Consisting of Different Measures: the Content of The Virgin Muse

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Rob Koehler, Series Contributor

This series examines the first teaching anthology of poetry in English to reflect on teachers’ reasons for directing students to read poetry.

In my last post, I considered the pedagogical thinking that underlay the first teaching anthology of English poetry, The Virgin Muse. In the book’s preface, the compiler, James Greenwood, argued that his textbook was designed to teach students to understand the technical and formal aspects of poetry as opposed to critical or analytical reading. This post will take Greenwood at his word and examine the poetry included in his anthology and the two appendices he included for reference purposes in order to discover what we can learn about Greenwood’s methods of compilation and annotation and whether they matched his prefatory remarks.

The Virgin Muse is made up of 126 selections from 32 different authors; the collection contains two predominant forms of versification, heroic couplets and blank verse.  Greenwood includes examples of poems using other forms of versification, particularly irregular odes and common meter, but the book is not organized to make these distinctions clear. Instead, poems seem to follow one another indiscriminately or, at least, without a particularly prominent interest in their versification.

The book, in fact, seems to have no single overall organizational system; poems neither ordered by title or author nor by theme, topic, or year of composition or publication.  What seems clear is that Greenwood had no overall scheme to which he was adhering in the ordering of the poetry. His two appendices, one for explanatory end notes for difficult passages and the other a glossary of hard words, shows a similar lack of organization and preparation. Although the first is supposed to annotate difficult “places”, assumedly difficult lines or passages, it instead serves as a series of notes giving explanations of classical names and locations that are referenced in poems throughout the collection. In several places, it duplicates the work done by the glossary because both offer similar glosses of the same word. At no point do the end notes explain a series of lines, offer assistance in understanding figurative language, or otherwise give an explanation of a particularly difficult section in a text. All of this suggests that Greenwood likely had no overall system for organizing and annotating his collection.

However, if the entire collection does not manifest a strong unifying system that clarifies Greenwood’s priorities, glimpses of a systematic purpose—beyond that claimed by Greenwood in his preface—appear when examining individual poems in the collection.  For example, Greenwood shows a clear interest in poetic imitation and parody, including two passages from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and their equivalents in imitations written by John Dryden. He also includes two accounts of the tale of Baucis and Philemon, one translated from Ovid by John Dryden and the other a parody of the tale by Jonathan Swift.  Although a teacher might use these varying examples to discuss versification, it seems more likely that questions about poetic adaptation and imitation would also be of interest to both teachers and students.  Similar questions might arise based on Greenwood’s choice to place excerpts discussing the same event or describing the same human attribute.  For example, he places two descriptions of the descent into hell next to one another, one by John Dryden and the other by Edmund Spenser; he also places two descriptions of fame next to one another, one by John Sheffield and the other by Dryden.  These again would seem to implicitly suggest the possibility of comparison on a level beyond the technical, especially since several of these pairs were written using the same form of versification.

Thus, though no overall scheme of organization—whether based on versification or some other system—is apparent in the collection, it seems that Greenwood did have some sense of pedagogical possibility beyond merely teaching students the technical and formal aspects of poetry. Why these possibilities were not more explicitly expressed draws back again to the question of how this book might have been used in the classroom.  Perhaps the basic cause of the lack of structure is that Greenwood expected the book to be read topically, with teachers selecting passages for reading and students following along, rather than read through from beginning to end as a whole. If this were the case, Greenwood’s lack of overall organization would make sense because that imposed structure would not necessarily reflect the realities of classroom use.

My observation brings us again to the contested terrain of the classroom and the moment at which the plans of this textbook’s compiler and his vision of possible pedagogical purposes met the lived realities of pedagogical practice. These two posts have considered these questions from the perspective of the compiler and teacher; in my final piece, I want to turn to the students that were considered the audience for The Virgin Muse, examining how we might understand the purpose and structure of this book for those who would have learned from it.

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Rob Koehler's Author PhotoRob Koehler is a second year doctoral student in English at New York University and has an abiding interest in the processes and peculiarities of teaching reading, especially reading literature of all sorts, in the classroom. He blogs at Reading.Text.Book.History. on all things related to education, textbooks, and reading.

“their words make this possible”: A Roundtable Discussion of Poetics of Emplacement with poets from Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence

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By Miscellaneous Authors

Emily Johnston’s series “Traumatic Emplacement” explores poetics of emplacement, and the simultaneity of dislocation and enmeshment in traumatic poetry.

In Emily Johnston’s previous blog post, “Traumatic Emplacement: Poetry Emplaces Violence,” she talks about pedagogical strategies for teaching trauma and poetry in relation to one another. Specifically, she writes about teaching with Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, an anthology of poems about gender violence in the United States by more than 100 North American women poets. That blog post helped to establish a relationship between SRPR, Laura Madeline Wiseman (the anthology’s editor), and several of the poets featured in the anthology, which prompted them to dialogue more about connections they see among teaching, resistance poetry, and SRPR’s poetics of emplacement. This roundtable blog is a result of that dialogue—hopefully one of many more results to come.

Emily Johnston: Spoon River Poetry Review defines poetics of emplacement as “writing that reveals the borders of our comfort zones as sites of connection rather than irreconcilable difference.” Speak about your experiences in teaching poetry that explores issues of gender violence and resistance. How have these pedagogical moments created connections, even as they moved the borders of such comfort zones? In your answer, also discuss texts that foster such exploration of a poetics of emplacement.

Jehanne Dubrow: One of the poems that I often teach (particularly to students in the introductory creative writing classroom) is Rita Dove’s “Adolescence II.” It’s a poem that explores gender violence through a set of terrifying images, which students often describe as “trippy” or “fantastical.”  Initially, students struggle with moments like “Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round / As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines” and “I clutch at the ragged holes / They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.”

This is a text that tends to divide the classroom along gender lines. Male students often reject the idea that the speaker in the poem has constructed a beautiful-grotesque idiom—surreal and alienating—as testimony to a violence she has experienced. They want to label the poem a dream or hallucination, rather than imagine that the narrative of a girl trapped with menacing men might be real.  Meanwhile, female students will frequently edge toward a cautious, nervous reading of the poem:  has something terrible been done to this young woman?

The poem doesn’t offer up its answers easily, which in turn teaches the students about the relationship between form and content. Poems about gender violence may appear to speak with difficulty, may stutter or stumble, may be forced to find a new language to communicate experience, and to reflect how violence simultaneously urges us toward silence and speech.

Emily Johnston: I can definitely hear, in your description of students’ responses dividing along gender lines, how Dove’s poem reveals the borders of our comfort zones and how those borders themselves are often divided along gender lines. My teaching experience has also revealed how female students often feel hypervigilant about protecting women’s bodies from an ever-present threat of violence, while male students often feel hypervigilant about safeguarding male identities as “protectors” and “providers,” which can make recognizing men’s pervasive violence against women nearly impossible for them.     

Lisa Lewis: This semester I am using Women Write Resistance in an advanced undergraduate poetry writing class.  I wish I could say it was easy to cross that border from the poems about gender violence to my students, who have mostly grown up in Oklahoma.  I have to find new patience and new questions to ask whenever the topic of discussion is one of those concerns that are held as if paralyzed in amber—visible, but untouchable—by the prevailing majority views here: gender, race, class.  The moments one hopes for, when a woman might, for instance, experience herself in the presence of enough empathic support to speak with understanding about the poem, or herself in its context, are fleeting, often hardly discernible.  One learns to identify small signs.  Students try to catch my eye when someone dismisses or denies on sexist grounds they dare not call “sexist.”  They’re not ready to fight, but they mean to encourage me.  That’s how bad it can be here: women still smile constantly—not convincingly—to buy their right to live in relative peace among people who want them to present themselves as living a perfect life.  What their eyes say is unsmiling, guarded.  I look to their eyes, the look in their eyes.

That’s why those of us who teach poetry—feminist poetry, any good poetry at all—in areas like this are doing such necessary work, if apparently uncommon ourselves.  Even in the face of discouragement, connection does happen.  Young women can find a way to escape what harms them.  They can make art that will open to them a way to speak, and then to act, to save themselves and others.  It is a lifelong process for us all—to recognize, to write, to push forward into action.

Emily Johnston: Thank you so much, Lisa, for your inspiring vision of teaching poetry as activist work, particularly in a global moment when so-called social advancements (technologies, economies, etc.) threaten connection at every turn.

Laura Madeline Wiseman: One text I’ve taught is Anne Sexton’s Transformations, a collection introductory poetry students seem to be able to approach because they feel they can grasp the content. Having a text in common—Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, Twelve Dancing Princesses and it’s various contemporary depictions in Disney, cartoons, children’s books, toys, contemporary flicks, etc.—and whether or not the students have read Grimm, allows most to connect on the level of story and then to move to other questions such as delivery, craft, allusions, form, and interpretation. Some students stay there, in the retellings and the craft, not probing into interpretation, why Sexton might portray Sleeping Beauty’s father in a given light, while others question the imagery and word choice, asking, “Is this poem about incest?” It is these questions that move the edges of border zones and allow the class to connect on various ways to read poetry.

Another tool I bring into the classroom to help students grapple with larger issues of gender violence and its representation in literature is the Power and Control Wheel, asking students to find examples (e.g. emotional abuse, using children, making her think she’s crazy) in a text that illustrates the ways in which an abuser maintains control before resorting to physical and sexual abuse. It’s always a powerful discussion because students examine the edges of their knowledge of what constitutes family violence and what it means to the reader of poetry and literature. Students are often shocked to compile the examples abusers use to maintain power, a process and discussion that gives them the opportunity to rethink their interpretations of texts such as The Twilight Series, Jane Smiley’s One Thousand Acers, Joy Castro’s The Truth Book, and Sexton’s Transformations.

Emily Johnston: Yes! I too find the Power & Control Wheel helpful for teaching students to think about gender violence as a manifestation of power and control. I’d be interested in talking more about “what it means to the reader of poetry and literature.” Perhaps a future blog topic…

Grace Bauer: I like this word “emplacement” as a descriptor for that transformative thing that poetry can do. Poetry doesn’t just give us information about an experience, but can also recreate experience in a way that allows the reader to enter into it, even if that experience is beyond the scope of their own lives. As a teacher, I’ve seen this happen many times – especially with undergraduates who may be new(er) to poetry that deals with violence or controversial issues.

The poems that first come to mind are not about gender violence, per se, but an aspect of (some) women’s experience that tends to polarize – namely, abortion. Most students will readily identify themselves as pro-something or anti-something on this issue, but then we’ll read poems by Anne Sexton and Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks – and I’ll ask “Are these anti-abortion poems or pro-choice poems?” and most of the students will recognize that they are neither, that the poems don’t so much take sides on this highly politicized issue as put you inside the speaker’s mind, the woman’s dilemma, the can’t win of this particular hard choice.

I also think of books that focus on large-scale violent events — like Brian Turner’s Here Bullet (about the war in Iraq) or Bob Hicok’s Words For Empty, Words For Full (largely about the Virginia Tech shootings). Students have read about these events, they have watched reports on the news, but many of them will say that the poems do a better job of conveying what the lived experience must have felt like, even better than the graphic images they may have seen on the big or little screen.

Students — all readers — know that gender violence exists. We know – intellectually – that it’s a terrible thing, but poems like those in Women Write Resistance can take us inside that experience. “Emplace” us there. And, hopefully, elicit empathy. And further resistance.

Emily Johnston: So well said, Grace. Healing—especially from such an isolating trauma as abortion—becomes possible when others bear witness to our lived experiences.

Monica Wendel: As a professor of composition and creative writing, my course load is primarily English 101 and 102 classes. It’s the class where, among other things, you learn to read in a new way – not just for answers, but for understanding, nuance, and analysis.

It is also the case that resisting gender violence also involves a different way of reading: a different way of reading catcalls and whistles; a different way of reading Huffington Post articles on war; a different way of reading sexual assault prevention tips; a different way of reading advertisements for children’s toys.

In a perfect world, one act would lead quite simply to the other. Analyzing literature would lead to analyzing the world around us, and vice versa. However, any piece of writing that treats women as fully-formed, dimensional characters, capable of independent thought and action, is writing that discomforts a large number of my students. Before students can explore issues of gender violence and resistance, my challenge is for them to acknowledge that gender violence exists, period.

We dive down “into the wreck,” as Adrienne Rich says, or trace the fairy tales and nightmares embodied in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” We find the diamond “in a knot of flame,” as Audre Lorde writes.

I have no idea if, or how, these pedagogical moments create connections or move the borders of comfort zones, but they are necessary in order for students to look at all characters as human, first and foremost. As Henrick Ibsen said, “Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. … I am not even quite clear as to just what this women’s rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of humanity in general.”

Emily Johnston: The theme of reading keeps surfacing in our conversation here. Before students become ready to accept the deep roots of patriarchy that continue to anchor our political, economic, medical, and educational systems (in addition to countless other social institutions), they need to understand the central role that reading (texts, body language, media, casual conversations, etc.) can play in transforming the world.

Tyler Mills: I’ve had productive conversations about gender violence and resistance in workshop when teaching the poetry of Sylvia Plath. After asking students “what they know” about Plath’s life—her famous tragic ending—and letting them talk it out for a minute or two, I urge them instead to think about how Plath’s work functions on the level of motif, metaphor, even mid-twentieth century artifact. This might seem like a no-brainer, but it is really hard to get students to make this switch. “Irreconcilable differences” that many students initially bring to a poem such as “Lady Lazarus” (statements about how “messed up” the poem is, how “depressed” the poet must have been, even how she must “hate men”) begin dissolving. Students start analyzing the terrifying imagery rather than assessing it as something “other” to their experience in the world. It is when we acknowledge the well-known details of Plath’s life, and talk about what Confessionalism was and meant for a core group of writers like her in the mid-twentieth century, that we can instead turn to the speaker as a persona: one very much like the personae that speak from the position of the lyric “I” in many other poems that deal with violence. Acknowledging the life but then choosing to focus on the art shows students how brilliant a poet Plath was—a genius, really. She deserves to be taught that way rather than to have students hunt for her “head in the oven.” I like talking about Confessionalism in relation to (and in tension with) Louise Glück’s essay, “Against Sincerity” (Proofs and Theories). And the next time I teach Plath, I’d like to also assign B.K. Fischer’s fascinating contribution to the Los Angeles Review of Books “Poet’s Roundtable on Person and Persona” from this past October: “Proximity, Proxy, Practice.”

Emily Johnston: Again, the theme of reading surfaces—here, as a means of moving from othering to connecting.

Rosemary Winslow: Teaching a junior level course to majors from every discipline at the university last spring, I noted a sea change in greater understanding of the experiences of gendered cultural forces.  The evidence was most marked in responses to Adrienne Rich’s essay, “When We Dead Awaken.”  To my great surprise, and counter to my experiences of previous decades, students understood, with palpable compassion, the violence to the self as Rich considers having no place or voice for a female self.  One young man wrote in an essay of his own that he identified with Rich’s position as he and other men now have to forge their own identities in the economic and social domains.  He and other men, along with the women in the class, were highly vocal–often horrified–on reading poetry expressing gender violence. The women and the men in the class spoke frequently of the damaging acts recounted in such poems, offering at the same time ways the actions of characters in poems could have made a fine and loving relationship.  The poems opened up gender forces to view for response, discussion, understanding, change.  Poets whose work surmounted sheer violence with expressions of love and strong positive action were especially highly valued–Audre Lourde’s “Coal” and “Black Mother Woman” were favorites. Other poems that conveyed women’s strength and power included Adrienne Rich’s essay named above and “Diving into the Wreck” and “Power.”

Emily Johnston: Rosemary, what a hopeful message! I think that one of our biggest challenges—not just as poets and teachers, but as human beings—is finding ways to face violence with compassion; to allow violence to open us to recognizing our inevitable, irreversible connections with one another. I’m thinking especially of Judith Butler’s call for interdependence as the basis for global community in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

Jennifer Perrine: “Course, Interrupted”: For nearly ten years, I’ve taught at least one course on poetry every semester. In these classes, poems that explore and resist gender violence often appear, but not because I assign them.  I don’t ask students to write about particular issues, and yet students write poems about gender violence every semester, every year. Perhaps some students feel safe writing about gender violence because they know that I also direct and teach in the women’s and gender studies program at our university. Mostly, though, I suspect they recognize, as Richard Hugo put it, that the “creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters,” so they share truths from their lives in a way they might not in other spaces.

When students write these poems, the rest of us are often pushed to a learning edge where we must reckon with a reality we’ve ignored, forgotten, or never recognized in the first place. Though some of us may have once believed our lives were not affected by gender violence, we are now touched by it, by this person who sits beside us for three hours each week. When one person dares to resist gender violence by breaking the silence around it, our classroom community always changes. We still read, write, and talk about poetry, but now we also question gendered assumptions, roles, and systems. We ask how poetry can be a form of witness, action, and resistance. One brave student writes a poem, and we all come to understand that the work of our class is not only to learn about poetry, but also to respond to the reality of violence in the lives of those around us with care, support, respect, and—dare I say it?—love.

Emily Johnston: Say it, sister… love!

Sarah Chavez: It was a first year rhetoric and inquiry class focused on the topic of American identity. For that particular day we read Lucille Clifton’s shapeshifter poems, a series about a young girl being molested by her father. The usually talkative students were quiet, squirmy, refusing eye contact. The resistance in the room was palpable.

They had no trouble talking about the graphic violence in Fight Club, no qualms about the joblessness, depression, and naked vulnerability in Philip Levine’s poetry, but this pushed their comfort level. Clearly a line had been crossed. Finally, a male student blurted out, “I just don’t understand what this has to do with American identity.” A chorus of “yeahs” erupted, vehement head nodding. His outburst broke the silence perfectly. It invited the question, what makes something American? That was safer to focus on.

“Because it happened in the U.S.?” someone said.

“Because the writer is American?”

“Sure,” one student said, “but who wants to talk about this stuff? No one.”

Another responded, “I guess, maybe, that’s what it’s about though, that the little girl can’t tell anyone.”

“Yeah,” said another. “It’s ‘the poem the little girl breathes / into her pillow” because “there is no one to hear.’”

Exactly, I said. But now you’ve heard.

That is poetry’s power. Our classroom transformed into a place of witness. For at least half an hour, the students considered the trauma and sexual violation of one person as inextricably connected to our collective consciousness as a nation. It is impossible to truly teach witness, but we must create spaces where it is invited. I am deeply grateful for poetry like Clifton’s, as I am for Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Rigoberto Gonzalez, and so many others; their words make this possible.

Emily Johnston: What strikes me too, Sarah, is how even a student’s initial declaration, “I just don’t understand how this is relevant,” is both evidence of a pervasive, impermeable boundary around some new thing students encounter in the classroom (in this case, Clifton’s poetry), AND of a simultaneous desire and need to push beyond that boundary.

Thank you so much, Jehanne, Lisa, Madeline, Grace, Monica, Tyler, Rosemary, Jennifer, and Sarah. Your words have brought up some vital points about our roles and responsibilities as writers and teachers of poetry. I look forward to continuing our dialogue!

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Emily R. Johnston is a Doctoral student in English at Illinois State University, and she is a Senior Editorial Assistant of SRPR. Emily earned her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her creative and critical work appears in Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, The Fourth River, and Dos Passos Review, among others. Emily eventually hopes to build “Therapy House” where victims of violence can explore arts, movement, and collaborative activities as tools for recovery.

Rosemary Winslow lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches at The Catholic University of America. Her book Green Bodies expressed and grappled with the complexities of love in troubled families, and sought understanding, forgiveness, and compassion for the wide circle of humankind. She has taught in shelters for women, and now enjoys yoga, hiking, swimming, kayaking, and singing in a choir.

Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre, which won the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press, 2013). Her poems have received magazine awards from the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Maryland, she is currently pursuing a PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Sarah A. Chavez is a mestíza born and raised in the California Central Valley completing her PhD in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found in various publications such as Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place, the journals North American Review, The Fourth River, and others. Her chapbook All Day, Talking is forthcoming from dancing girl press in summer 2014.

Jennifer Perrine is the author of The Body Is No Machine (New Issues), winner of the 2008 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry, and In the Human Zoo (University of Utah Press), recipient of the 2010 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. In 2014, she will serve as a member of the U.S. Arts and Culture Delegation to Cuba. Perrine teaches in the English department and directs the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Drake University.

Grace Bauer’s newest book of poems is Nowhere All At Once, just out from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Her previous books include Retreats & Recognitions, Beholding Eye, and The Women At The Well, as well as four chapbooks, most recently, Café Culture, from Imaginary Friend Press.

Monica Wendel is the author of No Apocalypse (Georgetown Review Press, 2013) and the chapbooks Pioneer (Thrush Press, forthcoming June 2014) and Call it a Window (Midwest Writing Center, 2012). She is assistant professor of composition and creative writing at St. Thomas Aquinas College.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside. Her fifth book of poems, The Arranged Marriage, will be published in 2015. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an Associate Professor of creative writing at Washington College.

Lisa Lewis’ books are The Unbeliever, Silent Treatment, Vivisect, and Burned House with Swimming Pool, as well as a chapbook titled Story Box. She was the 2011 recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. She directs the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as poetry editor of the Cimarron Review.

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s books are Some Fatal Effects of Curiosity and Disobedience, Queen of the Platform, and Sprung. She is also the author of the collaborative book Intimates and Fools with artist Sally Deskins, two letterpress books, and eight chapbooks, including Spindrift. She is the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. www.lauramadelinewiseman.com

A Night of Poetry & Community: The SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series

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SRPR (Spoon River Poetry Review), published through the Illinois State University Publications Unit, announces the second annual reading event in the SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading Series, which will take place on Thursday, April 10th, 7 PM. This event will be held at the historic Ewing Manor in Bloomington and will feature poetry readings by Jesse Nissim, the 2013 SRPR Editors’ Prize winner (you can read her winning poem here), as well as Jason Bredle, Monica Hand, and Jacob Saenz. The reading will be followed by a reception with free wine and appetizers. The series is named for SRPR’s long-time editor and benefactor, Lucia Getsi, and is co-sponsored by WGLT’s Poetry Radio, ISU’s Creative Writing Program, and ISU’s Department of English. For more information about this event or accommodations, contact SRPR at contact@srpr.org or editors@srpr.org. The event is free and open to the public. Donations are welcome, but not required. Spread the word, and bring a friend!

Against Procrustes

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

At the end of his recent article in Poetry, Slavoj Žižek proclaims, “The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry.” Ok, so poetry is a form of political violence in and against language—this is an old and storied avant-garde conceit. The novelty of Žižek’s account lies in the relation it posits between language and subjectivity. Language, he argues, following Lacan, is the “torture house of being,” a scene of sustained political violence against the self. Poetry merely returns the violence of language to itself. Or, more precisely, it reverses the roles: the tortured subject of language becomes language’s torturer. This is, needless to say, a bleak view: here the economy of political violence is total. Poetry does not offer a way out; it provides an opportunity to reverse the vector of violence. An empty alternative: the possibility of such easy alternation dissolves what might otherwise be an ethical and structural distinction between torturer and tortured. For Žižek, they are one position: to inflict violence is already to be its object.

However, Žižek’s closing proclamation is itself amputated; as a commenter on the Poetry Foundation’s website points out, much the same language appears in Žižek’s monumental exegesis of Hegel, Less Than Zero: “The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry—think of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of fixed forms of rhythm and rhyme.” Žižek’s habit of repeating himself—particularly his jokes—is well known. The repetition of these quips and stock phrases tends to naturalize them, leveling their humor and their eruptive, disruptive, force. Procrustes seems to have suffered such a fate, a casualty of repetition. (He’s been “disappeared,” as Žižek would have it).

In the myth, Procrustes—who lives in a castle on the sacred road between Athens and Eleusis—offers shelter to passing pilgrims, and then stretches or shortens their bodies to fit an iron bed. He is eventually subdued by Theseus, who punishes him by “fitting” him to his own bed—a Žižekean conclusion, in which torturer becomes the tortured. The myth has become a stalwart of debates in poetics, so much so that we might think of a Procrustean tradition. For instance, it appears in William Drummond’s Conversations with Ben Johnson and in Thomas Campion’s attack on rhyme in Observations in the Art of English Poesie:

…there is yet another fault in Rime altogether intolerable, which is, that it inforceth a man oftentimes to abiure his matter, and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of arte: for in Quatorzens me thinks the Poet handles his subiet as tyrannically as Procrustes the thiefe his prisoners, whom when he had taken, he vsed to cast vpon a bed, which if they were too short to fill, he would stretch the longer, if too long, he would cut them shorter. [as originally appeared in Early Modern spelling]

Campion has roughly reversed Žižek’s position: the torturous violence inflicted by rhyme is not an occasion for celebration, but rather an impingement on the poet’s liberty as an Englishman. This is again a false and fleeting difference: beneath their disagreement, Campion and Žižek agree that form is political violence, inflicted on the body of the poem.

The hinge upon which a Procrustean poetics hangs, however, is the metaphorical conflation of body and poem. For the metaphor to work, the poem needs to have a body that can be violently stretched or shortened. More: that body must precede the poem’s encounter with Procrustes and his tyrannical violence. Torture is not a form of productive power: it requires, structurally, a preexisting body which it can threaten with irreversible pain transformation. And here the metaphor begins to break apart. Poetic form is generative and productive. As the new critics taught us, the poem is not separable from its form—nor can it be said to precede it. If form is a kind of political violence exerted against the body of the poem, then it also produces the body it acts on. Pace Kafka, form is an instrument which produces the body (of the poem) by writing on it.

Procrustean poetics thus relies on a projected before: the fantasy of a body which precedes form and is, in a sense, the reality of the poem. In other words, it produces (and it relies on) a distinction between form and content. And this entails a further distinction between ordinary language and form. Recall Žižek’s formulation: “think of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language.” Form acts on language, transforming it into something other than itself—and language precedes form as an organic totality, the natural and unimpeded body which is violently interrupted by meter and rhyme. Language becomes the metaphysical presence which underwrites the poem’s absence. Žižek tries to avoid this position by equating language and violence—a move which, as we’ve seen, tends to erase the distinction between language’s action on the subject, and the subject’s action on language in poetry. This suggestion seems to me the most productive in Žižek’s brief and equivocal essay. If we are to think about poetry as a kind of violence, we will have to rethink form itself. It can no longer be the fence which separates poetry from other kinds of discourse. It must instead betray that difference, inciting us to imagine poetry as a separate and protected sphere, and then disappointing the desire that it has itself created. It’s easy to imagine how this argument applies to texts in the modernist tradition—texts which ostentatiously betray their own formal limits. But these betrayals involve a set of assumptions about traditional forms: that they need to be broken open, dismissed, discarded. That, in other words, their machinery protects poetry from generic rupture and ensures its difference from ordinary language. In this centennial year of Anglo-American modernism, it might be profitable to interrogate this foundational conceit. Can we conceive of traditional forms as themselves as a false and porous fence between poetry and its other?

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.

Poetics of Emplacement – Map 6 (A Valley in our Bones)

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Rebecca Lauren, Guest Contributor

This post is part of a series on SRPR’s ongoing and evolving conceptualization of the Poetics of Emplacement. What do we mean by Poetics of Emplacement? SRPR’s editor, contributing editors, staff members and friends share their thoughts here.

In the opening poem of my chapbook, The Schwenkfelders (2010, Seven Kitchens Press), I recount a beloved fable of my ancestors, a fable that explains their scattered settlement in Silesia before religious persecution brought them to a different set of valleys in Pennsylvania:

… one night, when hope got lost at the bottom
of some forgotten stewpot, the Devil
stuffed Schwenckfeld’s followers into a sack
and set off for the underworld—
spindly Santa Claus in red with no sleigh.

While soaring over Spitzberg,
snow caps gleaming beneath him,
the Devil snagged a corner
on the mountain’s peak.
Burlap seams split, spilling
Schwenkfelders into the valley.
Men’s bodies bounced like jacks;
women’s spun and splayed like unfurling yarn.

After the great fall, Schwenkfelder women
shook starlight from their heads,
stood and straightened bonnets.
While somewhere in the sky
the Devil hopped on one leg,
cursing a stubbed toe, the valley’s green womb,
the dazzled men and women with looms.

Like my ancestors, there is starlight in my head, a valley in my bones.

Through the historical reimaginings made possible by poetry, I explore the limited physical space available to Schwenkfelder women as homemakers in a valley. However, in The Schwenkfelders, I also express the myriad ways women resisted these constraints through acts of creation: marginalia in school cipher books, fraktur drawings and hand-written letters mailed beyond the valley and across the Atlantic.

Daphne Spain, in her theory of the construction of space, explains that “spatial segregation is one of the mechanisms by which a group with greater power can maintain its advantage over a group with less power…By controlling access to knowledge and resources through the control of space, the dominant group’s ability to retain and reinforce its position is enhanced.”  As I piece together my own poetry and try to find space for it in the literary world, I recognize that I have much in common with my eighteenth- and nineteenth-century female ancestors who scribbled in the corners of whatever piece of paper they could get their hands on. Spain’s theory helps to frame for me how living in a valley – for women in particular, for women like myself – can be simultaneously restrictive and freeing, a womb that both gestates life and pushes it into the world.

Nestled in Central Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna Valley is where I grew up. It’s where my dad and his dad before him set down roots.

My mom, on the other hand, hails from Philadelphia but showed up in the valley one weekend to attend a Doobie Brothers concert with my dad. It was their first real date, and my mom wore a see-through shirt tied in a knot above her midriff along with tight bell-bottom jeans and platform shoes. She arrived at our town’s only bus station on Pine Street next to Rea & Derrick’s Drugstore. My dad met her there and said he just wanted to make a quick stop at his parents’ house before the concert – to introduce her to them, of course.

I think my mom wishes she’d worn a sweater.

When they stopped at the house, my dad’s mother gave my mom a thorough once-over and promptly asked her to drop her bags in the guest bedroom, located on the opposite end of the hallway from my dad’s room.

Later that night, when my dad and mom returned home from the concert, they were greeted my dad’s mother, awake at 3:00 AM on her knees scrubbing the refrigerator.

I have heard this story so many times that I can picture the Tupperware containers of food sitting on the countertop, my grandmother’s nonchalant greeting in which she tries not to sound too overprotective or eager, my mom’s blush of embarrassment, my dad’s chuckle. And I can hear my mom’s unending question, Who cleans their refrigerator in the middle of the night?

I believe this was the exact moment that my mom was introduced to the valley where even the hills themselves seem to watch over everyone like curious parents, waiting to ask where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Like my dad, I love the Susquehanna Valley. During my last year of high school, my best friend and I biked through our town to photograph our favorite places in case they were torn down in the next development scheme or worse – in case we moved away and forgot them.

I have a whole album of these photos – the playground equipment from our tiny elementary school before rural kids were bussed to the giant intermediate unit; the restaurant, Kinfolks, where my girlfriends and I would order large plates of mashed potatoes after high school; and the local paint store that shared the same name as a boy I’d had a crush on when I was twelve.

As the years passed, I watched friends marry young and buy quaint houses down the street from their parents, settling down in the valley as homemakers.

I was incredibly jealous.

The-Schwenkfelders-cover

The mother in the photograph, Mary Lentz Yeakel, is the author’s great-great-great-grandmother. The youngest daughter, Mollie Blanche Yeakel, is the author’s great-great-grandmother and is featured with her sisters in the poem “The Night Mollie Blanche Yeakel was Named” in The Schwenkfelders. The photograph was taken circa 1893 in Williamsport, PA.

But like my mom, there were times when I felt uneasy in our small town, like I didn’t quite belong. And like the female Schwenkfelder ancestors I wrote about in my chapbook, I could not quite quench the desire to travel beyond the boundaries of hills that grazed the sky, especially if it meant freedom. Especially if it meant making sense of what I could not see.

So I joined the throes of high school graduates who moved away from the valley and who, even now, nestle a certain nostalgia of restlessness in their bones. Though we’ve backpacked through Europe, attended graduate schools, and moved to big cities to volunteer in soup kitchens, nothing’s felt quite like home. Our restaurants are chains named after days of the week, and our paint stores are run by corporate CEOs in New York City, not our ex-boyfriends’ parents. As women from a valley, we find ourselves constantly searching for our place in the world.

When the Schwenkfelders came to America, they were unable to secure a single plot of land, and many of their relatives remained in Silesia.  As a result, women in the valleys of Pennsylvania relied on written correspondence to maintain their identity. Now that I have moved away from the valley, I feel that I too have fallen from some vast Silesian sky and awakened to the hard ground beneath my feet. Writing feels a bit like trying to shake the unsung poems from my head, so like my valley-bound ancestors before me, I turn to writing to bridge the gap, to remember the terrifying fall from the sky, and to find my sense of place again as a woman who is now “free” from the bounds of geographical segregation.

Daphne Spain divides the social construction of space into two categories: geography and architecture. To this list, for women in particular, we must add “artistic space,” or the use of space on a canvas, page, textile, or other creative medium. Virginia Woolf famously pines for “a room of one’s own.” Sojourner Truth asks, “ain’t I a woman?” when her story does not match up with society’s definition of femininity. Elaine Showalter introduces the gynocritical model of inquiry, examining the lack of scholarship on women in literature. Poet Adrienne Rich suggests that “diving into the wreck” allows us to recover lost female voices and encourage women writers to create despite a male-dominated literary world. Alice Walker goes “in search of our mothers’ gardens” to uncover creativity where it has be squelched. And today, VIDA, the organization famous for its pie charts depicting the percentage of women writers in literary journals each year, aptly illustrates how lack of creative space for women continues to directly correlate to lack of power in the literary world.

So sometimes, I revisit the valley in all its fertility and loam-rich possibilities. Sometimes, it is even in person. Most of the time, however, it is in my writing, as I imagine space beyond marriage and housework, beyond farmland sold to real estate developers, beyond bus stops and drugstores and male-dominated narratives.

As a woman writer, I avidly follow the VIDA count but write and submit my work anyway. Like the women who came before me, I create despite confinements, a river making its own way, carving its path.

Susquehanna-Valley

Photo credit: Rebecca Lauren

 

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Born in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley, Rebecca Lauren lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Eastern University. Her poetry has been published in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. Her chapbook, The Schwenkfelders, won the 2009 Keystone Chapbook Prize and was published in 2010 by Seven Kitchens Press. She received an MFA from Old Dominion University and serves as managing editor of Saturnalia Books.

Alice’s Adventures in Hypertext

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Adrienne Dodt, Series Contributor

Adrienne’s series “Digital Landscapes” is about navigating hypertext.

&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c., a poetic hypertext by Cynthia Spencer and Zoe Addison, follows one character, Alice, as she navigates exterior and interior spaces.

Characters named Alice always hearken back to Lewis Carroll’s titular character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice is a totemic figure for girls, especially those who have experienced drugs or mental illness: to go on a trip, to go on a journey of the mind, to fall down the rabbit hole. Indeed, Spencer & Addison’s text includes both heroin and self-injury.

In another sense, however, the journey that both Alices experience can relate to gender relations in general: that women exist in a world without control over that world. Women (that is, people that society deems “women”) have to constantly struggle against a world that does not permit agency, that acts upon them.

In &c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c., one page simply states:

“Alice sat quietly filling space.”

Women are expected to be small, to not take up space. Men will encroach upon a woman taking up too much space. I experience this constantly when riding the train: men will always sit next to me, even when there is an empty seat next to another man who is carrying nothing. They “put me in my place,” demand that I take up less space by virtue of designating me “woman.” Through most of the poem, Alice is alone, so she has the ability (though not always the psychological wherewithal) to take as much space as she wants.

This is disrupted by the character of “the man”:

“There is a piece of paper. The piece of paper has a picture on it of a man.
The man is to be feared. She fears the man.
She cannot climb down the hillcrest where the man is waiting to be feared by her.”

Alice then goes in the opposite direction of her intended destination to avoid the man. Women are the ones who have to change direction to avoid danger, specifically masculine danger. The men who are dangerous have the privilege to exist wherever they want. It is women who must circumvent.

Spencer and Addison’s Alice is not only encroached upon by people, but by the natural world:

“Now, she is experiencing blueberries”

The act of eating becomes passive, as though the blueberries were the real actors in this scene. And:

“Horizon is approaching”

She does not move; the horizon does.

“She keeps the clouds from her eyes
with the ease of a habit. Then the water
breathes her into the little parts of her sigh,
salting both the precarious object and the price charged with it.”

The natural world, then, has agency and acts upon people, who are rendered objects. One can liken this to many natural disasters in which people are swept away or flung or electrocuted. Alice is a part of the world, but she is also subsumed by that world.

The journey is also through the text. There are multiple links on most pages, so one could travel many paths, circle around, and pick another link. Words blink into other words, black boxes show words when one mouses over (and the words change when moused over again), words that disappear, backgrounds that “blink”— quickly changing from white to gray then white like lightning. The links loop the reader around a lot. The reader will take one path and circle back to where ze began. The subject/reader can only respond to a world that doesn’t always make sense, that is always changing. The reader is taken for a ride.

One page, “linger,” shows “A square/of ashes.” Above, if one mouses over some white space, the phrase “a  l i s t  o f  b l a c k b i r d s” which is a repeating phrase throughout the poem, appears. If one mouses over “A square/of ashes.”, it disappears and two more stanzas appear: “An irretrievable/solemnity.” on the left and “Three broken/twigs.” on the right. One can only see one stanza at a time because when one mouses over either stanza, it disappears and displays the other one. Both stanzas, though, are one link. The reader expects two choices between these stanzas, but there is only one. (However, “a  l i s t  o f  b l a c k b i r d s” is also a link— more on that in a minute.) The fork in the road is a mirage; there is actually only one. It is a sort of deterministic “there is only one path” sense that the reader receives from this world.

Another set of nodes does something similar. On the page “an-experiment2,” there are four black boxes in a grid, and the reader can mouse over and see, from top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right: “Her head felt heavy/like honey, and” “her fingers did not /want to move.” “She thought anyone/who interrupted” “was a nuisance.”

There are two links out of this page, out of seemingly four links. If one clicks either of the top squares, one is taken back to the same page. They are links that go nowhere. “her fingers did not /want to move.” takes the reader to another grid. All boxes say “Not much caring if/she failed,” and mousing over makes “she did not want to/ move.” The first phrase irretrievably disappears and is replaced with “Oh.” Clicking any of these boxes takes the reader to one single black box that says, “Oh.”

Going back to that first grid, on “an-experiment2,” “was a nuisance.” changes to “a  l i s t  o f  b l a c k b i r d s” when moused over a second time. On the next page, “grain,” there are two choices: the blackbird sequence (which is separate) or another sequence beginning with the word “pearl.”

Regardless of these choices, one ends up at this page: http://etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetc.tumblr.com/engine

This is where the paths actually diverge into several paths and sub-paths. After one continuous path, there are suddenly many, many choices. The reader is overwhelmed (or at least this reader was) with the freedom of movement within this space and one must overcome one’s sense of linearity in order to read the text.

UNLESS one follows the blackbirds, which, through following several links with “a  l i s t  o f  b l a c k b i r d s,” brings the reader back to the original grid on “an-experiment2.” It is a loop; the blackbird circles, and the reader circles with it. The blackbird is a sort of spirit animal, but then it does not allow for flying away/escape. At another point in the hypertext, Alice performs a ritual on a crow which had died by flying into a window. The spirit animal is, itself, a spirit by virtue of being dead. The blackbird cannot lead the reader outside, as though it were circling its own carcass.

In sum, &c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c.&c. takes the reader through a ritual of space, a journey through interiority and exteriority, examining the subject as object.

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Adrienne Dodt is a poet and essayist. Adrienne’s work can be found in The Body Electric anthology and Fact-Simile, Apothecary, Con/Crescent, and Monkey Puzzle magazines. Ze is a member of The Next Objectivists poetry collective in Chicago. Ze was the Poetry Editor for Bombay Gin magazine in 2008-2009, and ze edited the Next Objectivists’ chapbook Collective Unconsciousnesses in 2011. Adrienne currently teaches English at City Colleges of Chicago.

Towards a Poetics of Emplacement: Finding the Genius of a Place

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Angela Narciso Torres, Series Contributor

Angela’s series attempts to explore through her own writing process and that of the other poets the ancient Roman construct of the “genius loci,” a guardian spirit that enlivens a place, igniting and inspiring the creative imagination.

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When SRPR invited me to share my thoughts on the Poetics of Emplacement, I fretted about how I, a writer uprooted from her native Philippines and a Filipina-American who has lived in at least six different states and more than nine US cities, could even begin to locate the influence of place on my poetics. I was born in Brooklyn of Filipino parents, moved to Manila in infancy, and spent the first 23 years of my life there. I went abroad for graduate school shortly after college, and since those first few years in Cambridge, MA, have lived in various cities and towns across the United States, including Tucson, Arizona; Austin, Texas; the San Francisco Bay Area (fourteen years there, with an intervening year back in Manila and six months in Fayetteville, Arkansas), and most recently, north suburban Chicago.  If I were asked to describe my writing life in relation to place, the closest answer would be “nomadic, at best.”

Eudora Welty, discussing what makes for good writing in her seminal book On Writing, points specifically to a sense of place as the starting point: “place is where [the writer] has his roots, place is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes, it provides the base of reference; in his work, the point of view.” She goes on to explore the role of place as  “focus[ing] the eye of genius”: “Feelings are bound up in place, and in art, from time to time, place undoubtedly works upon genius. . . . It may be that place can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight — they are like the attributes of love. The act of focusing itself has beauty and meaning; it is the act that, continued in, turns into meditation, into poetry. Indeed, as soon as the least of us stands still, that is the moment something extraordinary is seen to be going on in the world.”

Welty’s quote led me to contemplate the troubling notion of “genius.” The dictionary defines genius as “exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.” Historically, this idea of genius as springing from within, as inborn or innate talent that only certain individuals possess (think Mozart, Da Vinci, and their ilk) finds its roots in the Renaissance, when the human being was planted firmly in the center of the Universe. This idea was reinforced by rational humanism, one of the strands of the Age of Enlightenment that developed as a response to Middle Age religious integralism. While Welty talks of place as working upon genius to bring its focus to a point, the idea of genius as an inherent prerequisite to good writing remains.

Born sixty years after her fellow memoirist Welty, the author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), in a TED talk on creativity, reaches back to Ancient Rome to explore the origins of this idea of genius. She discusses the concept of “genius loci” which translates as “the spirit of a place.” Geographer Edward Relph defines it as such: “The term ‘genius loci’ is an ancient Roman belief that indicates that ‘every being has its genius, its guardian spirit.’ This spirit gives life to people and places, accompanies them from birth to death, and determines their character.” Gilbert goes on to explain how Roman lore believed this guardian spirit resided in the very walls of the artist’s studio, a kind of protector of one’s creative life, of one’s imagination. As such, Gilbert finds comfort in the idea of being relieved of the burden to keep coming up with “strokes of genius” each time she sits down to create art. The Roman concept suggests “having a genius” rather than “being one.” The artist’s sole responsibility, then, would be to show up for work at the desk or the canvas, inviting the genius of the place to infuse her with its divine power.

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Being a writer borne of multiple homes, towns, cities, and at least two continents, this idea of a “genius loci”—a guardian spirit of the place residing in the very walls of the artist’s studio—appealed to me. If every place I’ve lived and worked in had its own resident genius, then I need not worry about moving from a place and leaving its “mojo” behind, especially if that place had been particularly rich and inspiring for my work.

The poetry I write is very much rooted in a sense of place. Although I started writing poetry in earnest over a decade after I left the Manila of my youth, many of my early poems reflect the Philippine landscape: its flora and fauna, the smells, tastes, and textures I grew up with, the color of the light through the haze of dew and smog. The fact that I wrote these poems on American soil could be a testament to the fact that the “genius loci” is not something that gets left behind, but rather, something that can be discovered anew wherever we find ourselves.

One of my favorite Neruda poems begins: “And it was at that age poetry arrived in search of me.” For me, poetry arrived much later than most. Although I’ve always loved reading, and however naturally writing seemed to come to me at school, it was not till I was a mother of three that I discovered poetry as my main form of creative expression. Then, we were living in a tract home in one of those cookie-cutter developments in densely populated Silicon Valley. The only writing time I could manage was after I put my three young sons to bed. Something about being enveloped in the blanket of night, the quiet of the house, the lack of street noise coming in through the thin stucco walls of the Mission-style home built to suit the year-round temperate climes of Northern California, provided a sanctuary that allowed me to travel home, if only in imagination. I like to think it was then that the “genius loci” emerged from the walls and compelled me to write “the first faint line” (Neruda again). Perhaps something about being removed from one’s familiars, and the deliberate act of invoking the sense of a place one has left, has a way of sharpening that focus, as Welty suggests. If hindsight is twenty-twenty, then hindsight magnified through a lens that spans an entire ocean and a couple of decades must be even sharper.

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Five years ago we moved from the eternally sunny skies of the San Francisco Bay Area to a suburban neighborhood north of Chicago. We moved in January during one of the worst winters the area had seen in twenty-some years, we were told. In this house, insulated against the vagaries of Midwestern seasons, I carved out a writing room in the basement, far from the bustle of the household. This is where I finally completed my first book of poems. The book is a kind of loose poetic memoir that includes poems set in the Manila of my childhood, my life in Boston as a clear-eyed, ambitious graduate student, my years as a first-time mother in Austin, TX, and later as a mother of three in California.  It contains travel poems as well as poems that reflect on the various internal emotional landscapes of a woman whose identity has been shaped by her life in two continents as well as several cities and towns.

On the wall beside my writing desk hangs a printer’s drawer given to me by my neighbor M., who found it in her basement while spring-cleaning. It serves as a catch-all for trinkets I’ve accumulated over the years from various places I’ve lived: a miniature owl collection that grew when friends learned of my penchant for those nocturnal birds of prey, a smattering of souvenir thimbles, a small blue globe that actually turns, two tiny typewriters, a doll-sized bubblegum machine. There are various seashells the kids picked up from weekends at our favorite beach in Half Moon Bay, CA. A miniature ivory bookmark made from a piano key and painted with purple irises that a dorm-mate found in an art fair in Harvard Square. A vial of sand from Boracay, a beach in southern Philippines. More than a mere collection of tchotchkes, I like to think this printers’ drawer houses talismans that contain the genii of every place that I’ve lived. Like a collection of Aladdin lamps, they invoke the spirits of various locales that have shaped me as a writer. I imagine those genii happily cohabitating in the walls of my studio.

This collection of talismans also serves to remind me of the importance of “thinginess” in poetry: how objects can, and do indeed, invoke the larger life: feelings, spaces—both physical and emotional, relationships, entire seasons of life. I am reminded not only of W.C. Williams’s famous adage, “No ideas but in things,” but also something Seamus Heaney uttered once long ago at a reading (and here I’m paraphrasing badly): “Small things can bear the weight of anything.”

Or, as Marianne Boruch writes, “A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in . . . . For safe-keeping. Okay. Or it’s a time capsule, or even a catapult, for poets with more public ambitions, overarching, or just arching enough. (Sorry, there it goes, getting bigger….) So again, just this: as a box, the poem contains. As a box, it is carried place to place. And closes. And has secrets. And can weigh quite a bit. You pack and repack it languidly or with exact intention. Or with hopeful indifference (back up, see languidly, again, and float there with a little more gravity). You forget to include your favorite things in that poem, or you don’t forget to forget, on purpose, putting old habits of beauty aside each time, so it’s new. Maybe it has to be new and sound different. It still weighs a lot. You can hardly lift it to the table, the porch, the car. But the truth is, you can always open the box. You can always look down into it, and take things out, and rearrange its not-at-all-like-little-furniture in there, the whole time lifting it, about to lift. Because the poem is lighter now; it’s going up. And now, it is up and out of your hands. You can hardly make it out up there, but you know the shape of its shadow down here where we live. It darkens the ground.”

So how have the various places I’ve lived in informed my poetry? I’m hoping that through these musings, I’ve somehow written my way toward some answers. Or at the very least, have found a way to contain them. Like my printer’s drawer of found objects, a poem contains. It is also portable. But unlike a box, it is borderless. No idea is too big, no thought too small, no place too remote, to carry around in a poem. And so we carry them–in our pockets, in our backpacks, to the grocery store, to the dentist’s waiting room. We fumble with them in the dark while putting our children to sleep, or park them on the bathroom rug in case something occurs to us in the shower. We unfold them on the train, in buses, at the airport security line, at the red light while driving to and from soccer practice. Sometimes they can weigh quite a bit. But that’s okay—unlike other boxes, they move surprisingly well. A poem is a box that can bear the weight. Of anything.

Works Cited

Boruch, Marianne. “Heavy Lifting.” In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations. Trinity University Press. San Antonio, TX.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. “Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity.” TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED, Feb. 2009. Web. 09 May 2012. <http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html&gt;.

Relph, Edward. “A Pragmatic Sense of Place.” Environmental & Architectural  Phenomenology  Newsletter. http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Relph20th.htm

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Angela Narciso Torres‘s first book of poetry, Blood Orange, won the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. Recent work appears in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and Cream City Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, and Midwest Writing Center. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for RHINO.

The Appositional Project: Groundhog Day, Homophonic Translation, and Transformation of the Self

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Ryan Clark, Series Contributor

Ryan Clark’s series “The Appositional Project” examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination/loss.

Happy Groundhog Day, SRPR Blog readers. In honor of today’s holiday, I want to talk about a particular form of homophonic translation that offers a poet, to some degree, the opportunity to re-enact the long journey of self-transformation that Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) experiences in the movie, Groundhog Day. While obviously the movie has very little to do with poetry, it does shed light on yet another way that we can understand the Poetics of Emplacement, because emplacement is not only about location; it is also about something that is placed within a location. Often, that something might be the person who is writing the poem, or it might be the poem itself. But to really talk about emplacement, we should pay attention to both the place and the placed, particularly in the effect they have on one another.

For Phil Connors, he finds himself in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a small town 84 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, the city where Phil works as a news weatherman. Something about Punxsutawney and its famous Groundhog Day celebration has trapped Phil in a time loop, and each morning he wakes to live the day over and over again. He is not able to escape this loop until he learns to stop being selfish and egotistical and start being a more caring person. While the town of Punxsutawney becomes something of a character in itself (despite the film actually being filmed in Woodstock, Illinois), it is the town’s effect on Phil (and his subsequent transformation) that is most significant. As he learns more and more about the town and its people through his countless relived days, Phil realizes that other people in the world, apart from himself, need and deserve care and compassion. It is his experience with the town that drives him toward this path to self-transformation, and it reminds us that emplacement can manifest itself in ways that point us toward the internal attributes of the subject that is placed (in this case, Phil Connors) in addition to or even instead of the external features of a geographic location.

In poetry, homophonic translation presents us with an opportunity to place ourselves inside of a similar loop, particularly if we consider the re-sounding method of homophonic translation. The re-sounding method (which differs from the standard method of approximating sounds of a source text, as in the Spanish “rei” becoming the English “ray”) is built upon the idea of re-sounding a word based on each individual letter’s potential to make sound within a single language. For example, “cat” can become “sash” when we use the s-sound of “c” (as in “cede”), the ah-sound of “a” (as in “cat”) and the sh-sound of “t” (as in “ratio”). In this way, a simple three-letter word like “cat” can be be translated into more than sixty different words or phrases. With this method of re-sounding, one could translate a text repeatedly. “Cat” can become “sash,” which can become “essays” (“s” read as “es” and “h” silent), which can become “size” (silent “e” and “a”), which can become “eyes” (silent “s”), and this can go on just about forever. If we use a longer text from which to begin, the possibilities for transformation increase exponentially.

Keeping in mind Phil’s transformation from an egomaniacal jerk to a sensitive and compassionate hero, consider the shift from conquest (represented by Phil’s careerism) to care. This shift is very much at the heart of the Appositional Project, as it involves the repurposing of harmful language for poetry concerned with care and repair, and it is a shift that this method of homophonic translation can handle very well. Just as Phil was given the opportunity to repeat Groundhog Day until he was able to learn how to be a better person, homophonic translation can provide the chance to go back and re-sound language away from domination and toward a place of compassion.

As an example, consider one of the many hurtful things we regretfully say at various points in our lives to people we love. What if we were to take that language and translate it over and over again until we transform these sources of pain into poetry that emphasizes a concern for those whom we have hurt? Perhaps this could be a move toward healing, or at least it could serve as a purposeful self-examination in which we actively choose to move toward the practice of care.

The journey of Phil Connors was one of self-repair, and it was made possible through a long series of repeated attempts to become a better person and to treat others in the world with respect. Only when he succeeded and finally woke up on February 3rd was he able to move on from the town of Punxsutawney, unsticking himself from a time and place to which he was bound until he learned to appreciate it for what it was: a community of people who were no more and no less deserving of love and care than he, himself. His story reminds us that in order to fully grasp a sense of place, we must first clear our vision and learn to see beyond ourselves. Homophonic translation may provide one way to write through this potentially transformative process of self-examination, as it gives us the chance to re-sound and to transform, which at the very least sounds a lot less like a vision of purgatory than the plot of Groundhog Day.

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Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in Smoking Glue Gun, Tenderloin, Seven Corners, and Fact-Simile, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from Something on Paper. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.

A Compleat Book for the Teaching to Read Poetry

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Rob Koehler, Series Contributor

This series examines the first teaching anthology of poetry in English to reflect on teachers’ reasons for directing students to read poetry.

My interest in the poetics of emplacement—in the border(s) between language and place, the written and the lived, the created and the experienced—comes not with the process of composition but rather with the process of instruction, the moment when a poem enters the pedagogical space of the classroom and becomes a part of its unique and contested landscape. More particularly, I am interested in the border between what a teacher believes he or she is teaching and what a student believes he or she is learning.  This is the unruly and ineradicable complexity in any pedagogical situation and can quickly spiral out to encompass all moments of instruction whatever, so, to focus my analysis, I want to reflect specifically on why teachers ask students to read poetry.

Of course, as many beliefs about why students should read poetry exist as there are teachers in the world.  And, were I another kind of scholar, I would spend these next few pieces drawing out the various reasons I have heard discussed and argued.  However, my own bent is historical rather than ethnographic, and I want to turn from the answers we might give in our moment to the answers that another teacher gave in a quite different historical moment.

Teaching poetry is so familiar and widespread a practice to us that it is somewhat surprising that the oldest teaching anthology of poetry in English was published in London in 1717.  To give the educational milieu in brief: early eighteenth-century England had no public school system, no uniform legal mandate requiring formal education, few educational institutions that would educate women, two universities, and a uniform recognized language of scholarship and learning, Latin.  Thus, the publication of [The Virgin Muse] in August of that year was not business as usual.  Up to the publication of this textbook, the teaching of English in schools extended to teaching basic reading; once students could read their Bibles, they started learning Latin or stopped learning to read at school.

What I want to consider in this and the other pieces in this series is how an examination of this textbook can offer a productive perspective on why teachers believe students should read poetry.  I will use the work of James Greenwood, the compiler of The Virgin Muse, to consider in turn what was being taught by reading poetry, what poetry was to be taught, and what students were perceived as needing to use this textbook.  Through a nuanced examination of how one teacher answered these questions in the past, I hope to provoke us to think again about what benefits we see in the present and how those benefits relate to our actual classroom practices.

To return to The Virgin Muse again, I want to give some brief background on its compiler, James Greenwood;  Relatively little of his life has survived down to the present, most important in this context is that teaching was his lifelong vocation and that his career culminated with his appointment as Surmaster of St. Paul’s School in London in 1721, a post he held until his death in 1737.  Despite the lack of biographical details, Greenwood left us interesting evidence of his thinking in his preface to The Virgin Muse.  I have posted the entire preface elsewhere, but I want to focus here on Greenwood’s articulation of what his students would learn from reading poetry.  He writes,”I have endeavoured to make it [The Virgin Muse] a compleat [sic] book for the Teaching to Read Poetry: The Poems consisting of Verses of different Measures, you have all the chief sorts of English Versification”.

To Greenwood, then, to teach students to read poetry was to teach them prosody and poetic forms, to help them understand the structures of poetry rather than its meaning.  In short, students should be taught to understand and recognize the technical system of arrangement and organization from which, in Greenwood’s moment, all poetry was built.  A teacher could measure students’ success in learning to read poetry by asking them to scan a poem, give its meter, and identify its form.  Questions of interpretation, of affective response, of criticism generally were not the teacher’s responsibility or the student’s .

Of course, Greenwood does not disregard interpretation or criticism; he addresses those concerns quite clearly in his preface when he says, “I have therefore had great Regard to introduce nothing here, but what is strictly Modest, and truly Poetical; and as for the difficult Places, they are made very easie [sic] and intelligible, by the Help of Notes, and a Large Index, explaining every hard Word”.  Criticism, then, is removed to a pre-pedagogical moment, in which the teacher reads and selects only appropriate pieces based on moral criteria of Greenwood’s own devising, a process to which students are not made privy. The process of interpretation is also removed to a pre-pedagogical moment, with Greenwood giving glosses that interpret “difficult” passages for students an definitions of “hard” words for them to use, those passages and words that are left unexplained must, implicitly, be understandable to any student.

Greenwood’s understanding of what a teacher should teach his students is an early articulation of a position that argues that the teaching of poetry is concerned with the technical and empirical aspects of poetic form.  The implicit goal seems to be to teach students to focus on those aspects and to avoid questions of interpretation and criticism that have no immediately discernible answer.  Those questions are left outside the space of the classroom, questions for the teacher but not for the students.  Yet, and here we come again to the question of a poetics of emplacement, the landscape of the classroom relies on more than what the teacher states as his or her pedagogical objectives. My next piece will turn from Greenwood’s objectives in teaching to the poetry that he chose to include in his anthology, offering an examination of whether Greenwood, in fact, created a “compleat book for the teaching to read poetry” by his own criteria and also what other implicit pedagogical objectives he seems to be pursuing that might undermine his stated goals.

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Rob Koehler is a second year doctoral student in English at New York University and has an abiding interest in the processes and peculiarities of teaching reading, especially reading literature of all sorts, in the classroom. He blogs at Reading.Text.Book.History. on all things related to education, textbooks, and reading.

Six Micro Essays on the Tenuous Public Body

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor

Toby’s series “Bodies in Space” is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.

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Let’s be real (though the injunction already admits a failure of reality which is the condition of our discourse): everyone likes looking at bodies. I choose that word—likes—with a certain care, certain as I am that ‘liking’ something is both the most generic libidinal act, and fretted with corporate power. Capitalism is engined by like(s): as Facebook reminds us, metaphor is money gone wild. And so the libido is a kind of economy, or the economy is a kind of libido. Not that the ‘or’ matters for those of us down here in it, who have it the American way, that is, both ways at once. Capitalism is the surveillance we delight in. Delight is surveillance itself. To watch and be watched, to like and be liked: this is the consummation for which a body is trained and shaped.

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I am flexing my critical muscles here—a bad habit, but nonetheless revealing: of the thing that flexes; this body, in its critical acts, slouched at a desk in insatiable winter; swollen at the waist; irredeemably white and male, and therefore capable of disappearing into its language. Or, rather, appearing as its language: on Facebook, a major symptom of privilege will be the ability to appear as fossilized language, to delete the material and historical facticity of one’s particular flesh. A material and a history which is otherwise intractable and carnivorous, dismantling language, reducing authorship to the circulation of the body.

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Leigh Stein, in her trenchant and necessary open letter to HTMLGiant, documents the casual violence through which women’s writing is reduced to the circulation of a body:

In the summer of 2011, I met with a team of Random House sales reps who would be responsible for bringing my novel and poetry collection to bookstores and libraries around the country. One asked me what kind of cover image I wanted for my novel.
“I only know I don’t want a headless woman on the cover,” I said. “I don’t want my book cover to exclude men from picking it up.”
“Do you really think a man would read your work?”
“Well, a lot of men like my poetry,” I said.
“Only because you’re cute,” I was told. By my editor.
I didn’t know what to say. I like to think that out of the 37 people in the world who read poetry, the men who read mine are finding some merit there, and not just jacking off to my author photo.

Such misogyny limits the female body to itself; it denies access to the means of literary production and circulation. Or (this or again an and), it seeks to reduce literary production to the traffic in women: the distribution of female bodies for specular pleasure.

Such misogyny, in its stupidity, its virulence, its violence, may be understood as a vigorous defense of the actual. If it seems hysterical, in (paradoxically) the pathological sense of the word, it’s because the mechanisms of literary production and distribution already organize bodies in rigid and misogynist logics—lending some the capacity to recede into text, and forcing most writing to circulate instead as the body of its author.

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The mechanisms of literary community and circulation are structured by an underlying misogynist logic: the logic of liking and circulating bodies; of specularity, surveillance, and digital capital. Take, as an example, the poetry reading—a form which offers the display and specular consumption of bodies as one of its major pleasures, adjacent and often superior to its literary allure. To be an audience member at a poetry reading is simultaneously to engage in voyeurism and disciplinary violence: the pleasure we take in looking at bodies is, partially, the pleasure of limiting and shaping them with our gaze. In such a setting, the capacity to disappear into one’s text, to delete the body, is the capacity to evade discipline: which, in our country, is both the image and prime symptom of race and gender privilege. (Just ask William Zantzinger).

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Let us therefore build better institutions, and critique the ones we have with a generous and collective care. And let’s celebrate the improvisatory and ephemeral practices of poets who critique the interpolation and discipline of their bodies with their bodies. In that spirit I turn to a recent example from a ‘reading’ given by the poet Emily Barton at the Red Rover Series in Chicago—in the belief that such interventions dizzyingly exceed this lame, safe act of internet, institutional critique, in both subversive potential and bravery.

I use scare quotes here because Barton refused to read or, indeed, to engage in any of the ritual pleasantries of the poetry reading. Instead, she sat on a stool at the front of the room and quietly read the New York Review of Books (a publication which has become notorious recently for excluding women from its pages). In the background, from a small iPhone speaker, a male voice (ok, full disclosure, my male voice) read her poems in a dreary monotone. It was a precise parody of the gendered dynamics of the poetry reading. Surrendering her voice, offering her body purely as a thing to be seen, Barton reenacted the reduction of female writing to the female body. (It matters too that it was my voice, since at the time of the reading, Emily and I had been engaged some three weeks: under critique is marital heterosexuality which, even with the best intentions, remains a ritual of patriarchy, not a form of but the traffic in women).

Barton’s performance, precise as it was in capturing the gendered dynamics of the poetry reading, was not a capitulation to their disciplinary force. The poetry reading is a scrupulous and decorous space—so scrupulous that its implicit regulations are rarely felt because rarely violated. The poet is expected, indeed compelled to participate in the ritual. To refuse to engage, as Barton did, is to express hostility to the ritual itself. This hostility was richly registered in the room: which became suddenly possessed by a physical sense of discomfort, accompanied by the special and diligent silence reserved for painful and awkward public situations. Here, I think, lies the full brilliance of Barton’s performance. It is one thing to parody the strictures of gender. It is quite another to make a room feel the critique as a loss: of certainty, of the grid through which (gendered) (aesthetic) experience is rendered intelligible. Barton’s reading did not point toward a solution to the gendered imperatives of the reading series—that would be simple utopianism, which we all should learn to avoid (desiring). Rather, she showed us—a fecund demonstration, open for imitation and critique—how the logics of the poetry reading might decompose itself.

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Over the holidays, I spent a few languorous and pleasurable days reading about the history of the poetry reading—a mechanism of literary distribution which is really only fifty years old but, like gender, masquerades as the natural. I was disappointed to find that, despite the recent ‘performative turn’ in poetics, the poetry readings have only been very tentatively theorized. Peter Middelton, for instance, writes compellingly about the role of space in the aesthetics of the reading, but has little to say about its politics. As a card carrying member of the devil’s party, I believe it is better to know—however little knowledge actually helps us negotiate the rough imperatives of power. I think it is time, therefore, that we collectively come to grips with the politics of the poetry reading—rather, with the way that the reading inflicts politics unevenly across (our) bodies.

Ideally, such an account would be mobile and intersectional: a diffracted and kaleidoscopic model, which registers the way poetic power acts differently on different bodies. At a panel on “The Politics of Poetry in Performance” at MLA this year, for example, Kate Zambreno lamented the cultural injunction against women expressing anger—and posed her own angry language as a form of resistance. In a subsequent talk, Douglas Kearney noted that, as a black male poet, anger acts as an automatic generic demand on his writing: radically limiting its possibilities to a stereotypical form of racial experience. For him, the question becomes how to subvert that expectation without blunting the force of his anger. Poetry readings produce contradictory demands on different bodies. And so, any theory of the poetry reading must be supple enough to accommodate those contradictions. As an initial gesture toward such a theory, this little essay falls woefully short. Neither intersectional nor particularly supple, it risks (with much feminist work—especially by white critics) positing a universal white subject. I end with that failure, in hope of correction.

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Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.