Talia Brown

i. The loop, the flower, Rosmarie Waldrop’s LIFE, YOU REPLIED

LIFE, YOU REPLIED

What shall we do. While thinking about it. For such a long. Ashes of dead stars passed into. Such a very long time that. The book of minerals too. Too hard to read. Driving, not really fast, but. Wanting to. Take our distance. From thinking about it. Which is not

Last spring I went to look for a flower I had misidentified out of bloom. I imagined a delight in seeing it correctly named. I encountered it later, lit and delicate, lobed hepatica. The delight, I realized, was in the moment of uncertainty: of misnaming and recognizing.

Sometimes a poem flickers, and I am no longer certain whether smallness is important. It’s like squinting. At a haze, at the start of a spring.

What shall we do, Rosmarie Waldrop begins.

I encountered Rosmarie Waldrop’s poem “Life, You Replied” in a similar moment of uncertainty—of distrust in renewal, interval, deferment. I was on the edge of an open space, finding myself deepening uncontrollably into disappointment, longing for the changing light to be just-as-it-had-been-once. The loop: a departure and return, a reconciliation of the beginning of the poem and the end.

To deny the loop and to continue along it.

Rosmarie Waldrop, elsewhere: the interval has all the rights.

For such a long.

*

The first poem I understood as a poem was Lydia Davis’s “The Outing.” A sentence built of brief, differentiated intensity.

An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.

I am drawn to these barest particulars of location. Language segmented from the arc of the earth and yet structured as an uninterrupted block. A wholeness, in clarity of partiality.

Read alongside Rosmarie Waldrop’s poem, a scalar shift is visible, but the segmented-ness remains. The everything-else-in-the-gap-ness remains. And so the everything-ness of what is present. In the disembodied sway, perhaps, of a car in a turn. Outside of ourselves, but present in the swing of the poem. Back towards the title. 

I understand this poem as simultaneously symptom, transcription, and reach toward resolving the problem of the loop. That one is not always certain, in the poem, where to begin, and yet is always reaching towards a place of beginning. Creating not an enclosure, but a narrow path of travel, into which may be pulled presence, absence. I worry about what is dissolved, what is excluded, what is immortalized. And yet I understand it to be the nature of memory, composition, reality.

Driving, not really fast, but.

This tripling will return.

ii. Interlude: the nature of the loop, music

Tiny eddies or whirlpools floating in the river, like strange blank circles. Rotating and moving. 

The nature of the loop:

Making sentences about missing a place, but not saying what of it. Somewhat like evaporation’s pass-through. Never the same water, but always the same body. It’s like worrying the difference between being acquisitional for new things, or old, or stones. Going home with enough lake water on the skin. Opening the window without the screen, before it is cool. Eating a peach from the tree we’d written off for taste, enjoying it. Like the moment of doubting not your position on the road in alignment with the flow of traffic, but the orientation of the road, the vehicle, this convention, over the earth. Noting a new shape in the body while lying on your back, new divot. Not really thinking of it as still self or new self, just noticing. How warmth changes fear, how the boat is felt in relation to the water. How in the fantasy there is a dim light. On ramps sharing space with exit lanes. How this must change language too. Retroactive potential energy. Loving feeding a dusty foot through the leg opening of a garment after swimming. Dust because of the adherent properties of the water, now evaporating. Needing to do it carefully. I took that walk back and forth between the hot springs and the river with such joy – the soil was darker than we’d been used to, which I reveled in, and the silt in the water coolly radiant. The submergence was without a gasp – I was committed to it in a way that overrode the immediate sense of it, and instead projected forward into the loop that was walking, sliding into the concrete pool, climbing out, into the river, pulling water up into my hair, sliding up. I did it three times. In that water we could see each other with closed eyes. I wrote that day that I poured myself like a chain.

*

Lucinda Williams echoes herself at a delay. Swapping the weight of the melodic phrase for the words of the following phrase, enacting a lag, a seiche. Making her own music unaccustomed to itself. But still contained. Pendulousness, reapportioned. The balance settles out by the end of the song, not the same meaning but the same body, the words said-to-have-contained. But needing to show their distance. She releases a song unrecognizable from its previously released, later recorded version - out of touch. A third song which I often mishear as words fail echoes and in many places aligns with the second version of these two. Compression and pression. She once started an album all the way over again. Attending to the gap, the issues of the loop.

iii. Returning to the poem, Agamben, reassurance

Giorgio Agamben, whose writing, like Waldrop’s, requires the reader to maintain momentum in order to grasp the quality of the whole, writes of an idea of the Whatever:

[W]hatever singularity (the Lovable) is never the intelligence of some thing, of this or that quality or essence, but only the intelligence of an intelligibility. 

The wrack of the poet in the loop—reaching towards the real, then pushing away (or off of) that which has not fully embodied it. A problem to do with love.

A haze is created. In this haze, things move between germination of poem, phrase forgotten, thing said incorrectly, thing said in place of the forgotten thing. The whatever, always shifting, the lovable always shifting. How to continue, and from where. 

We pick bluets, place them in a windowsill in a jar. We are amazed by their number. Perhaps there were more bluets this year. We wonder if they will last forever in the jar. We don’t know, can’t remember, how long they last outside. There is always an amnesia in the return of spring, this columnar mud, against any fact-gathering, against any staying power of fact. We are warm, nearby and watching them, a strange experiment so close to the larger, the “real.” Unsure which is the correct truth: the jar, the corner of the lawn, our warmth, our forgetting.

I tried to write about a summer spent finding circles—nests of shorebirds in the sand. A job which committed body, eye, and nervous system to noticing. After the summer ends I retain their afterimage, I continue searching for a loop of thought into and back out of them.

What shall we do.

A pose: allowing it to be, to gather adjacencies. To know that some of what rises is vehicle, some vessel. That a control is needed, or a misconception, an image, to think in relief. Something to move from, somewhere to begin.

In spring, I mimic my loved one. Opening all of my car doors upon return from the grocery store, leaving them open for the air to pass through it in stasis. I adopt his learned preference for furniture, begin to believe that a painting can rest on a table, against a wall. I wonder at and endear myself accumulatingly to three t-shirts we’ve passed between us, pulled from a rag bin and deteriorating. All of them worn around the collar, the folded seam splitting in what is the natural progression of the initial fold, if kept near the skin, the neck, in sweat, through spring. I wash them too much and he too little, opposing abrading forces. In all of these things, love is in the space, in tracing the space. In the distance from myself to him, and in marveling at the exact interval of distance.

Giorgio Agamben dresses whatever not as "being, it does not matter which," but rather "being such that it always matters."

A friend asks me how I write about love all the time (I don’t know / I’m never certain if I do, completely), and I tell her that I circumscribe it. Closely, all that I do not know. Something which doesn’t need to be true to have hold. Necessarily ephemeral. Something to bridge a gap.  

At Pando, the world’s largest (as gleaned from aerial survey in 1976) living organism, the letters o h carved into a trunk. Abstracted, seemingly, by the trees’ growth, the letters become other than themselves, form a single image – not initials, not a word, but a tendered mark of an exclamation, a soft one. An indecisive expression of noticing, being affected, given twisting and unyielding life. A five-minute walk away, carved into another tree:

August 10
‍ ‍1998
‍ ‍4:14 PM

As if against the other impulse, but with the same motion. Down to the moment. On trees nearby, in a 6-foot radius, others have done the same, marked time, one layer of it. A maxim: just say the most recent thought and it will contain the rest.

I’ve been thinking about language recently as an intermediary, as something that allows the following thought, whether it is a thought in agreement, or contrary, or adjacency to the initial language. 

I think of Ekman transport, a force which acts upon deep ocean water to turn directional motion into spiral motion, through friction between layers of water. The original intent of the wind, effaced. I misremember this force by the name of the one that sets it into motion, the Coriolis effect, a better word. Misremembering - that which shapes all motion.

Too hard to read. 

So often in poetry and in Waldrop’s work, love is not body within the poem, yet love is the atmosphere, the afterimage of the poem. Love being attention to what is. Things attending to their existence as just-offset, and in the repetition of this interval offset from reality, a space of poetics. Realization of the loop. This is the quality of “Life, You Replied.” 

I find some nameable anchoring in Waldrop’s poem through Agamben: “Life, You Replied” is an intelligibility. Intelligibility is the tether which holds the loop of the poem. As eddy, as centrifugal force. 

Agamben unravels the Whatever backwards—

The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire.

Desire being the current which forms the eddy. Being the water and the current.

What shall we do. While thinking about it.

The flower again as a study: I understand and remember the hepatica (now knowing its name) through three connected gestures. (1) It is one of the first in spring, (2) because its anatomy allows it to persist in the early cold of spring, (3) anatomy which also catches light. The flower is beloved because of the third, which ignites the memory of the first, which holds attention. Which activates anticipation, the retroactive. The second fact is vehicular. The light lingers past a function.

What I mean is that there is a drag in “Life, You Replied,” a step-wise and overlapping felt-becoming, like this. I hesitate to write about it. This function is what the poem enacts.

Such a very long time that. The book of minerals too. Too hard to read.

Rosmarie Waldrop, in her book Lavish Absence:

The writer’s task is to lure the words onto the page. And they are willing and even eager to go there, but on their own terms. They have their own order and fight their own battles. They use the page to make love and then leave again. The writer is the catalyst. The words use him/her to come into existence, but once the elements have come together he is eliminated.

Anne Carson writes “A poem is an action of the mind captured on a page. It is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning.”

There is something of absence, of erasure, of vacancy in both dressings of poetry. For Waldrop, the vacating of the writer, and for Carson, the erasure of the moment (and the former self) once the poem—which contains an action, not a presence—is created.

This vacancy is also enacted in “Life, You Replied”—many of the sentences are truncated, lacking subject or object or even verb. Standing alone, the result is a nothingness, an irresolve. Together, this nothingness becomes a presence, a reality. This affect is possible because this is a prose poem, containing sentences, which lack differently than lines in verse.

Ashes of dead stars passed into.

I often struggle with this type of nothingness, or lack-as-presence, wanting the responsibility and humility of a locatable, anchored truth. A named subject and object, correctly laden. I worry the gap between aboutness and the reality of the poem. A gap where the author-as-person can slip. This gap, though, allows the presence of the lack, of the almost-ness (to which the addendum -ness feels almost necessary, denoting another layer of uncertainty) of the poem.

Sara Nicholson addresses the concept of the image in her poem “What The Lyric Is,” inverting the reality of the poem with reality of that which it is about:

I've been told
We should pretend
That everything we see is real,
That images should try
As best they can
To come to life. I feel that iron
Should take the place of snow
In the literature
And that silk flowers
Should be manufactured like
Real ones each spring.

I might want to write about plants because of the attention they point to, and the pause. A freeze in the loop. Margin of error, wilt of the bloom. Margin of error, the tipping point where lyric poem becomes more logic puzzle than lit feeling. Where exactly the decisive moment is located in composing. What matters. I struggle to write about it, halted by simplicity, my own judgement of it.

The silk flowers, born in the poem and house for uncertainty within it.

This push and pull, defiance and return—a reality of poetic practice sharing shape with a reality of being. Shadow of Life, You Replied, cast smaller.

iv. Returning again to the poem, companions

Bernadette Mayer writes “and language the false start to love it is, how unknown it is.”

Edmond Jabès, “I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express”

We realize we must place faith in suspension of disbelief. We must wait. These things return. The poem has a loop.

James Tate:

I don't know but I keep working, working

half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.

Take our distance. From thinking about it. Which is not. 

The title is spoken by a voice outside of the poem. The poem longs for the voice of another. The ricochet and oblique attention of the space between two voices. The loop of the poem is a small one too.