This lyrical musing is the work of Seattle poet Susan Parr. –TM
I heard the word ???porous’ today, and it made me think of water pouring into my ears. But porous doesn’t have anything to do with pouring. It’s a pore the word is made of, pore like a vessel or a small cup holding liquid, like sweat or milk or oil. Skin with its pores, for example, is not so much a sheet or a wrapping, more a network of soft little pots.
A friend of mine (who I’ll imagine“) experiments with porousness in paper. He wants to create a paper that contains ink-pores. He would fill the ink-pores from thimblefuls of color in his small shop, then let them sweat out their contents under the heat of day. Stapled to a utility pole, a poster or public announcement made of this paper would quietly erupt into a kind of flushed excitement. The ink wouldn’t drip so much as creep out–then become promptly absorbed back into the paperscape around the ink-pore. (Gravity pulls ink down, yes, but the droplet is small; the paperscape pulls up.) Flushed, then, is the right word for the effect: the poster highlights itself in pinks, it self-promotes, indeed, it freaks out.
So, this friend draws portraits of say, queens (there are more queens in the world than one thinks!) or various laborers. Then, patiently in his studio, he indents the drawings with a tiny tool, and injects these indentations, these pores, with color. Hung up outside at night, the poster looks ordinary enough. But at dawn–or around ten thirty–or in late afternoon, whenever the air warms–the poster suddenly releases its inks, and intricate tattoos appear on the high cheeks of the queens, on the necks of the linemen, on the bald spots of the bookies. Good golly.
When I said I was going to write an entry on a blog, my friend scoffed. He dislikes the Internet for what he calls its “spotlit underglare.” But I think he secretly feels sorry that my paperless wordscape contains no pores. Alas, I, too, love the tactile world–already I miss it. Vaporzied into a scant assortment of Latin letterforms, where is me and my ubiquitous “I”?
But perhaps I should reconfigure. Like the ear, misintercepting the word porous, “I” must give over to the “eye.” What pours into my poor head must come out somehow. Perhaps what the poster–the blog poster–contains is simply a more amorphous kind of vessel: pores for the words, pores for the images, pores for the sounds pulled from the sites, whether websites or sites of culture.
So if a post is a reading on something topical–a lineation on a portrait of Pop–then maybe that means, reader, that you are the heat, you the lamp, and you the sun?
It’s nice to imagine, anyway.
Susan Parr’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cranky, and Filter, and are forthcoming in The Seattle Review and The Best American Poetry 2007. She makes her home in Seattle, where she works as a graphic artist.