The mirror can be the starting point of a visual spiral of reality as is seen when, in Higuchinsky’s film Uzumaki[1], Shuichi’s father films himself reflecting in a mirror on his way to a watery, spiraling death in a washing machine. This then also becomes a spiraling point of reflection for the other characters who are then able to piece together the possessing power spirals hold over their town. As they attempt to decipher the meaning in the particulars of this death, they discover that the word transliterated as kagami is the same set of syllables (although written with different characters) meaning both mirror and snake, the snake’s coils being a natural version of the uzumaki or spiral[2]. The snake is also here connected with eternal life, which in this instance this can only be seen as infinite through reincarnation, or a spiraling transmutation of soul. This town seems susceptible to this spiral possession – as well a lack of the recognition of this fact until it is too late – in part because most of its members are living so fully on the surface that they do not have the depth needed of and for reflection. Without the true spiraling of meaning brought about by reflection, their lives are merely repetitive actions. Yet when one descends deeply into such powerful reflection, one can lose the self and the dayworld in the spiraling interconnectedness recognizable through such an act. Hillman would not see this as a negative loss, for he argues that we must leave the dayworld meanings behind us and seek the metaphoric in underworld imaginings.
The reflecting power of mirrors is also used by Murakami to bring about Boku’s moment of epiphany when he realizes that the Rat is dead, a ghost who has visited him initially in the form of the Sheep Man, and more solidly setting Boku on a path of self-reflection and the realization that his true quest was personal rather than solely for the mysterious star-marked sheep. After cleaning the mirror during his purification of the house (and symbolically of himself), Murakami’s narrator relates:
The mirror reflected my image from head to toe, without warping, almost pristinely. I stood there and looked at myself. Nothing new. I was me, with my usual nothing-special expression. My image was unnecessarily sharp, however. I wasn’t seeing my mirror-flat mirror-image. It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me. (318-319)
This is a clear example of Frye’s comment in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance that, “When the action passes from one level to another through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex, to use another Yeats image, a feeling we express in the phrase we so inevitably use when summarizing a romantic plot: ‘it turns out that . . .” (91). Hillman places great value on the implications of the mirror when he writes that,
So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection, by reflective means: pausing, pondering, change of pace, voice, or glance, dropping levels. Such reflection is less willed and directed; it is less determinedly introspective like a heroic descent into the underworld to see what is going on here. (52)
So, not only is Murakami using this scene to bring about transformation through reflection, but he is also indicating that Boku is now entering another underworld labyrinth, the labyrinth of the self.
That Boku’s revelatory experience happens when he sees himself in the mirror but not the form of the Sheep Man who he can see in the room (and who leaves physical evidence of his presence in the form of a whisky glass and cigarette butts), hints at the close relationship between this spiral and madness. Boku comments, “I checked the Sheep Man in the mirror. But there wasn’t any Sheep Man in the mirror! There was nobody in the living room at all, only an empty sofa. In the mirror world, I was alone. Terror shot through my spine” (322). In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault suggests that, “The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive” (27). While Boku may very well be mad, this incident marks an important point in his transition from passive to active, and if it is madness, it results in a healthy self-preservation and the culmination of his quest, and thus is a madness which works in his favor, allowing himself to perceive some truth about himself and his wild sheep chase.
In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye also recognizes this as an association of the spiral and the labyrinth with the hero’s point of epiphany, “the symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (203). Perhaps in this schema, it is actually the very contradictions and convergences between the spiral and the labyrinth which compose the epiphany. The labyrinth can be seen as the “undisplaced apocalyptic world,” and the spiral suggests the “cyclical world of nature,” and in the conversation between these elements, one is assaulted with their multiple, convergent, closely related, and yet contradictory aspects. In the act of interpretation, it is important to accept the possibility of an endless spiral of meaning circumscribed by the tall walls of the labyrinth. The point of epiphany would thus be a rare moment of alignment which allows one to see the beauty and complexity of these relationships as a manic, dynamic whole.
[1] This title is translated as Spiral or Vortex, and the word is used throughout the film for these ideas.
[2] In an interesting counterpoint to this Japanese perspective, Frye argues that the snake is generally seen as a demonic animal, and yet even in the West, he acknowledges, the snake is also used to symbolize infinity when fashioned into an ouroboros. In spite of the snake’s positive connotations for this character in Uzumaki, it does lead to his physical death, and the audience is not given to believe that reincarnation is taken seriously by any of the other characters, rendering this highly symbolic death futile.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
550: Ode to Spring, Vishnu & Hercules
24 April 2007
Ode to Spring
The grass leaps four inches after the first spring rains
Soon it will reach sky and I sink,
sink – return to the primordial muck, then deeper still
a reverse Persephone descending by choice away
from burning memories of sun. New life is a cruel joke when
Gone ones sing out of ether, through portals like oracles,
and I demand silence.
I past our house – refilled with a circus of bells
of happy hippie party people whom I want to crush – and cringe.
I only returned when I had killed all senses, to move, to escape
to run not far. Ghost or not, it is haunted. Twice
you called into the dungeon; I answered, and for my faith, no reply,
Pleas be damned; you emptied the crawling silence again
like a morning without magpies.
They call to sell you cable services and ask if I am
Mrs. E. Do I make them feel like shit and tell them you’re dead
the hard irrevocable sounds shaming them to silence and stutters?
I want to just hang up. Which is more rude? I don’t care.
They plead through the mail for you to open a credit card
account. Do their powers really extend that far? Will you
purchase sheet music and repay them with arpeggios and chords?
Their fliers attempt enticements for lawn care and mattress
sales. Apparently you can take it with you.
I rip into tiny – invisible, I hope – pieces.
I hate the new me newbie, forced to swim, envious of drowning
Angry, empty, pretending. When my mask slips, I want to
consume Belladonna, drift into night’s shade. But what difference
does it make when I already live eternally with Hades.
Sun and dewy grass bring no pleasure, only shadows and ice.
Frost is softer with its scent of death, the illusion that winter murdered all.
Vishnu and Hercules
The flurry of ideas passes, replaced by a squall of nothingness
a stormy void obliterating all remnant of thought. Vishnu,
god of creation and destruction, creates destruction – truth
beauty melts into ash. Contemplation leads to confusion,
combustion, like crossing iron-spiked fields, leaving a trail of
shredded flesh and entrails. At the edge, the bones fall
and shatter into shrapnel piercing the unsuspecting with
thought fragments. No one embarks on the impossible task,
no Hercules emerges to piece this skeleton together, no god
rushes to breathe spirit into shards.
Ode to Spring
The grass leaps four inches after the first spring rains
Soon it will reach sky and I sink,
sink – return to the primordial muck, then deeper still
a reverse Persephone descending by choice away
from burning memories of sun. New life is a cruel joke when
Gone ones sing out of ether, through portals like oracles,
and I demand silence.
I past our house – refilled with a circus of bells
of happy hippie party people whom I want to crush – and cringe.
I only returned when I had killed all senses, to move, to escape
to run not far. Ghost or not, it is haunted. Twice
you called into the dungeon; I answered, and for my faith, no reply,
Pleas be damned; you emptied the crawling silence again
like a morning without magpies.
They call to sell you cable services and ask if I am
Mrs. E. Do I make them feel like shit and tell them you’re dead
the hard irrevocable sounds shaming them to silence and stutters?
I want to just hang up. Which is more rude? I don’t care.
They plead through the mail for you to open a credit card
account. Do their powers really extend that far? Will you
purchase sheet music and repay them with arpeggios and chords?
Their fliers attempt enticements for lawn care and mattress
sales. Apparently you can take it with you.
I rip into tiny – invisible, I hope – pieces.
I hate the new me newbie, forced to swim, envious of drowning
Angry, empty, pretending. When my mask slips, I want to
consume Belladonna, drift into night’s shade. But what difference
does it make when I already live eternally with Hades.
Sun and dewy grass bring no pleasure, only shadows and ice.
Frost is softer with its scent of death, the illusion that winter murdered all.
Vishnu and Hercules
The flurry of ideas passes, replaced by a squall of nothingness
a stormy void obliterating all remnant of thought. Vishnu,
god of creation and destruction, creates destruction – truth
beauty melts into ash. Contemplation leads to confusion,
combustion, like crossing iron-spiked fields, leaving a trail of
shredded flesh and entrails. At the edge, the bones fall
and shatter into shrapnel piercing the unsuspecting with
thought fragments. No one embarks on the impossible task,
no Hercules emerges to piece this skeleton together, no god
rushes to breathe spirit into shards.
550: Jim Harrison
17 April 2007
Jim Harrison: The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Dr. Keeler pointed out my tendency to “take you on the journey” of how I came to appreciate each of the class poets, I had intended to avoid that. But, as one who has tried to read some of Harrison’s novels and has had countless personal interactions with the man and his family, I did not look forward to taking his poetry seriously (or for him to take it seriously, thoughtfully, and elegantly as he does); I really didn’t think I could do it. But once I quit imagining his voice reading them (intolerable), I (with a self-professed distaste for nature poetry) thoroughly enjoyed these. Harrison manages to blur the lines and exploit the expectations of the human/animal (nature) dichotomy without losing respect for either, and he does this in an incredibly eloquent way. His natural places are fully encroached upon by cabins and canoes, and yet there is no synthesis or true understanding in either direction between Humanity (and all the crap, physically and conceptually, that it brings) and Nature. Following are some comments on passages which struck me in this volume.
The Theory & Practice of Rivers
4 This is the ascent out of water:
there is no time but that
of convenience, time so that everything
won’t happen at once; dark
doesn’t fall – dark comes up
out of the earth, an exhalation.
This grabbed me, in part, due to its relevance to Sexson’s class with its ascents and descents, elements, underworld, time, and of course for me, spirals – “time so that everything won’t happen at once.” The spiral exists in interesting relation to both space and time so that nothing is every exactly simultaneous or exactly repeated. Time is here seen as so intractable that it is portrayed as the earth breathing. A similar theme is returned to on page 14 with a musing on circles and time: “And because of time, circles / that no longer close / or return to themselves.” Harrison shows his understanding that there are no neat and tidy resolutions, no simple or complete answers, and no returning to an imagined idyllic past where everything was “as it should be.” Harrison seems to struggle with nostalgia in this volume. He frequently uses the past tense, tells stories, and reminisces, but something always seems to be frustrated in the remembering, in the telling, or in the attempt to pull meaning out of these incidents. Perhaps this refrain is central to his project in these pages: “The days are stacked against / what we think we are” (6-8).
*****
15 . . . Who among us whites, child
or adult, will sing while we die?
How is the way a culture “deals” with death indicative of the way it lives and the meaning and peace it ascribes to a life? Does this suggest that “we” are less close to nature, and thus more separated from understandings of life and death, than are other peoples? This passage is followed by the story of a guy who, when he thinks he is about to die, can only think that it is appropriate, even necessary, to drink. This tale concludes:
16 . . . It is hard to learn how
to be lost after so much training.
I read this very reflexively. This aspect of an education in literature is one of the things that bothers me greatly. We become blind to so much because we are trained to look for and do other things. There is much to be gained from being lost. I liken it to my musical education. I was given piano lessons for several years growing up; I learned how to read music, musical theory, classical and hymn music, and just a little on how to improvise the accompaniment of hymns. Sadly, because of all this training, I find exploring on the piano, attempting to play by ear, improvising without a guide, or playing more contemporary pieces to be damn near impossible. And even though I’ve forgotten most of the technicalities and my playing is embarrassingly rusty, I cannot forget how to read music; I cannot feel my way around the keys; I cannot seem to lose myself without unconsciously falling back on my training to guide me. And because of this, I have not truly felt the joy of creating music, of being lost in that beautiful way that allows all possibilities. I have too much “system” and not enough room for texture and possibility, as Harrison here laments:
23 A “system” suggests the cutting off
i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,
the suppression of texture to simplify
**** A couple passages which pulled me up short:
24 . . . Writers
and politicians share an embarrassed moment
when they are sure all problems will disappear
if you get the language right.
Damn it. I’m guilty of this. I just watched Labyrinth this weekend for the first time since childhood, and I was struck by its emphasis on getting the language right. Sarah can’t accomplish anything without the right words, but it is, after all, just a fantasy. I will admit, though, that I haven’t quite given up on the power of language, though I am not naïve enough to believe that “all problems will disappear.”
28 This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong
for life; a place to drown not live.
Is this menacing fumarole more natural or more important or more revealing about nature than a peaceful, life-sustaining pond with drinkable water? Nature’s beauty is “too strong” for us to understand or truly appreciate.
******
What He Said When I Was Eleven
56 . . . When I miss
flies three times with the swatter //
they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;
Cabin Poem
63 I reject oneness with bears.
She has two cubs and thinks she
owns the swamp I thought I bought.
While Harrison presents his speaker constantly surrounded by nature, he cannot get away from realizing that there is an inevitable, unbreachable distance between, on the one hand, the human, concepts of ownership and fairness, meditations on death and aging, and, on the other, the natural (Nature?), the land, plants, and animals, that which we only think we have conquered and understood.
Jim Harrison: The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Dr. Keeler pointed out my tendency to “take you on the journey” of how I came to appreciate each of the class poets, I had intended to avoid that. But, as one who has tried to read some of Harrison’s novels and has had countless personal interactions with the man and his family, I did not look forward to taking his poetry seriously (or for him to take it seriously, thoughtfully, and elegantly as he does); I really didn’t think I could do it. But once I quit imagining his voice reading them (intolerable), I (with a self-professed distaste for nature poetry) thoroughly enjoyed these. Harrison manages to blur the lines and exploit the expectations of the human/animal (nature) dichotomy without losing respect for either, and he does this in an incredibly eloquent way. His natural places are fully encroached upon by cabins and canoes, and yet there is no synthesis or true understanding in either direction between Humanity (and all the crap, physically and conceptually, that it brings) and Nature. Following are some comments on passages which struck me in this volume.
The Theory & Practice of Rivers
4 This is the ascent out of water:
there is no time but that
of convenience, time so that everything
won’t happen at once; dark
doesn’t fall – dark comes up
out of the earth, an exhalation.
This grabbed me, in part, due to its relevance to Sexson’s class with its ascents and descents, elements, underworld, time, and of course for me, spirals – “time so that everything won’t happen at once.” The spiral exists in interesting relation to both space and time so that nothing is every exactly simultaneous or exactly repeated. Time is here seen as so intractable that it is portrayed as the earth breathing. A similar theme is returned to on page 14 with a musing on circles and time: “And because of time, circles / that no longer close / or return to themselves.” Harrison shows his understanding that there are no neat and tidy resolutions, no simple or complete answers, and no returning to an imagined idyllic past where everything was “as it should be.” Harrison seems to struggle with nostalgia in this volume. He frequently uses the past tense, tells stories, and reminisces, but something always seems to be frustrated in the remembering, in the telling, or in the attempt to pull meaning out of these incidents. Perhaps this refrain is central to his project in these pages: “The days are stacked against / what we think we are” (6-8).
*****
15 . . . Who among us whites, child
or adult, will sing while we die?
How is the way a culture “deals” with death indicative of the way it lives and the meaning and peace it ascribes to a life? Does this suggest that “we” are less close to nature, and thus more separated from understandings of life and death, than are other peoples? This passage is followed by the story of a guy who, when he thinks he is about to die, can only think that it is appropriate, even necessary, to drink. This tale concludes:
16 . . . It is hard to learn how
to be lost after so much training.
I read this very reflexively. This aspect of an education in literature is one of the things that bothers me greatly. We become blind to so much because we are trained to look for and do other things. There is much to be gained from being lost. I liken it to my musical education. I was given piano lessons for several years growing up; I learned how to read music, musical theory, classical and hymn music, and just a little on how to improvise the accompaniment of hymns. Sadly, because of all this training, I find exploring on the piano, attempting to play by ear, improvising without a guide, or playing more contemporary pieces to be damn near impossible. And even though I’ve forgotten most of the technicalities and my playing is embarrassingly rusty, I cannot forget how to read music; I cannot feel my way around the keys; I cannot seem to lose myself without unconsciously falling back on my training to guide me. And because of this, I have not truly felt the joy of creating music, of being lost in that beautiful way that allows all possibilities. I have too much “system” and not enough room for texture and possibility, as Harrison here laments:
23 A “system” suggests the cutting off
i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,
the suppression of texture to simplify
**** A couple passages which pulled me up short:
24 . . . Writers
and politicians share an embarrassed moment
when they are sure all problems will disappear
if you get the language right.
Damn it. I’m guilty of this. I just watched Labyrinth this weekend for the first time since childhood, and I was struck by its emphasis on getting the language right. Sarah can’t accomplish anything without the right words, but it is, after all, just a fantasy. I will admit, though, that I haven’t quite given up on the power of language, though I am not naïve enough to believe that “all problems will disappear.”
28 This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong
for life; a place to drown not live.
Is this menacing fumarole more natural or more important or more revealing about nature than a peaceful, life-sustaining pond with drinkable water? Nature’s beauty is “too strong” for us to understand or truly appreciate.
******
What He Said When I Was Eleven
56 . . . When I miss
flies three times with the swatter //
they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;
Cabin Poem
63 I reject oneness with bears.
She has two cubs and thinks she
owns the swamp I thought I bought.
While Harrison presents his speaker constantly surrounded by nature, he cannot get away from realizing that there is an inevitable, unbreachable distance between, on the one hand, the human, concepts of ownership and fairness, meditations on death and aging, and, on the other, the natural (Nature?), the land, plants, and animals, that which we only think we have conquered and understood.
550: Dipping into the veins of some contemporary poets
10 April 2007
Komunyakaa on the brain for this one, particularly his “Ode to the Maggot.”
Ode to the Calendar
Cousin of the wristwatch
and maple; you decree order.
Deaf hedonists and sloths ignore
while obedient slaves kneel
to your prophecies. Neglect
in turning your scales will not
reverse rings, erase lines,
summon rain out of season,
enact or subvert justice.
Perpetually March 19th, a mirage
fooling no one. You lie not of your
will but of my forgetfulness.
The truth is underneath, inside.
Ambassador of time yet
Insensitive to its verdicts.
False now; to the future,
never; historian and oracle
but dumb you are; numbers ceaselessly
parade across your skin. Even were you
not forged from kin, time’s law
writes itself
on her, on all.
Inspired by William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”
Walking to School
After cereal on the false cherry
table, I herd the children out of the door, pulling
on hats and backpacks. To their myriad questions
I have no answers, but still I search for words to satisfy.
Meanwhile, they have moved on to the next puddle.
The mud is thin and grey under a cloudy sky. A water main burst
yesterday next to the creek; it rained last night.
Lamme Street is still barricaded.
Uniformed men sweep away evidence of the failure.
The water department using more water, from hoses
this time, to clean up the mess of pipes, creek,
and rain united with soil, grass, and hedge.
The boys’ only interest is checking that the hole is filled,
while I stand before crossing the street. Did the tamed city water
and wild streams meet again or did the quarantine hold.
Was there joyful reunion, triumph, or suspicion, fear of contamination?
The sky holds no prejudice – all mingle there now.
Soon it will rain.
Komunyakaa on the brain for this one, particularly his “Ode to the Maggot.”
Ode to the Calendar
Cousin of the wristwatch
and maple; you decree order.
Deaf hedonists and sloths ignore
while obedient slaves kneel
to your prophecies. Neglect
in turning your scales will not
reverse rings, erase lines,
summon rain out of season,
enact or subvert justice.
Perpetually March 19th, a mirage
fooling no one. You lie not of your
will but of my forgetfulness.
The truth is underneath, inside.
Ambassador of time yet
Insensitive to its verdicts.
False now; to the future,
never; historian and oracle
but dumb you are; numbers ceaselessly
parade across your skin. Even were you
not forged from kin, time’s law
writes itself
on her, on all.
Inspired by William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”
Walking to School
After cereal on the false cherry
table, I herd the children out of the door, pulling
on hats and backpacks. To their myriad questions
I have no answers, but still I search for words to satisfy.
Meanwhile, they have moved on to the next puddle.
The mud is thin and grey under a cloudy sky. A water main burst
yesterday next to the creek; it rained last night.
Lamme Street is still barricaded.
Uniformed men sweep away evidence of the failure.
The water department using more water, from hoses
this time, to clean up the mess of pipes, creek,
and rain united with soil, grass, and hedge.
The boys’ only interest is checking that the hole is filled,
while I stand before crossing the street. Did the tamed city water
and wild streams meet again or did the quarantine hold.
Was there joyful reunion, triumph, or suspicion, fear of contamination?
The sky holds no prejudice – all mingle there now.
Soon it will rain.
550: Alcosser
Perhaps I’m overgenerous, but for each piece (or author) that I read, I genuinely try to like it or to find something worthwhile or interesting in it. If I should find this difficult, then I try to see why someone else would (for someone obviously did). This is what I had to do with Sandra Alcosser. And of course, if you try hard enough, you can surprise yourself. For the first few poems, I was, admittedly, quite lost. I couldn’t seem to find a foothold (other than the obvious Southern setting, exploratory and almost adventurous nature of the speakers), and I didn’t like finding myself in the stifling humidity amid unsettling images and thoughts. The South is not a place I have fond memories of or want to return to, and Alcosser paints it vividly, luridly, grotesquely, pulling you into it and yet pushing you away at the same time. I felt as if I drowned with her there. But even by the end of this section, I was growing accustomed to her voice and able to honestly appreciate some of the poems, “In the Jittering World,” in particular: “Perhaps we are both lost in our landscape, / woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin” (20). So then, you can imagine my relief when the next section’s introduction whisked me away to another time and another place, and when upon looking ahead, I saw reference to my beloved Mission Mountains and indications of a much more genial and familiar setting. I’m not sure why this should make a difference, but it did.
Side note: I can’t decide if Alcosser owes a debt to the surrealists or if there is something else holding her seemingly scattered verse together. I am not always able to follow her leaps. Perhaps I’m not meant to.
The bittersweet nature of “Possessions” (21) and “The Red Dress” (35) gave both of these poems an interesting take on nostalgia and both the patterns and unpredictability of the people we think we are close to. Though I have to admit that I’m a little baffled by the idea of prose poems: I don’t quite understand how they are poetry instead of vignettes or short stories. Plenty of other authors write prose poetically but don’t call it poetry. So, of course, off to trusty Google where I find that the form originated in France in the 19th century from whence it was borrowed into English. Modernists like Pound and Eliot rejected it while Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embraced it. The only line between prose poems and short fiction (particularly flash fiction and short short fiction) appears to be the choice of the author in naming it. Rachel Barenblat of In Posse Review (online) puts it this way, “if a writer calls something a prose poem, then it's a prose poem,” and that’s that. This mingling of genres and frustrating of expectations is a positive movement in literature as far as I’m concerned. I almost wish we didn’t have to name and categorize everything and that this could be a non-issue, but that is, of course, not the case.
Subversiveness seems to be a common element of the prose poem in both its paradoxical name and form and in its content or attitude. It is purposely breaking rules, and thus, while some may try to constrain it for a while and define it (I found some rather restrictive definitions in my internet search, laughable, actually), it repeatedly defies definitions, continually evolving. I can see its beauty and its use, but I am still a little confounded by the notion of prose poetry or perhaps just by the naming of it. Though I find it interesting that at the bookstore where I worked until recently, sudden fiction and flash fiction collections grabbed people’s attentions and sold remarkably well, while “poetry” sold rarely. Is there something in the familiarity, the appearance of a lack of pretense, the approachability of prose poetry that (like Billy Collins) will draw in unexpected readers to poetry while sometimes rebuffing the more snobbish elements of the literati? I have to admit that of all her poems, Alcosser’s prose poems are the ones that stick in my mind the most. But even then, they didn’t feel as poetic as I perhaps wanted them to. I didn’t encounter the kinds of metaphors and use of language in them as I did in her poem poems, and for this, I am slightly disappointed. I wonder how the process of writing these is different and/or similar to the process of writing in a recognizable versified form.
I also read some poems by the three authors listed on Dr. Keeler’s website, and I don’t quite know what to do with them yet. I think that, especially with poets who are writing unconventional poetry, I have to become acquainted with them in order to really understand what they are doing and what they are saying. I guess I have to make the Other not so Other by forging a familiarity or a relationship with it. In Alcosser’s case, after reading her whole collection, I got a feel for her style and her preoccupations. I got comfortable with her and was thus better able to appreciate that which I didn’t understand or didn’t like before. I was able then to feel her feminism, her sexuality, her relationship with nature, the way she explodes myths while sometimes still embracing her essence (this I found to be particularly the case in “The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores” [61]), the way she explores the humanity in nature and the nature in humanity, as when she expresses envy for the “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel” (65). I was particularly struck by the end of “Trajectory” where she writes, “like orbiting / the planet on a tempered glass // windshield, one crash / and all would shatter, not shatter exactly, / but fracture full spectrum, like life / as we know it – radiant beyond rescue” (68). This is beautiful, sad, and true; it paints a vivid picture and says something recognizable in a way I had never experienced before. As I have only read a handful of poems by each of the others, I have not yet been able to grasp their voices or appreciate their choices, although I did find them interesting and provocative. They are still Other to me. And while I know that each poem should work on its own, I also think that the context is important. A book of poems can become its own (relatively) self-contained universe wherein each piece has its place and can build upon the themes, images, feelings, and rhythms of the ones around it. I didn’t expect to like Alcosser at first, but this experience of a whole and the way the sections fit with each other or contrasted or complicated each other has given me an appreciation for her poetry that I might not have had if I had encountered just one poem singly.
Side note: I can’t decide if Alcosser owes a debt to the surrealists or if there is something else holding her seemingly scattered verse together. I am not always able to follow her leaps. Perhaps I’m not meant to.
The bittersweet nature of “Possessions” (21) and “The Red Dress” (35) gave both of these poems an interesting take on nostalgia and both the patterns and unpredictability of the people we think we are close to. Though I have to admit that I’m a little baffled by the idea of prose poems: I don’t quite understand how they are poetry instead of vignettes or short stories. Plenty of other authors write prose poetically but don’t call it poetry. So, of course, off to trusty Google where I find that the form originated in France in the 19th century from whence it was borrowed into English. Modernists like Pound and Eliot rejected it while Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embraced it. The only line between prose poems and short fiction (particularly flash fiction and short short fiction) appears to be the choice of the author in naming it. Rachel Barenblat of In Posse Review (online) puts it this way, “if a writer calls something a prose poem, then it's a prose poem,” and that’s that. This mingling of genres and frustrating of expectations is a positive movement in literature as far as I’m concerned. I almost wish we didn’t have to name and categorize everything and that this could be a non-issue, but that is, of course, not the case.
Subversiveness seems to be a common element of the prose poem in both its paradoxical name and form and in its content or attitude. It is purposely breaking rules, and thus, while some may try to constrain it for a while and define it (I found some rather restrictive definitions in my internet search, laughable, actually), it repeatedly defies definitions, continually evolving. I can see its beauty and its use, but I am still a little confounded by the notion of prose poetry or perhaps just by the naming of it. Though I find it interesting that at the bookstore where I worked until recently, sudden fiction and flash fiction collections grabbed people’s attentions and sold remarkably well, while “poetry” sold rarely. Is there something in the familiarity, the appearance of a lack of pretense, the approachability of prose poetry that (like Billy Collins) will draw in unexpected readers to poetry while sometimes rebuffing the more snobbish elements of the literati? I have to admit that of all her poems, Alcosser’s prose poems are the ones that stick in my mind the most. But even then, they didn’t feel as poetic as I perhaps wanted them to. I didn’t encounter the kinds of metaphors and use of language in them as I did in her poem poems, and for this, I am slightly disappointed. I wonder how the process of writing these is different and/or similar to the process of writing in a recognizable versified form.
I also read some poems by the three authors listed on Dr. Keeler’s website, and I don’t quite know what to do with them yet. I think that, especially with poets who are writing unconventional poetry, I have to become acquainted with them in order to really understand what they are doing and what they are saying. I guess I have to make the Other not so Other by forging a familiarity or a relationship with it. In Alcosser’s case, after reading her whole collection, I got a feel for her style and her preoccupations. I got comfortable with her and was thus better able to appreciate that which I didn’t understand or didn’t like before. I was able then to feel her feminism, her sexuality, her relationship with nature, the way she explodes myths while sometimes still embracing her essence (this I found to be particularly the case in “The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores” [61]), the way she explores the humanity in nature and the nature in humanity, as when she expresses envy for the “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel” (65). I was particularly struck by the end of “Trajectory” where she writes, “like orbiting / the planet on a tempered glass // windshield, one crash / and all would shatter, not shatter exactly, / but fracture full spectrum, like life / as we know it – radiant beyond rescue” (68). This is beautiful, sad, and true; it paints a vivid picture and says something recognizable in a way I had never experienced before. As I have only read a handful of poems by each of the others, I have not yet been able to grasp their voices or appreciate their choices, although I did find them interesting and provocative. They are still Other to me. And while I know that each poem should work on its own, I also think that the context is important. A book of poems can become its own (relatively) self-contained universe wherein each piece has its place and can build upon the themes, images, feelings, and rhythms of the ones around it. I didn’t expect to like Alcosser at first, but this experience of a whole and the way the sections fit with each other or contrasted or complicated each other has given me an appreciation for her poetry that I might not have had if I had encountered just one poem singly.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Spiraling madness, dreams, and Foucault
The following passage from Foucault's Madness and Civilization is something I have been pondering. Soon I will try to expose those thoughts that are comprehensible or communicable. I'm really fascinated by the phrase, "the image begins to gravitate about its own madness." Any thoughts you all might have on this passage would be welcome as well.
The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness. The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to speak, to remind, to teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.
Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. . . . Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. (18-19)
The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in the forms of madness. The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to speak, to remind, to teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.
Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esoterism of knowledge. Things themselves become so burdened with attributes, signs, allusions that they finally lose their own form. Meaning is no longer read in an immediate perception, the figure no longer speaks for itself; between the knowledge which animates it and the form into which it is transposed, a gap widens. It is free for the dream. . . . Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning. (18-19)
Monday, April 2, 2007
550: Attempt at longer poems
Wind Language
Hurricane breezes play zylophone on
metal shingles with birch hammers
Clangy, sudden, disharmonic
Now silent and safe
Or so it seems
After dinner the back porch door
she thrust down, lying out
lying to the earth
claiming to protect but
no longer serve
Except now it holds hors d’oeuvres
As an obnoxious new-old table top
it protests the burden of light
conversation, wishes again
for wind sorcery
to release from stability
and duty back to swinging
free yet not
hanging from hinges like nooses
deciphering wind-powered
Morse-code in the rain
The Day the Cat Died
I opened the windows and
pulled down the shades
I hate to admit – I cooked
salmon, ate none, then left.
Destination unknown
transport reliability, some
Dancing leaves mocked
her coat of many colors
so I followed then became
the wind chasing debris
swirls of dust then dirt
and mud, pebbles and bricks
fled before me though I tried
to creep and slink, leap
and pounce, my windness – no match
for her catness – gave me away
Apparent, I was; invisible
my thoughts no more
The sun erupted, then belched
away the clouds, scolding me for
impertinence. Angry, I banished my
airy self to the netherworld.
Finally – oh, finally! – I
crumbled like stale biscuits
my pieces scattered and disintegrated
the diaspora of me now infecting
streams or declaring oneness
with country lanes.
The sun conceded rule
to the rain, reigning heavily
on the conscience
bombing my streaming remnants
a million miniature mushroom
clouds of solid water bursting
from iridescent murk
but I remained unmarked
unremarked, free to sink
colliding softly with the
bed, drifting purposely
through protective stones
amulets of the deep
Resting, I wondered if
she returned to nibble,
invisible, the pungent
offering abandoned amid
frenzied shutters flinging.
Hurricane breezes play zylophone on
metal shingles with birch hammers
Clangy, sudden, disharmonic
Now silent and safe
Or so it seems
After dinner the back porch door
she thrust down, lying out
lying to the earth
claiming to protect but
no longer serve
Except now it holds hors d’oeuvres
As an obnoxious new-old table top
it protests the burden of light
conversation, wishes again
for wind sorcery
to release from stability
and duty back to swinging
free yet not
hanging from hinges like nooses
deciphering wind-powered
Morse-code in the rain
The Day the Cat Died
I opened the windows and
pulled down the shades
I hate to admit – I cooked
salmon, ate none, then left.
Destination unknown
transport reliability, some
Dancing leaves mocked
her coat of many colors
so I followed then became
the wind chasing debris
swirls of dust then dirt
and mud, pebbles and bricks
fled before me though I tried
to creep and slink, leap
and pounce, my windness – no match
for her catness – gave me away
Apparent, I was; invisible
my thoughts no more
The sun erupted, then belched
away the clouds, scolding me for
impertinence. Angry, I banished my
airy self to the netherworld.
Finally – oh, finally! – I
crumbled like stale biscuits
my pieces scattered and disintegrated
the diaspora of me now infecting
streams or declaring oneness
with country lanes.
The sun conceded rule
to the rain, reigning heavily
on the conscience
bombing my streaming remnants
a million miniature mushroom
clouds of solid water bursting
from iridescent murk
but I remained unmarked
unremarked, free to sink
colliding softly with the
bed, drifting purposely
through protective stones
amulets of the deep
Resting, I wondered if
she returned to nibble,
invisible, the pungent
offering abandoned amid
frenzied shutters flinging.
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