The Poem that Can’t Be Written

The Poem that Can't be Written
by Lawrence Raab

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished—those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.

The New Yorker, 4/6

Myles’ and Hopkinson’s Stylistic Surprises

Monday I ran into Carlos. We exchanged confusion about the next evening’s event—a science fiction writer? My confusion grew as attendees entered into our seminar room Tuesday afternoon. I feel this event drew the greatest cross-section of the Georgetown community and beyond: a large group of high school students from Kansas, a handful of professors that do not always come to Lannan events, a quorum of graduate students more interested in gender and queer theory than poetry. And then there were the six of us Lannan fellows that had very little idea what to expect. I entered with no knowledge or attachment to either author’s work, but left with a great appreciation for their creative contributions to queer literature.

I was most interested in the personal genealogy Myles presented as to how her writing style evolved in the shadow of the precedent set by other queer writers. She acknowledged the spaces of absence that fill Sapho’s poetry and her challenge to mix the public and private sphere, paid homage to the writing style of a Swiss novelist, Robert Walzer, who constructed novels out of bits and pieces (a technique that aided her transition from poetry to fiction), and referenced John Wieners’ serialization of things in his poetry as an influence in her own voice. Myles approaches art as a grand lust and sees time as the place where the queer past and queer futures meet—she uses this time as a thrift store scouring the racks of history (and futures) for meaningful material and inspiration.

Nalo Hopkinson provided a similar defense of her genre, which was particularly useful for me as a non-science fiction reader. She described science fiction as an exploration of the effects of changing communities and an attempt to use dislocation, alternative realities, reality itself to evaluate social circumstances. She identified time and space as the primary dislocations that create spaces for change. For a style of writing that I am neither familiar with nor a self-identified fan of, I really enjoyed her reading and the objective of her work. Her first short story, “Flying Lessons” was rich with modernity and the nostalgia of childhood. She was a wonderful storyteller, her characters came alive with distinct voices and her prose flew between lyrical descriptions and efficient plot details. I do not know that I will race to read a book of hers, but I loved her performance and the meaning I attribute to her text because of it.

I am however anxious to read Myles’ forthcoming Inferno. It takes gumption to title a novel Inferno, but after the selection I heard I feel it fits. Myles lucidly chronicles the confusion of her protagonist’s inner dialogue and personal experiences. She offers a genuine glimpse into sexual self-identification and creates a language to aptly express those frustrations. During the question and answer session, someone asked about her pauses, a habit I too was curious about. She had a habit in her poetry and prose to read briskly and conversationally and then breathe at the page breaks. These breaths (pauses) gave her reader a moment to process, but then she picked right back up again emphasizing the necessity to continue, to move on, to explore the queer futures she had previously referenced and encouraged we invest in.

Carson's Coded Poetry: A Review of Ciarán Carson's Recent Visit to Georgetown

Ciarán Carson was a firecracker! My impression of his work after reading First Language was positive, but hearing him speak about his method and science of writing left me wildly enthusiastic about him and his work. In my original reading of his work I voiced the following review: “His poems are playful; he uses words in new contexts, unexpected placements that add depth and reflection to his poems”. After hearing him speak about his work, I found confirmation in my casual observation. Carson raved about his affinity for dictionaries and thesauruses—resources very obviously used to code his poetry in a language of specificity and originality.

This tactic seems one of many that make his poetry an adventure. He aims for both the author and the reader to constantly interrogate the meaning of each word and how they operate together. His caricature of casting rhyming pairs left his audience in stitches, but also demonstrated the care he pours into each selection. Rhyming “spoon” with “moon” would be too easy and expected; but rhyme pairs like “Velcro” and “dayglo” take creativity. He concedes language is much larger than any individual and admits rhyme is an arbitrary device, but embraces it as a tool to constantly explore our own ignorance.

Free verse lyric poems overwhelm contemporary poetry, so I am encouraged by how he embraces form. I have recently enjoyed using poetic forms as skeletal rules to push my poems in innovative new directions and felt he really echoed the utility of form poems to push language to its limits. In my own work I have played primarily with established forms like pantoums and sestinas, but he encouraged me to rely less on established rules and make my own. In For All We Know he decided every line would be fourteen syllables and contain a certain number of lines, rules all his own, but useful insofar as they forced him to carefully choose his means of expression.

When I went to visit with Ciarán Carson in his office hours about my own work, his advice that came up again and again was to bury and understate my language. He dissuaded me from the obvious syntax and turns of phrase, encouraging instead syntactical choices a reader would stumble over. He also insisted upon cryptic, unexpected word choice. He encouraged a style that forces the reader to not just read but process every part of each poem. He seems less concerned with his reader’s ability to access a poem than the poem’s ability to operate independently as a self-contained commentary on verbal possibility. His love poem in Irish that he has never translated is an example of a coded poem that derives its meaning from sound rather than specifically defined interpretation. As a charge for my own writing, I have a lot to learning and experimenting left to do: there is a delicate balance between making your reader work for it and alienating him or her.

Carson has mastered this balance in a way that remarkably enhances the meaning of his poems. Lines like “she put her mouth to mine and sucked the broken English from a Gaelic tongue” surprise the reader. Hearing “she put her mouth to mine” endings of romance come to mind, but he makes it about nationalism and language of belonging. Carson’s reading has been my favorite of this semester because of his engagement with his work and his audience. The greatest lesson I take away from my interactions with Carson and the examples in his work is the warning to never idly trust your language because it has the ability to constantly surprise and evolve.