. . . Perhaps poems do represent facets of the poet when placed in an autobiographical context, but even autobiography is not true. A retelling of events does not represent what actually happened, but the autobiography couldn’t exist without the events it fictionalizes. Even the most true of my poems, like "one poem for john" or "City Side Walk," are fictions. These poems speak of actual events in real places – "sitting on the wall at [K]enwood" and walking "three blocks beyond my straight beat path to glimpse through the . . . window of another . . . Chicago apartment," – invoking culturally and historically recognizable images, and expressing honest authorial impressions. This thread is followed closely through "Source Texts Incarnate," knitting together the idea that the words find their way to the pages as the result of interaction between the poet, her environment, and her mythical muses. Poetry may be created in isolated space, but it relies upon conversation, observation, and socialization to coagulate. As introduced at the opening of "Source Texts," what "we think about as we build, over decades, the manifest construct of our minds," is each other. "for Rande," examines this idea, that our poems find their way through layered channels of inspiration. On a beautiful morning, filled with playful sunshine, the narrator received the poem given to the storyteller by muses of his own. The first two and last five lines of the poem explore gratitude over the transference of inspiration, "the gift. . . of your poetic run . . . turning to face . . . sunrise," lending credence to the idea that "you conspire well," in the ability to pass along an unwritten poem to another poet. Yet, the eleven lines which flesh out the body of the poem reveal the static attached to the inspirational transfer. The narrator appreciates the gift, but is unable to write that particular poem because she is consumed by the physical environment surrounding the story and the academic environment of her own studies. The casual mention of Charles Olson in the context that "grad school rules" suggests that the narrator is both directed and distracted by poetry and its poets, delightedly fragmented by the poetic beauty of "the weather, the story," the studies, the gaming, and the idea that these temporally disparate layers swirl together into a single poem. "LIMB," screaming out in capital letters from the middle of the collection, describes this functioning of poetry written for another poet. Letting the limb represent the poem, the dedication represent the tangible influence, and the reach for the grasp represent the action between the poem and the reader, this collection pivots on the point that regardless of origin, the poem exists loudly on its own, waiting only to reach a reader. The "Source Texts" poems blur the lines between truth and speculation most fully by taking the inception away from the muses and placing it with the poet’s society. The incarnate sources are real, but the works remain fictions inasmuch as the words themselves build meaning and validity inside the poems. Once born onto the page, poems move away from their people, projecting realities which validate a reader’s approach rather than a poet’s position. Arguing for a sacred dimension of all things, these poems attempt to transform ordinary observations into spiritual meditations. By operating within themselves, exclusive of their experiential contexts, the poems attack personal history with peculiar attention, illuminating details which create new realities, irrelevant to actual events. At the close of "Letting Bleed," the narrator reveals that "poems are nothing but wind. . . rustling leaves from [the] . . . mind." Built of words blown into corners, raked into tidy piles by the poet’s pen, the ethereality of my poetic is solidified. I might rake the leaves, but the biochemical heat generated in the thoughtfully composting center belongs solely to the poem. Collected here, the leaves of this book interact with each other to create any heat a reader might feel, exclusive of authorial background or intent. My attention to poetry’s singular fictionality becomes meaningful in the context of authorial distance from my expression of common human experience. An advisor observed of me that there is no wall between my person and my projection, in which case it may be inferred that the experiences in the poems are not common, but individual. If I am the narrator of "And If You Can’t Be," expressing the extremely private realization that sharing my body with the wrong man creates disappointment and deceit, my person and my projection intersect in my poetry, and this becomes a confessional poem of self "wet with the wish of imagining" a different lover. Problematic are the notions of confession and attachment. Whether I created the poem as a response to an actual event or found it in the well of pure speculation is irrelevant and distracting to examination of the poem’s function. In one hundred twenty three words, this poem creates a moment of meditation, of hesitation over missteps, revealing a narrator trapped in a mistake of sexual decisionmaking. Completely unable to be present in the intimate moment consuming her, she removes herself to an imagined intimacy. The sensual images in the poem, "Wanting to taste your salty thick flavors. . . [with] Tongue and lips wet" describe the other, the absent "you" whom the narrator desires. This permutation of physicality and fantasy is much more interesting and relevant to the relationship between the poem and the reader than is the speculation over authorial confession and the extent of truth in the narration. Yet the paradox exists that the author is all of the characters and none of the characters. I have enjoyed, endured, and overcome every obstacle I examine in my own work, and I have paid particular attention to the ways in which the words create their own spaces, focal points, and sacred areas. In the process of fulfilling my responsibility to create records of my observations, I attempt to capture elusive truths and let them speak. Projecting from the world back into the world, these poems try to create an imaginative forum for relationships between themselves and their readers. If the acceptance of the narrator of these poems as a single, if fractured, voice at a distinct, if inextricable, distance from the author, seems perhaps a conspicuous point to pursue, consider for a moment the value of observing the obvious. In meditation practice, we learn to release our thoughts, letting them drift through the mind without commanding attention, while we mindfully attend the ubiquitous function of breathing. We breathe and think regardless of this practice, but by attending the obvious – the necessary and utterly unignorable breath – we attain clarity, calm, and self-understanding. Analogous to this, studying the poetry exclusive of the author allows a reader to interact with the poems on a more intimate level. When the author is absent, the reader is left unchaperoned, free to explore the poems’ truths, to learn if and how the work works in private conversations with a readership. And if it does work, it is because the poet held a faceted mirror up to a human truth and reflected it adroitly onto a page. The poems in "Letting Bleed," the first chapter in the collection, explore this process of engaging the muses, finding poems in the silences of attention to the moment. The opening poem, "All Right Here," describes the process of finding words "unsought." Perhaps the poet knew in his heart that the poem existed, but instead of writing it, he discovered it, found it in a silent space between intent and understanding. As explored in "Drafted," "I play with my pen. . . nothing of this is responsible to me or I it." If "I" is a poet, experiencing the feeling common in writers of being not the writer, but the scribe, "I" has gleaned, as I have gleaned from my contemporaries that the words bubble down from the ethers, leaving the writer very little to do with the composition. In this way, the poems come to the page rather than to the poet, revealing in "handwriting. . . mimicry [of the] muses in my ears." An assuredly esoteric construct steeped in fantastic intangibility as the poems are observably written by the poet, it is nonetheless important to a reading of the text in which its narrative describes the process by which the poems manage to write themselves. In the world of these poems, words bleed, asking to be ignored at times, heard at others because "words are my life. . . I define myself that simply." These poems come to their pages in a loosely definable style. Freely observational but economical with words and sparse with judgment, the poems present one per page, complete yet open ended, waiting silently to be read. In the reading action occurs. If the work engages, the energy of that relationship creates small but often spectacular moments. Because of this, I am compelled to confine the poems to single pages, for a reader turning in medias res might lose the mood. As expressed in "Definition," something in a poem defines the moment when orgasm slips. Like any instance of ecstasy, the moment of truth and exactitude lies in the echo of recent memory. Poems and observations face off, sharing artistic merit, finding lyrical expressions in clear moments of minor epiphany. As a poet, I visit places of perception and see what I find there. |
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I earned a master's in english thinking this way. It was an excellent time that I remember fondly. Perhaps someday I'll try another.
all text © 1998-2002 wendy blake let me know your mind: rant@taopoet.net