IFPE Presentation

Inhabiting Geometry: The Prose Poem as Container for Atmosphere & Gesture

Joan Fiset, IFPE Languages Spoken and Unspoken
November 7, 2009
Discussion Panel: Moving Beyond Words

IOWA, JANUARY

In the long winter nights a farmer’s dreams are narrow.
Over and over he enters the furrow.
              Robert Hass

 

In the mid-seventies a friend gave me William Stafford’s Traveling Through the Dark. His poems seemed to know something. In hopes he would offer suggestions for poems I was trying to write, I enrolled two years later in Stafford’s poetry workshop at Centrum in Port Townsend.

Instead he offered two words, “permission” and “receptivity,” and created an atmosphere of possibility where his only comments addressed our pens or the color of our ink. He spoke of rising daily at 4:00 a.m. to write whatever occurred to him; if the refrigerator hummed he noted it, then let it lead to the next “inkling.”

Four years later, Robert Hass, in his poetry workshop, described paragraphs on the pages of a yellow tablet as “these things I’m writing.” He said, “I write to discover what the Hell I’m feeling,” and spoke of how writing enables him to “lift out of the flow of ordinary feeling into emotion.” “You want to be up there,” he said, “. . .we want those intensities that bring us back changed and connect back into ordinary life.”

As he related the origins of the prose poem, acknowledging its purported birth in 19th-century France, I fixated on its spatial aspects, its geometric shape. A deep-running sense of relief accompanied the four posts locking into corners. Hass elaborated, “. . .a space to range around in. . .go all over the place. . .tell a little story. . .write a little essay. . .mix them all up together.”

His prose poems “Late Spring,” “Museum,” and “Tall Windows” and others appeared in Antaeus later that year and are among the twenty prose poems published in Human Wishes 1989.

 

When Jack Spicer described form as “the mental connecting tissue of poetry,” I related his comparison to the way fixed poetic forms like the sonnet serve as antagonists. Wrestling against constraints like a sonnet’s prescribed rhyme scheme and metrical and stanza patterns paradoxically frees up the life of expression, particularly in relation to difficult material such as the landscape of love informing the complex network of most of Shakespeare’s 126 sonnets.

Within the form of a paragraph, the prose poem’s music can occur in the way of jazz. Reflecting on his process in writing “Apparition of the Exile,” a prose poem we will soon consider, Bruce Weigl states, “I was also thinking about something I referred to as the music of the sentence and the music of syntax, trying to find ways to jazz up the music inherent in the language by trying to invert typical syntactical patterns.”

When Hass had invited us to write prose poems, I’d found myself permitting stray tendrils of language, associations, emergent half-thoughts, and strands of memory to inhabit a sturdy rectangle. In doing so I began to learn the way of “receptivity” Stafford spoke of and continued writing prose poems that gave voice to strands and splinters of unspoken experience, one example being “Eternity”:

 

ETERNITY

On the table of a distant room a fan revolves. My father is tall; his army khakis well pressed. It is hot in this summer afternoon — “muggy” he says, and “stifling.” Cigarette smoke wafts slowly out the open door. Patterns of sunlight and shadow a shifting confluence, for the wind has begun to pick up. This is the beginning of eclipse. Light grows dim and then it will vanish. His mind turns back to lilacs. He continues to smoke as if the sun had never disappeared. And yet it has, of this there is no doubt. It is hot in this summer afternoon, “muggy” he says, and “stifling.”

 

In the spring of 1995, Jim Benson, a senior in my high school English class, looked at peppercorns through a Private Eye loupe, a magnifying glass modeled after an actual jeweler’s loupe by Kerry Ruef, founder and director of “The Private Eye: (5X) Looking/Thinking by Analogy.”

Ruef writes, “The secret of the loupe compared to a hand lens is that it cuts out the rest of the world, intensifying visual feedback and concentration. By asking, ’What does it remind me of? What else does it look like?’ the ’eye-mind’ keeps looking and thinking by analogy and metaphor. What one sees through the loupe becomes very personal to the observer. . .unfamiliar things seem familiar, abstractions approachable, the unknown comfortable.

Jim compared the peppercorns to “craters.” They reminded him of “the hole in my backyard.” This led to his prose poem “Foxhole”:

 

FOXHOLE

We were tough soldiers when I was in fourth grade. Pat, the neighbor boy, was always on my side. We needed a secret advantage to win: a foxhole. We dug for hours and hours, used a collapsible army shovel from the military surplus store. At night we covered it up with plywood.   When the hole was deep enough to stand up straight in, Pat scooped dirt from the bottom with a Tupperware cup. He handed it to me to dump out. We hid from the enemy in the dark dampness, and climbed out to attack. When we covered the hole with branches it was a booby trap. My dad made us fill it in; he said it was dangerous. Someone could get hurt. We didn’t want to fill it in, but knew it was time. There is still sunken dirt where our hole was.

His father, a sniper in Vietnam, had never talked about it. What little Jim knew of his father’s war experience his mother had told him. This brought to mind my own father’s silence in relation to his years of combat in World War II. About it he wrote:

Emotions run deep and change with startling rapidity in war time. One cannot recall them in tranquility as Wordsworth did his daffodils — the emotions are too kaleidoscopic in recall to allow for sustained meditation or philosophic evaluation. One vivid memory quickly dissolves into another resulting in an ever changing montage of feelings.

 

A week after Jim wrote his prose poem, I read an editorial by a journalist whose monthly column focused on the military. He wrote about the Seattle Vet Center, an outpatient arm of the VA, where veterans “caught in a web of grief” processed their experience in groups and with individual therapists.

At the end of the 1995 school year, I left teaching to volunteer at the Vet Center. Team Leader Don Johnson, a Korean War veteran, agreed to let me try using metaphorical and other right-brain strategies with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and shared his paper “PTSD and Healing.” Johnson’s description of trauma’s lasting impact resonated with my father’s words:

It is difficult to identify with that former self. It is as though the individual’s life has been segmented, severed into pieces made up of times between significant personal events like stones scattered on a sandy beach or beads lying on a woman’s lap. . .without structure or mortar. . . . Is there only one ‘correct’ place for each stone? What about the missing beads, the buried stones?

 

Bounded by geometry, memory’s split off “beads” and “stones” can sometimes return through a context of atmosphere to be refigured and reclaimed, retrieval kin to T.S. Eliot’s metaphor of poetry as “a raid on the inarticulate” in Four Quartets. Inherent within this rectangle are four corners. I began to think on the corners themselves.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests the corner is “a haven,” and “this most sordid of all havens. . .deserves to be examined.” He describes the corner as “a sort of half-box, part walls, part door serving as an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside . . . “

Consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner produces a sense of immobility, and this in turn radiates immobility. An imaginary room rises up around our bodies, which think that they are well hidden when we take refuge in a corner. . .We have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space for our being.

 

A prose poem’s corners can hold and contain the unbearable aftermath of war. The internalized atmosphere of the “sordid haven” resonates with British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concept of “nameless dread,” the primitive terror of annihilation a baby experiences in the absence of another mind to receive, attune, and provide reverie for its own.

After volunteering with veterans I earned an MA in psychology then worked as a Readjustment Counselor at the Vet Center for two years. During this time I introduced a writing group of Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD to the loupe. For a Marine Corps rifleman, a dandelion seed brought up a memory of flares. He wrote:

 

The dandelion seeds look like memory’s freeze-frame of fireworks, or night flares popping out there somewhere, casting light on nothing, nothing moving, a night landscape in stasis, the death of another day. We’re looking for something, someone out there but they won’t let themselves be seen; they’re part of the landscape, part of this land; they live here and we don’t hear them either. Another flare pops. We stare into its brief light and come away with nothing, take nothing home, and the children play on burned-out tanks.

Once called up, “memory’s freeze-frame of fireworks, or night flares” can begin to illuminate the territory of the “nothing” whose invisible enemy is one with the landscape.

During World War I Bion served in France as a tank commander and “reluctantly” accepted the Distinguished Service Order and the Legion of Honour. After the war, in his analytical training, he worked with veterans suffering from PTSD, then known as “shell shock.” In “The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W. R. Bion,” Kay M. Souter writes, “The battlefield. . . gave him searing insight into what a person needs when in extremity: the sympathetic presence of another mind.”

In their own way, the loupe in combination with the prose poem’s form serve as gesture and container for unmetabolized fragments of traumatic experience. By offering a circumscribed circumference, the loupe invites the senses to “think” in response to what is encountered. My own experience with the loupe has been one of containment within a safe yet spacious zone. “Cold”was evoked by the memory of a snowman as I looked through the loupe into the white underside of a tortoise shell:

 

COLD

Schoolyard, black tar and chain link fence. Icy patches of sooty snow clumped in the corner. When the recess bell rings everyone runs outside to play, but I sit on the cement stairs trying to warm my hands. This morning we drew snowmen with twigs for arms and tall black hats. Mine has no mouth, only eyes with a carrot nose. He wanted to say something, but I wouldn’t give him a mouth. Now he talks from the corners of the schoolyard. The biting chill that numbs my fingers and toes freezing my face and ears is him saying, This is what I was trying to tell you.

 

While the loupe invites almost imperceptible traces of lost sensory memory to resurface, slices of fruit on a plate or a breeze through the window catalyze them as well. The indelible impact of the Vietnam War is reflected in the following prose poems and in the words of John Akins who served in the Marine Corps in 1968 as a rifleman in the infantry and received the Purple Heart.

A member of the combat writing group, Akins went on to publish Nam Au Go-Go, a memoir, and On the Way to Khe Sahn, a volume of poetry, which includes “Witness,” a talk he gave at his son’s high school. In it he describes “what violence does to you. . .how it stops the sweeping arm of your emotional radar.” “. . . [C]onnections are pulled for hope, meaning, and dreams. . . you die inside.”

Established poets Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa both served in Vietnam. Weigl’s “Apparition of the Exile” and Komunyakaa’s “Grenade” utilize the form of the prose poem.

Enlisting in the army shortly after his 18th birthday, Weigl served in Vietnam from 1967-1968 as an infantryman with the 1st Air Cavalry and received the Bronze Star. He writes, “The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return. . . the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror.” “Apparition of the Exile” is included in Song of Napalm, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1988.

When asked what led to him writing this poem, he replied:

It was a little cool air blowing through the window that wanted to take me back to something but I didn’t know what. And then my friend came into the poem; a fellow veteran who one day stopped talking and wouldn’t leave his house, and then his room because of what had happened to his squad in the war. In the end of course, all of them are me.

 

APPARITION OF THE EXILE

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended.

From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.

 

Yusef Komunyakaa was in the US Army and stationed in Vietnam from 1969-1970. During this time he worked in South Vietnam as an information specialist and as an editor for the military paper, Southern Cross. He earned a Bronze Star. Dien Cai Dau relates to his experience as a soldier in Vietnam. In 1994, he received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Neon Vernacular.

 

GRENADE

There is no rehearsal to turn flesh into dust so quickly. A hair trigger a cocked hammer in the brain, a split second between a man & infamy. It lands on the ground — a few soldiers duck & the others are caught in a half-run — & one throws himself down on the grenade. All the watches stop. A flash. Smoke. Silence. The sound fills the whole day. Flesh & earth fall into the eyes & mouths of the men. A dream trapped in midair. They touch their legs & arms, their groins, ears, & noses, saying. What happened? Some are crying. Others are laughing. Some are almost dancing. Someone tries to put the dead man back together. “He just dove on the damn thing, sir!” A flash. Smoke. Silence. The day blown apart. For those who can walk away, what is their burden? Shreds of flesh & bloody rags gathered up & stuffed into a bag. Each breath belongs to him. Each song. Each curse. Every prayer is his. Your body doesn’t belong to your mind & soul. Who are you? Do you remember the man left in the jungle? The others who owe their lives to this phantom, do they feel like you? Would his loved ones remember him if that little park or statue erected in his name didn’t exist, & does it enlarge their lives? You wish he’d lie down in that closed coffin, & not wander the streets or enter your bedroom at midnight. The woman you love, she’ll never understand. Who would? You remember what he used to say: “If you give a kite too much string, it’ll break free.” That unselfish certainty. But you can’t remember when you began to live his unspoken dream.

 

Komunyakaa says he “woke up in the morning with ‘Grenade’ in my psyche. I wished to think of other things, but the images wouldn’t let go of me. ‘Grenade’ is informed by the rhythm of intention. . . For me, ‘Grenade’ can only exist in the tonal shape of prose. . .I haven’t been able to change a word.” “Poetry” he says, “is a kind of distilled insinuation. . .a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.”

What Komunyakaa discerns in regard to poetry resonates with the life of perception the loupe makes available through a parallel process.

During World War II, William Stafford was a pacifist and Conscientious Objector. As a registered pacifist, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps operated by the Brethren Service Commission of the Church of the Brethren. This consisted of forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month.

In his introduction to Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937– 1947, Fred Merchant writes:

In his first decade of writing, and in particular in the four years he spent in the CPS Program, William Stafford discovered writing poetry was for him an act of deep listening. . . to the voices in his world and listening inwardly, to signals emanating form the deepest levels of his own being. One name for that would be conscience. . .a “knowing-with.” It proposes we find or create a sense of right relation with one another, with the world around us, and with ourselves. How can one know what those right relations are? Stafford might answer by saying one has to learn to listen deeply.

 

Pause

I’ll conclude with “Meditation,” a poem William Stafford wrote in March of 1943 at Los Prietos, California:

 

MEDITATION

If I could remember all at once — but I have forgotten.
Still, some day, looking along a furrowed cliff, staring
Beyond the eyes’ strength, I’ll start the avalanche,
And every stone will fall separate and revealed. . . .

 

References

Akins, John. (2004). On the Way to Khe Sanh: War Poems. John Immel Akins.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1964) The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1943) Four Quartets, Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Fiset, Joan. (1997) Now the Day is Over, Blue Begonia.
Hass, Robert. (1989). Human Wishes. The Ecco Press/New York.
Hass, Robert (2007). Time and Materials. Harper Collins.
Johnson, Don. (1995). “PTSD & Healing,” unpublished manuscript.
Komunyakaa, Yusef (2008). Warhorses. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ruef, Kerry. (1997).The Private Eye: Looking/Thinking by Analogy — A Guide to Developing the Interdisciplinary Mind. Skylight Professional Development.
Stafford, William. (2008) Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937–1947, Graywolf.
Souter, Kay M. (2009). “The War Memoirs: Some origins of the thought of W.R. Bion,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Weigl, Bruce. (1988) Song of Napalm. Grove/Atlantic.