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On Complexity—Henri ColeComplexity is not smoke. It is a forest. In a forest I feel self-forgetful. I feel mortal with an animal body. I feel embraced by uncertainty, I feel the seepage and pain of human things—marriage, loss, childhood, fathers, mothers, loneliness—buried there. In smoke I feel oppressed. I feel my mouth against a wall of vapor that is dense, oblique and unbreathable. A poem can be metrically complex or syntactically complex. It can be thematically complex, psychologically complex or verbally complex. But if it is none of these thing, I am left thinking. "Is that all?" I prefer obsessiveness in poetry—the obsessiveness of a servant pleasing his master, which is language. Language is the human medium. If our desire is merely to use it to communicate—as in a classroom or newspaper or cookbook—complexity is not a virtue. It is affected and troublesome and distracting. But we are Imaginers. No poem is just its autobiographical content. No poem is just its embroidery of language. As a reader, I favor poems that have multiple textures, moving freely from plain-speech, to silken discursive meanderings, to turgid description, to little abrupt narrations, etc. But all poetic language must be soaked in the oil of human feeling, even when resisting our intelligence: "speech alone/ Doth vanish like a flaring thing,/ And in the ear, not conscience ring," George Herbert cautions in his poem "The Windows." Lately, it has become fashionable to make poems in which the self is invisible. This writing pulses with perception and with intimations of urgent, humanistic desire but is stripped of any coherent moral, ethical, civic or even autobiographical consequence. This writing is striking for its mysterious self-confidence. Yet, in the willful obscuring of the self there is a deep narcissism that says, "I am God. I hide my face." This is pretentiousness wearing the mask of power and complexity. The mask reveals nothing but what it hides. No human core emerges. Language heats up but does not convey knowledge or formulate truths. Such writing is sometimes praised for its stylistic ambition, though style can be monolithic, blocking out the forces that result in poetry, the forces of irrepressible emotion: joy, grief, desperation, triumph. As we begin a new century, when even the Heavens (the house of our souls) are at risk of being blown away in a nuclear war or accident, I favor a poetry where the soul (both the poet's spirit and representation of personality) is not occluded by language, not perishable, and not anesthetized by ambition. Complexity should be defended when it invigorates poetic language but guarded against when its corrosive agents prevent us from feeling the flesh that makes us human. All of life is a longing for unity, a unity that is permanent. A poem temporarily creates the illusion of unity, filling up the reader with the poet's words, with the passion and purity of a soul in dialog with itself, and with the ornamental graphic that ink makes on a page. Nothing should obscure this act. There is offense, even injury, in that which does. Thoughts on Complexity—Susan MitchellThe poets that interest me most, that excite me to return to them again and again, all share a single characteristic: they are remarkably attentive. They see, hear, smell, taste and feel more of the world than other poets, and they contrive to pack that moreness into their poems. Like the narrator of Beckett's Ill Seen, Ill Said, they could all say, "Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left." As a result, their poems attend to more of the world, including disorder as well as order, contradiction as well as congruence, insanity as well as sanity, the hidden as well as the inaccessible. The attentive poem is Marianne Moore's "magic mousetrap closing on all points of the compass." Such a poem is necessarily going to be complex. When I think of complexity in works of literature, what comes to my mind immediately are some of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, men and women who keep changing as we learn more about them, people who ultimately elude us. Chaucer, incidentally, is the first English poet on record to have used the word attention in writing. What Chaucer paid attention to were the contradictions—and the shadowy places, the opacities—in human beings. His most complex characters fascinate because there is ultimately something unknowable about them. Chaucer created characters the way some modern painters have created landscapes. There is a painting by Gustave Courbet called "The Source of the Loue" which portrays the Loue River emerging from a dark cave. What we see clearly depicted is the darkness, the mysteriousness of the source. To shine a light on that source, to illuminate it clearly would destroy something essential to its nature—its obscurity, its innerness. After Chaucer's characters, I think of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with its four braided plots, its many interwoven verse forms, its play-within-the-play. To be complex is to have many parts, and since the word complex goes back to Indo-European roots that mean to twist, to braid, to weave, Shakespeare's play acts out the very meaning of complex. Even Shakespeare's thinking about comedy was complex since this play includes another play that is tragic, though presented as farce—the love story of Pyramus and Thisbe. It is as if Shakespeare, when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, was thinking about how much that is essentially non-comic he could pack into a comedy; and how much that is farcical, sheer buffoonery, he could fuse with high romance. But it is not only large literary works that are complex. Robert Frost's "Desert Places," which is only a little longer than a sonnet, packs in four different verb tenses—the past, the present, the future and a tense that wobbles between. The poem begins with snow falling and night falling:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.1 Without a verb to anchor the participle falling, snowstorm and nightfall seem to be happening in the present, key images in a scene the narrator describes even as he witnesses it. But this turns out not to be the case. The snow and night were falling in a field the narrator looked into some time in the past. The second line situates the scene in the past, but the third line and the fourth again make the time ambiguous by using participles, covered and showing, without a verb that would fix the scene in either the past or the present. Logically speaking, the scene is past. Emotionally speaking, the scene is present, emblematic of the narrator's persistent mood of loneliness. Like the snow that covers up spatial markers, his mood obliterates distinctions between past and present loneliness. What the speaker feels is one huge stretch of desolation. In fact, his loneliness extends into the future: "And lonely as it is that loneliness/ Will be more lonely ere it will be less." Just as time in this poem turns out to be enormous, so does space as the narrator suddenly turns his attention from the emptiness of snow-covered fields to the empty spaces "between stars—on stars where no human race is." The poem's astonishing ability to contain what is obviously so much bigger, the universe, becomes a metaphor for inner space, which has the equally astonishing ability to swallow up outer space by the poem's end. But there is even more to be said about the narrator and his emotional state. Describing the woods around the snow-covered field, the narrator remarks, "All animals are smothered in their lairs." A very different kind of speaker might have held out some relief from the desolation by imagining animals that were warm and cozy in their lairs. But interior space in this poem is either terrifyingly huge and empty or suffocating and claustrophobic. Why that is we are not told. The poem reveals and conceals. Or perhaps I should say that what it reveals allows us to see that there is still more that is concealed. Is Frost's poem difficult? Or accessible? Readers seem to enjoy it even before its complexities are recognized and appreciated. At least, this has been my experience when I have taught the poem. But since the poem's complexities are so much a part of its meaning, what is it that the reader enjoys? And what does the reader understand of the poem if the reader has in fact missed so much of what is going on in it? In their book, Clear and Simple as the Truth, Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner observe: "Classic style is modeled not merely on speech but on the core concept of conversation—conversation between equals. There is an implicit symmetry in the relationship between the writer and the reader. The model assumes that the reader could take the next turn in the conversation." It is precisely this symmetry in the relationship, a symmetry that allows the reader to feel equal to the writer, that accounts, I believe, for the love so many Americans have for Frost's poetry and for what might be called a poetry of plain speech. Frankly, I don't think that Frost is direct and clear at all. Frost is crafty, convoluted, intricate, complex. But listen to his sentence sounds—they are so colloquial, so plain, so American that the reader assumes she/he could take the next turn in this conversation. "They cannot scare me." "I have it in me." You could have said that. I could have said that. And so, Frost disarms us. But that does not mean he is accessible. Not every poem, though, works on the conversational model that Frost's poem uses. In poems by Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Ann Lauterbach, Leslie Scalapino, Clark Coolidge, and more recently, Jorie Graham, the conversational model operates only sporadically, if at all. In these poems something has also happened to traditional ideas of syntax, of the narrator, of coherence. Something has happened to the idea that all parts of the poem can be accounted for by a single whole, that there is only one center. But especially, something has happened to the narrator, which is why the conversational model of a Frost poem can no longer be applied. There are times when the narrator fragments. And sometimes, the narrator merges with inarticulate matter, becomes artifact so that what speaks to the reader is the poem itself. Perhaps we are seeing so many different models for poems now, such rich diversity, because on a formal level poems are acting out the ethnic and racial diversity that characterizes America of the 21st century. Or perhaps we are seeing so many different models because we are shifting from an oral tradition to one that is textual. Or perhaps the new poems reject a phallocentric model, embracing instead one that is based on female biology which is multiple and complex. The Middle English word that Chaucer used for female genitalia was the same word he used for curiously contrived, elaborate, artful, difficult—the word queynte. A poem based on female biology is no longer fixed or congealed: it shifts between a multitude of centers, which may themselves be shifting. Right now in America we are witnessing a paradigm shift in poetry, and while I think this is happening for all the reasons I have just mentioned, there is still another, maybe the most important reason: the poet's assertion of innerness, of mind, of psyche at a time when innerness is threatened by nearly all aspects of contemporary American lifestyle. Innerness refuses to be a sound byte on television. Innerness refuses to speak up at a huge poetry festival. Innerness demands that the reader slow down, take the time, pay attention. Innerness demands that the reader's attentiveness be equal to the attentiveness of the poet and the attentiveness of the poem. 1"Desert Places" from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1936 by Robert Frost, © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Taste Test—Bob PerelmanSince this is to be brief, I'm tempted to use complexity as shorthand for quality. In quite a few ways, it would be true enough: endless examples spring to mind of poems I know and always like reading. And with new poems, it's often complexity that catches my serious reading eye. But "complexity," in that kind of shorthand, also feels precisely wrong: it's the sign of a thousand other commodities. For instance, the food section of a recent New York Times featured a large spread on high-class hot chocolate: only certain (quite expensive) brands of chocolate imparted the necessary complexity. Why is that such a sacrilegious comparison? Complexity that you taste immediately, but that provides a continuing articulation of pleasure and knowledge, making you want to repeat it, tell people just how it's good—isn't that a provisionally acceptable analogy for a useful poetics? Well, OK, but poetry, I'd answer, can be more complex than the most exquisitely crafted hot chocolate. In both cases, body tastes world; but drinking hot chocolate is a private experience. When poems are interesting, body tastes writing, a process where a known language displays some of what's not known, other people and histories, revealing a not-exactly-comfortable public arena where, it turns out, one actually lives. I do admire (and like) good cooking; but taste in poetry is more paradoxical, working in longer interpersonal circuits. Interesting poems (and these are by definition undefinable beforehand) offend against good taste in the most complex ways. The present doesn't taste good to any one palate, but it's the crucial ingredient. It strikes me that one of the best ways of "offending complexly," i.e., of reaching the present for a mixed public, is immediacy. But I don't mean the immediacy of the transparent, socially pre-scripted poem that simply "communicates" from one fixed identity to another. Every manner of poem is complex in manifold ways. But complexity without immediacy is not enough. There are self-contained complexities that stay on the page, awaiting (belle-lettristically) appreciation or (academically) explication or (iconoclastically) revolution. Poems can aim for wider contexts. The situation of poets and readers in America in 2000 is of such complexity that individual poems are hard pressed to register anything like an interesting amount of the present, of new and old history, of globalized flux and reflux, technology, fashion, emerging body stances, traffic patterns, street codes. Immediacy, as I'm grappling with it here, is ultimately as opaque as complexity. Both have to be written and at the same time are results of reading experiences, and these change. My high school poetry initiation posed the complex (T.S. Eliot) against the immediate (Walt Whitman): I went for The Waste Land because it was "hard," in that dumb sense that appeals to some teenagers. I couldn't understand the chopped-up, literary parts, the foreign phrases, I couldn't understand the bar-talk, the typist's seduction. And of course "shantih"—how weird was that? But through those closed doors, a vivid seriousness called to me. And on the outside there was sex (good), dog claws and corpses (good), and vague gothic religious stuff (good). The Waste Land, with its hints of crucial adult problems, made me want to read and, later, to write poetry: perhaps the world would be like this when it and I got interesting. Whitman seemed the opposite: the already-known world was great, life was great, self-expression was great. Great and easy—it was for everyone. It was vivid presence, not of "adult problems," but of the sensory, social world: "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,/ The carpenter dresses his plank—the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp." I agreed. But what was I agreeing with? These two lines now seem wonderfully complex: the woman with low voice singing from the high loft; below, on the street, the sound of the foreplane leaping upward. One of Louis Zukofsky's often-quoted definitions situates poetry above speech and below music: "lower limit speech,/ upper limit music." Here in Whitman, as part of a much larger catalog, there is a human voice making music in one line and metal and wood producing speech in the next. This is the most straightforward eloquence, immediate in its descriptive rush, but thoroughly surprising from word to word. A metal tongue produces both a thin curl of wood and an animal/spiritual language in which there can be no mistakes. The lisp is the perfect pronunciation. A poem's complexity/immediacy takes place in the social and historical dimensions as much as the purely linguistic. A hundred years ago Paul Laurence Dunbar's dialect poems were read as simple, 'childlike' entertainment; Dunbar himself labeled them "Minor" as opposed to his "Major" poems in standard English. But his "Ante-Bellum Sermon" (1895) is nothing if not complex, preaching resistance under cover of piety. An excerpt:
An' yo' enemies may 'sail you
In de back an' in de front . . . But de Lawd will sen' some Moses Fu' to set his chillun free. . . . But fu' feah some one mistakes me, I will pause right hyeah to say, Dat I'm still a-preachin' ancient, I ain't talkin' 'bout to-day. But of course Dunbar, through the mask of the ante-bellum preacher, is talking about "today"—1845 and 1895 for him; 1845, 1895 and 2000 for us. Such history is part of what I meant by "the present," above. Melvin Tolson's recently reissued Harlem Gallery is wonderfully complex/immediate. Behind the following excerpt, there are very complex sets of narrative framing. In part: we're in the Zulu Club in Harlem, where the poem's narrator has been taken by Curator, to hear Hideho Heights and other unrepressed improvising social historians spout poetry. Here, many words are immediately striking, but the larger structure (and this is a small piece) is far from transparent.
One last small example, to testify that complexity can nicely thread itself through the simplest little ditty, and that the most immediately recognizable childlike rhythm can encode one of the biggest theological cruxes. Heinrich Heine, translated by (quite a bit of historical complexity here) Ezra Pound: I dreamt that I was God Himself  Whom heavenly joy immerses, And all the angels sat aroundAnd praised my verses. Are God's poems complex enough, immediate enough? Apparently not. Even immersed in a heavenly bathtub of joy, He is Anxious, and Needs angelic approval no matter how bureaucratically enforced. It's better, and bitterer, out here in the world for us writers and readers, offering, withholding, accepting, refusing our presents, never at rest with the taste. 1 Melvin B. Tolson, 'Harlem Gallery' and Other Poems (University Press of Virginia, 1999), p. 275. Poets on Complexity—Marge PiercySince for me poems are primarily artifacts created out of sounds and silences, I respect the ability to make the surface of a poem appear simple and clear. The hardest poems to write are those that look as if they had written themselves, effortlessly, like water gliding into a basin—poems that appear transparent. There is a poem of Lucille Clifton's, "Miss Rosie," that I have often used with workshops to demonstrate how much art exists in a poem as apparently simple as that one. We look at the rhythms, the repetitions, the line breaks and line lengths. Nothing in the poem calls attention to the techniques used to create it. Instead it appears, as I said, transparent until you look carefully and critically. I believe you can get away with a fair amount of complexity and still have the poem resonate with the listener or the reader, if the poem remains emotionally coherent, if the arc of the poem is clear. The listener or reader may not grasp the poem in its intricacies, but they will have a direct knowledge of it, an understanding that is emotional and tactile rather than intellectual, although the intellect may also be seduced into involvement. Any piece of writing is a seduction. You want the reader to read your particular work and not the one before it in the zine and not the one after it at least not until the reader has absorbed yours. You use your title to grab attention and you entice the reader in and down the page. If her or his attention wanders, you have lost. After all, if we were only pleasing ourselves, we would not bother with sending poems out and risking rejection or even insult. We would write poems, enjoy them and then erase them. Indeed, there are many people who write poems without letting anyone else ever see them. However, I am assuming that anyone reading this journal does at least intend to send work out into the harsh light of the world. Indeed, once the poem is finished and published, it no longer belongs to you. People will experience it in marvelously inefficient and fabulous ways making it mean to them what you never imagined, using it in ways that you are not sure you find comfortable. So what? It now belongs to anybody who likes it, just as an over-friendly dog will go home with any passerby who speaks kindly or whistles. They will tack it up on the bathroom, put it on the refrigerator, paste it beside their computer. They will use it in wedding ceremonies, in funerals, to get into bed with someone, to break off a relationship, to accompany a gift, to apologize, to confront. They will use your poems in classes, in rallies, in nursing homes and with sick children so long as you have given them words that are memorable in rhythms that work on the brain, something they can say and mean even if they cannot say exactly what it means, since a poem doesn't mean something exactly. Sometimes when students call me up or send me emails that ask, what does this poem mean? I despair. I say it means what it says, what it says in words, in sounds, in rhythms, in silences, in images. That's what it means. To me whether a poem is dense or sparse, syntactically complicated or simple as a child's primer, imagistic or bare, depends on the poem itself and what it needs and demands of the writer in order to become embodied in those sounds and silences, those bytes of communication, those evocative wispy associations that provoke so much of the resonance of a poem, those rhythms and those images that demand our assent in the instant when unlike things are yoked in the mind and we find the sameness in difference. Some poems proceed logically as a proof; some go from step to next step like an algorithm; some leap like deer through their underbrush; some move like dreams with disparate image melting into wild acrobatic surges of the strange and the mundane. Each poem teaches you the right way to create it as you go that is, when you succeed. All workshops can teach anybody is the questions to ask when a poem does not work what the variables are and how to use them. Often in workshops, poems are obscure because the writer was afraid to find out what she or he wanted to work with, not because there is any great complexity in what the poem wants to be. Then I have the sense of a poem under the quasi-poem, something unwritten underlying the thing that has been put down, distorting it. Some things cannot be gotten at straight on. Poems about what is holy or otherwise ineffable proceed best by indirection. On the other hand, writing liturgy demands a discipline in which the self is almost erased and every image is checked to make sure it will work for group recitation. I will always try to make the poem as clear as it can be, which is sometimes quite murky and quite dense. It depends on the poem and what it needs to be. Invisible Guests—David RivardA day begins, more or less, with your five year old daughter telling you, "I scratched my momma's bed like a mole." It ends, more or less, with you stepping into your Mazda on a night of sub-freezing temperatures and noticing the smell of your freshly shined boots—the tannic sweetness of that dye-tinted alcohol and petroleum distillate waxing the very air of the car. In between are many moments likewise, each with its characteristic mood or flavor. Every one moving through you on its way, changing you. Which is why Czeslaw Milosz says this, towards the end of "Ars Poetica?":
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.1 There is good reason for that question mark at the end of the poem's title. It implies that the moment-by-moment flux of perception and identity will never be embodied by language, by the artifacts of consciousness. No poem will ever capture the changefulness of being, in spite of our wishing one would. Still, Milosz does begin his poem with this deceptively casual bit of rhetorical framing: "I have always aspired to a more spacious form." So the desire—enlivening and tormenting—never disappears. If it did, no one would write poems past adolescence. Is this situation—of being alive and of writing poems—acomplex or a simple matter? Both no doubt, or neither. There is something faintly laughable about the whole question of complexity in poetry, as if one could choose to be complex, or as if an objective measure existed for recording the strangeness of being awake. On both counts, the range of poetic greatness tells us otherwise. Wyatt is not Ginsberg is not Dickinson is not Wright is not Jonson is not Rich—though we say each is complex, we can hardly mean the same thing in each instance. We mean simply that they are alive, and aware of it. Nonetheless, some people need to feel reassured about the existence of complexity. As with many other needs, this one can lead to confusion. Some of what passes as complex in poetry these days seems to confuse complexity with monumentality, as if the ambition to render some sense of being alive were a matter of largeness of scale—massed length and breadth, amplification, lots of exploded views. This version of ambition reminds me of being forced to watch a filmed recording of a crash test, one of those educational consumer reports in which a Saab or Volvo is raced into a cement wall in slow-motion. The main event is the excruciatingly drawn-out deployment of an air bag, and the depositing of a dummy's forehead thereon. The technical achievement is considerable, and one is glad even that so much of a benefit is being lavished upon humankind, but it is often deadly dull. A longer piece than this one would deal with the related social implications of a such a notion of mastery and achievement (i.e., as a marker of class identity and an illusory privilege). So, in lieu of complexity, strangeness. In lieu of willed thought and feeling, the accident that makes an activity in the soul as it strolls or runs through this world. In lieu of the convoluted ironies of identity as a performance, the improvisations of surprised clarity. In lieu of toneless narration meant to be heard as omniscient seriousness, the dramatic intimacy of a single voice speaking. In lieu of achievement, pleasure. In lieu of wisdom, uncertainty. In lieu of earnestness, a sincerity compounded of humor and vulnerability. As here, in this brief piece by Tomaz Salamun:
One must cook well for one's husband and pigs.
I comb my daughter's hair. Where are you going, stars?2 Some folks might think this nothing but a hiccup or pimple. But its wakefulness is considerable. Its virtues are the virtues, on the one hand, of the haiku of Basho or Issa—a quick (you could say portable) defining of a constellated moment, a flash, built playfully out of juxtaposed or collaged pieces of spare expression. Its surface seems simple, and is. Its resonance is anything but. It has that quality of haiku sometimes referred to as sabi, an undertone of aloneness that is bound up with the transience of all beings, and which fuels the poem's expansive tenderness. On the other hand, the poem also possesses virtues one might just as easily associate with the English and Scottish ballads—a way of narrating experience that depends on elision and compression, on a wit with the subtlety and grace to leave things out. Its drama, like the drama of "Lord Randal," is charged by suggestion. Many pockets of invisible action and feeling exist inside it. It seems much larger than the sum of its pieces. And, as my father used to say, that's about the size of it. 1Czeslaw Milosz, Collected Poems (Ecco Press, 1988). Translation by Milosz and Lillian Vallee. 2Tomaz Salamun, Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997). Translation by Salamun and Eliot Anderson. hyena uses sweet words to inveigle the stork1—C.D. WrightYou asked, and i am writing you with chronic tardiness and informality, in far short of a thousand words, what do i make of complexity, and i submit the more our lives are governed by the great mixmaster of egoistic, material and technostructural forces the more distorted the whole business of living and creating has become for me to be undone by a work of art nowadays i seek a transient clearing in which i am compelled to rely on next to no references; i have to find it on my own and i may or may not choose to share it, so fearful i am of someone trying to stuff my wee opening with pre-frozen servings of praise and censure, and i am still wanting to get my eyes peeled by what they alone are seeing and my hair pulled by what its individual roots are feeling and my mind bent by the weirdness of its wiring, and i am at the exact same location with regard to making anything resembling art, subordinating itself to the nomenclature of poetry, anyone calling oneself called to write poems amid all the earth noise we're putting out there; my relationship to art changes, and i would not have it fixed; for example i recall i didn't like mr. donald judd's work until about ten years ago; then i started finding when i was in a big name-brand museum my entire anticipation was built around getting to those boxes; they just seemed to be enough; i saw them as whole, selfless, and quite useless except to behold; that's all and that's an eyeful; and i could name a few living poets who currently strike that tone with me, but i won't, not right now as i am feeling protective of and protected in their spaciousness, and that is a space i aspire to occupy privately, that whatever space i might come to take up in my own book of books have a singing inside; it is not that complexity is overrated it's that it is overcomplicated; it's not that obscurity is too obscure it's that the subfusc grows moldy if it isn't exposed to a change of air; it's not that the language is exhausted it's that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore it's that the cuts are getting thinner; it's not that art is artificial it's that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable it's that they're invented; it's not that theories are not beautiful it's that they're feeble; though we have opposable heads the legions of poets composing our blue sheets will have to orchestrate the lucid intervals and be prepared to fill them with eye-peeling, hair-pulling, mind-bending language, and don't even get me started on form, but if i were an engineer i am sure i would want to have built the brooklyn bridge even if it half-paralyzed me as it did the builder; the mere mention of which sends me to rockbridge county where there's a photographer who sees the cleavage in the ground; she sees the writing in the trees; she sees the light in the blackwater, the trunk leaking, the columns disappearing; there's another down the road in monroe who can throw her blackdrop up over the door to the death chamber and render the map in the backroads of a face nailbright; there's a poet in the desert who tweezes the glittering particulars of the species from mounds of dead cells and arranges them along the hairline fractures of our souls (if there is such an immanence); in montreal there's a long tall poet who quits her job at the trainlines "to receive the calibration of air in the immense hall of the station"; then there are the stalwart waldrops; there is never enough time to sort it all out so some of us get laggard; just at the rarest opportunity to shift deeper into the miraculous, we hit the wrong answer button; we turn our slender chances into drool; just when we thought we were being conducted to a single point for a specially set-aside purpose; it is not so complicated but it isn't simple either; I like to come and go through different doors more than I like to throw my weight against the same one every time only to discover it was never locked; and I like to change the locks once in a while too; but it isn't just about keeping it interesting for the Author or Dear Reader; it is about how differently things actually are if you come and go by different portals; long live la difference; as for transcendence, well baby, that's the sun's job—cd 1Title from student in Peter Guernis' ESL class. |
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