The Endless Overlay

Poetry feels like a religion that I form out of fragments. The intensity of this courtship can prove to be unrelenting and all consuming. I used to hurry into containing the event of the poem through numbering or slapping down titles, hoping that my mind would consider the poem finished and then click forward. Lately I have been trying to hold off on this immediate need to impose an order, to allow the mind to be still, to let my poems just stand and reflect off of one another. It’s like having to give up any immediate distinction between writing a poem and jotting down a throbbing, aching idea for a poem.

These questions surfaced again recently after rereading an obscure sequence of poetry by Barbara Guest titled A Reverie on the Making of a Poem and written in 1998. I refer to this nine-part sequence as ‘obscure’ because it is not included in The Collected Poems (2008). The Collected ends with a handful of new poems, but A Reverie is not among them. I first encountered the poem in the anthology Civil Disobediences, edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright (2004). The following excerpt is the third to last section (and fairly emblematic of the whole sequence):

an advanced punctuation bursting from vases
 
                                                  into an arena of sound
the aroma continues as a cloud of invisibility    shelters
 
                                         ghost exiting
 
        there from center right:      solid objects merciless

 

 
mood
 
what else can poem perform in its arena
 
of possibilities
 
the phantom of possible ideas

I think I am drawn to Guest’s explicit staging within the poem because the words seem to be on the brink of caving in, “the phantom of possible ideas.” The sequence is fitted with its own trapdoors, an alcove and balcony plus easy access to the underworld, thrown in with one thin line. This literal subtext sounds like demented computer commentary on the poem lurking above. I woke up the other night thinking that maybe each poem is a floor plan for an abandoned room.

I imagine these poems as structures left open to the public.

A Reverie sits on the edge between stating strategies for poetry while also bracing itself in the throes of lyric composition itself. I get the sense that the ‘key’ to the poem has been mislaid in one of its rooms. I actually like that this sequence has fallen outside of Guest’s Collected Poems. It restores my sense of poetry as a hidden religion. I should also say that A Reverie was heavily influenced by the French poet Anne-Marie Albiach. It feels as though Guest lifted a few orchestral and investigative strategies from her work. There is a similar sensation of stalking the very act of writing as well as a need to highlight the white space of the page. Both poets feel invested in questions of word order and how italics and quotes can be used to come across as ‘haunting’ the text. The following is an excerpt from Albiach’s sequence titled EXCESS: this measure. The translation is by Keith Waldrop from the volume Figured Image (The Post-Apollo Press, 2006):

compulsive   pauses
                  interlude
 
“she assigns the overture”
 
                          the imprint
designating
           appeal
    voices in the corridors
    counter-trace of a childhood
 
 
                            prop of air
                      octave or relapse
                                upstream
          “behind the fissures”

The compression I bring to the act of note-taking can result in a kind of scribing space; it’s as though the rush to move my strategies into language imparts an immediate pulse to the material, like storming the gates of the serial poem. I come to realize (all over again) that a fragmented take can sometimes be the most accurate. Alice Notley often speaks of the possibilities embedded in the line of the poet and how these can differ from book to book. In a 2013 interview with Lindsay Turner, Notley describes the process of composing two recent poems, “I Am Vocal and the Salt” and “Winged”:

In these poems I keep being myself as a little girl; I’m being in the geography of Needles. We had had to close up the house that I had grown up and that my mother had lived in since I was six or seven years old, and that was really like a death. It was very traumatic for everyone—and I was still there, and I was still inside of Needles, and still inside of her dying, and still inside my childhood and everything simultaneously, the way a life usually is—rather than linear. Which is why poetry is better for describing life than prose is!

When I read this I immediately thought of one of Ted Berrigan’s lines from The Sonnets, “Wind giving presence to fragments.” I have always taken this line as description of one possible approach to measure. A kind of best-case scenario of received language as upheld and funneling through my mind. Notley also testifies to the material of the poem surrounding her although she seems to have less choice in the matter and the level of her agency seems to border on astral projection “rather than linear.” She is still inside, packing up the house, approaching an overlay of available dimensions.

I want the correction
for my sake. I want to be in the right universe.
 
Now I’ve gone to where I’ve abolished you, am I
calling for a new you? It’s so restful here.
 
Momma he won’t shut up. They don’t even know
how to speak they understand each other
saying nothing words.
 
—Alice Notley from “I Am Vocal and the Salt”

Are there clues revealed along the way that can betray the needs of a serial poem? There are times that the fragments involved are so intensely blinding that in order to tame them I have chosen to roll the dice to strip them of any intentional sequencing. Even the use of outright collage cannot obliterate narrative, it merely introduces another reading. Any flagrant procrastination can result in my feeling trapped within the making of the poem. The possibilities of its architecture can only be kept in the air or frozen as separate parts for so long.

I also realize that a poet can gain access to a sequence by agreeing to live inside of it and to listen for years on end. Robert Duncan allowed his series Structure of Rime to unfold over several books, published years apart. These poems always interrupt his collections in an exciting way. They reveal that Duncan is adept at keeping a chorus of voices active and that no single conception of the serial poem can satisfy his imagination. In a 1967 interview Duncan speaks of the series as an endless landscape:

I would let rhyme tell me certain things about itself, instead of the other way around. At the same time, I wanted to do an open series – one that does not have a beginning or end, but simply takes place. It refers to a very real realm that exists. I go to it. I don’t make it up.

Even Duncan’s introductions, essays, and art writings seem to veer off in the service of detailing this “very real realm.” I found several instances of this in his introduction to Bending the Bow (1968):

I enter the poem as I entered my own life, moving between an initiation and a terminus I cannot name. This is not a field of the irrational, but a field of ratios in which events appear in language.

There is not only a melody of sounds but of images. Rimes, the reiteration of formations in the design, even puns, lead into complexities of the field. But now the poet works with a sense of parts fitting in relation to a design which is larger than the poem.

Here is the opening stanza of Structure of Rime XXIV (from Bending the Bow):

In the joy of the new work he raises horns of sublime sound into the heat surrounding the sheets  of crystalline water to make the walls in the music.

The Structure of Rime series seems to form an intermittent cave-like space in which Duncan is allowed to hear secrets of composition and simultaneously to share them. The series would continue to unfold for over 25 years.

I have enjoyed placing these poets’ voices alongside one another—each one feels uncanny and brimming with belief. I often imagine poets as detectives on separate cases, always edging toward uncovering a new fragment or a whole sequence. In this 1999 reading/lecture at the Kootenay School of Writing, Barbara Guest states that in our work as poets we must strive for “a noble plasticity.” It feels like her own version of John Keats’s “Chamber of Maiden Thought,” Arthur Rimbaud’s “Now I drift through the Poem of the Sea” and Robert Duncan’s “heat surrounding the sheets of crystalline water.”