Naive and Sentimental Poetics: On Billie Chernicoff’s Minor Secrets
To engage with the language. Lawyers do this, as do readers of poetry. What exactly is this clause of this statute actually saying? How does it fit together grammatically? What are the etymologies of the key words; and to what degree does that matter? What if the writer seems not to be aware of the origins of his words? Is it still valid to consider them? Are there any current cultural references, historical references, literary references, mythical references, biographical references (if known, if unknown) that need be considered? Is there a literary dialogue taking place with some other writer or writers, living or dead? What if you don’t recognize this? What out of all that you recognize is salient, and what may not be relevant at all, and what seems to constitute an atmosphere of understanding without actually raising itself to a place where it affects your reading directly?
What is there in the words; and what is gestured toward through the words?
“The unseen is proved by the seen, until it becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn,” which may or may not be true assuming you can understand what it means.
There’s something in your ear and something in your mind. The thing in your ear is primarily melodic and rhythmic; a line, or lines. The thing in your mind is multiple; harmonic; polyphonic, intellectual chords and riffs within and through them. There’s also your eye and what happens there. But to me, the visual aspect of a poem is more an aid to the ear. It helps determine how the poem sounds, establishes a flow or a set of blockages, and a rhythm, a set of rhythms.
I ask, is it possible to immerse yourself naked into a text? What experiences and meanings accrue? What happens then as you put on more interpretive clothing? One is never actually naked; one always dangles some conception or other. Perhaps one is “nude,” the aesthetic attitude of nakedness. One presumes, attempts to be as blank and open as one can — to be that “field” in which being can enter, or however it goes; in which language can enter (and yet language is, and must be, already there). As blank as one can be. Then one steps back and studies the field in which language has entered. Not the pure field anymore; the porous field, the contested field — at which point you realize that you’re still in the field. The field was always just a tentative demarcation, a set of boundary markings, to set the field apart so that you can read it. You finally have to read it while you’re in it. You just have to know that when you think you have “contextualized,” nonetheless you’re still there.
It’s so fun to experience that inter- zone. It feels — I don’t know? — “passionate”?
Paul Klee, A Guardian Angel Serves a Small Breakfast, 1920.
In April 2022, I was corresponding with Billie Chernicoff. This is when Kent Johnson was very ill. He died, of course, in October. Billie and Mike Boughn were putting together a collection of poems for Kent modeled after his “I Once Met...” series. So, this would be a collection of “I Once Met Kent Johnson” poems or reminiscences. I wrote something and sent it to them, and Billie responded. We became friends through email. Then we exchanged some books, and so my reading of Mark Scroggins and Rachel Blau DuPlessis was interrupted: there was Billie.
A complete change of gears. I’m reading Minor Secrets, her most recent. I also got Amoretti, but I’ll get to that later.
It’s not Drafts, whose reading it interrupted — quite a contrary set of movements. It’s very much poems — lyric, beautiful, very musical, very much about lyricism, beauty, the senses, sensual, sexual. It’s also very religious, in fact, quite Christian. The final section of poems are — what are they? — Hymns? To the Virgin Mary! Yes, that’s what they seem to be. Billie is married to Larry Chernicoff, nice Jewish composer, but she’s still a Catholic girl in some form.
She is a kind of poet-priestess. The spiritual-sensual striving and incanting is real. An “incantation” is a song, and a spell. Art and magic.
Mary is a goddess. Of what? Of virginity and fecundity (with sex somewhere; somewhere sex) and enclosure, of wombs, feminine pulses, lilies, goddess of alphabets. She is not Euridice, whom Rachel writes about. We do not need to bring her back. Where is she not? We do not need to reanimate her anger. Jesus is not Orpheus. In fact, in Billie’s poems, there is no Christ that I can see. No savior and no need for one. “...the confusion of spring is inside her...” (88). There is no other confusion. Wait, there, I see Christ: “Christ is only an open mind” (98).
The poet says,
She prays for us now
in the measureless
nanosecond of our death,
the haven, the almost chapel
between breathing out
and breathing in, the time
it takes light to take one step (90).
The poet says, “accept my confusion as devotion” (110).
The poet says, “Can you use me in your army,/ or in your maiden choir?” (111).
The poet says:
How sweet our errands are,
from place to holy place,
till all are sacred to us
and all women our mothers,
wives, sisters and daughters.
From porch to porch,
from cradle to altar
to grave, sprig or bundle,
scatter your rosemary here
and here, to keep the thief away.
Braid it into your daughter’s hair
that she may remember her Greek (112).
The poet says, “Mary, I dreamed you flowed right through me without resistance,/ continually, so that everything breathed your perpetual yes” (117).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ecce Ancilla Domini! 1849. Oil on canvas.
Who is this poet? Who says these things...and makes us believe them; or at least in part. I don’t believe in Mary; I have no interest in Mary. I love medieval and renaissance paintings of her. I love her blue robes. I love the look of astonishment and calm on her face when the angel/messenger visits her and annunciates. I love annunciation. Which is what these poems are, I think. The force or spirit that passes through you and then leaves something to inhabit and grow in you, and when it grows large enough you will pass it out from you, give birth to it. The small thing was not you, then it grew as part of you, and then it becomes separate again, but never separate.
“Then something settled in us all, like sweetness in a fig, or faith in a monk, or friendship in a friend” (117).
I love the poem “A Marian Alphabet.” Small passages for each letter. What’s it called? It’s an “abecedarian.” Quite wonderful, whimsical, varied. I love “F,” the shortest: “Not far, never far” (99). I quoted “C” already: “Christ is only an open mind.” I love “H”: Hi, Helios!/ Sun,/ Salutations./ I greet, I praise/ and receive him, I do” (99). Hi, Helios! Very perfect, and silly. And I do there at the end. Received. It’s a great performance, a great poem. Every letter is a... Every stanza reaches... Every arrival brings... Surprise. Pleasure. Real sense of the real-unreal-real. Myth at this level of play, performance, knowledge, love and generosity is not myth; it’s just description of certain particular and universal conditions, recognized and charged, thrown back into perfect shapes. See the shape; hear it. Can you put your mouth around it? Does it agree with your tongue?
Only one poem, really, I distrust, and that’s the poem explicitly about the Annunciation. The whole book is annunciation, but this one I don’t believe. “The Girl Who Knew Everything.” It describes how Mary, at that moment of impregnation and revelation, “knew everything”... that is, she knew who her child would be, “would have felt within her pulse” all the future travels, and trials, and suffering her son would endure; “the lessons of her young rebbe” and “hearing also, in her womb,/ the agony of a man’s body,/ and, for a moment, his doubt” (105-06). Then, at the end of the poem, drawing on the history of painting and iconography, Billie writes, “The painters make it clear she knows,/ even with her child held safe in her lap,/ anyone can see, she knows” (106). But that’s exactly where and why the poem is false! Of course the painters know. Mary’s premonition is part of the myth that they’re representing. The poem portrays the portrayal. It gives us preexisting knowledge. The rest of the Mary poems remake myth, and the myth thereby is new and therefore credible — i.e., not an orthodoxy. The Mary of the rest of these poems is the Mary who doesn’t know, and that is the Mary who matters — the Mary whose devotion is confusion.
my thought grows hectic
as each proposition
contradicts the rest,
Caesura, tell me
if that is your name,
or Ampersand (110).
That works better for me. Do we see the rupture or the connection? Surely, we don’t see the telos of sacrifice and salvation. Surely, not that. Take that cup from me, for goodness sake. I don’t need it.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation, 1898. Oil on canvas.
On the other hand, I think that Billie genuinely is a Christian, so perhaps that is what she wants us to see, at least in one instance. But that’s the one place that’s not true.
From what I’ve quoted, can you see how beautiful the poems are? How seductive! Yes, they carry you across crests of waves, in foam, in beauty that gestures toward the beauty of bodies made of flesh. There are lovers in these poems. There is a sense of idyllic.
There’s actually a 17th or 16th-century quality to Billie’s poems; as if Sidney and Herbert and Herrick had conspired to join and become modern — the lightness, spirituality, eroticism, wit, linguistic invention all entwined. Seduction as a poetic quality. The reward is delight; come and be delighted. Here is a poem — about salt, called “Salitter”:
Ecstatic, bittersweet
thou of the sea,
the god in matter,
strewn
grace that praises
whatever it touches,
so do we praise,
do we love,
with our fluencies,
poetries, fleurs
de sel, briny
flowers of Eros,
sal sapientiae,
wise salt, mercurial,
and most difficult
covenant with
our god, the salty one (63).
What can be more true, even if made beautiful with praise and wonder. Not always beautiful, nothing is always beautiful, certainly not our relationship with our fluids! That’s very difficult, even considering its ecstasy. “Briny flowers of Eros”; yes, always. And to bring salt to sapience is not often achievable, and so the covenant is hard. Salty bastard. But there’s the poem... as with Herbert, “something understood.” Yes, I think that’s the link. I don’t know if she thinks so.
I’m wondering about the status of dreams, for there is much mention of dreams. I don’t run across so many “dreams” in contemporary poetry. It seems maybe too “poetic.” But Billie insists on the dream as an important feature.
“A landscape,/ even a face, depends/ on having been/ dreamed,/ dream comes first” (18).
“In doubt, say thou/ to a dream/ caught out,/ a trembling lake,/ alert as a hare...” (27).
“I am over it, over that moon,/ me, a naif of a worm with no prospects,/ no future to speak of, dreamless” (32).
“Après un rêve I wake to find this is the only day” (33).
“If you can breathe, you’re dreaming” (48).
I, a nothing
more than listening,
late to school,
lost my cello
left my dress
in someone’s dream
my body in a glade
somewhere (59).“We swim in this dream and waltz in others” (61).
“Am I here?/ Are you my birthday?/ Are you dreaming?/ Are you my enemy?” (62).
“Sometimes a dream/ leads one or the other/ into the day...” (71).
“I’ve said the lovers,/ recounting their dreams,/ every meander a tryst” (83).
The dream is the glue, the dream is the field — the “dream comes first.” Lou Reed’s Romeo “left his soul in someone’s rented car”; this poet left her dress “in someone’s dream.” You can swim or waltz. It can be today or tomorrow (and thus yesterday); no future without dream. Music comes after the dream; is music the recollection? Breath. What seems a meander becomes an intention, desire in focus. Breath is spirit, voice, breath is the line. No limit; only one limit.
Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Amore e Psiche, 1707–09. Oil on canvas.
There is one more instance, a short prose insertion which Billie presents as a memory of being on a boat on a lake with her family at the age of three or four — the moment in life when memory first begins. She has the memory of falling into the water and slowly sinking, yet feeling strangely at peace, “a radiance above me” and feeling “a sensual, even erotic, pleasure, that was also deeply comforting, an experience of absolute trust and bliss.” She recalls then forgetting the episode, and then recalling it when she was around twelve. And it strikes her then that no one in the family has ever mentioned her near drowning and she doesn’t know how she was saved or what happened next. She asks her mother, and we read:
She was brief, dismissive, telling me only once, firmly, that I had not fallen into Lake St. Clair or any other lake and almost drowned, indeed, we had never been sailing at all. It was only a dream, she said, and she sounded as ashamed of my dream as she might have been of letting me drown” (25-26).
What a strange recounting. How do we understand the mother’s brusqueness, or shame, if that is what it is? To tell a parent that you remember falling into water and not being saved — Is this akin to a sudden recollection of sexual trauma? It was only a dream. It was only an unconscious desire? This is Freud’s early thesis, later revised, or never quite fully revised. Did the trauma occur or was it imagined? If it was imagined, was it also desired? In this case, it was desired. The remembered experience of drowning was radiant, sensual, erotic, “deeply comforting, an experience of absolute trust and bliss.” Whatever reality has been forgotten, elided, denied... this was the dream. Was the ostensible “event” in truth the occasion for the reality of the dream — which is a dream of comfort and fullness? Human voices wake us and we drown? The dream takes us to the fullest depth of childhood and loss.
Detail: Psyche lifting Cupid’s wing; The Story of Cupid and Psyche c.1473; Sellaio, Jacopo del; painter; Italian artist, 1441/2-1493; Tempera and gold on a wooden panel.
The dream is what you never will be rescued from, Billie concludes: “First dream or memory, first embrace — of death or birth or falling in love — the one from which I’ve never been rescued.” “The sweetest sounds I’ll ever hear,” goes the song... But they’re far stranger than you think, a synesthesia of death and life and the more than life that’s love. And this, in the poetry, is the meaning of dream. The mother’s shame and brusqueness is also part of the dream.
“Seduce, to lead away, astray” (81). And it does, I looked it up. “Se-ducere.” The poems seduce. But I wonder, where is “away”? Where is “astray”? I would say, read “Letters From a Holy City,” a nine page poem in twenty-five sections. The “seduce” line begins section 22. The holy city is, apparently, Charleston SC, not Jerusalem. I don’t know Charleston (or Jerusalem); but there is nothing but beauty here. I could quote any line. Just committed, remorseless (or do I mean relentless), unashamed beautiful writing. “Astray” is simply where it leads you. Once you’re there, it’s like that sense of sensual radiant bliss described in the drowning poem. One more quotation, without comment:
All is licit. Sunlight
falls like a lover’s
undoing hands
over me and over
the barely decipherable
letters inscribed here,
tracing the shape of a wing (81).
No, sorry, I have to comment. Nothing is illicit, but all is seductive. Writing, flight, sex, radiance, interpretation, making (love) as unmaking, the shape of the wing but not the wing; but the letters are real. All this is the holy seduction of the poem.
A Plan of the Town & Harbour of Charles-Town, 1711.
