Although I began writing poetry in short lines (and continue to do so at times), prose, whether in long lines or a prose poem, opened up as an arena of transgression for me. Prose felt more capable of drift — ecstatic in its potential for syntactic permutation, its rhythmic runs and sudden verbal associations — while verse felt more contained, committed to the versus, that break and semantic slide back to a dominant left margin.
In short, as a young woman poet, the need to transgress limits of gender, class, and inherited culture seemed more possible in the relatively open space of prose, but a prose that could meet poetry in its attentiveness to language. After all, I had inherited from the New American poets and their sources attention to the roots and semantic shifts of words, as well as the rhythms and diction of contemporary speech.
In prose there is the appeal of the rhythmic run of a sentence, the way a thought will grow, extending itself through rhythmic variation, syntactic possibility, and melodic association to branch out into extended meaning — as if a sentence might embrace the multiplicities of an immediate world or whatever is local to it. Yet at every point there is choice. So this movement from word to world depends on an often unstated “I” generating those words, whoever is speaking/singing/uttering (outering) her way into meaning others might recognize. The hope for communication — communication as both common in the sense of shared as well as a making known of individual perception. What a singular “I” hears or sees depends on variously specific ways of relating to this world we all inhabit, out of which a self emerges.
My emergence as a poet coincided with large-scale political awakenings: the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and lesbian/gay rights movements of several decades, the 1960s through the 1980s. I began listening to voices, their oral syntax and diction, markers of social class, gender, ethnic background, political stance. This led to early work in aural (or oral, but I prefer the insistence on listening in aural) history and a certain amount of intertextuality in my poetry, a mix of the spoken with the written. Texture-al.
Composition, the act of putting words together, is full of conflicting immediacies. There is always threshold, the edge a poem rides in its coming into form out of the inchoate, the formless. Liminal.
Silence registers in poetry. At a micro-level it occurs in crossing that threshold of wordlessness into the phenomenon of wording, the astonishment of a word or phrase rising out of an empty, prior-to-wording state to meet the page “live” in its connection with a previous word or phrase. The connection flickers, comes in a backwards-forwards motion suggesting new melodic or semantic variations as it refers back to earlier ones. A word in its immediate claim on attention will relate as much as it also isolates, based, as words are, on small and very specific distinctions in their capacity for play — add “l” (hear “elle”) to “word” and you get a world of difference mediated by language.
At the most immediate level in composition (crossing a threshold with each word or phrase, sometimes each syllable, certainly each line), words come shadowed by their histories, half-forgotten remnants of past language activity, subliminal echoes. Poems often begin for me as a moment’s thought-activity gathering at the threshold of not-yet-heard potential that might suggest a question as large as what IS this life we are caught up in together? This groundless web of inter-relations, multidimensional, folding and unfolding in drift, each of us small knots of radiating (and potentially radiant) connection on which we project fixed identity, transient and conflicted as we are, constantly changing, becoming and breaking. How can a poem, that immediate network of words channelled by syntax, how can it register this constant trans-forming of the singular?
In the immediacies of composition, a poem will generate a current, a charge, as it develops. This current activates material that may simply drain away, disconnected, or may merge with that current, enlarging it. Writing, not just the fingers on the keyboard or the pencil (yes, their rhythms and movements too), seems to be a listening: listening in the echo-chamber language operates in charged thinking. Hearing other altering, alt/erring, even errant, possibilities of connection on both phonemic and semantic levels, on memory levels (the resonating phrases from others’ work through time), all points of contact in a web of thought that shifts, folds over on itself, opens further connections.
Fingers, yes — in the act of writing there is also the physical body, with its senses tuned not only internally but also externally within various eco-webs and social networks of the world we inhabit. I write at home in what surrounds: room, shared house, trees noisy with birds, trafficked streets with their human and non-human denizens. I write among diverse co-inhabitants (there goes that coyote loping down the railway cut), within a linear depth of history and memory, a lateral sweep of the surround. Where these intersect, a point of pressure, a register of the speed of change within our culture. The faint clink of another email coming in against the chatter of a squirrel; voices raised next door against the roar of an excavator at a construction site one block over.
Connection and continuity (both shape narrative and identity) are features of a sentence transferring action from subject to object, thought from sentence to sentence in forward (linear) moves. This is one way we make sense of what surrounds us. If the structure of a sentence resembles a mini-narrative that shapes thinking, still, at any point a poem can resist that narrative to broaden perspective. The question for me is how, without abandoning syntax altogether, can the lateral drift of linguistic connectiveness alter sentence-ing to register the ways we are implicated, on so many levels, in the fragile overlapping eco-social webs of our world?