A Poetics (# 93)

The First Book Anne Gorrick Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse
AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it ways and how it didnot move linearly, how it seemed richer for being about her as well as Plathand for being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this causedme to begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I removed even more bitsof text from Anne's essay, sometimes, slightly revising them, and then Iresponding in detail to those. This, then, is a non-linear poetics, one builton response and argument with Anne's words, but one in deference to that textthat I slashed into pieces here, so that she would still be able to publish heressay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [.   ]
I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods.  It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.
Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a gap in a tooth).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing, aleftover from the Russians.)
WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate. 
Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer's Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the i to the W) was exactly the same width, allowing littlevisual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essence part of a grid,each letter filling one box on an x and a y axis. But in our modern world,where proportional fonts are those we use almost exclusively, there's no needfor the extra space. Additionally, those extra space cause holes in the text,holes made even more dramatic when the text was full justified. I gave up onthat extra space that day.
Justas I changed my handwriting. One day in the first half of 1977, during the yearI attended the American School of Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangierand thinking about Eliza Eastman's handwriting. I admired her hand, how clearand definite it was, but also how she had simplified her letterforms when shewrote them out in longhand.  Thatday, I decided to emulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certainextra swoops in their construction. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of thatline, and continue to the next letter. By the time I had walked back to mydormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, I had changedmy handwriting.
Andthat is how my handwriting remains, though I often write letterforms in variousways while wrawing my doodled visual poems onto a page. Because differences inletterforms are differences in meaning. Because even a single lost rising of aletter off a line on a page is a meaningful absence.

b. book-stealing
Thefirst book I ever stole. The wound in the book.
The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, orcontained within the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set ofwords.
Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,though I mind moves within the carapace of the skull.
The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.
Hayden Carruth once told us that hecould translate poems from languages he did not know because every poem wasencoded: poem = code. The trick to translation was not to understand theoriginal language but to understand the code. And a decoded message is neverthe coded message itself. It is a mirror to the language, and a mirror may besplintered and still reflect.
There is a wound in the book from beingstole, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. There isa would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is built thefinest of houses.

c.cashmere
Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.
Black is ink is the bones of the book.The bones of the book give it its structure, allow it to hold itself together,as a piece, like the ribbing of a chest, and breathing, also, comes easier withthis structure in place.  But blackis warm from size, like breathing, great, and enwrapping. Around the body,around the thinking body of the person who imagined the coat that is black andold, like cashmere, or a boat, there is a thought in little ink words, littlewords with horns so that they might go running across the page and crashingagainst each other in battle. That is the form that thinking takes in the dark,which is inky, and the inkhorned beast beat each other back and forth in theevening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew, crooked, butnot dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and it is a smalllight, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horn intodarkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There is norunning from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords of ink born and bred.
With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair
I hadcut off most of my hair.
I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few heads grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp that convex mirror that fitsup into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, over which skythe universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions of darkness, isitself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely
Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).
It is a root, I think, and in that waythe cards mean, by teaching how a search for meaning itself is not necessarilymeaning, by teaching that not all answers are true, and neither are allquestions. There were a pack of them, which ran all night howling not at themoon but at the image of the moon on a certain card, or they accumulated likedarkness on a deck looking out over black water, black air, solid black mud.And every message they scrawled with that ink, with their paws, disappearedinto air, earth, water the same color as it. To see what is important requiresthe identification of that which is not, for they are knit as one, woven inwarp and woof, and that is their twisted cry.

f.graffiti
thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days
The body is not a palette; it is acanvas. We write intentionally upon it of things "both wonderful &strange." A body is a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded theravages of life: the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, thesplinter like a stick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across thearm, the cutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices justunder that girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.
These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (theslipt knife) more than succeeded (the clean pierce).

g.breathe
barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues
It seems a strange coincidence that Iran out of tissues today, my nasal passages so much clearer than they usuallyare because they have been blown clean, and it is as if I can smell the world,but I seem only able to smell the insides of my nostrils with every intake ofbreath.
Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but is that connection between thetwo actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.
We don't simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found.

h.alarums
Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn't recognize me.
We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn't an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, how do I enjoy reading poems when they are unfathomable to me?
Maybe because they're music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzles ofwords designed to create puzzles of thought.
It was good that he didn't recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.
If he'd known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him.  You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth
athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn
Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe.  Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension against something else. He didn't seem torealize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning, ortension against the expected forms of the language itself.
Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but they always had titles, thus the text of the poem (asingle word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse.  (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas
lovely
lovely
Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram's pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that.
So as we are thwarted by something,thus we have the opportunity to create against that conflict. I see yourprofessor here as one who may have actually produced great scholarship, becauseof this conflict, even if the conflict also kept her from publishing any of it.
Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith
We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poem we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how it was constructed.
Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for saving quiteintentionally and not by those who created them. So Plath might scribble wordson paper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.
Within the records themselves (draftsof poems, let's say, or notebooks, or diaries) there is some knowledge, that ofPlath herself, and the archives, the Smith Archives specifically, needed tobelieve in the value of that knowledge. But the value of that knowledge is inhow it can be used by others to create other knowledge, to understand her life,to understand her art (and are the two separate? or even separable?), tounderstand her times, the world of poetry, maybe even to know the officialverse culture of her era.
We make knowledge out of otherknowledge, as poems are built out of other poems, as art comes out of otherart, as life comes out of other art.
A small maple seedling growing from thespot where we buried our prairie dog so many years ago. I imagine its delicate whitebranching root as the heart of our dead Couscous, and the living heart insidethe empty chest of that small dead animal, who once was nothing but warmth andthe fiercest desire to dig.
Dig hard enough, and you will find it.

k.great
Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.
Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have as sweetest to it, even if sucking in, through thetiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were the almost toostrong for us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.
Or: We believe sometimes, as poets ofthe unrestrained word, the word unrestrained by emotion, that the entry ofemotion is the harbinger of illth, that only the compassion of objectivity, therestructuring of the word according to proscribed (and also prescribed)patterns allows for a poetry with legs, one that will last, one that will walkon its own.
Yet we are grounded by the human insideus, which is a little blood-red muscle sometimes larded with fat, but whichbeats out the numbers of our lives, so much so that the music of our lives goesaccording to the pattern of that ostinato, neverending, ever-rending, untildeath, one that feels like a bastinado of our every footfall.
We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards
almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards
The winter has just begun, and the snowfalls, lightly, a dusting, confectioner's sugar, but we know the cold of it,the moisture trapped in the false form of whiteness.  The blizzard is blindness and comes sometimes as words.Enough of them, black little inklings, and the world turns white before oureyes. Too white to see.

m.dance
dancedance dance dance dance to the radio ("Transmission" by Joy Division)
I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it's not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. "Joy Division" being a self-made irony, theartists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs, being merely thevague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)
The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Divisions's debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else's, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into somethingelse. We are repetitions of the original though, building complexity as we go.
Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.
The music is better than the singing.It is all beats, music and lyrics, and Ian Curtis has a voice that refuses tolisten. I am curt, is I ?  (Now I'mlistening to all my Joy Division music, starting with "Love Will Tear UsApart." Believe it.)
How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?
I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean
theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean
Say, "ocean," and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.
So Melvillian, this idea, to beswallowed, as a pebble, by the ocean, recognized less than the death of an antto the mind of god. (There is the pearl of a thought in there somewhere.) Wewrite against a giant darkness of water that surges towards us. We are soslight, thin of bone and flesh, that we disappear into the first lapping ofwave, yet we go on because the choice is always simple: Yes or no. Do or don't.
As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the extent that we can, than we canride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio
I'dlisten to the radio and wonder, "Is this all there is?" Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far ends of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.   
"Rock and Roll," The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. We don't want to go homeanyway. We want to make a new home, to find a new place to be, a new way to be.So we are searching.
Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It's not"Plath was the hint though."
It's "Plath was the hint through."  We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.
As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.
I am listening to the Feelies now,obsessively. Their hint through was the Velvet Underground, and you can hear itin them. I'd say their specific path was the Velvet Underground's eponymoussecond album. They have a delicate roughness to their sound. They are beholden totheir makers (Lou, John, Mo, and Sterling), but they are something else.Influence is a virus, but it is not so much a self-replicating virus as onethat changes constantly, one that mutates fast enough so that we cannot stopit. Maybe I am infected by that same virus from the VU: Velvet Underground (myfavorite band), Vanderbilt University (my alma mater), Volume Unit (the VUmeter I saw as I played Lou Reed's "Street Hassle" Vanderbilt's student radiostation, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I've already seen). Lou Reed and I shared ateacher (Philip Booth) in different decades at Syracuse University. In theVelvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," Lou sings of "rules of verse," which I heardfor years as "Rooseverse." Why the focus on the Roosevelts? I wondered.
Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.

p.voice
thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit's no longer hinged on the self
I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don't see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök's work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not aword of himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is thegenesis of all poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.
I'm not arguing with you here. I'm justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I'll grant you) than Lynn's, but I actually think bigness is morethe domain of Lynn's work than yours. That messy presentation of the selfproduces her broad-brush expressionistic train wrecks, and they are larger, inthat emotional and sonic way, than yours.  Not more beautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceraltype.
Your size is Erik Satie-like, builtupon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalist music) and builtupon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time. I'd say Lynn'sare more sculptural, monumental.
Voices come in differentmanifestations, some even mute. A visual poet cannot forget the power ofmuteness.

q.suttee
poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until a essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It's a form of suttee, a ritual killing. 
I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word "suttee"suggests two things: that society and Plath's husband (as it is with suttees)is the cause of Plath's death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.
Everything, meaning existence in general,pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act of taking powerover one's life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is the ultimate act ofself-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless. I don'tlook at suicide as most people though. I don't see it as a tragedy. I see it asa right, one that people take when they want nothing else, when they actuallywant nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one's ability to deal with thepain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable, final. Yourstatement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There's nothing toexonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were her childrenmost of all. If she "could live with" that, then that is simply her choice.
We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole
Theentirety of her final work acted as a spoken spell for the final trap. Therewas no other way out. I'm so very grateful and glad to write in a time whenmythomaning isn't the only way into the poem. The self becomes a deadly, boringmatrix from which to begin. Deadly when it's the only one.
This idea that a focus on the self ledto Plath's death seems an argument just to prove a point, especially given thatit ties into the post-avant rejection of the self as an opening to possibility.I don't see any way to argue this point or to prove it. The self always is thereason for the suicide, because she is the self. The self doesn't disappear inpoems not absorbed by the self.
I still see the self suffusing yourwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else. The self can berejected, but not escaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidoteto suicide. A focus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.
And I must see the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, so each self has thepossibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or not doesnot matter. All that matters is that the self is so that the creation is indeedpossible.

s.Quietest
probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet
I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon's use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. For instance,I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That's the secret of his success. But WCWcannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand of poetry in hisattacks on TSE.
Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E
[stealing the one-word poetics of DanWaber]
Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.
Wishful thinking. I don't thinkanything like this ever would have happened. Otherwise, it would have happenedto Adrienne Rich. Most people set a course early and follow it through changesbut don't veer onto other paths.
Should, maybe, Plath's daughter, then,have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path?
There's no hope of knowing any of this,though, without the continued living of Plath, though. Only the existence ofself makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.
I'm not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities
Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail
We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. And these possibilities can be of manydifferent types.

v. joy
what Ilistened to: Joy Division
Sorry about expending your time withargument. I'm not a partisan, so I don't come to poetry from one pole of binarythought. I don't believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hopefor originality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focusis on possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me todifferent conclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.
Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning
I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.
Unlearningis most of learning.  Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.

x. intestate
Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate. 
Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree from Paul Zukofsky vis-a-vis his father.  As an archivist, I desperately wantrecords be used and for something else to be made out of them. I want people togain insight by the records we preserve.
Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and fairly makingsomething else with it. Copyright, as it is now practice (as an act ofaggression) may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go.

y. I(art)
I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.
Quoting:"Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!" (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman'sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])
Artcomes out of art. I art art. To be that art, there can be a lifelessness. Focusis both nourisher and depriver of nourishment. But could artlessness be better?Is balance better or the abrogation of responsibility? Or are we—I shudder tothink—beset with too many responsibilities (personal, familial, societal,human, profession, artistic) but with no way of meeting each? Is time soindefinite to us that we live fully whatever life is closest to us because wedo not know when it all will end? Is our only thought, the only mover of anaction, the realization that we cannot recall our beginning but that we knowour end without ever seeing it? Are we ready for the surprise of thatrealization?
Canan art be made well without the obsession to make it too much, too often, toocompletely with the body and the mind? Does that create a friendship of artthat occludes a friendship of the beating, or beaten, blood?
Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundness, and how light, therefore,wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops, and clawedfrom that language an originality that befalls the smiths of the least word, afocus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I think of the humanevidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly his talismans againsthis leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connection to threefamilies. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled thread tautenough through the cloth holds two pieces together. But what holds in placethat thread? What threat did he encounter from the living of life that theliving of art protected him from?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

 really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?
Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo that with the little thoughtthings we create.
In that way, we go forward.
ecr. l'inf.