Jumping Up and Down Inside the Box Gives Us the Shivers

I have to say that I don’t really know what people mean when they speak about “energy” when not referring to, say, alternative fuels. This diction seems to me similar to when people use the word “heart” in other contexts not referring to a muscle inside of a body that pumps blood throughout. Both of these other uses are metaphors that name processes and experiences that quite frankly don’t have names. It seems to me a major purpose and quest of poetry is to name the nameless, but then if somehow these oddities find names, a terrible tragedy comes to pass. For we need that namelessness, it seems to me, in order to write a poetry that matters. Poetry needs silence as much as it needs noise; that is, poetry is transformative, for out of these, this muck that surrounds, poetry makes an object that of its syntax ever approaches the event horizon of music; indeed, Zukofsky proposes that music is the upper-limit of speech. Once something gets wrapped in a name, however, that gesture, that failure towards a will to know becomes prose. Poetry takes on mystery and looks it square in the ear. Prose and poetry are not the same, can’t be, ever.

In many ways I find the Rukeyser essay one of the most important that we’ve read because of its absolute apprehension, its tenable specificity. Except that throughout she assumes a most irritating anthropocentric solipsism, assuming that poems are for, about and of humans—the objects of human subjectivity; that is, Rukeyser’s assumptions seem to lead to a tense hierarchical relationship between subject and object: “…the human energy that is transferred is to be considered” (194). To get out of this dualistic system she brings up this idea of “witness,” a term which seems to bear up certain legalistic and Judeo-Christian connotations, for she also assumes that the purpose of a poem is to “further [understanding] of what it means to feel these relationships;” i.e., to bear witness (197). She then concludes with this oddly amorphous notion of depth: “If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man [SIC], the world of possibility” (198).

The problem of this word “depth” is a complex one. On the one hand, in my experience, I’m not sure that there is a “shared experience of “man [SIC],” for it seems to me that people do and experience what they do when they do and how they do for a practically infinite set of reasons. Thus, I don’t see how much could really be “shared.” It seems to me that we’re all kind of alone in this project. On the other hand, I simultaneously think that, yes, there is something out there that brings the shivers to pretty much any and all of us.

When I was a boy after, say, a long day of swimming, I remember warm summer nights--the trailing smell of the barbecue, the sound of the air conditioner’s hum in the alley outside my window, how my father would with his strong hands set me with my sunburnt skin, my lungs tight with chlorine, in my bed of cool, clean sheets. And right at that second, each night, I’d get the shivers. And I’d grin. I don’t know why this would happen to me. I’d even try on some nights not to grin because if a grownup saw me grinning s/he would inquire and I’d have to make something up, etc., so I’d try not to grin. But I couldn’t do anything about it. It was something cellular and, um, “deep.” I’d shiver, my mouth would arch. This came to me I guess from eons and eons of experienced pleausre, from caverns, from the waters. These were, I suppose, for me fleeting moments of ecstasy on the deep end.

Still, I’m not sure that it’s the job anymore of 21st century poets to write of human experience. Hasn’t that been done already at least once or twice? Look at Dante, look at Milton, at Donne, at Dostoyevski; have a look at Melville, sometime at Joyce, at Dickinson, once or twice at Lispector in a good translation. Take on Shakespeare when you've got a lifetime to spare. The thing is, you're no Shakespeare, son. So don't bother. It seems to me thus that the job of poets in the avant garde--now!--is to give voice to the ineffable. What about the desires of jackals and fruit bats? What about the click beyond the reach of the antenna of an ant beneath the bark of cedar, what about carbon? Rock and quasar? What about the glint of light just before dawn? What about the grit on the machine shop floor, the edge of water? What about other galaxies, other solar systems? Which came first: the egg or the kitchen? What about pixels? Aren’t we bored by human experience by now? Ought humans to quiet themselves for a time? Ought a poet attempt simply to listen and give voice to these other matters? Fire the cannons and duck, duck! Hold!

Plus, what does “deep” really mean anyway? Nothing, right? It means just as much as “heart” and “energy.” When Charles Olson writes: “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he [SIC] will have some several causations), by way of poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader,” what does he really mean (174)? What is energy and what has it got to do with poetry? Though I love Olson and the place he holds in the history of poetics, this line reminds me of my mother talking about her Reiki studio. It's so mysterious and all that. Isn't the work of a poet really just pretty obvious? Go outside, look up, look down, stop talking. Listen. Hear that? That hum is the sound of the new wor(l)d.

So, what is energy then? What is shared human experience? Well, go to an avant-garde poetry reading sometime. While the poet yammers on and on in hir musical rhythm of anti-representational, non-narrative language gymnastics, you’ll hear now and again a chuckle in the room. While the line just read may not have been particularly funny, that chuckle registers from that audience member a certain apprehension, a certain transfer of energy, a certain naming of shared experience as if that audience member were saying, “Yes! Right! You bet’cha! I got it! Bring it on!” Perhaps this is energy.

The other day Daren and I were in my office looking at one of his drafts. We came upon a line in his rather of anti-representational, non-narrative poem and at the same moment decided together that that line was the “closer.” How’d we do that? We just knew. It was just the right one. It was obvious. Something “deep” in our shared cultural experience, a perhaps increasingly shared aesthetic, alerted us and we responded. The thing is that it's pretty difficult to say quite why that particular line works best as the closer, for it brings absolutely no closure to this text which spends its whole time on the page unlocking and spreading. That final just fulfills some other obligation, and it's the right one. It just is. As audience members at the presentation of that poem’s making, we at that moment chuckled together. The four sides of the poem cracked apart for a moment and we looked inside the apocalypse, hearing the joke and its long history. Daren will by now have probably changed that line, but the crux of the matter is that the raison d'etre of the poem may not be some shivery heart of energy imposed upon; instead, that found instant of collaboration between audience, text and maker perhaps becomes the purpose of poetry, for it is in that moment, astonished, that the hegemonic potential to change the language shows on the reveal. Here, we could end war, we could re-frame borders, register different keys, finding other ways outside of and beyond LMNOP. And it is perhaps toward that ecstatic attention which we march. Try, try...