Prose for Poets, Poetry for Prose Writers: How I Read and Write in Troubled Times

III

THE LANGUAGE WITHIN LANGUAGE

So, what I want to describe is how, as I mentioned above, I look for the patterns in words, in the language of the text, for it is these patterns that reveal the often hidden or inexpressible world, as Bret Lott’s shared meals do. This world is not given in direct statements, but in the art of the writing itself, in the form. It is what holds a piece together as what Aristotle called a “well made thing.” It acts on a subconscious level to move us, and because of that, it is immensely more powerful than any surface statements or plot. For example, in Shakespear’s King Lear we can follow the plot and character development and deterioration. But we can also notice at the beginning that all the good characters speak a language of nature, but it is disorderly and chaotic and they end up defeated of going mad. The evil characters speak a language of business, politics, and militaristic terms, but they are orderly and purposeful and overwhelm the others. What interests me is that, besides the plot resolution, what acts on us, almost subconsciously, is that one of the evil characters, Albany, starts to use a language of nature, adding order or chaos as he turns sides and thus resolves the play’s language as we begin to sense, even participate in, how one can change morals with a change in language.

Or Mary Oliver’s “Swan” which is a poem and a prose account of its writing. In the prose she talks about concrete “pictures of the world” and “threads from the perceptually felt world to the transcendent world.” These threads—links of images and perceptions like Kang’s “white” images work to keep the elements linked and heading towards a larger vision. When we get to the poem, we see the swan linked to images of “ship,” “waters” and “shore,” suggesting a destination, but also a strand that moves from “wings” to “paradise” and “heaven,” suggesting the destination is transcendental, even religious, especially with relation to the mention of the religious poet, William Blake. The poem creates an experience we feel through these parallel movements that is more personal and intense than simply saying the swans remind her of angels or something like that: it creates a vision beyond the language itself, the personal land that Zagc felt so necessary, and that includes us in a kind of subconscious connection.

Now I want to look at 4 pairs of stories and poems that make these sorts of connections in different ways.

So when I turn to a story like James Balwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”—one of the best stories ever written to my mind—I appreciate, beside the many different complex themes that run through the story—the way the narrator develops as he comes, literally, from darkness into light through a series of references. The narrator begins, in fact by remembering the two darknesses: the one that was the lives that he and his brother lived, and the other of the movies that tried to hide those lives. When he sits in a bar and remembers Sonny the “dark” filled everything. Then, in a cab with Sonny, they travel “through streets which seemed… to darken,” a past that seems inescapable. As he remembers his past he recalls, “the darkness rowing against the windowpanes,” and faces that “look darkening,” the “darkness” that frightens a child,” which is finally “the darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about.”

In many ways, the issue becomes how the narrator must escape the darkness of both the outer world and the inner self. Sonny’s aspirations to be a musician start to blend in with the “darkness” images. A crucial turning point occurs when the narrator sees Sonny listening to a religious revival as he stands off in the shadows, but also receiving, along with the narrator, a kind of revival, going from darkness to the light. In the last few pages, the narrator goes with Sonny to hear him play—he setting is down a “dark street” into an indigo-colored room at “a table in a dark corner.” When Sonny plays, the spotlight is on him, and the narrator finally understands Sonny and his music—and himself—“it’s the only light we got in all this darkness,” the narrator acknowledges. And at the very end the scotch on top of Sonny’s Piano “glowed and shook above my brother’s head like the very cup of trembling,” a reference to the book of Isaiah (51:22) that echoes back to the revival scene. In essence the whole story is a kind of spiritual revival.

When I think of the way those images develop, I think also of James Wright’s “The Journey,” set near Anghiari Italy with his wife. Look at the way “dust” gets redefined the poem, one of the last he wrote when he knew he was dying. Just tracing the different ways the word dust is used here suggests the transformative power of the image to create an image story where the opening stroll becomes a more purposeful journey or quest (a “search”), one which results in understanding how one must “bathe” in the dust of mortality in order to transcend it. At first everything seems “graying gold with dust,” initially suggesting both negative and positive associations, they are simply tired and wash the dust off, but then it becomes “mounds and cemeteries of dust,” an obvious reference to death. But from that arises the spider who frees herself of the dust by going through it—an image that suggests the Christological concept of entering fully into mortality in order to rise out of it. Finally, the speaker realizes that one cannot escape mortality, but must embrace it, let it “blow its dust all over your body.” And this allows him to end on the biblical reference: “let the dead bury the dead” for the business of life is to be on the journey to something beyond. Like Baldwin’s story, a religious or transcendental vison is gradually revealed that we hardly suspected at the beginning. (It took me a few years before I could not read that poem and not be moved to the point of tears.)

This sense of how the language develops constitutes what I would call, after Denise Levertov, the form—that understory or underplot of language and images—as opposed to the surface format—the shape, plot or theme as it unfolds.

Language itself can become a subject that leads to something larger. Allen Wier’s “Things About to Disappear” begins with the narrator leaving Texas after his father’s death. As he leaves, he names the places he passes and leaves behind, taking delight in the sounds and associations of their names: “Buffalo, Tucker, Palestine” and then a page later:

I was holding the names of places sweet in my mouth… like hard candy… Melodies of names, names like Dripping Springs, Round Mountain, Marble Falls, Spicewood… San Saba, Cherry Spring… and the name of the man… I was leaving behind, the name I couldn’t speak. And the name that rhymed with breath and was forever.”

In between those catalogues he recounts what seems like an off the cuff incident: the story of he and is friend thinking of the Trinidad fertilizer plant as an alien facility that processed human blood, and a code phrase they would be able to later signal each other with.  

But he continues his journey and witnesses a car wreck. Here his love of words and description and the alien plant come back into play. As the car shoots off the road he “imagined the aliens landed at Trinidad and constructs another catalogue comparing the  incident to things like, “a  bird gliding…a thrown stick… a fish jumping and caught in the sun… a pole vaulter… the crest of a wave curling back… a clipped fingernail,” as if he were more amazed by his catalogue of metaphors than the incident. When he then goes for help to a lone house he finds a man with, “a long pink face and empty blue eyes—an alien-looking character.” And then, looking at the phonebook, makes another catalogue of place names. When he returns to the scene, the injured woman is being pulled out of the car in a way that suggests a birthing, but it put in the only available vehicle—a hearse. What the accident scene does is pull together motifs of death, language and aliens to set us up for the emotional ending.In the last page and a half, he remembers visiting his father’s death bed:

The double windows in which the sickness made him see men from outer space, aliens from another world would stand around his bed watching him… he would call me in… Didn’t I see that spaceship in the backyard? [The aliens] just stood… around his bed… watching. He could make them disappear with a flashlight.

And then the father leaves him a gift, a memory of something unusual from his own childhood—his surprise at hearing cicadas for the first time: “We used to call them Crickadees,” and he spelled it for me. And he told me that since I liked words, he thought I might like a word like Crickadees and… I wrote it down… and put it in my wallet where it still is, Crickadees, smelling like leather and sweat. He ends by returning to the opening, still leaving, but “listening for Crickadees and loving so many things that were about to disappear.” What began as a quirky travel story ends with an almost—for me—overpowering account of what we lose and what we can retrieve of the past as we travel on our own odysseys. Wier, almost as if following Zajc warning against the stalkers of the world, creates his own language, his own land, his own history—and in doing so adds to ours as readers entering that world.

I see a similar use of language and emotional turn at the end of the text with Gerry Stern’s poem “Soap.” It doesn’t take long to realize that this is a holocaust poem, and the poem changes the definition of soap. Stern begins with a flip tone in order to establish a distance that the poem then goes on the correct:

Our consciousness of the subject behind the word soap and the complex tone mixing flippancy, irony and disgust is overwhelming. But then he becomes ever more specific:

The irony and emotion is heightened by the biblical reference to a “land of milk and honey.”

The poem then starts to become more specific and individualized, listing other “soap” referring to the soap that the Nazis made, and at the same time expands its frame of reference to Austria, Hungary, the Ukraine. As it goes on reporting how “I buy a black Romanian for my shelf,” who had a dream of living in Vienna and listen to music. More dramatically, it reverses the Nazi's process by personifying the soap itself. The narrator's reaction is all the while both emotional, reinforced by the many parallel structures and mini-narratives that grow out of images and references, and also incredibly humble:

About two thirds of the way through the poem he introduces “My counterpart… born in 1925 / in a city in Poland—I don't like to see him born / in a little village fifty miles from Kiev,” a fictional character who soon takes on a reality and history of his own that implicates the narrator:

The forward push of repetitions and parallelisms is halted with this last line—the whole movement of the poem, the whole vision of the narrator suddenly questioned by the apostrophe, a technique used a few lines later. The result is that the end of the poem gains in emotion, in a sense of self-discovery where no one fully is absolved of blame. That allows the end to have ever more validity:

That ending is, for me, overwhelming. Beginning with that simple word he completely changes its definition for us, and more, each time we wash—at least for me—I am reminded of those horrors. The way the rhythm of soap images moves forward and then breaks near the end is an overwhelming experience.

Stern’s poem is an uncovering of a history behind a word, or rathe the perversion of the word by history.  Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands”, from Winesburg, Ohio, follows a reporter, George Willard, as he tries to understand the meaning of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands, the main physical image in the story. The story begins as Wing’s, “nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead,” while waiting for his friend, George to arrive. The restless activity is like, “the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird”—hence, his nickname. As it turns out, Wing is ashamed of his hands and often hides them in pockets or behind his back, though with George he, “talked much with his hands.”

At one point, he places his hands on George’s shoulder to tell George in a teacherly way that he must dream. Then, a short while later he, “raised his hands to caress… [then], a look of horror swept over his face… [and he] sprung to his feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets,” before leaving abruptly.

Just as we suspect at this point, it is revealed that Wing had been a “much loved” school teacher in another town, would often tousle a boy’s hair as he encouraged them, but one boy misunderstood the gesture, and his parents started a protest that ended up having Wing (Adolph Myers) run out of town. Since then, he felt his hands were to blame.

That in itself would be a good story, but the ending has the narrator watching Wing through a well-lighted window as he leaves.  What he sees is Wing picking up spilled crumbs from the floor, and the imagery, our whole sense of Wing, finally changes from pity to something like reverence: 

In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of a devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

In the end, we associate the name with angelic wings, and Wing himself with an innocent martyr. The image of then hands, and to some extend the image of a wing, are what underpin the story and allow us to see a movement from curiosity to a more complex and tragic history to what feels like redemptive ending.

Wing’s hands are not just a word but a visual key. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem titled simply “Poem” also uses an image that is a visual key which is gradually transformed. “Poem” begins with a description of a seemingly unremarkable painting, a small piece (“about the size of an old-style dollar bill”). In contrast to the owners who probably, “looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to,” she delves deeper and begins to examine the painting and make inferences about its setting, noting little details that lead her to conclude,

Obviously, she is as much inventing as seeing and recording which she acknowledges with a self-questioning couplet: “A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?” She goes even further by inferring temperature and season, the presentation of the “fresh and cold” air.

All of these remain curious inferences and assumptions until the speaker realizes: “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!”), at which point the artwork's details (and, consequently, the poem's details) begin to take on more depth and emotion. She then more assuredly hypothesizes:

Then the detail then becomes more specific: “Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, / he'd be your great uncle [...]” whose “visions coincided.” their separate gazes open the poem up to two different “looks”, art and life, the memory of life, “so compressed,” she says, “they've turned into each other.”

In this way art’s, “touching in detail--that little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust,” becomes the mode through which she engages us in her creative act. Just as the poem begins with impersonal and benign descriptions of the cows, the greenery, the weather, and the geese, so it ends returning to these elements, now heavier with memory and significance. 

The poet Charles Simic once said in an interview that we can never really express the complexity of what we want to say: words always fall short because they are essentially metaphors, not the thing itself. It is as if we have two circles that partially intersect, one of experience and one of language, and they overlap for just a fraction.

We have seen how having images of darkness, words themselves and visual images can metamorphose into unexpected visions. Another way to try to expand that overlap of circles is to create a parallel story to a larger given story so that the entire story or poem itself becomes a metaphor, an allegory.

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World allegorically counterpoints the story of a journey across the border to America and an Aztec myth about the journey to the underground. Rather than a single word or motif being metamorphosed, two parallel stories evolve by echoing each other. The novel begins with, Makina, the main character, telling herself, “I’m dead” though we, as of yet, do not understand if that is simply an expression of if she is actually dead, as she watches a large sinkhole open up before her.  Makina’s pilgrimage throughout this novel follows the same structure of a journey through the underworld of the Aztec people. Each chapter refers to one of the nine stages that a deceased soul must take along its years-long journey to its ultimate resting place. So in terms of the surface story, she is alive, but in terms of the allegory she is dead and on the journey to the underworld.  In terms of the story, her mother has given her a message to deliver to her lost brother, and a cartel—like person wants her to carry a package, “presumably drugs,” across the border—which allegorically is the passage from death to the underworld.

After passing through several parallel stages, in the final chapter she is both across the border and imprisoned, or in the afterlife with her brother. In either case she is faced with a whole new identity. It is a place with, “no music, no conversation, just the sound of running water and we are suddenly also back in the first chapter where the sinkhole is, “not a cataclysm’ but an opening, and she finally understands by ending with the opening words of the novel—“I’m ready.”  What the novel does with the double journey is, besides tell a story of self-discovery, offers critique of the cartels, imperialism, and violence—in sort, a critique of our materialistic world.

In this context, I think Eavan Boland’s poem “Persephone,” about the relationship of mother and daughter in her own time of the Irish “troubles.” The poem works on a personal and implied political level, both informed by the myth. The legend of Persephone and Ceres, her mother (sometimes referred to as Demeter) tells how the daughter, tempted into eating seeds from a pomegranate, is whisked off as are result to hell ruled by Hades. Ceres, associated with grain crops, fertility and motherhood, threatens to create famine and so reaches a compromise to have her daughter 6 months of each year.

Boland’s poem, we learn halfway through, is prompted by seeing a pomegranate in her daughter’s room. The poem begins with the poet’s acknowledgement that the myth is one “I can enter anywhere.” Where she does enter is a memory of her own childhood where she lived in exile, a kind of hell—London—as an unwanted Irish immigrant. It is a world of “strange consonants,” a different accent (British) opposed to the clarity of the myth. It is a world of the “crackling dusk of / the [mythical] underworld,” a twilight where “stars are blighted.” Later, she says, searching for her daughter, the “stars are hidden” in a wintry darkness, an image progression that is later picked up with “tears / ready to be diamonds,” —a traditional association—and “veiled stars,” that is, lightly clouded over, as she worries about her daughter’s future. She is, like Ceres/Demeter “ready / to make any bargain to keep her” from the darkness.

That movement, marked by those star images, marks the time progression from Boland’s own fears to ears for her daughter. The fact that they are just veiled towards the end, not lost, provides some hope. What she fears is that her daughter will be tempted by a similar darkness she must have felt in London in those violent times in the UK’s history. In fact that the daughter “pulled down / the French sounds for apple”—pomme—relates the Persephone myth to the Graden of Eden story, adding a moral dimension to her worry over her daughter’s future.

What Boland can offer is not “rescue” as she first thought, but this myth: “But what else / can a mother give her daughter but such / beautiful rifts in time.” Rifts modulates the poem’s opening where she says “I can enter anywhere.” The poem ends with an ambiguity like that of Yuri Herrera’s novel. The rifts are her stories, her poems, this poem. In the end the daughter holds the “papery flushed skin in her hand” which is the fruit but also the paper that the poem is written on, again, this poem itself. And the Pomegranate itself is a traditional symbol of cyclic relationships among people and natural elements, but also the carrier of innumerable, unknown seeds, futures, the daughter’s own “rifts in time,” her own stories. What she can offer is the “summer twilight” that “she walked out in” earlier in her own life—not a solution, but stories for the daughter to continue on and in her own.