To the Letter

Letters are the bricks that make up any poetic structure, and in the December 2014 Poetry, two contributors accentuate their brickwork in a host of ways. For Terrance Hayes and Molly Peacock, letters aren’t just linguistic units: they serve as physical objects, they reinforce themes, and perhaps above all, they remind us of the large role played by the small.

In “How to Draw a Perfect Circle,” Terrance Hayes zooms in on O. “Omen begins with O,” he writes, and “at the center of God looms an O.” Yet O doesn’t serve merely as a letter here—it also corresponds with spatial phenomena that recur throughout the poem. The speaker draws a model whose body comprises “spheres”; his cousin performs a backflip, cutting an O in the air; a woman slices an onion, that tasty nest of O’s. The physical world is particularly significant to this speaker, who is producing a “blind contour drawing” that requires him to replicate a scene while neither looking at his work nor lifting pencil from paper. “Everything is connected / By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake / Swallowing its own decadent tail,” Hayes writes.

Accordingly, the “lines” of his poem—like those of the drawing—aim to connect everything, no matter how seemingly disparate. The “spheres” of the model’s body visually echo the self-consuming snake, an ancient image known as “Ouroboros” that signifies, appropriately, cyclicality. The speaker’s cousin knifed a policeman in the eye: that act resembles his mother’s efforts to slice an onion, as well as the cousin’s earlier, more benign violence against a plate of meat. Half-blinded, the cop brings to mind the “blind” contour drawing as well as the onion’s blinding effect on the woman who cuts it.

The speaker suffers from imperfect vision, too: he mentions the possibility of an “omen,” a sign of his cousin’s upcoming madness. But “there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy,” he laments. He remembers only the cousin eating meat and performing a backflip, using his body to circle around nothing—just as the speaker does, seeking a portent and finding none.

What’s the story of O, anyway? What does that letter suggest to you? Note its resemblance to a zero, which associates O with lack—a reading the poem supports. The speaker loses his cousin, shot dead by the policeman he attacked; the cop is deprived of an eye after the cousin knifes it, leaving an O-shaped hollow; above all, the speaker lacks understanding.

But might O suggest something positive as well? The round, closed shape accommodates and delimits, much as the lines of a drawing or poem do. It provides form, imposes order on chaos, describes (or circumscribes) the world. Accordingly, through its circular progress, this poem curbs tumult, and makes some sense of the senseless.

Letters play an equally marked role in Molly Peacock’s “The Poet” and “Q’s Quest.” The pieces come from Peacock’s book Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions, and each highlights a different letter; the first focuses on P and the second on Q.  Like Hayes, Peacock emphasizes the physicality of letters, but in a different way: she couples her poems with collages that include images of the letters alongside images from the poems. The artist Kara Kosaka lays a curlicued P atop a lily pad; a Q nestles among roses and wears, surprisingly, a crown.

Why juxtapose illustrations of objects with illustrations of letters? Does the pairing highlight the distinction between things and words, between what we see and how we describe what we see? Or does it liken them, as if to suggest that letters are material forms themselves, and just as worthy of representation as a sword or a lily pad? Do some poems rely on this view of letters? We’ve seen that, in Hayes’s poem, letters serve as linguistic components as well as physical forms laden with evocative power. Another such poem is E.E. Cummings’s “l(a,” which relies partly on the resemblance of l to 1—a parallel that reinforces the poem’s theme of solitude.

In “The Poet,” Peacock plays up P through plentiful alliteration: “Instead of petty policies—immensity,” she writes. “Peaceful farmers would be impaled, paltry officials imprisoned.” Her focus on the tiniest constituents of words matches the Poet’s emphasis on minutiae. While a great war starts, he grows all the more taken by the details of his life: a lily pad on the pond, a pool of silk on the bed. And when “a pinpoint of a poem stabbed him”—as though the poem were no bigger than a pin—the phrases comes in bits, starting with the most diminutive words, the prepositions.

“From his masters he had learned that immensity makes the small crucial,” Peacock writes. “A little poem before a big war becomes a necessity.” What might she mean? What can a haiku do in the face of war? When you confront disaster, do you find small joys more or less critical than before?

At the end of the poem, a conquering soldier reads the haiku, which serves as a “stay” against his vision of the past. Out of the small, as Hayes and Peacock show us, much can be made.