“A fairer House than Prose–/More numerous of Windows–/Superior–for Doors–”
What Emily Dickinson was talking about, of course, was the capability of the poem towards dynamism–a perennial unsettling, a moving forth between meaning and non-meaning, from poem to poem, and within a poem from line to line, image to image. I think Emily Dickinson would very much have appreciated the surface of a Hans Hofmann painting in which classical perspective is abandoned (and hence, to a degree, linear thought and narrative) in favor of what Hofmann called “push-pull perspective.” The story of the painting–and most all of Hofmann’s paintings had specific and sometimes narrative titles (never a Rothkean “Orange and Blue”)–found itself moving through the various elements, never quite in an “order” but rather in an experience of the canvas as a whole.
We experience life like this and sometimes poetry, too.
I was in Saint Catherines, Ontario last week visiting my cousin. On our tour of this old Canadian city we came across a nineteenth century church marked with a historical plaque telling the story of Harriet Tubman’s years there. Coming from Oberlin, Ohio, I thought I knew a great deal about the Underground Railroad. What I didn’t know, hadn’t known, is that Harriet Tubman’s years of activism spanned decades and she died well into the 20th Century, having lived nearly fifty years after the end of enslavement. Though her story is more or less essentialized into the rescue missions into the South, during the Civil War she worked as a scout and a spy, later leading a military expedition. After the war was over she became a Suffrage activist and even did a Rosa Parks turn on a train.
When we lock ourselves into singular understanding or interpretation we lose all of our chances at actual knowledge.
I was teaching a yoga class the day before I left for my 20-year High School reunion. In the class we were thinking about the nature of the self. What (or who) do we mean when we say “I”? I thought to myself how strange it would be to go home after twenty years–after all, I had changed so much. Of course I soon realized that much of my anxiety stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t changed at all. But how could both of these things be true?
The reunion wasn’t anything like I thought it would be. The people I had been friends with all those years ago I still liked very much. As in high school, I missed talking to many people I thought were very interesting. One classmate had come in a long turquoise dress with turquoise-painted fingernails and toenails to match. I wanted to talk to her all night! The real charm for me was the chance to talk with people I hadn’t actually known well in school, feeling new and strong connections. In that sense, the reunion wasn’t a tying together of lose ends, but rather another door forward into new possibilities and new friendships.
The “self”–and so by extension what we call the “lyric I”–is a dynamic thing, ever-changing as a Hoffman canvas, not fixed like a photograph. In the self there is something that is constant and there are a million shifting things. These all exist at once. In poems, as in the friendships I made at the reunion, there are places you thought were finished and closed where suddenly something new grows.
Of course, yes, it makes writing poetry impossible, because you don’t know, will never know, how a line ends, how a poem can finish, how music completes itself. Like Tubman’s chronic hypersomnia and visions–perhaps physiologically connected to her childhood head trauma, but thought by Tubman herself to be of divine providence–a poem like Dickinson’s or like yours or mine can only hope to reach out in the dark, to deny an ending, to wish or wonder.