Drawing is like touching from a distance. Seeing is like touching with the eyes. If you spend a long time in the act of tracing the shape of something with a pen or charcoal or a brush and admitting into your view the areas shaded and lit, it’s as though you’ve felt all the parts of the thing you’re looking at, the peculiarities of their relation to one another, the elements that make this thing you address specific, itself, on paper. And it is not only “the thing” but the moment that is being touched—the folds in the towel make this shadow, in the light coming from this angle, at this time of day. 

     Seeing Is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees, Valery’s seminal idea about perception, is also the title of Lawrence Wechsler’s biography of Robert Irwin, a visual artist who has become increasingly preoccupied with issues of unmediated perception and art that delivers a sense of “presence.” When I first came across this phrase after reading about Irwin in the L.A. Times, I wrote it down on the back of a bookmark and looked at it every day, and began to practice looking at things—a rose, a face—this way, trying to bypass the name of what I was seeing—basket, card, phone, sheet—and to simply experience the thing—unmediated, itself. It seemed essential to me, as a procedure, a way to get back to something more in tune with the thing or moment itself—a way to get closer to direct encounter, to the sort of experience H.D. says she’s after in “Tribute to the Angels,” the second part of Trilogy:

I do not want to name it,

I want to watch its faint

heart-beat, pulse-beat

as it quivers, I do not want

to talk about it,

I want to minimize thought,

concentrate on it

till I shrink,

dematerialize 

and am drawn into it.2 

            It’s one thing to practice this exercise in a purely visual universe. But we are poets. We are, after all, stuck with words, therefore with naming. So how, in this, our naming art, do we get to the experience that preceded the naming? How do we not name? Put another way, how do we name in such a way that we preserve the shock of transport contained in the original experience? “Words,” says Valery, “are only placards.”3 How do we use them to allow the power and mystery of presence—of a state, of a moment, of an object, of a scene, of a feeling, of what we call “the ineffable”—to be transmitted, transfused, rather than simply indicated or pointed to?

      My attempt has been to find ways in which words can pull the rug out from under themselves and drop us back into an experience closer to original perception, which Irwin would argue actually precedes conception.4 What I’m looking for: ways to jam the gears with the tools we have, so that we can progressively approach a less and less abstracted sense of the way we experience the world. Our poems will finally run into the same difficulty a piece of visual art will: “Instead of being fully present,” says philosopher Karsten Harries, “it is only a metaphor of presence.”5 But they can still yank us out of our perceptual tedium. They can restore in us the experience of wonder and even the hush of awe. In other words, they can alter consciousness.

          “A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—,” says Valery, “is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.”6 . Here’s, as it were, the rub:  “Poetry,” he says, “is an art of language. But language is a practical creation.”7 In poetry, then, we may find ourselves abandoning the practical in favor of what Valery calls that “strange discourse, as though made by someone other than the speaker and addressed to someone other than the listener. In short, it is a language within a language.”8           

      There are several ways, I think, to jumpstart this process of getting from “practical creation” to “strange discourse.” The ones I’ve stumbled across seem to employ either subtraction or addition: for instance, using metaphorical modifiers (additions), which shift nouns or verbs into newly-minted, newly-opened things—Anne Carson, Georg Trakl and Lynn Emmanuel are particularly adept at this. Another method is the conscious use of omission, which results in double take, dislocation or the de-linking of general categories (conceptual pools of items pre-arranged, pre-classified by the mind) in favor of going straight to the specifics of what is perceived. Poems by Belle Waring, Beckian Fritz Goldberg and C.D. Wright show us different ways to do this. Another kind of subtraction: what I think of as “implied simile,” bringing one part of a simile or metaphor into view without revealing the other. This forces us into our own sense of association, our own questions, our own discovery of what, in fact, the other side of the comparison might be or, perhaps more to the point, what it might feel like—and there are samples of this strategy in the work of Wright, Goldberg and Ralph Angel.

     A word to the wise: I am not talking about talking about this not-naming. By this I mean that I am not talking about poems that simply refer to the idea of moving toward this state, using abstract category-nouns, as does this short Whitman poem, “A Clear Midnight:”

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.9  

This is a poem that prepares us for the idea of a journey away from naming, while still naming—perhaps a good leaping-off point. What I’m curious about exploring here is poetry that actually delivers us, transports us, not to the pinned-down butterfly, but the butterfly still alive, fluttering in our hands.10   

“Latches of Being”

     What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning “placed on top,” “added,” “appended,” “imported,” “foreign.” Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red11

     I want to build on Carson’s idea about adjectives here to include something broader as well: what I’m thinking of as metaphorical modifiers—words or phrases that suddenly extend or define the pedestrian meaning of a noun and often gain their energy from the act of unexpected comparison—but that still seem “added,” in Carson’s sense.  Carson’s book-length essay/poem Autobiography of Red, a sort of “portrait of the artist” as a young red monster with wings, is strewn with adjectives, metaphorical verbs and phrases that dramatically shift our sense of what we’re looking at and how it’s being seen by the speaker. Here are a couple of examples.  

     Geryon, the unusual winged photographer-hero, has been propelled by failed romance into taking a long journey. In the section of the poem called “Skepticism,” Carson shows us the harbor he sees while traveling in Buenos Aires: “a paste of blue cloud untangled itself on the red sky over the harbor.”12 This is not the same as “a cloud untangled itself on the sky,” the plainest way I can say this without the modifying phrases. The use of the verb “untangled,” alone, goes a long way toward giving us a very specific, striking image. Still, I would not have guessed “blue;” I would not have guessed “red.” I would have seen something different. And “a paste of blue” untangling itself is utterly startling, especially in an expanse of red over water. “Paste” and “untangled” are both essentially metaphoric, but it is their tangle as a modifying phrase, along with “blue” and “red” and “harbor,” that allows us to approach something closer to the actual reality of this particular cloud in this particular moment. As Valery would say of these words, “they act on us like a chord of music. The impression produced depends largely on resonance, rhythm, and the number of syllables; but it is also the result of the simple bringing together of meanings.”13   

     Later, after “panic jump(s) down on Geryon at three a.m.,” sending him, logically enough, out into the night, Carson gives us this version of a nightclub singer in the section called “Tango”: “It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.”14 This changes rather dramatically when reduced to: “It was a song and she had the throat you need to sing it.” It is not that this is simply plainer, an utter reduction to information, but that the sense of it is entirely different. 

     And consider: “Black night sky weighed starlessly on the windows.”15 Excising both the adjectives and the adverb, this becomes “sky weighed on the windows,” an interesting idea, perhaps a strange new aspect of physics, but something without color or time of day, though it retains a sense of presence. Curiously, without the additional modifications of adjectives and adverbs, it becomes a concept rather than a sort of synesthesia-imbued perception: it becomes more abstract than concrete. It feels less lived.

     Carson has had plenty of colleagues in practicing this sort of thing. “The sun has set in black linen,” said Georg Trakl in his poem “On the Way,” which is redolent with autumn, with evening, with the random flickerings of life that occur as a stranger’s body is carried to the morgue.16 How unlike, simply, “the sun has set” this is. It is wild enough to imagine the sun setting in linen, but Trakl has gone one step further and given us “black linen.” This creates, again, an entirely different image, and it also reminds me how prone I would have been to assigning “white” to the linen I was about to create in my head. As death and impermanence, autumn and war haunt poems like “In Springtime,” “Downfall,” “In the East,” “Grodek,” and “Nightly Surrender,” we see that temples are “green.”17 Night’s “forehead” is “shattered.”18 Eyebrows and mouths are “broken.”19  “Blood is a dark dew.”20 Nouns are continually cracked open by the words surrounding them, and we’re forced to modify the mental pictures we would have created otherwise. We’re also surprised into a greater sense of alertness—alerted to what is vivid even in its dying, its disfiguration.

     Well-used, adjectives and metaphorical modifiers are essential in delivering the specific thing seen, the exact quality of what is heard. It could be argued that perhaps they’re simply extensions of ways to name, to make more precise. Another way to say it is that they so alter our usual sense of name that they manage to get under what has already been codified—codified to the point that it can scarcely be seen.  In this way, they actually counteract names. Or, perhaps, they counteract and give a different kind of life to received names. How do they do this?

          To a large extent, I agree with Valery that the project of poetry is similar to the project of dreaming and it revolves around making new connections—the resulting spark of one thing hitting another in an unexpected way produces a kind of energy.21 Obviously, this is the core of what happens in simile and metaphor, where we’re connecting two things, pulling two things together into a different relationship in order to find some way to approach expressing what we experience. Adjectives and adverbs can do the same thing, though they often don’t, which may be one reason we are advised against using them. Verbs are strongest when they’re metaphoric, when they imply a comparison and are not simply “active.”  It is not that this use of language realigns the world but that it realigns our idea of the world—the way we represent the world to ourselves, the way we translate it. According to Dr. Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard, dreams operate in a related way:

What’s happening when we dream is that we’re taking memories and 

trying to figure out how they fit together. . . and seeing if they make

sense to connect to each other and then strengthening those connections.

We’re actually modifying our memories to help us understand things

better. That’s what it means to sleep on a problem . . . you know, when

you have lots of information but can’t clearly see how it all fits together.

And that’s how creativity works. It’s finding connections between

memories and concepts that no one else has seen before.22

     Lynn Emmanuel’s poetry is studded with word choices that rely frequently and heavily on metaphorical phrases. Take, for example, the last three lines of “Desire,” a poem which will convince us that Pittsburgh is no less adequate a site than Venice for the blossoming of longing: “Here in our own backyard we can find / The rare acres of stars, the thin wind / Abating in the huge green hesitations of the trees.”23 Stripped of adjective and metaphor, we have, “Here in our backyard we can find / The stars, the wind / Abating in the trees.” It is no coincidence, I think, that in nearly every case, dispensing with these transporting additives also makes the music of the poetry suffer. It is almost as though the rhythm induced by the moment, the rhythm itself, is looking for a way to flesh itself out, to become flush, carving a channel of necessary syllables to allow for a rendering as lush or attenuated, as nuanced, as vivid as the moment the poem describes.

     Emmanuel, again: “ . . . The men are bored / But the girl whose name hisses like an iron across damp shirts / Peels open a pack of cigarettes and fills the room with smoke.”24 Compare this to the denatured version: “ . . . The men are bored / But the girl / Peels open a pack of cigarettes and fills the room with smoke.” The white bread version, essentially, delivers a different moment. Knowing that this is not just any girl, not some generic girl, but the girl “whose name hisses like an iron across damp shirts” changes the way we see her peeling that cigarette wrapper, changes the way the smoke gets blown into the air, changes the surface tension in the room; changes, I bet, the men’s boredom. The girl’s “name” is “Priscilla,” but in describing her very name with this vivid simile, Emmanuel re-christens her, allows us to rehear “Priscilla,” allows us to understand what that name on this girl might really mean, might really feel like. The name of the poem is “Discovering the Photograph of Lloyd, Earl and Priscilla.” Priscilla is the only one of the three whose given name is not mentioned in the body of the poem—which is actually also an example of my next topic, omission.

Omission: Double Take, De-linking and Dislocation

Literature is the instrument neither of a whole thought nor of an organized thought.

—Paul Valery25

    Some poems get under our skin because something is missing. It takes a little work to put them together. Some big piece is missing, or something small but relevant or pointed, some moment of information that may make the poem initially unclear, or just barely clear, or may slant it some way, as though we’re tripping over it in the same way the speaker is, and having to focus on the things around it, the things that will ultimately lead us back to the clues that allow us to see the whole picture.

     Why, for instance, is it that Belle Waring says “Some days I avoid my reflection in store / windows. I just don’t want anyone to look at me” at the end of her poem “Baby Random”? It took me several readings to realize that it was not simply the aftereffect of a bad day on the ward, in which the nurses and an unfledged doctor had come to a standoff over how to handle an AIDS preemie in crisis. The baby had actually died. And the last lines of the poem are the speaker’s enactment of guilt about not risking insubordination to save the baby’s life. But look at how this moment is handled: 

When Random cries, petit fish on shore, nothing

squeaks past the tube down his pipe. His ventilator’s

a high-tech bellows that kicks in & out. Not

up to the nurses. Quiet: a pigeon’s outside,

color of graham crackers, throat oil on a wet street,

wings spattered white, perched out of the rain.26  

No visible moment of death. Or rather, the moment of death is signified simply by “quiet” and the close-up of baby random is substituted by a look at the pigeon outside—a good long look.        

     Thus the poem avoids sentimentality but also forces a double take, pries us into a higher state of alertness, and the details of this simple glance at a pigeon become all the more heartbreaking, as happens with those views we take in more completely in moments of grief or high emotion, and cannot forget. This strategy, in combination with the very extreme terseness of language and fierce metrics employed in much of the poem (“The kid almost hits the floor. I can see the headline: / DOC DUMPS AIDS TOT. Nice save, nurse, / Why, thanks.”), keeps the piece memorable, piercing, and in every way uneasy.

     Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s poem “The Book of Hens” begins this way:

The wasp wants to be a bell.

This is what I learn in June. I add it

to the things I have confirmed 

this year: I am missing.

Here the pomegranate tree has all

blossoms on hold like my dream head—

My mother and father are just married.

My husband and I are just meeting.

He is born.

I am seven, cradling my red dog

for the first time.

I’m the clock with twenty hands.

I am stuck between the past—

and here she doesn’t say, “and the future” or “and the present.” The fragment trails off, leaving us with the sense that she is stuck between, simply, the past, as though the past had pages she had fallen between, an idea which is not actually so surprising after what has gone before. Is the succession of images in the second stanza—the father and mother just married, the meeting with the husband-to-be, his birth, etc.—a series of photographs? Whether or not they are actual photographs, they operate in the same way—they are crystallized visual moments of a past being shuffled through, not in any chronological order. What the poet gains by not telling us in advance that these are photographs (or, if not photos, that they make a photo-like appearance in a dream) is a sudden and tremendous intimacy. We are thrown into the moment of the speaker’s encounter with these wedges of personal history. We get no preparation for it. We are just there, looking over her shoulder at what she’s looking at. In fact, if she had spelled out more clearly, in advance, what we were about to see, we couldn’t have seen it—not in the way we’re forced to. And though we are invited to view these images as “blossoms on hold,” and clued in to the idea that we might be looking at her dream, the figurative language still refuses to say, categorically, exactly what category of things we’re seeing.

    The end of the poem is clearer about this, as we approach a second list, but it may need to be:

Add to this the manuscript I opened

in my studious sleep. I got no further

than the table of contents, titles

my eye ran down:

The Hen Myself

The Rider in the Hen

The Belgian Hen’s Monologue to the Tree

I Am the Hen

Hens Eating at Dusk

The heart wants to be—

anything in it.27

Here we know for sure that we are about to look at a table of contents. Then we look at the contents. They are strange. They were equally strange to the speaker. Perhaps they are too strange to carry the freight of the poem without being contextualized first as elements of a general category. The contrast between the elements of the more “normal” list of un-introduced familial images and the more properly introduced elements of the odd hen list makes for a happy and slightly skewed parallelism in the poem before it ends by embracing everything on both lists. Is the “I” really missing if it is everything in the dream? Or is the “I” so desperately missing that finally it will agree to be “anything” in the dream?  Look at the effect of the dash in the penultimate line, and how differently the last two lines would read without it. This sentence was headed somewhere else before its will was broken. 

     Let’s go back to the first stanza for a second and take a look at the way it moves. Just as the lack of chronology in the presentation of images in the second stanza heightens a sense of dislocation, the first four lines of the poem move from one to another in a way that seems, at first, jarring. The first line itself, and the idea of the first line, is arresting.  But to go from this sentence to “this is what I learn in June” and then to the next sentence with its equally jarring succession of clauses is to take an unexpected dance step. And we get no dance instructor. Dislocation is the result of gaps in transition or lack of context. There are such big gaps between the kinds of things being said from one line to the next, and then from one stanza to the next, that each movement throws us off a little—where are we now, where are we now? This is part of what makes the poem exciting. Even in its syntax, it can’t quite settle down—it makes effective use of end-stopped lines, enjambment, whole sentences, fragments, lists, thoughts cut off in the middle of—I’d say “elliptical” lines, but that would undercut their ungentle jumpcutness. The poem in its syntax and movement is as dislocated and fragmented as its “I,” until it pulls together anyway, embracing its very brokenness and multiplicity.

          C.D. Wright’s poem “A Series of Actions,” on the other hand, is, in fact, a series of fairly simple actions, minutely observed and in chronological order. Why, then, is it so  terrifying?

Like someone who gives

The gift of blood

The skin of the face is shining

Arms fold around each other

A string leads the way

Cold is the floor that receives

      the feet

The movements by which one 

     accedes to the door

The handle inscribed in the hand

The door opening on the scene

    of shoelaces, eyelashes

The left hand keeps it focused

The door opening on the living 

      almost unbearable

Light inside the space

The door opening as the palm

    of an eye28 

     In spite of the clear line of action and the seeming simplicity of the step-by-step process described, and in addition to the time-lapse, pixillated quality of the journey and the strange incidentals—shoelaces, eyelashes—which suddenly have unbearable weight as things glimpsed, there is one overwhelming omission that governs the mood of the piece. What is interesting about this piece is the way it utterly throws us, compels us into this moment before, this moment of what would normally be an unnoticed transition.    

          The omission at work here does not subtract emotion from the poem but, in a funny way, trusts it so much that there’s no need to “announce” it, as though the idea is to engage it and let it inform the piece, but as an engine below what emerges in the text. Oddly enough, this places the poem even closer to, rather than further from, the emotion of the moment—one which, I think, involves real terror and precedes devastating grief—by allowing us to linger on what was actually perceived, or remembered, in that state, and because there’s no need to abstract—or even narrow—the emotion by naming it.

Implied Simile

A metaphor is what happens when one looks in a certain way, just as a sneeze is what happens when one looks at the sun.

—Paul Valery29 

     Some poems ask to be taken as similes for the thing they’re getting at, describing, finding a way to talk about; but they refuse to give us, directly, the other side of the simile, which creates more space and mystery, and which helps to throw us into the midst of their embodiment of, enactment of, an experience, rather than leaving us on the clever outside of it. In other words, in comparing one thing to another without bothering to tell us the name of one of the things being linked, a simile is implied, rather than stated explicitly. Here’s the last stanza of C.D. Wright’s open field poem, “Like Peaches”:  

      things that are not written in this book

don’t go boring your nose in the fork of a tree not even present

                arise   refreshed     wormed

                  pulpy   opaque  ecstatic

lingering innocence

          of perfect nexus   shave the epicarp  collect the juices

                                                             we orchard30 

     What is this thing “like peaches,” that needn’t have a name? In a way, the poem becomes a riddle. But the object of this kind of riddle, I think, is not to guess the answer. It is, rather, to experience the clues with heightened alertness and sensitivity; to bask in the clues. The clues, in a sense, are the answer. How much more, and how much more mysteriously, this allows us to approach experience than, for example, simply saying the word “sex,” which can’t approach itself. We are forced to reckon with the idea that a word can’t come near the thing it stands in for. In a sense, this extends the idea that in order to have a more direct experience of something, the name of its general category must be stripped, de-linked, removed. The name is like a lid on a pot of boiling water, keeping all the steam inside. It can’t begin to imagine its own variations, the true heat and power rumbling beneath.                                              

     And what if the other side of the simile is more mysterious, even, than sex? What if the other side of the simile is “the ineffable,” the very thing that defies being named? Perhaps we can only hope to approach expressing it by an extended act of comparison, as in Ralph Angel’s poem “Subliminal Birds”:

Like the infant, wriggling free, tasting air,

hollering from the blue cliffs of Echo Park.

Like clear wind, like ashes rising from the tips of leaves,

or wooden storefronts in the must of towering construction.

And all that occurs while waiting, or forgetting,

the sound of a train in the heart’s distance.

All that coming and going, so much

life spreading its wings in both worlds,

soaring beneath the crust of the handshake and signature,

between the lines of stories we tell

in order to be heard here,

in order to feel confidently at home.

Right here, where walls of survival are windows.

A whole galaxy of stars in the nod of the proprietor

of a carnival shooting gallery.

Where, ecstatically, with the blinds drawn,

a woman tumbles from her bed

into the swirling green waters of an Oriental carpet.

Where children, school kids

in gray and white uniforms, twirl

until the buildings

are dust on the parched lips of a storm,

a shimmering ribbon,

an indelible, radiant haze.31

     What is it that is like this? Do we suppose that “subliminal birds” are like this? Perhaps. But what is a subliminal bird? It seems a small point, but how different this poem would be without its three “likes” in the first two stanzas. Without them, it is already an exaltation, simultaneously wary and ecstatic. But it is the hinge of “like” that pulls at the phenomena of the world, at the moments of direct statement—captured thought, reflection—and the hinge is then extended by words like “and all that,” “here,” “right here,” “where” that insist that these are all examples of the thing—the thing the hinge is connected to, the thing that remains unnamed. These words propel us through the poem, propel the poem, give it another dimension, curve it, in a way, into some place we can’t quite see, but know by the way the hair goes up on our arms.

      In a strange way this connective tissue between the seen and unseen, the named and unnamed, echoes the gradual historic movement in the visual arts to reduce the distance between figure and ground. Irwin notes that “if you go from classical painting all the way to cubism . . .what you’re saying in cubism is that the figure, this thing of value, is no longer isolated or dissociated from ground by meaning, but that it’s interlocked and interwrapped with this ground, that they’re interdependent.”32   The way Angel combines the hinge effect of what I’m calling implied simile with the very compelling immediacy of apprehended phenomena has a kind of psyche-bending potency, and yet it is absolutely rooted in what can be observed.

     Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s “Unmeasured Prelude” operates along these same lines, though it never once uses the word “like.” Instead, she gets an analogous effect with repetitions of the word “near.” In a sense, she talks about not-naming by not-naming, by sidling up to, by showing us how to do it:    

Near a match, what trembles—the world in the palm of your hand,

                             gold with red partitions, shifting on its hinges.

Near a door, what hesitates—space, splitting you

    head to foot

and sometimes the scent, when a man passes, holds too much

    information. No angel comes

and clucks its meaning. . . . 

To know who had heat. To know the light hairs rising even before

                           touch takes its advantage.

                       Near a field, near speaking.

           Near you, what weaves but desire’s unmeasured prelude,

    waves, but your own smoke—your breath’s sweet onion—

          Do not confuse this mouthful with any other. 33

      “Metaphor,” says Valery, “marks in its naïve principle a groping, a hesitation between several different expressions of one thought, an explosive incapacity that surpasses the necessary and sufficient capacity. Once one has gone over and made the thought rigorously precise, restricted it to a single object, then the metaphor will be effaced, and prose will reappear.”34 Groping of this sort is at the heart of this poem’s operations, as it hovers over the moment we feel a charge in the air, before we know why, and celebrates this arousal, this shift in consciousness, this heightened awareness, in all its phenomenological specificity, whatever it results in, whatever it becomes. Is it an ars poetica or a love poem? It resists deciding that. Even the idea of prelude—used here metaphorically—involves encountering that zone before absolute knowledge, before cognition has folded something definite into its stream of information, when what will form is still forming. 

      The technique used here is another method for opening up possibilities, for trying to get into the cracks of things that are hard to express. I don’t believe that it is impossible to find ways to approximate such experiences—to come closer to a sense of how they hit, in their mystery; but they do seem to demand a different language or a different way of using language, one that parallels, as much as possible, the strangeness, the unnamedness, of the experience itself, which seems to demand that it not be named in the same breath as it demands its own commemoration.

     Implied simile also provides a kind of freedom from the literal while at the same time allowing us to savor the literal; perhaps it is simply a response to the necessity of finding a more analogous way to talk, to write, to make sound about something. The danger in not naming it, not giving away the other side of the simile, is that no one else will be able to enter it. The more thrilling possibility is that they will.

In Other Words 

     Thought must be hidden in verse like the nutritive essence in fruit. It is nourishing

But seems merely delicious. One perceives pleasure only, but one receives a sub-stance. Enchantment, that is the nourishment it conveys. The passage is sweet.

—Paul Valery35

     What is all of this not-naming, this attempting to get beyond the limits of naming, really about? It is hard to get away from wanting to know the name of something seen for the first time—vetch, say, or Queen Anne’s lace. And yet at the very moment of naming, that magical moment of having the “how to call it,” we are apt to surrender the enchantment of encountering the very thing we want to address or refer to. When something has a name, we say we have a “handle” for it. “What’s your handle?” It becomes manageable when partially abstracted, reduced to a word, to something that can be used.   We are apt not to see it quite as freshly. We are apt to limit our experience of it. The I and Thou of it, as Martin Buber might say, is likely to be injured.

     The kinds of strategies I’ve been exploring all seem to allow more immediate access to what I’m sure I’ve heard described somewhere as the poem under the poem—to the often somewhat mysterious presence that the poem itself inscribes. They also restore some of what Irwin calls “the extreme complexity and richness of our sense mechanism.” As he notes, “we edit from it severely, in time to see only what we expect to see.”36 

     If I’m writing about something, I want you to see what you don’t expect to see, or to see what you might expect in a fresh way. I don’t want you to experience the name of it. I want you to experience it. And in a way, all poetry is simply translation—of experience. It is a container for what can otherwise not be expressed or led to without somehow being flattened, without becoming a rumor of itself. It is, hopefully, repeatedly flammable, arranged to cause repeatable shocks of transport. And yet, my specific language will never be exactly yours, and, I hope, will always work at the boundaries of my own. “An epic poem,” says Valery, “ is a poem that can be told. When one tells it, one has a bilingual text.”37  

       Finally, perhaps, and paradoxically, our attempts at “not-naming” lend themselves to a virtual renaming of experience, as though our words are the urns for it—but we must be able to drink from them. In effect, a poem becomes a new (long) name for something otherwise inexpressible, but because it engages in “strange discourse,” it delivers the spark of recognition we might feel as children first learning a word for something. Emerson’s idea that all language is “fossil poetry” is, I believe, a way of saying that the language we glide over the surface of once had the same sense of power and magic and mystery—of presence—that our new constellations of language in poetry try to evoke and provoke. What we are trying to create with poetry is something that has not fossilized—something that, in fact, refuses by its very nature to become a fossil. It does no good on the shelf. Poetry is meant to be inhaled.  

     And yet, to achieve something so alive that it defies fossilization, we must constantly be on the lookout for new ways to keep it breathing, and we must do this because language ends up somehow delimiting—or, conversely, opening the aperture of—vision. As Charles Wright says at the end of his poem “Looking Outside the Cabin Window, I Remember a Line by Li Po”:

We who would see beyond seeing

      see only language, that burning field.38 

Notes

1. Cited in Lawrence Wechsler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), p. 203.

2. H.D., “Tribute to the Angels,” Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 77.

3. Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot, ed. Jackson Mathews (Princeton, New Jersey: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 173.

4. Cited in Wechsler, ibid, p. 78.

5. Cited in Wechsler, ibid, p. 198.

6. Valery, ibid, p. 60.

7. Ibid, p. 64.

8. Ibid, pp. 63-64.

9. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: Signet Classics, 1958), p. 372. 

10. Kristi Hager, informal conversation, 1996.

11. Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1999), p. 4.

12. Ibid, p. 85.

13. Valery, ibid, p. 75.

14. Carson, ibid, pp. 98-100.

15. Ibid, p. 101.

16. Georg Trakl, Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, trans. Daniel Simko (Rhode Island, London: Asphodel Press, 1998), p. 89.

17. Ibid, p. 107.

18. Ibid, p. 121.

19. Ibid, pp. 141, 145.

20. Ibid, p. 39.

21. Valery, ibid, p. 59.

22. Robert Stickgold, “Talk of the Nation,” (National Public Radio, 10/29/99).

23. Lynn Emmanuel, The Dig and Hotel Fiesta (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995) p. 105.

24. Ibid, p.109.

25. Valery, ibid, p. 182.

26. Belle Waring, “Baby Random,” New American Poets of the 90s, ed. Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten (Boston: David R. Godine, 1999), p. 399. 

27. Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Never Be the Horse (Akron, Ohio: University of Akron Press, 1999), p. 18.

28. C.D. Wright, Tremble (New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1996), pp.30-31.

29. Valery, ibid, p. 180.

30. Wright, ibid, pp. 9-10.

31. Ralph Angel, Neither World (Oxford, Ohio: Miami University Press, 1995), pp.17-18.

32. Cited in Wechsler, ibid, p. 109.

33. Goldberg, ibid, p. 20.

34. Valery, ibid, p. 177.

35. Valery, ibid, p. 179.

36. Cited in Wechsler, ibid, p. 129.

37. Valery, ibid, p. 183.

38. Charles Wright, Chickamauga. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), p. 38.

--This essay first appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Volume 37, October/November, 2004.

Sarah Maclay is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The "She" Series: A Venice Correspondence (What Books, 2016), a braided collaboration with poet Holaday Mason; Music for the Black Room (UT Press, 2011); and The White Bride (UT Press, 2008), a book of prose poems. Her poetry, criticism and theatre pieces have appeared in well over 100 publications. Among them are The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Hotel Amerika, The Writer’s Chronicle, Pool, ZZYZYVA, lyric, Ninth Letter, The Laurel Review, The Journal, Manoa, Scenarios: Scripts to Perform, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner), Slope 47, Poetry Daily, VerseDaily and Poetry International, where she also served as Book Review Editor for a decade, as well.