Читать книгу Broken English - Heather McHugh - Страница 6

Introduction

I. The Place of Poetry

I have not extirpated all sentimental attachment from my affections, God help me. Eight now mine tend to collect with lapidary precision around a particular spot on earth, 45 degrees latitude, 67 degrees longitude, where all the addresses end with a ME and an US.

But it is not THAT sense of place, the place of sentimental attachments, the place of literal topographies, I hold poetry answerable to. To be frank, the inevitable panel discussion on the “poetry of place” bores me: it takes place too literally.

Poems take place as time takes it; and they address their object as an attention does. The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving. Like other loves it cannot be free of the terrible; it is barely dictable at times, certainly not predictable. It verges on unguaranteed domains: the unsayable, even the unspeakable. The place of the poem is the place of our homelessness, our groundlessness. A poem is untoward.

In the field of positions, a passionate position is like a held fire. Robert Creeley opens “The Window” with the line “Position is where you put it…” Given the fire of language, exposition is (etymologically speaking) where you put it out.

Exposition means to mean, mainly. Its language intends to dissolve in the service of its meaning. Exposition's means is its invisibility: it aims elsewhere; you look through it at its object. Exposition is a very windexed window.

It is not itself the place where its ends are inscribed: its means mean nothing, next to its ends. It does not give itself as evidence, as inscription (or conscription); at its closest to its object, it offers description.

That is why poetry is not exposition. It is the place that suffers inscription. It bears the mark or scar of what was seen and what was grasped. Its hand is script (felt, hammered, or quilled). Its eye cannot disappear in service: it fills with shades and shines. Everything moves in it (as everything moves in the mind); its glass is not transparent but is the sign of the seer's own slant. It takes upon itself, into itself, what it sees; the song is of insight. Whether out of joy or grief, it sings us in, and as it does, we are moved—from explication to implication, from ex-to im-position.

For poetry is imposition and self-exposure, urgency and deferral. Its act is tenacious: and its hold can hurt. In me, that hurting place is locable moreorless where God used to be; but you must remember how illocable that is.

The window of Creeley's “The Window” is a place where we hold the world, a place where we take in what took us in. It is a window that can weep (it's an eye), a window that can be beaten (it's a heart); it is a changeable, a perishable place. Poetry isn't made to make you forget the insecurity of its status, or our own: it is not for burying the terror, salving the sorrow, buying a balm. No salesman's music or easy analgesic, it is not in the comforter business. For its regards are not formalities: they require us to notice what we might otherwise most wish to overlook. Imagination isn't needed, says Valéry, to see what isn't; it is needed to see what is. That's what we most deeply miss.

The position of poetry is THAT imposition: it requires you to face the difficulty, the unfathomability, of your life. When Rilke writes “You must change…,” you feel the force of that embrace. It's merciless. Says Creeley, “I can feel my eye breaking.” That brokenness, the broken regard in which we hold all being, that is poetry's place.

II. The Part of Poetry

The poem is a space of time. In it occur patterns for eye and ear, our curious catchers of frequencies. To my eye and my ear, the poem has always been a graph and score.

My work as a writer and my work as a reader are similar: I study and then remark patterns: occurrences, recurrences, currents.

When I call poetry a form of partiality, I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked. The frame of the still photograph, and its eventualities in time, are a poetic frame.

The poem occurs in an old time (the undone) and in an old language (the penultimate). It contradicts itself, is true twice. The forked tongue, second face, double bind got bad press: everyone's from two. And poetry is of two minds: it is language's way of being of two minds.

That is why I say it's broken language. In poetry, by definition, the making of lines is the breaking of lines (in this way poetry's deeply unlike prose, the units of which are sentences, defined grammatically by their completeness). Poetic language is language in which meaning refuses to be single-minded: the transitivity of meaning splits, as we mean more than we intend. More like evidence than judgment, the well-crafted poem can present several versions at once; it is the site of possibility. Having so many ends, it remains open-ended.

But some of the richest constructions were always the sparest. That is how Dickinson and Celan both amaze. Their lyricisms are fuller for the spaces, their structures a math of the missing.

It is the space that defines the words, the skull the kiss, the hole the eye. Among the essays collected here is one paying homage to the way silence deepens around Celan's language until we feel life itself is only briefly spared. One essay is an appreciation of Dickinson's characteristically terse structures, which generate so many mutually resistant yet simultaneous readings. (How much smaller would her sums have been, if all their plusses and equals had been signed, as her first and tidiest editors wished, making her more accessible, assessable, and smug.)

One piece is a reading of the photographic diptych “Tour de France” (that circle of circles, seen through two squares); and one is a piece on pieces, taking for its occasion the artistic fragment, both archaic and (as garde will go) avant. The fragment essay included in this book considers the implications of broken language in very literal ways, and queries the idea of the whole (an idea always just behind the thought of fragments).

There is a little theme and variations on a and the: a tribute to the differing integrities of grammatical articles (the definite's presumptions, an indefinite's permissions). There is an admirer's inquiry into works of Rilke and of Valéry, whose fluent senses greaten the senses of meaning. Through Rilke we can learn to attend, rather than intend, what we mean; of Valéry it seems true, as Emilie Teste said of her husband, that “his eyes are a little larger than visible things.”

For it is not that the eye (or the first person singular either) holds the whole; rather, it sees how deep things are, and sees no end of things. (No infinity but in finity!) Finally there is a celebration of the work of translator Ulli Beier, who studied Yoruba songs. Even in our ignorance (of the shadings of drum-language, nature of praise-naming) American poets can close-read these transcriptions to advantage; salutary cautions and encouragements abound.

I am interested in ways language can suggest or provoke (though never surround) an endlessness. Exclusionary practica of meaning, no less than convictions that the whole is sayable, seem to me to impoverish poetic means. I prefer to think of partiality as something greater, paradoxically, than comprehending. For a whole (which is a sack of intent) is too tidy, too bounded, for the extent, the portent, the attent, of the poetic…

Poetry is a declared partiality, a love of (not entirely in) words. The line is by definition broken. If you yearn for wholeness, maybe you need fiction. Unadulterated feeling is a freak of reason or intent: in the chemistries of real life, feelings are always being mixed. How to set off the reaction in the reader—with its whiffs of the ineffable, its shifts of solubility, its dusts and distillates? The work of poetry, the poet's work, takes its place in the reader.

The poet works by feel for the physical materials of language, and by dint of sympathy. Poetry is a discipline of attention: we must not just re-use but re-materialize the language; no old saw may go unsharpened, no old privilege be presumed. For nothing is foregone, for poetry; instead, everything is gone, again and again: at the end of each line another nothing.

So there was never only one nothing, never only one everything. The poem keeps recasting those unlimiteds. It is a framer's art, and the frame is a part (not apart), a way (not away). With great care, not only the poem but the line, not only the line but the word, and not only the word but the letter, can remind us of the space in which they rest. Recalled to our attention is the very medium of media: all those deepening split-seconds we spend decades (glib, or destination-greedy) missing. The poem trips us up. The trippage, the breakage, is not only how, but what, its metric means. There is no of-course about it, and (in its course) no end of ends.