A Formal Feeling Comes: Or, Just Forms

I am aware of the prognosis of my illness and I understand that treatment is palliative rather than curative. I consent to the management of the symptoms of my disease as prescribed by my Attending Physician and/or the Hospice Medical Director. My family and I will help to develop and will participate in a plan of care based on our special needs. [Virginia Dept. of Medical Assistance Services, Request for Hospice Benefits form]


How will my body be received once it arrives at Georgetown?
Very special care will be given to your very special gift. You can be assured that your remains will always be treated respectfully, carefully, and sensitively. The doctors, students and healthcare professionals here are mindful of your serious and generous intention to enhance their opportunity to study human anatomy. They are aware of their debt to you for offering them such a priceless source of learning. [Georgetown University School of Medicine, "Information on Bequeathal"]


In accepting these services, which are more comprehensive than regular Medicaid benefits, I waive my right to regular Medicaid services that are duplicative of services required to be provided by the Hospice except for payment to my Attending Physician or treatment for medical conditions unrelated to my terminal illness . . . I may be responsible for hospice charges if I become ineligible for Medicaid services. [VA Dept.]


I understand that unless the donor has indicated her/his preference, which is binding, Georgetown will not share the use of a cadaver with another Medical School without the permission of the Next of Kin. [Georgetown]


Mercy wanders in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. She
climbs to the top of a mountain, one of the Old Woman
Mountains. She sits down, filthy and hungered. Who.
Why aren't you floating? I have to do this this way.
[Alice Notley, Culture of One]


I understand that I may be billed for co-payments and deductibles required by my medical insurance. I understand that I am responsible for notifying Heartland immediately of any change in my insurance coverage and that I am responsible for any charges not paid by my insurance carrier resulting from my failure to do so in a timely manner. [ADMISSION AGREEMENT: Election of Hospice Benefit and Consent to Treat]


Dear Dr. Braddock:
If you die in your sleep do you know you are dead? Your clinically precise word order is a failure of dream-work. It gives an effect of harmless vacancy. Why this violent tearing away?
Sincerely,

[Susan Howe, That This]


EXCLUSIONARY CRITERIA
(Revised from "Donating Your Body to Science")
7. The donor is in fetal position or has contracted limbs.
Rationale: The body must lay flat on a table in order to be placed in our storage area.

__________

May the elements of the earth not rise up against us or the elements of forms, containers, urns, bearers of ash. My son's teachers say his prosody is good when he reads. He scans. I scan form after form, email, pdf, fax, fail. Repeat. I understand the progress of my treatment, where I am my mother. I do not sign for--but as--her.


My sister-in-law tells me about a book in which the inside is larger than the outside of a house. The house of my mother's body still contains her. Not the her a "memory table" can organize, but one on which photographs are set beside the white out. Each visitor must dip his brush into the white substance and cover over a part of her face, her arms, her legs, her breasts, the cigarette she held up in the 1950s black and white snapshot.


Her body is an urn. Ern Malley was a fake. Poet of air, not the dump. Culture of one, where one is multiples of one. He was two men, but a third poet. Why do we say a dog has a good "personality"? The neighbor who walked Murphy died; I knew his widow by the dog she walked. She is he because his little dog loves her. I call Murphy's Funeral Home to make back-up plans, just in case mom's body is "excluded." It's a family-run business. There are the Murphy's on their website, all eight of them, looking out. It was Martha J. Keefe, because the "O" had been too Irish. Whited out. Half the women in Cork looked like her.


I can't remember why I wanted to make a codex.
Marie doesn't know the word "codex." But she tries not
to remember, by making what she makes containing
all her memories and yours, o garbagers


Random access memory. Trunk of a tree or block of wood. The plank in reason. Rationales for "exclusionary criteria": as if fact mitigates fact. If your body is obese, it will not fit in our storage area. Or: "the anatomical relations are altered." No alteration where alteration found. Donne was a nasty poet, Ben notes. Ambition is as ambition does. Has nothing to do with flies, but with aggression. "The point is not to suppress your anger, but to watch it and let it go," writes The Motocycliste.


I am short with family, short with friends, short with cat, short with dogs, short with newspaper commenters, short with people on the phone. I am short. My mother is short, as was my father. Shortness runs in the biological family. My mother's body, stepping into the tub, taught me what a woman's body is. Pubic hair red, her head of hair was brown. (Born a red-head, her hair color changed within days.) It is now mapped otherwise. Choose satellite or map, or the hybrid that offers pegs & pins on photographs of actual streets. They will try not to use IVs, as that might exclude her body from "donation to science."


In Notley's book, Marie's shack gets burned down, and again. Her dog is killed by mean girls. My mother's mother put her dog to sleep when she was away. My mother's body is a house that will be burned. Her cremains revert to Next of Kin, where Next of Kin is I who sign the forms as her.


It means that I make perfect sense. [Notley]


The the. That this. Here, thereafter.

"If increasing sadness": Muzak meditations

Arrived at the land of Muzak, not a destination really but a hold, a pause if not a rest. "When we listen to music," Susan Howe notes, "we are also listening to pauses called 'rests.' 'Rests' could be wishes that haven't yet betrayed themselves and can only be transferred evocatively" (TT 28). While Muzak means to offer calm, it cannot rest. Relentless Muzak. The tunes are not familiar, except as Alzheimer's music. The voice-overs aim to reassure the listener: your family member is very important to us. There is no sadness in the voice-over. When I reach Heartland Health, I hear the same muzak in my ear as at the Arden Courts number. "We're part of the same corporate food chain," I'm told by a hospice worker.


In the "Health and Safety Appendix" to the Heartland Hospice Care Patient Information Handbook that's sent me as a pdf, I find a chart. Three columns, from left: "Body System"; "Symptom"; "Comfort Measures."


E calls to say mom is "comfortable," and "in no pain." But she does not have funeral arrangements. She gives me two names. One is Money & King. May I laugh at the irony? I do not think the muzak would want me to.


Under "comfort measures" for "Symptom: Feeling sad," I find, listed after bullet points:

Offer gentle support
Allow discussion of feelings
Give medicine as ordered
Notify nurse if increasing sadness


What I'm told is that my mother speaks, but that she makes no sound. Ellen: "She 'mouthed' some words but I couldn't make out what she was saying. I told her that you send your love." Social worker: "When your mom was speaking to me this morning, she was not projecting much sound and it was primarily me understanding the words she was mouthing to my questions."


Mouthing. When the mouth operates, but cannot project sound. The OED defines "mouthing" as

The action of mouth v. (in various senses); spec. the action of speaking in an empty, pompous, verbose, or foolish manner; an instance of this.

Merriam-Webster on-line defines it so, as well. The fourth definition works best: "to form soundlessly with the lips." The example has to do with a librarian. The librarian has volition; he knows he ought not to speak loudly, so he mouths his words. My mother tries to project sound, but none emerges. Another definition for the noun: "The entrance to an underground working from a mine shaft." To mine the mouth for words. To mine the mouth for words and come up without a seam, a vein, a breath. To go underground but not find the ground of saying. Form without content, and yet still content.


Muzak is mouthing's opposite. It's all sound, no meaning. No, that's not right. There's meaning, but the meaning is to avoid the underground, the mouth, the vein, to pause in thought if not in time. "This is an odd mix of the practical with the metaphysical" I say to someone on the phone from hospice.


After writing that I would not be advertising my posts any more on facebook, I got mad at Mark (this is a different Mark) for commenting that blogs are "so 2006." There are words like platform, like social networking, for what he means to discuss before he knows what I mean to say. The blog is a mouth. It opens and closes with the other mouths. It is the entrance to a mine. It is sometimes thought to be pompous, bombastic, loose with the facts. It might be Muzak. But mine. Is meditation, is retrieval, is trying to make the sounds that mean something. The Heartland handbook tells me, "You may be experiencing many emotions right now. Heartland Hospice is here to guide you on your journey." They mean my mother's journey, but it's mine. I am feeling pain. I am mouthing it. If you visit, you might hear it. In or out of the rests.


Why can't I remember the tune, the content of the voice-over? Why is there a cattle egret at the zoo, when I see three outside my window now, hunting roaches in the wet green grass? Why is memory what binds us together, like a simile, or "the cow stuff," as Sangha calls Elmer's? Why is ambition so predictable in its vehicles? Why does my chest quaver like a string? Why do doves coo, and mynas scream "cat!"?


I ask the social worker, the one who is working between the one who left and the one who has not yet started, if I should come to visit. It would have to be soon, as I'm in Scotland in July. I know this is a loaded question. [The cat comes out from under the bed; he will yell in a minute, as my door is closed. "Mom is busy," Bryant tells the kids.]

Susan,

Forgive my frankness.....if you are hoping to see your mom before anything happens then I think the trip in a couple of weeks is a good idea. With "seniors", conditions can change so quickly. She is weak. I've been surprised with other clients how quickly and suddenly their condition turned. I suggest you see her in a timely manner....just in case.

There are now six egrets on the field. The cat (a "senior") sits next to me, watches them, scratches his left ear with his back left leg. She might "turn" soon. A turn in a poem is when momentum breaks and the poet turns her wheel. Away from. Toward. "When we wander in circles / Driven by keen delusion / May the King of clear skies / Go before us, turning / The great wheel, and sounding the conch / on the path of radiant light / The way of all-embracing wisdom." This is where my eye falls when I write the word "turn." Sina sends her re-casting from the Tibetan Book of the Dead for Albert Saijo's passage. It's called "Fundamentals of Navigation."

Should I choose a funeral home by its website? Should I call and test their Muzak? Should I choose the home that uses metaphor? "We understand that family care extends beyond our front door." Ah, the "straits of the liminal." Or should I choose the home that uses a more literal approach? "Among the property's distinctive attributes are its front porch lined with rocking chairs."

The hospice nurse returns my call. Cannot tell if there's urgency or not. "Aspiration pneumonia," so it's pneumonia again. Oxygen mask, so she "obviously" can't say anything. Antibiotics. Not in distress. Comfortable. Will call back with any changes.

Another call. This time it's billing. She's going to send a form, but it's confusing, so she'll explain it to me. Medicare Part B, as in Boy. Three options. Advanced Beneficiary Notice. Medications may or may not be covered by Medicare Part B as in Boy or by the secondary insurer. "I presume you'd like me to choose the first option," I say, after she enumerates them. "I can't say anything more," she says.

"'Rests' could be wishes that haven't yet betrayed themselves," Susan Howe. Why the word "betray"? I know what mom would wish.

Mom report / Susan Howe's _That This_ / Albert Saijo's passing

[Today's weather]


Morning call from Arden Courts: mom has pneumonia. They've done chest x-rays. She's very weak, "weaker than before." [I'm having a hard time understanding the woman's accent on the other end of the phone, so I ask her to repeat herself.] She requests permission to call hospice. Yes, she would still be in the same place, but might have a hospital bed. If she gets better, they'll leave. I say yes, of course, thanks for calling. Yes.


When I look up "hospice" I get the word "palliative." palliative care (from Latin palliare, to cloak): care that makes patients more comfortable, lessens their suffering. Cloak. Loose over-garment. Cloak and dagger. Superman. To cloak. Conceal, cover over, hide. You cannot cover over pain, though perhaps you can ease it.


Her death has been in my mind for days now. Bryant says we had 2.5 inches of rain this morning between 5 and 8 a.m. Rolling thunder, rain at times shearing toward the mountains, plants fallen down on the lanai. When I heard that Mark's mother was in ICU and then died, I worried that my mother does not die. I cannot say that worry is easing, or that it's cloaked.


Say that her death is on or in my mind. What is death's shape, its smell, what rent does it pay, or is there a mortgage, as it comes to own us over time? Death is a resident; she lies on a bed and it is to her that the cat comes. Cats know, you know. To reside is not to abide, though it suggests a coming again (re-) to the activity of being. Do not resuscitate. Do not force feed. Do not extend
beyond.


We own death (it is ours) for a time. We own it as concept, not as fact. It is her death that is on my mind, though my death is there, too. Hers and mine are relatives, but not the same. She gave birth to mine, as I have adopted those of my children. It is still her possession, even if she cannot understand it. But possession also has an end. Not a possession to be bought or sold, but relinquished. Into time, which is not one. I can say "her time has come," but that is a double abstraction. She has her death, but not her time.


Radhika lies on the floor, reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. She is singing or chanting, I cannot tell which, though I do distinguish the rain, water in the drain, thunder; I saw egrets on the lawn, white against dark green beneath gray. A day without horizon, thick. Kamehameha Highway is closed at Waikane. Bryant whistles: "waterfalls everywhere!" Every mountain fold water full.


That This. That is over there, this is over here. That happened; this is happening. Short vowels tucked into short words. They point. Which syllable is stronger, that one or this one? Is it that this? or that this? A line of egrets moves from this to that.


If I were writing the review of Susan Howe's book, as I'd planned, it would involve her invocation of "ancestors," those who "opened" Japan and traded with China. Or her sentence about Pearl Harbor and Hans Andersen. Her desire to be inside history, the discovery in her grieving for her husband, Peter Hare, that she is relentlessly between things. Temporal tectonics.


"Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and envelopes its referent without destroying or changing it--the way a cobweb catches a fly" (13).


Language as cloak, what comes between the spider and her prey. Language as palliative, as nurse, as easing pain before an end.


"More and more I have the sense of being present at a point of absence where crossing centuries may prove to be like crossing languages. Soundwaves. It's the difference between one stillness and another stillness. Even the 'invisible' scotch tape I recently used when composing 'Frolic Architecture' leaves traces on paper when I run each original sheet through the Canon copier" (31).


Howe moves from sound to sight, centuries to languages, scotch tape to the Canon copier. One of her favorite words is "hinge." A hinged picture squeaks.


"It could have been the instant of balance between silence, seeing, and saying; the moment before speech. Peirce would call this moment, secondness. Peter was returning to the common course of things--our world of signs" (35)



Howe's evocation of secondness, that instant between sound and silence, meaning and its release, comes in "Frolic Architecture," where material from the journals of Hannah Edwards Whitmore, sister to Jonathan Edwards, is cut and then spliced to the page with "invisible" tape. Among what's left of Hannah's words are markers of Howe's research: "1208 EP G 3 of 3 folders" (51). Secondness works in both directions, then, as a falling into silence and then a coming out of it, out from the aptly named "folder." Research is not rebirth, but.


Somewhere in the book's first section, "The Disappearance Approach," she writes about "cremains," or what is left of the body after cremation. I have a form on my other computer's desktop, filled out with instructions on what to do with my mother's cremains. The punster in me breaks out with, what we love best, cremains. My mother's voice reminds me that they are the lowest form of humor.



The last word in "Frolic Architecture" is "sudden." As this word falls into that white page, it more resembles "sudder," then echoes "shudder." Sudden death, shudder. This is the opposite to my mother's death, which will not have been sudden. Her death will have an end, but it will not have been soon. That time will come.


Blogger's sitemeter sent me to cuke.com this morning, where I learned of Albert Saijo's death (they linked to my blog post on him from July, 2009). Saijo was a poet of the white spaces, especially toward the end when he refused to publish any of his poems. He was a beautiful man, and will be much missed by me and by my family. Rest well, Albert.



"But you're out. You went away and you came back. Now as you head back to civilization, you have a wildness in your heart that wasn't there before. You know you're going outback again."

Albert Saijo, The Backpacker, San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1972, 1977.

On Teaching the Difficulties

We had the "accessibility" talk in my graduate workshop yesterday. Every semester I've taught poetry has featured some version of this conversation. In some classes, the question arises in monetary terms. One undergraduate class told me that they were going to make money off their poems; when I laughed, they told me I wasn't taking them seriously enough. "Do you want to hear about my small press's finances?" I asked, and then told them about the alternative economy I participate in as a poetry publisher. In other classes, the question arises out of the energy it takes to read poetry. One of my first students at UH wondered who on earth would work a long day at the bank and then go home and choose to read something difficult. (That circles back on money, too, I see.) Yesterday, the question was engaged on many levels, as befits a class of ambitious graduate students. We have been reading Susan Howe's Singularities these past two weeks. It's a book I've been obsessed with for 15 years now, the only one of her books I teach with any consistency, and so I've perhaps forgotten what a shock it is to read it for the first time. During the week several words popped up on our google group discussion board, among them "discomfort," "audience," "understanding," and "accessibility."

I love these words because we all think we know what they mean. So I began class by asking students to talk about what we mean when we say them. What is an accessible poem? What is an inaccessible one? Who reads these poems? The discussion quickly turned into a loop: accessible poems make us comfortable; inaccessible ones lack an audience (except academics, of course!); a lack of understanding makes us uncomfortable. And so on. One student wanted to know how to enter into the process of reading a Howe poem; it turned out she knew full well, but could not find the end of the scout's path. To be fair, no one was arguing for the easy, lounge chair poem, but everyone was weighing the quotient of "getting it" and "getting stuck," failing to communicate (another of those words).

To understand a poem is to have some control over it. To have control over a poem means you can write about it effectively, that you can quote it to good effect, that you can carry it around with you as an answer, or at least a well-formulated question. To fail to understand a poem is to be irritated. In workshop sometimes our irritation flares up because a student's poem simply cannot be adequately interpreted as written. The poem that doesn't work is out of our control. But so are many poems that do work. These are the poems we want desperately to "understand" (standing under, having a foundation, holding the poem up like Atlas an entire world).

Graduate students are, by definition, good readers. Lack of understanding understandably irritates them; it's a paper cut to their sense of themselves. So, on the one hand, I suggest relaxing a bit. Listen to the poem, let it sit for while, don't worry on it so much. On the other hand, trust the poem to mean, if not quite to be understood. But this still leaves important questions like, "how can a poem with a small audience (or even smaller than usual) act in the world?" "How can a poem influence its audience if that audience is so small?" "Should we expect poems to act, or do they describe the world?" And so on. Good stuff.


But how to work toward the idea that "not understanding" can be a poem's subject, that "not understanding" or "not hearing" or witnessing an absence in the archive needs to be enacted rather than told? How to illustrate the "narrative in non-narrative" that Howe claims for her work? The exercise I developed came in two parts. First I asked students to find a six line section of the book; in ten minutes they were to rewrite those lines to render them "accessible." Perhaps the most vivid of these translations was by a student who took "velc cello uncannunc" and spun it out as "European strings," thus preserving the poem's larger context as she elaborated on the imposition of western culture on the "wilderness." A couple of students had not completed their translations because they'd better understood the passages in looking at them more closely.

After we'd discussed the translations, what was gained and (mostly) what was lost in doing them, we turned to the second part of the exercise. Here I handed out a copy of our latest administrative memo from the President of UH, M.R.C. Greenwood about further possible cuts in the university's budget. (One student had kindly printed it out 10 times for me, as my office printer no longer works.) I read a paragraph of the memo out loud and asked students to render a few sentences of it inaccessible. "Do you mean to say that it's already inaccessible?" chimed one student, getting way ahead of me.

A couple students translated Greenwood into Howe, making the memo's language into a chant. Another punned on green and wood and budge and jet (hurts my teeth simply to repeat that!) One replaced nearly every noun with "what." And so on. In the discussion afterwards, we talked about how alert we became to the memo's language, how we did not simply let it flow past us as if it did make sense.

That gets us to resistance, the resistance students feel toward poetry, especially of the difficult kind. This resistance is the teacher's ally, I think, because it evokes such crucial questions as those we discussed yesterday. And, if we take the budgetary memos and make them into difficult poems, that skepticism leads us into difficult questions about the university and the state. Who will spend this money? How can we best argue for the value of a university? What happens when, as one of my facebook friends put it, the bankrupt rhetoric of a university administration meets the rather more literal bankruptcy of the institution?

Poetry is not level ground, is steeplechase. But, like Stephen Collis, I hold to poems whose meanings live both within and without what one of my students, Jaimie Gusman, calls its "anyjar" or container. In a review of Hank Lazer's Portions in The Poetic Front, Collis distinguishes between the oulipian work of Christian Bok and the rather different formal limitations of Lazer as follows, "if I were to make the comparison, the difference between Bök and Lazer is that the former details the struggle to negotiate his constraint outside the poem, while Lazer shows us the struggle inside the poem, where it remains an (im)potentiality." It's the "(im)potentiality, or impish potentiality, that I so love, and love to teach, in "difficult" poems.

On the (im)possibility of meditative poetry: Jordan Scott's BLERT and Norman Fischer's CHARLOTTE'S WAY

Meditative poetry and stuttering. I begin from a nostalgia for meditative poetry, or better put, a love of meditative poetry that has been placed under some stress for me in recent years. But today my reading takes me from meditation to stuttering, two categories that interrupt each other than join together. Meditation has meant flow, that vaunted state of sentencing that my students inform me they lack, even before I begin critiques of their often jumpy prose (or poetry). Stuttering is distraction, is the children running into my room as I read, or the in-laws about to come over now as I begin my meditation on stuttering. Stuttering is disturbance. If, as Susan Howe writes in "Incloser," "There is a direct relation between sound and meaning" (BM 49), she often seems more intrigued by silences: "The fractured syntax, the gapes, the silences are equal to the sounds in Maximus," she tells Edward Foster (BM 180). I am reminded of Howe on stuttering by Yunte Huang, in his fine book, Transpacific Imaginings; I am reminded that during a walk with Susan Howe in a Buffalo park she told me that a prominent expert on stuttering is also named Howe. Google gurgles that S.W. Howe co-wrote "Speech shadowing characteristics of stutterers under diotic and dichotic conditions" and published it in 1988, at about the time the other Howe was writing her essays in The Birth-Mark. At the time I was trying to spread word of my book, Dementia Blog, I discovered that an authority on dementia shared my last name; he is Richard Schulz, who graciously answered my email to him. Howe and Howe, Schultz and Schulz are the opposite of stutters. They sound too right, as if the sonic idea rhymes rhymed with each other. To stutter (let alone to suffer dementia) takes away the fluency of that commutative equation between name and theme.

Meditative poetry has always seemed to me to render disjunctions (a kind of stutter) as fluidities. Temporal breaks, like loss of self or other or God, are seamed together ("let be be finale of seem") in the poet's quick conjunction of thoughts. Meditation suggests space, suggests time, suggests lag. Thinkers like Maryann Wolf, who wrote Proust & the Squid about dyslexia, worry that meditation is on its way out. Wolf:

I worry, like Socrates long before me, that our children are becoming more "decoders of information" than true comprehenders. I worry that they are deluded by the seeming permanence and volume of their information, into thinking they "know it all"--when they have barely begun to fashion the kind of brain that has learned how to probe, infer, reflect, create, and move to whole new places on its own. ("Reading Worrier," on-line)

Meditation is about comprehension, and comprehension about inclusion, understanding, totality. Or at least one suspects there are inclusions to be made, totalities to be grasped, even if or because they are tantalizingly beyond reach. "No man is an island" might well be a false statement, but John Donne implied a geography of the self in which continents held more value than atolls or islands. Even when systems are breaking down, as they are at the opening of John Ashbery's Three Poems, their shadows promise a velvety landing, or at least comfort in the search. (This may be one of Ashbery's least comfortable books, but the writing is among his most seductive, like a romance novel about the mind.) Stevens, like Shelley, found his map in the sky, which is wide. And the poems I'm reading today by John Koethe, whose Selected Poems I found used at BookEnds in Kailua, make a constant arc between meaning and loss, unwinding in long and looping sentences whose only hesitations are the line-breaks that punctuate the poet's thinking.

As I said earlier, meditative poetry is more problematic to me than it once was, no matter how much I will always adore early Ashbery and his imagined mentor, Thomas Traherne. As much as I instinctively reject the notion that Ashbery is merely the last flank of a great white army (if not whale) that presses down on islands from the eastern continent, his poetry does thrive on a luxuriousness that many people do not have, and a fluency that could be said to go along with it. Not that I'm against privilege, only the notion that privilege is in-clusive. But meditative poetry is not so much "inclusive" of world as it testifies to only a small province in it. New Haven (but only in the evening), New York (but only from the window), Rome (as the philosopher ascends to heaven): these are places where meditation goes on. Waipahu, Gary, not so much perhaps, at least in not so many words. To meditate in the age of consumption is not easy; I'm reminded of Wordsworth on his London bridge, calling a rural scene to mind, even where he cannot see it. And that was 19th century. Harder yet in a Walmart, though Ryan Oishi does his damndest. There is little fluidity in the goods, despite the tsunami in the aisles.

But it is not only left to the poet to ponder; the reader has a role to play, as well. My students wear their ear buds, text on their phones, talk on their phones, diddle with their laptops. They are in a constant state of distraction, as am I, knowing my next Facebook message might be coming at any instant. Even students who can concentrate don't. But what about the readers Maryann Wolf writes about who are dyslexic, can simply not read fluently? My son is one of them. The other day his friend pulled out a Star Wars mad libs book and wanted Sangha to help with it. Sangha announced that HE was not going to follow the rules; he was going to make up his own. I realized that his move into an imaginative space was due not to his overpowering imagination, but to the fact that he could not read the mad libs to begin with. As Wolf argues, people are not naturally readers; there is no center in the brain for reading. Whatever links there are that make us readers are not there for all of us. To read phonetically works for most young readers, but not for my son, who will get the sound of the first letter right, but then guess what comes next. His guessing often threatens (is that the word?) to become another story, as if the attempt to read were a launching pad, not an arrival gate. That's great, except in school.

My son does not stutter when he speaks; he stutters when he reads. Canadian poet Jordan Scott is a stutterer, one for whom the act of speaking is a minefield. He has written a book, blert, that at first glance resembles a Christian Bok production, but which is less "conceptual" than "realist." His is not the concept of the "stutter in the text," or a metaphor for gaps and silences; instead, he writes the material language of the stutterer:

The stutter here appears on its own terms, rejecting the metaphoric, thematic, graphic . . . or representational aspects of this language disturbance. The text is written as if my own gibbering mouth chomped upon the language system, then regurgitated the cud of difference. My symptoms are the agents of composition. (65)

Scott's meditations on his poems are composed in prose. Many poets use prose when they are meditating on their ideas, rather than rather than enacting them. They include Howe, who stutters in her poems but flows (mainly) in her prose, and Kaia Sand, whose forthcoming Tinfish Press volume, Remember to Wave, includes essays on the stories she writes more fragmentary poems about. Explications take the stutter out of the poem. Perhaps Ashbery's Three Poems in prose can be read as a prolegomenon to his poems, although the poems tend to render as flow instances that are discrete; in that confusion we find what is most Ashberian.

For Scott, the act of speaking is physical, not metaphysical, literal, not figurative. Open Lisa Linn Kanae's book, Sista Tongue, and you find quotations on the act of speaking. From Wendell Johnson, "a speech disorder occurs when all of the basic functions of speech are affected to some degree and, in certain cases, one function may be more seriously disturbed than another." Or from Hanson, "The most important structure of articulation is the tongue, which is responsible for effecting the changes in the mouth basic to the production of all but a few sounds. The tongue is so essential to human speech, languages are often referred to as 'tongues.'" For Kanae, "improper" speech is often a label put on non-standard English speakers for reasons that have nothing to do with the tongue. For Scott, the tongue and the hyoid bone make the speaker, and hence the language--even before sociology takes its turn. He writes in the language of "articulation":

Not articulated to any other bone, the hyoid bone lounges in the human neck. Suspended from the tips of styloid ligaments, only two plump bursas interrupt this hammocked marrow. In early life, the lateral borders are connected to the voice box by pretend membrane; after middle life, usually by bony union . . . Some muscles of the root of the tongue are attached to it, as well as some laryngeal muscles. It is not attached to any other bone, which it makes it something of a curiosity among bones. (42)

If stuttering is not metaphorical to Scott, then the mouth surely is. What are articulated are not words but bones. What is style is not writing but "styloid ligaments." Borders do not belong to words and phrases but to the voice box. Hammocks are not to be slept in but support the marrow. And so on. Our very mouths are metaphors, but their output is unmistakeably literal. We can meditate on the mouth, but words are tools used against their speaker. There is no meditation on language, because language resists thought, at least as it is spoken. Metaphorically speaking, then, Scott's speech is usually poetry, and his writing is generally speaking prose explication of that poetry. At times the two converge uneasily, but for the most part there are two Scotts as there were two Lears (stylistically, not thematically!)

Kanae's brother was a "late talker." He said "Itah, itah" for sister and "wuh-yol" for world and "too-too, too-too" for Popeye da Sailor Man. His sister translates for him, as she "translates" the story of Pidgin in Hawai`i to her readers. She begins from the material fact of language and gets into its less material (if hardly immaterial) station in local culture. Scott navigates a similar divide, albeit without ethnic and class ramifications. His poems present language as problem:

Broca's
camel clutch
grapple thalamus flux
box tonsils fresh black box
tongue scatter suckle polygon
syllable collar pop
mullet split end
leg lock glottal
lip off:

fresh nugs
mouse milking
NASCAR

wrist flex
snorkel mosh
dental furrow
Jell-O shot
ease Pantene. (36)

Not much separates this section or many others from other poems by avant-garde contemporaries. What separates it is the particular meditation on it, which is built into the poetry. While many poets are conceptualizing qualities of language or facts of politics in their work, Scott is creating a literal concept. He is not a conceptual poet, but a poet of the brute obstacle. He uses a shovel to speak: "I open, shovel bug on tongue. Swing teeth into lip. Cicada for Chiclet. Trident itch. Pluck mucus in harpsichord" (17). It is as if the mouth were conceptualizing the mind, obliging it to think about something it started off trying to avoid. Where the Pidgin speaker knows what he or she is saying, but is found inarticulate by the larger culture, the stutterer cannot know what he or she is about to say. There may be a thought that precedes speech, but it is not the same thought that postdates the (f)act of speaking.

Charles Bernstein once said that he is a poet because he's dyslexic, because language is difficult for him. That Bernstein's "Defence of Poetry" is difficult is testament not merely to the poet's obstreperousness, but also to his actual material difficulty with written words. But Bernstein instantly metaphorizes his difficulty. Difficulty will save us from ourselves. For Scott, difficulty is of another level of difficulty. It does not liberate us from itself, but immerses us in discomfort. We emerge less enlightened about the politics of language than about its resistances to us. We are its politics, not the other way around.

What, in the end, does any of this have to do with meditative poetry? This is a blog entry, so I'm not sure yet; my thoughts are tentative. I won't say they stutter, but they certainly are not in NASCAR territory, burning rubber around the track. In my own writing, the meditative poem fell away (in the late 1990s, to be nearly exact). I could no longer justify to myself all the connections my syntax was making for me, connections that owed as much to previous meditative poems as to my existence, its stops and starts and recognitions. I took away line breaks and replaced them with prose sentences. No two sentences could touch ideas. They were ever discrete. Much as I want to return to meditation, I cannot seem to get there. Perhaps it's as biological an issue as that of tongue and enunciation. But in my thinking about it, I realize that I could not return now to meditation as any imitation of seamless thinking. It requires its breaks; it break dances (RIP MJ); it hits brick walls. Then again, when I look back to Stevens I hear more stuttering than I did before. In my "as if" stage of writing (in college, in other words), Alfred Corn referred me to "Bantams in Pine-Woods" for a cure. The first two lines enact their last word, obliging the reader to yell and spit and nearly stutter:

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Now it's not "Tongue and canine boing-boing until CH CH knockout chipmunk achoo" (Scott, 16), but it's closer than one might imagine.

A more "standard" (in the sense of standard English) meditative poem is Norman Fischer's Charlotte's Way, Tinfish's only accordion chapbook:




Fischer's lines are long and sometimes prosaic, but move fluidly through time and Fischer's meditations in and of it. A zen priest, Fischer is at home with wavering, with finding home as the place that is always moving (Jennifer Kwon Dobbs's notion of the adoptive imagination operates here, too). So his poems tend to be long, capacious, inclusive of ordinary and extraordinary detail. In the following passage from the chapbook he moves easily between the meta- and the physical:

EXACTLY ENOUGH TO MEET YOU RESTLESSLY
In the shadow of forgetting
Which occurs so quickly and in such detail
Even the tips of the cypress trees subtly quivering in the salt wind
Know of it and reflect it in their patterns now yielding
To another now
Under equally changeable skies
As I write this line a leaf blows by

What the design of this chapbook accomplishes is to show at once the fracturing of those meditations--both in the exaggerated separations between sections of the poem, and in the folds created in the middle of som sections. In the section after the one I just quoted, the page break comes between the word "feeling" and the phrase "That is a person":

AS I WROTE THAT LINE A LEAF BLEW BY
Which I'd've forgotten if not for
Writing which makes a new now frozen
And not frozen in a reader's fluid awareness
A face, or faces, a face is always plural like a sea or a sky
For clouds or waves just as surely roll across it
And light does too
Thought there's nothing to be fixed or retained
The face expresses a person, a feeling
That is a person each face a history
Of a reckoning and a history
And a request consented to
With courage making a singular life story
Journey on the seas back to an island
Bright in the sunlight

"[A] feeling / That is a person" is a double stutter in the text (line break followed by page fold) that is crucial to the larger meditation Fischer embarks upon. While the page breaks are accidents of the design, they add to the poem by distracting from its flow. They are accidents like the blowing leaf. They are collaborations after the fact between the poet (who has written the poem) and the designer (Terri Wada, who is reading and placing the poem on the page). Kanae's book was designed and transformed by Kristin Gonzales Lipman, without Kanae's input. This book, while it had more input from the poet, still incorporates the material felicities of its design into the content. The physical folds are like Scott's tongue, his hyoid bone; they break our reading up. But the accordion is incapable of ending except where it begins, almost. The accordion is circular, not linear, or merely accumulative, like most books, which convert pages into little piles and then stun them inside covers like butterflies for display. The riddle of time and its passage, then, is enacted by the book itself, a book that flows and stutters in nearly equal measure.

Fischer's lines move from plural to singular (faces to face, selves to self or at least to that self's story), from an unspoken continent to a marked island. Islands are where languages collide most quickly, shift, change, move from oral to written and back again. No man may be an island, but his voice can be. Words as islands are stutters in the text, but how right that sounds here on Oahu, where the stutter is the meditation and meditations only rarely pacific.