The poet Peter Streckfus once remarked that what he loved most in a book of poems was a quality of persistent strangeness—“swimming in the confusion of it” was his phrase for the reader’s initial experience. This quality makes, as Streckfus suggests, an environment; it is not a matter of the shrewdly confused surface or of opacity, nor can it be elaborated into a deliberate aesthetic. Rather, one feels that something has been discovered in the language itself, some property or capacity, some tone never before transcribed, whose implicit meanings the poet has found ways to reveal.
Jessica Fisher writes a poetry of this kind, haunting, elusive, luminous, its greatest mystery how plainspoken it is. Sensory impressions, which usually serve as emblems of or connections to emotion, seem suddenly in this work a language of mind, their function neither metonymic nor dramatic. They are like the dye with which a scientist injects his specimen, to track some response or behavior. Fisher uses the senses this way, to observe how being is converted into thinking. The poems move like dreams or spells: momentum, here, seems less a function of will than an evolved form of passivity; it is that condition in which freedom from decision and choice makes possible a unique flowering of attentiveness and reflection. The poems succumb to movement as though it were desire, with its obsessive repetitions and reenactments, its circularity:
Because the valley spreads wide, ridged with the signs
we read; or because what we needed was always at hand—
reach down and there was a book, there a slipper, there a glass
of ice cold water. Hopefully we walked
the paths laid before us, there was a burr-bush,
there a blue jay, quail and other creatures, too many
to follow. Where did they go once we lost their lead?
Which is to say, where did we not go? Quick, quick,
they called to us, but we heard only the sound
of our boots on dried leaves, and were mesmerized;
we spoke to one another of things in the path,
we chucked to our horses, when we had them,
and when we had hats we took them in our hands
and hallooed to the passersby (brahma bull, bright
green bird) though we were not yet out of the wood,
instead it closed in around us, deep were its streams
and the trees thick around and thick together …
—“JOURNEY”
Impossible to begin discussion without first saying how beautiful a thing this is with its calm unfolding syntax, its air, common to so many of Fisher’s poems, of being not exactly of this time—better perhaps to say not of time at all. This is time from a perspective not yet ours, time simultaneously infinite and momentary, the voice a continuity through mutability. Like Frost’s “Directive,” a poem it resembles in its dramatic situation (though the pairing is revelatory mainly in the differences it suggests), “Journey” seems to have slid off the map; it takes place either permanently, without beginning or end, or repeatedly—it takes place, that is, in myth time, in fairy-tale time. The alert floating voice is hard to anchor in a body, though it reports physical actions and sensations. The usual signals of age and gender are utterly absent. A sense of the child’s voice comes and goes, but despite its intimacy “Journey” is not a poem of personal history or personal dilemma. “What do you think we dreamt,” this voice asks us toward the end, its casual familiarity transforming the reader from reader to companion. The answer reveals nothing of the dreamer’s character: this is not a poem that seeks to identify motive or obsession, though like all poems of obsession “Journey” is a ritual. But the catalyst is external, circumstantial. What initiates “Journey” is the fact that these paths exist: “laid before us,” the poem says; they allude neither to goal nor to destination. The poem ends in dream; the dream recapitulates experience, which becomes increasingly impossible to separate from dream. Its meaning is not known, though its importance is not doubted.
Some poets conduct themselves as though they were directing traffic; with others one can hardly see any sign of imposed will. Fisher doesn’t bully or coerce; her voice confides and drifts and veers, it pieces together impressions: no orders, no laying down of the law. The poems seem almost impersonal, as though their author were a sensibility, not a history. And yet, through even the most mysterious landscapes, this oddly jaunty voice, unplaceable yet distinctly human, this voice with its faintly archaic sound, periodically speaks.
The remarkable music of “Journey” characterizes Fisher’s work; it doesn’t indicate her range. Some of the best poems in Frail-Craft are prose poems. These eerie vignettes inhabit, simultaneously, the dreaming mind and the detached intelligence that operates intermittently within the dream. One of the book’s four sections is composed entirely of these poems, but the gesture appears earlier, in the amazing poem that ends the first section like an exploding flock of balloons, a Fellini movie crossed with a very sophisticated children’s book. It needs to be read in its entirety; no excerpt can give adequate sense of its ingenious shifts and surreal ebullience, though the opening lines convey something of both:
Now—the parade. Lions, red, black & yellow. They never go anywhere without a drummer, & also have someone to carry extra oranges, & a hat carrier, for when they’re tired. If their heads are bare they can be bonked with a stick.…
And much later, after many shifts:
… yesterday the sun shone. Mounted police forced the dancers off the street. Really exciting. All the windows in the town were covered with screening for that very event. A good time was had by all. Good dinner, good people, good night.
—“NOW—THE PARADE”
The mainly short poems of section two sustain these energies. They are, all of them, dreams, though they vary widely in their tones, their scenarios. This is a difficult form for poems: most poets seem a touch too proud of their dreams, too aware of their resonances. Fisher has found a way to use this material mainly, I think, because she never steps out of her invented worlds:
—the dream I stayed with past waking
in which Pascale sits sewing rabbit fur to glove your hands
and silently, feet propped on a table, I flay a long strip
from each thigh to make you boots. The skin peels easily,
it’s like stripping the pale bark from a fallen birch,
the muscle beneath like the crimson trunk still teeming …
—“FLAYED”
Or this:
A long man came on foot, his hair was long too. He spoke above the river. Many people came, so many that his voice couldn’t reach them all, but I heard it: I climbed a tree just behind.
Below me, a woman got to her knees and cried, her hair was thin as a bird’s first feathers, her mouth made a horrible shape. Mother said she must be a sinner, that the words of this man, who has held the Christ, pricked her soul like a needle does cloth.
I didn’t cry, nor did Daan Nachtegaal—he was in the tree too. After the man finished we went back to swordfighting. The sinners followed him into the river and drowned.
—“THE SERMON”
The elasticity of the form, the clarity and directness of this voice speaking from within contexts that seem fairly remote precincts of reality, allow Fisher to construct poems larger than might ordinarily seem within the range of a poet of such marked lyric temperament. As its title suggests, “Novella” is a miniature novel: in terms of plot, it begins with the disappearance of the hero. He stays vanished throughout, as though the function of the beloved were to lead the speaker back into imagination, which resurrects and perpetuates the connection. We collude, as readers, in his disappearance: if the wrong were righted, the poem would end. Whereas seeking him confirms his importance and intensifies his charisma. In this sense, “Novella” is also a poem about reading, about being lost in, a wanderer in, a text. “What you find when you’re lost you can’t look for,” the poem tells us. The argument being, “you’d have to get lost to find it again.” A logic both impeccable and perverse, deeply invested in the condition of being lost. As it did in “Journey,” seeking in “Novella” means following a path that has been set or created, in this case by François, to François. We can’t find him, and he can’t get back: “His footsteps, left on the ice, would be gone when he went to retrace them.” In these and other poems here, a particular kind of immersion figures: that being lost in which great discoveries are made, the center of one’s being if not found at least approached. Always accident and chance are preferred to purpose. And the path, often, is “the lead that led astray.” So that seeking, which recurs, seems not at odds with passivity, since chance and accident, like fate, cannot by definition be fixed objectives. Seeking is often being led; in Frail-Craft it alludes to depth, not distance.
For all the music, the sensuous detail of Fisher’s art, her demeanor is essentially cool, measuring, intellectual—speculative may be a more accurate term. When such composure takes on, as it does in a number of shorter poems, explicitly passionate or erotic subjects, what results are poems so pure, so violent, so absolute, they seem like choral laments in Greek tragedy:
You would think that I go mad with grief
when the white sails fill and the keel cuts
the waters like a knife honed on whetstone:
that’s the way you’re taught to interpret these signs—
matted hair, the salt-dirt lines where sweat has run,
hands that feed the mouth but will not wipe it.
But when my love decides to go and then is gone,
I can still taste him, bitter in the throat; I still
feel the weight of his body as he fights sleep.
I do not fight it: on the contrary, I live there,
and what you see in me that you think grief
is the refusal to wake, that is to say, is pleasure:
qui donne du plaisir en a, and so if
when he couldn’t sleep in that long still night
you sensed it and woke to show him how
to unfasten each and every button, then it is
promised you, even when he goes—
—“THE RIGHT TO PLEASURE”
What is being in the world like? For American poets in the mid- to late twentieth century, this has meant, in the main, being in a single world patrolled by a single intelligence bent on finding meaning. The poems made by these compulsions have been essentially dramatic, artificially weighted at the end with insight. Impatience with these premises, with pat, histrionic endings, has fueled a poetry more interested in impressions and possibility than in symbols and conclusions. This poetry wants to explore experience before it becomes coherent, therefore too rigorously channeled.
In various ways, many contemporary poets try to inhabit the earliest possible phase of this process, the point before experience begins to be organized into categories. The willed intensity and inertia of emphatic closure has bred revulsion to any stage preliminary to, and therefore tainted by, closure. Chaos has seemed increasingly fertile and attractive; the great problem is that chaos embodied in language is not chaos but form; the page cannot contain the void. This does not mean memorable poems have not been made of these ambitions. But such poems are an artifice in their own way, objects with boundaries, not the wind of the infinite.
The word artifice is very grim: it cannot suggest our experience of art, principally because it does not suggest the world of feeling that is both the source and object of art. Too often distaste for sentiment, anxiety at the limitations of the self, create contempt for feeling, as though feeling were what was left over after the great work of the mind was finished.
These issues obtain here, partly because Jessica Fisher has a marked taste for experiment: Frail-Craft inhabits the concerns of a period, its philosophic and linguistic dilemmas, but it does so with an intensity and suppleness rarely encountered: experiment never deteriorates into complacency.
Her poems are analytic meditations, their variety and beauty manifestations of extraordinary sensitivity to English syntax. She shares with her contemporaries intelligent suspicion of worn forms without being automatically enchanted by the arbitrary. Meaning is here, saturating the lines: this is not meaning like a kite with its neat string of explication attached; neither is it rote repudiation. Many of the poems are exquisite spatially: Fisher likes to use the whole page; her descending accruing shapes mime the sensations of associative thought—phrases seem to flood in from different parts of the mind, different parts of the life. The effect is musical, like the winds taking over from the strings.
This impression is fundamental. A highly trained, probing intelligence shapes this work, accounts for its precision, its shimmering logic that seems to belong more to mathematics than to language. And yet always the crucial impulse of these poems seems not argument but song. In Frail-Craft, Fisher has found a way to represent the cascade of sensations we think of as being without slighting the great presences, love and loss and death, that structure our perceptions. More impressively, she has found ways to generate emotional power without insisting on rigid correlation of event to insight. The marvel is how elegant, how whole, these poems are, their fluidity notwithstanding. Robert Hass has talked in this regard about rhythm as the underlying principle of form. His perceptions apply here; what gives Jessica Fisher’s work its sense of form, of repose, is her perfection of ear. That repose, with its strange mobility, its accommodation of surprise, is Fisher’s particular genius. To enter these poems is to be suspended in them: like dreams, they both surround and elude.
Repeated readings do not diminish this impression. I read Frail-Craft many times and felt, each time, the same involuntary relinquishing, the giving over, like someone standing at the edge of a body of water, hypnotized by the patterns of light, the slight shifts of color, and then led, without ever knowing how, deep into the recesses of contemplation, of emotion. The experience is unforgettable:
For a very long time we’d been on the road, you bet
we were tired of salt-beef, of sinew and the raw
wings of insects—
and so I suppose you can imagine
how it felt at last
to cross the mountains
And when it’s a long time
since you’ve slept
in the disturbing softness
of someone’s breath
that tree-body takes you by surprise—
space enough inside
for most of us, yet
all night we each felt all alone there
walking
from plain to peak to fog toward the idea of ocean …
—“STEREOGRAPHY: PIONEER’S CABIN, NEAR GROVE”
2007