“I said to myself that my poems must embody not merely “thought,” but necessary thought. And a necessary thought (rather than rumination, ratiocination) expresses or acknowledges what has resisted thought, what has forced or irritated it into being.”
—Frank Bidart
I did not want nor ask to write “the year of solution.”
Poetry often wells when life forces and irritates.
Often I have thought of Bidart’s insistence on the necessary poem as clarifying my draw to poetic architecture. One night, in looking for his specific quote (for the hundredth time), I re-read his 1983 interview with Mark Halliday and was newly drawn to the part where Bidart speaks of a “will unbroken and in stasis” that has “learned to refuse” what the world might easily offer.
My husband and I have named every year of our 19-year marriage. The year of seduction, the year of accretion, the year of burial, the year of the gong-song, the year of solution, and so forth.
Maya, our daughter, was three in the year of solution. She was deathly ill, misdiagnosed, incomprehensible, tiny and dominating our heart chords, sleep cycles, and every room of house with her needs. Our son, Elias, was seven and twisting his hair into circular bald spots. We needed a year of solution and the year of solution was a crying out.
We would have to move. In so many ways, movement was necessary.
Our wills were unbroken AND we were in terrible stasis.
In “the year of solution” poem, there are three subjunctive clauses including conditional statements concluding in a “then” statement of possibility.
if children half grey & the dead fence remains…
if only in low tones & on their hands…
if flames in the shapes of marching bands & carmine birch
then could there be a new ceremony
The subjunctive + conditionals = hypothetical possibility.
How I wanted a new ceremony.
A certificate of solution.
I studied Latin for years and it is, no doubt, influential to my works, my thinking, my way of negotiating the daily by parsing and distilling. “Subjunctive” is a past participle of subjungere which means “to join beneath” or to “subordinate.”
Here, Eliade resonates with his conviction of “as above and so below.”
Checks out.
But What’s above?
The ampersand is provides endless fascination.
The poem, “in the year of solution,” is housed in my book, & there’s you still thrill hour of the world to love.
“Ampersand” is short for “and per se” translating “and by itself.” For over 6 centuries, the logogramic ampersand was housed in the English alphabet indicating that a letter ( such as a or I ) existed as a word by itself ( speak it, “and per se and”) yet is also inextricable from the totality of script.
When reciting the alphabet, a child might recite, “and per se A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, and per se I.”
I is a letter / I is a word.
Contradictory and seamless.
And & and & and.
Conditions. Possibilities. Buried subjunctives.
Subjunctives lead to a looking back just as they lead to a looking forwards. They are Janus, the Grecian two-faced god of past and future. They are January on your calendar. New year / old year.
Wishes & / or goals:
What conditions? What possibilities?
We have never actually lived a year of solution. There was never a certificate of completion nor ending. Rarely even a clear moment of beginning.
We are Janus-faced.
We continue to live years of ampersands.
Personally, the earth has not yet opened its loam up to me.
I know you have yet to be called to the loam.
