T D Carroll

Some time ago I posted one of my poems on this website as a work in progress. I thought of it as an experiment in editing, in developing a poem into some sort of final form within the more 'public' space of this blog. I posted the poem intending to work on it in this more visible context but did not follow through. I was unhappy with the poem in some sort of vague way, couldn't find my way to a more satisfactory version, and just let it lie there, on virtual display. The poem lay fallow for months, until I finally and perhaps a bit reluctantly took it down, demoting it from 'published' to 'draft' status on this blog.*

Meanwhile, I found a way forward. Following the death of poet Louise Glück, PN Review 274 published a commemorative note by Philadelphia poet Daisy Fried, on getting poems right:

I remember going to her readings a number of times, and one particular Q&A, maybe at Bryn Mawr, when she gave some advice about revision, wherein she said that with drafts she wasn't happy with sometimes she would take the ending of the draft and put it in the middle of the poem and then keep on writing from there. This blew my head off, poets. I've passed that suggestion along (with credit) ever since. It doesn't always work, but it often does.

I took that advice and was happy enough with the result to read the poem at last year's annual meeting of The League of Vermont Writers. Here's the revised version -- still a work in progress -- with 'help' from Louise Glück via Daisy Fried:

Where does memory live?

   A clutch of elk

   The forest door

Light tilting

Against a thickening sky  

The gloaming

Tentative

then flaring

touching

         nose

         tail

         flank

Voices pitched at low thrum

"Indefiniteness is an element

Of the true music"

         says Spicer

         the poet

Cut from blue metal   

inchoate

tumbling

         Shavings drift to the floor

         smoking

         coalescing

         clustering

uniquely forming

this one sentence

Clacketyclacketyclack

  clattering

  riving

  my dream

Planetesimals whirr the dark

Seventeen billion

         spheres

Cut from hard metal

Seventeen billion

         trees

In a red-shifting forest

Our names carved

         into just

         this one

         tree

Walking these streets

Shadows blot the sun

I'm a cotton weevil

Caught in a loose cotton weave

Unbuttoning one ear

I hear the muttering voices

         Of the jabberwocky elk

Dreaming

Riding bareback through the forest

I taste the trail in my mouth

And think to write this down   

Having re-posted the poem, I wonder whether the poem is 'finished'. I tend to cover, listing any given poem as a 'work in progress', such as perhaps all poems may/must necessarily be. That thought back of mind, I opened the current issue of PN Review (No. 279) this morning, and read an appreciation by the editor of his longtime collaborator and fellow poet Stanley Moss, who died recently at age 99:

Often he would complete a poem and then follow on with three or four revisions: these sequences are editorially fascinating. He was profligate in discarding memorable lines, heaping up darlings like Herod's babies. He usually knew when a poem, whether his own or those of his authors, was finished.

Stanley Moss 'knew' when a poem was 'finished'. As editor who would publish one or more of Moss's poems from time to time, he might be in a position to comment on the poet's skills; on the shared challenges poets must face:

My occasional complaints were with his syntax, his sporadic doggerelish rhymes, and sometimes with enjambments, line and stanza breaks.

Enjambment! Yes, I know.

But there's more. Extrapolating now... The Thinking-About-Gladys-Machine is a fascinating collection of early stories by the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero, in a new translation by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, published by & Other Stories (www.andotherstories.org) and offered by Asymptote Journal through their translation book club (www.asymptotejournal.com). 'The Abandoned House', one of the stories collected here, comprises brief sections, each detailing the experience of a 'select few people who fall under its [the abandoned house] influence'. In the final section, 'Ants', the narrator conjures a solitary ant occupied with building a mysterious structure out of "little sticks and other small objects'. Archie the engineer in their group believes 'it's a giant engineering project' that will 'help him to revolutionize bridge-building techniques'. But the narrator thinks otherwise:

She uses them all to build something that isn't a nest; we don't know what it is, and for the ant it seems to serve no practical purpose. She walks about on it, enraptured, then forgets the whole thing, and returns, for a while, to her contemplative state.

What to make of this? The narrator:

I don't think they're bridges; I have my own views on the matter. Everyone uses magnifying glasses, everyone focuses on the detail and praises the meticulous work and delicately balanced little sticks. Personally, I prefer to see it as a whole and say that it's beautiful, and that its shape is not unlike that of an ant.

...

*I'm 'republishing' the original version of the above poem, which can be read at my blog post dated October 22, 2021.

Two possibly interrelated extempore notes. Reading in The London Review of Books just now. A review of The House on Via Gamito by Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky (Europa: March 2024). Reviewer Thomas Jones writes,

…Starnone is married to the writer and translator Anita Raja; they have both, jointly and severally, been fingered as the authors of [Elena] Ferrante's novels. When Jhumpa Lahiri translated Starnone's novel Lacci as Ties in 2017, the New York Times reviewer described it as 'in some ways a sequel' to Ferrante's Days of Abandonment, 'in other ways an interlocking puzzle piece' – though what other kind of puzzle piece is there? – 'or another voice in a larger conversation'. But novels don't have to have been written by the same person, or by people who are married to each other, to be in conversation with one another. That happens anyway, in readers' heads.

This right away put me in mind of something from Roland Barthes' S/Z as quoted in M/W by Matt Longabucco. (Longabucco's book is subtitled An Essay on Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain.) Here's the quote from Barthes (not the full passage as quoted by Longabucco):

The commentary on a single text is not a contingent activity, assigned the reassuring alibi of the 'concrete': the single text is valid for all the texts of literature, not in that it represents them (abstracts and equalizes them), but in that literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances…

Longabucco:

Typing out the passage, I feel his pleasure, the permission he gives himself, in extending this single sentence, a sentence that itself describes the vast, singular, interconnected texts we find when we turn to literature and in which we confront everywhere the intractability of difference…

I note this here as further evidence of the serendipity that persistently/insistently addresses the writer, eyes/heart open.

Following on that, another related/unrelated note: reading Behind the Tree Backs by Iman Mohammed (translated by Jennifer Hayashida; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), I came across the following standalone poem (quoted in part):

…Mesopotamian sculptures float in the water, they suddenly rise and begin to walk toward land, lips sometimes smile in deep sleep, the body is slack yet the face possesses thousands of nerves wanting to speak to it all.

I've been reading these poems, translated from Swedish to English, cross-checking the original to mark the continuities/adjacencies of these related/interrelated languages. Here's the quoted portion in the original Swedish:

…mesopotamiska skulpturer flytter i vattnet, de reser sig plötsligt och börjar gä mot land, läparna ler stundtals i den djupa sömnen, kroppen är slapp men anskitet besitter tusentals nerver som vill tala till alltet.

I've written on this blog about the stone figure I found on the beach at Barnegat Light many years ago and later rendered into the 'Eupalinos' thread, after the invented Socratic dialog concocted by Paul Valéry. It may have been as if/that the stone figure arose from the sea and walked toward land, as the poem says, waiting for someone to nestle it. I've imagined/understood that the stone figure was ancient; erratic; remotely surfaced. Either way, the figure is strange and wants reckoning. Anything that comes to hand would help:

mayhap

this poem