SHARKPACK Poetry Review

When the spider does dies
Death spider death
Or not the spider or
What to say when
To say always
Death always 
The dying of always 

If we choose to continue with our method of voices alternating lines, ‘Death spider death,’ ‘What to say when,’ and ‘Death always’ have vacated their earlier tonal continuum—the repetition of ‘death’ in line nine doesn’t resonate sarcastically, and the following two lines are graver still. In my reading, frankly, the tone of these seven lines is uniform.

Arguments about the structure of voice-play might continue ad nauseum—that one voice is dominant and another enters sporadically, that both voices show swinging moods, etc etc—save for a few formal points, which will posit my forthcoming reading as at least as reasonable as the aforementioned two-speaker one. First, the entire poem is majusculated and without punctuation, making it nearly impossible to locate the entrance and exit of speakers with any definitiveness, begging the question of (Riding) Jackson; next, the title of the poem points to a singular composing speaker; finally, the architecture of the poem speaks more powerfully as an examination of a speaker divested of her ability to move and visually pin-down vibrations (of thought, fear, of the spider himself) than as a dialogue between a stuck self and a dissociated self inserting its voice inchoately. Would a speaker caught in a spider’s web have any choice but to conceive of sensation as extra-visual, and thus to form of poem outside the stringencies of eye or mind’s eye alone?

The predator’s presence is strong in this poem: ‘spider’ and some variant of ‘death’ is mentioned in 64 of the first 100 lines. For this reason, the ‘I’ is either completely evacuated or rises to manic ‘insertedness,’ impending extinction dancing with ego:

What to say now
Now when the spider
What does the spider
The spider what dies
Dies when then when
Then always death always
The dying of always
Always now I
What to say when I
When I what
When I say
When the spider
When I always
                       (ll. 29-41)

As this dance of alterity—where the spider, even if unseen, takes on the presence of a titan, rising in stature as the  fearful ‘I’ fights on—reaches a proximal crescendo with ‘Legs legs then none/When the spider/Death spider death’ (ll. 66-68), a most remarkable turn vaults the poem into more palpably epistemological space—

The genii who cannot cease to know
What to say when the spider
When I say
When I or the spider
Dead or alive the dying of
Who cannot cease to know
Who death who I
                       (ll. 69-75)

Metrically, said turn is clearly marked: ‘The genii who cannot cease to know’ is the only five-foot line in the poem, the only line in clear iambs. A rather fascinating choice of vocabulary, too: ‘genii’ operates first, for most readers, as the plural of ‘genie,’ a tutelary spirit or one of the sprites or goblins of Arabian demonology per the OED; secondarily, it is defined as the plural of ‘genius,’ whose earliest fourteenth century definition references the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, moving through, in the seventeenth century, the quasi-mystical personification of something immaterial, to the definition most familiar to us, that of a native intellectual power of an exalted type. Notice how the poem moves into, again, a deeply epistemological space following the line of iambic pentameter; the entrance of either spiritual forces or the self’s sense of native brilliance removes the narrative from give-and-take contention to, I would suggest, resolute self-reflection: the spider is wrapped in the folds of a larger matter of philosophical estimation, one of many figures in service to, or generative of, thought. Formally, the move forward is toward linear atomism—’The spider who when/What to say when/Who cannot cease/Who cannot,’ then

Cannot cease
Cease
Cannot
The spider
Death
I
We
The genii
To know
What to say when the
Who cannot
                       (ll. 80-90)

And though the temptation may be to reinscribe the two-voice method in these lines (as, again, call-and-response: ‘Cease/Cannot/The spider/Death/I/We’) the reappearance and continuing mysterious use ‘genii,’ and then echoed self-reflectiveness (‘To know/What to say when the’) stays our readerly course—a course, that is, of many shades of the Self.

If ever, in the case of “Elegy in a Spider’s Web,” a biographer would find her look requited, it is in the last twenty lines of the poem. The congruity-toward-knowing is thinned to a wire’s width with ‘Or if I say/Or if I do not say/Who cannot cease to know/Who know the genii,’ and following:

Who they we cannot
Death cease death
To know say I
Oh pity poor pretty
How thorough life love
No matter space spider
How horrid reality
                       (ll. 103-109)

These are certainly the most legibly narrative lines in the piece, recalling the asyndeton of (Riding) Jackson’s “The Wind Suffers.” Notice, specifically, the entrance of a gallery with ‘Who they we cannot’; overt (perhaps facile?) emotion with ‘Oh pity poor pretty/How thorough life love’ and ‘No matter space spider/How horrid reality.’ Yet there is something ultimately redemptive in the use of ‘thorough,’ I think, that moves this narrative chunk past pathos—the iteration is quite removed, almost ‘professional,’ as if even absorption in that moment of readable emotion is understood in the context of the spiritually real; that life has a ‘thorough-ness’ to attend to, even as some subjects languish in the spider’s web. And, as with “The Wind Suffers,” the anguish of being is pushed past, as it must be—as language must be pushed toward the veracity of its motive in saying—

Who cannot
How cease
The knowing of always
Who these this space
Before after here
Life now my face
The face love the
The legs real when
What time death always
What to say then
What time the spider
                       (ll. 112-122)

The singing, stone comport of the ‘then’ in line 121 is easy to miss, so often has the line ‘What to say when’ appeared; as a conjunctive adverb, it implies, perhaps for the first time, the speaker’s sense of both cause and effect in her manifold architecture and her method of thinking. The poem becomes flesh, a dasein, a being-there.