The hide and seek muse, p.12
The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 12
(Wired for e-thought, two moving hem-lines branch.)
Queen bee, yokel tool—both scent hem.
Best pass as underbred, my king of rampage.
Download Homer. Look for pen of clever apes—
(Heather-thoughts: Hot art department … No more exams … )
Twitter HELLO earthward, to vanish alone.
Fetish’s vow is now to be: all heterogeneity.
The anagram—which involves rearrangement of the letters in a word, phrase, or sentence to produce another word, phrase, or sentence using the original letters only once—is a centuries-old form of language play. Anagrams are often employed to create pseudonyms (the Romanian poet Paul Celan, for example, created his surname from “Ancel,” a version of his original name, Antshel). In other instances, anagrams are intended to reveal some sub-textual or intuitive truth about the original subject text. For example, Wikipedia offers as examples “George Bush” = “He bugs Gore” and “Tom Marvolo Riddle” = “I Am Lord Voldemort.” “Chronicle of Higher Education” can be anagrammatically translated to “No Chute Cliché for Head Origin.”
A host of free on-line anagram generators now makes it easy to have fun with the form, but if there is a living poet who is capable of coming up with a legion of witty, pithy anagrams without resorting to technological engines, it is the remarkable wordsmith Heather McHugh, who has been practicing what she calls extreme “language sports” for decades, in poems of formal experimentation, exultant wordplay, and inventiveness, as well as in piercingly astute essays on contemporary poetry and poetics. Attuned to etymology, measure, punning, stereoscopy, materiality, the economies of whole and part, and the mathematics of fraction and sum, McHugh’s work impresses with its daring and fearless intimacy with language, our uniquely human gift.
McHugh’s “As Agents Can’t Perfect One Author,” a line-by-line anagram of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 23 (“As an unperfect actor on the stage”), “reliterates” and talks back to Shakespeare’s themes with a feist to match Shakespeare’s own. In sonnet 23, we see Shakespeare, himself a consummate linguistic acrobat, taking up some of the rhetorical plaints and modes we have come to expect in his love sonnets. Like an “unperfect” actor, he posits, whose fear keeps him from adequately playing his part, or a being so overcome with rage that “his own heart” is weakened and unable to perform, the speaker (“for fear of trust” and “o’ercharg’d with burthen of [his] own love’s might”) is guilty of neglecting to adequately pronounce, to speak aloud, his love to his lover (one senses that his lover may have whinged a bit about this). The poem is a plea for the lover to value his “books” (that is, what he, the poet, has written, perhaps in plays, certainly in the sonnets themselves) over his own unspoken words, perhaps his sexual performance, and, importantly, over the spoken words of any rival (“that tongue that more hath more express’d”). Shakespeare’s concluding couplet commands that the lover “learn to read what silent love hath writ: / To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.” My writing, Shakespeare woos, is better than his talking any day.
One subtext of Shakespeare’s sonnet, of course, is that the culpable, even slightly anxious or insecure speaker would like to be noticed and preferred both as speaker and as writer. He wants to be “seen” in and for his words; he wants to be loved for them. McHugh picks right up on this, moving her sonnet into the post-modern realm of complex, fluid agency, the elusive otherness of any notion of a fixed self, and the particular slipperiness of identity afforded by electronic media. Her anagrammatic re(l)iteration embraces and challenges Shakespeare’s speaker’s anxieties by questioning the significance of any one, preferred, perfectible poet or poem, lover or loved one, agent or reader.
The word “agents,” of course, offers a play on agent as actor, as subject, as well as agent as purveyor of literary texts. McHugh’s title and line one are both anagrams of Shakespeare’s first line, and in these two lines alone McHugh manages to address several questions at the heart of the literary enterprise, especially in our time and with regard to publication: Is there such a thing as a perfect author? Or just one perfect author? Or any author at all? In the especially shifting realm of cyberspace and on-line “publication” (perhaps more like Renaissance manuscript circulation and scribal publication than the intervening decades of print and book culture), can any one author or maker or purveyor of texts be determined? Importantly, how is this all related to the matter of love and to the pitching of one’s woo?
One senses that at least one intended reader for McHugh’s sonnet is Shakespeare, and in a way her poem is offered as a consolation. Never mind, she intimates, that oratory and “high truth, gloom-free writ,” however clever, might miss the mark or go unheard. One might as soon pursue toys as harbor that illusion. And why compare one’s own “competence” to that of other lovers? “Fie!,” she exclaims, moving into her manifesto: “I mind no neglected systems, nor wave one hat. / (Wired for e-thought, two moving hem-lines branch.)” I love McHugh’s spin on Whitman’s “I contain multitudes”—she is both “Queen bee” and “yokel tool,” full of paradoxes and many selves (especially rich is her tangent into a suddenly downloaded, fourth-wall-breaking and meta “heap of / Heather-thoughts: / (“Hot art department … No more exams … ).” The self is not promiscuous, but manifold and paradoxical (“Twitter HELLO earthward, to vanish alone”). Just as Shakespeare’s lover-poet wants, synaesthetically, to be heard with eyes, to be both lover and rival, text and reader, McHugh eschews the idea of any fixed economy of self, of agent or author, “hetero-” or Heather: “Fess now all vows to be,” she urges. “Hit hetero- / geneity.”
In “What Dickinson Makes a Dash For,” just one of the essays that make essential reading in McHugh’s Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, what McHugh says of Dickinson also applies to Shakespeare’s early modern speaker and to McHugh’s own post-modern one: “Dickinson’s poems don’t argue the coincidence of opposites; they embody that coincidence, in acts of poised equivocation. Here equivocation is the greater truth …. It makes no sense to seek the point of such a poem; one’s work as a reader is to hold the more-than-one (and often, more importantly, the more-than-two) in mind—to be of many minds.” I admire how these poems of “many minds” speak to one another across the centuries. When Shakespeare implores his lover to “let my books be then the eloquence / and dumb presagers of my speaking breast, / Who plead for love, and look for recompense”—when he wants to be self and other—one feels the truth of McHugh when she writes, in the Dickinson essay, “these interpretive branchings (channeling for consistency), begin to resemble the alternative pathways of computer programs. What is amazing about them is both their zeroing in and their zeroing out; the readings made available tend to cancel each other, but the sum is an astonishing set of potentials.” What does it mean to play in the fields of language if not to keep vital this astonishment, this susceptibility to manifold potency and promise?
PAUL LEGAULT
from The Emily Dickinson Reader
1104. It gradually became night through a process marked by crickets, hats being taken off, and the Sun descending past the visible horizon.
1105. Flirtatious Emily Dickinson is mad at austere, heartbroken Emily Dickinson.
1106. Nature is a hotel without indoor plumbing or room service.
1112. When people realize God doesn’t exist, God will die.
1113. That guy has a really big face.
1114. Sometimes I stop loving people.
1115. I like Heaven. I also like it when people tip their hat to me in the street. I like that very much indeed.
1116. I prefer sunsets to the Sun.
1117. Death is over there again, petting his dead sheep. He’s kind of weird but all in all a nice guy.
1123. I prefer liquor when I’m drinking it.
1124. There are two scientific extremities. The infinitely large and the infinitely small. People usually forget about the infinitely small. Don’t do that.
1125. Paradise is being able to opt out of “Paradise.”
1127. I am glad that days exist.
1132. I wish I were a vampire.
1136. I’d prefer to keep my soul.
1141. Sometimes I eat roses. Because I’m fabulous.
1145. When I’m dead, you’ll be dead to me.
1165. I hope the last thing I say before I die isn’t stupid.
1171. I like to watch people sleeping (a little too much).
1178. When it comes down to it, I prefer small, insignificant things, like humans, to God and Jesus and all those guys. They’re kind of boring.
When my eldest daughter was college-hunting, I took advantage of an autumn trip with her to Amherst, Massachusetts, to fulfill what had been for me a long-held dream of visiting the Emily Dickinson Homestead. Later that afternoon—still high myself from the power of taking in Dickinson’s tiny writing table and looking out the bedroom windows from which Dickinson often wrote the world—my daughter and I drove with friends out to Hampshire College and met a pleasant young student tour guide who noticed the Emily Dickinson Homestead sticker that had served as my entrance ticket to the Homestead still pressed to my jacket lapel. “Booyah!” she exclaimed in sisterly solidarity. “I take classes in Emily Dickinson Hall. I own Emily Dickinson!”
As Millicent Todd Bingham, daughter of one of Dickinson’s first editors, once remarked, “They all think they own her.” And it’s true that for all of her oblique, damasked “veil”—both in her poems and in her life—Emily Dickinson often inspires a remarkably intense intimacy with her readers that can lead to a thrall of recognition and insight but also to possessiveness, a cult of sentimentality, mythic idealization, academic and poetic turf warring, and a wide range of projection and appropriation. To paraphrase Dickinson, portions of her have been assigned to (or taken up by) by feminists, Marxists, foodies, Queer theorists, agoraphobics, psychologists, the tourist trade, culture vultures, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, gardeners, and a host of others. Her work (letters, poems, letter-poems, aphorisms, fascicles, fragments) and biography are at the heart of debates about textuality, scribal practices, intention, Bowdlerization, and the character of the lyric poem itself. Recent critical readers have questioned, in fact, whether or not what Dickinson was writing in her wild scrawl—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Monthly editor and friend and correspondent of Dickinson, compared her handwriting to the “fossil bird-tracks” preserved in the Amherst College library—with its almost hypertextual use of variant readings, can even be considered lyric poetry, suggesting that the “poems” we now attribute to Dickinson are really redactions and constructions of various editorial decisions and the move from script to print culture.
At present, Dickinson seems to be enjoying a “moment,” one of several the poet has experienced since her death as various versions of her poems have became available over time to a wide range of readers, beginning with the highly edited and regularized Todd and Higginson edition, Poems by Emily Dickinson, in 1890, four years after the poet’s death. Recent interest in Dickinson must owe in significant measure to the excellent and innovative work that continues in the wake of the scrupulous reparative scholarship and re-visioning of Dickinson’s manuscripts by R. W. Franklin in editions made accessible in the 1990s. The past two years alone have seen the publication of important new books about Dickinson by Helen Vendler, Aífe Murray, Alexandra Socarides, and Lyndall Gordon, texts which in turn build upon the excellent scholarship of the past decade by the likes of Sharon Cameron, Susan Howe, Jerome McGann, Martha Nell Smith, Virginia Jackson, Brenda Wineapple, and many others. A popular recreation of Dickinson’s flower garden, including an exhibit of her extraordinary schoolgirl herbarium, by the New York Botanical Garden in the spring and summer of 2010 also brought Dickinson’s work and “[lunacy] for bulbs” to a wider audience. Perhaps the “Twitterable” compression and intensity of Dickinson’s lyrics also account in part for this renaissance.
Poets have quite naturally been influenced by Dickinson’s “long shadow” (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Agha Shahid Ali, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Mary Jo Bang, Heather McHugh, Marianne Boruch, Lucie Brock-Broido, Charles Wright, Rae Armantrout, Mary Ann Samyn, Karen Volkman, Brenda Hillman, and Lynn Emanuel, to name but a few) as have a wide range of other artists, including Martha Graham, Judy Chicago, and Leslie Dill. One young American poet, Paul Legault, already the author of three innovative books of poems, has recently published The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, 2013). Legault’s project involves what he calls “English-to-English translations” of Dickinson’s work. For the past several years, he has been involved in the endeavor—part homage, part parody, part experiment—with the intention of “translating” all 1,789 poems and fragments offered in Franklin’s reading edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Legault’s translations of poems 1 – 499 were gathered in a chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader: Translations, Vol. 1, published by Try and Make Press in 2009. Iconoclastic and impudent in a way Dickinson herself can sometimes be, these poems, as Legault himself says in an interview with Julia Guez on BOMB magazine’s blogsite, “are a joke that became serious.” In the same interview, Legault goes on to say, with regard to Dickinson, “People are ready for her—for queers and vampires and the two in combination. (I would include E. D. in both camps.) People are tired of the sacred the same way Dickinson was tired of it—if still obsessed with its possibility. Of course when I say ‘people,’ I mean me.” A sampling of Legault’s translations from the book appear above, and the numbers correspond to the numbers assigned to Dickinson’s poems in the Franklin reading edition.
Harold Bloom says that parody offers a “carnival sense of the world” and that “everything has its laughing aspect, for everything is reborn and renewed through death and ambivalence.” Legault is often able to go straight to the “laughing aspect” even of Dickinson’s most serious poems, but his translations are not merely parodic. In the spirit of Jack Spicer and Robert Creeley, other innovators unafraid to talk back to iconic poets they love, Legault is engaged in a kind of playful, funhouse “mirroring” dance with Dickinson. What Peter Gizzi has written about Spicer’s Lorca project, for instance—that it “enacts a play—a drama—between materiality and invisibility, the lines and what’s between them” and that “part of the absurd labor of poets is to parry with each other” as a kind of homage—might be said of Legault’s project as well. (Interestingly, Legault, who works at the Academy of American Poets and is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books, studied screenwriting before getting his MFA in poetry.) One chief effect of Legault’s talking back to Dickinson in this way is the sleight of hand and foot by which the translations bring us not only dos-à-dos, back to back, with a poet we might think we understand and own or know, but they also return us, send us back, with fresh vision to the incomparable poems of Dickinson herself, in all of their difficulty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly inexhaustible, regenerative power.
SOME MUSINGS ON
POETIC SELF-PORTRAITURE
SOME MUSINGS ON POETIC SELF-PORTRAITURE
When a friend of mine, a painter, wants perspective on newly finished work, he walks his canvas in front of a large mirror hanging in the studio. It is only in a reversed, refracted reflection of the piece that he can locate enough distance to assess what he’s accomplished. Another colleague, who prints and makes books, often takes a tome he’s recently stitched and bound and buries it in his back yard for a few days. When he unearths it, he feels ready to “see” the thing he’s made.
Writing itself is a kind of drawing, and for centuries writers and artists have worked in and cross-pollinated both disciplines, with poets drawing inspiration from works of art and from the techniques of their makers. Ekphrasis, which in modern times has come to refer exclusively to writing that is about art, comes from the Greek (pl. ekphraseis) for “description” and is an ancient mode (the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics cites, for instance, Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad and the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne in Ovid). Poets working in ekphrasis might use a work of art as spark for a sustained meditation on imagined scenarios and abstractions (Keats’s Ur-poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” for example) or borrow from a visual artist certain techniques (juxtaposition of color planes, for instance, or the use of negative space or distortion of scale) they can then “translate” onto the page (in syntax, lineation, form), something Charles Wright attempts in what he calls his “failed experiment,” the beautiful “Homage to Paul Cezanne.”
Especially interesting in this regard is the self-portrait poem. Artists have been making self-portraits since antiquity (what model is cheaper and more readily available?), but the self-portrait poem, as a self-conscious literary entity, is arguably relatively new. Some might posit that the self-portrait poem, at least in the lyric tradition, is a tautology—isn’t every poem a “portrayal,” however disguised or indirect, of its maker, be it Sappho, Basho, Mirabai, or Gerard Manley Hopkins? And yet, with notable exceptions, it isn’t until the mid-twentieth century that we begin to see poets calling their works “self-portraits.” A recent Granger’s search yielded 103 results for poems with “self-portrait” in the title. Only a handful of these writers, mostly from Europe, were born before the twentieth-century. And while Emily Dickinson taunted “I’m nobody! Who are you” and Whitman claimed to celebrate and sing himself, and although it is possible to see Eliot in Prufrock or Yeats in “Among School Children,” with some exceptional early to mid-twentieth century forays into the self-portrait (Williams, Creeley, Ammons, Justice, O’Hara), it is not until the appearance of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) that the practice of writing self-portrait poems appears to explode.
