Disjecta Membra: Rosmarie Waldrop's "Thinking of Follows," 1996
“Shall We Escape Analogy” (Claude Royet-Journoud); Or, Composition as Process
Nothing is given. Everything remains to be constructed.
I do not know beforehand what the poem is going to say, where the poem is going to take me. The poem is not “expression,” but a cognitive process that, to some extent, changes me. John Cage: “Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it: we possess nothing.”
As I begin working, far from having an “epiphany” to express, I have only a vague nucleus of energy running to words. As soon as I start listening to the words, they reveal their own vectors and affinities, pull the poem into their own field of force, often in unforeseen directions, away from the semantic charge of the original impulse.
Valéry: “When the poets enter the forest of language it is with the express purpose of getting lost.”
Jabès: “The pages of the book are doors. Words go through them, driven by their impatience to regroup...Light is in these lovers’ strength of desire.”
Palimpsest
But it is not true that “nothing is given”: Language comes not only with an infinite potential for new combinations, but with a long history contained in it.
The blank page is not blank. Words are always secondhand, says Dominique Noguez. No text has one single author. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always write on top of a palimpsest (cf. Duncan's “grand collage”).
This is not a question of linear “influence,” but of writing as dialog with a whole net of previous and concurrent texts, with tradition, with the culture and language we breathe and move in and that conditions us even while we help to construct it.
Many of us have foregrounded this awareness as technique, transforming, “translating” parts of other works.
[...]
Communication
In crossing the Atlantic my phonemes settled somewhere between German and English. I speak either language with an accent. This has saved me the illusion of being the master of language. I enter it at a skewed angle, through the fissures, the slight difference.
I do not “use” the language. I interact with it. I do not communicate via language, but with it. Language is not a tool for me, but a medium infinitely larger than any intention.
What will find resonance is out of my hands. If the poem works (and gets the chance to be read), it will set off vibrations in the reader, an experience with language — with the way it defines us as human beings.
Walter Benjamin: “Art posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”
Meaning, Especially Deeper
All I am saying here is on the surface, which is all we can work on. I like the image in Don Quixote that compares translation to working on a tapestry: you sit behind the canvas, with a mess of threads and a pattern for each color. You follow out patterns but have no idea what image will appear on the other side.
This holds for writing as well. We work on technical aspects, on the craft. We make a pattern that coheres. Our obsessions and preoccupations find their way into it no matter what we do.
What will appear “on the other side,” what the text will “mean,” is another matter. I can only hope that it gives a glimpse of that unreachable goal (which, paradoxically, is also its matrix), the concentration, the stillness of those moments when it seems we are taken out of ourselves and out of time.
PRACTICE
I don't even have thoughts, I have methods that make language think, take over and me by the hand. Into sense or offense, syntax stretched across rules, relations of force, fluid the dip of the plumb line, the pull of eyes. (A Form/ Of Taking/ It All) //
From Keeping / the window open: Interviews, Statements, Alarms, Excursions by Rosmarie Waldrop and Keith Waldrop, Edited by Ben Lerner, Wave Books, 2019, 162-68.
