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P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N printed by cadmus professional communications, us Poetry • October 2010 • Volume 197 • Number 1 Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 444 N. Michigan Ave, Ste 1850, Chicago, IL 60611-4034. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, po 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, po Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2010 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Indexed in “Access,” “Humanities International Complete,” “Book Review Index,” “The Index of American Periodical Verse,” “Poem Finder,” and “Popular Periodical Index.” Manuscripts cannot be returned and will be destroyed unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope, or by international reply coupons and a self-addressed envelope from writers living abroad. Copying done for other than personal or internal reference use without the expressed permission of the Poetry Foundation is prohibited. Requests for special permission or bulk orders should be addressed to the Poetry Foundation. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the uk. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, in creative works contained herein is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
October 2010
POEMS rachel wetzsteon
3
Cabaret Ludwig Algonquin Afterthoughts The World Had Fled Rain at Reading Silver Roses
bob hicok
10
Feeling the draft Report from the black box A private public space Unmediated experience
eleanor ross taylor
17
Vita Schizotableau Trying to Get Through Small Trek
joel brouwer
21
Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees Lines on Marriage Lines on Distance
peter spagnuolo
28
Her Scar Interpol 22019 – 1.7: The Head of the Hatra Apollo
dean young
30
The New Optimism Speech Therapy
jane mead
32
The Geese Walking, Blues
COMMENT ange mlinko & iain mcgilchrist
37
This Is Your Brain On Poetry
fanny howe
50
Keepers of the Image
letters to the editor
57
contributors
58
rachel wetzsteon Cabaret Ludwig I’ll fly o≠ to a Δord in Norway, post “Oh the pain” above my doorway if you insist on going your way, for this is not a duck. That is what cowards say, and realists who run away, shun the appeal its rare white fur holds, although they feel it’s a rabbit full of pluck. Let’s multiply, let’s twitch our noses, let’s walk among the night’s dark roses, though where the oldest story goes is a place where tongues might cluck. I’ve had my share of quacks and hisses; whereof mouth cannot speak, it kisses; hop to it, man, and realize this is a lovely bit of luck.
RACH EL WET Z S T EON
3
Algonquin Afterthoughts By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying — Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying. — Dorothy Parker
Or else our drunken tumble was too true for daylight’s pleasure, too much in vino veritas troubled the gods of measure who sent bright draughts of sunshine down and sobered up my treasure. All night rapacity had come as naturally as breathing; we nibbled on each other’s necks like greedy babies teething. How soon an empty bottle makes one feel a blissful free thing. “Aspirin, aspirin,” he implored; I fed him several pills, and when he wondered where he was it gave me frightful chills, but still I told him of the party’s unexpected thrills. Words woke us up, reflection turned a≠ection to regret: “After she left me I tried not to do this, but I get so lonely” ... so I showed him out, warbling “I’m glad we met.”
4
P O E TR Y
But now I crave the swift return of scotch-transfigured nights, like Chaplin, horrified by his rich friend in City Lights who only recognizes him from liquor-gladdened heights, sticking a tall glass in the man’s upstanding hand (the clink or worse awaits poor tramps like us if scamps like you won’t think) and meekly scolding, in a voice weak with nostalgia, “Drink.”
RACH EL WET Z S T EON
5
The World Had Fled The world had fled, with all its silly cares and questionable aches, and in one swoon we rose above its stupefying airs like flying lovesick pigs up to the moon. In that blue light where two lives equaled all, our souls looked down upon a spinning ball. The world returned, and this was a surprise I raged against like someone on a rack, telling the sun, tears clouding my stunned eyes, give us our splendid isolation back. I craved third rails, a shot of something strong when I found out it doesn’t last for long. The world came back and stayed, pain never ended, but when the aches and cares begged for a hand, grew softer in the light we’d made and tended, I finally began to understand love’s widening third stage, and of the three this was the most outstanding ecstasy.
6
P O E TR Y
Rain at Reading We had gathered under a tent in the park for some words before lunch and after separate mornings, and when — twice — the poet said “capital,” the lightning bolts that followed the noun had me bolting too; I’d always suspected God’s communist leanings, but now I regretted how few exchanges we know between craft and climate: imagine a rhyme inciting a rainbow, blood feuds bruising the sky, hymns of forgiveness bringing a soft new light to the faces watching the last act, waltzes and songs and declamations — this would be capital entertainment! — locked in a clinch with open air. But the lightning was as quick as it was loud. The clouds dispersed, and then so did the crowd.
RACH EL WET Z S T EON
7
Silver Roses The strings, as if they knew the lovers are about to meet, begin to soar, and when he marches in the door they soar some more — half ecstasy, half pain, the musical equivalent of rain — while children who have grown up with one stare steal further looks across a crowded room, as goners tend to do. My father loved it too, warned me at dinner that he’d be a wreck long before the final trio came ( Ja, ja, she sighed, and gave him up forever); he found his Sophie better late than never and took the fifth about his silent tears but like him I’m a softie, with a massive gift for feeling blue. I went with others, threw bouquets and caution to the whirling wind, believing that the rhapsody on stage would waft its wonders up to our cheap seats; but mirrors can be beautiful fierce cheats, delusions of an over-smitten mind; I relished trouser roles until I had no petals left to strew. Up, down the avenue I wandered like a ghost, I wondered why a miracle is always a mirage, then plodded home and set back all the clocks, spent hard-won funds installing strong new locks, telling myself if violence like this could never sound like violins, I would to art, not life, be true.
8
P O E TR Y
And I am trying to fathom the way I got from there to here, the joy that snuck up when I’d sworn o≠ joy: we’ve made a sterling start, we’ve got a plan to watch it on your satin couch downtown and I’ll be there upon the stroke of eight, bearing in my trembling ungloved hand a silver rose for you.
RACH EL WET Z S T EON
9
bob hicok Feeling the draft We were young and it was an accomplishment to have a body. No one said this. No one said much beyond “throw me that sky” or “can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not. The lake was sent home and I ate too many beets, went around with beet-blood tongue worrying about my draft card-burning brother going to war. Other brothers became holes at first base at war, then a few holes Harleying back from war in their always it seemed green jackets with pockets galore and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered how to worship these giants. None of them wanted to talk to me or anyone it seemed but the river or certain un-helmeted curves at high speed, I had my body and flung it over branches and fences toward my coming sullenness as the gravity of girls’ hips began and my brother marched o≠ to march against the war. I watched di≠erent masses of bodies on tv, people saying no to the jungle with grenades and people saying no to the grenades with signs and my father saying no to all of them with the grinding of his teeth he spoke with. I’d pedal after the nos up and down a hill like it was somehow a rosary, somehow my body was a prayer I could chant by letting it loose with others like me milling around the everything below five feet tall that was ours, the everything below the adult line of sight that was ours to hold as long as we could: a year, a summer. Until the quarterback came back
10
P O E TR Y
without ... well, without. When the next Adonis stepped up to throw the bomb.
B OB H I COK
11
Report from the black box For Flaco
A cooler head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor asked his question and paused for us to watch him pause and think inside the pause, I almost answered as if we were in a bar, just the two of us and a balcony and spotlight. The two of us and programs and makeup and a sofa from the director’s living room and the black / womb / agora / séance of theater inviting us to feel together alone. I recall I don’t recall the question but its scope on his face was immense, as if he were the Milky Way asking am I pretty, am I here for sure for real for long and my breath was the quiet yessing of tall grass against the shoulders of a cat stalking the night. I actually opened my mouth before I actually thought you will be stoned and not in the good way, not with stones of tongues, stones of fingers against my forehead but the play was messy and tangible and full of the etceteras I am full of and why wouldn’t I want to talk with that is a question the poem is asking you to answer wherever you are without me is the problem theater solves, since we sit together in the dark with the dark because the dark deserves a face a soliloquy a lover a bow at the end. When I always wonder if the players regret that the lights come up and they see us as we are seeing them as they were, what a weird mirror that is, showing one side sudden appreciation and the resumption of loose ends, the other the vast
12
P O E TR Y
and devotional possibilities of being kidnapped by a dream and which side is which side are you on?
B OB H I COK
13
A private public space You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them to your party and they don’t come, they’re too busy tending vaginal flowers, hating football, walking their golden and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem in which she was in love with a woman and the church but the church couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed. When I asked if our coworkers knew, she dropped her head and I said nothing for years until this morning I realized no one reads poems: my secrets and hers are safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne, Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice, the name’s been changed to protect women who can’t stand in a room holding hands because you can’t trust heterosexuals to love love, however it comes. So I recorded the party for her, for them, the mic a bit away from the action to catch the feel of waves touching shore and letting go, the wash of moods across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes were thrown and I breathed the quickening revelation of a cigarette, someone said “I gave up underwear for Lent” and I hope
14
P O E TR Y
they play the tape while making love. As if finally the world’s made happy by who they are, laughing with, not at the nipple lick clit kiss hug in bed and after, the on and on of meals and moons and bills and burning days of pretending they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just a friend.” And oceans are merely dew upon the land.
B OB H I COK
15
Unmediated experience She does this thing. Our seventeenyear-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog. Our mostly dead dog, statistically speaking. When I crouch. When I put my mouth to her ear and shout her name. She walks away. Walks toward the nothing of speech. She even trots down the drive, ears up, as if my voice is coming home. It’s like watching a child believe in Christmas, right before you burn the tree down. Every time I do it, I think, this time she’ll turn to me. This time she’ll put voice to face. This time, I’ll be absolved of decay. Which is like being a child who believes in Christmas as the tree burns, as the drapes catch, as Santa lights a smoke with his blowtorch and asks, want one?
16
P O E TR Y
eleanor ross taylor Vita When I was two feet tall and held the hand above, how could I know how far that limping bond would go, that finger-inch of love.
ELEAN OR ROS S T AY LOR
17
Schizotableau She’s sitting at my little desk, drinking decaf. How’d she get back in? Where’s her blind man gone? (I pray he’s gone — though the desk needs tuning.) What door was unlocked? They all seemed bastioned. I sight through the crack. That’s my favorite cup, with the bite out of it. She’s writing one of my poems. Just who’s sitting at that desk, playing me? Shrubbery, thrashing to get in, lines all panes, long windows split in parallels. My windows set out on separate expeditions. They never meet, no matter how far extended.
18
P O E TR Y
Trying to Get Through I make a knife of words. I sit here waiting. I play with crumbs. Her eyes that should look straight at me are toward the window, glazed — husband’s horizon? Not armored. Only armed with pots and pans. Not out of arm’s reach, beyond curtains of doorbells, garden gates. She puts up ironwork in her eyes; it draws a bolt over what’s real — then looks at me. I wish I’d brought my saw.
ELEAN OR ROS S T AY LOR
19
Small Trek snowbound homebound hidebound hamstrung hogtied in a corner up a tree down the river nosedive headway deadmarch footloose pointblank playground
20
P O E TR Y
joel brouwer Lines from the Reports of the Investigative Committees The Department of the Interior and Department of Homeland Security announced a joint enquiry into the explosion and sinking of the Transocean Deepwater Horizon on April 22. The us House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have also announced investigations. Last week bp launched its own investigation into the incident and has an investigation team at work in Houston, Texas. — bp.com, April 28, 2010
Beneath three thousand feet, the sea is wholly dark. The shuttle feeds hydraulics to the blind shear ram and represents a single failure point for disconnect. Recommendation: Declare selected points on earth invisible. A≠ected communities have been provided with limited quantities of powdered milk and other staples. Many questions remain. Some close their eyes under water instinctively. Imagination can create a sense of peril where no real peril exists. Safety equipment tests were necessarily imaginary; mechanisms in question were wholly inaccessible. A journalist sinking into the mud was told to toss his camera to a colleague and hold extremely still. In this sense, we are our own prisoners. Investigators have salt in their hair and sand in their teeth. The hotel pool is empty. Yet questions remain. Barbeque billboards depict grinning pigs in aprons and toques. Cleanup crews recover thousands of plastic milk jugs from the shallows. Do these images appeal to the death drive? Care should be taken to ensure the highest possible reliability from that valve. Thousands in a≠ected communities have been evicted and live in tents. Demonstrators
J OEL B ROU WER
21
have prevented investigators from accessing hotel stairwells. 1900: Rudolf Diesel demonstrates an engine fueled by peanut oil at the Paris World’s Fair. The Vietnamese owner of Bad Bob’s bbq Bu≠et tells a journalist she last drank powdered milk in a refugee camp “a thousand years ago.” Items available only in limited quantities are found in Appendix c. Cleanup crews have stacked thousands of drums of dispersant in hotel parking lots. Dominant failure combinations for well control suggest additional safety mechanism diversity and redundancy provide additional reliability. Bank of America will o≠er limited foreclosure deferments in a≠ected communities. Thousands of years ago, a pronghorn ram slipped beneath the surface of a tar pit, jerking its snout for air. Recommendation: Live at inaccessible elevations. Recommendation: Close your eyes. Recommendation: Prevent access to the invisible. Engineering reports noted required safety mechanisms were unlikely to function yet were required for safety’s sake. If the committee may o≠er an analogy, a blind surgeon is dangerous, an imaginary surgeon harmless. Still, questions remain. bp’s 2010 q1 replacement cost profit was $5,598 million, compared with $2,387 million a year ago, an increase of 135%. Unlimited quantities of peanuts are available. However, care must be taken to ensure continued high reliability of the shuttle valve, since it is extremely critical to the overall disconnect operation. Phenomena not meant to be accessed or imagined are found in Appendix e. Cleanup crews are sometimes idled for lack of fuel. 1913: Diesel
22
P O E TR Y
found dead, drowned under suspicious circumstances. The investigators’ hotel toilets won’t flush. Midas turned everything he touched to gold. In this sense, seabirds cloaked in oil are rich. Cleanup crews live in tents and are provided with limited quantities of barbeque and wear white canvas jumpsuits like prisoners on furlough. If the committee may o≠er an analogy, the death drive resides at wholly dark depths of imagination and fuel issues from a wound we’ve opened there.
J OEL B ROU WER
23
Lines on Marriage You’re not dewy with sleep in the next room, or impossibly distant. You’re not here. “Bovary bores me, Bovary irritates me, the vulgarity of the subject gives me bouts of nausea.” You might be jogging or buying groceries. I don’t know where you are. It’s not midnight or high noon or dawn. It’s about three, I think, the hour Sartre said is always too early or too late for whatever it is you want to do. Flaubert hates his characters not because of what they do or who they are but because they don’t do anything and are no one. Which is to say they’re like us. You might be on the moon or puking gin at a truck stop but likely not. Emma buys a map of Paris to coordinate her ennui. We live
24
P O E TR Y
in a city, not on a map. Marriage can’t be a love story or a hate story because it’s not a story. “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” unlike “L’État, c’est moi,” is a diagnosis, not a boast, and the disease is pettiness and mediocrity, which is to say life itself, and as long as you are with me I wish never to be cured. Always too early or too late, but always.
J OEL B ROU WER
25
Lines on Distance She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned on first the radio and then the tap. The Predator operators of Nellis afb have as much or more ptsd as pilots who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant I listened to her work to wash events away as quickly as they accumulated. A sort of race. I thought of where the soap was going. Targets glowed on monitors in the base’s trailers near Las Vegas and operators in full flight suits drank co≠ee from paper cups and adjusted altitude as I stroked myself beneath the blankets. I don’t like to take chances and haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilots call people who run for cover, black sperm writhing across their screens, “squirters.” Near my finish line she tugged up the puckered rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should remind you of a time a doctor took hold of your arm for comfort or leverage and tore the bandage o≠. If nothing like this has happened to you, imagine it. The haberdasher in Diderot who stole his wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leave Paris for Geneva, sensing distance will make him less guilty. She wasn’t coming back to bed. She may already have left. Villagers call the drones, which make a buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radio reported to an empty room. “An assassin,” writes Diderot, “if transported to the shores of China, will lose sight of the corpse he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.” Asia’s always such a great place to hide,
26
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but Geneva’s obviously more convenient. Say she expected her husband to return from duty in a month. Would anything we did between now and then make us any more or less wretched than we were? The drone returns to Bagram without the missiles it left with and a soldier restores its complement. Either his name is Dan or else imagine that. And that a cuckold’s rage can snu≠ a bomb. I came into either a tissue or my fist. This was weeks or months ago, and I can’t recall. When de Castañeda and his men clambered down into the Grand Canyon in 1540, they found the boulders which had looked as tall as a man from the rim in fact stood taller than Seville’s La Giralda. They must have marveled at distance’s power to deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion. Their women and homes forgotten. You can’t hear their screams from here, but they’re there.
J OEL B ROU WER
27
peter spagnuolo Her Scar Remember me: the murmuring lips half said in half-light, buried in the hollow a boy’s neck made, as now inside his head they stir again, though twenty years swallow the purest parts of her, all but her plea, this taunt — what act from him could it command? The boy who’d know is gone — Re-member me — but what man can assemble limbs, make stand again those legs that twined in his, or hitch the yoke of hips to sway and resurrect a girl? I try, but only recollect her scar — each lewd, profaning, cautered stitch — vermiform, red, furrowed belly to breast: where nights, long past, he’d laid his head in rest.
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Interpol 22019-1.7: The Head of the Hatra Apollo Missing from the National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003
No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strains through burlap now, Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track across Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains, once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free. Or not — just stashed behind a rubbish mound where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal, scant miles from the museum’s shattered room. Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loom of sacred strings, no Horai here spin round, just pacing men who wait to close the deal. A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov: the godhead mute since looters hacked it o≠.
PET ER S PAG N U OLO
29
dean young The New Optimism The recital of the new optimism was oft interrupted, rudeness in the ramparts, an injured raven that needed attendance, pre-op nudity. The young who knew everything was new made babies who unforeseeably would one day present their complaint. Enough blame to go around but the new optimism didn’t stop, helped one pick up a brush, another a spatula even as the last polar bear sat on his shrinking berg thinking, I have been vicious but my soul is pure. And the new optimism loves the bear’s soul and makes images of it to sell at fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese, soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey, sand, hamburger drippings, lint, any and everything partaking of the glowing exfoliating cleanup. And the seal is sponged of oil spill. And the broken man is wheeled in a meal. War finally seems stupid enough. You look an animal in the eye before eating it and the gloomy weather makes the lilacs grow. Hello, oceans of air. Your dead cat loves you forever and will welcome you forever home.
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Speech Therapy The ugly duckling remained ugly its whole life but found others as ugly as itself, I guess that’s the message. Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard. Do you think if I hang around here long enough someone will pro≠er a mu∞n, one skulking shadow to another? Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt. Have I learned all the wrong lessons, the ones you shouldn’t know until the last dew-clogged lawn is mowed and the sun goes down on the ruined battlements? Why was I given a toy train if not to stage stupendous wrecks? Sure, I can walk by the sea holding a hand with as much melancholy as the next fellow, substituting the cries of slammed waves for the droll adumbrations of distraught skeletons, the day taking on the sheen of a stone removed from the mouth and skipped between the breakers jubilant and sunk.
DEAN Y OU N G
31
jane mead The Geese slicing this frozen sky know where they are going — and want to get there. Their call, both strange and familiar, calls to the strange and familiar heart, and the landscape becomes the landscape of being, which becomes the bright silos and snowy fields over which the nuanced and muscular geese are calling — while time and the heart take measure.
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Walking, Blues Rain so dark I can’t get through — train going by in a hurry. The voice said walk or die, I walked, — the train and the voice all blurry. I walked with my bones and my heart of chalk, not even a splintered notion: days of thought, nights of worry, — lonesome train in a hurry.
J AN E MEAD
33
ange mlinko & iain m c gilchrist This Is Your Brain On Poetry We’re fans of Iain McGilchrist’s new book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2010) — not only because it o≠ers a fascinating analysis of, and a clear warning about, our increasingly divided brains, but also because it contains lots of poetry. The best description of the book comes from the author himself, who says on his website (iainmcgilchrist.com) that “this book argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite di≠erent priorities and values.” The right brain, McGilchrist goes on to say, is responsible for our ability to see things in their totality, to make metaphorical connections, to fuse ideas and disciplines (science and poetry, for example). The left brain, by contrast, enables us to arrange and organize given information. It sorts and counts, it manipulates and controls. The title of McGilchrist’s book implies a clear hierarchy, but he is quick to point out that both sides of the brain, operating in tandem, are necessary to living a full human existence. However, over the past five hundred years or so the left brain, or the “emissary,” has been gaining control over the right brain, which for our happiness — and perhaps for our very survival — must be the “master.” The Master and His Emissary is a compelling, disturbing book, and we thought it would be a good idea to have a poet, one who knows her way around the scientific material, to engage McGilchrist’s ideas specifically from the angle of poetry. The result is the exchange below. — The editors
ange mlinko: I very much enjoyed reading The Master and His Emissary. I write short essay-reviews on language books for the Nation, so I am familiar with the popular work of linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists who by definition were scientifically trained; that’s where their education began and ended. You’re di≠erent. You pursued a degree in medicine and psychiatry after teaching English literature at Oxford. If anybody has delved deeply into two di≠erent kinds of knowing, it’s you. The Master and His Emissary does more than acknowledge the di≠erence and outright conflict between scientific method and humanistic tradition; it advocates for the embattled latter, by warning us that we are on a slippery slope toward an atomized, utilitarian culture in
AN GE MLI N K O & I AI N M C G I LCH RI S T
37
which intuition and feeling are suppressed, while the quantitative is valorized. Or, if intuition and feeling cannot be suppressed, they are e≠ectively isolated, not permitted to contribute to the public discourse. That is what I think has happened to poets (at least in the us), some of whom quietly resign themselves to their labeled bin, and some of whom are scrambling right now to reinvent poetry as a discourse as relevant to modern culture as Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. But the fact remains: poets can’t be considered possessors or transmitters of “knowledge” because we as a society have decided that knowledge is quantifiable — but art is not. Art is precisely the experiment that can’t be reproduced under identical conditions. In The Master and His Emissary, you give poets a shot in the arm: you argue, for instance, for the primacy of metaphor to our thinking, and you couch your entire argument in the title metaphor, borrowed from Nietzsche. Let me ask the obvious question: Did you have poets in mind as a potential audience for this book? Do you think poets have knowledge and should fight more vigorously for a place at the intellectual / cultural table? And as a corollary, did you ever think of incorporating contemporary poets’ work on epistemology into your research? O≠ the top of my head, I’m thinking of Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which asks what the role of the senses has been in the creation and reception of poetry through history; Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, which explores metaphors for value, economy, gain and loss in poetry; or Allen Grossman’s essays on the founding stories of poetry (Caedmon, Orpheus, Philomel). These are poets with profound things to say to the contemporary intellectual community and the culture at large, but they are ghettoized. What has to change? iain m c gilchrist : I have to admit that I probably didn’t have poets in mind, partly because they already know that metaphor is the only way of understanding anything. Clearly, however, many people don’t. Some reviewers have assumed that when I speak of the division of the hemispheres as having both literal and metaphoric truth, the metaphoric being probably the more important, it means I don’t really believe what I am saying at the scientific level. Rather a waste of time, then, my backing the neuroscience argument with all that carefully documented research.
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Of course I agree that poets have a form of knowledge that is hugely important, but, as you suggest, knowledge can never be inserted into other people in the way that data can be into a computer. If it’s knowledge, not information, that we want, we’ll have to keep struggling for it, and that means that those who purvey it have to wait to be heard. It is tempting to want to make poets more powerful, and give them voices at the table, but even if that could be achieved, which seems to me doubtful, I fear it would have the paradoxical e≠ect of making them no longer poets. The debate round that table is explicit and conducted in prose; it is in the nature of poetry to be hidden — as perhaps is all truth. Both Heidegger and Heraclitus certainly thought so, and both were cryptic, content to acknowledge that their audience would be limited, and each of them, in the end, wrote a kind of poetry. We live in a society where the indirect, the di∞cult, the implicit are not valued. But is the answer to abandon them in favor of their opposites, in order to get a hearing? That seems to defeat the purpose. I can’t help thinking of Auden’s response to Shelley: “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” are not the poets, but the secret police. I hope you won’t think that a rather defeatist position. I don’t see it as that at all. Subtlety and depth require tact, time, and sheer hard work, not likely to find favor in a culture that demands instant gratification, prefers the loud and the blatant over the quiet and tentative, and is impatient of the idea that nothing good is achieved without a battle. That’s not propitious for poetry, and it’s that we should hope to be able to change. am: I don’t at all think you’re being defeatist. I agree that it is in the nature of poetry to be hidden. It simply follows, for me, that if social conditions are less propitious for intuitive thinking, as your book argues, then they are correlatively less propitious for poetry. I’d like to bracket that thought and ask you more about metaphor. You say that poets “already know that metaphor is the only way of understanding anything,” but in American poetry metaphor has actually become somewhat unfashionable. For example, there is a wicked moment at the end of August Kleinzahler’s poem, “The Old Poet, Dying.” A poet in his hospital bed asks the narrator about a certain “big shot”:
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— You know that poem of his? Everyone knows that poem where he’s sitting indoors by the fire and it’s snowing outside and he suddenly feels a snowflake on his wrist? …………………....…………………………... — That’s not going to be just any old snowflake, now, is it? This probably sums up the general attitude: metaphor is obvious, or precious, or merely ornamental. I’m also thinking of the avant-garde poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, who recently made a distinction between poets of metaphor and poets of metonymy, metonymy being the more progressive. I thought I might run a couple of widely anthologized poems by you, one metaphorical and one metonymic. I know you like Philip Larkin, so I’m guessing you already know this poem, “The Trees”: The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. This to me is a metaphorical poem rooted firmly in the English tradition; I loved it when I first read it many years ago. Now here is another poem I love, John Ashbery’s “Some Trees”:
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These are amazing: each Joining a neighbor, as though speech Were a still performance. Arranging by chance To meet as far this morning From the world as agreeing With it, you and I Are suddenly what the trees try To tell us we are: That their merely being there Means something; that soon We may touch, love, explain. And glad not to have invented Such comeliness, we are surrounded: A silence already filled with noises, A canvas on which emerges A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, Our days put on such reticence These accents seem their own defense. Here you can see the e≠ect depends more on contiguity than simple one-to-one correspondence between vehicle and tenor. So, as I say, recent American poetry is more indebted to the latter poem than the former. And I have to admit, I think the latter poem makes more demands on capacities you associate with righthemisphere activity: it demands more frame shifts and readiness for new experience (from line to line, only the rhymes set up and fulfill expectation; the sense is never anticipated). Our assumptions are continually revised. On the other hand, the poem is largely decontextualized and impersonal, so you might see it as appealing to a more left-brained Modernist? The Larkin poem, it seems to me, depends on capacities you determined are left-brain. It is unswervingly focused on its metaphor. It sticks to a metrical grid. It is logically sequenced and it basically reiterates ancient wisdom equating spring with resurrection. We’ve
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seen this message before, in other words. I’m not denying that the poem is masterful, and pleasurable, any more than I would deny that the Ashbery poem is more di∞cult, precarious, and less “sticky.” But within the framework of right and left brain, which you established, the Modernist poem seems to stay a couple steps ahead of us, teasing us with intuitive possibility, whereas the traditional metaphoric poem paraphrases information we already have. I suppose I wonder what conclusions you, a critic of Modernism, might draw from this. I wonder also if the conventional wisdom — that poets have not kept up with science — is precisely backwards, and it is science that has not kept up with poets. That is, I don’t think neuroimaging can tell us as much about our genius for elasticity, for associations, as “Some Trees.” I’m interested to hear your opinion because I was genuinely shocked at your critique of Modernist painting — even Matisse, whom I think of as so joyful, is rebuked for the flattened perspective. I admit, your argument made me examine my own fetishization of this era, and wonder if it’s a symptom of my capitulation to the “disenchanted world.” im : It was the Enlightenment that first thought metaphor “obvious, or precious, or merely ornamental” — and, as I say in my book, I believe that is an inevitable consequence of the left hemisphere’s view of language. Kleinzahler’s poem is terrific, and very funny, but the derided image only succeeded in reminding me of that devastating scene at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which uses just such a metaphor with enormous power: Kris returns to his father’s dacha and, unseen by the old man, looks in from the rain through the window, only to see the old man stooping over a table on which he is sorting photographs, smoking raindrops inexplicably falling, too, on the back of his father’s jacket. The right hemisphere is not just better at understanding metaphor in the strictest sense, but at making unusual connections, and therefore at any non-literal use of language. I don’t think we need to get hung up on that: metonymy is also going to be a righthemisphere function — indeed my thesis is that poetry is nothing if not a recruitment of the right hemisphere. So the “metaphor versus metonymy” debate may be interesting in itself, but does not impinge on the hemisphere question. Incidentally, why does there have to be
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an either / or — shades of the left hemisphere! — to it? Can’t we go with both? About the two poems, both excellent in their way, I’d disagree. You have chosen a particularly simple poem of Larkin’s, possibly his simplest. Another famous poem about spring uses metaphor in a more oblique and, I think, if possible, still more powerful way: On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon — And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy. — From Coming
Here the intimations of recovery and forgiveness, coming out of su≠ering and desolation, and also of a deep bareness out of which something unimaginably rich is to come — for a while — are subtle and complex. But “The Trees” is itself far richer and more subversive than you make it seem. In fact it inverts what we thought we knew. It does not reiterate “ancient wisdom equating spring with resurrection,” but introduces the opposite, setting up a fatal counterpoint of permanence with impermanence, of renewal with decay. Trees in spring, it turns out, speak to us of aging and death, and “their greenness is a kind of grief,” a line so wonderfully right, once it is said, that one scarcely notices its reversal of received truth. They only “seem to say” that we can begin afresh: theirs is a “yearly trick,” since, though
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enacting renewal, they are actually dying, like us. Incidentally, the closeness of spring to grief is a deep perception: the peak of suicide is not in the winter, as one might expect, but in the spring. In any case a metaphor does not have to be new: in fact the best ones never can be. They are like the language of love, as old as the hills and yet fresh with every new lover. The trick of the poet is to make what seemed feeble, old, dead come back to life. True metaphor is a union like love; perhaps, to use another old metaphor: a durable fire In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning. — From Pilgrim to Pilgrim, by Sir Walter Ralegh
And I could not agree less that having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting, or tends to suggest the left hemisphere’s attitude to language. They are the condition of all music and dance, the right hemisphere’s domain, and when we decide to dispense with them, we take a knowing risk. Here the resigned simplicity of the regular meter emphasizes the inevitability of its subject. Compare Housman’s: For nature, heartless, witless nature, Will neither care nor know What stranger’s feet may find the meadow And trespass there and go, Nor ask amid the dews of morning If they are mine or no. — From Last Poems
Or Johnson’s: Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blast or slow decline Our social comforts drop away. — From On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet, a Practiser in Physic
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The Ashbery is a great poem, too, but just because it takes more working out exactly what is being said, it seems to me the less powerful of the two. The last line, “these accents seem their own defense,” although suggestively self-referring, is so far from transparent that it makes us scratch our heads at the very moment when the poet needs to carry us with him. There is a tension between what has to engage our conscious debating minds and what must carry us into a realm beyond any such ratiocination. An excessive fear of being direct, and the worship of the di∞cult, endemic in Modernism, threaten at times to undermine the direction that poetry inevitably takes, away from what we have to “work out” for ourselves toward what we thought we knew already, but in fact never understood. In poetry, being simple takes more skill than being di∞cult. It comes back to a fundamental distinction between newness and novelty which I make repeatedly in The Master and His Emissary: poetry need not seek novelty, because true poetry makes what had seemed familiar new. As to my critique of Modernism, I hoped I had made it clear that I consider poetry, along with film and jazz, to be one of its great triumphs. And I too enjoy Matisse, but introduced him to make the point about the deeper meaning of the loss of perspective — not just the old chestnut about there being no privileged point of view any more, but the way loss of perspective destroys depth, and therefore to a large extent our felt connectedness with what it is we are viewing. am: The problem here, Iain, is that I make a terrible spokesperson for the idea that metaphor is passé. Of course I don’t believe we have to choose between metaphor and metonymy; of course Larkin’s poem actually inverts the cliches of spring within that disarmingly simple song structure. But Waldrop’s distinction certainly holds true for American poets in search of the poetry of the future. And if Larkin’s poem successfully deploys a metaphor to hold two opposing ideas aloft, I see American poets trying to find a way to hold a multitude of indeterminacies aloft. Certainly these poets seek a freedom that includes the freedom to fail (which remains a possibility whether one accepts or rejects tradition!). Cole Swensen’s introduction to American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry quotes Paul Auster’s observation that “most twentieth-century American poets took their cue either from the British poetic tradition or from the French.” If Swensen’s
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anthology is the new mainstream, then Rimbaud’s “We must be absolutely modern” and his “willful derangement of the senses” has prevailed over the poets that created continuity with the British tradition, like Frost (who, like Emily Dickinson, saw metaphor-making as a primary task). A typical poem in the anthology might elicit the same skepticism that prompted you to say of Ashbery’s poem, “There is a tension between what has to engage our conscious debating minds and what must carry us into a realm beyond any such ratiocination.” It’s tempting therefore to suggest that French-inflected American poetry needs more ratiocination, not less. But also, if this is the period style, it must say something about the period: perhaps that the disenchanted world provokes an over-aphasic poetry in reaction. Regarding meter: I wasn’t suggesting that “having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting” — I was merely referring to your book, since on page seventy-four you say, “discriminating rhythm patterns activates broadly distributed networks in temporal, inferior parietal and prefrontal cortex almost exclusively in the right hemisphere. However, some basic, metrical rhythms are mediated by the left hemisphere, particularly by Broca’s area.” (The italics are mine.) I interpreted this to mean that the anchoring e≠ect of meter gives a kind of pragmatic left-brain armature to a poem. This is not, by my lights, a bad thing. On the other hand, I agree it would be overdetermining things to go down a list of poetic devices and assign them a right-brain or a left-brain value. I know that certain writers — Ian McEwan and Richard Powers come to mind — incorporate science into their work and find it liberating that brain research gives us useful empirical knowledge about literary devices and their e∞cacy. Other writers, like Marilyn Robinson, inveigh against scientism for undermining the authority that individuals have over their own experience, let alone the authority that artists have over their own art. You caution your readers that neuroimaging is “not as precise a science as it may appear,” explaining for instance that current fmri methods can’t distinguish inhibitory from activating events in the brain. Or that, in fact, less brain activity registers in areas where we have the most expertise: “For example, people with higher iqs have lower cerebral metabolic rates during mentally active conditions.” So given the fact that we’re absorbing these things secondhand, and from unreliable sources, what indeed is the stance poets should take toward research reported in the press? To evoke your own term, what disposition
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should we have toward a discipline that seems to confirm some intuitions we have, but perhaps not others? I love that you argue that, Saussure notwithstanding, not all musical and linguistic associations are arbitrary and conventional. The minor key really is sad; there is a biological underpinning to syntax. But by accepting closure on such debates, does the poet risk becoming a mere emissary to the scientific masters? And by doing so, aren’t we giving up that “freedom to fail” which gives the artist a sense of her own autonomy, not to mention the thrill of risk-taking? im: That’s a really interesting point. I am not impressed by the trend towards neuroscience in the modern novel — it seems to me bound up with a sense of inferiority, as though, despite the bravado, we accept that our realities are only playacting, while the scientists know what’s really going on. It reminds me a bit of colonial subjects in the bad old days, dressing like the Brits in order to be taken seriously. How it messed up the study of literature, all those university departments that had to prove they were doing something di∞cult and serious, a form of science! We badly need an antidote to this culture: we should not be concerned with proving ourselves clever, but rejoicing in doing something science could never do on its own, understanding and celebrating experience — otherwise known as life. Poets and all artists take the inside view: as I say in the book, the brain is just the view from the outside. It’s not more real. But that is di≠erent from denying the way in which we are to a large extent determined by things outside our consciousness and outside our control. It starts with being alive at all, and ends with the inevitability of death, and covers most of what goes on between. We are obsessed with self-determination, but freedom is, of course, paradoxical. I love, like you, the fact that there are givens, that we can’t make the world any way we want. How lonely that would be — in fact it would be precisely the left hemisphere’s world, one entirely made by ourselves, shiny, clean, without friction or contradiction. It is the postmodern predicament: nothing really exists because we made it all up ourselves. For me, though, everything depends on the reciprocal relationship between our minds and the relatively independent world beyond them. The solidifying of spirit into matter, the business of incarnation, provides the necessary resistance without which nothing could move, or change, or have any meaning. I was thinking
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of that absolutely extraordinary and puzzling moment toward the end of Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” where he describes the “halcyon,” the kingfisher — do you have them in America? — little bright blue and orange birds, very shy and immensely fast, which live in the river banks; and he says: So when the shadows laid asleep From underneath these banks do creep, And on the river as it flows With eben shuts begin to close; The modest halcyon comes in sight, Flying betwixt the day and night; And such an horror calm and dumb, Admiring Nature does benumb. The viscous air, wheres’e’er she fly, Follows and sucks her azure dye; The jellying stream compacts below, If it might fix her shadow so; The stupid fishes hang, as plain As flies in crystal overta’en; And men the silent scene assist, Charmed with the sapphire-wingèd mist. The strange idea (intensified by the talk of “horror calm and dumb”) that the world becomes thickened, resistant, gloopy, and fixed, contrasting with this little swiftly darting flash of brilliance speaks of the nature of incarnate life, and I wonder if Lawrence had it in mind when he wrote those wonderful lines about the primeval forests: I can imagine, in some otherworld Primeval-dumb, far back In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed, Humming-birds raced down the avenues. Before anything had a soul, While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate, This little bit chipped o≠ in brilliance And went whizzing through the slow, vast succulent stems. — From Humming-Bird
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Actually, I think Lawrence’s lines are even greater. The movement of those last two lines is itself the best expression of what it describes, the tension between life and the resistance to life that makes creation possible, and I often mutter them to myself for the sheer pleasure of it, especially if I am lucky enough to see a bird flashing through the gunnera — like soul and body, each as awe-inspiring as the other. am: Thank you, Iain. Just one more question: given your passion and knowledge of the field, have you considered writing a book on poetry? (I think there should be more books about poetry that take “the inside view,” as you put it.) In any case, knowing that there are readers of poetry like you out in the world raises the bar for this poet. im: Well, Ange, that is a lovely thing to say. Certainly I am passionate about poetry, but I never really know whether I have anything to say about it. I did once try — in a book called Against Criticism, which nonetheless was a book of criticism — my belief being that talking about poetry can work only by sleight of hand, in a paradoxical fashion, almost working “against” itself (hence the title). It has to avail itself of the right hemisphere’s understanding of the paramount importance of the oblique and the implicit. Perhaps to revisit Auden’s remark about Shelley, critics should be more like secret agents, even if poets should not be like the secret police. And if they have to smuggle their perceptions into our minds, are they really very di≠erent from poets, who also have to smuggle in their jewels by distracting the o∞cers of the left hemisphere, our busy everyday minds? Here’s to subversion, and here’s to poetry!
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fanny howe Keepers of the Image A few years ago, I completed seven years of work on an adaptation of poetry from Polish to English. The book, A Wall of Two, was comprised of poetry written by two young women, basically girls, inside the barbed wire of labor camps. When my task was completed I put away the originals and other pieces of writing by the two sisters, especially one of them, my friend Ilona Karmel. Born in 1925 in Poland, she was a poet as a youth, a novelist in middle age, and a teacher later. I would say she was my mentor. So I was surprised by the discovery of a three-page document of hers I hadn’t seen before when I was emptying out boxes of papers and letters in my attic. She had typed it herself and had made a few corrections. So why didn’t I recognize it? It seemed like a short speech she might have been asked to present before reading aloud from her novel. To me the discovery was similar to the “message in the bottle” that Paul Celan used to describe his poetry. Her message gave me comfort, because it pulled me back from the icy knife of psychology; its authority was born from an experience. The message was both casual and deeply thought, and its purpose was to explain why she had been compelled to write her masterpiece, An Estate of Memory. My purpose writing this now is to share this thing of value from the twentieth century and in particular from the war that has haunted our world, from painting to film to poetry, as a collective nightmare. The experience of that time belonged to Ilona’s generation, though the residue of the experience has glowed in the structures of literature and philosophy and other arts, like pieces of shrapnel in a patient’s brain. *
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*
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Like Dostoyevsky, Ilona Karmel pursued truth (without quotes) through a relentless and unfavorable account of human behavior, interrupted fleetingly by something wonderful and strange. She wrote: “I began my novel with only one assumption; that man lives in constant tension between contradictory forces within himself, above all what I would call ‘the everyday and the Sabbath’ — his awareness of himself as he is, and his longing for what he wants to become.” Karmel and Dostoyevsky had experienced the worst in human behavior, mostly inside prisons, and were unable to forget it. Both used the common word “freedom” for the moment when an unforeseen act of self-abandonment occurs. This moment of freedom releases one from the everyday and the inevitable, and sometimes has the reckless look of suicide. For both of them — if they failed to find a trace of that freedom in their long labors at writing and remembering — life would continue as a dazzling aftere≠ect of hell, a mirage of trauma, like the lightningfast Shoah in Hiroshima. *
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In order to trace the path of an unselfish act through plot and character one would have to account for every troubled step around real rooms, barracks, cells, and streets. It would involve making this exceptional act inevitable in relation to one person’s character in the midst of causes and contingencies. The everyday life of people in prison or war is not at all ordinary, and it is not science fiction. Its extreme abjectness and drudgery encourage both false claims and self-censorship. To make any gesture that transcends such a situation would be incredible. But for such writers as these, “transcendence” was not part of the equation. Paradoxically, each wanted to take the mystery out of selfsacrifice and prove its place in human personality, while at the same time revealing it to be an unpremeditated gesture, or one act that lacks the logic of will.
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Karmel’s mother, in Buchenwald, told her teenage daughters to behave well because “the world will be the world again.” This was, I suppose, her continuing daydream: a sabbath world, slavery finished, a return to the safe social structures she had built for her children out of tradition and her own childhood. She would never have imagined the situation that actually followed: instant communication with people around the world, speedy travel, and flashing pictures like open windows on everywhere. An inverted world turned so that the identification of a particle proves that there is no other purpose for its existence beyond its being found and named by a human mind. *
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At the conclusion of her essay, Karmel wrote: Somehow halfway through the book I realized that my characters — though none of [ Janusz] Korczak’s stature — were following in his footsteps. I tried to describe those steps as exactly as I could.... To describe this is all the book attempts to do; not to accuse or complain (the time for this has passed), nor to propound a thesis, just to describe the changes which, from the shabby origins of our love, can lead to this act and this death. Korczak was the teacher and writer who founded an orphanage during the war in the Warsaw ghetto, and died voluntarily (the ss o≠ered him his freedom) in Treblinka with the children. It was the unaccountable quality of a life like his that made her weave her way through the thicket of plot in search of an explanation for it. She had witnessed, in the camps, an act of self-sacrifice on the part of a young girl that she could not forget. (A pretty blond teen who was considered superficial put herself, spontaneously and voluntarily, in place of someone else on the gallows.) And she saw smaller acts of radical kindness, none of them determined by convention but by an extreme lucidity.
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Her fiction is a documentation of days as she experienced them in a particular period. As if being constructed as a record for later historians, it’s painstaking in its accumulated detail. Shoes, foods, jewels, barracks, beds, snow, and faces. The characters are neither good nor evil but described inside folds of necessity. It would have to be this way. The story involves a struggle to recognize the world as it is given when it is given at its worst. How do people stay sane when others, just like themselves, behave in unrecognizable ways? *
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I know that it took her ten years to write the novel. She was in Germany with her husband then, and working in an orphanage. She made a vow. She would write down what had happened during the war with the sole desire to salvage meaning from the facts, to rescue the integrity of the people who had struggled with their shortcomings when corralled into slavery and had, in a few cases, changed for the better. She loathed sentimentality, especially about people who endured prison camps during the war. To redeem them from the smear of pathos by making their di∞cult personalities real again, and then to see what would happen, was part of her goal. In other words, to see what a human being is in relation to ethics, others. She stripped her characters, one by one, of passively accepted values, and tested them in a world where anything was possible, even killing children. Her purpose was more than a demand that we remember what happened. It was a demand that we rescue meaning (what is just possible, about to be born) ... to rescue human beings from self-loathing by reminding them of acts of charity. She wrote in her essay: “Terrified and alone one turns to others, not out of love, just out of the desperate and self-centered need for comfort. Those are the shabby beginnings of our love. Yet gradually a transformation occurs. He who knows how to grant comfort
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becomes the guarantor of hope, the keeper of one’s image of oneself.... No ideals of self-sacrifice or courage are now at work. Just the inner necessity to defend what has become too precious to be destroyed.” *
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And this explains why she called the essay “Keepers of the Image.” Those who are keepers of images are people selected to hold a precious object safe. They are entrusted with the work of protecting, say, the Emerald Buddha, the Torah, or the Virgin of Guadalupe from the onslaught of wars and plunders. They have taken a vow to do so because of the singular nature of the image itself. The image is a representation of a secret self, the being one longs to be, the sabbath-self, the infant. The keeper’s vow sweeps aside everyday life for the sake of a distant achievement. Everyday life is both the cover for the image and the vehicle for the vow. Often this involves a vision of something as yet uncreated. The vow to enter the future might be addressed to a distant point outside of oneself, but its source remains tangled in the interior, like the beginning of a little cry. The cry is aimed into an infinity of air, or an ear of infinite depth, expecting to be heard somewhere by a You whom we do not know, a kind of eternal estate of memory. The vow to protect an image is a way of transcending the days you pass through by holding something that is not yet realized in human form, holding it against you, in secret. You might vow to stay true to someone until the end of your life. You might vow to spend your life working on a peace agreement. Or to end capital punishment. Or to finish a piece of work. You cannot vow to see something happen that you wish would happen, however. You can only vow to labor for that something. (In a sense, this is what makes revenge dependent on lies and dishonesty.) When a person becomes the keeper of an image, it requires a vow that is strange. This is because the significance of the image is only revealed in the act of preserving it, and the vow to be the one who
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sustains that significance must continually endow it with attention to the exclusion of real life, the everyday passing. For Karmel, the vow to write the record of that time, to take as long as was needed to complete the documenting, ensured her status as the keeper of an image. *
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In the same cardboard box, under more papers, I found handwritten notes that Karmel had made, perhaps for a class, on passages from Proust, Henry James, and Franz Rosenzweig. And then there were two pages of random observations of the sort that are found in notebooks, but in this case they were on loose sheets. They struck me as many such writings do, as having a power in their very roughness and haste. Spontaneous writing suggests, if nothing else, a poetic way — that is, a way that includes a non-performative and non-egoistic reportage. Like the notes of Simone Weil written during her three weeks in a transit camp in Casablanca, unedited and unsolicited, these cuttings from Karmel’s thoughts help us see that she looked for meaning in every spare moment, how swiftly it comes and goes. The very fact that she wrote poetry in Buchenwald suggests that poetry itself is a part of the mind reserved for resistance to force. Poetry doesn’t just help someone survive, it is a survivor itself: fluid, protean, as it passes through walls, and brings a particular beat to a way of thinking and being. *
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In other words poetry is not just a set of enjambed lines on a page. It is not just poetry. Ideally poetry reveals the face of justice through syntax, balance, image. That is, the harmony strung between two disparate images. It doesn’t give more to one than to another. It is visible in all things that are unfolding and disappearing. It o≠ers a trace of freedom. And so it is the opposite of oppressive, opinionated, controlling or controlled.
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The word “image” is central. The proliferation of images showing the distance between the earth seen from miles above and the globe, its ground stained by rubbish — these images inspire ghastly fear, not just awe, because there is no particular harmony between the two. Are these the few pure remnants of the work of the twentieth century? Works of technology rather than imagination? And another question: can we recognize ourselves? — stays with us, just as warm arms and kindness remain basic to our existence. How can we enter the new versions of time and space without remembering that physics produced the bombs over Japan and now, having accomplished that, will take us to another drama, or trauma? This is where we stand, face to the sky, waiting for the next readjustment to our self-image. Materialized and identified, but instantly gone from past to past to past. A leap out of one’s seemingly determined fate (an act of charity) can come from any number of experiences as the novel, An Estate of Memory, labored to prove, and this message is o≠ered to the twentieth century as something to be treasured. More than ever, now: to believe there is something that is not simply a norm. In a sense, when this epiphany takes place, it is a miracle. A miracle is an event that changes the meaning of things. It is like a thought that floats free of the surrounding systems and conventions, and enters, uninvited, a sentence, a stanza, a conversation, a lab result, and sends it on another path. A miracle can be the appearance of another person rising out of an emptiness that we are beginning to accept as permanent. As Paul Celan wrote, it is a rumbling: it is Truth itself walked among men, amidst the metaphor squall.
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, I was dismayed to find this passage in Daisy Fried’s letter to the editor [ July / August 2010] in response to David Biespiel’s essay [May 2010]: Since no thinking person could possibly see the Bush administration in a positive light, and Gioia is a thinking person, he must have believed that the good he could do as head of the nea — and he certainly did good — outweighed the symbolic evil of agreeing to serve America’s most malignant administration ever. I’ve learned never to introduce politics or one’s political views unnecessarily into a discussion because it most often clouds the issue and polarizes one’s audience. But, even when this is unavoidable, it can be done more artfully than with invidious phrases like “most ... ever,” and plain condescension such as “since no thinking person could possibly [disagree with me].” This last is particularly arrogant and high-handed: regardless of what Fried is talking about, her language itself singles out a fraction of your readers and tells them, “You are not thinking persons; you must be idiots.” While such rhetorical flourishes are perfectly befitting of a blog, they are less well-suited to scholarly exhibition, and hardly becoming of the edifice that countenances them. A letter to the editor is about communicating a point, but such sentences are not about communicating, since they often a≠ront the audience and turn o≠ people who had hitherto been receptive readers. This is mere self-indulgence, and it detracts from what is otherwise an interesting letter. paul baumstarck falls church, virginia Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail to
[email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we cannot reply to every letter.
LET T ERS
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CONTRIBUTORS
joel brouwer’s most recent book is And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He teaches at the University of Alabama. james harren * was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He studied fine art for three years before transferring to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan to study cartooning. He left sva after a year to pursue work with Marvel Entertainment. bob hicok’s most recent book is Words for Empty and Words for Full (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). fanny howe is the author of over twenty books, most recently What Did I Do Wrong? (Flood Editions, 2009). She currently teaches at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown. iain m c gilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he researched and taught English Literature, and a former consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital, London. He works privately in London. jane mead is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Lannan, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations and the author of three collections of poetry. She is on the faculty of the Drew University Low-Residency mfa Program and farms in Northern California. ange mlinko’s new book of poems is Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010). She teaches at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. peter spagnuolo lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is the author of the chapbook-poem Egg and Dart (Filter Press , 2010). eleanor ross taylor’s latest book is Captive Voices (lsu Press, 2009). She is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Poetry Foundation’s 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
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P O E TR Y
rachel wetzsteon (1967 – 2009) is the author of The Other Stars (1994) and Home and Away (1998), both from Penguin, and Sakura Park (Persea Books, 2006). A new collection of poems, Silver Roses, is forthcoming from Persea Books. dean young is the William Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas-Austin.
* First appearance in Poetry.
CON T RI B U T ORS
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