Remember that metaphor brings a new thing into being by strapping one known thing to another known thing and watching it move across the room. Poetry asks its readers for a species of double vision, as two things become a third and yet continue to remain themselves.
— Ann Townsend
i
I adore words. I ogle words that strike a sentence like lightning.
Words have hues, shades, timbre, textures – each word carries its connotations and associations like jangling bracelets on a wrist. When we ignore the connotative meaning of a word, the jangling gets left out of the soundscape. To me, every jangle matters; every sound wants to be heard as part of the poem’s music.
Each word also has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning.
My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:
Poems are made from words, and some words carry that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. “Abortion” is one of those words: it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. In many ways, “abortion” gravitates towards meaningless; the abstraction overwhelms its visceral, embodied reality.
I want the forbidden, unspeakable viscerality.
What's interesting about the word abortion is its abstraction. What’s devastating about the word abortion is the socially-constructed shame that prevents us from inhabiting it. An abstraction doesn't feel located within time. It is placeless; the subject displaced from the particular.
I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed.
— Annie Ernaux, Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie
Annie Ernaux’s book about abortion is titled Happening, as translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to “break” the silence of shame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time.
Although the book draws upon personal memories, it has been called an “eponymous novel.” Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errata of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. Lit-crit aside, the author is haunted by her abortion: it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Christ. Throughout the book, the speaker wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it.
Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. “I shall have no more power over my text,” Ernaux writes. (Note the translation here into “power over,” a phrase that elicits structuralist theories where “power over” is hierarchical, and associated with patriarchal structures of power that insist on standing ‘above’ the subject, above the body in question . . . a positionality that often gets written as a variation of abjection.) Writing about the abortion will also have its “aftereffects”—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.
“This thing had no place in language,” Ernaux says of abortion (italics mine). It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: “(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.”
This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable. Perhaps she is defiant. Certainly, she assumes that readers will trivialize her words, relegating them to the pathetic, or to “pathos,” or to the silo of pathologies.
To quote Ernaux:
The cost of narrating the abortion, for Ernaux, is as significant as the cost of undergoing it. In both cases, she is “determined to go through with it.”
ii
“May my silences become more accurate,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote in a notebook.
When Roethke died, he left 277 notebooks behind; each filled with 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:
iii
Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weiner Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.” Your Weimar, her Weiner. Bringing a blade to the machismo inside the Dada circles, Hoch leveraged the connotations of the domesticated knife (i.e. the kitchen knife) to cut up and reshape masculinity.
“The male Dadaists, despite opposing the beer-belly values of the bourgeoisie, were quite capable of reproducing them,” Ben Lerner adds.
Hoch’s photomontage includes a tiny self-portrait:
“A gloom shagged with flags and tending towards violence. The initial fact (anger) is macrocosmic in the sense of being relevant to all occasions.”
Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” is titled after Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage. It is a poem in parts that leans into the curated “reading” of the photomontage in a museum or gallery. One can almost think of it as a series of captions:
Lerner describes Waldrop’s grammatical experiments with periods as “opening a silence within a single thought” rather than granting closure. “In Waldrop’s hands, a period is not the sign of authority but a tiny black hole within its logic,” he says, noting that she “deploys the period as a rest, often magical, in which potential meanings multiply,” and her periods often provide the sort of beat and breath that line breaks accomplish.
Like Hoch, Waldrop takes a form that draws on patriarchal authority—the lecture, the program note, the gallery description—and uses it against itself. There is no greater pleasure, which is not discount the pleasures of being alone with a fresh pack of watermelon sour-straws at midnight.
iv
Abstract subjects lend themselves to lecture forms or short talks. Anne Carson has a series of poems structured as "short talks." She takes a word and expands upon it, twists it, tries to catch its reflection in a rain puddle.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” he said.
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. But its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which 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,” Berger’s friend says, “Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort.”
Archaic language is singular – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity.
The particular wants new words—it desires to be apprehended in its uniqueness, like the lover rediscovers himself in a nickname– the intimacy of diminutives.
Here’s a poem by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Timothy Adès:
This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation.
Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn't close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.
“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures.
A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.
v
IF YOU FEEL INCLINED TO WRITE…. Jot down five words that interest or intrigue you, and pick one (or settle for “birthwort”). Write a short paragraph about it, as if you were writing a catalog entry for a natural history or art museum. Describe the word. Build from associations that are particular to the speaker. Anachronize once or twice, very carefully, with an eye to the particular connotative value of the knife. Take us from the catalog entry into the private gaze of the viewer staring at the dinosaur bones or the painting in the museum. No one would trust that woman to say anything intelligible about the painting— which is precisely why her words are the most interesting ones. Title it short talk on whatever.