well i like these statements very much, because it never feels fully "authentic" for me to say that "english is my language" or "chinese is my language." poetry makes so much more sense as a language i feel a part of...ever since i fell in love with works by louise glück and margaret atwood, i have been a native speaker of this tongue. native, and yet utterly other as well. it is the language of strangeness and exile. it is the language of making and at the same time, unmaking.
and yet. is poetry truly my language? does it belong to me? do i belong to it? i have no idea. the point i want to make here, though, is that we need to stop thinking of "foreign/world languages" as "other languages" that we can just pick up/take/study. "language" can mean the many ways of using, say, english alone. so poetry in english is a different sort of language from ethnography in english. the most common example is perhaps when people speak of "literature" and "science" being two very different (polar opposite) languages. and different kinds of english can be brought into dialogue with one another. "literature" can speak to "science," "poetry" can speak to "ethnography," etc. is "poetry," then, a dialect of english?
another way to think of this is that "poetry" is a language that is not bound by any one "dialect" - english poetry can speak to french and finnish poetry. historically, one could make the case for poets being amongst the most promiscuous of thieves, most multi-tongued of speakers. but i have to be careful, looking at these histories of poetic border-crossing, because of how tricky it can be to distinguish between radical transgression and cultural appropriation. what kind of power relations might poems reproduce? who speaks, to whom, and when become very important issues.
on the one hand, rethinking "poetry" as its own language offers an alternative or way to break out of "self/other" dichotomies that place one's "own" language in the center. can anyone be a "native" speaker of poetry, or is it always a language that has to be learned, over and over, learned as well as remade? poetry, in this sense then, is a language-always-in-invention. on the other hand, rethinking poetry in this manner could blind me to histories of language-as-oppression (e.g. english only education policies), language-as-system-of-power (e.g. according to a mix of legend & history, standardizing chinese was a way for china's "first emperor" to gain complete control of a 'unified' chinese territory).
*
thinking about prose poetry.
been talking to e.m. about baudelaire's prose poetry, of which i haven't read all that much. i've read more of rimbaud's. but here's one by baudelaire that i like (fitting for a friday night, eh?):
Enivrez vous
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là : c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre,il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé , dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront : "Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; Enivrez-vous sans cesse ! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise."
here's an english translation. and another, which curiously enough, renders the prose poem form back into enjambed verse. hmmm.
found this little article on the history of prose poetry. i like this more in-depth article better, though. i especially like these 2 paragraphs toward the end:
The prose poem lends itself unusually well to reinvention because it is itself a reinvention of traditional verse. The prose poem came into existence through reinvention. Because of this, it reinvents well.
...
Although prose poems have come to be relatively accepted in the literary world today, the form still retains something of its original oppositional nature. The words "prose" (that which is not poetry) and "poem" (that which is not prose) add up to a paradox. Perhaps there is something dialectical about the form's success: the contradiction of "prose" and "poem" provides a writer with an impetus and an opportunity to synthesize something that transcends the boundaries implicit in the name.
and i love what ben lerner, himself a up-and-rising contemporary practictioner of the prose poem form, says about the form. e.g. what he says about another contemporary prose-poet, rosmarie waldrop. lerner explicates the importance of the prose poem form for waldrop:
Waldrop’s poetry explores and explodes the governing dichotomies of Western thought: subject and object, mind and body, reason and emotion, etc. The prose poem — itself a collapsed binary — formalizes the instability of such oppositions. Logic and lyric plot a collision course.
and here's a glorious, gorgeous prose poem by waldrop:
The Matter of Light
for Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
A swallow cuts an arc along the roofs, cuts it again, as if to move the horizon inward. Light spills through my chest, stirring up armies of pigment. The gulls cry like babies, and clouds cut the distance with splendid, unnecessary profusion. The movements that my body is afraid of, your shirt on the line does in perfect harmony with the elements.
The depth of the river is measured in drowned bodies, but the laws of nature copulate madly, in moth frenzy. I remember the pines and poplars, their reflections, too, drowned, and the white handkerchief waving and waving to cut the distance. I meant to tell my troubles and sail on to a wholly new identity. This curve was headed for the high turbulence of moist dreams.
The years we've lived together are piled on the path to the shore. In splendid profusion. We can walk on them now, with the air cooling. Turning a "No" mask slightly downward is known as "clouding" because the mask takes on a melancholy aspect. The way my eyes had the run of the sky, but were defeated by its blinding excess. Bands of white foam ripple out into the Bay where the river comes undone. The contour of the rocks, like the mask, is meant to be looked at from a distance, yet is most alive close up, in light rain.
We had leaned out the window and found night early. Hugged the bed in alarm and dived below the skin. To move the horizon inward, makes clouds drift through our bones. The swallows had drowned in their reflection, along with the pines and poplars. And the handkerchief waving and waving. If there is enough deep red in the landscape will even an old woman's embrace spill light?
Words stuck in the throat, unable to take the shape of love or sorrow will tomorrow smear sentimental. Your shirt on the line dries from one identity to another while above our heads clouds cut the distance with, yes, splendid, unnecessary profusion. Though a body of water both reflects light and eats it too, I know its depth is measured in drowned bodies. I circle like a moth until blinding splendor exceeds the anxiety of wings.
found another essay on prose poetry; it also mentions waldrop. and i love the mention of mei-mei berssenbrugge there, another incredible practitioner of prose poem forms; berssenbrugge, like waldrop but in her own fashion, completely reinvents the prose poem with her long, long, philosophically dense, aesthestically eye-and-ear-bending lines. and surprise surprise, ben lerner has also reviewed berssenbrugge. i've posted some work by berssenbrugge at my old journal, but i'll have to read more of her and post some new stuff on here.
for now...berssenbrugge has said some fascinating things on form:
That particular conjunction of events which includes the history of your body, your experience, and your art vertically, and the time and circumstances you are in horizontally, seeks an expression, that is inevitably unique, or new.
A formal problem or limit represents a limit of what you can make or say or see, at a particular moment. You might make a new form by following a desire or an intuition into a further, more contemporary part of you, such as varying the line length according to the horizon, embedding scientific terms into an equivocal or into a lyric context, using thought imagistically.
I find the idea of newness interesting, during a time when there is no recognized critical aesthetic. The criticism is at the edge of what it can discern or say, and so it's interesting to seek emerging form in fashion, in the margins of the arts, on the street, in experimental physics.
No comments:
Post a Comment