On Reading On: Cole Swensen and the Open Text.

 

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time over the last few months reading poetry and essays by Cole Swensen. She’s the author of more than a dozen books of poetry that range from more or less traditional descriptions and meditations to more experimental “open texts.” In an essay entitled “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian has described this kind of writing as follows:

The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.

This kind of writing, in other words, is concerned less in presenting the reader with a narrative or argument that can be paraphrased or “understood,” and more in providing the reader with an opportunity to enter into a kind of dialogue with the writer about how the juxtaposition of certain kinds of words or images might offer food for thought. In an interview in the Georgia Review, Swensen puts it this way:

I have a strong conviction that poetry’s role is to expand language. And there are so many ways that can be done—through innovative syntax, sound relationships that create new connections, images that do the same. Expanding language is so often a matter of creating new connections, which sometimes extend the network and at other times make existing linguistic networks more intricate. In other words, expanding language doesn’t only mean enabling it to cover new expressive territory, but also making existing expressive territory denser, quicker, more intense. Much great poetry seems to create an arc that spans from the concrete and graspable to the slipping-out-of-your-hands, and the leaps we make to catch that which is slipping land us in new regions, while allowing us to remain anchored in the “understandable.” I put “understandable” in scare-quotes because I’m not sure that poetry is ever about understanding—when we understand something, we’re necessarily standing outside of it, whereas poetry uses language in such a way that we don’t understand it, but experience it, participate in it.

 

As an example of what a poem of this kind might look like, I’d like to offer a short poem from Swensen’s 2004 collection Goest:

The First Lightbulb

precise erase 

 

a gate again 

 

where the sky died 

 

in a coin

This is a poem which I imagine that most readers, even dedicated readers of poetry, might initially find bewildering. I myself cannot claim to “understand,” but I’ve spent literally dozens of hours over a period of weeks inside this poem. I’ve read it, re-read it, memorized it, graphed some of its observable structural and sonic devices, recited it to myself while walking or washing the dishes. And even after all this time it still fascinates me. It is in some ways like a koan, in that it is short and invites thoughtful consideration without necessarily promising revelation as its end goal. It’s clear to me that no amount of further study will bring me to “closure” with this poem, but it’s precisely its open-endedness that keeps looping me back into it.

In the title essay from her remarkable book of essays Noise That Stays Noise, Swensen makes a distinction between the message of a poem and what she calls the “noise” within it, and offers a surprising (to me) redefinition of poetry:

Each source of noise corresponds to a different subsystem of the poem, such as the denotative system, the metaphoric system, the image system, the syntactical system, the rhythmic system, the system of sound relationships, and so on. What is information to any one of these subsystems may be noise to the others; for instance, the syntactical system may create difficulties for an appreciation of the denotative system in isolation (odd syntax can make it more difficult for a reader to know literally what is being said). Both systems are in themselves instances of organization, and these organizations can interfere with each other. However, at a "higher" level of organization, such as that of the entire poem, they can work together to create a more complex body of information. The more we look at possible sources and manifestations of noise, the more it seems that in terms of all literature, but most acutely with poetry, information itself must be redefined… Perhaps poetry itself can be defined as those literary instances of language in which the nonquantifiable aspects of its information overshadow the quantifiable.

“The First Lightbulb” is to my mind a pretty good example of a poem which a) foregrounds the “nonquantifiable” aspects of poetry, b) makes interesting use of juxtaposition and disjunction, and c) invites the participation of the reader in the creation of the meaning of the poem. Before you continue reading this post, I invite you to spend, say, ten minutes reading this poem and noticing whatever it is you notice about its vocabulary, its architecture, its sound relationships, its use of white space, and so on. I’ll pause here so you can try.

- - - - -

(Soothing music playing in the background.)

- - - - -

Okay, we’re back. I hope you enjoyed that. (Feel free to let me know what you came up with.) 

My own “reading” leads me to the following observations (among many others):

• It’s clear that there is no “message” that a reader can reasonably be expected to infer or intuit. 

• It consists of a series of words placed in what feels like a very deliberate set of parallelisms. “Precise erase,” for example, juxtaposes two words of two syllables each. The first syllable in each poem features a long e sound; the second syllable in each features another long vowel sound followed in both cases by -se. “a gate again” demonstrates a similar kind of mirroring, but with slightly different dynamics. There’s a repeated a-g-a sequence that is re-emphasized by the fact that the second word is “again,” which seems to gesture both backward toward the first line and forward toward the next, which (again) features two words with matching long vowel sounds: the sky died.

• The last line is a logical jump shift in several ways simultaneously. It doesn’t seem to connect syntactically in any obvious way with the lightbulb, with the gate, or with the sky. (Although it does, interestingly, begin and end with the same two letters: another mirroring.) It’s a line that raises questions just at the point where we might have been expecting closure. I’m quite sure that that is not accidental. In everyday parlance, the logical leap is not a bug, it’s a feature. It is one of the things that encourages me to go back to the top and start reading again, and as I have continued to do so I have managed to spend many pleasurable hours inside this poem.

• Despite whatever interpretive challenges the poem may present, it's clear that it has been very carefully constructed. The bulk of the poem, if we consider it as a structure, seems to consist of white space interrupted by verbal artifacts. In that sense, it reminds me a lot of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in which various objects and shapes hang balanced in space, as if in distant conversation with one another. This poem also seems to stand in relation to traditional representational poetry as abstract art does in relation to traditional representational art: asking the viewer to set aside whatever previous expectations they might have had about what is supposed to be the case and engage with the work as a unique field of energies. It's not simply not an act of verbal communication, but also—and in some cases primarily—a created object: a sculpture made not of wood or wire or stone, but of words. (Tangentially related note: Three years ago I wrote a series of posts about Renee Gladman, who is also very interested exploring the way that sentences might be read as structures, and vice versa. And it turns out that Cole Swensen has written about Gladman as well, in her recent book Art in Time.)

• Even given the premise that the poem is not primarily concerned with meaning, it is of course inevitable that any reader, myself included, will be tempted to try to tease one out. Humans are pattern-making creatures, wired to seek meaning even where there clearly is none. That’s how we wind up with descriptions of the constellations and origin myths and suchlike. I might, for example, be tempted to take the title “The First Lightbulb” as a metaphor for coming up with a new idea, and then follow that thought into the elements of idea-generation such as precision and revision (precise, erase), to passing through a gate (again) to a new state of consciousness where even the things we are most familiar with are withdrawn (where the sky died, even if they were previously thought to be set in stone, or, more precisely, in metal (in a coin). 

Having done so, I have no real reason to think that such a reading of the poem is plausible, much less definitive. There are alternative readings of the poem that might be attempted. But to what end? The problem with this kind of “reading” is that it reduces the multifaceted, open-ended experience of reality to something easier to "understand" but existentially inaccurate and impoverished. (Stephen Dobyns, in his book Next Word, Better Word, extends the logic of this argument to the deployment of any language in any circumstances: “No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become, it is always a diminishment of the reality described.”)
 
Those of you who have been following this blog for any length of time know that in addition to my interests in teaching and in writing, I have for many years now been a maker of collages, and other sorts of artwork. I see concerns in this poem with many of the same elements that I am very much aware of when I am working with my own materials: lines, shapes, juxtapositions, contrasts, negative space, and so on.

Needless to say, the time that I have spent reading Swensen’s poetry, as well as that of other poets she discusses in her essays like Peter Gizzi and Susan Howe and Charles Olson, has led me to reconsider my own default notions of what poetry is and how I have gone about writing it in the past. I host a poetry group that meets weekly on zoom, at which each of us presents a poem we have written in order to get feedback from the others about what works for them and what does not. As I have begun trying to put into practice some of Cole Swensen’s notions about poetry as a zone for “expanding language” into new expressive territories, I have on more than one occasion been asked by a member of the group, “What makes this poetry?” That's a terrific question. It’s the kind of question that starts to open doors in the mind. And an open door is an invitation ("a gate, again"?) to step through and behold what surprising realities might be waiting for you on the other side.

What I've Learned

 

What I've Learned

 

 

Alas, not much. But not nothing, either. A place to start,

to begin with. Point A, as when the pen meets the paper

 

for the first time, and keeps moving until it stops and lifts,

or doubles back on itself to make a shape of some kind.

 

Or continues on into the white space, meandering,

trying to discover what it's meant to become this time.

 

Boundaries are helpful. You can go in one direction

only so long without getting lost. Better to return

 

home on occasion and consider whether to expand,

consolidate, change course entirely, or begin again.

 

The choices you make at any particular time are

mostly a matter of intuition. Often one move

 

will dictate the next, and the one after that, in a way

that will, with luck, deliver what you never saw coming:

 

A flower. A comet. A house. A star. A beating heart.

Process Reflection:

This is a poem written after I completed the pen-and-ink drawing in my previous post. The poem is a reflection on the process of drawing in general and of drawing that picture in particular; it is also, inevitably, a parallel reflection on the writing process as I understand it and practice it. Formally, I was attempting several things at once. I originally had it in mind that it would be a sonnet, or at least sonnet-ish, and that each line would contain 14 syllables. When I got to the end of fourteen lines, I found that the logic of the poem as it had unfolded in the writing suggested that I needed one more line, which was a) a surprise to me (I hadn't planned to do that) but also b) a surprise in the poem that mirrored or echoed the surprise that I felt once I had completed the drawing and began to see things in it that I had not completely intended. Although I think looking at the picture may help snap the intention of the poem into focus, I hope that the poem works as a standalone written document as well.

Back to the Drawing Board

 

 

 

 

This is the most recent in a long line of pen-and-ink drawings I have done over the last fifteen or twenty years. I have a particular way of working that has evolved over time. Most of the drawings are done on Bristol paper, which has a very smooth surface that accepts a clean line, and doesn't tear up the tips of the Pigma Micron pens (usually .05 or .08) that I like because the ink dries quickly and is waterproof.

I find the process of drawing to be enjoyable, a way of centering myself. I most often listen to music, humming or singing along to myself while I am drawing. I begin by penciling in the rectangle that I'm going to work within. I used to do the drawing first and add the surrounding rectangle, afterwards, but discovered that it is prohibitively expensive to pay for mats and frames in custom sizes, so in recent years I pick a standard-sized mat, measure out the opening in the mat, and then draw very lightly in pencil the lines that will form the outer edges of the finished drawings.

I never have a plan laid out in advance when I draw, I just put the tip of the pen down on the paper and draw some kind of shape and fill it in, then do another next to that, and another next to that. I leave white space between each shape, and as I work the white space, the negative space, starts to assert itself as a compositional focus that often outweighs the shapes I have actually drawn. At some point I will draw straight lines, like the diagonals in the picture above, to subdivide the paper into sections. In terms of composition, my goal is to wind up with a some stylistic consistency within each section and stylistic variety from section to section. (In an earlier post I wrote a poem about how this process works.)

Obviously this drawing is not a literal representation of anything to be found it the world. It's more or less a pure abstraction, although inevitably some abstracted elements will wind up suggesting something to whoever looks at the drawing. While it's not unusual for people to tell me when they "see" something in the drawing, it is very unusual for that something to be anything I had consciously included. An example in this case is the small rectangular shape in the middle right of the picture which reads as perhaps a house or a face sitting atop something that might be read as a star. I find it interesting when those elements make their presence known as I draw, but I can't say that I have planned them. I accept them as pleasant surprises, or as evidence of my subconscious tossing up something I was not expecting and will not immediately—or perhaps ever—understand. Even the large flowery shape at the upper left emerged mostly because I was working to fill in the negative spaces left by the sixteen smaller shapes surrounding it. I was also consciously trying to introduce some semitones in the form of dots and thin lines to contrast with the more heavily contrasted black and white sections in the rest of the drawing. It became a plant form only by default.

I've had a lifelong interest in art, and have a large collection of books related to drawing and painting and collage. One of the things that satisfies me about the work that I have been doing is that there is nothing like it out there anywhere. There's some Zentangle stuff that I took an interest in for a while, but most of what I saw out there seemed to me to be over-structured and stylistically repetitive. This art is my art. Each time I sit down to draw it's an adventure of sorts, a process of exploration and observation. I enjoy making the drawing, and I enjoy studying the resulting artwork once it is made.

These kinds of drawings do not lend themselves to explanation. There's not much that I or anyone else could offer by way of paraphrase or summary. I could describe in words what goes on in my head when looking at any one section, or at the drawing as a whole, but that would be a pretty pointless exercise. They exist in a non-verbal plane.

Which is not to say that there are no parallels between what I am doing when I draw and what I am doing when I write poetry, or prose, for that matter. My writing practice is not unlike my drawing practice. Probably the most simple and elegant articulation of that process, whether working as an artist or as a writer, has been attributed to Jasper Johns: Do something. Then do something to that. Then do something to that.

I'm sure that there are some people, and you, Gentle Reader, may very well be one of them, who would question why any sane person, given the ongoing political and environmental chaos going on in the world and getting worse every day, would choose to spend his time producing hermetical drawings or often well-nigh incomprehensible poems. My response is pretty simple. There is little or nothing I can do at the personal level to deal with any of that stuff. I'm an old man. I do not see any reason to choose to spend the limited amount of time I have left on this planet tilting at windmills. My art, and my poetry, is something that gives me pleasure while I do it, and some small measure of satisfaction when it is done. Granted, the value that accrues from it does not have a positive impact on the world as it is. But it helps me to navigate and endure that world, for as long as I remain a part of it.

I'll bookend this post with the followup drawing I completed yesterday:

 

Intermezzo

            Sally Rooney has a large number of readers who enjoy and admire her work and an equally large (or perhaps larger) number of readers who dismiss her out of hand as a niche writer catering to GenXrs ("the Salinger of the Snapchat generation") by mirroring their romantic preoccupations. In his NY Times review of her latest novel, Intermezzo, Dwight Garner leads with an acknowledgment of the "Rooney backlash" before mounting a strong defense of the book. And so I find myself in the unusual position of siding with Dwight Garner, no stranger to snarky dismissiveness himself, in his assessment. Because Intermezzo, in my opinion, isn't just a good book, it's a terrific book, in pretty much every respect. It centers largely on five characters. Ivan is a 22-year-old chess prodigy. His brother Peter, ten years older, is a successful lawyer. They are both in mourning for the recent death of their father, and, from early on in the novel, they are both involved in complicated but utterly convincing relationships. Ivan falls deeply for Margaret, a woman in her mid-thirties. Peter has a close relationship with Sylvia, an ex-lover his own age with whom he still keeps in touch, but he is also involved with Naomi,  a younger woman who seems to be using him for her own purposes at the same that he uses her for his. In the process they manage, without necessarily intending to do so, to create something that feels very much—first to the reader, and then to the characters themselves—like love. Peter and Ivan have a different kind of complicated (and convincing) relationship, elements of fondness and love warring against elements of resentment and dismissiveness as they try to find their way toward one another.

 

            A summary of this kind perhaps makes it all sound like some kind of hipster soap opera. What saves it from being so is Rooney's uncanny ability to render the events of the story from inside the heads of each of her characters. I don't recall having read a book which so strongly conveys what it's like to be torn in three directions at once as one attempts to decide what to do in a particular situation. Here's an example in which Margaret, who has just met Ivan at a chess match at a venue where she was the hostess, offers to give him a ride back to his room. They are both aware that there is something in the air between them, but neither of them is possessed of the sophisticated social skills that more experienced (and perhaps more jaded) proto-lovers would use to gloss over the awkwardness. The paragraph serves the very straightforward narrative purpose of getting Ivan from point A to point B. But Rooney follows Margaret's thoughts very carefully as Margaret considers not only her own feelings in the moment, but Ivan's as well:

 

Outside, the car park is glowing with the skeletal orange light of the streetlamps, the paved surfaces dappled and glistening. She turns on her wipers and they click and scrape rhythmically over the windscreen. It happens all the time that she drives someone home like this, or drops them to the station, and they sit in the car together this way, chatting about something. It’s just work. And if Ivan doesn’t want to chat, if he wants to sit there looking at his hands and then looking at her and back at his hands again, that’s okay — he’s only twenty-two, and very gifted at one particular kind of board game, and after all there’s no formal etiquette for the situation. Finding yourself in the car of an older woman after a presumably strenuous public event, being driven to your accommodation with your little black suitcase, no one ever teaches you how to behave under such circumstances. If he wants to sit in silence, looking at his bitten fingernails, that’s alright, no problem. She, too, of course, is sitting in silence, and has nothing to say. They come off the main road and down onto the small lane to the holiday cottages, the gravel crunching noisily under the tyres of Margaret’s car. She has done nothing wrong, has done nothing at all, in fact, beyond what is required for the purpose of driving Ivan from the bar to the holiday village. If she made a little error in the conversation earlier, if she used one little dubious word or phrase, asking him what he was passionate about, that was excusable, even in a sense deniable, because subjective. She pulls up outside one of the houses, a white bungalow with peeling paint and darkened windows.

 

Later, as another example, we are inside Peter's head as he is driving to court and adjusting to the pharmaceuticals he has ingested. I love the way the scattershot syntax and time dislocations convey what he has done, what he is doing, what he is seeing, what he is thinking, and how it all plays out:

 

In the morning, hiss of the iron, buttered bread roll, milligram of alprazolam, blue tie or green. Stands at the dining table rearranging his papers while the coffee cools, thoughts running rapid with broken phrases, details of argument, streams diverging and recrossing, hands clammy touching the pages. The point of law. To raise the question of. His briefcase then, bitter aftertaste, overcoat, and outside the chill wind of October moves through the leaves of trees. Wide grey streets around the Green, buses slowing to a stop, wheel and cry of gulls overhead. Leaves rustle over the park gates. Barred windows of Ship Street then and the vans reversing. Blue clearing in the white clouds, rain-washed cobbles. River dissected by the glitter of sunlight, Grattan Bridge. Copper stepped saucer dome over Portland stone balustraded parapet, dirty green cap in daylight, the Four Courts. Feels the effects by the time he’s inside, dressing: slow serene feeling beginning in the hands and feet. Breathing settles. Thoughts grow orderly and sequential, facts arranged in place, stately procession of claims and counter-claims. That’s not actually recreational, Naomi told him once. Like, you can get a prescription if that’s what you’re using it for. Along the corridor, scent of cleaning fluid, overheard voices. Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness. Clear luminous certainty. In the courtroom, flow of speech unhurried, precise, inexorable. Admitting no contradiction. Familiar command almost perfect, yes, and pleasurable even, and then over.

 

Yes, this is writing that places demands on you as a reader. But it offers extraordinary rewards as well. I felt, and feel, like I got to know these characters as well as I have ever gotten to know most any of the flesh-and-blood humans beings I have met in my life. And that's because when you are with an actual person, you can never know for sure what they are really thinking. But with Rooney, due to her extraordinary psychological insight and writerly control, you can. 

The complexities in a story like this inevitably make you wonder whether the plot will be plausibly satisfyingly resolved, and whether or not the trip will have been worth it. The answer to both questions is a resounding "Yes!" Rooney is no longer occupying the wing in my personal house of literature  associated with interesting contemporary writers. She's in the larger room at the back having tea with Jane Austen and George Eliot.