by Adam Ray Wagner

1. A Flattening Out

Let us say there is no inner, no outer. No psyche, no soul. The only depth that there is is something or someone over there, where you are not, and that there was someone and will be someone then, when you were and will not be. The feeling of psyche-soul is a false spatialization of what is temporal—you before you, I before I; you after you, I after I. Preceding ourselves, we think we are partially elsewhere but really we are elsewhen. Always just about to be while being and having just been.

What a poem must do today is resist the cult of introspection. Introspection has had noble goals, but it has ultimately created the idea that one gets to the other circuitously—through the psyche mire. But look at this page! Temporally, the only thing between you and me are these words. And you are crossing them now. You will arrive at me once you realize you are saying them in the order I did. 

A poem is made of the tension rod sustaining two beings upright. A revelation of the space which enables I to say I and you to say you and, in that, we to say we. When I said above that depth is only someone over there, I meant also that their overthereness defines your overhereness. Depth is not you abstracting backwards out of your head wondering what the poem means; depth is the constitutive space you’re made of because you aren’t someone else. I take seriously the idea that by being in this space a poem makes it easier to say we and mean it because we see that a we is not the closed circuit of you and I, but an open stream others enter and exit. Like Joanne Kyger hiding “me” in “mean” and “us” in “Cantus” to tell the story of me making us: 

During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I mean a beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean in the Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery.

First it is a question of language—how to encounter it—make paper “Firm us.” I write because words are my friends. I only get to know them by talking to them, which is the work of the poem where their meanings grow so close they become comfortable and talkative. This is why you must give the words space to speak across and time to get their points out: the page and prosody. Keep them apart as best you can; they love to coincide and try for one great big word of all words. But just as we need depth of space to say we, so do words. Time makes their space.

A poem attunes us to the intervals between all beings, not to overcome them but to show us our responsibility in the world to be something other, since we constitute that interval as we travel between spaces to places. A poem may attune us mystically, comically, tragically, or adverbially otherwise. But if it does not do this, it is not doing the work of poetry. 

It has already taken you time to traverse these few words and you are thinking along them—accruing time behind you and beginning to parse the potential before you. The words are doing this with you. And so am I since it is taking me time to write them. Your reading tempo and my writing tempo differ, but our rhythms are the same.

What I believe in is interaction, encounter establishing rhythm. I see you touching me hearing, responsively, erotically, outrageously. As you read me, your eyes move, maybe your mouth a little too. So did mine. Well, my mouth a lot. I write aloud.

The conductor and instrumentalists breathe in, starting the rhythm before the first note. This is where we, the audience, begin, too. You took that breath when you picked up this page as I took it when I sat at my laptop. One of us must beat the drum the other makes.

God is dumb
until the drum
speaks.
The drum
is dumb
until the gong-gong leads
it.

I am speaking to you very carefully over a long period of time like a drum across a wide landscape. You understand me because you could have said these things yourself. You wouldn’t have, but you could have. A poem is made of the time it takes to write it.

A poem inserts itself uncomfortably into the gestalt of sensuous experience. Snagged, our attention is drawn all at once to itself. 

Before writing the poem, I look desperately for something with fixed certainty. What to write about? What to write about? I have no idea what I’m looking for—wandering about, fixated on inattention. This is my poetics. Attention is my material, and it sits—right there—as I encounter myself in the world among others. I may or may not write about what “actually happened,” but I will find language at attention in my noticing. 

2. A Straightening Out

The idea that language is inexact or limited stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that treats language as a container or vocabulary selection. Language acts. It would be nonsense to say "The face doesn't have enough expressions" or "There aren't enough ways to dance." "I do not have the right words" is as if to say "I cannot smile the right way in reaction." Language gestures. By speaking, I am not transmitting anything to you; rather, I am pointing and showing something in front of us both. 

You are folded into and fold language—as you are folded into and fold any expression. Which is all there is. I know I have read a poem when it folds me over and I see how flat I am.

So, when I sat down to write this, I projected you. Yes, I need you in order to speak because you being away from me creates time and space. I told you, “you are my future,” and there you were. I had to speak to you, then, to get to you. You have just said something to me and I have forgotten what. To get you to say something, I have to speak until you’re able to respond to what I’ve said.

In the drama of my projected you, I may try to disguise my ignorance. I am doing this now—speaking in the hopes that what I say will fit in well with what we’ve constructed around us. Or, I may say something vaguely insensate, and you’ll realize my predicament. I have just said a poem. This is why all poems are honest.

I do not know who you are. You are not my audience, but you are who I’m speaking to. The poem is not for you, but it is because of you. Writing begins in pluralisms. I have projected you to make depth between us. It does not matter if something will be read, but that it could be. The presence of potential is reason enough to do anything and potential rests in otherness. So Orlando in As you Like It carves bad poems in the trees of a forest—knowing if the words are there, his love will find them like pages: 

O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.

“Books” fall under an omnipresent eye that “looks” and the meta-position of the absolutely general “character” rhymes with its placement: “everywhere.” Language, Orlando’s rhymes discover, will always have their reader made for them out of witnessing.

Sometimes, I don’t project you. You are already there. What has been called muse or inspiration is really you, waiting to be spoken to with varying levels of patience. You are never passive—making your way to inhabit every word I could say. In these moments I catch the last word or phrase you’ve said and so am granted some initial trail into what I must say.

This is why every poem is really a love poem; it needs someone to speak with so it makes them until they are there. The poem’s edge is love’s edge tracing out the body, Amiri Baraka says:

But
die soon, Love. If
what you have for
yourself, does not
stretch to your body’s
end.
(Where, without
preface,
music trails, or your fingers
slip
from my arm

Baraka’s line breaks refuse to set body and end together and conflate “music trails” and “fingers.” The “end” is only where you slip from me, my last point.

You are at my end to begin me. Every poem is a cosmography, writing what happens between us—which is everything. I know that I am in the world because if I turn around, you’ll see my back—still there. I know that I write because you’re seeing the backs of my sentences even as I’m not around, as you see them with their syntactic terminus present. I now face the other side of my sentences too, at their end. As their point of arrival, you change them by bringing them. As listener, you change me by making what I will say said.

3. Some Similitudes

Words are our hinges. I am your doorframe and you the door. You are my doorframe and I the door. A poem presents the squeakiest of hinges so that you hear it and know it is well that it is there. Someone has come in. Come in.

The sun is as unknown as a word. A word is as unknown as the sun. Topological anomalies, both seem to be holes and radiances. Looking right at them, they are bottomless and painful with no end. Looking around them, they spill creation and clarity. A word strikes the throat to cast the shadow of voice. 

Imagination and memory both take place in time. Recalling something or imagining a victorious argument, I am caught making expressions unsuited to where I am awake. Each time I do this, I enjamb the line.

In the time of a poem, the last line is not the bottom but the top. A poem moves geologically. The myth of the instant has led us to believe that a poem manifests there—coherent thing whole and spherical. But the poem’s rhythmic base puts it squarely in time—lines fall one on top of the other, compressing and storing the weight of what has come until a topsoil settles. A good reader is a good mole—poking her head out at the end to feel the airy warmth of the sun, having just felt the density of earth. This is the particular lightness that plucked Dickinson’s head right off every time.

Two faces, when growing closer (in love, friendship) and then apart (in hate, distance, etc.), build over time a new cyclopic face. When we are closest, most spherical, like living in Donne’s angels, we speak:

Form is how I arrange my house. I would like to be able to get to my kitchen and would like anyone who should need to to be able to get to my bedroom. Couch faces the TV, dining table does not. Syntax is choreography in space. Where shall one land and how shall one get there?

Rhino so loved the moon, Li Shang-yin tells us, so loved the moon he sang up to it every night. Tried to sing like it. Sang so like it that near his mouth it began forming on earth up and up and on his snout. Love was the revelation that the rhino could be closest to the moon by speaking as it is.

A voice works primarily like a shadow: uncontrollable in that it is forever constituted by a relationship between an emanation and an interference, and which is controllable in that one does sometimes decide how to interfere. Walk around and the shadow does the same. No one is in the way of the sun as an obstruction, but all are constructions. Being with the structure. I think of con-struction as sister word to con-sider and con-template. Instead of stars or temple, one is with the very act of building when engaged in shadow play.

It would be as well to say that the poem is your spine keeping you upright or your arm locked out to help a friend stand up. Or your face is a couplet of eyes and mouth that no one will understand and you cannot translate. It is there for the finding only as you move between sitting, standing, and lying down.

As he was getting ready to leave for work, he turned to his home. I will be back around 3, he said into the empty place. 

4. A Tapping Out

For Lena Walker, whose friendship has been a lesson in conversations-having-souls

I hope you are reading this out loud so your chin drums on empty air. I hope you notice after you’ve read a poem that is a poem you discover you’re in a place like standing before a painting right before walking off to another one and you’ve been stood there a while. I hope you know a word has nothing to do with you until you’ve said it. And a word has nothing to say until you’ve said it amid other words to someone. I am asking you to put on Coltrane and read this and then I am asking you to put on Brahms and read this and sense that sense changes sense. I can ask you to do this because you are anachronistically responsible for me and I can hope because I am anachronistically responsible for you. If we weren’t this wouldn’t. “Ne nous quittons pas!” cry the beloved spirits in Fargue’s Vulturne. Let us not leave each other! We are rhythmic alternatives. If we put our palms together I can feel you touching me but I can’t feel me touching you. You have to do that. You have to do that. But if you say this out loud you can hear you saying me into place. And you’re going to do it in a cadence these words half build—some stresses are unavoidable and some are mine. Those that are mine you might change. Did you stress mine or you there? Our pluralism is variety of sense. Those that are unavoidable are eros. Those that are variable are chaos. These are not opposites but rhythms. Downbeat and upbeat in swing shaping each other positively. Not 1010101 but 1:1:1:1. Form and content are two hands pressed against each other trying to feel feeling and feel felt. This is rhythm. This is rhythm. Stress felt. Unstress feeling. Tensing your grip on an apple that invites your bite then you loosen. Standing in a dark room waiting to yell “Surprise” to a friend. It’s not quite their birthday but you are waiting to see them step in. The senses are elemental. We have divided them to discuss but they are only and always combinatory and you: the gravity of them. A pine needle looks sharp and sticky. A ripe strawberry tastes bright red. Know that those verbs are in the English-impossible middle voice. A word senses. Saying here you hear me by seeing and make yourself poem & the poem flesh. Each word prepares you for the next in the inhabited past I also dwelt in. I felt the empty space after each word as a tensed string—pulled back or plucked. Shot or sung in the vision-deep air. Whistling through perfume. I overwhelm you until you catch up—my air you become overwhelming me. You are the furnace forging me as I pierce you. You are the wind waving the banner of me so that onlookers know your force. You are the stone against the river of me and you are the ripples. You are the cormorant drying your wings of me. You are the plow that furrows me to plant you. You are the stones that uphold the building of me that you enter. The eyes of vowels, the nostrils of syntax, the mouth of consonants, the beard of inarticulate sounds. Count me constantly as I court you numerically, linguistically. You will never know what is me unless you focus. I atmosphere you. Condense me to be you. Distinguish us by saying what we are as I do before you. Time me. I could go faster or slower if you would. We restrain us, contain us. You lay your hand on the table to hold yourself steady and find that I built the table. I set out to travel and find the road is named after you, for all you will do. We baffle the most astute timekeepers, I then and you now. You do not even have to be human but you are. I have been too. 

What are we going to do without us? 

Concentrate. 

Make us.