The amazing poet Terrance Hayes was just on npr, talking about his new book, American Sonnets for my Once and Future Assassin. I heard him read some of these strange, powerful poems in Seattle last year and I’m looking forward to the book. But what’s on my mind now is a phrase he used about how a poet is always trying to activate the space between the lines. I hurried to write that down: activate the space between the lines. The idea is one I think about all the time, but have ne’er so well articulated. I try to point to it when I talk to students about the rhythm of the line, about tautness rather than slackness, about making a poem rather than saying something. What I’m getting at is how those lines create a force field in the spaces between them.
I think these force fields exist in metric poems and free verse, in parts of long poems (you know them when you come to them in Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example) and some whole shorter poems. I think it’s what took the top of Emily Dickinson’s head off. Poems that have this can be translated, but they can’t be paraphrased. I can’t offer a more specific definition, but here are some examples of the electricity I mean, the sparks leaping across the white space.
First, this familiar early 16th century lyric:
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
***
FLY
W. S. Merwin
I have been cruel to a fat pigeon
Because he would not fly
All he wanted was to live like a friendly old man
He had let himself become a wreck filthy and confiding
Wild for his food beating the cat off the garbage
Ignoring his mate perpetually snotty at the beak
Smelling waddling having to be
Carried up the ladder at night content
Fly I said throwing him into the air
But he would drop and run back expecting to be fed
I said it again and again throwing him up
As he got worse
He let himself be picked up every time
Until I found him in the dovecote dead
Of the needless efforts
So that is what I am
Pondering his eyed that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from
I who have always believed too much in words
***
IN THE EVENING
Jean Valentine
In the evening
I saw them
their little
open boats
carrying us
across the blood water
their invisible company
their invisible company
you beauty I never
did not know
no time
no place
you beauty
little ferryman
***
ETYMOLOGICAL DIRGE
Heather McHugh
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.
Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn’t come from come.
Person comes from mask.
The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.
Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.
8 Comments
I just found this blog last week and signed up for the emails. What interesting timing that turned out to be. I took a couple classes from you at Ohio University around 2000. The year before, I had been at Columbus State Community College, where my favorite teacher was Terrance Hayes. I went to see him read a few Monday nights at a bar called Larry’s. And I excitedly bought his first book, Muscular Music, when it came out that year. I still have a copy with a nice inscription, as well as one of his earlier chapbooks.
But what seeing his name on your blog made me think of instantly was one of my most embarrassing moments in college. At some point, you asked us each to bring in one of our favorite poems to share with the class. I chose Terrance’s “Noir: Orpheus.” It was only once I was reading it to the class out loud that I realized I’d never done that before. I’d never read it out loud. And I had no idea how to pronounce Eurydice. Needless to say, I butchered it and felt like a fool. And I still think about that sometimes. If I’m being honest, I don’t even think I understood all of the piece. But I was so drawn to a few lines that I really didn’t care. I still remember them verbatim. And I’m not the type of person that can just quote things.
Love should be a tow truck-
What rescues our stalled, abandoned hearts;
What leads us back to repair.
Love should save us,
But it won’t.
Anyway, I’m glad you are still at it and seemingly well. I’m glad I decided to look you up and found this blog. And I look forward to reading more. Thanks.
Hi Chris. I’m so glad you saw this and posted. The lines you quote here are exactly what I mean. You were lucky to have him as a teacher–he blows my mind every time I read him or hear him. Thanks for this.
Thank you, Sharon, for this post…I’m getting to leave for VCFA and was thinking about how to articulate “activate the space between the lines”–the Hayes quote is perfect.
LAND SURVEYOR
Forrest Gander
And came home with beggar ticks in his pubis
And the light syrup stink of urine on his jeans,
Godawful b.o., sat down on the bed unlaced his redwings
And lay back on the brown blood stains in the unmade
Sheets and the ferruginous odor of her period, saying
Holy holy holy, I do not feel kindly
To the copperhead in the copple-stones and the brown
Recluse making its nest in my underwear,
I hate poison sumac poison ivy poison huckleberry.
The ganglia of blackened liana
And the bowers of meshed kudzu trouble my step.
From spraddle-legged dumps, the fissure blooming between my cheeks,
I said the degenerate itching of my locust-leaf-wiped butthole
Only increaseth among company. I have pointed my sweatblind face
Through tents of webworms, I have lava-soaped striped leeches
From bruised ankles, I have brushed the hair
Of outrageous arachnids and their eggsacks burst and crawled
Every slake and chine of my sopranic skin.
Placed my unwitting palm on dead things nailed to fenceposts,
Imagined bodies and parts of bodies in the footsucking weedlots,
Startled at the crack of limbs in wheezing copses,
And I have grown strange.
But thou oh moon backsliding coolly from blue slips of cloud
Over bare semi-dark autumn fields where the stars smoke dimly for anyone,
Restoreth my peace.
For me, there is just so much visceral electricity coursing through these lines. And then the release.
I love this topic, Sharon. So many times I’ll read a poem or hear a lyric and think, why am I so moved by this? I look at the lines and there’s not enough there to touch me so deeply. Then I realize that the words on the page have a trapdoor beneath them that seems to open of it’s own accord, allowing me to fall through and into the real depth of what’s being said. Restraint is a big part of it — the poet knowing not to hit me over the head, trusting that the emotional flesh will be there on those word-bones. This is one of my favorite examples of what I think we’re talking about here:
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
Charles Bukowski
THE ONLY ANIMAL by Franz Wright
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
traveled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.
The only animal that cries
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth—
Somewhere
the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backward in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.
And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I’m never coming back
and yet
this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.
You gave us each in secret something to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child
You said, though your own heart condemn you
I do not condemn you.
Hi, Sharon, and thanks yet again for a wonderful topic. The “activated force field” is, as you say, the heart of poetry; it’s what leads the practical words of language to art. Haiku poems are “just” the force field for me. When you mentioned the topic I immediately thought of a relay race and that chaotic moment before the baton is passed off. It’s a chaotic split second because it vibrates with so much potential … then the right phrase takes up the baton and the race seems inevitable again. It’s all flat on a page but the reader is breathless. Any word can do it to you, even the word “Eurydice” (I love ChrisD’s entry).
I’ve never run any kind of race, but this moment of passing the baton is utterly compelling to me, and what you describe–vibrating with potential. That’s what I want lines and spaces to do in poems, both of them.