It is 20 years ago, several lifetimes for this poet at least, and I think
David Howard has answered the question in a later post: "In poetry the
silence, scored by lineation and stanzaic breaks, is active; it is where
meaning is released. It's not enough to break up text with a ragged right
margin; this can produce the simulacrum of a poem while failing to enact
the imaginal that animates silence. When lineation only establishes
rhythm, which pivots upon silence as much as it does upon a stressed
syllable, the text lacks the integrity of either fine prose or realized
poetry. Lineation is the syntax of active silence."
He wasn't, of course, directing himself to my poem. And there's still the
question of what you mean by verse, what by prose. The more aphoristic
lines, and those presenting an ideational narrative apparently seem to you
less "poetic" than the imagistic revery that follows. To me they are
simply different voicings. Tho clearly--more clearly than when I read these
things last, the aphoristic acts as a transition. But calling it so would
seem to value the place arrived at more than the place passed through, and
I have difficulty with that as a concept--more now than then.
One of the joys of prose poetry is precisely its lack of definition--so
that the term permits Russell Edson but also Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and
Lezama, not to speak of T. Joyce.
Here's a piece by the Cuban poet Soleida Rios which she considers prose and
I consider prose poetry. It's the title section of a larger book of the
same name, all of it in the same manner, and with no narrative holding it
together--discrete pieces.
DIRTY TEXTS
I
Must I enter a castle because I see before me its stone walls and
stairs and smell the scent (presentiment) of age, its heavy suffocating
dankness? Even if in fact there are no bridge, moat, tower, or pavillions?
I take the step which situates me irrevocably within the Place,
the Site. Only later will I remember that I don’t know how to move. It’s
happened once before. Once before. I stagger, or better, I walk in circles.
I trace long, fat S’s. Or I question.
I ask myself whether the women I see at the far end of the great
hall, etched into the stone wall like postcards or pretty miniatures, are
real. Long, voluminous medieval gowns. Lush reds and blues. Women out of a
romance of courtly love. They detach themselves from the wall to attend to
some business or other that I don’t understand. The one we call The Chicken
emerges from the crowd–Walter L’s wife (W.L., department head, that
Walter). Overdressed as usual, she approaches, dragging the train of her
blue gown behind her, her long hair in yellow braids.
The Chicken: Soleda? You’re here?
I answer: That’s right.
The Chicken: Where’s Mario?
I answer: There.
The Chicken: Ah!
Oddly, even for me, without a moment’s hesitation and apropos of
nothing, I respond, “no, we don’t know how to live.” (A we without limits.
The no absolute, lapidary. Present indicative? Removing that lapidary no
might dissipate the terrible chill of the phrase, but that would implicate
it instead in The Lie or The Joke.) I offer my own example; I hear myself
say, “if, like Mario, they were to release me suddenly in whatever Country,
could I survive? Would I know how to live?”
The Chicken: Ah!
“The important thing was–is–that leading such regimented lives we
haven’t learned how to live. We haven’t learned it. I go on--I can’t stop
myself: “We don’t know how to solve the problems of our own lives. Without
Divine Intervention. Without A Decision From Above.”
The Chicken (she wipes her nose with a handkerchief embroidered in gold and
silver): That’s right.
“But Mario does,” I tell her. “He’s been able to make his own way.
He’s doing well in Buenos Aires.” And I tell her what I know about Mario’s
life in Buenos Aires. Everything I remember. The Chicken nods, “That’s right.”
II (INTERLUDE)
Six or seven stairs. The same dark stone as the wall. I descend. I look
around. A small chamber. A scene is being performed for the camera. Or for
some other reason. Two men. A woman. A sofa. A petite table, low to the
ground. The woman, a girl, is one of those dressed in medieval
clothing. She stands, facing the men from a safe distance, the toe of her
slipper balanced on the table’s edge. I can see the men's backs. I descend
the stairs.
The man sitting on the right side of the sofa seems familiar. As I
approach the bottom of the stairs I rest my weight on his back, supporting
myself with my hand. Or so it seems. And when I realize that I don't know
him at all, I press down still harder. Impertinent gesture. I force this
unknown man—the one on the right, on the sofa--to bend beneath my
weight. With total impunity. Or perhaps he doesn’t react because I'm
weightless. I finish my descent and take a few steps forward.
The medieval girl begins to writhe. It's as though she were about
to float. She stirs (they drape her in diaphanous veils) displays her
body (swathed to the ankles in skin-tight bright green) and offers
herself. The man on the right, the one I’d used for support, does his
part, assists her. He or the table support her. With a lurch, she rises,
her body describing an acute angle to the floor. An arm moves, a hand
moves. She is quivering, vibrating, she tenses her twisted arm and hand,
and the man bends over, bites her pelvis, licks at her, swallows, bites
again, swallows, lingers at the seam, the deep pleat of her bright green
garment (now darkened), swallows, bends still further, and thrusts his jaws
into her, holding her aloft. Her body, which moments before had been
shaking violently, relaxes, subsides into a regular beat. Tick tock tick
tock. Like a clock, a heart, a liver. Held aloft by the man's mouth.
The climax. What they were seeking. I feel an extraordinary
excitement. It lifts me off the ground. I tell this to Teresa Lavandero as
we search the stone hallways looking for an exit from the Site, the
Place. I say to her, "There are men with whom I’ve never experienced that
much excitement." Enormous. Astonishing.
III
Solid walls. Stone. Openings that surely lead nowhere. Sara Esquivel
busies herself in the kitchen. She drags the train of her blue gown behind
her. The delicate ribbons in her silver-blue coif flutter
nervously. While she works we are engaged in a long conversation. She has
been talking about a mirror, an inscription on a mirror. All of a
sudden I exclaim, “ what a great dream I had." (But they feel like Sara’s
words.) And I talk about Mario. I tell her everything I remember about
his life in Buenos Aires.
"He was able to…He knew how to…"
"That's right," she agrees.
Then I repeat in minute detail my conversation with The Chicken.
But we’re still embroiled in The Same Conversation. I underline,
emphasize, exaggerate the meaning of my words. I say "…and this fear of
foreigners, as though we weren't lost."
I actually say it: lost. But it’s my second choice, the word that
saves me. The first—the one I would have preferred—sticks in my throat. I
can no longer remember it. That word, with all its heft, its specificity,
its volume—I can’t remember it—becomes a bolus of filthy rags, a wad of
stuff stuck between my teeth. It won't come out. I can't pronounce
it. I repeat "…as though we weren't lost." The word lost bursts forth,
expelled, falls awkwardly into The Conversation. Sara doesn't notice,
isn’t even aware of my problem, the mess I've fallen into because of the
denial (my denial?) of the word for which I have substituted lost. Is that
why she walks to the widest opening in the stone wall, glances out, turns
to me again and says:
“I knew it! I knew it all along! I didn't want to tell you…(and
then, one after another: seriousness, a mysterious air, and a series of
expressions synthesized from or subsumed beneath her habitual grimace and
the look of a frightened animal. It stops then, or rather, diminishes…)
…It was his request...”
It was his request! His request! This Trifle is suddenly less
amusing . It creates The Kingdom of Confusion. His! Whose? What's he
asking? When?
With these questions I return abruptly to Reality. Therefore:
Sara Esquivel recedes into the distance. She is etched into the
stone wall. A postcard, a pretty miniature. Big hair. Blue. Identified
by the curl of the little finger of her right hand.
The medieval girl approaches the audience (the Void), bows.
The man I had leaned upon, the man on the right, The Detonator of
Excitement (painter, photographer, cinéaste) steps forward, nods.
The other man on the sofa waves without rising.
Gracefully The Chicken holds the train of her blue gown, smiles
(odd teeth, stunted, yellow), and wags her head.
Mario is Away, he won’t be appearing.
Teresa Lavandero peers into the Void, mumbles “ 'dirty texts,'
where will it end?"
I come forward I sneeze I have said it presentiment I sneeze that
suffocating smell I sneeze.
>Mark, can I ask you a question about the first of these pieces, the only one
>I've come near taking in, as yet? Thinking on from my earlier question (why
>bother breaking lines to produce verse rather than working, unbroken, in
>prose?), and acknowledging my frequently tin ear for American verse music, I
>was struck by the way the first several lines after your switch into verse
>struck me as 'prosy', whereas the later passages moved, more gradually, into
>a mode which I had no difficulty recognizing as verse:
>
> > The horizontal glory of space.
> >
> > The land,
> > colors, plants, the mystery
> > of its silent animals (the eyes
> > of a poised deer in the forest, rich beige
> > of its living flank) the flash
> > of bodies in water, naked,
> > as fluid as rivers.
>
>. . . and so on . . .
>
>My question: do you recognize the distinction I'm making - the gradual
>migration of the verse from prose values - and, a supplementary, did you
>have a particular reason for softening the transition?
>
>Who needs the Spanish Inquisition, eh?!
>
>Cheers,
>
>Trevor
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