intimacy

There have been so many beautiful posts in the past few days. Sometimes, I am overwhelmed by my feelings. I am going to try, clumsily, to express what recent discussion here has provoked for me.

Om, you posted this brilliant question:

Can what we call language poems or poems that utilize more philosophical or abstract language, be understood when approached from the more sensory/emotional? Or do they need to? And what about the discomfort when hitting up against this type of poem/text? Is it worth the struggle? It seems that we have as many different kinds of poems as dispositions, a fruit salad of poem. Similar to religion, no? "

I think about this question a lot. And I think it would be interesting if we started to work on this a little, if we thought together about how our “disposition” informs our response to poetry or directs us toward a particular type of poetry.

I often struggle with suspicion and discomfort regarding so-called “language” poetry, which to me often does seem detached from the sensory or emotional. I haven’t really seen anything like that posted here. I love it when we share the ways we find our way “in” to a poem (although I think of it more like creating a space through which the poem can enter me.) For me, it is always begins with the physical. I mean what are we literally doing when we read poetry anyway? First I listen to the sound and try to feel its rhythm. Sound and rhythm are absolutely physical, and reading the poem expresses this physicality—we are talking about air vibrating, the rise and fall of breath, the movement of eyes across a page. I find Om’s poem Ascending a Nude to be so evocative because of its intense physicality—that movement which points me toward a sense of implicit feeling (and meaning.) Of course, good poetry transcends its own physicality. Poetry is the place where the physical and the conceptual meet and subsume each other. And for me, this happens via emotions (which I experience both in my body and my mind). So the exercise of carefully reading poetry teaches me to close the gap between body and my mind through feelings. I read and write poetry because I find the union of these (falsely) fractured elements or experience to be so powerful and moving.

I imagine there are a thousand other ways to penetrate a poem. I think the strictly conceptual language poetry falls flat for me because I can’t find it in my body, and I haven’t yet learned that other way of feeling. I happen to be the type of person who has to start with my body in order to locate my feelings.

So when you talk about your Ascending Nude, Om, as integrating the abstract with feelings, I find myself totally agreeing. I also think that gratifying poems, like this one, somehow exist in between both extremes. It doesn’t really matter how we find our way in; I am just glad we can all meet in this new integrated space and experience intimacy.

But there is something else. For me, the most powerful poetry tries to say what is unsayable. To speak toward something beneath language, to evoke experience that is at once completely familiar and utterly strange. That Rilke sonnet I posted recently haunts me because I experience something I cannot give words to, that feels deeply known and unknown. It evokes, in the end, after all my words, my thoughts, my reflections, a stillness that is equally reverent and haunting—silence.

Someone recently commented to my latest poem that it left them “speechless,” that it makes “me want something, but I cannot wrap my mind around it.” To me, this is such a beautiful and gratifying response because it is what I so often experience when I read many of your wonderful poems. I am left with want—and this want can be powerful or tender; it is a kind of pain and a kind of joy. I cannot wrap my mind around it. It is too much to contain. I call it intimacy, but what do I, and what do we, really mean by intimacy? What is intimacy? I suppose we can ask this question on many levels—physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually... And we point to it with language. This is what I try to do with poems, and this is what so many of your poems do for me. I wonder, where are the limitations of language and how can we convey things that extend beyond those potential limitations?

This is my mystery of poetry—that it points beyond itself and back toward its pre-linguistic, primal place of birth. That it contains everything and nothing. Sometimes, my friends, your words evoke in me the deepest longing, the desire to be intimate. I love and fear that awesome, intimate silence beneath your words.

5/30/07

When I came here to sit on the driftwood you sometimes find
bleached white by the madly shining sun,
the blown out afternoon was blinding to the mind
so the body listened to the music of the surf
and knew its hushed voice before memory--

It was then that I saw their silhouettes distant down the beach,
her nude form undulating on top like a playful seal,
and the mind struggled to be freed from the light
but the body knew what it saw and smiled--

and when she was done, she rose and dashed naked to the water
where her feet splayed, made tentative by the cold. She splashed
over her nakedness and squatted down to let the salty rush
clean her out, and turned to face him. He was still on his back

in the coarse sand. She must have been shivering, she was slender,
and I think she saw me then, way down the beach, watching her with my pen,
because she sank to her knees and maybe laughed, and then ran back
to the towel with the warm body waiting for her naked on the beach
and you could almost smell joy in the breeze

Together we made strangers of ourselves. We knew this and bore
it with dignity. Of the things we did not speak, the tacks
we made in mind and poise, the coolness with which we moved

in crowds, each of us encased as if by glass, none
would meet another gaze. It was this merit that afforded us containment.
It was this inwardness that held us out against annihilation.

We moved in multitudes, our erratic swarming
well channeled by the canyons of the country we inhabited—
the philosophical repose our buildings held, the cool formality of light

upon our towers. To each other, we were a restive scenery,
like the sidling forms of cats, the emergent patterns of the ants.
Upon us, an otherness crept. We moved privately

through the public spaces of our lives. We learned not to see
what we were, even when forced violently into intimate proximities,
even when we held each other to keep from falling.

We held our lives in thin separation above and below, left and right.
Years might have passed, we might have never learned who we were.
We made strangers of ourselves and to ourselves became strangers—
in our absence, we grew frozen and small.

Sometimes we were quiet, alone in the spaces we inhabited but did not share
We moved down the stone steps of our architecture, clutching
our briefcases, our jackets, our selves. Sometimes we waited,

our hearts silent in the greatness of the private country that we had built.
We looked out upon the longings of our consciousness.
We felt sadness in what had entered us. For the newness of our love unborn.