chris at 10:06 PM |

 

A Few Words on Barry Schwabsky's Opera (Meritage Press, 2003):

These extremely artful poems, individually (including the writer's careful attention to minute details in each poem) and then again as an intriguing whole, fascinate me. They draw one in from both perspectives, the large and the smaller views, simultaneously--a not uncomfortable predicament in terms of result, per the ways Schwabsky sends forth this verbal art. They are like looking at one of those photographs of an object, say, a face, enlarged to consume an entire wall, but of course up close each point of what was thought to be the comfortable blur of plain graininess actually turns out to have other entire images--full of other stories--at work within the whole. Captivating, almost overwhelming, but in ways well worth contemplating, studying forth.

This is from "Drafts (of Water)" :

Unless patterns pursue themselves like waves, Luisa,
unless patterns ... unless they
pursue themselves ... unless
waves... but let me put it this way:
sea light will not be cajoled, Luisa,

into sufficient confusion
except on condition you explain realism at the
            dinner table:
subscription to water
wilderness of water

...

he eyes her eyes,
starminded.

(21)


It would be easy to stop paying attention here and just fog off into the congenial semiotic flow. It's not only the subtle, implicit critique of "realism" that might be missed, though. What else would be missed is the too-much: the more-than-naming, the excess of what is delicate, pressing and refusing to be "cajoled" in and by the driven flow of predictability: "patterns," endlessly chasing themselves around in the "sea-light." Indeed such is always in danger of being missed and yet is always missed--so longed for, if only because such can only be intuited from the “wilderness of water,” or that fluidity which holds what can be known, alongside what escapes knowing and *any* kind of naming. This predicament asks for consideration of what is both unquantifiable and qualitative, what happens when we participate in attempts to name things even though hopelessly “starminded” much of the time. We cannot afford to let go our *starmindedness* but are neverthe less caught up in the need to account for detail even while flowing in what is conceptualized as a poetic whole, here, a constellated, though happily unnameable poetic universe. One wants more, indeed feels the worn corners of a paperback Beckett slowly fraying in the back pocket during reading moments such as this.

But here is another reminder of the inclusively contradictory large and small views taken in simultaneously yet without collateral damage or loss, in the sense of being forced to favor one view over the other while also being made aware of what remains unnameable:

Miranda

If you give up the right to remain silent
you die. If the wind could slip

this old shirt off you might see
bones as damp as winter. Time

grows cloudy in this silo. Another sun
will wring the season out. Assignment:

Write one poem ommitting reference
to God. Your only chance may be to keep

your own appointed counsel, striking tense
or careless poses in keeping with the lateness

of this hour in which you’re caught up
short, at the last possible moment

in the most unexpected way.

(97)


There is here a very slippery “You,” involved with the speaker, converging as it does in differing senses of “Miranda”--as familiar legal dictum, as possible person apostrophized--and these two ride out the wave of the poem together more than pleasingly, in fact, throughout, in what is named, sure, but also in delicately unnameable ways, or “in the most unexpected way.” And what else is, perhaps, “unexpected”? By the time we get to the use of “silo,” the knaw of knowing is near certain: this is not only that cylindrical structure full of corn out Rural Route 10, but also that structure in the desert, full of power-polity’s intention for (I will qualify here: I mean, *god forbid*) this planet’s final end. All of that part of the awe in the flow, and a wavering “You,” to speak with, to boot. Very nice.

So, with these poems: keep your eyes completely open under the water, which is to say, open in several worlds at once when reading and listening-hearing what is being said, or as others have noted in praise of Schwabsky’s work: what is *sung.*