What Is Necessary About Belief: On Carol Ciavonne

As I’ve been looking over past contributions to the blog, I was especially struck by the series of posts Stephanie Young curated last April, in which poets talked about the relation of their work to money. (For instance: Timothy Yu, Jennifer Moxley, Eileen Myles.) I was drawn to the sense, in these pieces, of talking about something pervasive in one’s life “as a poet,” but something nonetheless almost always elided in the public conversation about poetry. It feels intimate and transgressive at once, a winning combination.

And so I thought I’d write a little about reading this month. I know that sounds ridiculous. Just this week, Harriet’s put up their monthly Reading List, as usual a cornucopia of pointers. & as far as the economics of the business go, while things are ever shabbier and more riddled with inequity in academia, it’s still the case that a healthy proportion of you out there, like me, have some professional connection to weekly performances of reading: student poems, one another’s poems, essays, theoretical treatises, works far-flung in space and time. And yet. It’s the very professionalization of reading that makes it an endeavor fraught with anxiety, the one sure thing maybe being that however you’re doing it, you’re not doing it quite right. Not attentive enough to detail, to comma placement, to sociopolitical context, to the funny parts. What I hope to end up with is a sense of one reader’s process, not a method per se but a set of explorations, stumbles into illumination.

I was a latecomer to poems, having almost successfully evaded them through my undergraduate degree. I suppose, ultimately, what drew me in was the conviction that I had no clear idea what it meant to read a poem, and that the uncertainty around that could be liberating. I’m still not sure I’ve figured out what I’m doing. But floundering around some in public seems to be an essential element of it. There may be a larger argument I’m trying to delineate; if so, though, it’s going to percolate out of a few specific encounters.

I’m starting with a poem by Carol Ciavonne, whose work I’ve been admiring for many years. I’ll focus on “an animal meant” in part because it’s one of the handful of poems I can link to, but my reading is informed by the whole of her quietly extraordinary collection Azimuth. The first thing that catches my eye is that gap between the tight knot of the first stanza and the roomier meditation of the final three lines: are they an afterthought? a coda? What’s meant to hang in that space?

We’ll get back to that. First, though, there’s the subtle misdirection of the title, the mismatch between the syntactical expectation it sets up (“this is what the animal meant”) and the way the sentence actually plays out in the first line (“this is what the animal is meant to have”). That catch draws attention to the slightly unsettling verb choice here: whose intention is it that the animal have two horns? Nature? God? I start to find myself a little stuck at this point, & it’s a stuckness that seems familiar with Ciavonne. For one thing, she writes poems that unabashedly address spiritual issues, & often do so using traditional religious vocabulary. But (& this is perhaps what makes her seem both untimely and absolutely contemporary) the purchase of those terms is never exactly taken for granted, & questions of grace or divine existence arise out of the simple facts of daily existence: of death or dusk, choral chants or dish washing.

I mean that animal. Why aren’t we told what kind of animal it is? (A bull? A buck? A ram?) I’m imagining now the poet coming across a dead or dying buck in a forest, looking from a distance like a brown sack of cloth. (As though seeing the animal was itself a kind of penance, donning a sackcloth for our relation to the created world, our using it as pure resource.) I find myself wanting to read the refusal of specification as a kind of rebellion against the Adamic naming of the animals, against seeing animals as a vehicle for meaning—but isn’t this poem predicated on the same kind of impulse?

After all, Ciavonne seems deeply ambivalent about representation and its ability to get at the truth. The deer skin looks like canvas, and that appearance is what hides the animal from the onlooker—hides the fact that it’s a hide. This camouflage, at least at first, works, unlike (perhaps?) the camouflage that the hide is supposed to provide, to make the deer blend into the forest. Is it too much of a stretch to see the poem as the canvas that also might make the blunt fact of the dead deer recede, turn it too easily into an object for meditation? (Think about the critiques that get lobbed William Stafford’s way for “Traveling through the Dark.”)

So much rides upon Ciavonne’s tone here, the reticence of her lines playing off of the tangles of thought that lie within them. It’s that impression of tangle that leads me to read the gap with which I began as primarily a release, the space on the page figuring the “no mind” with which the poem concludes. It’s not a resolution: rather, it’s what comes from accepting the impossibility of resolution. Or maybe it’s closer to say it’s about opening up the possibility of irresolution, since even “acceptance” seems too final a word for this triplet in which the word “if” plays so central a role. The poem leaves off invoking formulations that resonate with both Eastern and Western mystical traditions: god as openness, god as withdrawal. What I find most compelling here, though, is the corresponding openness with which Ciavonne lays out the poem as her own path—invites us to jump from the grim vista of the first stanza to the questing reflections of the second—& stays poised, hesitating at the end of those lines.