Towards (A) Lyric Science
I studied for my graduate degree in poetry during another particularly acute economic downturn, and at the time, a classmate and I liked to joke that we should start a program that awarded a certificate in poetry and small engine repair, so that graduates would have guaranteed work waiting for them when they finished. Sometime later I find myself not in small engine repair, but nevertheless still influenced by the idea of mixing the technical and the creative. I teach poetry to undergraduate scientists at MIT and my pedagogical approach to the poetry workshop is to focus on the word workshop in the classical sense and create a classroom environment reminiscent of my high school shop class.
Each week I bring a selection of poems to class which manifest some particular structural element we are learning. We read these poems aloud and observe their movements, and as we dissect them, we analyze their poetic systems, their energy sources, their gestures. We then reconstruct and rebuild approximations of their functions so as to better learn how to create our own poems from our own language and experiences. I like to teach poetry like a form of technology because it is a form of technology—a word carapace that if built perfectly contains a transmissible thought or emotion or memory that can travel undiluted and undecayed through centuries and even millennia. Even after all the time, its capabilities remain unsurpassed.
My favorite point in the semester is when we discuss appropriation of other modes of language and the application of translation techniques in our own poetry. In this lesson I always share Goethe’s “Theory of Colours” as an example of writing that blurs and even perhaps erases the line between what they are learning in my classroom and what they are learning outside of it. I love this piece because it is an antiquity that manages to feel full of promise, a remnant of the past that seems almost futuristic in its risks. When we read it out loud together, I like to watch the students’ reactions. They smile and even laugh at Goethe’s easy marriage of the subjective and objective. They are both amused and bemused by it. It is both familiar and utterly foreign to them.
I have a personal predilection for thought from this time, before the schism, when the analytic and the lyric were two symmetrical arms on every human body, instead of two divorced modes of being that are no longer on speaking terms. When I wrote the accompanying piece, “Temporal Saturation,” I knew I wanted to write about a particular temporal phenomenon that we’ve all experienced: how our perception of duration can waver during different episodes of our lives. I have been stuck on the idea of writing about time for all of my time and I’ve always enjoyed the thought of writing as a force that could effect the inversion of that arrow, the timeline, with its incessant forward hurl. For this piece though, I wanted to attempt to use my subjective experience as a basis for objective conclusions. I dreamt about writing poems that were lightly disguised as a proofs. “Temporal Saturation” is the first poem in Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, and it is the template that I used for writing the rest of the book. The first part of the poem is analytic and the second lyric but neither section can exist without each other, they are one.
The book that unspools behind “Temporal Saturation” is a series of inter-genre pieces, which I call poem-essays. Each is an interrogation of knots of words, mysteries, symbols that repeat throughout my life. Some of them are also explorations of other observed temporal phenomena but they all follow threads of faith and translation and linguistics. I aimed to fill my sails with the conviction of inevitable understanding and power the work with the humming engine of the scientific method. I wanted to write my way to demonstrable talismanic findings and have the poems be a record of this approach. I am a person between, I always have been and always will be, and I belong nowhere but to borders. “Temporal Saturation” was an attempt to build a poetic form that reflected that reality, between poetry and prose, in English but articulating an existence between languages and cultures, and a first foray into a place that lies between the poles of the lyric (the melodic, subjective, sentimental) and the scientific (systematic, objective, and exacting). In other words, in this piece I am writing towards the beckoning betweenness of a lyric science.
