'Magnetic Lines/of the Moment': Barry Schwabsky Introduces Arthur Sze
Today, we recommend that you hit the slopes with a hop and a skip and head to Hyperallergic, where Barry Schwabsky introduces readers to the writing of Arthur Sze, one of his favorite poets. For readers who are not already indoctrinated, this most recent opus by Schwabsky, who is a regular contributor, is quite a boon.
I have a habit, when reading a good book of poetry, of looking for the places where the poet seems to be reflecting on his or her own sense of what poetry is. Arthur Sze, one of my favorite poets, writes, “If I sprinkle iron filings onto a sheet / / of paper, I make visible the magnetic lines / of the moment.” That’s one way to understand what he does in his new book, Compass Rose: as a sort of secular divination through poems made of small particles of sense, yet in which the poetry of the poems (if you know what I mean) is not made of those particles but of the hidden forces that organize the patterns formed by these disparate particulars that are the poems. And yet Sze also holds that “to the writer of fragments, each fragment is a whole.” That is, the fragments—the “iron filings”—are after all not merely a vehicle for making otherwise invisible formations discernible; each is somehow also an autonomous whole with its own inherent value. There are fragments and there is a whole but there is no evident mediation between them—no narrative, no discourse to account for the relation, only the intuition that it is so. It is the burden of Sze’s poetry to make the reader feel this antinomy vividly while also feeling that, line by line or rather statement by statement—for this is a poetry of statements—the contradiction is being resolved, that (like a Leibnizian monad) “each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects / every other.”
As should be clear from what I have quoted so far, Sze’s fragments are not the “simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction” that Kenneth Rexroth discerned in the poems of Pierre Reverdy, but they are also more self-contained than the “narrative or at least informative wholes” used, in Rexroth’s account, by Apollinaire and the main line of European and American modernists who followed him (Pound, Eliot…). But Sze’s poetics does share with Reverdy’s what Rexroth describes as the imperative to convey “an invisible or subliminal discourse which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic.” And this is despite the fact that the fragments out of which Sze constructs his poetry can be syntactically and also semantically denser and more elaborate than those of Apollinaire et al. Because they are topically far removed from one another, conjuring no unifying scene or theme or individual consciousness (previous to the activity of reading itself) through which they can be synthesized, their relation or nonrelation is not simply that of parataxis; rather they become a kind of implicit syntactic catachresis, as if ideas were not simply succeeding each other but rather constantly substituting one for another. War, love, eating, the indifferent processes of the natural world, the banality of consumer culture, spiritual longing, historical memory commingle. The scope of this poetry is Whitmanesque in its inclusiveness, though its rhetorical modesty is anything but Whitmanesque.
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