Midwinter Day (Mayer)

 

 

The name of the poet Bernadette Mayer has come to my attention several times over the years. Several years ago, for example, I ran across her listing of prompts for writing that has become something of a classic. More recently I read Rivka Galchen's piece in the New Yorker this December in which surveyed Mayer's career (she passed away in November of this year) and mentioned Mayer's book Midwinter Day, which I was able to find at my local library and started reading on December 20. Midwinter Day is a book-length poem, written about one day in her life, December 22, 1978, the day of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 1978. (She maintains that she wrote the entire book on that day as well, which seems on the face of it to be a physical impossibility, given the elaborate details of her rendering of not only what was going on around her, but what was going on in her mind as she considered each bit of incoming data. How she could have been experiencing all of that while she was writing is beyond me. But she says that's what she did.)

Midwinter Day divided into six sections, each of which takes us through one chunk of that day: her dreams as she's waking up, the morning she spends in her home with her husband and two children, and so on through the day. As it happened, I wound up reading the middle part of the book about December 22 on December 22. Much of the book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that seems to owe something to both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. There is a kind of manic omnidirectional energy in the poem, which keeps shifting in shape and in focus its attempt embrace everything going on around her and in her mind simultaneously. As might be expected in an experimental work of this kind, some of the passages are more reader-friendly than others. What I found most interesting were the instances in which she puts together inventories, some of which continue for four and five pages at a time. This passage, for example, gives an impressionistic rendition of her observations as she begins moving about her house in the morning:

From the bedroom, curtains blue as ink I stare at, red Godard floor white walls all crayoned, from the bed raised on cinder blocks at Dr. Incao's midwife's request so Sophia could be born, fake Indian cover Ray gave us for Marie American Indian and Ray's old real wool blanket and all our sheets her gifts,  Lewis' Aunt Fanny's crocheted afghan and Tom's old sleeping bag, the mimeograph machine and its cover, diaper rash ointment, from the walls a butterfly kite, a leaf on a ribbon from nursery school, mushrooms by Joe, an iris and a gladiola by Rosemary, the gladiola painted here, the stuck clock, the window faces south, laundry on it, closet doors hung with jackets, shawls, scarves and Marie's dress, closet floor boots shoes boxes bags baby carriers and my broken inherited chair, that's the airport, closet of stuff, carpet sweeper, another broken chair,from there I go to the kitchen sink you can sit on at the imagined forest window, two coleus plants too cold today, now a Wandering Jew, two related spider plants one is hanging, stones dead branches and collected pine cones, and old ghost and a Boston fern on the spooky refrigerator in which is the food, drawings of attempted faces by Marie that look like Cy Twombly, the dumb electric stove, George's red shirt calendar, soon it'll be over, the Lenox Savings Bank historical calendar, Pilgrims landed yesterday, winter begins today, shortest day of the year, Lewis and Harris with Marie in a Bronx corridor, little light, the African woman backpacking a baby, she's talking to a totem figure, a street scene by Rafael and a German altarpiece Rosemary sent, a crude drawing of a nude woman by Paul, a poster of a panda on the door to the former pantry now a house for two heaters one for air and one for water and the vents ducts and pipes for each, old flowerpots, the hall to the door to the hall, full of boxes of Angel Hair books, the broken bassinet now a toybox with turtles and cups in it, a small space full of brown paper bags and cardboard six-pack wrappers, broom, dishes and pots, fruit on the hood of the stove, bottles and jars, teas and books, medicines foods and detergents, binoculars, the dishwasher, vinegar, garbage, Lewis' mother's old Scotch kooler, spices, another of George's plaid shirts, coats on hooks, a red tray; to the deadpan bathroom, a woman by Matisse in yellow and blue and an ordinary mercator projection of the world, potty chair, diaper pail for cloth diapers, plastic bag of used plastic diapers, toilet sink tub, bath toys an alligator that swims mechanically and a shark with teeth that is a mitt and a sponge, hideous old curling rug lying in the tub after yesterday's flood, hooks on the back of the door, layers of clothing hanging on them, a mirror, ointments and pills, razors poisons and soaps, shower curtains; to the main room the living room, two leaping goldfish, cornflower plant, jade tree, Wandering Jew not doing too well, another spider offshoot, purple weed I don't know the name of accidentally growing in a pot of sedum, Christmas tree fern with a sense of humor, whiskey, the main collapsing table covered with things, rocking chair, small wearing rug on the golden wood floor, two couches with things on them, public school chairs with arms for principals at table, shelves of books and books in boxes, boxes of paper and stencils, two ring binders of photos since Worthington, my desk I steer and things, a standing lamp Nancy got us, a jacket by Joe and a blue shirt by George, a flower by Rosemary I don't remember the name of, a water color of a drapery by Rosemary done in Worthington, a drawing of Ted by Joe, a photo of Lewis by Gerard, pictures of the window out Main Street in different seasons, Main Street and Cliffwood Street, Our Lady of Perpetual Help-butterfly collage by Joe, a slinky male figure by Joe, a watch by George, some Kirschwasser, dead files and dead flies, magazines and library books, toys and balls, a stereo, four windows and the more frequent door. (32)

I'm sure some readers would find a passage of this kind to be exhausting, but I find it exhilarating, in terms of both its execution and its ambition. She comes closest to defining that ambition herself in this passage from later in the book:

I had an idea to write a book that would translate the detail of thought from a day to language like a dream transformed to read as it does, everything, a book that would end before it started in time to prove the day like the dream has everything in it, to do this without remembering like a dream inciting writing continuously for as long as you can stand up till you fall down like in a story to show and possess everything we know because having it all at once is performing a magical service for survival by the use of the mind like memory. (89)

 

I like the way Mayer pushes the boundaries of the sentence in a way that mirrors more accurately than traditional syntax the way the mind actually moves and makes connections in the moments of everyday life. It seems to me to be indeed "a magical service for survival by the use of the mind."

At the very end of the book Mayer employs a more traditional poetic form and diction to bring the poem, and the day to close with a praise song of sorts:

From dreams I made sentences, then what I’ve seen today, 

Then past the past of afternoons of stories like memory 

To seeing as a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, 

Then to end I guess with love, a method, to this winter season 

Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember 

Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December 

 

Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light 

That takes the bite from winter weather 

And weaves the random cloth of life together 

And drives away the long black night!

 

There are people who make it a point to re-read Midwinter Day every year in mid-December. I'm planning to be one of them. It turns out that in recent years there has also been an annual oral reading of the entire book that has been filmed and is available on youTube. There are lots of other resources available about the book as well, for example here and here.



 

Essay

 

 

 

Essay

A place to begin. An undertaking. An attempt at con-
        struction, picking up pieces, turning them this way

    and that. Squinting, weighing, wondering

         whether this one goes here or
                    there.

                                             How do we de-
        cide? Slowly something takes shape, a song

  insists on being sung. One voice, another, eventually, a choir.
                    A cathedral. Vocational

            therapy. We're in this together, we

        gather, we lean on
                    each other. We wander. We stand tall,

       we call out, we await the arrival
                    of the eyes

                       that, falling upon us, bring us,

                                            ever so briefly, to life.

 

 

Process Reflection:

Most people, hearing the word "essay," don't necessarily think about its derivation, the sense of the word that means "a trial" or "an attempt." But every work of art, and of writing, is in that most elemental sense an essay. The collage at the top of the page, entitled "Essay" is one of literally hundreds that I have worked on in recent years. The poem, a very "wet" recent draft with the same title, is an attempt both to generate some words about the collage and to mirror in its structure some of the observable elements of its architecture: the way in which disparate fragments and pieces come together, or, insisting on their unique individuality, resist coming together. One critical difference between the two "essays" is that the pieces of the collage, once glued down, are immovable, whereas the poem, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation, is subject to as many re-visions as I have the time and the patience to attempt.

           

 

 

Julie Carr: Noun Poem

 

 

Often when I run across a poem that interests me, either in a book from the library or online, I will go one what amounts to an online scavenger hunt, looking for other poems by the same poet or for interviews where the poet talks about what goes on in their head when they sit down to write. Very often this kind of online investigation leads me to blogs curated by other readers who share my interests and enthusiasms with regard to writing, and often in those blogs there is a sidebar with links to other poems and poets.

It was in just such a manner that I ran across Julie Carr. I was reading an essay written by Renee Gladman in which she referenced Carr, so I followed the breadcrumbs and wound up reading a number of poems by Carr, which I found interesting precisely because they challenged my sense of what a poem might be, how it might be read, and what sort of "sense" it might be said to be making.

I'd like to share one such poem, published in the Denver Post, and try to unpack some of what has gone on in my mind as I have read and re-read it. I can't claim to have any special insight or expertise, either in regard to this poem or to Carr's work in general, most of which I have not yet read. And yet this poem does engage my interest. I know that there are some readers who find it hard to relate to art or poetry which is nonrepresentational. I'm not one of those readers. I am actually really interested in the question of what happens when you take a literal medium and remove the literality. What is a drawing if it is not a drawing of something I can point to? What is a poem if it is not a poem about something I can point to? I am actually most drawn to artwork and poetry which explores the in-between spaces: work which is neither entirely literal nor entirely abstract. This one, for example:

Noun Poem


A man in need of a bird of yarn

enters a town with two suns

The bird unwinds its tale of read

in which a woman paints a postcard for her son

This is a sentence with two nouns

One is the noun we all know

the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:

a widower in search of a bride

Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,

can I have a glass of milk, Mom?

She fills him a glass and watches him drink

the brush poised in her hand

The bird and boy whistle one to the other

red spooling from incongruous mouths

This is a song with two swallows

The other gathers others in the skies

This, a sentence with two eyes

One sits within his like an egg in a nest

the last spills as it mates, as it cries

 

The first thing that catches my attention, unsurprisingly, is the title, which immediately suggests that what will be foregrounded in this poem will be the kinds of words it uses, as opposed to the kind of meaning it makes. The first two lines confirm that suspicion:

A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns...

Having been nudged by the title, I am sensitized to the sequencing of the five nouns in the first two lines. And what I am more or less forced to notice in those two lines is that there's a kind of syntactic instability in play. Even though the words are all simple, familiar, one-syllable words (other than "enter" which is two, but still) that I recognize and understand, there's something odd about the phrasing. What is "a bird of yarn," for example? Is it a bird made out of spun wool? Or a bird in a story (yarn)? Or a bird of legend? All of the above? None of the above? And why would a man be in need of one? Carr is putting words together in such a way as to work against the part of my brain that wants to just read the poem and "get it." The third line does the same kind of work:

The bird unwinds its tale of read

The word "unwinds" suggests that maybe we are talking about a ball of yarn after all. But to speak of unwinding a "tale of read" suggests, in an oblique way, not only the the unspooling of yarn, but of a yarn (a story), or even perhaps of the very poem we are reading, as it "unwinds its tale of read."

So my sense is that there is a certain amount of playful misdirection going on here. The poem is unfolding, but is doing so in a way resists easy paraphrase, and encourages us to consider multiple possible readings simultaneously.

I'm going to resist the temptation to indulge in a line-by-line analysis of the syntactical shifts in the poem and the various possibilities that they present to me as I read, which would likely be as laborious for you to read as it would be for me to write. But I do want to make note of a couple of features of the poem which might not be obvious on first reading but become more so the longer we stay with it.

There are three places in which an assertion is in the poem made about the poem: "This is a sentence with two nouns," is the first, and later, "This, a sentence with two eyes." And in the middle of those two assertions, "This is a song with two swallows." I note first of all that are three assertions include doublings: two nouns, two eyes, two swallows. Once I've noted that, I notice other doublings throughout the poem: a man and a woman, a woman and her son, a bird and a boy whistling to each other, and finally  the two eyes at the end of the poem: one in apparent contentment in its nest, the other shedding what I take to be tears:

One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries

The piece that I've skipped over in that sequence is perhaps the most important for me in terms of how I construct the poem in my mind as I read. It's the middle assertion: This is a song with two swallows. And it is precisely this phrasing that snaps the whole poem into focus for me. It's a song. It is asking to be read as a sequence of words that make a certain kind of music. And once that is brought to the forefront of my consciousness, I see it everywhere. Re-reading, for example, those first two lines: A man in need of a bird of yarn enters a town with two suns. Put aside for a moment the question of what it might mean. Listen to the echoes there, the consonants: man, yarn, town, sun; need, bird; enters, town, two. These combinations and permutations of sound continue throughout the poem: a woman paints a postcard; a bird and a boy whistle one to the other; This a sentence with two eyes; spills as it mates, as it cries. If this poem were read out loud to a listener who had no English, they'd still hear its music.

But although this poem presents itself in some ways as an exercise in sound and syntax, it is also a narrative poem of a sort. There's a cast of characters in action in a landscape or series of landscapes: a man and a bird in a town with two suns, a woman painting a postcard and watching her son drinking milk and whistling with the bird "red spooling from incongruous mouths." Which I have to say is belatedly becoming my favorite line in the poem. And finally, surprisingly, the two eyes at the end, each living its own story.

I've read the poem maybe twenty times now and it's starting to cohere in my mind. I don't feel the need to have all of the elements here line up and make logical sense. The narrative makes the sense that it makes. The words make the music that they make. I find the poem to be curious and rich and, well, astonishing.

Process Reflection

 

 Every Tuesday for the last five weeks I've posted something here that I knew in advance that I wanted to write about. In each case it was about something or somebody I had been reading (Renee Gladman, Mark Strand). I had a number of motivations for doing so. One was simply that I had gotten out of the habit of posting to Throughlines, but was not yet ready to give it up, so I figured I'd better get myself together and try to jump start it. I have learned from long experience that I work well, or at least better, when I am working to a deadline, either one set for me or one I set one for myself. So I made a preliminary decision, after my first Tuesday post, that I would put something up each Tuesday for as long as I was able to keep that up. So now I'm writing this on Monday December 9, and what you are reading at this moment is the byproduct of that subtle pressure building up: what I am going to have ready to post tomorrow?

A second reason for posting was that as a retired English teacher I find it hard to get out of the habit of talking up writers whose work I admire. It's my hope that at least once in a while someone might read about a writer here and be encouraged to go out and read that author on their own. I once read someone's snarky description of a well-known poetry critic as being a "bobbysoxer for the poets that she swoons over." I thought to myself at the time, Well, what's wrong with that? There are of course legitimate differences in how individual readers will respond to individual writers. The question of what is good and what is not good in any of the arts is always up for debate. But as a matter of principle I am more inclined to respect those who speak up on behalf of what they like—even if I am unconvinced by their observations—than those who seem to take pleasure in ripping others to shreds.

The third reason—and in my mind the most important—is one I have often written about before. Writing about what I read is for me a generative act: it helps me to better understand what I have read, and, on good days, to work my way into thoughts and realizations that I would not otherwise ever have arrived at. And now that I find myself well into my seventies, it serves the additional function of imprinting in my mind the essence of what I am taking away from the reading. I find at my age that when I don't write about what I have read, it fades much more quickly from my mind. That's always been the case; it's more so now. In recent years I have on more than one occasion found myself halfway through a "new" book saying to myself, "Wait a minute. I think I read this book already." Books I have taken the time to write about, however, tend to stay with me.

The same logic applies, of course, to writing more generally: writing about our experiences, writing about what we believe, writing about our dreams, writing about people we know, writing about our pet peeves, writing about what's wrong and how to fix it. So much of what we experience every day is subliminal, below the threshold of perception. We may be scarcely aware of what we actually do think unless we make it a point of practice to spell it out for ourselves. That's why I'm here today, and why I am planning to have something to post next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that. Given the world that we live in and its many distractions, it's easy enough to fall off the wagon, and I supposed at some point I will do that. Until I re-booted myself this November, I had gone sixteen months without posting anything to Throughlines. It's not that I wasn't writing, it's just that I was not posting any of it here. And I've come to miss that.

It's not that I'm under any illusions about failing my legions of followers. No one is going to suffer any intellectual or spiritual impoverishment in the absence of my reports from the field. The only person to whom this enterprise is truly essential is me. So here I am. It's good to be back.

Applications (Gladman IV)

 

The last few weeks I've been reflecting on the work of Renee Gladman, with particular attention to the investigations she has been conducting about the relationships between writing and drawing. In her essay "The Sentence as a Space for Living," she has, among many other interesting passages, this one:

In any case, for months, I’ve been struggling with how to articulate a bridge between the writing I’ve been doing and this drawing I’ve started to do. . .  a kind of drawing that feels very much like writing, a way of turning the sounds and symbols for speech and thought inside out. One day in a movie I noticed a character holding a fountain pen over a large pad of paper; as soon as she began to scratch at the surface I felt something turn over in me. I had been drawing for years, aspects of buildings, habitations, but drawing was something I did when I was not writing. And though I had a collection of fountain pens, I’d never used them to draw. A fountain pen has, for me, a love of the line embedded in it. A pen with a good nib wants to just go; drawing put that “turned over thing” in my hand. To move my hand was to look at it, to pass with it. This was a way of being most present in language, because, though I was drawing, I felt immediately that writing had carried over. I knew these were prose architectures I was making, and that into the drawing space: that meant I was no longer in the proverbial “page” into which or out of which comes language. I was now on the visual plane. Yet, it was writing that I was doing. The notion of “drawn writing” struck me as a new kind of conversation with prose. It was the writing of a text with its inner syntax somehow revealed.

I've been conducting similar investigations over the last several years, doing "drawings" that were based on the notion of the line exploring space. (For example, this one.) Most of my drawings arose in the traditional manner of black line on white paper, much like the ones by Gladman which I shared in previous posts. But last year as I was looking over Gladman's web site I saw that she had a number of drawings which flipped the script, deploying white lines (and some color as well) on a black surface. Here's one from her web site:

(Copyright Renee Gladman, used with permission)

There's a good deal that might be said about such a drawing about the sequencing and echoing in the white-line motifs, the swaths of color, the sense of a story of sorts being suggested without the use of words. But what struck me most about this drawing, and the others in the sequence, was how dramatic they were, and the kinds of questions that they raised in my mind as I looked at them. I decided to see what I could do by way of entering into that somewhat mysteriously suggestive realm on my own. I began with this one:

 

This was the first in what became a series of drawings that explored the effects of white line and color on black paper, in a manner which was neither strictly abstract nor strictly representational. Here's one from a little further on in the series:

 

 

There's a kind of intuitive geometry going on here. The major shapes are in conversation with one another: the horizontal and vertical empty shapes framed by the white lines, the grounded reds, the upward striving greens, the floating blue suggestive of something like dance or freedom or escape. These are what I might call, borrowing Gladman's words, prose architectures on a visual plane, which demand to be "read" on their own terms.
 

Plans for Sentences (Gladman III)

 

 

In Calamities (2016) Renee Gladman used writing itself to reflect on the ways in which line-making in writing and drawing can be said to mirror one another. In Prose Architectures (2017) she turned to drawing as a means of continuing her investigation of line-making as a mode of thought. In Plans for Sentences (2022), she has circled back around to explore the relationship between visual and verbal lines. She highlights the circular nature of this investigation in her epigraph on the first page of the book:

These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.

So how might this work? In what sense might sentences be said to have existed previously, and to be currently experiencing an afterlife, and also making their first appearance? I can't be sure that what I am about to say is anything like what Gladman intended, or what someone else looking at the same materials might come up with, or what I may wind up thinking myself at some later date. But it does seem to me that there is a logic to these seemingly paradoxical assertions.

The text of Plans for Sentences has an architecture of its own. Open the book anywhere and you will see on the left-hand page a line drawing similar in nature to those in Prose Architectures. (There are sixty such drawings. Roughly midway through the book Gladman begins experimenting with the effects of the addition of color in parts of the drawing.) On each facing page are prose sentences which seem to echo or develop notions suggested by the drawings across from them. It's as if Gladman were looking at the drawings and then "translating" the drawing in a somewhat intuitive and experimental way, or unpacking the thinking that the drawing generates in her mind as she looks at it.

But there's another dynamic at work as well. In almost every case there are three or four sentences on each facing right-hand page, and as you read those sentences in sequence you are made aware of echoes and redundancies and divergences not just among the sentences on that page, but among all of the sentences on all of the other pages of the book as well. There's a sense in which the entire book, the collection of drawings and sentences taken as a whole, consists of a set of vibratory interactions. It's almost symphonic in that regard.

Let's take, for example, Fig. 9

(© 2022 Renee Gladman. Used with permission of author)

 

This drawing is illustrative of many of the ideas about the relationship between the architecture of the sentence and the architecture of the drawing that Gladman has been exploring in recent years. On the one hand, it is clearly a constructed object, a linear sculpture of sorts which balances many different visual elements—horizontal lines, vertical lines, positive and negative spaces, lights and darks, circular and rectangular shapes—in a manner which comes across as artful, almost lyrical. Squint at it just right, and it might be landscape of sorts; squint at it another way, it might suggest a building.

On the other hand, many of the sequences, and most of the horizontal movements, look sort of like handwriting, and the drawing as a whole looks as if it might be a second cousin once removed to the kind of prewriting outline that I for one often create when I'm trying to organize some ideas for an essay. A thinking map.

With those preliminary thoughts in mind, let's consider the sentences that appear on the facing page:

These sentences will constellate the gears that alter your movements on weather; they will foment tiny gears of speech, clicking, turning, moating, and will be like wind blowing thought back onto itself, behind itself so that thought moves by leaning forward

These sentences will have performed the dreams of sentences upon arrival

These moats will separate objects from subjects and preserve silence

They will set the world of text in motion, diverting at the escapement, turning to void, and will make small bodies of sayings that will click and moat

First of all, I notice that there is a kind of instability or lateral drift in the way these sentences unfold that echoes or mirrors in my mind what happens when I look at the drawing. This drawing does not work the way I am used to seeing drawings work. It's not a picture of something, nor is it a pure abstraction. I can sense or intuit a logic to the drawing, but it is not a logic I could easily articulate. There are elements in the drawing that are unique and idiosyncratic, but there are also echoes, lots of echoes, in which one part of the drawing seems to be reflecting or re-presenting another part.

Likewise, these sentences do not work in the ways I am used to seeing sentences work. The word "moat" for example, is deployed here three times, once as a noun and twice, surprisingly, as a verb. All four sentences are syntactically correct, but they are nevertheless enigmatic and resistant to paraphrase. And there are, as in the drawing, lots of echoes here: words and phrases repeated in different contexts and generative of different effects.

So to return to the original question of how sentence might be said to exist simultaneously in different times, I think it has to do with the ways in which these sentences—and drawings—reverberate and cross-pollinate with one another. They are "like wind blowing back on thought itself," in all of its instability and recursiveness. As a writer I am always acutely aware of how trying to capture a line of thought in words is necessarily reductive. As Stephen Dobyns remarks:

The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.

 

Which is why we have to keep coming back to it again and again, and why, in Gladman's writing, things that have been said before, that have been seen from a particular angle of vision, are revisited and seen again, as if for the first time. The past is the present is the future. The "real," whatever that might be, can only be visited (and re-visited) in our minds obliquely, imaginatively, intuitively.

I am primarily aware, as I look at Plans for Sentences, of a very active and innovative intelligence engaged in a purposeful and structured exploration of alternative modes of thinking. Reading Gladman is for me not unlike watching a very self-assured artist at her easel as she goes about bringing an entire world to life on the blank canvas. I find the time that I spend attending to her work to be both interesting and inspirational.

Prose Architectures (Gladman II)

 

 

 

 

Renee Gladman's Calamities was published by Wave Books in 2016. As I discussed in my previous post, much of what I found most interesting about Calamities was Gladman's thinking and writing about the relationship between the line in drawing and the line in writing. In 2017 Gladman followed up Calamities with a book entitled Prose Architectures, a series of 107 drawings which documented her subsequent investigation of the possibilities inherent in the nature of the line. In her introduction to the book, she says,

Having had no previous training in visual art, no apparent aptitude for it, I drew from instinct. Or better: I drew out of the matter that was most central to my thinking and living, and that was the city. It seemed the shapes I most wanted to represent or I most could represent were buildings.  I don't remember setting out with any particular goal in drawing but I do recall clearly feeling that, through drawing, I had discovered a new manner for thinking.

 

Following up on this discovery, Gladman in characteristic fashion put a lot of time and energy into pursuing the implications of engaging in this kind of thought process. She put pen to paper in a way as to explore the possibilities of the line not simply as the representation of a pre-existing thought, but as generative of "a new manner for thinking." Here, for example, is drawing #30 in the sequence:

 

(Image used with permission of author.)

This is a drawing that invites me to keep looking at it. It consists essentially of four vertical structural elements, a grouping of line-based sculptures. Within those structures there are sub-components that echo one another, for example the "C" shape in the second column mirrored by the reverse "C" shape immediately to its right, echoed by a similar shape further up in the same column. The columns are all connected by single lines that suggest perhaps telephone wires running between buildings.  There's an interplay between the upward thrust of the elongated major shapes and the horizontal movement of the shorter tiers within each vertical structure, which call to mind asemic writing. The fourth figure, over on the right, feels like an outgrowth, an offshoot, both a continuation of and a departure from what has gone before.

The drawing looks as if it might well have been composed in one line, moving from left to right, the pen never leaving the paper. There's clearly a logic to the construction, an aesthetically pleasing unity and balance and coherence. But it is in no sense a paraphrasable logic. This drawing is not a re-presentation of anything. It is, like all the others in this book, a world unto itself. Alexis Almeida, writing in an essay on Tripwire about the drawings in Prose Architectures,  puts it eloquently:

What attracts me most [about] them, then, isn’t any immediately discernable reading, but rather the proximities they create around me: the lines being extended between body and syntax, diagram and utterance, writing, mark-making, and physicality. When Gladman says they are a way “pulling the process of thought apart,” she is also re-imagining the way we can inhabit space, and thought itself, the way we might reconfigure the most familiar social and political structures, as well as how we can position ourselves within them, so that different relational possibilities begin to appear over time.

These drawings are thus the visible evidence of a certain kind of attention being paid by the artist over an extended period of time to the defining questions about the artistic process: What are we doing when we write? What are we doing when we draw? What are we doing when we speak out loud? When are we doing when we make music? 

(For fuller overview of the nature of the drawings in the book, check out this video, a link to which is also posted on Gladman's web site.)

Gladman's work demonstrates that often in artmaking we are in essence pushing a line (of letters in sequence, of ink on paper, of sounds from within us) into an empty space: paper, canvas, silence. Much of the time, of course, we do these things more or less automatically and unreflectively. But over the years I have come to have a lot of respect for those writers and artists and musicians who investigate with attentiveness and thoughtfulness the ways in which the very act of writing or drawing can lead us in unexpected ways nearer to clarity and truth and beauty.

Each of the drawings in Prose Architectures is the product of a certain interrogative disposition, arising out of a focused curiosity: What would happen if...? They are part of a longer trajectory of examination represented by the entire body of Gladman's published work, about which I will have more to say in my next post.






 

Calamities (Gladman I)

 

 

 

For many years I have found enjoyment and certain satisfactions both as a writer and as an artist. It is perhaps inevitable that I would wind up reflecting from time to time on the ways in which these two endeavors parallel one another. In both instances, for example, one begins by confronting an empty space (the page, the canvas) and the questions of where to begin, what to do, and what to do next. Jasper Johns wrote a note to himself in his sketchbook that summarized his artistic process pretty concisely: "Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it." And Andy Goldsworthy famously opined that "the essence of drawing is the line exploring space," a phrasing which to my mind applies not just to drawing but to the process of writing as I have practiced it (and asked my students to practice it) throughout my life.

Not all writers, and certainly not all teachers, see it that way. And most students have not had the chance to experience it that way in school, a lamentable situation which I have written about often enough that I won't get into it again here. (There are several essays in the "Elaborations" section of the sidebar here that address the issue.)

Every once in a while I come across a writer who has a similar way of viewing the process of writing, but a unique and highly personalized way of working within that point of view. One such writer is Renee Gladman. Several years ago I ran across her book Calamities, and it basically tore the top of my head off.

The book is a collection of short explorational essays, most of which begin with the words "I began the day..." For example:

I began the day standing at at threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously. It was hard to follow these opposing tendencies, especially when you were writing and couldn't see anyay, see anything other than these words appearing on the laptop screen. You were writing about something you weren't looking at. There had been a break. I was saying this on paper.... (31)

In this passage and in many others, Gladman is pushing a line of thought across the page while at the same time maintaining and articulating her awareness of the fact that she is pushing a line of thought across the page. She is in essence watching herself watching herself, which in another writer's work might come across as tiresome or gimmicky, but which by virtue of the originality and breadth and depth of her thinking winds up being surprising and often, to me at least, exhilarating:

I began the day transcribing some of Gail Scott's sentences onto the wall of my living room. For months I had been trying to say something about them, which when I went to say it became layered, thus impossible as an utterance. I had already argued somewhere that one could not express many different things at the same time in the English sentence, and so was not terribly surprised by my failure. I'd learned that to think in this language you had to be patient: you had to say one part, like drawing one side of a cube, then say the next part, like drawing another side, and keep on saying and drawing until eventually you'd made a complex observation and a picture-feeling... But when you were alone, when no one was there to listen to you unfold some puzzle in your mind, you coveted that ability to think in paragraphs with a single sentence, and ability you may never have had but that your instinct said belonged to you. (43)

Gladman often goes off on riffs that illustrate exactly the many-layered complexities that are inherent within the architecture of the sentence, which is to say, within thought itself, whether expressed in words or in images:

I sat down with the objective of pushing words off the page and bringing a picture into being and doing this for a number of hours in a row, for a number of days, all accumulating into a number of months, perhaps amounting to years, such that this became a picture in which was embedded many other pictures and that gave off a dimensional feeling, even though these pictures belonged to my thinking and were nestled in my mind, which like everything else in thought was not like a pot you could pour water into and heat up but rather was like seeing a pot and having a living vision of all the actions therein. You made a space that gathered all the possible pictures accreted through all the pushing of words off the page, and many times called the shape novel and a few times essay. I set the cup down. I pushed the words I set the cup down off the page, then picked up the cup and set it down. I drank from the cup, though I didn't remember this until I'd read the act on the page, my reading having become a picture of a body standing at a window with cars parking below. But it wasn't long that I was in this body thinking about the cup at my mouth or other things the body needed when I realized that all the cars parking were doing so all at the same time, and this was strange. It never happened this way. You never had a moment when all the cars had been gone and then returned all at once, all wanting to park and all finding a space to park and parking at the same time as all the others. Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck, perpetually sipping from that cup and looking over cars behaving bizarrely. (93-4)

Here Gladman is making total sense, and simultaneously skirting the edges of the surreal. Gladman's discipline in sentence-making—and she is all about sentence-making—is to follow the line of thought where it leads.

Any good critical thinker recognizes that all thinking is embedded in a point of view, and that at any given moment our thinking on a particular subject may be embedded in ways that are not readily apparent, if not invisible to us. It is one of Gladman's great strengths as a writer and thinker that she is always questioning and attempting to clarify for herself what lies behind her first thoughts, her first attempts at articulation: Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck...

The realization that one's situation—as a writer, as an artist, as a human being—is always precarious and to some degree untrustworthy is a necessary precondition for the development of a fuller awareness and understanding. We get to second thoughts and third thoughts only by questioning our first thoughts,  a process which can be engrossing and sometimes a little frightening.

Later, Gladman talks explicitly about the embedded energies of the line in language, as well as in art:

Language was beautiful exposed; it was like a live wire set loose, a hot wire, burning, leaving trace. If you looked into language this way,  you saw where it burned, the map it made. The wire was a line, but because it was electrified it wouldn't lie still: it thrashed, it burned, it curled and uncurled around itself. It was a line but one that moved, sometimes forward, but mostly up then back then over itself then out then up then curling in one place until the mark grew dark then out forward and up into a rectangle then inside the rectangle and around, circling with small, tight movements. I was amazed that I was talking about wires when really I was talking about prose. I was talking about how it was to write, but doing it through drawings (but drawings were language) and using wires to spell it out, but I was doing this on a foggy morning, where there were neither drawings nor wires. There was a table, upon which sat a computer, and I was staring at a screen imagining the drawings I had made and wanting them to teach me how to talk about the line, the line in art, which I could use to talk about the line in language, because you'd need to know they were the same line. There was not a thing different about them. (103)

She follows this up with another statement that I think is clarifying and elegantly expressed:

Monika Gryzmala said, "Drawing is a process of thought which is conducted by the hand," and she was an artist, and though she was using language to explain her art, it was her art that most concerned her. Drawing was a process of thought—that was true, and so, and especially, was writing. And we wrote through the hand, even if it was typing: we used our body to write. "Thus, drawing is writing," was how I wanted the quote to go on. And to write was to think; to make lines was to draw; and lines were the essence of writing. (104)

 

The Continuous Life

 

I've spent a lot of the last several months going through my poetry files, both analog and digital, and trying to put them into some order. I began keeping those files nearly fifty years ago, when I was first teaching English in middle school. It was understood that as part of the curriculum the students would be asked to read and respond to writing in a variety of genres. The department came to grade-level agreements about which novels would be read in common each year, but when it came to short stories and poems, teachers were more or less on their own.

I was fortunate to have come to the middle school after several years of teaching in elementary school, where Barbara Helfgott-Hyett, working with the Poet-in-the-Schools program, had come in as a visiting poet and led writing workshops both with the students, and, after school, with the teachers. One way of working that Barbara shared with us involved the use of model poems. She would present students with a poem she had chosen—often a poem based on a memory or event that young people could understand and relate to—and then ask the students to make observations about craft (what did the writer do first? what next? what do you notice about the language? the shape of the sentences? the stanzas? etc). Then she would ask the students to draft a poem of their own in which they would employ one or more of the techniques they had observed that were of interest to them.

When I first began trying to "teach" poetry in my own classroom, I had a very small selection of "teachable" poems, most of which I had picked up from Barbara. As I ran across others in our middle school textbook or in poetry books I found in libraries and bookstores, I would either photocopy them or type them out and put them in a manila folder in my classroom for future reference. When that folder became too thick, I broke it into three folders alphabetized by author (A-H, G-Q, S-Z). Eventually I had a folder for every letter of the alphabet.

Then personal computers arrived and it became possible to search for particular poets and poems online, I began archiving poems I liked as Word files. I created a digital folder called "Alpha Singles." As I ran across a poem I liked or thought might be of interest to students, I'd either type it up myself, or copy it from the internet, paste it into a Word document, and add it to my digital archive. That archive now amounts to something like 2500 poems.

I wound up having two archives: the manila folders in my file cabinet, and the digital files on my laptop. At the start of this year I thought I might as well go through both sets of archives, print and digital, and concatenate all of the poems I have on file into a complete digital archive. Along the way, I typed up or downloaded a great number poems, some of which I had run across before, many of which I had not. Often I would simply pick a line with an unusual sequence of words from a poem I had in print but wanted to have in a digital version. I might, for example, take a line (Ashbery's "waiting to leave the tongue behind," for example) and type it into the search bar, where I would most often find the entire poem available online.

At times I would wind up being directed to familiar turf, as for example the Academy of American Poets or the Poetry Foundation, but often I would find myself visiting one of the hundreds of blogs curated by poetry lovers of every conceivable stripe; and when I had copied the poem I had sought out, I would start scrolling through whatever else was posted there, and in so doing would discover many other interesting poems and poets I would never have encountered in any other way. Indeed, one of things I enjoy most about conducting targeted searches of this kind is precisely the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that I'm going to find something even more interesting that I didn't even know existed.)

All of the above has been by way of introduction to a poem by Mark Strand that I found online while I was hunting for another poem entirely, but which pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks.  I'll get to that poem shortly, but first a word or three about Mark Strand, who long has been one of my favorite poets. His poem "What to Think Of," for example, has been for many years one of my go-to texts for use in the classroom:

What to Think Of

Think of the jungle
The green steam rising.

It is yours.
You are the prince of Paraguay.

Your minions kneel
Deep in the shade of giant leaves

While you drive by
Benevolent as gold.

They kiss the air
That moments before

Swept over your skin,
and rise only after you’ve passed.

Think of yourself, almost a god,
Your hair on fire,

The bellows of your heart pumping.
Think of the bats

Rushing out of their caves
Like a dark wind to greet you;

Of the vast nocturnal cities
Of lightning bugs

Floating down
From Minas Gerais;

Of the coral snakes;
Of the crimson birds

With emerald beaks;
Of the tons and tons of morpho butterflies

Filling the air
Like the cold confetti of paradise.

One of the things I most enjoy about this poem is its playfulness. It puts us in a surprising (and deftly rendered) landscape and asks us to imagine ourselves as existing in a magical dimension in which we are honored and worshiped. Not something most of us have experienced, or are likely to, but pleasant enough to contemplate, for sure.

In the classroom, we read the poem together, the students make some observations about what the poet has done and how he has done it, and then we shift to the question of what one would need to do to write a poem of this nature. The most obvious answer in this case would be to start with the working title "What to Think Of," and then write a poem that gives your reader some interesting things to imagine. (You could of course also borrow anything else that you observe or admire in Strand's poem: his use of short couplets, the way he plays with the sounds made by the words (green steam, Prince of Paraguay, kiss the air that swept over your skin)  the interweaving of real and surreal imagery, etc.) The idea, in other words, is to use the architecture of "What to Think of" as a kind of scaffolding for a poem of your own composition. Structurally, it's basically just a list poem (Think of a, think of b, think of c and d and e.)

When you're done with your first draft and considering which parts of the poem to keep, which to drop, which to expand), you might choose to keep the title (and acknowledge its inspiration with an epigraph like after Mark Strand) or give it a different title of your own composition that seems appropriate for whatever it is that you came up with.

This particular exercise always seems to provide students with a game to play that results which are interesting and enjoyable to read, and more importantly from my point of view as an educator, interesting and enjoyable to have written. My primary objective as an educator throughout my career has been to try to create environments in which the students' experience of writing as a source joy and satisfaction. I won't go into detail about about this in this essay, because I have written about it at length before, but the notion that writing can be a source of pleasure for the writer is generally foreign to my students. Enjoyment of writing is not something that they are ever likely to have experienced in school. Every year I would have one or two students who loved to write, but that's something that they either were born with or learned on their own, but not in the context of their English classes. As it happens, I was a kindergarten teacher for a few years as well at the start of my career, and I know that most kindergartners LOVE to draw and to write, after a fashion. But by the time many of them hit second grade they have become convinced that writing is not something they're good at, and certainly not something they enjoy. So one of my primary goals is to try to give my students the chance to re-discover the pleasure of writing as a pleasurable form of exploration.

And that is in fact one of the reasons I like Mark Strand's poems. He's clearly a writer who enjoys what he is doing. His subjects are sometimes whimsical, and sometimes quite serious, but it can be exhilarating to follow his mind as he works his thoughts out on paper. That's certainly the case with the poem I now, at last, put before you:

 The Continuous Life


What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

I've read this poem dozens of times and it blows me away every time: the ambition of it, the audacity of it, the beauty of it, the compassion of it. I'm reminded for the zillionth time of Christopher Clausen's assertion that all literature "implies some kind of answer, shallow or profound, to the fundamental human questions,  What kind of world is this, and how should we live in it?" The striking thing about this poem is that Strand isn't leaving those critically essential questions to be answered by implication, he's coming at them head-on. Right in the first sentence, he asks a question which might be paraphrased as "At what point do we as humans just give up?" Interestingly, Strand filters this question through the consciousness of the children, who are "watching the grownups for signs of surrender," and wondering, as the grownups themselves must wonder, how hard to work, how long to work, and how to know when the work is done. What does it mean to be alive? How should we live? What wisdom can we convey to our children about how to answer these questions?

These are huge philosophical questions, which have generated many lengthy (and for many of us more or less impenetrable) texts by the likes of Descartes and Kant and Wittgenstein and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But here is Mark Strand, trying to spell it all out for us in four sentences.

I love the second, long sentence, a capsule summary of the human experience:

                O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
    To prove you existed.

This is the reality of life: that it is at one and the same time completely ordinary, and deeply mysterious. We are given this time, and yet no matter what we do to use it wisely we will have to face the fear that what we have done is not enough. I love that line about the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops, those instruments of the quotidian which have their own miraculous beauty, if only we can bring ourselves to apprehend it. As a person who has been retired now for close to nine years, I can attest that the taste for mundane and the worship of household chores does in fact seem to grow, and that the question of what we might hope or wish to leave behind as we approach that second darkness grows in resonance as well.

And then the music and precision and eloquence of the very last sentence:

            Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

The available languor of the earth! And the tremors of love it engenders. I'm stunned by the originality and beauty of the phrasing, and of the idea.  I can perhaps imagine myself beginning a poem as Strand began this one, essentially starting with the question, "Well, what about _______?" and then attempting to offer some answers. But I cannot imagine myself getting from point A to point Z in the way Strand does here. It's a poem which unfolds a sequence of ideas and images in a way that is artful and musical and emotionally resonant, and, to my way of thinking, profound.

One of the reasons I am drawn to poetry is that it is a means of keeping myself focused, of learning and re-learning how to pay attention, a life skill that Strand both endorses and demonstrates in this poem. Why are we here? We are here to keep busy, to learn something, to lean down and hear the careless breathing of the earth, and to experience such love as we can encounter (and generate) in our selves, our days, and beyond.

Makes sense to me.