I’ve been thinking about the issue of texture. There has to be a word—I’m using “texture” for lack of a better one—that describes how words in a poem interact, how they produce sensation. There was a group of poems in the Kenneth Rexroth issue of The Chicago Review that grabbed my attention; they were by a poet unknown to me, Emily Wilson, and I enjoyed what she was doing immensely. Am I breaking any rules by reproducing one of them?
WATERCOLOR WITH SCRAPING-OUT
Those jots of fir
in passages of snow, snow—
endorsed gullies where the ridge drops
off, into what—
the hatch of light poles and
athletic-field fencing
that elm, its yellowish
ticking off from the strong-limbs.
There are people going over
all the time on occasion I imagine
trying to see where it chambers down
or out, the long ravine.
Where no roads go, paths go, and then
plaited ruts that end in a general
crescent—something broad
turned about, cracking the grass.
It resists?
It does not resist.
This time the clouds get their edges
vanished away from, banded in crops
corrugations.
They must be more certain
more ruled and scale into the iced cuts
of the parking lot.
Like a thought thought out
on its track
far off from myself
I may recall in plain sight—
sort of true, sort of dangerous
cumulatively speaking
the darker grips
toward black
(Emily Wilson)
Barely an “I” there; barely a narrative; awkwardness of odd speech rhythms, of barely complete sentences. A basic phenomenological confusion as to whether we’re in an artwork or an earthly landscape. “Cumulatively speaking,” all it’s got going for it are its words and the abstract rhythms they make, the feelings they arouse as they jostle—and to me, this is everything. The poem, cut from the mind; the weave of the thing. No crutches.
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