Thursday, March 19, 2020

Meditation 30



19 March 2020

Jesse Glass asked me to explicate a poem (he calls them “squares”) from I Want to Write an Honest Sentence. The poem is on page 17, dated 31 October 2017. These prose poems are often an aid to my memory: something happened on this date, which then caused me to remember other things. But this poem required me to do some research of my own, as I couldn't remember what had been in the news that week, and hence in the poem. Here are a few of our exchanges this past weekend:

Sun 11:25 PM

Hello Susan, I hate to bother you again, but I'm finishing up and including your square poem on page 17 . . .  I notice what appear to be several topics mixed together--money laundering, Filipina maids. Range Rovers, wave patterns, dead reefs, two women adrift without a cell phone, scarlet yarn from a chicken's entrails--why do you call that yarn?--Virginia mansions--a very powerful section about killing 'them'--tender buttons--yes--more climate change--and someone driving away in a Range Rover with a smile. Then end it with a date--Halloween 2017. That's lots of territory to cover in one poem.

You know that terrible letter from Harriet Monroe to Hart Crane about his Melville poem, and Crane's sad letter in which he tries to explain his process and what each symbol means. I don't want you to do that, but I would like to get an insight into how you wrote this poem. Where, for instance, did the Filipina maids come from?

Jess

P.S.--Do you harvest the newspaper? I do that--have done that with the Japan Times.
Mon 9:07 AM
Just saw this, Jess. Let me have a look and see if I can remember some of that!
As for the rest of it: "Room after room," not sure of the exact reference, but Waikiki is full of Filipina maids, one of whom I recall was very sweet to my late dad when he got terrible sunburn back in 1991. The two women lost on a boat were here in HI. I think that, too, may have been a scam, but I'll have to look that up, too. Bryant seems to remember that the lost at sea story was a fraud. Chicken entrails simply looked like yarn to me. The Virginia mansions refer to the AOL mini-mansions built in the 90s. I remember a taxi ride from Dulles where the taxi driver talked about how empty the huge houses were. "The flag of our disposition" is from "Song of Myself." And the deposition given us by the Trump administration. The gunman who didn't get into a good school (according to one article I read) was the guy in Vegas who shot over 50 people. One of my students was at that concert and had to run for his life, which comes up in other of the poems. He's sent his girlfriend back to the Philippines (more hotels and Filipinas). I think the perp drove a Range Rover and had returned to his house one night before going to the hotel to shoot people. And someone caught a photo of his face through the window of the vehicle. Does this help? I dunno, it jars my memory when it does. Otherwise, some small mysteries in there.

I don't harvest newspapers, per se, but news does emerge in my writing from the day or the week or the month I'm writing. So maybe that a good term.
I remember Bill Lavender saying that the most obscure poems are those that contain contemporary references. Now I see how that works. Thanks again for reading and thinking about all this, Jesse. Hope you're safe from the epizoodic.

I'll now keep going here, for my blog, which is again for Jesse, and for anyone who happens upon it.

As I ponder Bill Lavender’s dictum about obscurity, I begin to think of my poems/cards/squares as being about the very process of the public becoming private. There’s a lot of contemporary history in the square, but it needs to be unpacked, not in the way you’d unpack a Hart Crane poem (through deep listening to the lexicon and to metaphor) but via Google, diving into the week’s (wreck's) news. The process throughout is one of starting from the public moment (corrupt members of the government; shooter in Vegas), then quickly absorbing each detail into a private flow of associations. History becomes memory becomes a temporal space that is utterly private. Written down and then read—even by the author myself—involves exhuming the historical context, then combining it with personal memories. Many of those memories combine history (the AOL bubble of the 90s) with memory (the taxi ride from Dulles Airport to my mother’s house in McLean, Virginia).

There are a couple of valences to this movement from public to private. The first is spooky, mirroring the ways in which we all now absorb the public into ourselves via cable television. It’s as if we took a horror movie into ourselves and then replayed it constantly, because we have Netflix and didn't need to go to a theater with other people (however few). This movement is away from community, from sharing. Someone I knew in high school wrote a moving essay about the way the television held everyone together after Robert F. Kennedy died. She alternated between his death, the train that carried him across the country and the television that her family was watching. That assassination played its part in the chaos of the time, but the reporting was still narrative; it was still something we watched together. The poem of that event might have been narrative. After all, Stein was dead and the Language poets weren’t yet writing.

We live in the terrible interiority of the outside. And now, hunkering down in our houses, we shut out everything except what’s televised or streaming on the internet (except for blessed dog walks at least twice a day). We have privatized public feeling. This is the reverse of the Commons, a re-territorializing of the self into states of quo that are always inevitably separate from one another. No wonder I’m thinking more about my parents these days. My father’s simple kindnesses, which seemed naive to me as a younger person, now feel visionary—a means to get out of this trap, perhaps.

Bryant and I watched the first installment of the Icelandic television show Trapped last night. It was recommended to me by fellow Ashberyan, John Emil Vincent, a dear friend I’ve never met (ah, the virtual sphere can be kind, as well). As the segment ended, one child says to another that they’re all trapped, they and the murderer who has been set loose from the Danish ferry, if indeed he is the murderer. The pandemic is a trap that sprung on us. The solitude it imposes is partly mitigated by the digital world, but insufficiently so. We are forced to hide from one another, and hence to become better acquainted with ourselves.

At the end of the “square” dated on Halloween, 2017, the image of the mass shooter in Las Vegas returns: “He’s driven off, face hidden by a sun visor, though one angle shows him smiling.” He sits inside his Range Rover, having left his condo for the hotel room where his armaments are laid out to be used on concert-goers below. His movement is ever more toward interiority, but also outward toward mass murder. This is not to equate those two things, but to show how this radical new interiority of the outside can be a form of violence, can inspire violence. It’s trauma, though we also try hard to internalize the video of a fawn with her head resting on the stomach of a German shepherd that rescued her. Split the screen, rapidly shifting your eyes from suffering to cuteness. Cuteness may be one way to save ourselves, since it comes of arbitrary and unexpected kindnesses. Hello Kitty may be the cult we're seeking. (I think I'm joking here.)

My newest poetic meditation (27) ends this way, in relation to Magda Szabo’s amazing novel, The Door: “The writer had no time to save the savior. The protagonist died on her way from the bed to the door. Remember, the poet advises, that suffering is your door. No angle will save you.” I had just thought through the Vegas massacre poem, which ends with the one angle that shows the shooter smiling before his act. This meditation written later the same day also ends with an “angle,” which might be either the size of the crack when the door opens, or an angel. Or it could be both, the angel that arrives when you begin to open the door. Terrance Hayes writes about the way suffering is a door. My students thought hard on that. It’s an opening, at least until it closes us shut. Back into the dark room of an earlier decade, before the genocide, when things seemed to make sense. Forward into the dust that room has become.

At this point in the week (it’s now Thursday) that everything is closing down against pandemic, the door that opens on our suffering is now closing against it. Or so we hope. It may only mean that our suffering becomes more private, as out of a global crisis we each internalize a pain too enormous to bear. But let’s remember that doors have the capacity to open, even when they’re nailed shut. That a door, too, can turn to dust.

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Posted by susan at 1:30 PM
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