Third Place

Why is it that the encounter with a text, which stimulates what must be thinking—an alert fullness; the wary thrill of standing a little beyond oneself; emergent novelty; the threat and the inevitability of error—so often has no language content of its own? I think I know my brain, and I know it verbally, but the texts that I thrill to most don’t even raise the prospect of my speaking back to them. Language is for when something isn’t working. Such texts leave me grasping for deep animal metaphors of dwelling and motion to describe my experience. They leave me falling back on descriptions of my experience, because the mystery of my experience somehow exceeds the object that generated it, which, squinted at, disintegrates to a line of ants trekking across the page.

How and what does the mute, or semi-verbal, experience of a text know? Which texts allow this kind of inhabitation? And how do poets talk about the possibilities of such being inside a work? Put another way, how can something irreal and small come to seal around us as a world, and what do we learn when we feel through it with fingers and tongue, not vision?

My initial hypothesis is that rhythm is involved, pulsing in the dark zones of the midbrain that regulate our breath and attune us finely to the ghosts of a space. Because the book that most recently absorbed, changed, and muted me was Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), I went looking for, and thought back to, works at the sly edge of poetry and prose, for which the paragraph, or more probably the sentence-block, is the primary unit of meaning, and experience.

Here’s one such block from Robertson:

The cool threshold vibrated with sparseness. Then the hotel’s enclosed scent opened like a grove. I, a girl, exultant, crossed into the room of sentences. This room was suddenly ornate with the written vestiges of silence. No judgment, no need, no contract, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.

What an unprepossessing welcome! The door is unlocked for us, but we’re allowed to settle in at our own pace, experiencing the threshold, then the smell, then the entry, then the “sudden” fullness of being inside. Only slowly do we realize that a thorough architect has thought about how it feels to move into the room, and that the verbs in each sentence that we would expect to use to describe our own experience of space, have been gracefully attributed to the room itself. “Vibrate,” “opened.” Though there is an “I” it is a light one, and the fact that the verbs are almost independent—in the second half of the paragraph, absent—makes it very easy to fill the hole with ourselves. Because we are reading a paragraph, we expect the forward pulse of narration or argument; instead, we are given just the pulse, not the pulse of. We’re treated to the precise opposite of a stage direction, with neither the character nor the action specified. This is why, I think, when Robertson attempts to fill the room, after that beautiful “suddenly”—the moment when we realize we are really here—its most positive content proves to be a series of negatives (“no judgment … no seduction”). Which, in turn, reflects the deep fact that this space, where our literary experience is enacted, is a space of reprieve, of asylum, of waiting. It derives its power from refusal; its form is the pale negation of a real hotel. So, though the experience must be, in some way, the experience of nothing, of a vibrating “sparseness,” that nothing has become available to us to really experience. And it is that experience of nothing that is the real point, not the nothing itself.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s poem “Silence” (2021), here in its entirety, plays a similar border song:

Your silence which. With a question of punctuation. Seems to repeat. Elsewhere a long complicated life. Syllable by syllable isn’t. The slightest pause. What I wanted and. Therefore this curving to tell you.

The small victory of being—the poem’s, and, after a long career of telling, the poet’s—is perforated by periods that feel, in this poem, like specks of antimatter, an entanglement of nonspeech and its printed sign. Around which desire (read, meaning) pivots: “What I wanted and."

These are prose poems that wander, or sprout in eerie placelessness; uninterested in firm identities or sudden epiphanies, they shiver instead along their length. Julia Kristeva might call this feminine writing that resists masculine closure and clean symbolic order. But Robertson’s speaker, a belated provincial, a Romantic who wafts between metropoles, and takes this novel-in-paragraphs as her form, reminds me too of Édouard Glissant’s advocacy for a “poetics of duration,” against the sudden seizing of epiphany. Through poetry like the “accumulation of sediments” “dawns the linked histories of peoples”—and one hears the stress on linking. This is poetic making understood as the building, comma by comma, of a lost shared place, in which revised pasts and new futures become speakable.

I think the prose block and the prose poem have been, recently, a flexible way for poets to think about the simultaneous temporalities global modernity asks us to inhabit, about circulation and the translatability of experience. Maybe it found its first prominence with Baudelaire, at a moment when urban modernity was reshaping the received idea of what an I was and how we experienced it. (Paris Spleen is always staging the porousness of the mind to its environment, a blurring that the prose poem, lacking the recurrent fissures of line breaks, is well suited to.) Now, we constitute and deploy our Is in changing relationships to a continuous global discourse and the fantasies of cultural totality it enables. The prose block can be a useful blackbox in which to stage a manageable diversity of sentences, as they color and inflect and ironize each other.

This is from Sawaku Nakayasu’s poem “Some girls fight inside a bag of Cheetos,” in the book Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (2020):

Taking advantage of opacity, Girl E goes for it and punches indiscriminately. Her trembling fist, upon breaking through the flesh of another girl, transforms into words. There among the fleshy organs, she opens her fist-of-words, allowing mean, toxic syllables to thus infiltrate the body. At the point of entry, a scar is left, as a darker ring of Cheeto powder.

Less peaceful than Robertson’s, but an inhabitation nonetheless. Robertson’s room filled with a series of negations; Nakayasu’s book is populated by a series of lettered Girls, only sometimes distinguishable, and usually fighting. The rhizomatically organized book, by interspersing erratic translations of its poems into French and Japanese, wryly miniaturizes a global literary economy in which the prose poem, by its apparent fungibility, functions as the shipping container traveling between peripheries. Inside this quotation, concentric enclosures of commodity form—the poem, the Cheeto bag, the idea of the Girl—narrow successively to “the body” then “the point of entry,” where “a scar is left.” Even as the poem zooms in on the wound, its language becomes passively institutional, deflecting specificity and responsibility. However ironized and madcap Nakayasu’s demi-Jeremiad, it too asks us to really feel the possibilities and paranoias that come of being held, trapped, in a language-form. It projects, too, a strange hope, that what appears as physical as a punch, as flesh, might be, most deeply, “words” and “syllables”—thus capable of being reformed by other words and syllables. This is a version of Shelley’s prayer at the end of “Ode to the West Wind,” and I hear it in environmental, atelic verbs such as Robertson might use: “trembling,” “transforms,” “opens,” “infiltrate.”

This poem is as bumptious, unfinishable, and multiply centered as Nakayasu’s book at large. It’s a book that invites future makers: loosely woven, even sitcommish, it anticipates its own decomposition and repurposing in the long struggle against the suffocating language of capitalism. Like Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, like Auden’s Paid on Both Sides, it offers itself up as a catalogue of concrete moves, sharp tones, and fugitive camaraderie. The unruly conflict it allows is the blood sign of its allegiance to the vivid, breathing world. After all, if you are going to enact symbolic violence on an unjust system, which, being everywhere, notoriously evades our attempt to point directly at it, you have to first incorporate that injustice into your text. Which it will warp.