Sounds Her Depths: Reviewing Alejandra Pizarnik's Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972

Jon Curley reviews Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 (New Directions, 2016) by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert, for Hyperallergic. About her, he writes:

A translator and critic as well as poet, Pizarnik lived between Buenos Aries and Paris, befriending Octavio Paz and Julio Cortazar and identifying with, while not necessarily emulating, the so-called poètes maudites of 19th-century France, among them, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval, and especially Lautréamont (the last lines of her suicide note poem reads: “oh life/oh language/oh Isadore,” Isadore Ducasse being the birth name of Lautréamont). For her, much more so than these eminent antecedents, a sense of apartness grows into a suffocating sense of irreversible damnation, a sentence on which she deliberates over and over.

About her poems, Curley dwells in the depths (and even brings forth Sarah Kane):

Declaring one’s identity for Pizarnik is difficult if not impossible. She is relentless in her focus but contradictory in her assessment of what her poetry is actually doing. Her intention seems torn between a steadfast commitment to exhibiting the traumatic condition of her irrevocably damned sense of self (while sensing, fragilely, that this poetic register of despair is a force for consolation) and vitality just in the striving to articulate itself. As she describes in “Cornerstone”: “I can’t just speak and say nothing. That’s how we lose ourselves,/The poem and I, in the hopeless attempt to write the things that burn.” On the evidence of this work, Pizarnik’s survival tactic, or at least her effort to stave off the inevitable, was to translate extremity into distilled, stark forms that clarified her approach and predicament. In this she resembles English playwright Sarah Kane (herself a suicide at twenty-eight), especially in 4.48 Psychosis, a dramatic set-piece that plays as both an incredibly engaging yet troubling performance and a kind of suicide note in multiple voices.

In “Continuity,” this consummate poet of aloneness writes:

Cure me of this void, I said. (The light loved itself in this
darkness of mine. I knew that there was absence when I found myself
saying, It is I.) Cure me, I said.

Despite the plea above — “Cure me, I said.” — there is never any true tension between the will to live and the will to die, nothing but relentless atomization of a disturbed state of being in which inconsolable dread announces a nearness to death: the imminent demise of the poet herself. Frustration, failure, and futility dog her: “All these fragments rend me/Impure dialogue/A desperate expulsion from verbal matter” (“A Musical Hell”). Another poem advertises: “Yo prepare mi muerte./I am preparing my death.” This makes for funereal reading but, then again, most graveyards do showcase some brilliant and moving language. Translator Yvette Siegert has succeeded in faithfully rendering the minimalism of the Spanish in wrenching, stripped English; she and Pizarnik give proof that unadorned poetry, particularly of a confessional bent, can generate more heat and light than the more histrionic — and often pretentious — examples of that genre.

Read the full review at Hyperallergic.