Reading Prose
In our series Reading Prose, we’ve asked poets to write about how the experience of reading prose, fiction, non-fiction, criticism, theory, has sparked the writing of poetry or affected how they read poetry.
“Explore What Sparks Poetry” is made possible with funding from The Virginia Commission for the Arts.
On October 13, at the celebration of Jim’s life and work, at the Stonington Free Library, Joanna Scott told the packed reading room that shortly after Jim started treatment for cancer he wrote to her that he hated the idea of bucket lists but he nevertheless had some everyday things he wanted to do: “Eat a little flat pizza. Get in the car. Take a shower without worrying. Enjoy the water … Have one martini … Feel on the other side of treatment. Read a book. Discover something in someone’s sentences that I haven’t before. Think out loud about what it is that I so love about sentences, about syntax, the simple beauty of grammar … Have dinner at the little bistro in Soho, just you and me …” I enthusiastically recommend James Longenbach’s posthumous book, Seafarer (published recently by W. W. Norton). In our precarious world, it is full of astonishing poems. I trust a few will last forever.
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And yet, to enter the world—to be born into the world—is already to be changed by it.
Christ was laid out in a glass coffin, like Snow White. I visited and re-visited him. He looked so much like my father on his deathbed.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody.
I also knew that self-reflexivity is a mode thrust upon certain artists more than others, primarily those who are forced to constantly position themselves in response to the real and imagined ways that their identities are questioned and codified. Every Native writer I talk to fears being perceived as, or labeled, fraudulent. We all question whether, or how, we are enough. These fears lead, at best, to a care around identity and claim-laying, and, at worst, to a paralysis that constitutes self-colonization. Self-consciousness may be a first step to developing a more expansive, collective consciousness, but to sit in it too long only reifies the structures of governance.
In my “Eternity,” poetry attempts to overcome itself as language to arrive at language, using metaphor (as the prerequisite of that visual allegorical rendering of the body) not as trope, but as epistemology and ethics, a fleshy ethics and epistemology never abstracted from the corporeal.
Everything in this poem is true, or happened, or some things are, or would it be better to say they are real, remembered, factual, “the case”? I am troubled by the relationship between poetry and our world. Poems come to us from their world. They address us from behind a shimmering screen like aliens or hierophants. This is so, I think, even for poems that address lived experience (individual or communal) in a frank manner. If it weren’t, we could stick with personal essays.
Together, bound by our bodies and being with each other as bodies, there might be something better than “the fibrous needs of the heavens.” Perhaps, out here, in beetle mouth, amoeba, in the sugar water suckle of a hummingbird. A bruised blue so beautiful, and dusted.
The bowl she fills in the wake of his failure is an artifact fused with hurt and irony. The rose petals—perennial symbols of love and romance—obscure a collection of dead pollinators: no honey is about to be made by this meeting of flower and bee, at this hive of an art colony. As with most arresting images, the arrival of the bowl re-angles how I consider parts of the poem already read: in this case, setting, which is now made ironic: art colonies intend cross-pollination, fertilization, and bloom, not sting and death. The bowl of rose-covered dead bees is a clear, precise expression of rebuke delivered straight to the composer’s front door: intimate and elegant, a painter’s speech-without-saying.
