out of teeth, and out of hunting, speech. This house is haunted, the pipes shake water up fro the ground. Ripped shingles must be dark birds, a rail spur, blind alleys of evolution: go back to the ocean, the birds say, go back to that place where you chose to have joints, chose choosing. It's not flight you want, but to come home, lie down, be together.
November 6th, 2011
mental rest, but not
Reading Morton has been a bit of an ordeal. I feel a sense of responsibility as a reader to try to understand the point of any book, the ideology it structures, from the point of view of the author. I feel that only then can a reader, even when she vehemently disagrees, appreciate what the author has created. Morton makes that tough to do, and worse, I think he does it deliberately. Complexity, broken communication, these are part of the point for him. Such dislocation of the reader, the broken bridge between the author and reader, all of these things point toward the artificiality of the whole we seek to impose on the world. OK. Fine. But I’m human so I do seek a sense of a whole. I experience fracturedness all the time, every minute of every day, if I pay attention to my body moving. My aware mind seeks to balance that physical/material knowing through wholeness. The balance of the two is what enables my humanity.
So I put down Morton and picked up a book of essays called the Eye in the Thicket. I was reading Don McKay’s essay “Otherwise Than Place” before I went to sleep. It was perfect. A piece about our fear of oblivion and long stretches of time, McKay carries a small stone in his pocket: geologic time reconfigures human concern.
Here is the closing of the essay:
So let me close by risking another pair of definitions: place is the beginning of memory, and memory is the momentary domestication of time. We could continue that walk around the meadow, pausing at the mulberries where the cedar waxwings got drunk, the red maple beloved of orioles, and the grave of the second dog, Sam — and at each the stories would proliferate. But each would come with that temporary, provisional quality built in. Those little walks, whether exercised in situ or in memory, exist on the hinge of translation between place and its otherwise, with the flow going both ways, rooting me in place while they simultaneously open — always with that sense of danger, that pre-echo of oblivion — into wilderness.
Beautiful. And true to the simultaneous nature of being human. we have a body that walks, perceives, is part of the ongoingness of reality. Then there are the memories, the narratives that overlay the ever present ongoingness. Reading is like moving into another’s memory, and by doing this moving into a new one of one’s own. It does not supersede the body’s knowing of now and here. Narrative, memory, or McKay’s “place” just exists as a after image on a somatic photo already taken.
I know this in my body, in the calcium in my bones that will one day be part of some rock another will walk on, or carry. And yet I dreamt uncomfortably all night. As I read I could hear Morton’s refusal of McKay, the assessment of such ecomimetic strategies McKay employs as hiding the failure of the subject and pretending a holism we don’t in fact have. And I carried that niggle into my dreams.
And of course on waking I got angry, because we do in fact have it. Pay close attention to your walking. Feel your body’s pinging, pinging, pinging, and the attached thinking, thinking, thinking. This is the whole of the earth as it appears in this one little place called you. And yes it is a “place” but it is also a wilderness. It is both at the same time.
I suspect it may take a little time to recover from Morton. But also, the niggle, was something in McKay. The sense of the separation of place and its otherwise (wilderness) is an old trope but I think a bad one. In this I agree with Morton. But not to continually require artists to draw attention to this “failure.” That’s ridiculous and a bit petulant if you ask me. Instead, perhaps, we could draw attention to the simultaneity of multiple experiences, of the ongoingness of both “wilderness” and “place”. And with McKay, I agree that we might begin by conceiving of long-time, of rock history, of geologic scales as a counter weight to the brief flare of human time, of our impermanence, and quick oblivion. That would be a fine recovery.
For Jan Zwicky’s poem “Recovery” from which the book’s title comes go here. It’s a beautiful poem and perfectly fits my sense of recovery from Morton.