On the Image and Visual Part of Text; or 11 Ways of Looking at a Field in a Poem

1

Robert Pinsky described poetry as "a vocal imagining" which begins as an interiorized impulse but ultimately becomes social. I am interested in the relationship between the image and the impulse's particular vocalization.

Are there mountains around the field? If there are mountains, the voice on the field will have echoes attached to its feet.

2

Appearances demarcate events – images are opportunities in which to speak poetry. To paraphrase John Berger, one image interpenetrates another. Recognizing an appearance requires one to remember other similar appearances. There is an expectation of meaning attached to the action of looking at images. It is this search for meaning using our own cultural choices/experiences that differentiates, or creates irresolution, in the meaning of the image. I am interested in the vocal imagining which begins as an impulse and builds itself in relation to image, whether real or imagined.

Two ways of looking at a field in a poem:

“My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can. "

- James Dickey, "The Strength of Fields "

"And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
the lovely diminutives. "

- Theodor Roethke, "A Field of Light "

The fields are present in the titles; the poets are interested in different things, strength and light. But both Dickey and Roethke are using the field, and its images, as a way to defeat forgetting. Both poems have a Kierkeegardian element of wanting to preserve something ineffable and valuable. To forestall forgetting by carving it into the field.

"Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered."

- Soren Kierkegaard

3

"We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics,” Neal Stephenson wrote “The Interface Culture.” To be complicit in our dazzlement—this requires us to examine our relationship to the headshot, the image, the self as we hope to “be seen” in the world. Increasingly, the field of our personal data becomes a meadow to be mined for information.

If you open a jpeg as a text file, you'll find a random string of glyphs and encoded cosine functions that describe the location, luminance, and color of each pixel.

Most images are data. Rachel Ossip notes, "Today we exist as much in data and images as in flesh." How is this data-field self imagined vocally in a poem?

4

"A photograph is a secret about a secret," said Diane Arbus, "The more it tells you the less you know." 

This mixture of lucidity and obscurity is how the poem and the photograph reach the reader.

Do we read images rather than merely see them? Image literacy, the ability to think about what one sees in an image, involves similar interpretative practices to poetry. Even when being read or explained by the artist, the poem and photo remain voiceless in how they communicate what they communicate to each of us.

Field is pause   field is plot   field is red chigger bump where

the larvae feed   corn wig curled in your ear. Field cares not

a fig for your resistance   though kindly   gently   lay your

head down   girl   lay it down.  

- Erin Belieu, "Field"

Erin Belieu allows the field to define itself, and the juxtaposition of meadow language with her expansive use of the field makes the field, itself, feel relevant. The field speaks. And yet, I could not stop seeing a particular image as I read, namely, Andrew Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World (1948). This association may be related to the popularity and prevalence of this painting, or it might be the way the injunction to lay down her head made me think of the resistance to laying down in Wyeth’s subject?

This resistance mentioned by Belieu kept dragging Christina back into the frame as I read. Wyeth titled it after his model, Anna Christina Olson (1893 to 1968) who lived in Cushing, Maine on the farm pictured.

She had a degenerative muscular disorder that took away her ability to walk by the late 1920s. Eschewing a wheelchair, she crawled around the house and grounds. Wyeth, who had summered in Maine for many years, met the spinster Olson and her bachelor brother, Alvaro, in 1939. The three were introduced by Wyeth's future wife, Betsy James (b. c. 1922), another long-term summer resident. It's hard to say what fired the young artist's imagination more: the Olson siblings or their residence. Christina appears in several of the artist's paintings. [Source]

5

Two separate lines from Paula Meehan's poem, "Death of a Field":

The memory of the field is lost with the loss of its herbs

The magpies sound like flying castanets

Loss in its ecological sense—the articulation of things which disappear if the particular meadow disappears.

In ecology, endemism is "the ecological state of a species being unique to a defined geographic location, such as an island, nation, country or other defined zone, or habitat type".  For example, Bermuda cedars were prominent in Bermuda before the 17th century. Settlers arrived. By the end of the century, the cedars were nearly extinct, wiped out by the shipbuilding industry and foreign parasites. The Bermuda cedar is endemic to Bermuda. 

Kudzu originated in Japan, though it has grown characteristic of the southern US landscape. Indigenous species that are found elsewhere are not considered endemic to a place —- they can survive in alternate locations. Kudzu is indigenous to Japan though not endemic.

Americans benefit from "sweepstakes colonization,” living in a geographical location that has been largely spared the ravage of climate change. We have done nothing to deserve winning this lottery. We have neither tended nor protected this site of good fortune "rendered even more advantageous, as opposed to the "losing" species, which immediately fails to reproduce..." etc.

6

Joshua Marie Wilkinson said that we are drawn to what the photo or poem wants when we look at it. We are trying to learn how to want, and to desire – and how this occurs "is the poem’s secret to keep, and the photograph’s secret to flaunt.”

Here is the end of Rick Barot’s poem, "The Field”:

In the dark, alone, I went out to see the turn toward morning.
Then I saw them. What the imagination would do with two people
sleeping in a field is keep them where they are,
unknowable, untouched. The imagination also wants them
to stir, to wake them back into their stories.
The day will be hot. The smell of yesterday’s heat
is still in the air, like the sweat of a body. What would bring me
to a field in the night and have me sleep there?
Whose hand would I be holding, out of desire or fear?
My pants’ hems are heavy with dew. I know how far away
I am from everyone. Am I a child again, am I old?
Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body
from one end of time to another.

- Rick Barot, "The Field"

What should the eye want of the mysterious couple's image? Barot tells us the imagination has a script to "wake them back into their stories." His brings his own story, his childhood fears, into this space with the couple. There are shadows between them, and those shadows are what the poet recognizes. These are the voices he brings to the page.

This poem exemplifies the first-person roving camera. I’m thinking of how Caryl Pagel urged writers to allow “the poem to be an exercise in haunting instead of starring, an act of investigation instead of performance”; and how, in such poems, the first person I doesn’t serve as as a signifier of self, but as a roving camera or seeing instrument. Desire lurks in the heart of this roving motion, and something here is the poem’s secret to keep.

7

"All photographs are ambiguous," John Berger warns, "All photographs have been taken out of a continuity."

Dom Bury’s “The Opened Field” gives us a word in the title which frames how we read it: this field is opened, something happened to open it, and part of the poem’s journey will exist in relation to this word.

Three boys stand in a frozen field —
each child stripped and hosed, the next task
not to read the wind but learn the names

we have for snow, each name
we have given to the world. To then unlearn
ourselves, the self, this is — the hardest task.
To have nothing left. No thing but heat to give.

- Dom Bury, "The Opened Field"

"Ruins are a way of seeing," Robert Harbison wrote. It feels as if one is looking at the ruins of field rather than its destruction—at the ruins of the children in relation to the field. The frozen position of statues.

8

Leslie Scalapino called the assembling and arranging of photographs "a kind of contemplation." Louise Gluck’s formidable You is deeply contemplative and meditative. She often uses flowers as icons to focus concentration, and addresses them as one would address a divinity or a beloved.

What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that? Certainly
you don’t look at us, don’t listen to us,

- Louise Gluck, "Field Flowers"

I’m also thinking of how Dolores Dorantes' untranslated dictionary images in COPY (Wave Books) resemble small scenes in a film without subtitles – one wants to read the gesture in order to recover them from the narrative. But there are iconic in the sense that they encourage meditation rather than analysis—- to think upon a thing rather than to think through it. Poetry allows us to treat images as meditative icons, and to complicate this through invocative address.

9

In "Two Versions of the Imaginary," Maurice Blanchot describes the image as that which is present in its absence, or something which appears as a disappearance.

Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed
for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like
beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'm
thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering
unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got
torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten

- Carl Phillips, "Pale Colors in a Tall Field"

I think of these of two versions of the imaginary in Carl Phillips’ poem, with its lush, long lines and careful enjambments, and the echolocutive effect of these enjambments which echo back and forth across the field and the mind recovering memory in moments, fragments, snatches. To re-stage the moment which touched us is tremendous.

10

Here is the entirety of a poem which looks at a field, or makes use of the images evoked by a field.

"The Bright Field" by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

The relationship between normalizing and making something seem inevitable is the strategy of religious fundamentalists who refuse action on climate change. They believe the end of the world is God's will. To contest God's will is to be unfaithful, or disloyal. Life is not hurrying . . . It is the turning.

11

“Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written," poet Charles Simic wrote in "The Flute Player in the Pit.” In the same essay, Simic links the desire of the image to that of the poem: “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time….. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves.”

“Scientifically Speaking” by David Tomas Martinez

There have
been exciting

discoveries
in the field

of me.
Many

of which
I have

made
myself.

In this poem from Hustle (Sarabande Books, 2014), David Tomas Martinez uses words associated with science (discoveries, field of) and applies them to himself. There have been exciting discoveries in the field of me. I love this line for its simplicity, and for the surprise of the final clause— “of me”—which carves the self as a field worthy of attention.

Martinez makes use of a narrowed margin which foregrounds understatement, and results in a sort of mysterious humility—the speaker doesn’t inventory his findings or list his scientific observations. Instead, he overturns the concept of discovering as used in headlines about the latest scientific etc.

To quote Simic again: Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves. Recognizing often has the thrill of discovery, and Martinez’ discover of “the field of me” has the shape of a permission to other poets to recognize ourselves in the relationship between the poetic field (i.e. it’s projections, it’s use of space, it’s lineation) and ourselves.

Homophones.

Homonyms are words which share a name, or “have the same name” (etymologically), whether by spelling or sound, despite the vest difference between those two variance. Usually, homonyms refer to words which are spelled the same . . . Like the arid desert heart of the one who deserts you at Piggly-Wiggly.

Homophones are words which sound the same but are spelled differently, and mean different things . . . Like except and accept. Social life feels very accepting until it begins excepting you out of it. The film reel makes it difficult to discern what is real. To write the wrong is not to right it. I'll find you in the aisle with an ad for a tropical isle beside it.

The altar is where flesh alters itself into bread. The band got banned by local officials. A bear who is bare comes bearing acorns. The bread we eat, the habits bred by shared meals. To sell one's blood includes tiny red cells. The cord on the floor, the chord in the air. To elicit a smile, or to provoke desire with an illicit photo. The fairy has wings. The ferry has an engine and floats on water. Someone ferried us here. We marry and hope to be merry. He may mince words when looking for mints.

The oar helps move the boat, or something, in the sentence where the ore is buried beneath the earth. Each soil has its ores.

To sew is to connect with a thread. So, he said. Sow the plants seed that food may come of it.

One may pray for mercy. Another may prey on the merciful.

His hands on my waist, the waste of clean water.

One particular beast’s tail is another's tale to tell. Yet another’s tell to read and recognize in the game.

We is massive. But the wee is tiny. And oui, elsewhere, is yes.

Anyway, it’s fun to keep a running list of homophones in your poetry notebook. They make great hinge words and have the capacity to turbo-charge a volta.

[Motivating myself to work on this project by collaging and making an image public— this is my tactic. This is how I nudge myself towards the things I set aside in draft…]

Here’s what Charles Simic wrote in his essay, “The True Adventures of a Franz Kafka’s Cage”:

While the bickering of two housewives over whose son broke the window of a funeral parlor was putting the judge to sleep, a policeman brought into the court room a birdcage accused of propositioning a street sparrow to have a go at one of its swings.

A literary cage is, I think, a lovely conceit.

On journals and notebooks as genre, briefly.

In his 1918 journal, Andre Gide wrote:

It is from the point of view of art that what I write should be judged, a point of view never taken, or almost never taken by the critics… Moreover, it is the only point of view which is not exclusive of any other.

The journal continuously revisits itself and its conclusions in light of new reading or knowledge. The production of self, in this form, is tentative: it is willing to be rearranged or remade.

Tentativity occupies time and space differently from rigidity. The marble statue is rigid — it asserts itself against tentativity. The notebook is fluid.

As Roland Barthes remarks in his first published essay, “Andre Gide and His Journal”: "The stream is more durable than marble…”

The ellipsis is Barthes’ own. The ellipsis, itself, is common to journals, a marker of where a thought trails off to be picked up later.

And there is something poetic about this notebook’s ellipses — some way in which the uncertainty of self’s relation to time crosses both forms.

I’m thinking of Frank Bidart’s “Self-Portrait, 1969",” which uses ellipses in order to move back and forth between the self in the world and the self in the mind’s eye.

“He’s still young,” still overdetermined by what the word young allows or evokes.

Bidart plays with the eye a bit: this poem is composed of two stanzas, but the extreme indentation of “Once, instead,” makes it seem like three stanzas exist. The use of the field, the long blank before the qualifying condition, drags its finger along the rim of a sink, and all that white porcelain.

When I begin this poem
to see myself
as a piece of history . . .

Frank Bidart wrote this somewhere, in a poem, according to my notebook, which lacks the poem’s title and imagines each line as the first line of a triptych.

There is a way in which the journal or notebook genre enables the placing of words behind each other rather than after each other — it is disorienting to be the speaker inside a chronology. No conclusions can be drawn about the subject who is the speaker.

”I was writing this poem about someone else,” Samuel Cheney says in “This Was Before The Wedding.”

I was someone else before the wedding. Who am I now?

“I lost my father before I was twelve years old,” Gide writes.

From Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate, translated by Dorothy Bussy.

The day when Gide’s mother “changed the black ribbon in her morning cap for a mauve one” . . .

Should I watch With Andre Gide? Isn’t this question mark actually wanting to be an ellipsis . . .

On a different note, Roland Barthes published an essay titled “Deliberation” about journals and notebooks. In it, he explains why he didn't keep a journal; and why the notebook, as a text, to him seems to fail, or to be implicated in the aesthetics of failure. But some of his favorite writings were notebooks, particularly those of Andre Gide. Imagine the ellipsis.

Hashtag with poetry prompts from Kim Addonizio.

So much cruelty is framed as truth-telling on social media. #hottakefromhell I’m studying myself in the frame of social media posts, learning about this woman named Alina whose performance of perfection is stippled with protests to the contrary. #hownottoparent I’m a frame within a frame of competitive marketing in a publishing industry increasingly reliant on authors to hustle their books or mothers to worship their children or grandparents to repost cringe-worthy memes. #therealme doesn’t believe in competing for human relatives and attention but I have so many friends who #tribe, and I'm beguiled by new apps that commodify the market of self-improvement metrics which give us a sense of control by marking tiny achievements. Socialized early by school grades and tests, do we ever outgrow that training to display how well we’re doing? #performativewellbeing correlates with inflatable ego, which others evaluate on the basis of the size of the inflatable jumper one can afford for a child’s birthday party. #whocares #hashtageachheart #signifysomething #googleityrself

#poetryexercisesfromKimAddonizio

1. Find a line by someone else and look for different nouns or adjectives beginning with the same letter as the line. Play with substitutions.

2. Write a poem for the end of something with "lost" in the title. See "Lost Poem" by Ted Berrigan.

3. Name a specific time or place in your title and then write a poem about it.

4. Write ten openings that begin in media res.

5. Write a poem to the future modeled on Brecht's "To Those Born Later" or Ruth Stone's "Look to the Future."

6. "Jot down a list of things you see around you and fall recklessly in love with all of them."

7. Make a list of 50 favorite words and write a poem with them. Then experiment with framing by adding in words from a cookbook or a how-to text.

8. Write a lyrical list poem like A. Van Jordan's "afterglow" which uses slashes to build pauses through a string of associations.

9. Anaphora is the repetition of an opening word or phrase. Write one that borrows "but" or "the bluest".

10. Write a poem that repeats the last word or phrase of a line in the beginning of the next line.

11. Article, adjective, noun: article, adjective, noun, verb, adverb.

12. Write an opening sentence. Now change period to comma and add "as if" or"because" or etc or although.

On or around April 12, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

A monument wants to be souvenired.

“The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia,” Susan Stewart writes in On Longing.

Love wants to be remembered. Barthes believes this. He feels a duty to remember his mother, and to immortalize her in the project he never finished, the book she was supposed to star in, Vita Nova.

My mother said this explicity: “To me, the way you know someone is loved is that family remembers them when they die.”

This is not an fuzzy statement — it’s not unclear, blurry, or vague. It is a clear expression of her wish to be kept alive in our minds. There are many ways to do this, but none of them are related to our own personal needs for “closure”, which is the nice American way to describe erasure in therapy-speak.

On April 12, 1978, as Barthes wrote these words, my mother was in labor with me. She sat on the curb outside a Bucharest hospital and smoked her last cigarette before entering. I was born in the early morning hours of April 13th.

"Nests are a tragedy waiting to happen.” Ellen Dore Watson says this in her poem "He Watches Them."

The poem’s title includes two pronouns — like blank holes in a mask, all we know is the watching will happen.

The tawny owl hunts at night because its prey comes out. The hunter is guided by the actions of what it predates. It waits for the wood mouse who feeds on nuts and beetles. The barred owl moved into the tree close to our bedroom window after mom died. Sometimes I stayed up listening to it.

In an essay, “Wanting Wrong,” Anna Enright describes an “anxiety about consent” that runs through a book by Miranda Popkey, and focuses on how this anxiety might actually be centered in concerns about the “agony of others.” Enright calls it “the flower dilemma: you cannot ask a man to give you flowers, because to do so undoes the sense of a gift.”

You cannot ask a man to tie you up without complicating his intentionality if he agrees to your wish.

My mother thought being loved would keep her alive, but I know better. Hate is the thing which does not die— humans remember their own wounds better than they remember any fellow human being.

I want you to hate me.

And remember me.

I am here for whatever monument you wish to erect.

At night, the cloud looks down on the tree and whispers, “Look, I have memorized your crown. When they cut you down, I will remain as a moving monument. Others who knew you will recognize your silhouette in me…”

On July 9, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

There were several directions in which to define the definitive.

That which has happened cannot happen again, Barthes seems to suggest. And yet — the nature of grief is that it keeps happening.

Grief keeps its own time, I said to my father.

“But we define time,” he replied, “we are the ones who create it.”

We create and are created in turn by our definitions of time, hope, humanity, feasibility, wisdom —

Alan Lightman says, “An object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.”

The fact that Lightman says this in a book titled Einstein’s Dreams does not mean he said it less.

Barthes used tiny sheets of paper to collect and preserve the dailiness of his grief.

“You should not perform grief,” a yoga instructor said.

What does it mean to perform the unspeakable?

I did a headstand and everyone clapped. They performed their appreciation.

What did Witold Gombrowicz perform when writing about the performance of others in the memoir excerpted below?

Alone, in the loge, I, a modern person, deprived of superstitions, I, an antisalon man, I out of whose head the whip of defeat had knocked the sulks and airs, thought that a world in which a man adores himself with music is more convincing than a world in which man adores the music itself.

I had the feeling that I was among Proust's characters, who went to the concert not to listen but to grace it with their presence, where the ladies stuck Wagner into their hair as they would a diamond pin.

It is ridiculous to perform one’s self.

One must use words in order to create alternatives to the paucity of existing language.

“Words are events,” said Ursula Le Guin.” They do things, change things. They transform at both speaker and her; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

The energy of death.

The amplification of the void in strategies of avoidance.

A void dance.

Charles Simic's "Reading Philosophy at Night"

Whoever reads philosophy reads himself as much as he reads the philosopher. I am in dialogue with certain decisive events in my life as much as I am with the ideas on the page. Meaning is the matter of my existence. My effort to understand is a perpetual cycling around a few obsessive images.

I found these lines in my notebook, copied from Charles Simic’s essay, “Reading Philosophy at Night” — which I’ve shared below. This essay still resonates with me, and I think it allows the poet space to engage a broader ontological palette, which is to say, all the things we have read, thought, heard, believed… All of it.

“All my experiences make a kind of untaught ontology, which precedes all my readings,” Simic adds. “What I’m trying to conceptualize with the help of the philosopher is that which I’ve already intuited. That’s one way of looking at it.”

These ways of looking at it are the work of poetry.

Fernando Pessoa's sacred and profane existences: part 1.

Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms were deeply tangled with the idea of posthumousness.

In The Book of Disquiet, he describes how characters from novels, particularly Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Wardle, are more real to him than living humans.

The heteronyms existed on the stage of Pessoa's life as characters, but also as friends, as costumes he could slip into and flaneur across the page. 

[The self is a friend to some of us; ideas become our favorite company.]

In a letter dated 8 February 1918, Pessoa wrote:

There is only one event in the past which has both the definiteness and the importance required for rectification by direction; this is my father's death, which took place on 13 July 1893. My mother's second marriage (which took place on 30 December 1895) is another date which I can give with preciseness and it is important for me, not in itself, but in one of its results – the circumstance that, my stepfather becoming Portuguese Consul in Durban (Natal), I was educated there, this English education being a factor of supreme importance in my life, and, whatever my fate be, indubitably shaping it.

After losing his father and infant brother at a young age, with the sounds of his most recent birthday party in the background, Pessoa found life changed quickly: his mother fell in love with another man, who worked from Durban. In the final year of living in Lisbon, when Pessoa was six years old, he wondered in his diary, of this time:

"Is anything sacred? is anything permanent?"

This is a question that plagues writers and theologians. Is anything sacred across time. Is the notion of sacredness sustainable in application to eternity.

. . . Pessoa would move to Durban with his mother and family the following year. Stability is built into our idea of sacredness.

The young Pessoa. Source.

*

How Pessoa was described by a fellow classmate in his early teens:

I cannot tell you exactly how long I knew him, but the period during which I received most of my impressions of him was the whole of the year 1904 when we were at school together. How old he was at this time I don’t know, but judge him to have 15 or 16. [...]

He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes also a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes. [...]

He was regarded as a brilliant clever boy as, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken English in his early years, he had learned it so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language. Although younger than his schoolfellows of the same class he appeared to have no difficulty in keeping up with and surpassing them in work. For one of his age, he thought much and deeply and in a letter to me once complained of "spiritual and material encumbrances of most especial adverseness". [...]

He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent on reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.

Pessoa's sister, Henriqueta Rosa Dias said, of Pessoa as a child: "Reality was constantly being transformed, and we were the protagonists of his reverie."  

Pessoa typescript from 1930.

*

Charles Robert Anon.

At eighteen, Pessoa stepped into Charles Robert Anon to excommunicate all churches in a notebook piece titled "Excommunication":

His favorite book was Charles Dicken's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, of which he said:

"The women of Dickens were cardboard and sawdust to pack his men to us on the voyage from spaces of dream. The joy and zest of life does not include women . . ."

[This, in contradistinction to fellow heteronymer, Antoine Volodine, who gives women a central role in the posthumous frays and fictions.]

Pessoa acknowledged in a 1935 publication that he had created a fictional world around him since childhood - to make friends. To make friends by making them. [More on this on p. 116 of Pessoa biography.]

The heteronym enlarges this world with possibilities by making real the hope of another one.

I would call it Pessoa’s promiscuous posthumous mode. I’m interested in writer’s relationship to his heteronyms, per loyalty, allegiance, identification, etc. as compared to writer’s relationship with his characters.

*

Alberto Caeiro.

Source: Poetry Magazine, 1955.

Everything was subject to fiction – and characters gained biographies, became letter-writers, created a stage for themselves. Each heteronym was nurtured as its own creation. Pessoa  practiced their signatures, carefully distinguishing them from his own. A signature was a man's word, a gentleman's honor in correspondence. It was a high-status pledge to deliver in that relationship. Pessoa invested signatures with a sort of magical power,  even as he subverted their conventional bonds.

In the past, literary alter egos had been adopted by adults (usually males) once they had already established writing careers. The purpose was to separate particular texts from their public personas and reputations, as seen in Kierkegaard, Yeats, Machado, Valery and others. But Pessoa created his collaborators when he was young, almost as a sort of initiation into writing, a reason for writing itself, rather than to balance a work against reputational considerations.

In "Aesthetics of Artificiality," Pessoa articulates his relationship to artifice as a mode of being: "I live aesthetically as someone else...” An excerpt (with my line breaks for reading purposes):

Life hinders the expression of life.

If I actually lived a great love, I would never be able to describe it.

Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in these meandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself.

Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else. I’ve sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being.

Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself.

Who am I behind this unreality?

I don’t know. I must be someone.

And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality.

I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not.

If I were to give in to life, I’d be destroyed.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light –where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy.

Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys.

And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me…

And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.

In order to have the friends and camaraderie he wanted, Pessoa had to invent them, and it.

One suspects many writers find themselves returning to the page in order to have conversations, or feel kinned to others. The person one becomes when writing is kindred. 

Pessoa, writing as Bernando Soares in The Book of Disquiet (with my line breaks):

To know nothing about yourself is to live.

To know yourself badly is to think.

To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word.

But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Pessoa loved the visionary scope of John Keats, how he wrote from what he imagined rather than what he saw. 

His last known writing, dated November 29, 1935: "I know not what tomorrow will bring".

Pessoa died next day, on November 30.

*

Alberto Caeiro once more, as translated by Eduard Roditi, and published in Poetry Magazine in 1955.

On May 1, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

“Now it is my knowledge…”

The domestication of death. The knowledge which was foreign and has become personal — though still foreign, still inarticulable.

A friend told me: “Welcome to the club of motherless daughters, where words fail us daily.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling it's faultiness more deeply than any of my readers."

How can be held responsible for this knowledge, for what grief asks of the self?

A few years before, in April—

It rained for three days and then stopped.

The yard was smothered in pine cones, tree legs, bark, and spring leaves.

The granddaughters wanted to help with Bunica’s yard. They went through a phase where helping was important to them.

She laughed from driveway as they swept the sidewalk with brooms fashioned from fallen tree limbs.

The granddaughters sang a song as they swept:

I’ve been working on the railroad
all the live long day
I’ve been working on the rail
road
just to pass the time away

Repetition; vertigo; mother’s role in making myths for children

Autopoiesis, or self-production, tries to explain why the identities of living systems remain constant despite incessant change. I am interested in how humans continue to produce a self after loss.

The image-idea of ourselves in art discourse.

The mythography of the self as narrated to others — and the memorial form this mythography assumes after someone’s death.

A myth applies to a culture, but families are their own countries, their own terrains of sustaining myths.

I keep saying the same thing to my kids, and yet this thing is simply the softer version of the true thing I wish to say to them. Will this true thing every be said? Can they discern it from the softer version?

Why am I so afraid of leaving them with the wrong words?

Robert Calasso:

"The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. …The mythical gesture is a wave, which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them."

There is mythography in Julio Cortazar’s play, The Kings, the first piece Cortazar published under his own name.

Begin with the statement: “I find everybody takes what they have and invents a history from it.”

And then a mirror.

Minos: “There’s something behind it. As there is in every mirror. There’s always someone who knows and waits. “ 

There is always someone who knows and waits. I just needed to say that aloud to my self in this laybrinth.

Minos: “Mothers don’t count. Everything Is determined by the burning seed that chooses them, and uses them. You’re the daughter of a king: Ariadne, the feared one; Ariadne, the golden dove. He is not ours. He is a construct. Do you know whom he is the brother of? His own cage, his own stone prison: the labyrinth.” 

Ariadne: “To hear something spoken out loud is not the same as to know its meaning in your heart. To know something without words, and have it stay in our hearts, protects us from our image of it like a piece of armor.”

Minos: “You persist in seeing a resemblance between us, where there is only a shared destiny.”

Apheresis: a medical treatment with roots in a Greek word that means to take away.

"I am not my own idea as I'm falling," Dan Beachy-Quick says of the sailor who tumbles from the ship's mast into the water below.

When falling, I am the thing someone else has seen. Or this is the way I have found to think about what falling means.

Falling from a mast is like falling off a cliff: one is finished. We are speaking of finitude.

“Even the song of the lark is pitched without rumor…”, Jack Heflin writes in his poem, “Amnesia.”

Can't and Won't with Lydia Davis.

Reading Lydia Davis always drops ideas for form and constraint straight into my Sunday brain. I’ve included a few below because each of them can be used as a model for writing, or for generating something in the same vein. All are excerpted from Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t: Stories.

And here’s a link to “How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” another story from this collection that makes a great have-at-it.

REVERSIBLE STORY: Use Davis’ reversible story as a model for your own doubling-over.

CAN’T AND WON’T: Write a brief paragraph about a contraction, or a set of contractions, where contracting led to consequences in an event. Even if the event was a misunderstanding. Even better.

THE LANGUAGE OF THINGS IN THE HOUSE: I’ve included the first page of this piece, and then excerpted some of the beautiful passages on languages which Davis intersperses between sounds. The juxtaposition, and the flagging with italics, is worthy studying. How do italics change the texture of the language in this particular piece?

Make an inventory of the language of things in your house. Sit down or go for a listening walk through each room. Then go back and write a few paragraphs on the story of origins for select sounds. Use italics. Experiment with diction and mythography (as opposed to Davis’ semantic focus).

On the unthinkable.

1

The mayor of Hudson, Ohio demanded that the members of the local school board members resign because high schoolers cannot write about sex, beer, or death.

To write about something requires us to consider it — to think about it — and to think about a thing involves a certain level of epistemological commitment.

Source: Harper’s Magazine

2

Many things are unthinkable, or difficult to consider.

When I think of the book one doesn't want to write, I think of Emily Rapp's memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, about her son, Ronan, who was born with Tay-Sachs. The book journeys through the "terra incognita" of raising a child to die. From the beginning, Rapp centers the presence of death in their lives--she tells people her baby is dying. The presence of dying in the verb to be.

The death of a mother giving birth to a child: Rapp considers this while studying death as it draws closer to the life of her son.

Can we speak a death into existence?

Is manifestation an actual power or a means of self-soothing?

Mary Shelley Godwin's mother died while giving birth to her. Was there any relationship between her mother's death and 18-year-old Mary Shelley’s habit of reading ghost stories with her friends and then challenging each other to write their worst?

They sat with the dead and wrote. Mary's lover, Percy Bysse Shelley, Lord Byron, and his pregnant lover, Claire, were fascinated by recent attempts to "animate" dead matter. Mary's story was published the following year, 1818, anonymously. Was she trying to animate the mother she lost?

Maybe we are all writing to animate dead matter.

3

The line between memoir and fiction is so tenuous when it comes to dying or remembering. When asked about memorable images, Jorge Luis Borges remembered the tigers in illustrated versions of childhood encyclopedias better than “the eyes or the smile of a woman.”

4

A nest is a space we dream of returning to.

An empty nest is space that wants someone to return to it.

“Values alter facts,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. “The moment we love an image, it cannot remain the copy of a fact.”

There is the loss of a child, and then there is its aftermath.

5

Ralph Waldo Emerson grieved his son’s death in patches, across decades, through pages. The harrow in his tone is made conspicuous by his efforts to hold it back. There is a passage in “Experience” where Emerson attempts to qualify grief, to send a boundary on it, and something in me always breaks when I read it.

How shaky the ground he trods here. How wobbly his footsteps.

Here is the passage (adding my own italics):

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, —no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, —neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the para-coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Grief does not teach — it simply lays claims which cannot be evidenced or substantiated — it throws us back upon eternity without leaving a recognizable notch in it.

6

In the space where Emerson declares "the evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest” to be "the most unhandsome part of our condition”, I met Stanley Cavell.

Or, I met Cavell’s own obsession, for this is the terrain to which Cavell returned in Emerson, again and again.

One of the few things I remember from my 21st year of life is Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. I know there were lakes, road trips, bagels with herring, walks in the cemetery with philosophy friends, a fiancee, two cats, two fifty gallon saltwater fishtanks— but Cavell is the part I remember most vividly.

Cavell was the text. And then he was the film. And then he was the next text, the one sitting to the left of Wittgenstein’s Tractautus. And then somewhere near Wittgeinstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

But Conditions came first. Conditions and the handful of other humans who met me in thinking through its words.

7

The conditions for speech are different than those of aesthetics. But thought is the way through a life.

Thoughtlessness is what a human can share with a red balloon.

I’m not interested in the Ohio mayor’s opinion on whether teenagers should be allowed to think through the most difficult, unspeakable, and humbling parts of human life. I am interested in how, and under what circumstances, we are encouraged to think — and what sort of thought is socialized in American high schools.

Problem-solving is a way of approaching a statement with an eye to lessening its claim on the mind. But a problem-solving approach doesn’t always require thinking; we approach the day’s tiny slights and bana; disturbances without falling deep into thought. Habit can get us across a street. Habit can regurgitate and recite. Reciting the pledge of allegiance is a habitual regurgitation. As is any anthem or ritual.

8

“I don’t think when I perform a difficult piece on the piano,” M. said tonight. “If I think, I lose my place— I lose my bearings in the flow. Performing is a strange alchemy of muscle memories, mathematics, and riding one’s nerve. You never know if the thought of someone’s feelings will rip you out of it. I think of nothing outside the music, and there are no words for how the mind operates when I am completely caught up in it.”

Is writing like this? I don’t know.

There are notes scribbled in pencil all over M.’s sheet music. He guards his notations, his marginalia, as one would guard a secret.

Composer Anton Rubinstein had his music seized at the border because Russian officials thought its notes were a kind of revolutionary code. Under the Tsar, if one signed a letter of love, it shouldn't imply insubordination to one's First Love for God or the Tsar. What Mikhail Bakunin called the Black Beast (the Russian empire’s combination of church and state) dragged Russia along behind them in a yoke. The Tsar's coronation was literally a sacrament equal to those services accompanying baptism, marriage, and extreme unction.

At 17, Arthur Rubenstein appeared at Scriabin's door and offered himself as an acolyte. He would be the first to introduce Scriabin's Fifth Piano Sonata to Londoners.

In Nexus, Henry Miller extols Scriabin as a divinity, a holy distraction from the world. 

Scriabin's Sonatas use Italian for the general tempo markings and French for the intimate particulars. I am writing a novel about this.

“That is why I acquired a taste for misanthropy; why I nurtured hypochondria; why I became the most (leaden-like) miserable of men,” wrote Erik Satie in 1924. “It distressed people to look at me — even through hall-marked gold eye-glasses. Oh yes.”

Oh yes.

9

Here’s a small excerpt from my imaginary version of 642 Things to Write About for high school students. There are no questions or puzzles to resolve. There is a human, a pen, a notebook, a rephrasing of the statement or argument followed by a response to it.

The response cannot be anything except one’s own.

There is no correct answer. There is no grade or score. There are only thoughts to be thunk, and unspeakable things to consider, closely. More closely. Again and again, and more.

Albert Camus: “The only fundamental philosopical question is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories –comes afterwards.”

Stanley Cavell: “Death, so caused, may be mysterious, but what founds these lives is clear enough: the capacity to love, the strength to found a life upon a love. That the love becomes incompatible with that life is tragic, but that it is maintained until the end is heroic. People capable of such love could have removed mountains; instead it has caved in upon them. One moral of such events is obvious: if you would avoid tragedy, avoid love; if you cannot avoid love, avoid integrity; if you cannot avoid integrity, avoid the world; if you cannot avoid the world, destroy it.”

Theodor Adorno: "On Popular Music".

Gaston Bachelard: “So there is also an alas in the song of tenderness. If we return to the old house as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing…The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician, dealing… with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.”

Stanley Cavell: “What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets me.”

David Nowell-Smith: "The Art of the Fugue: Heidegger on Rhythm".

Douglas Shadle: "Classical Music and the Color Line".

Igor Stravinsky: “If one only need break a habit to merit being labeled revolutionary, then every musician who has something to say and who in order to say it goes beyond the bounds of established convention would be known as revolutionary. [...] The quality of being revolutionary is generally attributed to artists in our day with a laudatory intent, undoubtedly because we are living in a period when revolution enjoys a kind of prestige among yesterday's elite. Let us understand each other: I am the first to recognize that daring is the motive force of the finest and greatest acts; which is all the more reason for not putting it unthinkingly at the service of disorder and base cravings in a desire to cause sensation at any price. I approve of daring; I set no limits to it. But likewise there are no limits to the mischief wrought by arbitrary acts.”

Charles Baudelaire: "It is evident that rhetorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies, but a collection of rules demanded by the very organization of the spiritual being, and never have prosodies and rhetorics kept originality from full manifesting itself. The contrary, that is to say, that they have aided the flowering of originality, would be infinitely more true."

Robert Temple: "The Philosophy of the Fugue".

Tyhembia Jess: "Sam Patterson, Harlem, NY: Dec. 12, 1924".

Stanley Cavell: “Appropriating” seems to have the same stress put on it in relating the individual to the world through the ownership of property as “belief has in relating the individual to the world through the acquisition and power of knowledge.”

Emily Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?”

Aaron Copland: "A Modernist Defends Modern Music".

"I think therefore I green": The elliptical Elizabeth Willis.

1

I didn’t expect to burn a weekend absorbed in Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems, an NYRB imprint published in 2015 . . . but the eerie perverseness of her images, the buoyant bungle of her syntax, distracted me from deadlines and other avowals.

This is the end of my body as you know it
its superfluous penchant for love
its poorer costume, its shiny disaster

A dramatic statement followed by an eludication which estranges rather than illuminates. The secret sibilance folded into lines, binding the words by syllable —- and the internal rhymes, as in “By the smallest shipwreck / a daughter is laughter” — I can’t locate a facile comparison for Willis’ poetic diction.

There are images which blaze and linger — “a wall torn from a shadow”; “the sequin we could never come as”; the young William Blake “with flowering ears and hearsay”—- and colors created for the world of plastics and flowers, that “neo-forsythia”.

Willis is comfortable in the prose poem, as seen in “Indirect Catastrophe”, a meditation on holiness, blasphemy, plagiarism, and the rose, the flower which crosses her poems and books.

I thought I was reading but suddenly I’m read. Some kind of artist then, painting his targets. Distinct or indistinct sensation? I prefer clarity when I can afford it. So what if another flower plagiarized the rosary? I’d pick up a dime in private or a quarter in public, money’s always been ‘dirty’, some kind of death wish. Sure I’d like to own a pet, not own but take care of, not a monkey or donkey, but something that loves you like money or luck. Not a puppy made of flowers but like music, in dog years.

In “Autographeme,” Willis tells us:

The present was a relic
of a past I was older than.

2

Willis takes an overwrought idiomatic expression that comes to us in folk culture or popular culture and shakes it. She shakes it and turns it and presses her back against until something gives. She also uses these expressions to haunt language, to make us approach differently.

The title, “Kiss Me Deadly,” evoked the Lita Ford ‘s chart-topping big-hair-era song of the same name..

3

Elizabeth Willis knows how to work an image down to the unexpected softness of marrow inside a bone. I think part of this has to do with her elliptical use of figurative language, and how she uses images to open a word, to crack the shell of a solid, known thing.

”Metaphor carries something across, but from then on, it’s fugitive,” Willis writes in Alive. It is a statement of poetics.

In “Elegy,” the poem moves by definition, but it does on wood stilts — so one can feel every bump and slight dip in the terrain. She plays with rhymes and homonyms; she lingers at the microcosmos of the syllable, and this is where she sharpens sound:

a petticoat of sand
the mind’s a hinge
a roughly chestnut arsenal
a little box of nothing
an incidental rose

The mind’s a hinge — the image is what she rides to the next sonic speedbump.

I felt the grass’s poem
blown against me
like a fake harp

The abstraction is anthropomorphized, given agency, as in “The Human Abstract”, where: “Innocence shags experience and I’ll never grow.” But then beginning, a few lines later, with this uncertain subject, this enlarged speaker, this soaring line break:

Inventing a dress and the bird
it remembers

Or, elsewhere: “Desire is a form of a fastening”. The mind halts before this small frame, this metaphor, this figurative re-defining.

Another Willis strategy involves using a colloquial expression or idiom and running sandpaper across it. She brings Descartes’ Cogito ero sum to “Plundering Honey” as an interjection:

O, I think therefore I green the grass I’m
pinned upon.

There is a bit of wiccanery in the idiom-play, or in the self-referential quality of the idioms she selects. Many are related to folk tales or fairy tales. Several poems reframe lines from the witches’ speech to Little Red Riding Hood.

In “Friday”, for example:

My heart caves in
the better to see you with

In “A Species is An Idea (1)”:

What bitter landscape
the better to see you with?

A few more thoughts, a haphazard bouquet. The use of definitions as a sort of integument, or a pole vault into the next image, doesn’t land us on firmer ground with Willis — it changes the stability of the terrain.

Metaphor: “This love is a deer crying in a gentleman”.

Similie: “Triumph arches over us like bad emotions.”

Similie leaning into enjambment for suspense: “It’s always personal / like the failure of a knee”.

Ending with a question, as in “Accidental Breezes”: “What little monster have I made, to favor love of all that’s said?”

Undoing of artistic conventions: “A fig leaf only makes a crotch more obvious.”

Pronoun fluidity, particularly in Address (which feels kinned to Gluck’s You): “In this type of you / I see I am a sequel”

4

“Sonnet 63 ½” is a damn marvel. It nudges Willis’ words from an earlier poem: “As when the heart has lied / yet has a figure in it.”

In the end-notes, Willis described “Sonnet 63 ½” as a “loose translation” of Shakespeare’s sonnet 63 and sonnet 64. The half suggests this sonnet lands somewhere in the middle. Juxtaposing the two sonnets in order to trace Willis’ “translation” is fascinating and generative.

Sonnet 63 begins: Against my love shall be, as I am now,

Sonnet 64 begins: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

Willis: Against love’s battle lies, ungrammatical.

She closes the sentence in that first line, contra Shakespeare. There are so many levels of engagement and translation in this poem— I could stare at it for hours. It’s an easy writing prompt, a generous model to thieve (and attribute, if the poem moves into drafts). For example, write a sonnet which loosely translates Willis’ “Sonnet 63 ½” and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 69”. Do whatever math makes sense for the titling.

5

Aritra Sanyal first met Willis in February 2019 at the Book Fair in Kolkota, and his interview shares the poems she read aloud, including “About the Author” and “Address”. When Sanyal asked what made it possible for poetry to resonate and reach out to a reader or audience, Willis suggested a slight wariness with the word, empathy:

I think it is mystery and curiosity more than empathy. What makes me slightly suspicious of empathy is that I think it suggests that one being knows–that they can and do know–what another being experiences. It seems to me entirely possible that that might happen in a mystical sense but not in a narrative sense. That is, I might relate to, or identify with, or have sympathy for another person’s experience, but I can’t know everything that informs it.

As we’ve been talking, I’ve often thought about how many resonances there are between our perceptions about poetic and political reality. But I hope I never presume to know, empathically, what you experience. It seems more appropriate to respect the differences as well as the similarities in what we know–what Frank O’Hara calls “the love we bear each other’s differences.”

“Fear isn’t always obvious, but obviousness is one of my greatest fears,” Willis wrote in Alive. Also: “When a mystery is made obvious people call it a revelation.” This comfort with inexhaustive definition is a mark of poetry, and one which Willis plays like a personal lyre.

The lyric of the image: “People think God is obvious, or not: everything or nothing. A hole held open by a word."

6

The use of aphorism characterizes her more recent writing. “Steady Digression to a Fixed Point,” which she dedicates to Rose Hobart and Joseph Cornell, is sharp example of Willis’ conceptualism. Aphorism is impressionstic here. The poem begins with Willis’ trademark flora, a gesture invoking Hobart:

A rose can’t change the world. It can only open or close.

The poem moves in fragments, cinematic collations, and assemblaged forms. I’ll add a few of my favorite lines in no particular order:

This is a poem about a fox. An alligator. The misplaced animals of the backlot.

About looking into the face of desire until it blinks.

An assemblage makes of an I a “we”.

The body is a formal constraint. It has this one life with which to make eternity.

7

Willis has written about the proximity of a burning world. Her essay, “Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone,” begins in brimstone, in “the part of us that’s subject to ignition.” Brimstone “is a kindler of rage.” The lyric essay layers a sort of geomorphology into the the language, and then ends with a question:

The AAA guide for Wyoming lists more jails as historical sites than any other category of tourist attraction.

Jails were made to last.

By what sulphurous art may poetry, the “true fiction,” labor to take them down?

“Without its leaky reverie, the face is a shield,” Willis poems. The leaky reverie here— the evocation of tears, wonder, pieta statues, without using the usual language. Evading in order to expose.

Or, as she wrote in “Viewless Floods of Heat”: “The body is always softer than its image. Shined up, collectible, all it imagined.”

[Get your own copy of Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems from NYRB.]