In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet operating like one of those old-fashioned weather instruments in which a stylus scrapes a line upon a rotating drum covered in smoked paper. Here is an example:
Ever, Again
Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!
and would I could. I’d
fly, drive back to that house
up the long hill between queen
anne’s lace and common daisyface
shoulder open stuck door
run springwater from kitchen
tap drench tongue
palate and throat
throw window sashes up screens down
breathe in mown grass
pine-needle heat
manure, lilac unpack
brown sacks from the store:
ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one
big onion, milk and orange juice
iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing
potato chips, dill pickles
the Caledonian-Record
Portuguese rose in round-hipped flask
open the box of newspapers by the stove
reread: (Vietnam Vietnam)
Set again on the table
the Olivetti, the stack
of rough yellow typing paper
mark the crashed instant
of one summer’s mosquito
on a bedroom door
voices of boys outside
proclaiming twilight and hunger
Pour iced vodka into a shotglass
get food on the table
sitting with those wild heads
over hamburgers, fireflies, music
staying up late with the typewriter
falling asleep with the dead
Well, it’s a sly artlessness I see now while typing it out. First, the registered patch of experience is a memory & memories can be edited, consciously or unconsciously. (The way one edits memory, consciously or unconsciously, counts for everything, morally & aesthetically, which for me, increasingly, amount to pretty much the same thing.) The telegraphic registration of small details add up to a record of an experience that has been recovered and reexperienced, perhaps more intensely that it was the first time. (What is the positive term for nostalgia?) And as readers that recovered experience becomes our own through the graphing of details. Also, we all know that rich is a “political poet,” but I think that leafing through the newspapers “Vietnam Vietnam)” has the effect of placing the speaker’s recovered experience in the context of a particularly intense moment of history. It is also, of course, a poem about making poems inside both personal and national histories.
[The poem above is from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 by Adrienne Rich, published by W.W. Norton.]
joseph,
your explanation’s apt. more akin to reverie. it floats into the mind. ‘vietnam vietnam’ reference anchors memory. adrienne rich explores cultural/sensible connections, concatenations, contiguities. this & that of the work of the writer of “the year of magical thinking” suggest n analogies. finding real similarities in comparing structures of how personal history is captured would take someone else. i grasp likeness as a green thing these artists, dry-eyed disciples, present thrummingly adumbrated as nets of orbits gathered as they cross, enter, leave & perhaps reenter each other w/o constraint or blame. islands in a stream, katherine butler hathaway wrote in “the little locksmith” 1942. i was a child then and now in years an old man who wonders, ponders, maunders and loops returns to my perceived past aware of memory’s confusions and seeking a linchpin. adrienne rich’s is exemplary.
edward mycue