In Praise of the Poetic Mess

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Naomi Cohn’s poems “Awl” and “Cell” appear in the March 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

You don’t even know what it is, the lurid yellow smear on your boot, something rubbed off a rotting log when you stumbled on the dappled, damp path along the river. You might mistake it for a blob of fungus. But while it’s called a slime mold, it’s neither mold nor fungus. Slime molds sometimes move through the world as individual, single-celled, amoeba-like organisms; other times they aggregate into a mass of gooey protoplasm that can move across a landscape, form specialized structures, and send out reproductive spores. They shapeshift and behave in wildly different ways according to the conditions in which they find themselves.

Words and the forms we give them can be equally messy. How can something 15,000 words long, without much in the way of line breaks or meter, be called a poem? How can a couple fragments of such a thing be called a poem? Or be considered whole in themselves?

I’ve worried these questions for several years now as I’ve wrestled with “The Braille Encyclopedia,” a piece (poem? essay?) about learning and falling in love with Braille as part of adapting to progressive vision loss that began in my thirties. “Cell” and “Awl,” which appear as individual prose poems (single-celled organisms? spores?) in this issue are “entries” from this fictional encyclopedia.

Like a slime mold, the project sprawled in content. Being an encyclopedia, “The Braille Encyclopedia,” gets to be about lots of things: reading, writing, Braille, going (legally) blind, still being attached to sight and consuming and producing visual art, wood lice, slivovitz, woodpeckers, working as an encyclopedia editor, a Vermeer painting.

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I didn’t expect to ever have even a nodding acquaintance with Braille, let alone fall in love with it. I was born a sighted person, at least according to the norms of contemporary U.S. culture, where as long as a pair of glasses or contact lenses can help you read a set of letters of a certain size at a certain distance, you are defined as sighted, no matter how limited the capacities of your unaided eyes. So while I wore increasingly thick glasses, I was defined as fully sighted, until, in my thirties, tiny central patches of my retinas began to delaminate. For a decade or so after that I still hung on to sightedness, an increasingly tenuous trick.

I bumped into Braille at age 47, as part of a mid-life career shift. I stumbled into vocational rehabilitation, or “Adjustment to Blindness” training: orientation and mobility, tasks of daily living, technology, Braille, and wood shop. (Yes, you read that correctly, wood shop. Wood shop was a confidence-building blast, but I valued it most for its predictable ability to freak out fully-sighted people. Blind people with power tools and table saws—apparently a lot of sighted folks have nightmares about this.)

But back to Braille. It was not, on the face of it, the most practical thing I learned. Learning technology like text-to-speech and how to get around with a white cane probably have done more to help me eke out a living and stay alive on America’s mean, car-oriented streets.

But it’s Braille I fell in love with. I’m not much of a romantic, but I got all swoon-y for Braille, fell hard for its bumpy peculiarities. It gave me back some of the sensory pleasures of reading from a printed page, albeit one constellated with raised dots rather than inky print.

But as much as I was obsessively in love with Braille, I seemed, in writing about it, to be unable to focus purely on it as a subject. Hence the list of entries that ooze over topics ranging from “Awl” to “Blood” to “Cell” to “Ice” to “Needle” to Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

“The Braille Encyclopedia,” was supposed to be one of a series of essays about my experiences with blindness and disability. It was just going to be a little, normative, possibly even tidy, 2,500-word essay. But things got out of hand. Single-celled simplicity gave way to protoplasm.

Three years and 15,000 words later, the thing has ballooned into something too huge to be an essay, too short to be a memoir. It moved around. It sent out spores that have become projects of their own. I tried to separate it back into individual single-celled pieces, but they linked themselves back together into a series of connected prose poems—or something more gelatinous: a book-length prose poem.

A piece of writing can be all these things—sometimes memoir, sometimes a collection of individual poems, a single coherent long poem, a lyric essay. It can move back and forth, shifting form.

It may be perfectly annoying for a writer or poet to so abdicate responsibility, to not even be able to name the form of what she’s produced. But, for me at least, shapeshifting slime mold is the perfect—the only—form for writing about the experience of altered sight. Blindness is not a binary category; I see some things and not others; sometimes I move through the world with my white cane; other times with a camera. Like the strangely lovely slime mold, the best parts of life—including poetry—may ooze, spill over, self-contradict, and defy tidy definition.