ELIZABETH BISHOP, LOUISE GLUCK, ANNE CARSON:
THE DETACHED POETIC VOICE
a reading of three poems by Catherine Joyce
The detached voice in contemporary poetry reflects the stay against the complex, annihilating forces of the modern world. How else to respond if not with this clear-eyed, dispassionate naming of what is? In previous centuries poets might have written out of a romantic identification with the ‘other’, both absorbing and shaping the sensate world; today such presumed oneness appears naieve, presumptive. Only the constantly shifting, watchful, essentially ironic perspective of the detached poetic voice can hope to address the paralyzing contradictions of the current zeitgeist.
If we look at three poets, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Louise Gluck (1943 - ) and Anne Carson (1950 - ), we see a progression of detachment, an increasing withdrawal of self into the pure act of seeing. Moving from the vulnerabilities of Bishop, with her dream-like but precise evocations, through the godlike oracular visions of Gluck, to the multiple, dissolving planes of Carson – at her most playful, tantalizingly out of reach – we come upon a trajectory that is emblematic, if not definitive of the age. Poets can no longer write out of a stable self in a known world or even out of a stable self in a ‘fucked up’ world. The only response now is to mirror what is with an increasing withdrawal or dissolution of self (selves) to match the perceived, spinning vacuum at the core of the cosmos. Bishop, Gluck and Carson have taken us there.
THE FISH is a signature Bishop poem, with its gradual, eye-widening interrogation of the “tremendous fish” the poet/speaker has caught. Within the first four lines the simple scene is set – the huge fish hauled to the side of the boat, half out of water, held fast by the hook in the corner of his mouth. The precise details, the quiet voice hold the reader, like the fish, both close and yet at arm’s length – fixed to what is: this moment of being caught. What does she see? The poem inches forward by incremental observation, building, qualifying – “He didn’t fight./He hadn’t fought at all. . . /his brown skin hung in strips/like ancient wallpaper,/and its pattern of darker brown/was like wallpaper”. The fish comes into view under a willed act of such intense seeing that soon the reader, like the poet, cannot turn away. Bishop’s eye operates like a telescope, making constant, fine adjustments to bring the fish into focus, closer, closer: “I looked into his eyes/which were far larger than mine/but shallower, and yellowed,/the irises backed and packed/with tarnished tinfoil/see through the lenses/of old scratched isinglass. . . /it was more like the tipping/of an object toward the light.” This is Bishop’s art – to tilt the object toward the light, to see with such clarity that self disappears in the seeing; only what is remains – surreal in its explicitness. However, there is a vulnerability, an urgency in such seeing – a longing intense as hunger – to find the ‘other’, almost as if such finding were salvation, release from self. Bishop sees the fish, his warrior lip medalled with five hooks, bannered with the lines he has broken over a lifetime of getting away – and such seeing fills her up, tipping the moment into ecstasy: “I stared and stared/and victory filled up/the little rented boat,/from the pool of bilge/where oil had spread a rainbow/around the rusted engine/to the bailer rusted orange,/the sun-cracked thwarts,/the oarlocks on their strings,/the gunnels –until everything/was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!/And I let the fish go.” This is the gesture the poem enacts: the giving of self over to perception. The eye becomes an instrument for locating and articulating reality with the detached precision of a scientist, a photographer. And yet by its use of such spare, direct, almost casual language – giving each detail, “packed in like feathers”, its due – the detached voice releases feelings that have built through the very tension of such a rigorous discipline. The poem becomes the hook, the fish, the moment – saturated with rainbow, rainbow – and then Bishop lets it (and us) go.
PALAISE DES ARTS, illustrative of the poetry of Louise Gluck, lifts the detached voice to an oracular level. There is something untouched and untouchable about Gluck’s poetic presence. She opens the poem with an assertion whose ironic tone carries it beyond the personal while still registering an inherent melancholy – “Love long dormant showing itself:” – the signature colon setting us up for the skilled elaboration to follow: “the large expected gods/caged really, the columns/sitting on the lawn, as though perfection/were not timeless but stationary”. Gluck inhabits the mythic, the archetypal possibilities with ease but she steps out of the delimited picture with her ferocious refusal to end there “– that/is the comedy, she thinks,/that they are paralyzed.” She anchors the poem with this deadpan, merciless voice, and through an expanding aperture reveals multiple layers and figures of meaning: “Or like the matching swans,/insular, circling the pond: restraint so passionate/implies possession. They hardly speak.” Her poem, like the swans, moves in a circle of restraint, the visual world offering evidence, refracting the feeling of a love long dormant: “On the other bank, a small boy throws bits of bread/into the water. The reflected monument/is stirred, briefly, stricken with light – ”. And then the leap to the oracular, swift, arbitrary – scene captured, resonating, rippling out: “She can’t touch his arm in innocence again./They have to give that up and begin/as male and female, thrust and ache.” A walk in the park? The whole world elevated, austere – seen with an unflinching eye and addressed with a voice of authority, cool, detached, absolute: after Gluck, what more is there to say?
In FIRST CHALDAIC ORACLE Anne Carson sets the bar higher, to an occult art, defining the challenge of her perspective – that one may move so far in and out, that there may be no self, only the dissolving state of perception itself. “There is something you should know/And the right way to know it/is by a cherrying of your mind.” The ‘you’/the reader is not to proscribe her search with the accepted division of self and other, internal and external world – “Because if you press your mind towards it/and try to know/that thing//as you know a thing, you will not know it.” Rather a bodying forth, a flowing out of consciousness, organic, generative and erotic as fruit, this is how one must seek to know – “it comes out of red//with kills on both sides, it is scrap, it is nightly/it kings your mind.” The images proliferate, tantalize, elude definition – and yet we sense there is something vital here, something passionate yet annihilating, overlooked yet liminal, even preconscious – so essential it trumps your mind, possessing, ruling, dissolving any subjective state. Carson drives deep to planes of reality one intuits but cannot name – beyond self, beyond world, hypnotic. The urge to know becomes obsessive. “No. Scorch is not the way/to know/that thing you must know.//But use the hum/of your wound/and flamepit out everything// right to the edge/of that thing you should know.” It is as if Carson were exhorting us to a mythic challenge, to wield Philoctetes’ archetypal wound with its bow – ‘wound’ as the vibrating arc of a Keatsian multi-sensory awareness that would consume all before it in its quest to know. To prepare is all, to emerge honed, forever open to spring – “But keep chiselled/keep Praguing the eye//of your soul and reach – /mind empty/toward that thing you should know//until you get it.” The incantatory repetition of the longed for state becomes urgent, erotic – the possession of “That thing you should know.” – culminating in a final Tantalus promise: “Because it is out there (orchid) outside your and, it is.” Only by going beyond our prescriptive borders of ‘self’ and ‘other’ can the rare, the mysterious, the unnamed – beyond all our definitions – be found. In the FIRST CHALDAIC ORACLE, a poetic manifesto, Anne Carson examines the relentless pursuit of what remains forever out of reach. Her questing but playful voice, sounding through the architectural layering of tercets, captures the continual striving toward meaning, the poet’s elusive, shape-shifting art.
The detached voice – vulnerable in Bishop, oracular in Gluck, and playful in Carson – commands attention. It provides a stay (and equally a defense) against complexity – a focus on what is rather than on self – that frees the poet to inhabit a labile and threatening world. With detachment comes a cool, appraising eye, an intriguing, ironic, reflexive stance that hints at multiple meanings, suggestive of the unfathomable, the ambiguous – the resistant nature of reality. Such a voice co-opts the reader with its authority, its clear-eyed intelligence, its piercing awareness of difficult truths. We come to these poets not for music or lyric intensity but for the art of fearless observation, knife-edged perception.
INTO THE DARKNESS
a reading of the poetry of Paul Celan
“They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by and seeking reality.”
Paul Celan speaks out of a searing vision, a vision framed by the deportation and brutal murder of his Jewish parents in 1942. Their loss echoes throughout his writing, the shadow poem to every utterance. It is difficult to speak of such things; the grief burns into the cells, swims in the blood and emerges on the page transformed into bitter almonds, black hail, a severed ear. Words are repeated until their reappearance becomes incantatory, talismanic – roses, ice, death, grave, heart, eye, flake and stone, stone, stone. Everything plunges downward; dung and mud in a vast “greyblack wasteness” prevail. And then there is the light, the pressure of such loss bearing down until the poet becomes light; the unsayable sings through his veins and turns the poems into “Pure/gray-beaten heart-hammer silver” .
In the early poems, such as NEARNESS OF GRAVES , Celan speaks with a lyric simplicity, drawing together the planes he will work with throughout his poetry: the natural world of river, field, trees; the realm of God – here “with his blossoming wand”; and that of language – “the German, the pain-laden rhyme”. All gather as the poet addresses, through their energies, through their hope, promise or shared history, his lost, wounded Mother in a series of questions that can never be answered. The grief in this poem mounts in couplets, each one a plea, a prayer for succour, for the capacity to absorb and transform his mother’s pain through the agency of these elements: “Can none of the aspens and none of the willows/ allow you their solace, remove all your sorrows?” Here we see the beginnings of the compression, of the pressure of multiple levels of being brought to bear in the expression of the inexpressible – ending with the heartbreaking awareness that the very language he speaks in, the language of his childhood, is the tongue of the murderers, “And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time,/the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme”. Celan articulates the struggle to speak when the very words themselves are poisoned at their root.
In NOCTURNALLY PURSED” Celan weds images to incantation in a poem that rings like an anthem, an exhortation, even as it stands as an elegy to Hannah and Hermann Lenz. The title alone, with its echo of challenge, registers the stringent effect of darkness in closing up a heart that Celan would wrench open. In the first stanza we see him layering images from the natural world (“the lips of flowers,/crossed and folded/the shafts of spruce, moss grayed, stone jolted . . .”) to define the bleak, dark and cold realm of the dead. In the abrupt, second, two-line stanza, “this is the region where/those we’ve caught up with are resting”, we realize that this is a hunt, the burden of a life task, and Celan will not be deterred. The use of the colon that ends the first two stanzas sets up a tension that will issue in the articulated losses of stanza three: “they will not name the hour,/nor count the flakes,/nor follow water to the weir.” Repetition moves into incantation in the fourth stanza as Celan strikes the pivot point of the poem, “They stand sundered in the world”, and begins to toll out ever starker images, “each one next to his night,/each one next to his death,/testy, bareheaded, frostbit with Near and Far”. We are there under the sepulchral trees, in the cold, in the dark, seeing no hope in the present or the future; we cannot turn away. The tolling continues in the three-line fifth stanza where the harrowing idea of such a death being the paying off a debt – the debt of the original sin of being born Jewish – turns on the irony of naming, of language itself: “they pay it off because of a word/that exists unjustly, like summer.” A word – Jew (implied) – here as arbitrary as the word “summer”, and yet as opposite in connotation – signals their death knell. “A word – you know:/a corpse.” – the two synonymous (Jew/corpse) both without redress. In the final quatrain the poem becomes an exhortation toward redemption, toward turning this inexplicable and unjust loss into consecration, absolution, the sacred rite of laying the corpse out for proper burial – “come let us wash it,/come let us comb it,/come let us turn/its eyes heavenward.” There is in this poem the fierce, unflinching hunger of Celan to bespeak the horror, to immerse the reader in the relentless presence of that horror, which beats forever behind his eyes, to name it again and again as if knitting together the fragments of a broken people, a broken soul, by the one act he/we can offer – the witnessing, the honouring of the dead.
In SPEAK YOU TOO Celan addresses the reader as if he has him/her by the throat: “Speak you too,/speak as the last,/say out your say.” He is like the Ancient Mariner, who has so absorbed the truth of his repeated telling that he can now strip it to essentials: “Speak – /But don’t split off No from Yes./Give your say this meaning too:/give it the shadow.” He has seen Reality with its dark seam shot through “from/ midnight to midday and midnight” and he understands that these polarities are what create Life: “Look around: see how things all come alive – /By death! Alive!/Speaks true who speaks shadow.” And yet, as always with Celan, the poem turns in on itself: from exhortation he pulls back, feeling the undertow, acknowledging that such speaking forth is never easy or simple, “But now the place shrinks, where you stand:/Where now, shadow-stripped, where?” The task becomes harder. “Climb. Grope upwards.” It is as if he were now exhorting himself as much as the reader, as if under the weight of such imperatives, he too is struggling to gather his energy – his belief in the transformative effect of such an ascent: “Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!” (echoes of Rilke) and then he emerges so attenuated he stands, “Finer: a thread/the star wants to descend on”. He draws us into this conjunction of celestial and mortal longing where the star, like the poet-speaker, descends “so as to swim down below, down here/where it sees itself shimmer: in the swell/of wandering words”. This is the longed for consummation: the wedding of shadow and light through saying, through speaking truth – the prayerful state of becoming visible to oneself, and to the heavens. The hunger to express – the task of becoming a thread fine enough to bear the weight of knowing, of reflecting back the shadow, shimmer and swell of the inexpressible – this is the challenge Celan urges us to. In each poem, we see him returning again and again in his fierce determination, seeking a place to stand, to tell his tale.
Written in the late fifties, while Celan was still in his thirties, INTO THE DISTANCE , reverberates with pain – the psychic wounding that would eventually so overwhelm him that he took his own life at the age of fifty. The poem is short, only three, spare, cadenced stanzas of two lines each, mirroring the pared down, skeletal structure of his final poems. We are here inside the closed world of a grief so palpable, it can barely be sustained. The poem begins almost breezily: “Muteness, afresh, roomy, a house – :/come, you should dwell there.” Again the signal colon, the trigger switchback we have come to expect. Where once he bravely exhorted us (and himself) to “Speak you”, here he parallels muteness with an airy, open, roomy house – come, there is lots of room, why not move in, you should. Has it come to this? Has he no choice? Beneath the blithe suggestion, the tone is sly, ironic, unnerving. Where once shadow/death threw life into high relief, made him feel alive – now the hours tick by, “fine-tuned like a curse: the asylum/in sight.” with its threat of madness, loss of Self, of he who could speak true. And finally “Sharper than ever the air remaining: you must breathe,/breathe and be you”: what remains to him is an outer/inner atmosphere so biting that all he can do is breathe, breathe, continue in whatever way he can to be himself. A poem that enacts the mind’s dilemma, a poem so short it could be a mantra – “breathe, breathe and be you” – INTO THE DISTANCE lays out the landscape that Celan laboured in all his life: to affirm Being in the face of a shadow so unspeakable even God Himself must feel guilt and shame (“It was blood, it was/what you shed, Lord . . . Pray, Lord./We are near” TENEBRAE, )
This God hovers over Celan’s poetry with an implacable power: “God, so we’ve read, is/one part and a second, dispersed:/in the death/of all who’ve been reaped/he grows whole.” In “waiting for trueness”, for his own redemption and wholeness, the poet looks to this God and such a transforming death – “Our gaze/leads us there” but he knows that “it’s this/half/we deal with” – this life where to be, to breathe in the harsh, stinging air tests the limits of his soul.
It is this capacity to articulate the felt reality of a pain so searing – so relentless and inescapable that it comes to stand for the condition of life itself – that marks Celan as a poet without equal. With double-edged, often fractured, dream-like and strange images (“Black milk of daybreak . . .” DEATHFUGUE), born of a language both beloved and reviled, he holds us there inside this no-man’s land, inside the cloister of grief, inside the asylum of imminent madness, of muteness, inside the silence of a God who reaps our lives without redress. With a compression that sees Celan fashion (IN FRONT OF THE CANDLE) –
Out of beaten gold, just
as you bade me, mother,
I formed the candlestick from which
she darkens up to me amid
splintering hours:
your
being-dead’s daughter
– he conjures up this soul image, this slender, “almond-eyed shadow” that haunts his days like a lover, this self that trails after him in a refrain of grief – “You are still, are still, are still/a dead woman’s child,/vowed to the No of my longing, wed to a fissure in time/where the motherword led me,/so that just once/the hand might tremble/that on and on grasps at my heart!” We cannot read these words without sinking into the sea of blood that beats at the heart of Celan’s poetry, that crosses all planes of language, of the physical world and of the realms of God – to reach us, to touch us, to implicate us in the loss that both made and destroyed him.
Finally we see in the outpouring of Celan’s poetry a man addicted to the repeated act of wresting a moment of cohesion, out of the chaos of disintegration, that the creative task offers and implies. In the face of an unravelling Self, in the face of a pain that cancels out the idealized world of his childhood, of the love he bore for his parents, especially for his mother, for the language that enabled him to sing even as it squeezed his heart with the knowledge of its murderous history, we see him returning again and again to the reach of an ideal union of pain and redemption, shadow and light, silence and speech – to bridge the abyss, to hold himself there, whole in the arc of his telling, visible to man and to God. Shrieved. And when words fail, when muteness stares back in the mirror – the silence, refusal, hostility of the world, if not of his own inner voices – when madness threatens, there is only one way out: to dissolve, resolve himself, in the waters of death. Celan drowned in the Seine, April 1970.
