The hide and seek muse, p.15
The Hide-and-Seek Muse, page 15
Despite her use of temporal tags (“I used to” and “once”), however, Seay’s narrative is not linear. Just when we think we’re going to hear about that important time of facing up, of seeing into the truth of things, we’re taken on a tangent into the speaker’s notion of what she “used to think to be not alone meant”—again, the mesh of conditional tenses, infinitives, and negatives clouds the picture—life and love have been elusive and ambiguously bound up for the speaker with fantasies about fugue state bouts of perilous loneliness, including “[n]ot having to decide not / to fling from some height.”
“Once,” the speaker continues, shifting gears yet again, “the two of us rode one bicycle.” We are several stanzas into this tale within a tale before we realize that this bike ride along the seashore now being recounted is, in fact, “the time” referred to in line one. Things seem idyllic, even romantic, at first—our speaker in straw hat,
perched on the handlebars
and beside us the sea oats swayed like skirts
and I heard a trilling in the crabgrass.
The sidewalks were bleached as grecian stone
as we rode past the fishshop smelling of morning—
salt, bread, limes, men.
Yet something is not right. The narrator, “riding in front,” cannot see her lover, who is behind her on the bike, pedaling “into the wind.” And so when the speaker tries to point out things as she passes, her words are swallowed by gusts and misheard, if heard at all, by the pedaller of the bicycle. What might, under other circumstances, be a humorous, malapropistic vignette, however, takes a dark turn when we realize that the lover’s inability to hear the speaker has less to do with the fact that she and he are not facing one another (although this is metaphorical) and that the buffeting sea breezes are garbling the sounds she makes, and has more to do, finally, with his seeming indifference, self-absorption, and even dismissive detachment (“and then you said easily // it was nothing like that at all”). By the time we reach the epiphanic moment—the truth the speaker faces down—the economy of the poem has turned from matters of time to issues of quantity, to matters of what, finally, accounts for “enough,” in the relationship, in terms of what lies ahead for the narrator as she stares out ahead into a future that does not hold the full commitment of the lover at her back, who has betrayed a willingness to give only so much, and no more:
But our future was clear enough when I asked if you saw
the clean aprons of those men
(how much longer you think until they clean the fish?
did you see how white those aprons were? did you see?)
To which you said
How much is it, then, you think you need?
Those clean fishermen’s aprons, destined for staining—hard not to see them as the white page of the poem, the speaker’s full-frontal and difficult adjustment of the fit between her own expectations and her realization that the fulfillment she thought she was missing might not after all be any more than a solitary, one-sided, one way experience. What C. D. Wright says in an exquisite pamphlet about Jean Valentine, writing a word / changing it, published by Brian Teare’s micropress, Albion Books (2011), might also apply to Seay’s poem: “In words, narrative is ultimately inescapable, but scattered elements of it will get the job done. Rather than narrate, she is organizing her emotions.” To face the truth about her truth, the narrator of Seay’s poem borrows the temporal semblance of a coherent story, the account of a love affair, but with the interior acoustics of the lyric.
Looking into the “face” of this poem reminds me of the experience of seeing Richard Avedon’s In the American West exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1985. For his oversized black-and-white portraits, Avedon chose to photograph his often life-ravaged subjects in front of white sheets rather than before their actual contexts—rodeos, midways, carnivals, small towns. The subjects gaze one way, out of their frames, and the effect of removing the particulars of time and space in the backdrop is that the faces, finally, do the work of narrative, of fiction, making unspeakable but powerful testament. Interestingly, we never really look into any faces in Seay’s poem. But the poem brings the speaker and her readers face-to-face with an almost untranslatable negative epiphany. Seay creates a suggestive, temporal narrative of unrequited love by confronting its ineffable paradoxes, its lyric entrapments.
ILLNESS & POETRY
ILLNESS & POETRY
When we consider the physical and mental maladies and disabilities that artists, like other humans, have borne with courage and stamina, it is tempting to contemplate the effects these afflictions may have had not only on the physical making of works of art, but on the content and form of those creations, as well. Could a seizure disorder (epilepsy?), for example, account for Van Gogh’s nimbused vortexes and ferocity of light in some of his paintings? Did Beethoven’s fury and frustration at his own slowly advancing deafness (otosclerosis? lead poisoning? syphilis?) contribute to the complex and dissonant “arguments” of some of his later compositions? Is it possible that the eye ailment that sent Emily Dickinson to Boston for treatments and kept her from reading for what was for her an excruciating hiatus (the first text she savored when allowed to read again was Shakespeare) explains in part the prevalence of ocular imagery in her poems and letters (“Before I got my eye put out— / I liked as well to see / As other creatures, that have eyes— / And know no other way—”). Insomnia, melancholy, bi-polarity, post-partum depression, blindness, deafness, quadriplegia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, cancer, narcolepsy, multiple sclerosis, alcoholism, anorexia, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress syndrome—when one starts making a list of the physical and mental infirmities known to affect human beings, it seems obvious that few artists could be exempt from a periodic bout, if not a chronic struggle, with the body/brain nexus. At times physical affliction can feel and in fact be unendurable. In “Elegy,” Theodore Roethke writes, “I have myself an inner weight of woe / That God himself can scarcely bear.”
One wonders what effects modern pharmaceuticals might have had on the luminous work of writers with physical and mental illnesses. Such speculations are not new. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes in Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, “The fear that medicine and science will take away from the ineffability of it all, or detract from the mind’s labyrinthian complexity, is as old as man’s attempts to chart the movement of the stars. Even John Keats, who had studied to be a surgeon, felt that Newton’s calculations would blanch the heavens of their glory.” With anti-depressants making a halcyon field of the psyche, banishing the dark corners in which the Id might lurk and surprise, or with mood stabilizers evening out the roller coaster of emotional highs and lows, would writers like Virginia Woolf and William Blake, for example, have produced songs and texts of such prescient and haunting witness?
Perhaps, medicated, these writers might have led happier, more stable, and, in the case of Woolf and others, longer lives. At a party a few years ago, I overheard two poet colleagues arguing about which anti-anxiety medicine was better for poets to take, with a particular drug making one of the pair “just not able to come up with the right word when I need it.” An interesting book that engages this topic is Poets on Prozac, edited by physician and poet Richard Berlin, and published by John Hopkins University Press in 2008. In sixteen essays, poets articulate their battles with a variety of psychiatric and other mental/brain disorders, provoking questions about whether or not these illnesses contribute to the success of the poems, or if the real achievement is that the poets manage to succeed as writers in spite of their affliction.
In his memoir, My Dyslexia, Pulitzer prize-winning poet Philip Schultz explores these and related questions as he recounts his discovery of his own dyslexia in mid-life and looks back on how his undiagnosed struggle with the disorder affected his childhood and early adult home and student life, helping to shape the writer he would become despite his long misunderstood impediment. “Dyslexia” [
Schultz is not alone in suffering from dyslexia. The Levinson Medical Center for Learning Disabilities reports that over 40 million American children and adults are or have been affected by some form of the disorder, and names Pablo Picasso, Thomas Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jay Leno, and Whoopi Goldberg among the many well known dyslexics who have managed to thrive despite their difficulties. But because dyslexia involves the use and apprehension of language, its impediments are especially daunting and relevant for writers. Driving Schultz’s meditation on the subject (which has the same fresh forthrightness and tensile clarity of his poems) is the question of how “someone who didn’t learn to read until he was eleven years old and in the fifth grade, who was held back in third grade and asked to leave his school,” found his way to poetry, to a life involving the most intimate and deeply articulate acts of communication in language, and to the making of poems whose power and craft garnered him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for poetic achievement?
Discovery of his own dyslexia, Schultz explains, was like fathoming “a mystery I’d been grappling with my entire life.” Exploring his life prior to and after the revelation of his dyslexia, Schultz recounts his years-long struggle with and sanctuary in language. His book trains its unflinching, frank, and darkly humorous lens on a childhood and adolescence rife with difficulty, fear, anxiety, shame, self-doubt, behavioral problems, and anger. Chief among the memoir’s insights are those Schultz makes into the role his dyslexia has played in his development as a poet. Laughed at by an early tutor to whom he confessed his desire to be a writer, Schultz nonetheless persisted in his ambition. In a way, he suggests, his sense of otherness, of exile, foregrounded for him, early-on, something essential to the processes of all writing: “the life of an artist is in many ways similar to the life of the dyslexic. Both are essentially dysfunctional systems that produce in each individual volumes of anxiety, perseverance, and rejection, as well as creative compensatory thinking. Each, by their very nature, makes a victim of its creator, turning him into an outsider and misfit. It’s true of all artists, I think, at every level of success …. Each must, without appeal, strive to tolerate its own forms of self-defamation, creative excitement, and lack of forgiveness.”
I would urge readers of the memoir to seek out Schultz’s psychologically astute and eloquently vernacular poems, as well, including those in his Pulitzer-prize-winning Failure (Harcourt, 2007), whose title evokes Samuel Beckett’s admonition to “Fail again. Fail better,” and whose pieces about the narrator’s aggrieved and beset father could as well address Schultz’s private travail, as in these lines from “The Magic Kingdom”: “Bless the plenitude of the suffering mind … / its endless parade of disgrace / and spider’s web of fear, the hunger / of the soul that expects to be despised / and cast out, the unforgiving ghosts / I visit late at night when only God is awake …. ” It is a privilege to close with a poem by Schultz, “Getting Along.” A love poem, it confronts what Schultz calls in My Dyslexia a “true and original language” and, elsewhere in the memoir, an archeology of the soul. With its kinetic pronominal exchanges (“When the I won’t stay / hidden inside the we, / forgets where it ends / and the we begins / a lush / green river of intimacy / smothers it (me)” and its “hurt / buried inside the pride / hidden inside the pain”), it is as articulate an expression of marriage (and of the marriage of the “broken” mind and the “opalescent prescience” of the poetic imagination) as one might hope to encounter, both within, prior to, and beyond language.
Getting Along
My wife and I are getting along.
Right now, she’s listening
to Bruce Springsteen
in her studio, making out
of copper wire and pieces
of broken jewelry (plastic rats
and wedding rings) a cloud
of opalescent prescience.
Yesterday, she loved me,
she said, even though
sometimes I’m an asshole.
Grateful for the sometimes,
I said much of the time
I feel like one. Everyone
does, she said, except
the ones who really are.
They think fate is fucking
with them. When the color
of her eyes turns dark walnut,
it means: I loved you once;
or green: always, maybe.
Marriage is the hardest thing,
she thinks, harder than God,
childhood or childbirth.
When the I won’t stay
hidden inside the we,
forgets where it ends
and the we begins, a lush
green river of intimacy
smothers it (me.) Unrequited,
it’s the point we’re always
trying to make, the hurt
buried inside the pride
hidden inside the pain.
Love is an accident of fate,
an idea of surprising elasticity,
she thinks I think. Once,
we said nothing on the phone
for one hour. Each syllable
we didn’t speak was visible,
each breath we swallowed
swallowed us, each unspoken
allegation a covenant of fidelity,
a razor our silence rubbed
us against. As if love were
a house of mirrors we can’t
stop wandering inside,
viewing every intention
from every side. As if
we’re stuck in hindsight,
every day an anniversary,
forever crossing a January
Monday morning to meet
for the first time, how she
wouldn’t look at me, as if
everything we meant to say,
feared, and longed to be,
was there, in the stark fierce
diction of her eyes, a story
of once, maybe, and always,
waiting for us (for we) to read.
JOANNA KLINK
The Graves
Wind for your sickness.
The moon for your sickness.
A river of night-
trees. Mossy patches
where something recently slept.
A hand-drawn sketch of
fish for your sickness,
red and ghost-
loamed. From your mother,
for your sickness, a late
flock of snow-geese
swept up in a gust.
From your father, a cave
of violas in luminous
pitch. For the panic
desolation. For scratchy bed-
sheets, the gathering of tumors,
a dispensation traveling in
far-nesses across the
galaxy-quiet of what is
to come. Dark-sunned,
you are swimming in schools.
For the despairing quality of
hospital fluorescence,
the secondhand alarm—
theft of time theft of
hope. The messages
arrive like flowers.
For the common uncontested
light of dusk.
For tobacco moths
in clouds of wings at
the door. For the dawn-
emotion, a calm-in-vastness
that descends upon
what is. Upon the storm-
tangle of branches, wing-
veins and hand-veins
shadow-shown on that pale
skin of sky. Too stone for
fear. Too brittle for
findings. From the powers that,
born on the site of sorrow,
fall in strands of smoke
across your sickness,
for your sickness,
and carry and keep you.
That would keep you here.
André Hodier once described jazz bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker’s distinctive soloing, something he achieved not in the traditional way, by reconfiguring the melody, or head, of the tune, but by embroidering all around it, defining it by its absence. Joanna Klink’s “The Graves,” an advent poem in many ways—an incantatory, nocturnal vigil, a talismanic keeping-watch—riffs in a similar way around the unnamed center of the poem: the impending death of the ill “you” the poem addresses.
