BERNEVAL

Frank Bidart in an interview with Christopher Hennessy

If a poem’s any good, it must be a visceral experience. The way the eye moves down the page is physical. A body exists in space. A poem exists in space. Words on the page exist in space in the way that words spoken aloud exist in time. Words in time are surrounded by silence; words on the page are surrounded by space. It’s not a simple equivalence, a matter of a space being like a pause, but you have to make a dynamic on the page that corresponds to the dynamic of the word, as it exists in the sentence as you hear it in your mind.

From Outside The Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets.

And so for day 1023
01.10.2009

Compressed without the swathe of white space between lines and the indentations, the poem still conveys its subject: the strawberries that serve both as title and first line.

STRAWBERRIES
do not
hide their seeds

They scatter
into their own bodies

before
they find ground

And beyond this brief opening segment the poem goes on to remark about there being no need to slice one to reveal what is inside and concludes:

There are no bones
to structure its shape,

no peel
through which to plunge

Deserves to be visited in its book context along with the other poems in the collection to appreciate the spacing which results in words distributed in a controlled scatter effect spiralling down to page end and over.

Souvankham Thammavongsa. Small Arguments. “STRAWBERRIES”

And so for day 1019
27.09.2009

Mark Doty. Still Life With Oysters And Lemon.

As is my wont, I am reading a little bit backwards. Mark Doty arrives at these reflections on the relation between portrait and still life after having written about voice and breathing life out into the world again. But first, before we turn to that, let us dwell on the comparison of still life with poem and portrait:

A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait. When you look at a representation of a human figure — a shepherd, a saint, a prince — that figure looks back at you; the painting is concerned with the experience of animation, with what will give soul to the figure before us. The end of our seeing is in the eyes of the figure that seems to see us, that looks back toward us, quizzical, alive, caught. It is at the eyes of a portrait, always, that our seeing stops.

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.

And before this fount of never ending pleasure we as readers were brought to meditate on transitoriness, in particular “the poems of the dead.”

Where there was a person, a voice, a range and welter of experience compressed into lines and images, now there are only lines and images. Where there was a life, now there is a form.

And the form, spoken, breathes something of that life out into the world again. It restores a human presence; hidden in the lines, if they are good lines, is the writer’s breath, are the turns of thought and of phrase, the habits of saying, which make those words unmistakable. and so the result is a permanent intimacy; we are brought into relations with the perceptual character, the speaking voice, of someone we probably never knew, someone no on can know now, except in this way.

This is where the hinge happens between poem and still life. And so the act of looking is like the act of breathing.

I found myself resisting on first reading the easy identification of poem with intimacy. What of parody and mimicry? And then found myself agreeing that even the most plagiarized tissue of quotation speaks of an effort of choice and selection and so represents a unique perceptual character. I even found myself wanting to see what Doty would sound like if the words from this prose were arranged like the short lines of a Robert Creeley poem (imitation of examples found in Words or in Pieces).

a human
presence
hidden
in the lines
if they are
good
lines
is the writer’s
breath
are the turns
of thought
and
of phrase
the habits
of saying
which make
those words
unmistakable
and so
the result
is a
permanent
intimacy

Caught looking. Caught dropping commas. Avoiding periods. Too close for intimacy.

And so it is verified by empirical monkeying around that giving breath is like constant pleasurable looking. But I do differ with Mr. Doty on the question of portraits. Having read Stein, portraits like landscapes, hers and those of others, also offer pretexts for continuous looking and voicing.

And so for day 1017
25.09.2009

John Newlove’s “Brass Box. Spring. Time” in Black Night Window reminds me very much of the twists in the best of Sky Gilbert. I am not claiming influence of Newlove upon Gilbert but a kinship of theme where extravagance is allowed to bloom and then snipped with wit and a certain wryness. Newlove begins what is to become a long enumeration

I have a brass box for cigarettes and
two pair of shoes and

There follows two couplets given over to shirts and their colours and more follow with descriptions of types of paper and coloured pencils. There is in the mix “two wallets but no money” which does not stop us — two wallets even without money is in keeping with the theme of abundance as the listing continues. And our poet comes full circle and we realize the penury when abundance of a different sort drips down

and a pot to catch the ceiling’s rain and
clay ashtrays and, and, and —

I have a brass box for cigarettes,
when I have cigarettes.

Now I ask is this camp?

And so for day 1015
23.09.2009

Terence Johnson in his article on Robert Duncan in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (edited by Claude Summers) observes the timing of the cultivation of a certain theme. He puts it succinctly as a matter of biography.

After 1951, when Duncan began his lifelong relationship with the artist Jess Collins, the “household” becomes a major theme in his work.

It is the “house” itself that merits attention in a poem by Mark Doty. “Essay: The Love of Old Houses” upon meditating on the floorboards worn down by previous inhabitants proposes

here it’s proved that time requires
a deeper, better verb than pass;
it’s more like pool, and ebb, and double
back again, my history, his, yours,

My history, his, yours, doubling back to the motions of water: all the while succession demonstrates that the notion of place is indebted to words, not merely to build the description but also to mark the possession and dispossession. And we by this conjunction of pronominal play and verb crafting are reminded of Robert Duncan’s opening poem to The Opening of the Field which casts these concerns in the idiom of the repeatable. “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” begins thus

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

Duncan’s poem given his concerns veers into Hermetic images. It concludes with a characterization of the place that could be attached to the old house that Doty conjures. Duncan’s meadow “is a place of first permission, / everlasting omen of what is.” These are two very different responses to the genius of place (Doty captured by the particularities; Duncan vaulted into Platonic spheres) and yet with both one senses the ontological pressures and history that “a made place” could permit. Doty’s universe is heir to Duncan’s magical permissions and dutifully is more expansive in expressing what is possible because more is possible.

subsumed into the steadying frame
of a phrase I love: a building:
both noun and verb, where we live
and what we do: fill it with ourselves

And we are left at poem’s end with the image of two men tending house, sweeping, and waxing floors with rags made from their very “own old T-shirts cut / to squares and once again of use.”

And so for day 1014
22.09.2009