In my recent goodreads review of Anthony Madrid’s Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, I wrote about that moment in poetry workshops where someone comments that the poem could be read as the writer’s ars poetica. And depending on the mood, it can feel like, yeah, thank you for that reasonably dull comment. Or it could be the poem shows substantive interest in its own poemness. Like what about the art of a poem does this particular poem comment on?
Or, as Danika Stegeman’s poem, “Amanuensis,” (from Mercury Firs 4) might inquire: What does it mean when the poet feels herself saying the poem as it comes to her mind, and then having it appear in language? Like is there a relationship between the saying of the poem and the recording of that saying? Should the recording be considered a dictation? Is the poet merely copying down her thoughts? What might be poetically articulated in this shift from poetic impulse to poetic inscription? And how could this be elaborated further if the poet were to personify this inscribing assistant?
“You’ve got a face like lightning.” She tells her, or them, or him, whoever this amanuensis is at the start of the poem. And while the poem is definitely interested in drawing an intense personal connection between the poet and her assistant (”I can feel the lifeforce that inhabits your body.” or “Lux cords checkered and spiraling, joining to your material heart.”), the main challenge or ambition I see pursued in Stegeman is some understanding of what this connection means to the poet via the figure of an opera singer. Or via the song sung by an opera singer. Or via the “objectfeeling” someone feels when in the proximity of art. It’s like the poem is aware of the distance between art and audience, the electric current passed from art to audience, and perhaps, it implies, this is what it feels like when the poetic impulse is captured in language. “I dream a new shape. Some lines read horizontally, others vertically, others diagonally.”
And it’s the poem’s insistent pursuit, its tension, that drives the poem. “I seek the song but never find it.” The poem says. Which feels like a turbulent stasis. That, however stationary, is still eager for movement, and needing to employ the amanuensis to inscribe language. And making more poem with that language.
Of the literary theory that recognizes a distinction between speaking voice and written language, that sees the complexity of translating poetic impulse to poetic language, I would say Paul de Man’s “The Lyric Voice in Contemporary Theory” could serve as the best companion for this poem. Where he argues anyone reading a poetic voice will likely put a face to it. A voice will not simply exist, or seem to emanate from a cloud of abstract subjectivity. For my reading, Stegeman’s poem struggles with what face or what concrete incarnation she can give to that figure making language from her voice. Is it an “assistant” or “amanuensis”? Is there a perfect image that would be equivalent to what this assistant accomplishes putting the poet’s thoughts into language? Is it just complicating the whole poetic feeling further? I hope so! If only to give space and an evolving shape to the devotion felt between these two—the poet and her amanuensis.