Poets are obsessed with the appalling pleasure of vanishing into their own art. An angel’s starry sleeve once nudged (as it had to) Rilke into powder. Thomas James spoke with a shudder of pleasure as a cinnamon- and palm-wine-perfumed mummy. John Ashbery builds glass Versailles palaces and likes to slip out the back door before his own last line.
Yes, this vanishing-in-making isn’t unique to poetry; any unmixed concentration adjoins. I remember being nineteen, hearing my little brother and his guitar plunk out, then nail, then return and return to, Clifford Brown’s dazzly “Joyspring”. He was gone in it. I remember tonight drinking scotch and tea and listening to one friend lay out Lost mythology for another, in that fan-specialist language with its ring of ecclesiastical Latin.
But maybe this vanishing is so important to understanding poetry– is cast in higher relief– because poetry takes its shape around the voice, enacts a progression in time, and is portable. We expect language to communicate, demonstrate, and assert; instead, poetry uses the tools of self-expression for (meant, transmissible) self-giving-over.
John Keats gave a boring name (negative capability) to his beautiful explanation of the poet’s receptivity-adjoining-transparency, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
In a few months I’m graduating from an MFA. Last week, in a fight with a friend, I said I’d only love my manuscript if I were gone from it completely. Anonymous lies at the end of worked, alert, and gathered in– poems (or so I hope) so full of bowerbirdy repurposings of words, or beloved images, or jokes, or replies to other poets or friends, that the work would seem completely un-self-knowing, un-attached– like the swing of a vicodined boxer, or a juggler in zero gravity getting one toss in. I believe I am absent from my best poems, which is the only reason they feel ethical.
So. I listen to poets read and ask: the names are Alice Notley or John Ashbery, but who speaks here? Or, for God’s sake, here? (Both links are to the wonderful PennSound archive.) Alice Notley writes that “the voice of the poem isn’t interested in the poet at all… It seems to have come into existence just a moment prior to the poem, and though it doesn’t exactly cease with it since it vibrates so, is really only for the poem.” A poem needs you, its author, once; if you’re lucky, it then leaps off you, like a hat blown off your head and waving– without volition but with form– be seeing you before it’s lost.