I’m standing in an open field, throwing a tennis ball as far as I can towards the spring-equinox clouds that keep changing, turning to rain. Playing with and against motion – sometimes I think that this is the main thing I do when working on a poem. The poem becomes a ball that I toss up into the air, trying to keep it hovering, moving forward and further. Or perhaps I’m trying to turn the poem into an engine, so that at some elusive, unpredictable point I’d be able to let it take off. Reading the Philosophical Investigations, I’ve found it fascinating that Wittgenstein links meaning to motion:
‘When one means something, it is oneself that means’; so one sets oneself in motion. One rushes ahead, and so cannot also observe one’s rushing ahead. Indeed not. (Philosophical Investigation, 456)
The process of working on a poem often feels to me like that of getting lost. I am unable to observe myself, because while trying to create a poem in motion, I am, in fact, in a state of motion too. Fortunately, poetry lends itself effortlessly to motion. Even the way we write poems – vertically, from top to bottom, unconsciously echoing the law of gravity – evokes movement. I remember, aged nine, learning how to throw a basketball – you should shoot it forward and at the same time make sure the ball backspins all the way through. To me, this duality of movement reflects the flow of a poem: the text moves in one direction, while the enjambments create backspins that turn it into a spiralling-continuous motion, forming a sense of suspense by going against the end of the sentences, against any sense of pause.
Perhaps all this time I’ve been trying to create moving sculptures instead of poems. It is as if I’ve been carving line breaks in the soft stone of the script, leading myself and a possible reader in circles around the text that turns into a spiralling slide, where each spiral offers a slight change of direction or meaning or, hopefully, both.
The act of throwing a poem like a ball is an act of communication: someone is hopefully waiting at the other end of the field to catch this spiralling wave of a poem. To me, Wittgenstein’s notion of meaning as setting oneself in motion explains why an assumed audience is an integral part of the creative process: ‘Yes, meaning something is like going towards someone’ (PI, 457).
As a reader I hold onto poems that resist resolutions, poems that keep moving, spinning, changing their minds. Earlier in the Investigation, Wittgenstein proposes that it is not the business of philosophy to resolve contradictions and I often think it is the same for poetry:
It is not the business of philosophy to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery, but to render surveyable the state of mathematics that troubles us – the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (PI, 125)
For my own practice of poetry writing I choose to read it like this: It is not the business of poetry to resolve a contradiction… And yet if a poem resists resolution, how do you – the writer – know when it is complete? Presumably it could go on and on. Here is a possible answer – imagine the poem as a small creature: it has to be complete so that you’d be able to hold it in your palms without the risk of its parts – limbs, eyes – falling apart. And at the same time, because this poem-creature is complete, it can now use its limbs and eyes – and so it keeps moving, wriggling, trying and hopefully managing to escape from your palms, going towards someone.
*
for your absence of blue, an element –
locked, like a star. How did it happen, halfway
through the queue, that I started
to cry? There must be a trilogy
that begins with a rose
and ends with a streetlight – a blue
dot in the snow – deceptive
like water: clear and seemingly seeking
a deeper conclusion. I would never
have given you ten out of
twenty, except at that night
when the guy at the bus stop started – hey,
what’s your favourite place? And I noticed
the rain, the way it was fractured the second
it hit the blue lights – the tour de force
start of November. New York,
it was then when I knew it had always
been people like us – who grew up in small
places – who know nothing is worse
than the clear-porcelain moon
of blue sky, who’d go for the streetlights
reflections in quicksilver rain – any time – yes,
give me winter’s exaggerated
romanticism – a bitten-pink rose
in cigarette glass. I have fallen for each
fissure of pavement, for the crowd altering
the shape of quick
seconds, for the postman holding a pink
envelope – that wonder of physically
carrying a small piece of writing
from one place to another through snow and blue
snow. New York, that I’m writing you
here, in Monmouth café off Borough street,
London – lol –
what do I know of the light falling
backwards past Brooklyn Bridge. It’s early
July and the waitress feels sorry
for me – I can tell. Perhaps it’s the way
I’m holding onto the purple-blue leaf
in my bracelet as if I am trying to track down
my pulse. What do I know
of the heavy sleet turning to snow
in a city I visited once, for three
nights. Here, the Thames turning inwards, the air –
heavy with summer and impossible
heat. What do I know of the dreamers
fighting a blue-upturned umbrella
next to the Guggenheim trees, of the girl
running with a yellow guitar on her back, crying
into her phone: where? I can’t hear you –,
of the way her breath changes with each leaf
of snow, of the man at the bus stop, calling
through fast-moving sleet and blue
smoke: you, my pal
for the night – what are the odds
you’re into the greatest
espresso? What do I know of the yellow-plum
trees encircling a crescent
that until recently never really, particularly
mattered, of the local café
where the owner has broken
her arm and her fiancée’s car and her promise
to place a blue rose every morning
on the windowsill snow until
her grief passes, or at least changes
light, or at least let her fall
asleep in the night, of the game-changing
headline across the Atlantic, declaring
her place c’est Un Must, of the entire
neighbourhood’s extraordinary something
of a renaissance, of the pink
envelope she opens and opens and
fires like a paper-plane into
the snow. There must be
a trilogy, where three-quarters through, you
stand in a five-hour queue
with a guy who’s unlocking blue smoke
under flickering lights, who is out of his
element – and sure, so are you – yet you totally
know what he means when he says he is hoping
the coffee will live up to the hype.
come up with the questions.
Does the absence of blue
resonate with the sound of imminent
rain? Is the extraordinary
yellow a tad too
rebellious for the sole illustration
of yolk as a symbol
of how easy it is – to draw
one’s attention, to mistake
every circular shape for the chance
of a moon?
Things are holding together
quite well and are going
to break any
second – I reckon – but I’m letting
Velázquez come to terms
with the non-accidental theatrical
darkness around the impeccable
setting of spotlights –
the two central figures, the knife turning
the plate into a compass,
the spoon
almost touching the burning-clay pan,
the circle-in-circle
of the brass vessel, just
leaning under the boiling-oil centre
of drama and
light. Here’s the palm
holding an egg
as if holding the shaping in progress
of a non-elegant
thought. Here’s the boy
carrying what must be
the heaviest
moon but I know Velázquez
would say I’m going
too far.
He’d say I forgot
to give the two characters ‘space –’ let them
be there and
not there.
Each to their own
world of intentions and unanswered
calls,
each to their own constellations
of arbitrary objects floating
from one wall to another like an empirical
study in darkness and
play.
If you tell me
a story – he’d say –
how the glass bottle goes
with the way he’s avoiding
her eyes,
or how the red terracotta
brings the light into
action until everything falls
into places – I’m
out.
So I’m letting the sounds
own the space
for a while: the wine poured into
a goblet, the door opened and
closed like a possible
action on hold.
Then he comes back, puts his hat
on the table.
No, he says, only
kidding. It’s seriously raining
out there.
*After Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Cooking Eggs
Summer solstice (first scene). A girl with a knife cuts a pear
in half. Think ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’ goes city
and smoke. At the bar, a man dreams a glass of champagne
like an unbalanced thought. Think ‘Streetcar’ goes ‘Gatsby’, the scene
with the boat. She lights a cigarette as if it’s made of thin glass,
he’s telling a story as if it’s a city uncut. Cut.
A nightmare. The girl shouts in a black-and-white dream. Cut.
There’s a gallery. Think MOMA but rough. She looks at a pear
made of bronze, in a nest of cast iron and glass.
The gallery turns into a field of white roses, a white city,
is it still June? Think Fellini’s dancing scene
in ‘8½.’ One hand’s filling a glass with champagne
the other offering the glass. Champagne?
The girl dances and dances. Think Matisse, ‘The Cut-Outs’. Cut.
Close-ups: Scissors. A dancer. Another dream scene.
Think ‘Last Year at Marienbad’, the moon like a pear –
the shape of a question. The actors arrive at an improvised city,
think musical setting, the sky made of turquoise-stained glass.
London. A waitress with eyes like stained glass.
Think Soho stilettos, fake mascara, cheap champagne.
The phone rings with a ‘Moon River’ cover. Think New York City
at the end of the line. Can you hear me? We’ve met at the –. Cut
to a mirror. Think Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’. Cerulean pear
made of a girl and a corset too tight. But next, it’s the girl with the scene-
stealing smile. Ready? It’s ‘The Perfect Summer’ deleted scene:
a lake, pink lemonade, a girl’s wearing soft tan. Think ‘The Glass
Menagerie’, anything but. Sunglasses like a Venetian mask, a spiral pear-
and-amaretto tart, she drinks too much champagne
then hides and throws up. Think ‘Manhattan’, the outtakes. Cut.
Rome. A girl opens an envelope with the tip of a knife. Think ‘La Città
e la Casa’, pages revealing city by city as if every city
is cut into rivers and sliced into streets down to the seeds of each scene.
The phone rings. Don’t hang up. She hangs up. Cut.
Later, she watches how sand travels like rain inside hourglass
bulbs as if it’s a low-budget film. Sound effects: rain, champagne
flute drops from a hand. Somewhere a girl wears a ring like a pear
on a knife, like the deepest of cuts. Somewhere a city
is closed and is endless, is the shape of an 8, a pear mise-en-scène
where a glass stem is held like a spine and a promise. Champagne?
Yes, there was the abundance of nightfall –
the sky with a parachute scar,
the spoon clinking
on glass.
But no one could trace, like a hymn,
the blue-vanishing
trail of an apple-throw
arc. Things like this
happen –
a hula-hoop pivoting
beauty, a wonder thrown
like a firework into
the crowd.
Some say it was only
an arrow, meaning –
an error.
Others swear they could hunt down
the deepest
of sighs.
That the transformation
from an apple into
a question
was inevitable –
that the answer was no more
than a boy
offsetting fire with sci-fi
animation – I mean – what
would you choose?
The possession of Europe and
Asia / the greatest of warriors’ rivers
and tongues – the green in their night-vision
maps / a doorbell and how it rings
night.
The way you ran into the last rush-hour of the morning,
like a character in one of Sempé’s city sketches,
with your coat collapsing and the wind
not helping, water-coloured by the racing cars and rain,
which wasn’t even falling enough
to cause such a storm. There’s a picture, or a place,
where everyone’s thrown in their city’s steps and hours,
walking or smoking into each other,
holding their phones, T’es où? Allô, t’es où?
On the corner of
Baker Street and Marylebone, I think I was
the only one not moving, holding onto my mobile, to all my
where-are-you texts and messages, so I’d look busy
and not lost.
Tu as dit sérieusement, sans distance, sans un soupçon d’ironie,
le mot ‘déconstruction,’ toi, mon ami.
Yasmina Reza, ‘Art’
Look closer, here is the water
we dream. Your eye for a comic-strip
ocean, my weakness
for rain-following
streets. Look
closer – I’m always the writer
test driving the sky with no
moon – a yellow plum
by the fire, a boy
checking himself out
in a curved-mirror
spoon. So tonight, let me drive you
into my own, compositional
weather – shall we
balance a glass
on the unstable dream
of a table?
Are you with me –
my friend?
Have you got the wrong
message? It happened
to me a few seconds
ago, and last week
during ‘Art’ of all plays – of all
places –
when I had to look
for the things we call
keys. Language is all we are
left with –
I thought, holding on tight
to the missing back
of my seat.
1 I wanted to do all this
to flatten a bead to a disc – a leaf of sea
glass, to find the blue of a rose
in the quick of my wrist, to catalogue
every streetlight, each impossible rumour, the silver
of trees, to circle the city – my pulse in my palm
like a spring. Was the night open
to that possibility – the sky, an equation
of stars versus full-hearted
rain? I wanted to test how a gesture
turns into a physical land – an amplified
thought, how it changes when connected
to sound or joined to a sketch of blue
light, I wanted to watch how a lightbulb ends up
standing for light.
2 That night the city was unapologetically
there: a finally, fully
developed concept of streetlights and
rain. When the bridges took off
in a great-pelican flight – entrusting the river
to us – I gave names to each applicant:
the tracing-pink glass, the girl with a penchant
for imperatives, the band at The Drunk Anarchist
trying out turn-of-the-century
jazz and blue smoke. Poet, remember, your material
is words. Was the night cerulean, cold and
misleading? Was the city that different to the one
you had left with a friend? I now understand
what I thought I couldn’t: the place where
I’m confident is here.
3 The flight of plates
didn’t happen at once or according to plan.
When the spoons lifted their wings with a cry
of miniature birds, heading north and then
south, trying out clicks of clear silver, the seashore
became endless with rain, the blue-heron wings
didn’t make any sense but the rebelling sound
of the air – compressed and released like a girl
who would not play this game. I think she said dreams
matter. I think she said that’s Okay to not
understand. I lifted the near-miss of a moon
with one hand. The sunset not setting I couldn’t
explain. Mistakes always happen, she said. In fact, it is strange
when they don’t, she concluded, brushing sea glass
and salt off my hair.
Perhaps you wanted to test out a story
so you went to the balcony and constructed an airplane
out of telephone wires, a small fire, a sketch of a city
you wanted to fly as a high-altitude kite in the unsettled
weather, so you turned it into an engine, a poem
made of paper-plane wings. There are so many countries
that lead away from your balcony, a tennis ball flowering, spinning
away from the quick of your fist towards a distant-blue
circle, your pulse like a risk-taking rumour
in the long-summer evening you play on-repeat –
the street in the mirror, the moon taking shape in the room
of your script, and outside – like a study in streetlights
and rain – the city you live in and still can’t afford
after so many years. But perhaps that particular ‘so many
years –’if anything, gave you this small insight
to hold onto, try and release: that your own
concept of time links to that
of suspense. Somewhere, a probability –
high as the gate of a story – the one you mistake
for a place – begins to take shape: the throw of a ball
like a long-distance question, your own misconception
expanding, echoing a city you leave
and keep coming back to as if in a dream, except
this time you know you’re running this dream: the balcony
takes off like a light-flying machine, the moon pulling the script
of your street as short film, the night ringing the citadel sky
like a copper-blue bell in a country you’re still trying
to get, your hand raising a glass to the first
day of spring as if you have always held onto nothing
but this – the glass an exception –that an expectation –
a yellow ball spiralling towards an improvised
land – and its fulfilment – the fall or the poem you’re carrying
as if you were trying to catch it or give it a name –
make contact.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.
W.S. Merwin, The Nails
Now, as the rain turns into
sketches of rain, a girl draws a circle
on the quick-yellow sand.
In the picture, the sea is another
quick second. Hours are physical
matters, thinks the man who quit smoking
two hours ago –
in the picture. Here, he doesn’t fall
into his palms, he doesn’t seem
absent. Throw a pebble
into the water and watch how the circles
get bigger, thinks the woman
outside the picture, watching the snow
taking hold of a city she now
calls home.
Click
Two glasses of water waiting to happen.
Two dragonflies, blue and
quick-blue.
I wouldn’t mind being that kind of adventurous,
thinks the woman watching the street
holding onto the snow.
I wouldn’t mind being that kind of pretty,
thinks the child watching a bee
fighting a pond. Throw a pebble into the water
and go for a walk.
In the picture, the rain never stops
or begins, the man doesn’t fly
out of the streetlights, the city,
that year. In the picture – that year
never happened.
Click
A child, cutting the sea out of blue and dark
paper. A hot-air balloon in a short
animation. A telescope catches
a moon.
I wouldn’t mind being that kind of lost,
thinks the tree watching a car in the rain,
thinks the pond watching the door
open and close, thinks the picture taken
again of a circle turning
into a hole,
thinks the child drawing a rainstorm
before it takes form:
a tree practicing being a tree. A sandcastle
made out of water. Throw a pebble into the picture
and watch.
I’m back in the recording studio –
testing salt against
choice.
On your left-hand side – a city grows out
of a river. On your right-hand side –
I thought
we were going home but instead
there are trees of blue-green, a paper-boat
map. I’m back
in the recording studio – testing smoke
against glass.
If you look back – my sister
waving her hand. A carousel spinning
into an ammonite shell.
Nobody’s shouting Where are you going?
It’s not that.
*
Now that you dive into three different languages, you’re –
the mouth of a river / a ship
of three masts / the gorgons running in six
directions. Backward and forward and
backward.
I thought we were going home – but instead we’re going
home. I’m here
at the recording studio – testing dream
against light.
On your right-hand side – a door. On your left-hand side –
a shout. Now that you swear
in multiple
tongues –
now that you’re back.
Nobody’s saying Why are you crying?
It’s not that.
*
STAV POLEG ’s poetry has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, including in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and PN Review. She regularly collaborates with fellow artists and poets. Her graphic-novel installation, Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her pamphlet, Lights, Camera, was published in 2017 by Eyewear. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry and has recently facilitated collaborative work between poets and filmmakers for the magazine. She teaches for the Poetry School, London.
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* ‘It is in a language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.’ – Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, # 445