Eleven Pictures of Pizarnik

1

Alejandra Pizarnik is a poet concerned with language itself. Or perhaps that is false, and she simply confesses. I confess that for a while I thought about making this a set of  logical propositions. A and B. C  that sometimes D. Prove that A = D, or that A cannot equal D. If A, then D, or was it the other way around? Regardless, I would show my work.

2

Plutarch, in his biographies known as Parallel Lives, famously poses the Ship of Theseus problem, in which he asks whether a ship is still the same ship once none of its original parts remain, its planks having been slowly removed and replaced over the years. In Árbol de Diana, Pizarnik presents a related paradox about identity:

explicar con palabras de este mundo
que partió de mí un barco llevándome

The disappearing self, the present self. How to explain? Not having the words suggests that the world is more than its description, that our selves are more than the language with which we outwardly define the self. Pizarnik translates the philosophical conundrum into image, into something personal and urgent (for what is more urgent than watching from shore your own self wave a hanky from a departing vessel?). Poetry as operating in space and time, the extension of the second line emulating both the physical trajectory of the boat and the speaker’s mental drama of realizing that her self left on it. Poetry, through image, as possibly able to transcend logical impasses concerning the nature of the self.

3

Or maybe poetry and questions of self as image. Consider an early poem of hers, “Solo un nombre”:

alejandra alejandra
   debajo estoy yo
      alejandra

The piling of the lines forms the visual argument, with the final “alejandra” appearing literally underneath. The image as arguing against itself, for the word “alejandra” is visually identical in all cases, the final “alejandra” as superficial a description of the “yo” as the first. Though also already different, already the ship is leaving. White space is part of the argument, filling in the blanks.

4

In her essay “The Gender of Sound,” Anne Carson describes another work by Plutarch, “On Talkativeness,” in which he compares women to leaky vessels, unable to keep sensitive information to themselves. Leaky vessels, Carson adds, were a trope in the classical world for female sexuality. She writes, with what we are conditioned to suppose is a false calm: “By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in. Females blurt out a direct translation of what should be formulated indirectly.”

The female poet as confessional poet, and the confessional as unmediated. Sappho’s lyric “I” not as innovative, but rather the only thing she was capable of doing.
 

5

Pizarnik certainly finds herself aboard a lot of leaky vessels: her poems are replete with “naúfragas que son yo.” But to categorize her as a confessional poet, or to neglect her imagistic account of the self in favor of the logos of her language, is to already be lost at sea. Pizarnik’s rejection of language as stable strikes me as the only possible response to a world where women cannot reliably create meaning. Conceptions about the fragmented self, the rigor of image, as emerging from survival tactics. Naúfraga: (wo)man overboard.

6

In one of the final sections of Árbol de Diana, Pizarnik writes, “Vida, mi vida, déjate caer, déjate doler, mi vida.” The repetition of vida exposes the friction between its possible meanings: is the poem the fragmented self addressing itself, or is it the self addressing another, my darling, my life, in language that threatens to erase the self entirely?

7

(I confess to loving the perceived gratuitous feminine “confessionalism” of her diaries, private but no less mediated by language than her poems. But if form equals or sometimes equals or is sometimes related to content, then the profusion of  her prose and the sparseness of  her poetry have very little to do with each other.)

8

The rigor of an image that works at once through and despite language. A purity of image muddying claims made by pure language. Isn’t this what poetry claims to do in the first place? Take section 27 from Árbol de Diana:

un golpe de alba en las flores
me abandona ebria de nada y de luz lila
ebria de inmovilidad y de certeza

9

(My library copy of Árbol de Diana happens to be a first edition covered in the writing of previous borrowers. Under this particular section, a reader scrawls a thought that verges on confession: phoenix? rebirth? overcoming the opposites! loving the opposites!)

10

Possible meanings of this poem quickly branch.

Is the speaker abandoned “ebria,” or is the “golpe de alba” itself “ebria,” drunk? And drunk on what, on nothing, or on lilac light? How can one be drunk on nothing and something? Does “luz lila” mean lilac light, or is it a “golpe” of two nouns hitting the reader, not lilac light but light and lilacs, a recreation of the sun hitting the flowers in the first line, image image rather than syntax?

The speaker is present only as a receiver in this poem, marked and then left. The single image of light abandoning the speaker implies two moments in time: one in the sun, and another after the sun moves on. No wonder the speaker, in the final line, finds herself “ebria de inmovilidad” in addition to whatever she is calling truth (or again, is the light drunk, rather than the speaker?).

11

Truth, for Pizarnik, as branched. The self, perhaps particularly a feminine self, as renewing and simultaneous, with selves that threaten to contradict. One proposed solution to the Ship of Theseus paradox is four-dimensionalism, in which, with every new part, the ship gains a discrete identity, with those identities existing simultaneously in relation to each other, but coherent to us only through time. None of them, and all of them, are the ship.

(How long did it take me to realize that there isn’t a tree in Árbol de Diana?)