The Failed Azaleas

When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuschias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did they recuse themselves?

I maintain that the azaleas failed me. But there is a sense in which I, too, failed the azaleas. There is a reciprocity in this failure to accept the unexpected. And this relationship is the beginning of a poem.

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The poem is the failed azalea. Expectancy, anticipation, disappointment—this is the poem’s terrain. Language is the vehicle but it is also the poem’s limitation. The poet considers how she is reading the azaleas through an imaginative paucity that demands plenitude, in light of her own desires and socializations.

Similarly, the critic wonders what expectations she has brought to the book, which would constitute the book’s alleged failure. Since beauty carpenters the basis of aesthetic relationships, we want nature to deliver the beauty we’ve known. But poetry gives the most when it refuses to fulfill our hunger and offers what could be otherwise—the possibility of otherwisdom.

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Criticism is the art of writing about one’s relationship to reading. Critique is a conversation with a particular text in relation to other texts. Both the poet and the critic are tasked with seducing the reader’s ear and securing their attention. I value the non-neutral, exposed speaker who challenges convention by bringing themselves to the page. Mary Capello does this with Awkward, a “discursive autobiography,” a digressive romp through words, etymology, personal experience, and misunderstanding that relates books to the speaker's life. Rosemarie Waldrop’s translations of Edmond Jabès turned into a critical engagement with his poems in Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès. Re-reading, here, constitutes an intimate critique that makes use of their conversations, dialogues, and meetings. And re-calling evokes the way in which correspondences carve a relationship with ghosts, a way of speaking to their texts. To quote Waldrop quoting her own translation of Jabès :

There is no place not the reflection of another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the place. I write at the mercy of this place.

Waldrop’s re-view involves re-seeing, or seeing again, and seeing in light of how one has seen prior, and this gaze is rendered more intimate by the multiple levels of exposure. The re-view assumes this intimacy of re-reading has been earned.

The exposed speaker dialogues with their scars as much as with their tattoos. To write from one’s experience risks misunderstanding, or illegibility. The act of reading challenges the stability or fixedness of authorial intent. The reader imbues the reading with their own fears, experiences, culture, and biases. We may, in fact, take it the wrong way, which is to say, not as the author intended.

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Reflected places illuminate. Due to a traumatic brain injury and seizure risk, I wasn’t able to learn to drive alongside my peers. When the moment arrived, I was consumed by the freedom of chasing a whim down a rural road. Shortly after receiving my driver’s license, I parked near a meadow to feel the unknown world as a stranger, and sketched a poem about the redness of Alabama’s dirt roads. The poem emerged from images of fire anthill blisters written on my wrist with a pen. It became my first print publication. The journal’s editor included a generous, page-long note detailing how I had conveyed the legacy of the Vietnam war by evoking a rural meadow.

A representation can’t abolish infinity; an image cannot exhaust eternity. Representation localizes an individual within a particular frame and attempts to render them legible. But one may read a war where a young person sees their own freedom. Every time the reader takes it the wrong way, they expand the reach of the poem. Being misread has been a boon; the possibility of multiple meanings in a poem makes it more valuable rather than less. The poem’s failure may be its gift.

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Reading partakes of the world’s legibility—humans read the skies, stars, and tea leaves to know what to expect. Poetic schools, movements, and manifestos develop legibility by training us to read the world as a particular sort of text by naming the existing forms, discussing them, and applying them. By training us to value form, schools also prepare us to expect it. But each take has its limits. Each theory fails the azaleas in its own way. No theory can complete us. No school can offer us the final horizon. This is why theory cannot be a hero.

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What is at stake in the poem may be language itself, or the failure of language to describe what we need from it. Since crises of meaning inhere, among other places, in what words mean, in our relations to them, and in our absence of reflexivity about those relations, reading can facilitate reckoning. It can involve the opening of a relationship we may have with a word. God is such a word. It cannot mean the same thing to everyone because it is not a thing. This is why the critic cannot be a hero.

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Reading desires something from the page; expectation is informed by this desire, by this inarticulable thing we want from language. Criticism and poetry trust language enough to use it—even when their theory expresses a disbelief in the value of language. The image knows the ephemera of its subject, what Susan Sontag called “the ghosts of one's own expectations” beguile us continuously. The monster is what the poet imagines in order to explain the azalea’s failure. The poet creates the monster in order to defeat it. This is why the poet cannot be a hero.

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The sky is emptied by heat, pale with boredom. We are at the lake when a close friend notices the long scythe-shaped scar that runs over my right hip. “It’s huge,” she says quietly. “Don't be embarrassed,” my friend continues, “I think scars are beautiful.” She compares my scars to her tattoos while touching the butterflies and skulls written onto her shoulder and upper back.

While a tattoo is a text on the body, it is usually a text that a human selects. The modern tattoo is ornamental, a facet of how one wishes to be read, interpreted, and seen by the world. In this, it is romantic— a recreation of the skin’s surface as a garden of memorial markings, a living exhibit of memories, an art gallery, a picture book. The tattoo is the text one chooses to write on the body.

But a scar is a text that the world has written on you. The scar was not chosen or selected from a menu of possible images. The scar does not exist for the purpose of ornamentation. The scar is a reminder of how life inscribes us—it is a reminder of our own choicelessness rather than our choices or choosings. The unchosen tattoo, the tattoo imprinted against one’s consent—the number etched on the arm in a concentration camp, the marking of a gulag or carceral system—resembles the scar in its proximity to disaster and death. That proximity, that closeness, is a reminder written on the body and made legible to others. 

I’m interested in the complicated relationship between visibility, legibility, and hubris–and the belief that being able to read something means we can understand it. If someone shows you their scar, the nature of the text puts reading in a more demanding relationship with other texts, histories, background, context… . It makes sense to acknowledge this. It makes sense to acknowledge that empathy is an emotional response to someone else’s powerlessness rather than a story about our own. The power to define someone by the number inscribed on their flesh is fascistic—it originates in violence. Aesthetic readings can’t avoid the violation of the text, particularly since the legibility of violations is difficult, even to the person upon whom they are inscribed.

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That said, I want to meet in the penumbra of how you read a sunset, a scar, a text—and to inhabit  the world you create for your reader. I want to study how you use language to effectuate disclosure within the closed space of a book. I want to follow your book through its foot-notes to the next book, or the space which began your conversation. I want to respect how language fails you, me, all of us. More than anything, I want to risk being wrong in my ardors. “There’s a dollop of sex in everything,” Luther Hughes warns midway through his poem “Descent,” while negotiating desire with an unnamed man in a car outside his mom’s apartment. Hughes’s debut poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, wears desire like a lyre strung for music—it is how he sees and inhabits the world; it is the fire of life, the star of a sky whose sunset laws still exist in how police patrol the bodies of Black and queer men. The hunger is real—the risk is the realness. I want to tell you about it…

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I am interested in—and implicated by—misreadings, or what we mistake. I am compelled by the contamination, discomfort, and defacement of intimate proximity—by the geographies of exposures and their aesthetic commitments—in both poetry and critique.

There is a dollop of sex in every failed azalea when the sun drags its scythe across a scar.  There is a field with fire-anthill blisters. The world has written things on the meadow, the body, the sky. There is an epistemological limit to interpretation placed on these texts,  a boundary to the knowledge that can be derived by the reader.

The world may not always read you—but the world will write you. And wrangling with how the world has written you is part of what Hannah Arendt called the human condition. It’s a pleasure to re-view those texts, to explore how ecstasy informs the crime, and how the heretical articulates the sublime.