Monthly Archives: May 2012

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Insight from Foucault on the profusion of today’s lifeless sex-subject poems?

31 May 2012

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FROM ”We ‘Other Victorians’”

[. . .] But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. This explains the solemnity with which one speaks of sex nowadays. When they had to allude to it, the first demographers and psychiatrists of the nineteenth cnetury thought it advisable to excuse themselves for asking their readers to dwell on matters so trivial and base. But for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we are making. [. . .]

—Michel Foucault

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POEM: Richard Greenfield’s “Weapon Alpha”

29 May 2012

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WEAPON ALPHA

I wanted to talk

Give it up, the voice said
 

     The voice

was the brief meditation between the self and the absorbing blank cliffs

there would be no talking, only listening to whomever this other

     that is the voice is
 

It’s not so much the coarse melancholy, I said
 

Where was my sounding against it, in the ambient crash of water

and in its vicinity, effused starlight, the delicate stream realized into a

gorge over the past few thousand years, this was not a kind of

emptiness,

     I will not delude myself

   but then I did come along

and I waded upstream to the impassable falls, midnight, April,

the gap of night narrowed above me where rocks closed,

nebulae seared the overhang, all of the blue-white catastrophes

toned into the plummet, the spray blustering off of shale,

the ferns contorting, fronds in the wet air

 
 

This was not a place; this was an event:

   I was measured by it—

little remained or time, but there was none other

to gauge besides me, remanded into what should be

forgotten (the stones would never remember)

   I wanted to be    not me

and there was    no other there

without me    though I insisted in the falsity

no other was there—only the dispersal of

my own self
 
 

un-wildering where I went
 

—Richard Greenfield

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FRESH LOOKS: Louise Glück’s “Telescope”

22 May 2012

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TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

Per the general quality of this piece, you might find it quizzical that I first chanced upon it in the New Yorker—gravesite as that place has become for poetry. I remember the afternoon clearly: still quite the debutant, probably off a day walking up and down Newbury Street in Boston, browsing glossies at the Trident, I thought This IS the kind of work it takes to get into a good poetry periodical.

It was years later that, still resonant, the final two lines of the poem made it into one of my itinerant Google searches, and the poem was rediscovered. Though Glück’s particular troubles with hack or half-examined philosophy continue to trouble her here (the very purport of the poem, for example, hinges on the supposed merit of the verso of the idea that space is a place ‘where human life has no meaning’—why ought human life have no meaning in space if space has some meaning to the human? and how can one so easily assume that stars do not have a ‘body’ of sorts?), her very straightforward construction and pacing creates a precipitous drop at “Telescope’s” close.

It’s the turn after the third stanza—its abruptness—that solidified the last couplet’s simmering power. How well Glück’s leanness serves her, in this case:

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

The denouement is utterly ruthless; even if the speaker’s philosophy was hack previous, still the act of thinking did a good deal for transportation of the mind; as soon as the eye is plucked from the telescope, twelve of the following thirteen sounds are monosyllables, and explanation is of the most bony (though bright) sort.

And if this poem speaks to certain of Glück’s writerly quandaries, it also finds success in a rare spot: namely, the speaker’s refusal to marry revelation (or sadness) to the corporeal.   She is less a sufferer than a witness to suffering, and the coil of the poem does not release, but marvelously disintegrates.