Reading poetry, for me, often involves a patient acceptance. Where the poem has a method of meaning or makes gestures towards meaning, possibly even withholding meaning. In ways that are unique to itself. It’s like a negotiation centered on access. Is this a poem that will teach me how to gain access to its material? Or is this a poem that absorbs me, as a reader, into its manner of telling and the material it wants to tell me about? Is this a poem that’s mainly about listening to the poet’s voice, the rhythms of their telling, the tonal accounting of events. And, yes. I mean to describe reading as an activity, a doing. I’ve long been sensitive to Stanley Fish’s directive about doing things to the text in Is There a Text in This Class? And one of the things I like doing is listening for a poem’s guidance and encouragement. “Read this way.” The poem says. Like maybe I should occupy the inside of each poetic fragment, or maybe I shouldn’t be so atomistic. Maybe the poem isn’t supposed to use a fragmented grammar, but instead a menagerie of images, like with Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum.
And sometimes a poem is best read for the disjunction marking where two fragments stand juxtaposed to one another. Like they’re tectonic plates sliding above or beneath. Or they’re staring one another down, like macho men at the dance club. However it is you read the fragments, their disjunction might prove to be the central device, like how extended metaphor can serve as a conceptual map, or like a galloping rhyme scheme can feel like a smith hammering at a forge. I’ll admit, I like disjunction for the activity it brings. It can signal a shift in subject. It can comment on the velocity of perception. It can feel like collage, allowing various poetic images the affect of simultaneity, like it aspired to being visual art.
It’s interesting, then, to read Jennifer S. Cheng’s essay, “A Catalog of Falling Things” (from a recent issue of Iowa Review) like it were a memoir to disjunction. Like the life story of Cheng, of Cheng’s daily struggles and fears, considered as emotional renderings of disjunction. A reading I bring mainly because I’ve only known Cheng through her poems. So the essay’s consideration of disjunctive moments rounding to a conclusion that on what feels like a fairly explicit craft statement on disjunction, my impulse is to couch everything in Cheng’s poetry.
If it were possible, I would spend all my days like this, between the cracks, where a strange confluence of smallness and largeness dwells; where fear and pleasure lose their distinguishing boundaries, and fragility and strength tangle so intimately and daringly, they are almost the same thing.
To be “between the cracks” for Cheng is to fear herself falling, like when she has her focus wrenched away by OCD or when she reiterates her fears causing her to overthink the present moment, she’s falling in that sense walking could be said to be falling down the sidewalk. And the quick reaction where you try catching yourself, that is disjunction, and it marks a “crack” in her perception. A “strange confluence of smallness and largeness.” Something she embodies with the essay’s list structure—each item an episode or consideration. Of “falling things,” as the title says. And in Cheng’s citation from Cecilia Vicuña, they mark where Cheng feels wounded by her reality, and the wonder that might be prompted by that wound. I would say that marks the poetic potential of disjunction—the gap between what she fears must inevitably happen and an observation of what really happens. In particular, the disjunction, marked as a wound, attunes her to the moment. Yes, it’s couched in fear. But, as the prose in this personal essay indicates, her elaborated experience of fear discovers itself more fully when she articulates it into language. When her heightened awareness can actively shape her writing. It establishes a keen sensitivity to the present. A sense of wonder surprisingly ingrained in the wound.
It’s Cheng’s comments on the wound, and how often poets write about “wounds” and “bruises,” that’s at the base of this post. A wound can be provocatively complex, and in a poem it can reference things like raw tissue exposed to the elements, it can speak to the ongoing emotional hurt that follows after physical harm, it can speak to those poignant aches existing below the surface, elaborating a felt presence, seizing on what feels sudden and tender. Where it could be a sharp pain, sometimes dull, and sometimes you forget about it. I mean, I’m never sure how solid my grasp on Affect Theory, but I feel Cheng’s thoughts on falling and the wonder she experiences in that wounded space, it notes a point of resonance, where “a strange confluence of smallness and largeness” might appear.
Surprisingly, this frame speaks to the reading I’ve long carried for Mary Jo Bang’s The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans. Not that the book dwells explicitly on a wound, but more because I’m never sure how to situate the book’s poetic speaker. On one hand, I read for the speaker’s exaggerated poise? But has this mannered speaker suffered a wound? Has she explicitly obscured the wound from my vision? What has happened to her that she perceives only the most arch motives playing out in a scene? Like there is a correct way this poem’s speaker should appear correctly to her reader, because she’s using only the correct language addressing the correct “subtleties” of the scene. Like when the woman’s “fitted knit” is explicitly matched to the sexual tension it brings in the opening of “The Harbor,” the speaker deflects. It’s merely “suggesting several possibilities but mostly the mouth // at the nipple.”
This is not to directly equate Bang’s use of sexual tension with Cheng’s wound. What I’m more interested in is Bang’s mannered description. How the speaker occupies the affective moment. “The Harbor” concerns a woman describing another woman, and she’s all too aware of the tension her “fitted knit” will inspire in the male gaze. And the poem exists “where everything regressive feels right,” between the speaker’s cool anticipation of others’ responses and the realization she is the one controlling what the poem even says. The poem is hers, the speaker’s. And only what she observes will be what actually happens. And maybe this far-fetched correlation I see between Bang’s work and the ars poetica in Cheng’s “A Catalog of Falling Things” is the surprise that “between” has discovered a space where one thing hadn’t really been troubled to be seen as two. Walking down the sidewalk for Cheng is now about “falling,” because it can be. Precarity as wound. Forward momentum the poet can personally fragment into many moments. Likewise the dominating mannerisms in Bang’s poem putting language into the tension of control.
Both methods carve awareness into that “between,” then occupy it with language. In that way Stephanie Burt describes in her “Beyond Baroque” essay. They create excess where there wasn’t supposed to be anything excessive going on. Moments like this could be explained as metacommentary, a poem aware of itself as a poem. But like when John Barth energetically comments on the narrator/character in “Lost in the Funhouse,” the meta gets complicated, because the person in charge of telling the story is currently being overwhelmed by the very emotion at the heart of the story. But what happens when overwhelm is subsumed into a poise, as it is with Bang’s poetry? It feels more like the wonder drawn out of a wound. Whose mannered telling is assuredly the final word.
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