Once again, I am contemplating the lyric essay.

I have always wanted to write one, you see. A good one!

But we can't always have what we want & I am increasingly frustrated by my inability to write any brand of personal essay that is not overwrought & overdone.

I have attempted such a feat before & returned to the draft & vomited a little in my mouth at the sight of it. I don't suppose I have a cool head when it comes to this sort of thing.

I guess I feel as if I'm overdramatizing my life. I think this is common in creative nonfiction. When I worked at a journal, most personal essays I read from the slush pile were boring & narcissistic & melodramatic, even if the writing itself was skillful.

Oh, & also, one tends to write about stuff that sucked. Emotionally-draining events that I'm not always willing to revisit & analyze to death.

So, maybe no straight-laced personal essays for me. Not yet, anyway. But the so-called lyric essay seems a good place for a charged poet like me to begin (with its fragmented or non-linear narrative, poeticism, playful attention to form, etc).

I tell myself: Remember the beauty in simplicity.
I tell myself: You have much to say that has nothing to do with yourself.

But then I sit down to write & my brain falls apart & I think, You have a poetry manuscript that needs revision, you bloody fool. Why waste your time with this? What's the point?

I suppose the point lies in the difference in perceiving the world that such a format requires of me. And the value in that. I rarely think in stories. I tend to think and remember in images. There is nothing more difficult for me than writing dialogue in a nonfiction essay because I rarely remember what was actually said, only what was seen & heard & smelled, as well as the emotional aura surrounding the conversation--what was felt.

And so writing creative nonfiction requires me to engage in a mode of transforming the world via language that is somewhat foreign to me. I wonder if the problem here is that poetry for me is an intuitive art, whereas writing creative nonfiction requires me to swim against an established creative current in my brain. Even considering the liberties the lyric essay allows, I still have to write in a mode with which I do not have an intuitive relationship, which can be difficult. But additionally: I have to keep that poetic intuition on a leash, or else my lyric essay will become a prose poem.

Still, as a hybrid form, the lyric essay is forgiving, & I think I can manage it. I would like to draft one before I leave this residency, taking inspiration from poet-essayists like Thalia Field and Jenny Boully, i.e., those who create a kind lyrical whirling around a topic of interest with little if any regard for narrative trajectory at all (depending on the individual essay, of course).

(Thalia Field's "Crossroads" here: http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=3&si=12&s=17)

(Jenny Boully's "the future imagined, the past imagined" here: http://www.mipoesias.com/2006Volume20Issue1/boullyessay.html

and "Between Cassiopeia and Perseus" here: http://www.newmichiganpress.com/6_1/boully.html)

Elgar

*

Jacqueline du Pré is just the best. Watching her play is like watching sun and shadow and wind move across water.

Without this sort of thing, I might go insane.

Andre Breton

Vigilance

À Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante
Pareille à un tournesol
Du front vient quelquefois heurter la Seine et son ombre glisse imperceptiblement parmi les remorqueurs
À ce moment sur la pointe des pieds dans mon sommeil
Je me dirige vers la chambre où je suis étendu
Et j'y mets le feu
Pour que rien ne subsiste de ce consentement qu'on m'a arraché
Les meubles font alors place à des animaux de même taille qui me regardent fraternellement
Lions dans les crinières desquels achèvent de se consumer les chaises
Squales dont le ventre blanc s'incorpore le dernier frisson des draps
À l'heure de l'amour et des paupières bleues
Je me vois brûler à mon tour je vois cette cachette solennelle de riens
Qui fut mon corps
Fouillée par les becs patients des ibis du feu
Lorsque tout est fini j'entre invisible dans l'arche
Sans prendre garde aux passants de la vie qui font sonner très loin leurs pas traînants
Je vois les arêtes du soleil
À travers l'aubépine de la pluie
J'entends se déchirer le linge humain comme une grande feuille
Sous l'ongle de l'absence et de la présence qui sont de connivence
Tous les métiers se fanent il ne reste d'eux qu'une dentelle parfumée
Une coquille de dentelle qui a la forme parfaite d'un sein
Je ne touche plus que le coeur des choses je tiens le fil

*

I want to touch the heart of things, too.

"Insomnia" by Elizabeth Bishop

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

*

This poem really applies to my current state of mind, which is a-roaming.

Time for bed. Wish me luck.

Mare and Newborn Foal

When you die
there are bales of hay
heaped high in space
mean while
with my tongue
I draw the black straw
out of you
mean while
with your tongue
you draw the black straw out of me

--Jean Valentine

*

The last seven lines of this poem are incredible.

*

Let me explain, I guess: The last seven lines are incredibly, strangely impossible without seeming so. What does it mean to draw black straw out of a body with one's tongue? What does that look like, and what does that signify? Yet the speaker's voice and the action expressed seem wholly natural. I can imagine it; there is no difficulty (and if there is a little, it is a pleasant difficulty). This is in part because it is clear that the inspiration for such an image is, simply, the familiar scene of a mare licking her foal (and the tenderness of that), so there is an accessible frame of reference. Yet not one other reader will imagine "draw the black straw out of you" the same way as another; it opens the poem up to a range of imagistic and metaphorical interpretations, which makes the poem feel alive and complex (at least for me, the kind of reader who prefers that a poem not place boundaries upon my understanding of it). To use a silly metaphor, I really do think a poem needs a significant amount of dark matter to succeed as more than just a passing thought or heap of language. There needs to be something dark and impenetrable and mysterious between the words that holds them together, some unquantifiable substance that prevents the poem from being completely understood and explained away, thus allowing the poem to be a realm of infinite discovery. The image of a mare and a foal "drawing" the "black straw" out of one another with their tongues is one (for me) that gains a certain amount of weight in its darkness and mystery. It is one to which I could return again and again, with different eyes, and find something new. One might argue that the image has no point, that it is a reluctant one, that ending on enigma stunts rather than opens up the poem. I suppose it depends on the kind of reader you are or would like to be.

A friend of mine shared this brief discussion of Lolita, written by Natalia Anotonova, a survivor of pedophiliac sexual abuse. A choice excerpt:

Here, Nabokov does more than write about a self-contained world of horror in a beautiful way. He also presents a curious way in which the human mind can experience that world of horror. One of the things that always bothered me most was how my awful recollections could come back to me in exquisite wrapping: how I could recall overripe apples thumping to the ground in the night, a shooting star, or Bach being played on the piano in an adjacent room. In attempting to make sense of what happened to me, I seized on those moments as “evidence” of the fact that I “liked” what had occurred. If I could focus on the loveliness of Prelude No. 1 in C Major as something disgusting and illegal was going on, wasn’t I just reveling in that which was disgusting and illegal? I punished myself for a way of thinking that, reading Lolita, was revealed to me as a survival tactic. I realized, for the first time, that there was nothing wrong or strange with how I had been coping, by stepping out of the horror and into the beauty that was running parallel to it.

One problem of telling a story, any story, real or imagined, is the problem of angles. Is there a correct one? And does anyone have the right to marvel at the one that shows the glistening, freshly raped Lolita with her vacant eyes? Before Nabokov, I never really noticed how the world doesn’t bend to the horror of our individual experiences, it just carries on being the world. I would chew away at myself, because I couldn’t divorce something sickening from something that was still very much life, into which light shone occasionally, even when it was only neon. Lolita is a reminder that beauty neither de-claws nor lulls evil, it just exists, and might as well be accepted since it isn’t going anywhere.

Humbert’s terrifying, self-justifying brilliance is a relief in its own right, because it’s hard to admit that you tried to save yourself and failed. But it helps to realize what you were up against. How could have Lolita, no matter how smart-mouthed and full of bravado, outwitted Humbert? How could I have outwitted He Who Spectacularly Betrayed? The illusion that I could have done a thing to save myself — and hence was guilty, since I obviously hadn’t tried hard enough — was impossible to maintain after contemplating the merciless talent of a person like Humbert, how easily he got the girl where he wanted her to be, how effortlessly he rationalized his actions, how magnificently he described his odyssey and tied it up with a pretty bow.

*

I think something we all admire about Lolita is how terrifyingly beautiful (or beautifully terrifying?) the book is. I haven't read it in a few years but I do remember a sort of rosy glow draped over the whole thing, infusing every word, even as so many horrific events transpired (I think the newer film captured this atmosphere well by using a light, softening filter and choosing actors with subtle but lovely features). But the idea of beauty running parallel to horror is compelling, as if beauty does not infuse horror but exists somewhere at its edge: something into which you can step and bask in spite of the horror. In that case I might use the word "peripheral," or even "orbiting" (the image conceived is of a bright, crisp apple with a dark spot near the center: you may consume the surrounding beauty despite the rot, which can be isolated but not ignored? Something like that?). Or maybe even "centripetal": as if the beauty of the world is in motion, surrounds the core of the horrible event and attempts to penetrate it. But "parallel"? I'm imagining a stretch of treacherously gnarled woodland and a moonlit stream running through it: step from the dangerous dark into the stream, wade your mind in the water. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that word choice. Of course this has more to do with the way an individual mind regards and conceptualizes abstractions such as beauty (and horror) than anything, and how the individual mind attempts to render them palpable; it's incredibly personal. Regardless I think it's illuminating to hear an abuse survivor talk about Lolita as a book that saved her -- that helped her handle the complexity of her unique situation -- because one would typically expect such a book to further traumatize, given that in many ways it asks readers to empathize with a child rapist. Still: in the end, empathy does not negate what's happened; Nabokov never asks us to forgive or excuse Humbert's actions, nor does he implicate Lolita as the "little whore," and those are important distinctions to make. It is culture that has turned the terms "Lolita" and "nymphet" into condemnatory ones that appeal to rape apologists and misogynists.

Anyway. Here is a quote from a 1964 interview with Nabokov from Playboy I particularly love, as it explains the generation of the various names given to our heroine:

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny -- 1 mean, a small German hare.