Notes on ‘For the Ride’

I live alone in a culture that speaks a language, French, that's not my native one. My work, writing poetry, is solitary. Most of my professional activity that involves meeting people—reading my work, discussing literature, occasional workshops—takes place in the U.S. I don't work for anyone and I don't have much money. I turned 75 last year.

At the time I began For the Ride, in 2010, I had already been living like this for ten years, since my husband died. In some ways the poem is about a solitary mind. There has been a planetary catastrophe, and a lone consciousness is somewhere at a beginning, in medias res, post-crisis, starting to speak strangely and calling itself One. Here is a description I sent to my editor to help explain the book:

In For the Ride, a long narrative poem, the protagonist, One, is suddenly within The Glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings thus begin to materialize, and it seems that they (including One) are all survivors of a global disaster … They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide that what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They “sail” and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, which comes to have only one pronoun—“one” (plural “the ones”). The ones disembark at an abandoned future city and have adventures—engage in a battle, encounter animals, exude from their bodies their own poems … And other things happen too. The poem is “illustrated” by drawings made of letters.

As I say in the book’s Preface, I'm not always sure what happens in the poem, as I’m never sure what happens in life.

One, the protagonist, is, from the first line, inside The Glyph, which I modeled on the basement of a museum in Paris, l'Orangérie, on whose walls are hung eight huge paintings by Monet—Les Nymphéas— of a pond with water lilies. In my poem, One encounters a pond on the walls of The Glyph. But then One also observes scenes involving people who become characters of the poem. A ship materializes, eventually called Radio Free Ark. There will be a voyage away from the destroyed planet towards … somewhere. The characters decide they must take words with them, language, that which they must save. For I realized that if the human race were destroyed all language might disappear from the cosmos, no? Devastating thought … The characters invent a way to decide which words and usages to save, thereby changing language. They can now speak however they want to; they have that freedom. They board the Ark and “sail,” they tell stories on the ship, which soon “lands” at an abandoned city filled with frescoes. The painted beings in the frescoes come down from the walls and welcome the voyagers, but they are authoritarian—priest, leader, warriors—and there is immediately a battle our heroes win. When the people of the frescoes are forced to return into the walls, two characters choose to go with them. The remaining ones walk on; poems start to come out of their feet, and they recite them. An infinitude of words has been released from Radio Free Ark, and the characters are surrounded by words that keep growing in number, changing … Further amazing things happen. You should read the book to find out what they are.

I wanted to write in a long line. I needed formal constraints because I didn’t know what would happen. I wanted to get at the question of what the basis of being is and where language comes from. I could only use words to discuss the origin of words, so that was a problem. I often use characters and voices to address a subject, and I saw that I would again go at, with voices, a huge topic. But I get more information from voices if they speak in some form, so I decided to use two classical meters I was interested in, the greater Asclepiad and the greater Sapphic. They are long-lined meters adapted by the Latin poet Horace from earlier Greek meters. They’re interesting because they aren’t consistent across the line, being composed of long, complex feet that differ from each other. I also decided to write in sets of fourteen lines, which were not differentiated on the page, that is, I would write fourteen lines a day, but not sonnets. There is no indication in the text that I’m writing in groups of fourteen. I didn’t want anyone to know.

I wanted to include some short, embedded poems. So the characters decide that they need an Anthology of poems to take with them, which seem to be written as they go, in the new language. The Anthology poems often have bizarre shapes, which I got from the Loeb Classical Library volume called Greek Lyric I, Sappho and Alcaeus. The poems therein have missing words and letters—they’re relics of poems. I wrote poems using their shapes, incorporating the holes or spaces that indicate gaps in text.

I was afraid that the poem might become visually vague. The poem began in a setting—The Glyph—which couldn’t exist, and was going to continue, probably, in “another dimension.” I decided the poem needed illustrations. I began to make calligrams, which I thought of as drawings, and I drew objects and faces and figures via letter keys on the computer—usually forming words, too. The first calligram I made was of the ship. It would operate mysteriously, but I wanted the reader to see a clipper ship. I went to a model ship store in Paris and bought an assemblage kit. I found the store in the Yellow Pages—it was on the rue du Louvre, across the street from a detective agency with a neon sign always lit saying Duluc détective. I constructed the ship at home—it soon fell apart, but while it was together I drew it with letters. It became Radio Free Ark.

The abandoned city the Ark sails to is based on an exhibition in Paris, called Teotihuacan, Cité des Dieux, for which an abandoned ancient city in Mexico was brought over to Paris and installed in the Musée Quai Branly. The frescoes and frescoed personages in my poem are inspired by this exhibition.

I re-discovered a photo of my father in his auto supply store, Needles Auto Supply. He is selling something to someone, surrounded by parts and tools. My father became the model for one of the characters, Parts one, and the auto parts were transformed into parts of speech that get collected and discussed as the new language is being invented. My father died in a coma, and a state of coma figures throughout the poem: Is reality as we know it a coma?

I got one idea for how the new language works from a conversation with a Cambodian hair stylist. As she cut my hair, she told me that in Cambodian there is only the present tense but you can do tense-like things with adverbs. My poem's new language becomes a present-tense, adverbial language. But it's always mutating, always. The object throughout is to create a language with no gender references and in the present. The challenge of doing that causes zaniness—a quality I've always liked. Because everything becomes clumsy, then new.