Category: poetry

Working With Silence

With Jorie Graham.

Recognize this astonishment, this awe, this resistance to the hurry of speech. Its pressure signals the weight of what language battles. Here is the rupture, the interrupter; partner; opponent; interrogator; monument. Watch it.

To meet it on its own terms is to welcome some erosion. Each confrontation will put an end to the original witness, the one who meant to do the looking, and wrest from her womb a new creature, sharply aware of being watched.

When the word fists stop swinging, held behind the back, and the shouting mouth surrenders to its hold, what emerges? Here are the boundaries between flesh and time, sealed and open, the words we speak and those unspeaking us.

***

The above are notes while reading Jorie Graham’s essay “Some Notes on Silence” in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (2000), edited by Molly McQuade. The italicized phrases are Graham’s.

Ends Meeting

Notes from an underground.

The border of a wound is sewn to the opposite border until the gap between them recovers its missing substance, the dormant body waiting underground as others come and go, tending. 

They sing as they come and go, tending. They check the dressings, the heart’s drum. They find a song. They avoid demands for answers to the old questions. They are too busy with slow singing. The dormant body has new questions. When it comes, the old ones will no longer matter. They call them forth, the body and its questions. 

What happens in this shelter is mostly waiting and song. The dormant bodies will not come until they are called. They will not approach the old borders with their new questions until they have swelled beyond the lines that held them, and when this happens, they will sing a response.

What the Poem Taught

How not to lose the life of life.

It is autumn, she said. And we are going to die. And we have all this choosing to do, with great stakes. And yet, simultaneously: this beloved, ill; this new child, this sudden bird, this love. How often we keep our thinking separate from what we know. For a simple reason: simultaneous submersion within all sensibilities is unbearable.

So, how to know anything? How to keep the life of life in life? Try not knowing. Try reading below the threshold of interpretation. Try burying the head, leaving only the ear. It is possible to transcend personality and arrive. At a shared physical understanding. These songs were always here to pull us into them and we.

***

The italicized phrase comes from Jorie Graham, whose work inspires this piece.

Every Lifted Voice

Why the singing.

Now a manifesto, now jazz, now a love lyric; through these voiceprints of language now the witness takes a stand. Another stirs the mischief of the multitudes within each vibrating body of this vast and trembling We.

The point? Only this. Create a landscape wide enough to hold the simultaneous becoming dance of each and all, from the last beginning to the next. Any tent will tear against the strain.

But what do you need? Only to feel tended to and left well enough alone. You might try taking scissors to these pages, and then make a world to hold.

To hold us? That too.

What are you doing? This art is simply a protest. Against the dying off.

***

“Voiceprints of language” is a phrase June Jordan once used to describe poetry.

In Defiance of Taste

For the wild uglies.

What crawls and flies far from clean in its joy is often the subject of revulsion, but some forms of rage are raw enough to keep a crawling body painted with mud, and ripe enough with love to offer flight. One held nothing back of substance and much of detail and familiar story lines, to keep each mouthful tasting fully of itself. Eat, she said, there is enough for everyone, but cautioned that some would find at first bite, something raw enough to break the heart. It broke mine, she said, but then came a challenging joy. This angered some, but creatures of the earth are often hated for not making themselves more pleasing, more beautiful, for living just as they are.

Ceiling to Sky

With June Jordan.

You had some nerve, some told you, to speak love into the war, to flaunt that voluptuous hope in all her fullness, wearing not a stitch of modesty. Not even cynicism, or nihilism; neither was she utopian, and although they tried to call her ignorant, her brilliance shone.

They urged you to cover her up, but you wanted to let her dance. You gave her new songs and the earthquake moved you, the way every atom of life and its killing was suddenly known in the leaning faces of strangers.

Coming clean in a disaster is still a possibility, you insisted, and dreamed a blues to meet the moment when the ground breaks itself open, dreamed it a birth breaking open, a mouth to catch a final breath and release––and what came forth from that exhalation? They asked you about your aim and you told them. I aim to make love a reasonable possibility.

***

Inspired by Josh Kun’s (1995) BOMB interview with June Jordan, discussing the libretto she wrote for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (with composer John Adams).

Suggestions

For working with words.

No need to transcribe the experience when it’s already there; not unless that’s what you’re after. Even then, it might elude. But you’re after something else, aren’t you? No, it isn’t a release valve for emotion, either. Perhaps a vessel for their distillation? Or to save a life. Or to give shape to one that you mean to bring forth by looking. Or to keep a record of attention in an effort to witness this becoming. To call it out, over and again, finding it stranger at each turn. A silence opens.

***

The last line comes from the title of a poetry collection by Amy Clampitt.

Between Stations

Songs in transit.

Each meeting was a new territory, and the faces of strangers became unfamiliar markers in a foreign land. We watched her absorb these, making and remaking an atlas of the terrain. To the music in her chest, we pressed our ears. In this, we heard a place we knew well. In the corners of our childhood play, the strings, and then came the drums of our chase. The horns called us to birthday feasts, and the chorus resounded, singing us–––not home, but somewhere entirely new. A place we leaned into. In this way, she peeled us from the scripts of our nightmares and offered new arrangements of light and space, of time. Embraced by her shadows, we prepared to arrive.

We the Unclean

Singing lessons with dirt.

After we saw that having was out of the question––as in, anything in our possession, including accomplishment, it eventually became clear that none of us would be clever enough, quick enough, or hard-working enough to be the brilliant exception.

At the school of roots, we learned of purity, that it was possible under certain conditions. We learned the conditions, but the dirt kept on.

We played in it, laughing with the unclean birds above us and their songs called us out.