In My Trade Is Mystery, Carl Phillips writes the following: “I’ve long been fascinated with the role of a first poem in a poet’s first book. It’s a bit like the literary equivalent of attending one’s first debutante ball.” Phillips explains that this first poem is how we’ve chosen to announce ourselves, deliberately and purposefully, to the world. This first poem is encoded with preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions that might either be reiterated or railed against throughout the course of subsequent books.
In the spirit of Carl Phillips’s observations above, I asked four poets with new books out to answer the following questions and respond to Phillips’s remarks. Here are the questions: could you include the text of the first poem in your first book below and discuss what is encoded in it for you? How long has it been since you wrote the poem? How different are you—aesthetically, personally, imaginatively—from when this poem was published in book form? How does your latest book unfold either in dialogue, or in argument, with your “original” poem?
The answers shared by these four brilliant, big-hearted poets delighted me and expanded my understanding of their individual bodies of work. I hope you find these responses (and these first poems) as interesting as I do.
***
Primer for Non-Native Speakers
This is an apple. What is it?
A table. Some bread and tea.
II.
And this? This is a ruble,
a rue, a wish I could sell you
exactly what I feel.
A double negative: if you can’t
not speak, then write. Sit and eat
the peeled apple in your hand.
III.
I understand X,
but cannot speak Y.
Possessive phrases: he has,
she has, I don’t have.
Look, I lack,
says my language.
IV.
My language—
A heavy winter coat,
tight in the shoulders.
Sour apples,
plucked by the breeze.
Dirt stars,
smudges on knees.
V.
My camera is broken.
Can you sing? Where can I
hang my coat?
VI.
The titmouse chitter
before song.
The mad clap
and wingstutter
of lifting pigeons,
an asthmatic’s wheeze.
VII.
A line at the beer kiosk—
discourse in the past perfect,
the present imperfect.
Questions in the future indefinite.
VIII.
He missed his love.
He brought with him.
The sun already set.
He wound up at the station.
An inopportune time.
“They beat you
because of your face,
not because of your passport.”
IX.
I have a few questions
of a personal nature:
Where is the toilet?
How many acts in this play?
What is the rate of exchange?
Where does this street lead?
When is my turn?
You come after the speaker from Bulgaria.
Who is speaking now?
Could you speak
even slower?
X.
Prepositions governing
the accusative, the simple superlative
of adjectives. The Moscow Metro
is a most punctual subway.
It is also most busy. I’ve lost
my reflexive pronoun
many times among the
babushkas, bags, dacha bicycles,
drunks and dogs.
XI.
Would you like to see
Yury Gagarin’s spaceship?
Would you like to visit
the Exhibition of the National
Economic Achievements
of the U.S.S.R.?
At the metro entrance,
babushkas scolding
other people’s children,
someone selling fresh eggs,
pickled cukes, kittens in a coat,
and where the blast of cold
meets the metro heat,
the wordless pleading
of a blind pensioner.
XII.
Reticence of winter streets.
XIII.
The constant stress of simple comparative:
ours, yours, ours, yours.
XIV.
And in a dark stairwell, smell
of drying urine,
the light bulb stolen
again this week.
XV.
And in a dark stairwell,
a stone-drunk body.
Iambic steps now running up stairs,
the swear
of a slammed door.
XVI.
And in a dark stairwell,
a cry—
she’s just learned the language
of rigormortis,
then teaches the drunk
the declensions
of an outraged woman’s fists.
XVII.
If anyone asks for me,
I’m in Chapter Ten.
XVIII.
This is a label. What is it?
A libel, a labia, a lust, alleluia.
XIX.
And this? A table.
Some bread and a plea.
XX.
Please.
What is it?
You are wanted on the phone.
There is no dial tone.
The telephone is out of order.
I’ll be waiting for your call.
XXI.
Goodbye, dear friends.
I wish you every success.
Have a safe journey.
Please, stay.
XXII.
Let me introduce myself.
I feel sick.
How much must I pay
for excess baggage?
*
Poetically speaking, I was something of a late bloomer. I wrestled and floundered with language and form for much of my twenties, but like Jacob, I refused to let go. I found that working on translations helped, because I could live inside the architecture of another poet’s voice and vision, and try to find a language and form in English.
I was nearly a decade removed from living in Russia when I published “Primer for Non-Native Speakers,” what would become the first poem of my first book, in To See the Earth (2008). It’s a decidedly and self-consciously self-conscious and experimental poem, influenced by my year of living in Russia and my translations of the avant-garde poet Lev Rubinstein. I’d spent a year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, studying “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change,” which basically gave me the chance to meet poets, translate, and figure out what it might look like to live a life of poetry. Though I did not meet Rubinstein until much later, I met him on the page, and found his work utterly delightful. Since the 1970s, influenced by Fluxus and other native avant-garde movements, Rubinstein wrote poetic texts on library cards—series of little card-sized poems that often blended and parodied all manner of discourses (official speech, traditional poetic language, street talk, etc.). “Primer” is, in part, a homage to Rubinstein and to the conversation primer as a found form, as I tried to discover myself in another language, and discover another language in myself. It’s playful, weird, and funnier than nearly all of my other poems.
Fugitive/Refuge, my latest book, carries with it some of things I learned along the way in Russia—the blessed idea that, as one poet put it, “my homeland is [Russian] literature.” The idea that we could make language-sanctuaries, expansive imaginative places of refuge, has been one that I’ve returned to, again and again. As with all my work, I’m constantly finding forms in the forms and shapes that language takes. Call it a hermit crab poetics, after the essayistic innovation. In the book, I have a footnote poem, a manifest poem, and many other poems that take their shapes from found forms. It’s also relentlessly concerned with travel—but in this case, the problem and poetics of human migration, a feature of global human existence that flared up with a certain intensity in the early 21st century. We are all trying to find home. For some of us, that journey is a heartbreaking one of exile from a homeland, or houselessness in a blighted city; for others, it’s a long winding back to our own bodies. All of us, trying to home in.
***
The first poem from Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe/a self-portrait by proxy (White Pine Press, 2015):
IN THE CANYON I (ARRIVAL)
[Abiquiu, NM; present day]
From the outside, a small adobe butte: thick-walled and squat, with a roofed wooden deck that doubles its claim of desert. The shower, a black bag, dangles from a beam, and the outhouse, two minutes’ walk to the west, is a toilet on a platform with no walls. Inside, it’s tight as a ship’s hold, with a window punched into each white stucco wall. There’s no electricity, no reception. On the only set of shelves, the food I hope will last a month, which is how long I am to live here.
This morning—a life ago—the gray ribbon of highway fissured a thousand variations of red, from Santa Fe past pueblos of single-wides, scrawny dogs minnowing the heat-shimmers. Past the taquerias and feedstores of Española and onto 84. A stretch long and straight enough to invite excessive speed, it’s marked with descansos of makeshift crosses, flowers, and toys—an alternate triptik of lost children and travelers who died without reaching their destinations.
Then sixteen miles of rutted dirt road, the flat top of Pedernal hovering above—the mountain Georgia O’Keeffe painted obsessively, half-joking that God told her if she painted it often enough it would be hers.
To write these poems, I’ve come to live in her backyard.
At the ranch, I park in a back pasture. Transfer books, food, and my dog into the caretaker’s beat-up black truck. The final five miles are more tire tracks than road, helixed so tight to a riverbed—mostly dry in this driest June—we cross it thirteen times before leaving one canyon to enter another. Beyond a scumble of scrub brush and low-slung piñons, the cabin.
This noon sun devours all shadows. Only questions remain.
*
I wrote this poem in the summer between my second and final year of the now no-longer Purdue MFA program, during one of the loneliest times in my life. Two years before, I’d walked away from a career in academic publishing—a promising, well-compensated career in which, by the end of many long fluorescent-lit days, I could barely remember what had filled my time, and certainly couldn’t say why it mattered. So on little more than a hunch that teaching and writing poetry might be more of what I was meant to do, I left Manhattan for the corn- and soyfields of Indiana.
The winter before writing this opening poem, I’d found myself transfixed in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Pelvis with Distance” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a painting whose foreground is a massive pelvic bone backed by a scrim of tiny blue mountains. Thus began seven months of reading every biography and scrap of her writing I could find, before heading to that primitive cabin in Abiquiu with a binder of notes, a crate of books, and as much trepidation as hope that I might one day write a book.
It was a month free of other people, with no media other than books to fill my time. Such solitude was the antithesis of loneliness. Instead, it was a space of light that “devour[ed] all shadows,” in which the kind of questions we often stop asking ourselves after adolescence (What does it mean to live a good life?) were given room to reemerge.
Looking back, that time in the high desert was a clear inflection point. Returning to the noise and hurry of the world, in short order, I fell in love, got married (a marriage that would end just shy of a decade later), got a visiting professor gig, and wrote my second book Take Me with You, Wherever Your Going (Four Way Books 2019) to try and capture the heady rush of love and those early years of commitment.
I also read the Torah in its entirety for the first time in an attempt to have some company in those big questions and, with that reading, began a slow walk back to the Judaism I’d left behind as a teenager. I immersed myself in scripture, biblical scholarship, and Midrash, which is writing about and into the Torah, and was moved to found Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the type of community I lacked and longed for in graduate school.
The seven months of O’Keeffe research became the precursor for the seven years of study it would take to write my most recent book. unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, was published by Four Way Books in March, and continues to explore and expand on the questions that animated my first book’s first poem—that threshold, as well as the book and life of writing and literary community that lay beyond it. Reading “In the Canyon I (Arrival)” again, devoutly secular person I was at the time, I was surprised to find the word “God” there. I guess our obsessions, even when unknown or perhaps unacknowledged, find their way to the surface, waiting like wayfinder marks for us to notice and follow them toward what the deeper, less conscious parts of ourselves know we most need.
***
My first book is Domestic Uncertainties and it was published in 2012 with BlazeVOX. I think Phillips’s is absolutely right. My first poem, in my first book is called, “What Literature Teaches Us About Love” and it’s a poem inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. If you know me, you know that book is one of my deepest obsessions. wrote that poem in 2009, fifteen years ago. So much is encoded in that poem. I wrote that poem in the year that my marriage dissolved, soon after our one and only marriage counseling appointment where it was brought to my attention that I needed to be back in a poetry workshop. This was the first poem I wrote when I started putting together my application for Patricia Carlin’s Poetry Workshop at The New School’s Continuing Education program, a course I took, two semesters a year, for over 10 years. Looking back now, I realize how much that first poem set up my career as a writer — my obsession with prose poems, my obsession with repetition, and of course, love.
I am very different from when the book was first published. First of all, I’ve been divorced for over fifteen years. I’ve written five books of poems, I’ve been a high school and middle school English teacher for over fifteen years, and I’ve been the host and curator of the COUPLET Reading Series here in NYC that I started back in 2011. I created a new identity for myself as a writer, a poet and a woman. I also fostered and created my own chosen family, my own community of poets and writers, who shaped me into the person I am today. I conquered fears I never thought I would conquer and I’ve taken many risks
To be honest, I can say the same about my writing. My writing has grown more expansive and more political, yet I believe it to be as inventive as it always was. One thing that has remained the same is my love for the ‘I,’ in a poem, and my love, well, for love. I have always been fond of wordplay and repetition in a poem, and I think my recent poems, even in my new manuscript I’m nearly done with, currently entitled Ordinary Splendor, that still bleeds over.
In terms of dialogue, I believe that every poem I write is a love poem. (Dante, you know this better than most as I show you many of my poems. ) I always believe that I am writing the same poem – it’s one of my biggest frustrations as a poet but then I realize that all art is about obsession in some shape or form. Even the darker poems about hatred and greed in my new collection, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books), are love poems, because through their darkness, they highlight, love.
*
What Literature Teaches Us About Love
How long does Heathcliff wait before he storms through Linton’s door? And how long does it take him to learn the words she wants him to learn. To learn the habits Cathy wants him to acquire. How long does it take him to adapt to silk and satin? To grow adept to words like master and sir and certainly? And he does this for her. And for love. And for passion. And for truth. And for beauty. And he does this for her. For all the things she wants in a life. And he does this for her. And he does this for her. And he does this for her. And he does this for him, too, for when he finally gets behind that glass door; he will need this love. When he finally gets beyond that door, he will learn that she is not his – and what he thought was just a new name, an appendix, a footnote, a seal, is more than a name: it is an anchor to the world. And then, she crashes and is lost in the gasp of the night. He faces the bleak –and this is good enough for him – this life and love after death, because this all goes on beyond the grave. And after death there is no heart. And after death there is no unknowing for what could’ve been there is only what is. And there is only what has. And Love. Always Love.
***
The first poem from my first collection, Any Old Wolf (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006) is the title poem. The book had already been accepted under the title, Hey, You, Alive, when I came up with the wolf poem. I’d been reading Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs, and somehow got to wondering how vowels sounded in the Hawaiian language, when the first line of the poem appeared: “Puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business on Old McDonald’s farm.” When the poem was completed I was sure it had to be in the manuscript, and asked the press to let me both open the book with it, and make it my title poem.
Any Old Wolf
Puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business
on Old McDonald’s Farm,
I once thought vowels were feed, like hay
and slop, and therefore the critters cried neigh
or moo, oink or baa: they needed
to be fed. They came with consonants
like teeth, but vowels came from the man.
And when night fell, wild ones crept
around the barn to nab their share.
The famous wolf in silhouette against
the famous moon is howling back
his vowels in praise—it’s good to be
among the fed. The sadness
in his note is need. Ah, to need
he howls, but oh, to be well fed!
He believes his w, his l and f are mortal,
but his o grew from a seed
that fell once from the moon.
I am, I know, just any old wolf,
but I eat of the i, eternal,
and so I ah at the oo, which also is eternal.
I took in a t from the teats of my ma
but hunt the great farm for my e-i, o.
*
The poem dates from the early 2000s. I turned sixty in 2003, had been a practicing architect for many years, and was just beginning to write poetry. I’d written some poetry in my teens and twenties, but had set that work aside when I became an architect. I kept reading poetry, though, slowly working my way through Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible, Dickinson, Whitman . . . . In my 50s, the desire to write returned. On a trip to Italy to scatter the ashes of my beloved mother-in-law, I kept a journal. Reading through it, noticing I was breaking the lines, my wife said, These are poems. Shortly thereafter, in a gift that changed my life, she gave me a blank notebook, inscribed with a line from the late-discovered Gospel of Thomas: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” and I was off to the races.
Now in my eighties, I find something of myself still “encoded” in that first poem: The speaker’s child-like frame of mind, a kind of organized innocence, the idea that our mortal bodies are laced with immortal cravings, that language itself contains the secret sauce whose ingredients are found in the religious imagination (“I eat of the i eternal”)—all that still matters to me, is still very much at the core of how I think and feel about poetry.
This morning, scanning around in a file of notes for future poems I find this:
Inscribed in sounds and shapes, including the sound and shape of the ABCs, secrets wait (and want) to be revealed. Sighs and wails, chuckles and smirks, want to be poems and songs; just as physical materials want to be buildings (Lou Kahn: “What do you want to be, I ask the brick, and the brick says, ‘I want to be an arch.’”). Dark and elusive, reality wants to be governed by elegant shapes and laws like e = mc squared.
Your mother’s face before you had words. And behind her, in the shadows, your father: voice without face, body or shape.
I’ve been writing steadily since Any Old Wolf, and hopefully there’s been some development. The earlier work was clunkier, I think, and often, to my ear today, too wordy. I’m in my eighties now and being closer to the end imposes itself in a variety of ways. Be brief! But, in the thick of it, it’s sometimes hard to see the differences. The body speaks, of course. But the imagination speaks too, talks back to the aging body: Not so fast, with the despair! There are beginnings to be found in ends, right?
I’ve been reading The Divine Comedy again, with some poet friends, and trying my hand at translating passages from Purgatorio. Here’s a recent attempt at its opening lines:
Hell behind me now, set sail
for better waters, little boat
of my imagination, that second space, its seas
made not of language, but language
charts the way, where human spirits
whispered clean, are worthy of the stars.
In other words, dear Muse, I’m yours:
Let poetry rise from what’s dead in me,
and the mother of Orpheus guide my song.
That’s what I want, where I want to go. That space, that second space. Second Space, by the way, is the title of Czeslaw Milosz’s amazing last book, written in his 90s. I love the thought that poetry, with its roots in both song and the religious imagination, tries to navigate the strange waters of imaginative space, to find and offer its readers a home there, in language. Once again: I am, I know, just any old wolf, but I eat of the i eternal.
So I guess, in a way, and given my late start as a poet, I’m basically “reiterating.” Though it feels more accurate to say, I’m trying to dive deeper into this mystery, which says Phillips, is our trade. A poem in my new book speaks in the voice of all that have died, and begins,
You must change the past, you alive,
make it other, without so much suffering.
Impossible, you say?
But think, you alive, what else
is language for? Name the river
running through your thirsty selves.
The three books (Any Old Wolf, Master of Leaves, and Red Studio) (with, I hope, a fourth to come), are that unfolding you spoke about in your initial question. But of course that observation must be left to a future reader.
I had a text exchange with my daughter recently—now a film-maker, and a middle-aged mother of two (she’s the child in the opening pages of Wolf)—which ended with me blurting out, “Life sucks but there’s love.” And right now that seems to me a pretty good statement of what my current efforts in poetry boil down to. I think I can say that Red Studio has become for me, in a way that characterized neither of the first two books, a kind of second space; you are invited to enter the imaginative space within which the struggle to make poems occurs. There’s a kind of “present at the creation” quality that, for me, is new and that moves me. The title poem is a comment on Matisse’s painting, L’Atelier Rouge, his famous portrait of the studio within which he works.
Red Studio includes a poem, “Solomon at Eighty” (part 3 of “Three Bible Studies”). It’s in the voice of King Solomon, builder of the mythical first temple; this Solomon, of course, in part, is me, retired architect turned poet. “I built my father’s temple then I quit,” he says, adding that he’s built a studio for himself behind the temple, where he’s working on two books. The first, he says, is almost done (let’s call that Red Studio), and he follows this with:
. . . . The other one’s a sketch and I’ll need time. Hidden in our bodies, at the center of all songs, is a secret song I hope to sing.
What “my Solomon” is referring to of course is his desire in old age to write the Song of Songs. (The scholar-redactors of the Hebrew Bible, in a moment of imaginative glory, named Solomon as the author of the sexy and transcendent, and otherwise authorless, Song.) Dante placed Solomon, pre-Christian by miles though he was, in his Paradiso, right next to the sun. I think about that, and hope something about this will appear in my next book: Exiled Dante, in plague-ridden Ravenna, soldiering through his own old age, places Solomon in his Paradiso, where, for the pilgrim, he clarifies what to expect from the resurrection of bodies: we won’t exactly be us when we merge with the wind, but we’ll Be.
Life’s secret songs are the forms of that Being, the songs that poetry aims to sing. Or this: the child that lives in a man of sixty, puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business on Old McDonalds farm, thought vowels were something to eat, and, hard though it is to imagine, twenty years later still does.
***
Thank you for this great question, Dante. If Phillips is right about the first/first poem’s prescience, then the only really robust answer to your question would be a whole poetics, one that, having broken the code of preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions that engenders and organizes one’s life work, laid out in full that code’s grammar and lexicon. Plenty, though, warns me away from taking on that task: I don’t want to wear out the welcome you have offered me into your project; I suspect that I am not the most reliable explicator of my own preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions; and I doubt that I could elaborate so comprehensive a vision.
To orient a more modest, more realistic approach, let me take a cue from another moment in Phillips’s book: “We are, each one of us,” he notes, “many selves simultaneously coinciding and refusing to. The self that can provide — through articulated thought — a way through conundrum addresses that other self that can’t find, or has lost, the way.” In place of presuming to undertake an exhaustive poetics, let me try in this response to your question simply to be the self capable of articulated thought, even though the poem was composed by the self who couldn’t find a way through conundrum.
Here is the poem:
THE ACT
1.
We have practiced the act since I can remember.
His father, also a knife-thrower, began teaching him when he was very young.
I became his assistant soon after, for our parents had paired us when I was born.
We married at thirteen, and began performing a year later, after his father died in an accident.
The Circus called him “The Great Pietro,” though his real name is Dmitri.
I used to weep over being forced to marry him.
I said I could not love him.
But Papa always said love is made of danger, not romance.
I believe him now.
I fear Dmitri more with each performance.
I tell him I trust him, that I only act frightened.
But the knives could really kill, and it is because of this fact that I love him.
The knives are there always, not only on stage.
If they were not there, I’d hate him.
2.
The circus posters say I’ve never missed.
But one could say I’ve always missed.
The act consists of my throwing the knives as close as I can to the target without hitting it.
The appeal of the act is that the target is a beautiful young lady, and someday I might not miss.
The audience pays not to see the lady’s death, but to see my ruin.
Both views (that I’ve never missed, that I’ve always missed) are based on the same deception.
They assume I have a target.
The act depends on this deception, so my assistant dresses in a sequined outfit and acts frightened.
But I have no target.
For me she does not exist.
Ever.
If she existed even for a moment, she would exist on stage.
For me she is simply never there.
If she were there, I’d kill her.
*
The poems in Perfect Hell are not ordered chronologically by date of composition, and “The Act,” though placed first, was not written earliest. Still, it was written several years before the book’s 1996 publication, which means that when I wrote this poem, I was half my present age. We most often speak of ourselves as unified persons living one life from birth to death, but we also have a contrasting way of speaking in which we identify as sequential selves replacing one another (as in “I’m a different person now than I was then”). As the person writing this response to your question, the latter way of speaking seems more apt: in felt experience at least, I am a different person now than I was then. The person who wrote “The Act” seems long ago and far away, a stranger I only half remember and don’t entirely trust, one of those friends with whom now that you are no longer in contact you wonder why you ever were, a “him” and not a “me,” a self my present self replaced rather than a self my present self fulfills.
But maybe that’s a price one pays for a life of writing. Poetry has not offered me a stay against confusion, but I have tried with it to mitigate self-deception. Whatever else is true about the person who wrote “The Act,” he was not who he thought he was. I doubt poetry can kill self-deception, but I hope it can help sustain self-correction. I take that as one reason why your question is so compelling: for all the distance and “disconnect” between those two selves, past him and present me, there are in “The Act” premonitions of my more recent poetry, continuities that connect his work then to my work now. Thinking about this poem in relation to a more recent book resembles metaphor: finding salient likeness in distinct and mostly unlike items.
One compromise in the publishing process for Perfect Hell worked in favor of “The Act.” In mid-production the publisher eliminated a signature, to cut costs. To preserve as much poetry as possible, one space-saving design measure was to start sections on the left-hand page rather than the right (using the page usually left blank after a section title page). Doing so allowed the poem’s stanzas to appear on facing pages, which highlights their symmetry: the reader can see that they have the same number of lines, without having to count the lines. The stanzas’ equal length is not accidental, of course, and one principle behind it is that similarity of form accentuates difference of content: imposing on the two speakers the same constraint on how they speak heightens the contrasts in what they say. I’m sure I was applying the principle intuitively in writing the poem; it wasn’t something I “said out loud” to myself. But it is hardly a recondite principle available only to special favorites of the Muses: we apply it in the courtroom, in high school debate tournaments, and so on. By these and other applications we recognize the principle’s connection to such ideals as justice, truth, and wisdom. To call out violations of the principle we have a technical vocabulary (e.g. “epistemological injustice”) and an informal vocabulary (e.g. “shouting down” another person). Jaron Lanier identifies the erasure of the principle in the insular algorithmic information sourcings of social media as a threat to democracy. It is a structural principle, but it entails valuations and enacts revelations.
The “mirroring” that in “The Act” manifests first in that simple line-for-line match, giving two voices equal space for each to have its say, has proven important for me in many works that followed that first/first poem. If I take my 2023 Constellation as the recent book with which to put “The Act” in dialogue, it’s a mirroring-times-two. In “The Act,” the “her” who speaks the first stanza and the “him” who speaks the second are given the same number of lines, to emphasize their literally and figuratively facing one another, their equal-and-opposite ways of (not) seeing one another. In Constellation, the mirroring is at a larger scale, and doubled, but it’s still mirroring. The book has four poems, “Luminosities,” “Candescences,” “Grit,” and “Silt,” interrelated in such a way that each poem has two mirrors instead of one. So for example the first poem, “Luminosities,” has two mirrors, the second poem, “Candescences,” and the third poem, “Grit.” As with line count in “The Act,” so with stanza count in Constellation: each poem has fifty stanzas. What the first-person speaker, the I, of “Luminosities” says reflects (against) what the I of “Candescences” says, just as what she says in “The Act” reflects (against) what he says. But “Luminosities” has a second mirror: “Grit,” also in fifty stanzas, maintains a very explicit gloss or commentary relationship between a given stanza and its corresponding stanza in “Luminosities.” In “The Act,” the two speakers are explicitly distinguished as the “him” and “her” of a married heterosexual couple, each in turn speaking in the first person. In Constellation, the first-person speakers in “Luminosities” and “Candescences” are not distinguished so explicitly: they’re less like differently-gendered marriage partners than they are like the articulated-thought self and the lost-in-conundrum self that Phillips identifies. Just as in “The Act,” though, or as in a courtroom, they are given equivalent conditions in which to have their say.
To hint at how the double mirroring in Constellation plays out, here are the first stanzas from each of the four poems (part of the stanza for the first two, the whole stanza for the second two).
From “Luminosities”:
Against landscape, butterfly. Scolding its intemperate wings,
strict pattern. Within that pattern any moment of color,
behind that moment one grain of dust. There’s a reason we bow
to brilliance: coruscations escaping a caught trout’s bright scales,
ultramortality of meteor meeting atmosphere.
From “Candescences”:
Empty of people, the streets, but not empty. Not empty of foxes, for example, who if they notice me never let on. If they were more wary, I might feel more real, more myself. More a self, any self. I thought with all this walking I would locate something, and what I would locate would be myself. Instead, each spent breath shimmers and dissipates, and I follow that countdown, those ephemeral intensifications reflecting again what has been reflected already off moon, cloudscrim, snow.
From “Grit”:
For intemperate, the reader may substitute indelicate, inflexible, inveterate, inviolate, insatiate, or any other four-syllable iambic word beginning with the negative prefix in-. Recall here (recall, indeed, throughout this entire work) the use of epithets in the Iliad and Odyssey, their application guided by rhythmic context rather than by denotative content. I defer here no more than Homer deferred there to reference as the exclusive source or arbiter of meaning.
From “Silt”:
This concern for distance is not peculiar to me, not a function of my misanthropy or my debilitating agoraphobia. All sociability depends at least as much on distance as on proximity. Except when they’re forced into bait balls by dolfins or bluefin, herring maintain their group by each individual keeping its distance from every other. Starlings stipple a power line by settling each just far enough from the next not to be pecked by it. I’m not trying to draw you closer to me, my love, and I’m not trying to draw closer to you: I’m trying to establish and maintain enough distance.
The brilliant summer butterfly wing dust and fish scales in the first passage are mirrored by the shimmering moonlit winter breath in the second, and the word “intemperate” in the first passage is mirrored by “indelicate” and the words that follow it in the list in the third passage. The foxes in the second passage are mirrored by the herring and starlings in the fourth passage, and by the butterfly and trout in the first passage. And so on. Like the speakers in “The Act,” the speakers in Constellation could be said to share a body of experience but to experience that experience quite differently. Giving such speakers “equal time” through structural constraint in the way that I am calling “mirroring” is, then, a way for me to try to live up to the ideal that in The Language of Inquiry Lyn Hejinian so elegantly formulates: “It is the task of poetry to produce the phrase this is happening and thereby to provoke the sensation that corresponds to it — a sensation of newness, yes, and of renewedness — an experience of the revitalization of things in the world, an acknowledgment of the liveliness of the world, the restoration of the experience of our experience — a sense of living our life.”
I recognize that “mirroring” is a metaphor: stanzas with similar structures or images or themes can figuratively mirror one another, but are not literally mirrors. I find the metaphor apt, though, to the pairing that structures these poems, because it appeals to the aspiration for self-knowledge that animates these (and so many other) poems. We take literal mirroring as an indication of self-awareness or its lack: it is funny to watch a dog bark at a mirror, not recognizing the image there as its own reflection, and scientists consider it an indicator of self-awareness that a dolphin can recognize itself in a mirror. Self-awareness travels readily from literal mirroring to figurative, making symmetrical structures uncanny and resonant expositors of interiority.
For me, then, the mirroring in these poems doesn’t supplement the poem with a technical flourish, an accessory complementing the ensemble that dresses up the poem. It is not the formal icing on the content cake. To the contrary, mirroring is integral to the poem’s operation. Again, there’s a principle at work: we feel structure. Structure is susceptible to analysis and explication, so a music theorist can “take apart” the structure of a Bach fugue. But even a person (such as myself) with quite limited music-theoretical knowledge experiences emotion upon hearing the fugue. One could say that’s all a Bach fugue is, a structure of tones, but it “works on me,” engaging my whole person: my emotions, my mood, my thoughts, even my heart rate and muscle tension. Structure is evocative, even transformative: it changes the one who encounters it (as captured by the cliché that “music soothes the savage beast”). In “The Act” I leaned on structure (such as what I’m here calling “mirroring”), and that early faith in (dependence upon) structure has continued in all my poetry since then. It shows up in Constellation with a vengeance, in the doubled mirroring and in various other ways.
That first/first poem “The Act” and the recent book Constellation are not outliers for me in their use of mirroring. What I’m calling “mirroring” here is an intensified form of comparison, certainly, but it is continuous with, not isolated from, our many modes of comparison: metaphor, parataxis, and so on. From Aristotle through contemporary cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff, praise of metaphor has been consistent: I’m not the first person ever convinced of the revelatory power of setting things side-by-side! My being so convinced, though, is behind my building “mirroring” into numerous other works in addition to these two. My recent collection Moral Tales, for instance, has the same double-mirror structure as Constellation: a set of Plato translations with a set of the same number of Marie de France translations mirroring one another (a “him” and a “her” speaking in turn, just like “The Act”!), each set with its own mirroring gloss analogous to the mirroring glosses in Constellation.
My recent “hybrid” book Say It Into My Mouth, too, makes extensive use of mirroring. Each of its three sections could be described as “mirroring” in a way that resembles “The Act” and Constellation.
- The first section, “Always the clearest question keeps itself unanswered,” presents six pieces, each consisting of fifty couplets, and each couplet composed of two directly-quoted questions, the first from a male-identifying author, the second from a female-identifying author. The questions in each couplet, that is, mirror one another much as the stanzas in “The Act” mirror one another.
- The second section, “How opposition integrates itself,” gives a complete translation of the ancient Greek thinker Herakleitos, mirrored: it is actually two complete translations. For each passage of the original, “my own” “normal” translation into “my own words” is mirrored by a “translation” that is a direct quotation of a passage that was not intended by its writer as a translation of Herakleitos, or indeed as connected with him at all.
- The final section, “Two pictures of a rose in the dark,” consists of 82 segments, each a double mirroring. The first mirror is a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein juxtaposed with a passage from Leslie Scalapino, and the second is a pair of quoted passages that reflect in some way the Wittgenstein and Scalapino passages.
Again, all this mirroring is not decorative, not an optional feature tacked onto what is essential in the work, like a vinyl roof added to a 70s sedan. It is not, to borrow words from Wittgenstein, the wheel that, because it “can be turned though nothing else moves with it,” must not be “part of the mechanism.” To the contrary, it is integral to and constitutive of the work itself. Mirroring is one way (of many ways) to practice writing as discovery, as a mode of learning rather than teaching, of listening rather than speaking. Mirroring doesn’t uncover something that was already there, it brings into being something that wasn’t there before. Wittgenstein’s sense that “philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition” is interesting in itself, as is Scalapino’s observation that “Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy,” but the two of them together, facing one another, create something new, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Mirroring is not me first having some really smart idea in my head and then using the writing as a means to offer that pre-existing idea to others: it’s the writing itself (the fulfillment of a process, the realization of a structure) creating and disclosing something that did not pre-exist the writing. It’s not that I disclose something to the reader by means of the writing, but that the writing discloses something to me and the reader equally. The writing is not a vehicle through which I teach the reader something I knew and the reader didn’t; it’s a way for me and the reader both to see something neither of us could have seen otherwise.
More might be said about mirroring. For example, how might it participate in understanding of the relative properties (e.g. tallness) that Jennifer Cole Wright distinguishes from objective properties (e.g. rectangularity) and subjective properties (e.g. deliciousness)? Similarly, in answering your question more might be addressed than mirroring alone, as for instance by exploring how Phillips’s assertion and your question tap into our widely-held worldview-shaping premise that origin is essence. Stopping here, though, rather than continuing, seems surer proof of my gratitude for your including me in the larger conversation you are creating. Suffice it to say, in answer to your questions, that in the thirty years since writing the first poem in my first book, I have become a very different person, but in at least one way, namely through the structuring principle one might call “mirroring,” that “original” poem does create a precedent that for my poetry remains actively in play. I still trust it to elaborate tensions that inform our understandings and shape our lives.
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Author: Dante Distefano
