Notes on a Poetics      

                                                        

                                                                                      

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In Torn Awake, I was interested most in developing phrasal overlays and
polyrhythms and then in driving them through suspensions and repetitions
toward a complex emotional and intellectual experience. In Eye
Against Eye, I’ve tried to speed up the longer poems, to find lyric rhythms
that could evoke the multi-faceted, multi-vocal surge of the present. If the
earlier poems are centrifugal, expansive in reference and register, I want
the new ones to be centripetal, their energies pressing inward.

Why the difficulty, the dense passages?

I would say that my language is grounded in what Jan Zwicky calls “the
essential lack of clarity in human experience attendant on the exercise of
our capacity for language.” Aristotle claimed that “not to have one meaning
is to have no meaning,” but ambiguity is essential to language and
consciousness.

In my quotidian experience, my awareness alternately blurs and sharpens.
In my poems, words turn opaque, textured as sound, pitch, rhythm,
woven into design and then they come clear as meanings shaped by that
design. I think we see them and we see through them. Texture and text.
Nontransparent aesthetic form and transparent thematic content. It is
this staging of transparence and density, of appearance and disappearance,
which is, for me, the erotic tension in the work.

Of Torn Awake

I’ve wondered whether it is possible to find a line, syntax, rhythmical
orchestration that would decentralize the subject’s control of the sentence
or, likewise, expand the range of agencies. As part of that investigation in
reading, these poems have been nourished by Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible
and the Invisible and The Phenomenology of Perception and also by Levinas,
Ricouer, Shusterman, and Henri Bergson.

In an earlier book, Deeds of Utmost Kindness, I tried to work out a lineal
and thematic formalism from geology to write the poems of “The Blue
Rock Collection.” So, for instance, the poem called “Yellow Quartz” is
composed in six lines and references the passage of light because quartz
crystals are hexagonal and pellucid. Later, this came to seem arbitrary to
me. An entertaining, Oulipoean practice, but overly determined.

In Torn Awake’s “Line of Descent,” I wanted the poem to have the look
and feel of that winding, cutting back, vertiginous (hence air on both
sides) descent by foot into the Grand Canyon, and I was remembering,
too, the clarity of the strata as you descend the steeper north face. Of
course you read the stratigraphic layers as you descend, not only visually
but like a Braille. It is impossible not to trace your fingers across the
rocks, to feel the Triassic conglomerates shift into the Permian sandstones
and shales and then into the Redwall limestones. The strata extend and
thin out or are cut away, and sometimes there are abrupt uncomformities
(which the form of the poem about father and son in the KOA bathroom
means to enact—the visual unconformity parsing a geological feature into
a metaphor for the psychological and emotional disconnection between
parent and child). I wanted the line to take all that on.

In “The Hugeness of That Which is Missing,” I’m responding to both
a sense of personal loss for a close friend who died—”weeks after the
[funeral] service, they open a letter”—and to the radioactive poisoning of
the desert. But in the poem, I’m less interested in launching an argument
than in allowing the sensual and meditative to interact, as I feel they do
in my own actual exigent experience. I hope to provide an inherently different
form of insight, one that may be incommensurable with rational
analysis. So the poem’s indeterminacy mirrors its thematic obsession with
faith, belief, what can be known, how we might continue to feel each
other when we are all so blasted, all but overcome by self-concern (“did I
piss it away in talking” or “was it insignificant before I bent my gorgeous
attention over it”), loss (of friendship, of faith in the “fixed point” of a
controlling narrative, of hope), and media’s corruption of language (mistranslation,
the blur of events that dilute experience, equivocation, the
turn of phrase that is a false step).

In “Voiced Stops”: a language as stressed and baroque and emotionally
torqued as the experience, my own anyway, of raising a child beyond all
the myths of raising a child. Of being raised by a child.

In “Line of Descent’ with geology and with “Carried Across” with the
Spanish language, to incorporate into experience its literal strata—what
we stand on as both figural and actual at once—and, in another place,
the sound and image and the shifting metaphors of understanding that
might begin to give an account of that place. I.e., to write of experience
not as something proceeding from a subjectivity but penetrated by the
world and others, entangled with corollary systems of meanings, layers of
rhythm and voice and depth. To connect the human spirit to the significance
of the world that harbors it.