A POETICS OF TWO NEVERS

I'm thinking tonight about Charlie Jensen's post just after AWP (3.04.07) which seemed to me a defense of poetry, an ars poetica, a few sentences built to explain his approach to his own writing which might be autobiographical and narrative, a post entitled "The Poetics of Never Forgetting":

"the rest of the world, so transient to me, must be kept somewhere. I put these things in poems. . . the rise of the AIDS crisis . . .a book about my ex-boyfriend's suicide . . . a book about losing other people: another man, a boy in Wyoming. I don't want to forget how whole things once were. I think the world is a winnowing place . . . so I share the never-forgetting. This is all I can do. I don't write history, I write subjectivity."

I'm chopping him up here and I hope he forgives it. I love this post because it makes an argument for saying something clearly in a poem. I hesitate here. Saying an honest thing about lived experience. His post almost reads like a defense of confessionalism. Our experiences are what we have, why not save them in poems. . .

I think about Jensen's post as a kind of response to, or in a kind of dialogue with Joshua Corey's brilliant essay "Notes Toward the Dramatic Lyric" at sidereality.com (or through his blog Cahiers de Corey). What I love about Corey's essay is that, like the Russian Futurists, he demands of his language a political certitude. If language fails us, then how we go about "saying an honest thing" is by using the language to its ultimate ability, that is, demanding that it be more than conventional, self-indulgent, vulnerable to melodrama, as we see happening in so much narrative confessional work. He insists instead that it be provocative, offensive, that it wake up a real reader inside of us, an ardent consciousness.

One can't help think of a poet like Paul Celan, who I love, who's work is at once direct and elusive, but a work in which the langauge itself demands our heightened, even political, attention:

"Day freed from demons.
All breeze.

Disenchanted, the powers-that-be
sew up the stabbed lung.
Blood pours back in.

In Bocklemund Cemetery, the
hammershine from
infinity
races over the
shallow inscription on the front,
also over you,
deep Brother Letter."

I love this poem, and though I've had to live with it for a time to feel as though I can "read" it, it is something that I understand immdediately as an address to mortality, the wind over the letters engraved in a headstone. Still, it's frought with symbolism, both difficult and elusive, lyric, filled with intuitive but not narrative clarity. It's demanding in a way that much contemporary narrative, especially in the confessional mode, is not.

Here is how Corey addresses a narrative poetry of consumerism:

"even those poets who commit to raising readers' social consciousness are hamstrung by their commitments to narrative and the poet-identified 'I.' However vibrant their language, the formal decisions these poets make confine experience to the easily recognized, easily digested packages of meaning that can be swallowed without thinking. The resulting poem is anesthetized and anesthetizing. And poetry as a means of speaking the true and difficult is supplanted by a poetry of reassurance and distraction, of matter-of-fact mimesis, of easy identity politics."

Well. Jensen and Corey are two poets with opposing philosophies of language, and somehow I feel torn between them. I always have. I suppose a desire to make a poetry that is accessible to my family opposed with a poetry that is dramatic, intensely metaphoric, one that drowns itself with a pure delight in language and meaning. One devoid of a responsibility to narrate and explain. A poetry of fantasy, but one of real feeling, a real response to a spiritual existence, which is a vision plagued by signs--I suppose my approach has been to pursue an inversion of the real for the really real. Well, whatever that means is what I mean. It seems to me that both Jensen and Corey have a similar goal, but I'm interested in the certainty of their differing approaches. Mostly because I seem to war between them. On the one hand, I'm bored out of my mind with practically everything conventional in our journals, filled with poems of journalistic precision--as if poetry were journalism!

Except that it might be! A journalism of the hiddenside of experience, the welling of the truth that is about us, but not easily articulated. But clean narrative bores the hell out of me. It makes me want to vomit on myself if it can't accomplish something interesting in the language, something delicious in its approach. Saying something. How do we? Do we even want to? Or do we need poems to be just that: poems, pieces of delight in themselves, and not necessarily records, markers, artifacts. And yet. That's what they are. How much do I love Charlie Simic's work, which is just that: small visionary wallet-sized photos. Maybe I don't need to compare his poem to Celan's, since they both accomplish something unsayable.




So this entry is entirely folded in on itself, circular, pointless, except to draw the poles I am drawn by. Yes, I have a crush on Charlie Jensen and a hard-on for Josh Corey. One doesn't impair my heart-on for the other. I'm greatly promiscuous. I'm somewhere between a love for the confessional narrative and the postmodernist abstract lyric. Poetry, it seems to me, is an attempt to speak to the question of deep recognition in the world.

I guess one question we might ask ourselves is what part of the reader we are trying to reach, the part that will easily recognize us, or that part that must sleep to recognize us? Of course to really sleep is not to encounter the monotony of our consumerist culture, but to face a dreamlife that is at first senseless. A life bound by desire and how it is transforming us somewhere within. Remember lines from Lucille Clifton: "children / when they ask you / why is your mama so funny / say / she is a poet / she don't have no sense."

Still, I cannot deny my love for someone like Louise Gluck, who's AVERNO I've just finished reading. She really felt me up with that one. Really got me undressed and undone and helpless and ruined. God it was good. Braingasm. Filled with quietude and sense. When I think of this book, I think about what Jensen says in his post about poetry being a kind of remembrance that witnesses and saves us from the "never-forgetting." Gluck has written that "poetry is autobiography stripped of context and commentary" which perhaps supplements Jensen, perhaps transforms him. Perhaps confines his topics to versions of himself. Which is fine, because for me Guck is intensely compelling. A kind of bareness that is terrifying, even though it is given to us in a narrative of clear, unassuming, even confessional, language:


"Archaic Fragment"

I was trying to love matter.
I taped a sign over the mirror.
You cannot hate matter and love form.

It was a beautiful day, though cold.
This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture.

. . . . . . . your poem:
tried, but could not.

I taped a sign over the first sign:
Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments--

List of things to love:
dirt, food, shells, human hair.

. . . . . . .said
tasteless excess. Then I

rent the signs.

AIAIAIAI cried
the naked mirror.


Here is narrative description that works on the level of metaphor. It reminds us that this is exactly what experience is. Poetry, if we're awake enough.

I want my poems delirious! Even if the language is clean as still life, it has to deliver duende. It has to. Since language is dangerous in itself. Both Jensen and Corey's approaches seem prone to different flaws, different challenges. I'm not sure where I exist between them. I don't know that I can clearly save experience, to recount and remember, without losing myself into some abstract and meaningless well. I also don't know that abstract lines, even when charged with meaning, do enough for me without the context of narrated thinking. I guess I've written all this tonight as an attempt at understanding what my own poetics are, a navigation between these influences, the narrative and the abstract. For me, every poem seems to ask for a reconciliation between them.

THERE IS NO RED AT NIGHT

The title of this entry is from a few lines of an early poem by Beckian Fritz Goldberg,

I tell you there is no red
at night, and in the rose only a place
where the eye blows out.

I might be misquoting here, or dreaming it up, but I swear I remember reading this in an old apartment building as a student. My late nights caught with an oreo cookie half eaten in my mouth and some poem I couldn't get enough of. I remember the moment of re-reading this, and then re-reading it again. The negative attention that enacts a sensual image and simultaneously erases it--the way these lines forced me to see a color while they told me it never existed--was particularly powerful for me as a reader. Subtle irony, but more importantly they focused my awareness onto a kind of psychological drama. Enacted within, these lines said something about what language could do. The spotlight wasn't on the poem anymore, but on my own perception of things. I was seeing with the poet's eye. The poem taught me to read, but it also read the world from within me. There are lines in Jean Valentine's work, I think, that echo this kind of negative capacity: "there is no book and my name is written in it." I can't remember the titles of these poems, but the lines are in my head for years. I love the negative space they illustrate, the intuitive, poetic place, the otherside, the underlanguage, their intimation of death, body, and loss.

In Fritz Goldberg's newest book, THE BOOK OF ACCIDENT, she returns to her old themes--things we see in her first book BODY BETRAYER--and accomplishes something new with that old narrative approach. This is a book of stories, post-modern fairy tales of 20th century children, children that get tattoos and tongue-piercings, children who are dangerous and lovely. Immediately I think of a poem in her first book "The Children Dream Death" and remember that it is a child's imagination that can be cruelest. Right now on t.v. a commercial for marine recruitment: a young 19 year old marine is holding a toy airplane, commenting on the importance of technology and spyware to save lives--I'm reminded that our childish insights are simply forgotten, but they hardly disappear. Our dream cruelty shows up, ends in real disasters, murders, wars. Those old sci-fi movies with all their hidden political commentary are evidence of a way we predict our own destructions through play. So here is Fritz Goldberg telling stories, both fairy tale and sci-fi thriller. In the tradition of the narrative, we have the stories of Skin Girl, Wolf Boy, the Torture and Burn Boys, as well as poems that allude to and caricature the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb. In the end we have a commentary on memory and dream, real violence and imaginary horror, as well as our attraction to the sexgore of the television age, the videogame era, in which we are desensitized against vulgarity in all its forms.

What interests me stylistically about this book is the way narrative takes shape. We might think of Dobyns CEMETERY NIGHTS, Popa's WOLF SALT, or Hughes' CROW as precursers to a book like this, except that Fritz Goldberg's meta-narrative takes narrative into the 21st century. There is a departure from her early work here. Even though she's pursuing a narrative shape, her poems begin to hybridize lyric abstraction with traditional story. Take for example this poem:

"The Absolute"

Finally I gave up and became the rose,
all those treacherous peaks of my sleep
around me and only one eye
in the fold . . . Such time,

flouncing its dress, rests, essence--
inhumanly sweet. Green serpent head,
tongue flame, blood-lettuce, easing
bodice, breasts on the balcony,

breasts on the balcony. No one
to say where I came from
wasn't good enough--

My lips of many mansions,
gorget upon gorget, slit
upon slit where the blade pulls out
and the plush rushes up--

No one to repeat
what I said when I was drunk.
No one

to object to the recounting and recounting
of the fragrances of the tower of you--

Absolutely
no one to be a woman

in the life that had already
the look of pure attachment,

fire to the stalk.


Remarkable first for the confusion: Is this a dramatic monologue? A confessional poem? A poem of praise? To some extant it's monster of all three. I think of Neruda's early poem in which he writes

The parracial rose devours
and climbs to the peak of the saint:
with thick claws it fastens
time to the wearied being:
it swells and blows in the hard veins,
it ties the pulmonary cord, then
lengthening it listens and breathes.

This strikes me as a particularly erotic masculine language, where a rose "swells and blows in the hard veins / it ties the pulmonary cord, then / lengthening it listens and breathes." What the rose enacts here is masculine orgasm. Fritz Goldberg's "Absolute" is embodied by a different langauge, something akin in tone to Plath's "Letter in November" where she writes,

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist-high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Fritz Goldberg begins a kind of ode to the rose which becomes an ode to womanly body, and to body itself that swoons: "green serpent head/ tongue-flame, blood lettuce, easing / bodice, breasts on the balcony // breasts on the balcony." But the praise becomes witchcraft as the speaker offers us confessional material: "no one / to say where I came from / wasn't good enough" and later, "no one to repeat / what I said when I was drunk. . . absolutely / no one to be a woman." The spirit of the poem is inhabited by a new surrealism in which the mirroring of two objects is not complete. The speaker and the rose have the same life. The speaker is half-woman, half-rose, and we understand this beauty in the eros of its sadomasochism: "my lips of many mansions / gorget upon gorget, slit / upon slit where the blade pulls out / and the plush rushes up." Iambic, these lines also employ something of a sprung rhythm, enacting the rush of the bleed of being, alive and falling, alive and unable to be anything but the flaming repetitions of a sight that is human, desirous, deathbound. We might think of great Russian heroines, that threaten and allure. Of course, the fact that the rose is described in metaphor that recalls the female sex is new as well. The idea of a "pretty" rose is abandoned, and much like the language of say, Mebdh McGuckian's CAPTAIN LAVENDER, female sexuality is here afforded imagistic violence. We might say this poem re-writes that stereotype of the lovesick schoolgirl. Here the rose is standing in its own vision, rapt with itself--and isn't this the nature of desire? That to see is to feel something, until we're coming undone from within? Don't we need a woman to tell us about it? Don't we need a woman's body to dare to see, to dare to desire with the flesh--until it changes us? Doesn't a dream like a desire change us? To swoon alone, to "the recounting and recounting / of the fragrances of the tower of you"--the "you" addressing both the desired-after and the Self. Rose Self. Death Self. Self longed for with Pleasure. Flesh-petal, because we see and we fall apart with our longing. And as we fall apart we love our deaths, because our body is speaking its dark orgiastic vocables, its un-coming-dones, the language of "only one eye / in the fold"--our consciousness in the "those treacherous peaks of [our] sleep." Yes, since pleasure in Fritz Goldberg is always linguistically awake. Pleasure that imagines through a sculpted sound, until what we see is what we are when the "eye blows out." Until we have ourselves become the negative selfspace of her poem.