by Jennifer Valdies

All vision may rely on the interdependence of an internal and external source. An external image projected in the mind, an internal image projected on our surroundings, and what can be generated from the overlapping of these forms of vision, allows us not just to witness and be witnessed by the world, but reify our beliefs, our dreams, and other visionary forms of the divine and transcendent into an observable imaginary. What truly separates us from our environment or from each other, with those cellular membranes so small and infinite? If immanence is an inward-moving version of transcendence, how does this complicate our understanding of the lyric, and via the lyric, the world?

“One eye sees, the other feels,” so writes the painter Paul Klee, firstly conducting, as an epigraph, our movement through Pam Rehm’s Inner Verses (2024). From this aphorism we get a sense of the multimodality of perception, that “seeing” is only half of sight, as well as an interest in the dual operation of the two different sides of the brain: one that seeks to control and the other which seeks to know. This is perhaps a universal law, as even Aristotelian physics state that some motion is natural, inherent, and all other motion is violent, external, both being necessary for life to develop and progress, to change and be changed. Rehm’s poems move slowly and deliberately across the page, an arena of open space and sound, carefully and intentionally constructing little rooms of thought, each of which are spacious and complicated, both ambiguous and clear, a feeling laid over or underneath language, a tension generating from their asymmetry. Rehm’s new collection is interested in the penumbral, that which is both light and shadow, divinity generated and divinity observed, received. 

From the opening poem “Confirmation” we learn much about this little book, which, like a relic or milagro, contains passageways which extend beyond and are charged by their small physical form. We at once are dancing between meaning, the title referring both to confirmation as the sacrament or rite of passage within Christianity, as well as this urge to reinstill, by means of some kind of proof, faith within doubt, the “eroded” or “unpracticed” belief, an idea which resurfaces again and again throughout the collection. As if to complete the first of many invisible circles, an echo of the Klee epigraph returns at the end of this first poem: “A vale of close light / A light incarnate”. There is something so painterly and cinematic about this image, a doubling or coupling then equalization of light. The inner and outer seem to correspond, relaying light until it’s uncertain which originated from which. There’s also such distance and sense of aperture here, a form of deep focus, wherein the background, foreground, and middleground are equally clear in view.

Transmission and clairaudience, or astral projection and clairvoyance, may be another set of examples of this visionary (auditory) dichotomy—do we dictate or are we being dictated? The difference being where exactly these images, language, music are being issued from. I think about this poem from Eileen Myles’ Maxfield Parrish (1995):

All the doors in my home are open.
There’s a pulse outside I want to hear.

The phone’s unplugged.
The pastiche of you on me would be unforgivable now.

If there’s a god squirming around
she sees me & is me.
I wish the birds were souls, invisible.
I wish they were what I think they are, pure sound.

Eileen Myles, “Immanence”

Within this poem are so many layers of influence and desire, and a similar blurring or conflating the outside and within, a direct symmetry I read still early in Inner Verses: “This empty awareness / is beneficent // A pulsing of pulses // Listen / to the place” (“This Tender Riot of Chaos”). Even the birds at the end of “Immanence” become representations, imagined versions of themselves, wherein they exist only by the music that both emanates and is at once entirely separate from them. It’s no wonder that birds are a primary animate feature in Inner Verses, themselves such an acute reification of the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of song. They make up the first lines and first image in “Confirmation”:

Wild birds form
distances
for a restless eye

They retain
then edify
the soul’s longings

and throughout the book, “a bird-soul” (8), “But the trees / of birdsong / out back / of night fears” (12), “A continuous permission / To be permitted to return // to those whom we love / like migrating birds”. (35) Even more than apt symbols of song and the history of lyric poetry, as Rehm writes, they both house and instruct the desires of the soul. There is both a kinship and a looking toward these animals, an instructor we see a bit of ourselves in—poets know this feeling in reading a book by an old or new poet before restlessly moving through their oeuvre, tracing what feels like a dormant familiarity, seeking instruction and a friend. I’m compelled, too, by these first lines, that “Wild birds form / distances / for a restless eye”, that an object, particularly an animate one that carries so much meaning, can illustrate and make clear the invisible. Just as their proximity brings a kind of tangibility to distance, so through them we can see the wind, restless air, the signifier and signified.

The complexity and nuance and multiplicity of vision and the visionary seem to culminate in the sequence “Bowing to Forces Infinitely Greater”, delivering a somewhat ultimate catalog of worry, fear, doubt, and skepticism, as well as this clear-headed knowledge, a leveled sense of change and progression. “Surely, a genuine devotion lapses” (40), writes Rehm, but there is more longing than knowing here, “”I hope” / fused to // its shadow / (sorrow)”. (42) This crescendoing tension between “vitality” and “assurance” is a demonstration of an earlier wisdom from “Bleak Realities”, that “Uncertainty gives body / to the measuring / of everything”. (9)

To be certain is to be confined, to close meaning indefinitely. We know that for a complex, nuanced, and radical poetics, language must be kept open, allowed to change continuously across time. And we know (mostly) that the same goes for living: that ambivalence and flexibility are renewable and regenerative states of thought—meaning is buoyant, it floats. Whether we are the messenger or the message, we possess these capabilities to extend beyond our outlines and commune with something larger—a message from the outside, transmission, devotion; a message from further within, clairvoyance, intuition, an interior knowing, devotion. Between the perceptible and what we can perceive is this essential and irreconcilable breakage, and it’s in the breakage we’re able to find true and heightened meaning. Just as the lyric may be most moving when it approaches the breaking edge of song, or an image may be most compelling in the blur, between knowledge and the message of knowledge we may find hidden truths, ones that can only be revealed in brief, staccato moments. As Rehm closes (further opening) the book:

Love and its absence 
Move through us, moving us

How much sense we make
out of nothing but

an intricate tracing of how it feels
to be alive