Some poems seem a great tangle needing to be wrangled with, requiring one to pick and poke and study and prod, to pull and yank, unravel. Some present themselves as gifts, as gentle impossibilities, giant terrors, rude explosions. Emily Dickinson famously wrote that she knew a poem when it made her, “whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me“” John Cage wrote that poetry is,”…form…It is the continuity“of a piece of music“it is a proof“that our delight“lies in not pos-sessing anything“Each moment“presents what happens“” Merwin, for me, is a poet with whom I am very quickly led from moment to moment, from line to line, poem to poem. Sometimes without even total interest in content. I find myself reading for the “continuity“of a piece of music,” for the movement and motion and emotional trance of composition.
But what is this movement? How is it created? This week I’ve been thinking about what keeps something in motion in poetry–what gives the reader the urgent sense (suspense?) that they should continue; what forces one’s eyes across the surface of a page with speed, involuntarily; or, what moves the poem straight through a reader, as a ghost walking through a wall? Some thoughts:
1. Syntax, or Motion of Line
Something we’ve mentioned on the blog in the past is Merwin’s lack of punctuation. His hesitancy to finish anything in these poems, his stubborn open-endedness. Also, Zach has discussed Merwin’s use of syntax and how it is varied and wild in comparison with his rather limited diction. Many poems in The Shadows of Sirius seem to build in force and urgency through constantly turning (non-end-stopped) short lines, creating a faster and faster cyclone-like motion via the tension between one sound and the next (echo), and each idea linked to all previous contexts on the thought-thread that came before it. Then many of the poems, in the final lines, transition from formal fastness and structural incompleteness to an idea that leaves the subject matter in eternal movement as well. A tornado ending in an open door. A plank-walk that breaks to oblivion. For example, “Cold Spring Morning” begins:
At times it has seemed that when
I first came here it was an old self
I recognized in the silent walls
and the river far below“
There is the action of accumulation steering the reader through sound, rhythm, and structure. The first line is an incomplete thought, driving one into the next, and requiring the line after that to continue, and so on. The reader must experience all of these ideas at once, creating a sort of synchronicity, or constant. Try reading this poem straight through and finding a place where a period might complete an idea or halt the forward momentum. At the end:
I know where they are and the birds
that are hidden in their own calls
in the cold morning
I was not born here I come and go
Merwin, instead of knotting or shutting, presents a new thought that calls into question the location or authority of the narrator from the beginning. He ends with a fresh inquiry, maintaining suspense and secrecy, pushing us out of the piece with nowhere left to roam but our own imagination or the next poem. Another example of this speedy syntax, this quick folding or vertigo, appears in the first lines of “A Likeness” (“Almost to your birthday and as I“”), “Beyond Questions” (“What is it then“”), and “Note” (“Remember how the naked soul“”), etc. The music or mystery formally floats us, regardless of, at times, even event or idea or memory.
Q: Is music mesmerizing to you? Are you led by sounds or amazed by the way in which the composition’s trick becomes magic? (As Zach entranced by the bad juggler?)
Also–check out John Taggart’s syntax, from “Slow Song for Mark Rothko,” and how you can’t stop moving:
To breathe through the mouth to breathe through the
mouth to breathe to sing to
sing in the most quiet way to
sing the seeds in the earth breathe forth
2. Physical Movement Within The Poem, or Motion of Body
I like a poem that takes a walk. One moves, step by step (line by line) forward while breathing, as in poetry. The narrator must simultaneously think and act, be physical in the world and (if alone) internal. Walks (or runs, or drives, or dances, or adventures) give world to word, and place to space. Sebald, of course, is the master, but other favorites include: Frank O’Hara, Lisa Fishman, Emily Wilson, Emerson, and most Romantics. I’ve been thinking about the idea of bodies moving through lines ever since Andy mentioned that Merwin is known to compose while pacing his Hawaiian orchard.
Actual motion on the part of the narrator, it seems to me, might move the reader through time in a very linear way, although what we experience, process, observe, and think about is anything but. The body’s activity is a time-line or thread that weaves through what is otherwise mostly just chaos. When we move, we (or just me?) often host entire conversations in our mind, go back in time, and, alone long enough, moving forward, enter a sort of dream state, a semi-aware-being-there, a heightened grace or anxiety. The start to one of my favorite poems-in-motion, by Arda Collins:
It Is Daylight
I called my house from a pay phone
down the street before I went home.
I needed to check on the empty situation.
It was daylight,
still here.
My shadow looked large and unschooled.
The sidewalk was yellow in the sun.
I was thinking that I wasn’t anyone
and that my future would be a trajectory
leading further away.
The lilacs were out (“)
And what–you want to know–about: 3. Rhyme, Repetition, Echo, or Motion of Word and 4. Emotion, or Motion of Heart or Soul ? In the spirit of breaking
early in order to make movement or
the reader re-
turn in spirit: next week I may continue with the