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Number
288
August/September 2001
Seeing
Quick
RUSTY
MORRISON
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
FOR, poems by Carol Snow, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 2000, 74 pages, $14.95
paper.
DEEPSTEP COME SHINING, poems by C.D. Wright,
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, Washington,
1998, 112 pages, $14. 00 paper.
Both For, Carol Snow's second collection
of poems, and Deepstep Come Shining, C. D.
Wright's eleventh, offer an unabashed
plain-spokenness that examines life at its most
supple and protean. For these poets, the real drops
any stilted mask of '-ism' and stands before us
suffused in the blush of its naked and mercurial
strangeness. Neither poet needs to embellish the
obvious, gilding immediacy with orphic high notes
to garner our attention. Instead, each in her own
fashion uses surprisingly direct language to
signify the unbounded potential simply present in
our perceptual field.
Lyn Hejinian, in her essay "Strangeness,"
describes the ways that seventeenth and eighteenth
century explorers "sought to discover the
tangibility and singular distinctness of the
world's exuberant details" through "a respect for
particularity." She explains that the strangeness
which "results from a description of the world
given in the terms 'there it is', 'there it is',
'there it is', restores realness to things in the
world and separates things from ideology." Wright
and Snow are such explorers---but ones who attend
not only to their observations, but also to the
effects that the act of observation will have upon
their interior as well as exterior, and their
metaphysical as well as physical, landscape.
Those familiar with Snow's first book, Artist
and Model, know already the acuity with which
Snow observes perception's influences upon the
seen, as well as upon the seer, The interdependent
relationship between the visual artist and the
world to be observed, absorbed, and
represented---which reflects that of the writer
with her material---is a primary focus of that
collection. This focus returns in For,
albeit more subtly, with Snow's examination of
mind's creative recasting of the images it
construes as world. Snow uses not only a keenly
honed diction as filter for accruing the fine
colorations of these studies, but also, in
painterly fashion, she takes advantage of the
visual potential of the page--- adapting collage,
repetition, juxtaposition, and spacial arrangement
to depict her exploration of the ramifications in
any act of rendering.
Such formal decisions show Snow's affinities
with Denise Levertov, who, in a description of
organic form, proposes that "a constellation of
perceptions... [is] felt by the poet
intensely enough to demand of him
[sic] their equivalence in words."
Such intensity imbues Snow's craft, though Snow's
forms register not only this poet's assiduous
attention to the demands of her constellating
perceptions, but also her implicit questioning of
whether it is in fact possible to achieve their
equivalence in language. I should also note that
Snow's attention to perception doesn't ignore the
post-structuralist disavowal of the notion of a
unified speaker. Like Rae Armatrout, Snow exposes a
plenitude of competing sources that constitute the
volatile flux one might label as identity. Both
poets demonstrate how language constructs a
complex, many layered subjectivity.
Here, in the poem that bears the collection's
title, the speaker attempts to locate a sudden
glimpse of self in the rustling camouflage of
selves. Notice that Snow's use of lineation and
spacing suggests the feel of thought, its torsions
and floods, offering a spacial apperception of the
movement in time of a series of thoughts.
To begin, even in the---even with the---
disarray...
An assortment of stones; sand, framed--- the
"Miniature Zen Garden" a gift
from my brother---
or even
to be---the difficulty...
(then: "The difficulty to think at the end of
day"; but what had
reminded me, already, of Stevens? of "A Rabbit as
King of the
Ghosts"? I dreamt of my mother once as a
rabbit---funny---
but it's my father, clearly: "King" and "of
Ghosts," becoming 'a
shadow of his former self'---)
to be---
(that's what it was: "To be, in the grass, in
the peacefullest time";
confusion
rallies to my defence "at the end of day"
---10/23/90)
stones--- of the gift of the garden: "to
arrange"---any-which-way on the sand,
the little rake set by.
(page 64)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge also could be called a
kindred spirit to Snow. The density of
Berssenbrugge's text on the page may not seem
sisterly to Snow's more open arrangements, but both
poets are talented excavators of subjectivity
through their use of long sentences---both are able
to divulge semantically each ideational layer
within layer, and to expertly follow syntax through
perceptions, even those in the midst of violent
tectonic shift. Snow manages this complexity by
training her brackets, parentheses, slash marks,
and dashes to perform their duties at peak
potential. And, her spacing of language on the page
affords just the right dramatic highlight for her
punctuation's athleticisms. Here is an excerpt from
"Measure":
Ecstasy has its subject/object confusions: for
instance,
your hand reaching for the line is the line
approaching (distance---
closing to the grasped clothespin---[a
dancer]
partnering);…
(page 44)
This whimsical, but still heartfelt, willingness
to follow even a hair's-width shift of
perception---and to listen in for all of mind's
marginalia---has become a trademark of Snow's
craft. In For, she continues this focus on
the incessant nature of mind to constantly refocus,
but with particular attention to the effects of
positioning. So it is fitting that a poem titled
"Positions of the Body VI," which is the last
section of a poem sequence in Artist and
Model, returns in the early pages of
For. It includes this telling evaluation:
"Cézanne, leaning to his canvas, would have
mastered / that view, you thought..." Rather than
position herself in a similar stance of power over
the object of perception, Snow demonstrates in poem
after poem the fluidity with which she subverts the
idea of 'masterfully' observing whatever is 'under'
scrutiny. By seeing into, as well as beyond, the
binary relationship suggested by such 'author'-ity,
she is able to engage with the more subtle
interrelationships between observer and
observed.
Snow's attention to positioning also yields
intriguing studies of the ways we position
ourselves socially and psychologically: "and
between them / a closeness I'd (somehow) steal
into..." (from "Position Paper"). She is adept at
exposing the complex expectations that underlie
such positioning---be it involving lovers, friends,
family members. Here is an excerpt from "Dear," one
of many poems attempting to assay the shifting
relations between the speaker and her father. In
this poem, we have come to understand that the
speaker's father is living in a special care
facility because of an accident that has left his
ability to communicate, and to understand
communication, severely impaired.
We can talk a little, okay? But only a
little---a skimming
a surface. Under a bridge but over the reflection
of the bridge
in that painting you so admired---one of the pair,
Dutch (you owned).
(So much
in our shared look: wit, elation, intimacy---that
you recognized me?; I
resembled ... )
How you liked the Impressionists, too---their
reflection, refraction,
more difficult---( not to say 'loved'). (I thought
to belong in that look
forever ... ) Though your Boudin turned out to be
forged---a poor
investment---not even a copy,
since the original of that painting never
existed...
(page 32)
Here we see many examples of Snow's virtuosity:
the fluid shift from metaphor ("a skimming / a
surface") to detail of memory ("Under a bridge but
over the reflection of the bridge / in that
painting"); the attention to 'ownership' and
'originality' in art, which underscore the poet's
interrogation of these ideas with respect to
memory, familial love, identity; and the elegance
with which past and present 'reflect', 'refract',
"impressionist[ically]." All these
demonstrate how fastidiously Snow furnishes an
instance of awareness, inviting the reader to enter
thought as habitable space.
With such a discerning focus upon focus,
appreciative of life's illuminating paradoxes, Snow
examines not only the supple and shifting minds
within mind, but also the inattentions within
attention.
Years of therapy and beginning to notice my
habit of switching off the
lights, setting a cup down, putting up the
knife
in an area behind me---starting away (not
witnessing---blameless), an
arm stretching back---
fumbling, often; having to go back and begin
again but already
departing...
(from "Helpless, behind Her," page 28)
Snow isolates in the simplest of daily
experiences the many shifting surfaces that cohere
as one's apprehension of the real. Such skill makes
her an especially astute observer of the
fluctuating ground one experiences in more highly
charged life situations. In fact, some of the most
compelling poems in this collection traverse the
volatile terrain one enters after the death of a
parent. But in examining even such wrenching
experiences, Snow avoids resorting to the kind of
desultory elaboration of suffering that, in a
lesser poet's hands, might have swamped her
material. Instead, with the quickness of the
title's adverb---which is already moving toward all
that is sayable, and unsayable, as answer to
Why?---Snow illuminates, instant by instant,
the changing actualities of experience that living
is frighteningly, fiercely rich with, that living
is For.
o
Quickness certainly should also be enlisted to
describe C. D. Wright's poetic virtuosity. And, as
Italo Calvino explains in Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, quickness is essential in
furthering "the function of literature," which he
sees as the "communication between things that are
different simply because they are different, not
blunting but even sharpening the differences
between them." Such authorial skill Calvino
believes is especially needed in our time, "when
other fantastically speedy, widespread media are
triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all
communication into a single homogeneous
surface."
Wright has long been a poet who, like Snow,
eschews presenting a "single homogeneous surface,"
choosing instead to use a variety of formal
strategies to show the most surprising
"communication between things that are different."
In Deepstep Come Shining, surface breathes
more porous web than dense weave: "I always did
have a spidery hand," (page 81). It is Wright's
quickness that teaches us to balance as we leap
from thread to thread. Each is held tautly in place
by the canny accuracy of her language, and vibrates
with a music that is both eerie and eerily true to
life: both dispossessed of expected normalcy and
resonant with a strange familiarity. Enjoying
Wright's excellent ear for plain-spoken vernacular,
one is caught off-guard by the strange ghostings of
possibilities flawlessly integrated in the daily;
the sense of otherness is always within arm's
reach.
If I shell those beans for you, will you cook a
mess for me. There
goes Hannah behind that cloudlet.
(page 50)
Or:
Saucer of light on the wall
the hand of god
(page 51)
Surprising too are Wright's ingenious instances
of language play. There are her quirky asides,
which often illuminate just how many hidden
assumptions we carry into speech: "Which is
brighter g-r-a-y or g-r-e-y. Which is pitched
higher," (page 77). And there are many sly
syntactic constructions, such as "Morning glories,"
(page 27), which demonstrate that words lodge as
nouns, adjectives, verbs, in only itinerant
fashion, and might leave behind such limits as
easily as our speaker travels on down the road past
"Cloud's Fly Shop," (page 38).
Wright begins Deepstep Come Shining with
lines from Shakespeare:
LEAR: ...you see how this world goes.
GLOUCESTER: I see it feelingly.
The synesthesia of seeing "feelingly" is a
helpful heuristic for traveling Wright's
book-length poem, which is loosely structured as a
road trip through the south: "O lucky stars. /
Motel 6 left its light on for us. Remember you are
nothing / without credit," (page 13), but is also
as chock full of arcana as a country almanac or a
swamp doctor's book of lore:
"Odontokeratoprosthesis: a tooth for an eye. A
gruesome procedure, / but not a bad trade," (page
49). Wright's odyssey is as much epistemological
exploration as it is physical traverse through the
myriad competing, often contradictory perceptual
stimuli that become our sum of experience, our way
of knowing world, and ourselves in it. Like Snow,
Wright salts the life-stew with an infectious
humor, appreciating the tedious as well as the
terrible, as she stirs up the struggle to
understand who, what, sometimes even where we are:
"If Louise is the answer what is the question. Are
we stuck here / or what. Anyway, the singing's not
helping much," (page 100). Though Wright's delivery
is more deadpan ironic than Snow's, both poets find
enormous value and pleasure in keen
observation.
"Never avert your eyes," Wright cautions,
quoting Kurasawa (pages 3, 42). And she doesn't,
taking, as she calls them, "Stimulants, Poultices,
Goads" (page 109) from sources as diverse as Sir
Isaac Newton and the Lumiere Brothers. Like Snow,
Wright's strength is in demonstrating how such
open-eyed inclusion leads not to confusion or
diffusion, but to an ever more discerning awareness
of the potential magnitude perceivable in each
moment at hand.
Such a position is very much in keeping with
Wright's desire to allow language to open
possibilities, rather than limit them. As she
explains in "69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions,
and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning
the Stuff of Poetry": "Never deprive the reader of
opportunities for multiple exegeses." Lyn Hejinian
might well have been describing Wright's poetics in
saying that "[d]escription should not be
confused with definition; it is... highly
intentional while at the same time ideally
simultaneous with and equivalent to perception (and
thus open to the arbitrariness, unpredictability,
and inadvertence of what appears)" (from
"Strangeness"). In Deepstep Come Shining,
Wright gives us ample opportunities to find
surprising glimpses of understanding from the
"arbitrariness, unpredictability, and inadvertence
of what appears." Her sometimes shocking, sometimes
hilarious images are presented for viewing in a
swift succession radically free from the confines
of preconceived notions regarding sequence or
order.
Open the window. That the glory cloud may come
and go.
Inside the iris of time, the iridescent dreaming
kicks in. Turn off
that stupid damn machine.
Kepler's invention of the camera lucida
fell into oblivion some
two hundred years. There is no avoiding
oblivion.
Where does this damn stupid thing go. For god's
sake. Are you
sure you want to wear that.
(page 10)
Even while such paratactics shock, disrupting
reader expectations, Wright's tone offers a
remarkable down-home ease and affability. Wright's
voice carries us, and we soon find that many of the
displaced and displacing images, aphorisms,
snatches of narrative and lore begin to overlap and
congeal in intriguing patterns---but they are
patterns that adhere outside the bounds of typical
systems of logic and sense. Their often captivating
coherencies may in fact be opening our intuition to
methods of gathering or acquiring knowledge that
are quite different from those with which we're
most familiar.
Besides paratactic jump cuts, imagistic leaps
and starts, and narrative which bubbles and pops,
Wright also disrupts expectations by varying
margins, punctuation, lineation strategies, even
font size, so that our road trip's physical nature
is often shifting. We ride through in the way that
one passes from hill country into the flats, from
green country to dry, knowing where we are only by
attending to our senses---as Gloucester proposed,
"feelingly." Here, for instance, Wright shifts
margins, lineation and punctuation strategies, as
well as time and location, context and emphasis.
But what remains consistent is Wright's tone of
bemused appreciation for the invaluable opportunity
that life grants us: to be present for whatever
comes next into view.
We see a little farther now and a little farther
still
She said her lights would be on and they
were
Groping around the sleeping house in our
gowns
Peeping into the unseen
Beautiful things fill every vacancy
Ripcord Lounge is up on the right. 32°
beer. A little past the
package store. Suddenly I have the feeling of a
great victory.
A delirious brilliance.
All around in here it used to be so pretty.
The boneman's bobcat. Its untamable eyes in the
night. Did you
know a ghost has hair. A ghost has hair. That's
right.
Peaches and fireworks and red ants.
Now do you know where you are.
(pages 7--8)
Without explanation, Wright shifts effortlessly
into surprising instances of local lore, such as "A
ghost has hair. That's right," or "Whatever the
swamp / doctor says. Comply," (page 19), or "The
boneman hung up a sheet, slashed it, and ordered
the / blinded one stick his arm through, then he
stuck thorns in their / sightless arm," (page 28).
By presenting such folk wisdom in its vernacular,
without explanation or apology, Wright exposes its
grace, the seductive charm of its mystery.
Expressed too is the power of any community's
massive accumulation of knowledge and beliefs---how
such information is so difficult for its members to
question---even as such positioning in Wright's
text leaves these snatches of lore without the
protection of familiar contexts. Wright is enough
of an 'insider' in the southern landscape to
overhear its deepest secrets, and enough of an
'outsider' to know the shock value, as well as the
strange beauty, each bit of lore holds when cast
adrift from the act of kindred meanings and values
which usually keep it safe from scrutiny.
As with Snow, one can see in the movement of
Wright's text a deep respect for Charles Olson's
pronouncement to
keep moving, the nerves, their speed, the
perceptions, …the split second acts...
USE USE USE the process at all points... always one
perception must must must
MOVE INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.
Wright's isn't afraid to make such
"move[s]," even if it means leaping the
'lockstep' of logical coherence so as to
"…Deepstep now baby deepstep. Bear me along
your / light-bearing paths. Come shining," (page
49). Hers is a poetics of "split second acts,"
which "use[s] the process at all points" to
engage the reader to move with her, "instanter, on
another"---so that the process itself, expressed in
the form of the poem, becomes one of the many
"deepsteps" Wright takes for, and with, us. In both
subject matter and form, this poet demonstrates
that to risk 'stepping' out of the familiar is
necessary if we are to 'deepen' our awareness of
that ever shifting region which is being, and if we
are to claim any true understanding of that region
as our own---even as she calls into question, in
Barthes-ian fashion, any such ownership: "Stay here
with me. If you don't mind the dark. We can talk
until / the tape runs out. It has the aura of an
original," (page 99). For both Snow and Wright, all
such "talk"---be it interior or exterior---which we
use to construct and constrain our understanding,
is exactly what must be seen, and seen through. Yet
neither poet expects such sight will ever be
complete, nor that such steps taken into the
unknown will ever be finished. Both simply offer
the joy that comes in appreciating the stumbling as
much as the sight, demonstrating that attending to
the act of attention itself is endlessly rewarding.
As Wright puts it:
... O world world world
I but stumbled when I saw praise is the gate
to enter plenty of parking come early
to get a good seat
(page 102)
Rusty Morrison is an M.F.A. graduate of the
Creative Writing Program at Saint Mary's College,
Moraga, California. A contributing editor to
Poetry Flash, her poems and other writings
have appeared or are forthcoming in Nimrod,
Fourteen Hills, VOLT, First
Intensity, Untitled (a magazine of prose
poetry), ZYZZYVA.
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