Experience You’re Not Willing to Share + Book You’re Reading + Movies

In my first post “On Fictional Poetry,” I made promises I didn’t keep: to actually make the argument later in the month, for one. Also: that I would post a poem-essay on how poems make arguments (the sequel to “Essay on Bad Writing”), which I haven’t finished, and that I’d flesh out my half-formed sense that there was something important about the fact that the poets I knew seemed to be talking about novels more often than poetry.

Like anyone who can’t figure out an idea, I asked my friends for help. I interviewed Corina Copp briefly a few weeks ago, in part because, when Jasper Bernes shared my first Harriet post on Facebook, he noted we had been talking about the question of the “fictional” when I was last in Oakland, which made me realize I had been (and often am) a lot more specific when hashing out a question in conversation.

We were talking about Corina’s book, The Green Ray, about characters and dialogue and references to movies/books in it, and specifically, about her use of the French dialogic marks throughout, the guillemet:

Corina: In an interview I was too cowardly to publish, I was asked about that -- the interviewer thought I was from Europe!

I had to self-interrogate, to say, “No, no, no, this is a joke to myself.”

Diana: What’s it a joke about?

C: Midwestern upward mobility [we both laugh] . . . how I've surrounded myself now with “culture," how my intimate relationships are with films, books/poems, and dead female authors. To point at what is called pretension, when it is also a life.

A lot of it is actual dialogue: I’ll be quoting something, then I'd insert my own words, to mess with any consistency [as to quotation itself]. “Everyone’s going to hate it.”

If I wrote an essay about The Green Ray without talking to Copp, I would have different ideas about dialogue in it:

D: There are many times that I’ve sat down with the intention of writing about your book, and it gets really hard because it seems like you’re so insistent on a thing not repeating that, once I’ll get a sense of a pattern, I’ll be like “OK, I know what I’m going to say . . ."

Like, “There’s this thing going on, these marks seem to clearly be . . . it seems like she’s intentionally playing with the fact that this isn’t speech. This isn’t a quote. . . and then part of her work appears in the quote and there’s no end to it.”

I’m like, “I got this, I’m going to write about that.” But then, the next time, it’s clearly someone talking as if they are in a movie.

C: Right, right.

D: And I’m like, fuck, I got it wrong again. You’re unwilling to be consistent . . .

C: Yeah, those signposts . . . when I’m reading something and it’s that deliberate . . . it’s as if . . . like we need a key?

I tell myself, in the beginning, it was that I liked using them [the guillemet], I wanted to set something out visually, another register.

Now, the dialogic marks work as 1. A joke about the way a Midwesterner’s life has unexpectedly become about movies and books (I relate, damn), 2. A means of both indicating and taking away consistency, 3. A visual effect, 4. A rejection of signposts.

I’ve written so many versions of the same essay, one trying to answer the question of what holds a poem together. When this essay isn’t about the “fictional,” it’s been about the kind of references poems make (to pop culture, to luxury, to political events, to novels, etc.). I can’t entirely tell whether these are the same question, but I think they are partial answers to: What organization or logic can we give a poem that helps it “come together” around something—the sense that it becomes whole, or that its partiality alludes to something whole—without falling back on the emptiness of formalism? “Characters” can give a poem a minor system, one that will necessarily understand something “subjective” is happening, even if it’s a made-up subject; references make the poem’s world bigger, but they also locate it: this poem takes place, momentarily, in the film The Earrings of Madame de . . .

Copp emphasizes reference over plot. I made this formula out of our conversation, and then noticed that I never looked for its sum:

“Experience You’re Not Willing to Share + Book You’re Reading + Movies”:

C: It will often be related to an experience that I am having but that I am not willing to share.

D: So it’s: “Experience you’re not willing to share” . . .

C: Yeah, but that I’m still trying to convey . . .

D: Plus “book you’re reading” . . . can you give me a set of texts, without the experience? In one poem?

C: Ummm . . .

D: Like The Long Goodbye. . .

C: Oh is The Long Goodbye in there?

D: Yeah . . .

C: "Oh 1 HR / and 52 minutes, Long Good / Bye," that’s how long The Long Goodbye is. "How Long in historical time."

D: And you’re also reading Earrings of Madame De?

C: I was watching the film. Have you seen it?

D: No!

C: It’s so good.

I started that poem ["Moderator Cantabile"] when Ben [Fama] and Monica [McClure] invited me to their “Crush Party,” and they wanted me to read something. I was like, “I need to write something dense and sexy,” ha. And then I worked on it for a year and a half.

That moment itself . . . that poem itself . . . it was a breakup poem, originally . . . a lot of the accumulation and references were a way to make it "better than" this one strand of pain that it was starting to represent. To heap on other things more interesting to pay attention to.

D: I’ve been doing a lot of that recently as well. This terrible breakup poem that’s just a long reading of Elena Ferrante, with some songs thrown in, and some movies. You’re so much more elegant at it than me . . .

C: I don’t know what that would mean to you. I’m more interested in making it so you don’t know, whereas you let the cracks show.

To let the cracks show not only in my poetry—where, it’s true, I no longer actually replace the “strand of pain” with interesting things, but narrate the attempt to replace the pain instead—but also in “critical writing,” which is more resistant to the showing of cracks, I asked a number of other poets I love to answer a question about fiction and poetry. That will be my last post, tomorrow.

In their answers, though, and in a lot of the conversations I’ve had with writers in the last year, it seems like poetry refers to or borrows the functions of “characters” or “plots” in other media without the responsibility to build a whole world for the character to live in, to give all the description and background that a novel, say, often demands. That’s one side of it. But another is a more practical sense of a writerly tool. Copp and I turned to Austen’s use of free indirect discourse [FID], as we continued to talk about speech in The Green Ray:

D: Also, this is super dorky, but . . . in . . . Jane Austen . . . there are those moments where she puts things in quotes that aren’t things people could say. The moments of free indirect discourse where, within quotes, it will say, “He said”—

C: I love that.

D: Right? Like, where the quote is clearly a thing only the narrator could say, but it’s in quotes anyway. And you can tell it’s FID because the narrator sounds like the character, but they are still narrating, it’s still in the 3rd person. The quotes signal: some part of this sounds like someone else’s speech. It’s a thing I really like in the 19th-century novel, the slippage of character’s dialogue into text and vice versa.

C: I love that, too. Any time there’s a possibility of simultaneity, I will do that and use it. A lot of that book is noticing those moments.

The other day, I was singing. But my voice got all . . . something weird, it cracked, like when you clear your throat? And then another sound came out, I swear, beneath my actual voice! I was like, “oh my god, what is happening?” It was exciting because it was dual . . .

D: I hate it when things have only one meaning.

Copp doesn’t agree with me: she says she “struggles with actually conceiving of a singular meaning,” whereas I conceive of one and then want to mess it up even before I’ve said it.

In thinking more through what poets take from fiction, I keep returning to the way (I imagine) it sounded when Copp sang two voices at once. In singing—or in conversations with friends or other less “constructed” moments—the crack appears as an accident, one you suddenly want to take a note about, record, or find out how it happened.

In writing, there’s a chance to create the conditions for this crack. In the case of FID, this means creating such a consistent voice in one character that you can tell when she interrupts the narrator, when the narrator speaks in two voices at once. In the case of a poem, it might mean layering a personal experience with a film, say, such that the same line functions as the speaker, as her reference, as the set of decisions she made about their overlap.

Tomorrow, I’ll end with brief answers from Rin(don) Johnson, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Gordon Faylor, Ben Fama, and Corina Copp again. In these answers, I’m also looking for the place where two voices or two claims seem to overlap, only to suddenly split apart.

For now, though, I want to end this last post “by me” with one final request I got for poetry advice, that I think relates to my conversation with Copp:

Dear Poetry,

Somewhere in my heart of hearts I still believe all art constantly aspires to the condition of poetry, but I have a hard time feeling excited about anything. The last book of poetry I read and enjoyed was Earl Miner's outdated An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Perhaps it was the antiquated New Criticism frame, or the subject matter itself, that came as a reprieve from the anxieties and banalities of contemporary poetry—the world of professionalized poetry often seems a table set for courtiers rich in cultural capital. To be clear, it isn't that I doubt the cultural labor of contemporary poetry, or that I believe in some decontextualized notion that poetry makes nothing happen. Perhaps, as Rubén Darío wrote, "yo persigo una forma que no encuentra mi estilo," and the preciousness of my ideal, the infinite deferral of an ideal form, has made all poetry asymptotic and plebeian. I used to believe things like "all poems are love poems," and maybe that is the problem. Or this is a question of love: how can I love (poetry) again?

Waiting for the Gems,
Loveless in Brooklyn

The last thing Corina said to me before the recording ended—before an off-leash dog came to our table, and we cut off the interview to pet it—was “I’m kind of getting over my style in this book.” Bernadette Mayer also speaks of her desire to stave off “the addiction to style” that she thinks makes other poets repeat their own books. When we look for the other voice underneath our voice, bring in books or movies that can replace our personal experiences, look for a way out of what we hate in contemporary poetry and its interpretation, or long for an ideal form that we can only asymptotically approach, we find ways to make poetry struggle against itself. But for me, this isn’t “plebian,” or at least, not in the pejorative sense: it’s “common” in the sense that love is very commonly not grounded on an actual engagement with what’s loved, but waiting around to converge with it.

This sounds to me, I mean, like a letter from someone who loves poetry: this kind of disappointment and longing is love’s purview. Especially in the moment of the breakup, where you see everything stupid about the fact that you’re still in love, and hate the loved one (poetry) all the more for the fact that you still have hope.

My advice, then, is to triangulate. Ask someone you already love to email you poetry they love, once each morning. Do the same for them. This works for me with people, at least: everyone is cuter when a friend agrees. At the same time, it’s fine if you don’t like anything they send you. The important part is to read poetry with a different purpose. When you open a book, you won’t ask yourself, “What does this book show me about what poetry is capable of,” but “What poem would I want to read to my friend?”

Then, hopefully, you can get dinner with your friend, and pet a dog instead of finding out how contemporary poetry works.

 

[Editor's Note: In full disclosure we'd like to note that Corina Copp is a Harriet staff writer.]