The last kite you flew.
The last kite you saw being flown.
These statements are notions of time in a poem, or how the poem tracks its relation to living.
Poems create their own time. Returning to—or revealing—the time of the poem at the ending offers the reader a sense of completeness that isn’t finite. The infinite is more complete than the finite. The infinite is the temporality of poetry. In some ways, we anticipate this infinite-facing direction in the poem, perhaps less so in prose, (although, when someone celebrates an essay that strolls this infinitude, they often describe it as poetic or lyrical).
One can take leave in a descriptive poem with an abstraction—with a numbing ray of sunlight that radiates around what came before—the cruelty of childhood, for instance.
Sometimes, the relationship between the title of the poem should be weighed against the final line, And I think that something is lacking in the poem's energy when the poem ends with the title line.
The voluminous reverb of the homophone. The slight of hand finds it easier to hide the sleight of hand, easier to slight the off-hand remark a squirrel huffs to its acorn. Alternately: getting up and walking around the poem, rather than sitting, expectantly, inside it.
Not punishing the poem for its stride – its way of moving – when it limps quietly towards the door rather than throwing a plate and stopping out.
Each book blows the mind a bit differently. Each text exists as a result of how the writer’s mind has been blown. This is a statement about socialization and experience and one’s relation to it on the page.
Against closure: Although overdetermined from a materialist standpoint, death remains to haunt its inheritance in humans, places, and events.
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Closure is often defined as a satisfying end to an event, where narrative or experience. But an ending, like a beginning, is culturally contingent; beginnings and ends vary across cultures, languages, grammars, and time. Even eternity changes, depending on the place in which one stands to discuss it.
"An ending is something we construct, not something that occurs in nature," Nancy Bern writes. Similarly, closure is something we construct in order to give an event discrete edges (an edgeless thing is difficult to discuss). The "satisfying end" is how closure is culturally constructed, and the construct offers a social script for how humans should respond to loss. "Closure talk frames grief as bad and therefore something that needs to end,” Bern continues. And this closure-talk “rhetoric implies that closure exists, and assumes it is possible, good, desired, and necessary."
“Chasing Closure” by Nancy Berns (PDF)
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Birthwort vase (1909) by Henri Husson and Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard
In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song."
The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil. Its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which Berger’s friend says sounds like "a person, unique and singular. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name.”
"Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort” —his friend adds.
Archaic language is singular and eeriely nostalgic – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity, which may (or may not) evoke an unfamiliar time and place.
The particular wants new words—it wants, like the lover seeking a nickname, the intimacy of diminutives. I take the use of neologisms and anachronstic language as ways of refusing closure in a poem. Anything that fumbles with the familiar unfamiliar (a.k. a. that multifaceted, irreedemanle demon named nostalgia) brings longing to the affective palette and texture of the poem.
"Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears," wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong."
Hail to the images that estrange us from our grieving gestures. To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle.
A twig of tears is an anachronism. Anachronisms are the spice of bread and butter life. An anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Feeling as if one does not belong anywhere sets some moments apart from the others.
“On Longing” by Susan Stewart (PDF)
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It is no secret that American culture industry stalks closure obsessively. The presence of shame when remembering the dead— to remember is to make present, to live with undecidability. We must live with our selves (or with the idea of our self as constructed, nurtured, sold, and self-caringly tended) in the face of uncertain duration. To the question of how the living live with the dead, John Berger replied:
Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.
Shame appears as the lubricating silence that prevents us from losing face or social status by invoking the dead. Our eliminationist policy in relation to the planned obsolescence of contemporary technology. Eliminated. A word that has the sound of limb and limn buried inside its pit.
“A Reverse Alphabet for Finishing” by Lee Upton (PDF)
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Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg, poet, New York, December 30, 1963. (New Yorker)
James Baldwin wrote “For Nothing Is Fixed” as part of a collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon. In it, Baldwin plays on the two meanings of fixed throughout the poem, where fixed means “repaired” or “set in place, immovable.” The lines are simple: lacking complex phrasing and ostentatious vocabulary. The lexicon is intimate, proximate, and deeply indebted to religious language and ritual.
It feels like a litany that cannot stop moving —- “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing” — and nothing is fixed. Nothing stops moving long enough to be repaired. This is not redemptive in the religious sense, yet it holds the breaking, the brokenness, sacred; it hallows the faith between humans as a space of communion. Something in this pitch can never be “over”.
“Coin of the Realm” by Carl Phillips (PDF)
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HILTON ALS: “Nothing Personal” is riddled with these questions of identity—what makes a self?—a question that gave a certain thirteen-year-old ideas about the questions he might ask in this world: Who are we? To each other? And why?
NICK WARR: “The interruption of reading performed by the images confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of Sebald’s work. Constantly hindered, sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters, time, like the mineral water that is sieved through the salt frames of Bad Kissingen, percolates as much as it flows.
“Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s Joint Examination of American Identity” by Hilton Als
”Six Photos from Sebald’s Albums” by Nick Warr
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"May my silences become more accurate," poet Theodore Roethke wrote in one of the 277 notebooks left behind after his death. Each notebook collected lines and images for poems, observations, quotations, craft notes to himself, etc. He didn't use all the lines and images in his poems — but he wrote them. And saved them. Here is an excerpt from one of his notebooks, a pep-talk if you will . . .
“A fake compassion covers many a sore . . . “ Roethke elected to end the line in an ellipsis, which is punctuation mark for dropping a trail of crumbs that continues thinking beyond the text. One dot is a period—-the symbol of closure. Two dots is a no man’s land or a typo. Three dots is an ellipsis—the whisper towards more.
And maybe “fake compassion” is part of closure’s affect, part of “covering” the sore in order to make others feel comfortable. The labor of pain is linked to the social responsibility of hiding the wound, or performing an aesthetic closure so that one’s pain doesn’t infect or contaminate others. Late capitalist regimes for managing pain hygiene are so rigorous; I’m intrigued by the way they command a sort of devotion resembling the religious.
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Jerzy Andrzejewsky wrote a novel in one sentence. Italo Calvino decided to write a novel with ten beginnings. Raymond Queneau decided to write a set of ten sonnets whose corresponding lines could be replaced with one another. Jacques Roubaud decided to write a series of poems corresponding to the pieces of a game of ‘go’. Georges Perec vowed to write a novel in the amount of time Stendhal had spent writing one of his—and broke this vow, insofar as we know. “How can I possibly make myself understood?” Witggeinstein wonders across notebooks and papers. Who is this unified self that betrays us in infamous gardens at night on the eve before the event which will be taken to define us?
“The Rejection of Closure” by Lyn Heijinian
"Continuing Against Closure” by Lyn Hejinian
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2 pages from Steve McCaffrey’s 110-page binder containing “Carnival” originals, notes on panels, and other “early related typestracts,” ca. 1970s.
“Steve McCaffery kept 3-ring binders with originals of his concrete and visual poetry. Most of the poems are unique with an assortment of collage elements, colored and black pen drawings, and assorted typewriter (typestract) and type treatments.” (Granary Books)
K. IVER: I like to start with getting my brain in a meditative state and asking myself, “What are you most unwilling to feel?” The Hua TouBuddhist meditation, meant to focus the mind, is often delivered from masters to students in the form of a question. An old one, for example: “Who is dragging this corpse around?” That one sparks a lot more curiosity and bewilderment for me than the egoism of “Who am I?” that Western Enlightenment offered.
Interview with K. Iver on Poetic Closure by Mentor and Muse
“Discontinued Meditations” by Steve McCaffrey (PDF)
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MARY RUEFLE: I was reading the notebooks of the poet George Seferis (1900-1971) and had copied into the journal by hand my favorite passage, which was identical with the passage I had copied earlier in the day, believing completely that I had never encountered it before: “But to say what you want to say you must create another language and nourish it for years & years with what you have loved, with what you have lost, and with what you will never find again.”
”Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World” by Mary Ruefle
(with gratitude to Anthony Garrett for reminding me of this essay)
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Closure is attractive: it knows how to dress for the funeral. Formally, it presents itself as polish, smoothness, poise, competence. A line. A simple equation. Linearity leaves no dark corners, no secret crannies, no quiet nooks in which a child can disappear with a book. Where linearity lends itself to prediction, diagnosis, and marketing, Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space" requires bends, triangles, shapes, spirals, and curls. There are polynomials and bad formulas. Every loss shapes itself differently without quite resembling a line.
In the culture industry, closure presents itself as a solution to the alienations of late capitalist community. The village is dead; the city needs more policing; the therapist is the new best friend; and a closure is a thing one can "accomplish" by paying money and following the correct plan or guru.
Because closure is subtly framed as an accomplishment, it gives rise to a scale, a metric of determination enabling others (including strangers) to judge how far along in the process of closure their peers have come. "I'm on the third stage of grief." "Don’t get trapped in the fourth stage of grief!" "When are you going to get over it?" The language of closure infects the discourse of human relations with new hierarchies. What does it mean to "graduate" from the final stage of grief? What does it mean to "overcome" loss?
No one caters to the ideology of happiness like closure, the noun used to signify a timely end to grief. And it seems increasingly difficult to discuss the possibility that grief and happiness are not antithetical. Grief and happiness have coexisted in human bodies and cultures and languages throughout history.
Closure satisfies the narrative propensity as developed by self-help and testimonial literature. It redeems and restores the troubled speaker. But it also limits the experience of grief or loss to a predetermined horizon with sign posts and names. It timelines the intimately unspeakable.
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“The skull of Mary Magdalene can be found in the South of France in the once Gallo Roman town of Villa Latta or Tégulata, which after the death of Maximin (one of Jesus’ seventy-two disciples), became St. Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume.” Sourced from the publishing house named after the Magdalene.
Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Mary Magdalene; or Salvation' came to her while studying St. John the Evangelist's fiancee, as depicted in The Golden Legend (a.k.a. Legenda sanctorum: Readings of the Saints), an illuminated hagiographical manuscript authored by Jacobus de Varagine around 1260 C.E. The story is collected in Fires, a series of dramatic monologues retelling ancient Greek stories or myths. In this collection, Yourcenar rides narrative temporality like the last horse of the apocalypse. She filled Fires (translated by Dori Katz) with voice-portraits that spoke on her behalf, from inside familiar archetypes and mythologies. Perhaps mythopoesis is always a speculative nonfiction. Focusing on its fragmented shapes and episodic displacements, a New York Times critic called Fires an "unwritten novel". But Yourcenar made the "I" of nonfiction usable without assuming an autobiographical I. Her I is an unreliable narrator, as is every I, every eye, every eye-witnessed event. She believed everything in a person's life affected their art.
“Narrative Finality” by Armine Kotin Mortimer (PDF)
Resources on Poetic Closure from Mentor & Muse