Dear Samira and Scout,
Yesterday, I spent all day talking to friends and family on the phone. I kept saying: Sleepless in Seattle is a masterpiece. In the movie the child says: he is forgetting his dead mother as she recedes into the past. Grief passes over the child with conviction. I didn’t know the movie was about this: the radio as a supernatural force that brings the afterlife to earth, people appearing on the street who you will know and love until you die. I had thought it was about Tom Hanks becoming famous. The father and the son become like two saints, and so does Annie, the new mother the child finds. The movie fulfills a wish for death to function not as life’s negative but as an incarnation of life.
The uneven distribution of death destroys the “goodness” of life. Every person murdered by the state could have kept on living. To say that the murders in Minnesota were unnatural would be to disavow the unnaturalness of a life that could be ended with such callousness. Both life and death should mean something different. In poems we can wish for that transformation, but they fulfill wishes only imaginatively. Do you think of this as a silo?
Dreams provide another experience of wish fulfillment. This month my dreams were like this: my siblings turned back into three children in group therapy, but my brother was another sister, my sister’s friend; one dog became a puppy again, teething and biting me all night; my grandmother clung onto me like I was my mother, and she was a silent baby I was keeping warm. In Lena Tsykynovska’s writing, poetry is made out of similar transformations: “and I dreamed I was the one who was his / mother and father.” Both poetry and dreams allow us to travel through time, but also to exchange places with those we are secretly identifying, or who we mix up with ourselves in a big tangle.
A baby can become a grandmother, a mother and father can become each other. Likewise, Yuyi Chen’s poem makes a tangle between the present and the past. Memories rupture into the poem through a rabbit who keeps returning, becoming an overdetermined figure for the poem’s own inquiry into its temporal spiral, both being “six” and living in the “recent” present. The poem begins, “when I was six I realized / I was a rabbit of torture,” and then the rabbit returns:
I opened a book like
how I opened a rabbit but it was
not me that put my hands
into its stomach my grandma
this combative woman who married
my grandpa for eggs and chicken
drowned the rabbit with such
resolve she recently told me
to go back to China immediately cause
“a war is coming” she had an unknown
symptom to me she kept nodding her
head rapidly when resting
The drowning of the rabbit draws the grandmother into ambivalent relation to that six-year-old child with whom we begin, who is both a “rabbit of torture” and a torturer of rabbits, whose hands are both opening and “not” opening the stomach of the rabbit. In this rapid motion between the hands of the grandmother and the speaker, we “float,” and are then “anchored,” but only temporarily: “float a kid like me I anchored / anchored provisionally.” The poem becomes a provisional anchor, arresting development and grinding time to a halt, making it “rest” with the rabbit’s murder and then take motion again. “Unknown / symptoms” tell of something that happened in the past, but a past that still remains “unknown” outside of its symptomatic rupture in the present, in the floating space where we both are, and are not, in correspondence with memories both completely familiar and, like the rabbit “I was,” both known and “unknown.” This reminds me again of Tsykynovska’s poem, and the unstable category of knowledge in its final lines: “arriving late / to the first knowledge we have not come to.” The poem both arrives “late” and has not yet arrived at the “first knowledge” it seeks—the knowledge located in a timeless past, an infinite “first,” that seems to recede as soon as we arrive there.
Our conviction about an “unknown” correspondence between the present and the past (the forgotten arena of all “first knowledge”) makes a poetry in our dreams. In Sylvia Jones’s centos, the writer makes new poems out of old poems, forming a correspondence between the poem and the poetry she cites. The borrowed lines both forget and remember the poems they come from. They are placed in a “symptomatic” relation to their origins, but those origins, upon reading, are potentially obscured. Like memory, composition is a confusing process: its future coheres from a fragmented past: “each read brings with it an amnesia of meaning,” Jones writes. An “amnesia of meaning” recalls the “unknown / symptom” – something thick with meaning but opaque to knowledge. As experiences banished to amnesia are reassembled in dreams, these poems both erase and remake the past. They do not remember what they used to mean at all: “every day really is a new day, as i don’t remember the one before.”
The “rabbit of torture” reminds me of a banished memory of terrifying rabbits. Last month my brother told me a memory I had forgotten from our early childhood. He said, “There is no way you do not remember this book. You remember, but you don’t know you do.” I had no idea what he was talking about. He thought I would know by mentioning “the book,” but his memory, so immediate to him, felt gone and banished from my thoughts. He said I had once read the children’s book Watership Down aloud to him, but we had such a horrible experience with the book that I couldn’t finish reading it. Rabbits who were like humans had to escape their destroyed home, as if they were fleeing from a war. But as the memory vaguely emerged, I only remember being afraid of the rabbits, not the destruction from which they were fleeing. I was afraid that they were both humans and animals, something like my family but disturbingly transformed. There was a terrifying poster of a rabbit that hung on our wall. It had a menacing face, so I thought it would torture me. Now I have scrambled it in my memory to be the SCARY RABBIT, googling ‘SCARY RABBIT,’ then ‘CRAZY RABBIT.’ But it was THE WILD RABBIT. One rabbit became a screen for a family of rabbits. Now my brother’s memory of my fear has become his own.
I love you,
Hannah
❧
Dear Hannah and Samira,
I am glad to experience our like-weathers. I feel connected to you both by this snow. It was supposed to be too cold here to experience so much of it, but the snow has proven us wrong. The snow has outperformed the cold and falls anyway. I am supposed to be writing daily about a tree outside my window, marking its habits and patterns, those movements usually invisible to the eye when apprehended at this pace. I want to find comfort in the potential boredom of this task: living with the slow tree and recording it, even or because it remains in appearance to me more or less the same. Except for now, as the tree comes to bear the weight of this snow. The tree shows me the snow in time. I understand its accumulation more readily, conveyed in the heavy posture of a branch.
Time feels different every day. This is why I need the snow, it helps me keep track of what’s passing. It is this irregularity which makes me sure the clock in its routine insistence is wrong. I think Hannah, of what you’ve written about Lena Tsykynovska’s contribution to this season of Common Place, how “months’day” invites us into a dream-tangle of people and ideas wrested from time. The speaker dreams themself into the role of mother and father, dispersing their character, while also finding the quality — behavior, likeness, seemingness — of each character to be continually challenged:
like when you wrote
me an email and claimed I was imitating as I
always did
a tree in pink shade is made.
The speaker’s choice imitations bring them in proximity to trees. In emailing, they are tree-like. Or, it is the very accusation of having imitated (having imitated, who?) that conjures a tree, making a pink shade. In the pink shade of imitation, the poem grows long, offering a new sun with which to track a day that, as Tsykynovska writes, “continues and won’t end.” Is this something, Hannah, like your dream of a new kind of life, one where death is not the thing against which we must judge all of our days?
But in eternal life, too, there is something wrong. These days we presently inhabit, they do not seem to end. What would the poem of that day look like? An unending poem? A poem at once against death and as relentless, violent, and uninhabitable as a time defined by execution. This term feels more accurate to me than murder, as it carries with it an absolute condition. Where you have written that death enforced by the state is not, as we are wont to think of it, “unnatural,” but rather is the natural form of this iteration of that same state, I might add that it is equally not random. There is a natural and horrific precision to this elected form.
An execution is never random. The executions of Silverio Villegas González, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti were not random. Harassment, torture, and deportation are not random, but are the deployment of a violent ideology that hates life itself. I am moved by many conversations I have been exposed to, here in Chicago and at a distance in Minnesota, about the horror of the state’s primary monopoly, violence, and the meagerness of the kind of human life one is invited to cosign under a regime of execution. I will not call the present regime “current.” I feel the communicable energy of those who, right now, are engaged in a public refusal of a structure requiring violence for its own maintenance. This is the refusal of an ideology of life that hates life in pursuit of something different, something that might recover life itself from the state, where its intricate ingenuity is sent to wither.
Each of the writers in our Fall issue have offered us some version of a work-in-progress; a very recent work, or an unfinished work, or a work drawn from the loopy “progresses” of living and working, distinct yet inextricable activities. I want to know how and when we develop poems in this never-current-present. Even if by the poems we are taken out of this world, into some other one. Like the snow on the branch, this gesture orients me to life at a new speed, a scale and pace I might otherwise fail to understand.
My computer is acting weird, which makes me nervous. To lose a computer is to lose all touch with reality. Again, the problem of limited vision. I am inside a snowglobe I can only truly see by writing at my computer about the nearby tree. My computer makes me look, and turns my vision to sight. I hate to write by hand. That writing is already gone as soon as it has begun. I worry I can’t keep track of things the way other people can. My brother has begun making daily bread, a process he records and experiments with in a journal. In this journal he keeps by hand litigious notes. The notes improve the bread. I am unable to be litigious about notes or bread. But about typing, I am an expert.
I dream sometimes of being a secretary by day. I am a secretary. If I was a better one, I would write more often and with more accuracy about what I have mentioned so far, but more so, about what I have failed to record. I refuse the malignment of the secretary, she who listens, sees, and demonstrates. In the past I have taught the Sylvia Plath story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” to students. In the story, a woman documents the dreams of patients at the city hospital. She is a dream secretary. After discussing the story, my students were to cosplay as dream secretaries themselves, recording with speed and accuracy each other’s various dreams. This practice was not a writing “prompt,” meant to provoke one’s imagination. Instead it was meant to provoke each writer’s interest in one another. Of course, imagination tends to follow. But not from the interior of the self, nor from embellishing upon the other. The spoken material of others, in its original utterance, was to be taken as enough.
I was made to think of this, Hannah, in your writing about Sylvia Jones’s work. What kind of correspondence is the cento? It is an arrangement, a collage, a conversation. But it is also, as Jones writes, “a desire to circumvent some of the conventional trappings that constrict me when writing about the self.” Where the self then appears, it does so as a listener. What is outside animates the inside, presupposing emotion rather than portraying it. What we want to capture is recast in the moment of arrangement, the line breaks that “[thread] the emotional narrative of the poem.” The invisible thread is the present writer. The words themselves are everyone else. The other’s visibility makes us appear, too. But without having to show only one face. I dream of this possibility in daily life, where I must take my one face with me wherever I am made to go. The transcriber/arranger/reader’s freedom is thus located in the restraint cast by the fixed writing of another. Marguerite Duras writes about this, in Écrire, in another way:
The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write. When it loses its blood, its author stops recognizing it. And first and foremost it must never be dictated to a secretary, however capable she may be, or ever given to a publisher to read at that stage.
The person who writes books must always be enveloped by a separation from others. That is one kind of solitude. It is the solitude of the author, of writing. To begin with, one must ask oneself what the silence surrounding one is—with practically every step one takes in a house, at every moment of the day, in every kind of light, whether light from outside or from lamps lit in daytime. This real, corporeal solitude becomes the inviolable silence of writing.1
Rather than take this solitude to imply merely a classical isolation (though for Duras, it certainly begins there, in physical aloneness), I take this passage as another articulation of the cento’s demand. Give your work to no secretary, but do not do away with her task. In being alone to write, we are alone with the writing and its “stuff.” The cento makes this persistent feature of both the most talkative and the most spare kinds of writing apparent.
Where I said “stuff” above, I wanted instead to use a word that means the opposite of afterlife. The beforelife of writing? This does not seem complete nor accurate enough. Does anyone know of a good word for what I mean? The so-called stuff that precedes writing, but is not only in the past. The sperm and egg of writing.
In Hayley Stahl’s writing, this potentially isolated writing-self is further complicated:
I discover who I am while sitting in a car with my cousins
Overhearing two guys building furniture
What did it feel like? It’s like if you saw a sheet
A cloth hanging
And then something bumped behind it
I think of a broken leg or something
Something that wasn't really given to me
Funny how it was mine
This incidental eavesdropping from the site of the car lends to the scene a double-remove: the discovery of self is excavated through the external, and the external is composed not only of one’s immediate intimates, but of “two guys building furniture.” The speaker is caught in a conversation neither meant for nor forbidden from their hearing. Public language becomes atmospheric, the common domain of anyone, and is made capable of populating the self despite its remove from or (seeming) randomness in relation to that self. This great capacity for porosity becomes a method. In describing the occasion of these poems, Stahl writes:
Occasionally, I make dances. The movements tend to be drawn from family photos, movie stills, or, just as often, someone will move a certain way and we'll say, “Oh, that's great, let's use that.”
While the “solitude of the writer,” to use Duras’s construction, does not come from isolation in Stahl’s verse, the operative function of solitude is not disappeared from the writing, either. The solitary self is in the poem’s implicit future. The writer who will go off to record the self’s diffuse “discovery.” Or the choreographer who will show us her dance. We meet this writer/dancer at the site of the past. The poem or the dance presents quiet evidence of the occasional and social world, now gone. And who is here instead? The poem without the poet, the dance without the movie still or family photo. What seems like us, gathered from disparate sources (in the car, in earshot of furniture building, in the bend of a photographed arm), comes to indicate our arrival even and especially where we are not. “I discover who I am…” But how persistently strange that this is the case. Me and you, made of what we do not always remember taking on: “a broken leg or something / Something that wasn’t really given to me / Funny how it was mine.”
This reminds me, Hannah, of your childhood fear, and how it came to belong to your brother. This coinfection is painful. But if we are to live out some principle of love, to really share life, I suspect it to be the only way. We enable each other’s inner solitude. The development of something that is from each of us, as Duras writes, “involiable,” but received wholly from somewhere else. In Stahl’s peopled verse, I am reminded that the writer, social or otherwise, must handle both her own solitude and the solitude of others.
In learning to love writing, as I want most to teach my students, we learn to love other people. Not for the fact of their humanity — that, in a world beyond the simplicity of law, is from each person inextricable. I believe in writing as a technique for surfacing this kind of solidarity, one that does not deploy itself through the techniques native to domination, offering or withdrawing from each of us our humanness. I am not afraid to sound naive or sentimental in claiming this aim. It’s interesting. I can only, sometimes for months at a time, write hatefully, and about hate. But reading always teaches me to love. It makes me want to return to the writer something of my own. Like in Li Hongqi’s “Poem for Li Hongqi,” translated by Cecily Chen:
You came
Bringing my favorite drug
And a delectable tomorrow
How could I ever repay you
To give you the drug
To give you a wan and wordless dream
Or to stay up beside you
And soften your incurable fate
Of course, as the title instructs us, the “you” who has come with the perfect drug is likely meant to be the speaker/writer himself. He who is in debt to himself for this drug, that which makes tomorrow “delectable,” and is only repayable through sharing the drug’s immediate result. Or, “stay[ing] up beside you / And soften[ing] your incurable fate.” The ecstasy of company. The poem is against exchange: anything other than the good of this drug itself (namely, if implicitly, money) would be a false and meager payment for its services. There is no surrogate for its value, located in the “wan and wordless dream.” This is what my favorite drug, poetry, makes me feel. And so, to repay you for it, I have to do it too.
Before bed I’ve been reading Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd. “To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home,” she writes.2 I found myself moved to tears by this proclamation. This is precisely how I feel about the writer’s loneliness. The writer must go away. But this same writer is thusly never gone, as she maintains her secret voice, that of the constant listener. This is not just an operation of memory, but of imagination. At risk of an optimism, I think of this loneliness as a potential company. I am alone and never alone. I have left early, with all of these words.
I love you both. Hannah, your associations with Yuyi Chen’s rabbits remind me of my own recent associations with foxes. In the spring I dreamt of a fox giving birth. This mother fox was covered in long hard spikes. It looked as if her fur were the result of needles that had been stuck into her, as though she were a pin cushion. As she labored her child into the world, she was violently torn apart, as he too was covered in the same hard spikes. I think about this mother fox almost every day, even if that particular torture was only the doing of a dream.
Love,
Scout
❧
Dear Hannah and Scout,
Not a rabbit but a penguin. My students show me a picture of Donald Trump standing with a penguin on an icy plane, looking up at a mountain. I am thinking of the nature of alpinism in fascist film-making in Nazi Germany. The mountain acts as a useful vehicle for fascist ideology, for ‘overcoming adversity’ to become the perfect human, imbued with the anti-urbanist views Nazism extolled. There is a way to be perfect, it is achievable and measurable.
Fascism is opposed to dailiness. It believes the ordinary, the unremarkable, are aesthetics of those undeserving of life. It believes disagreers must be culled, that their disagreement must be overcome. I am drawn to the emptiness of this AI photo. Trump in a suit ill-fitting for the tundra, along with a penguin he appears to hold the fin of, as though it is a hand. Where is everyone else in this generated photo? It imagines a ‘new world,’ a palingenesis of a new frontier.
In the Midwest, cold is consuming everything. All moisture in the air turns to an ash-like snow clinging to the sidewalk. My hair is becoming brittle, coming out in handfuls after a morning shower and a brush. In the wake of the multiple executions by ICE agents this month, I am struck by the different registers of the word ‘arrest.’ To be halted in the developmental phase of life, as you reference Hannah, or to be caught by state-violence, shuffled into a federal prison. The latter of course holds more weight in this time and so I hear it in the backdrop of our everyday language more and more.
I turn again to Yuyi Chen’s poem. In The Academics, to be the perpetrator of violence against the rabbit is a shared identity. The speaker reveals themselves to be the rabbit’s torturer and the grandmother (though acting in the realm of mercy-killing) becomes implicated in the violence as well. “The rabbit was killed by my / grandma because it was suffering in / my hand & we skinned it we ate.” I am struck by how the violence is not allowed to rest in this poem. Violence can only be arrested by greater violence. It is an arrest of time and an arrest of a ‘stronger’ body upon a ‘weaker’ body. It takes great personal strength “resolve” to know when the next wave of violence is coming, so says the poem. I feel strongly that this prophecy, that “a war is coming,” is correct, whether factual or not, and recognizes where we’ve been, offering a prediction based on the felt past.
Cecily Chen’s translation of Li Hongqi’s “Back Then” also grapples with what becomes a choice of what I might call ‘personal narrative’:
Every afternoon at a quarter past three
I like to sit by the pomegranate tree outside my window
Upright and respectable, rays of sun atop the pomegranate tree
Ripple in the azure waves, carrying
Countless sexual consciousnesses
Like a wage
A bullet wound less than satisfactory
Oh yeah, so very many windows
Oh yeah, countless sexual consciousnesses
I want to be a man chock full of pomegranates
There is desire glinting in the word ‘want,’ and it is a personal one. Li Hongqi’s speaker is a singular “I,” intensely so in conjunction with its plural opposite (“countless sexual consciousnesses”). The glinting, bloody pomegranates, shiny in their tree, “rippl[ing]” with a robust sexuality in the “azure waves” host, in each of their bodies, a separate sexuality.
There is desire for freedom in the delimited self, “a man chock full of pomegranates.” With this comes a private, separate violence, interrupting, as in Yuyi Chen’s poem, the narrative progression of the poem, “A bullet wound less than satisfactory.” While we might remember the dark red of an opened fruit in this image of a bleeding orifice, finding continuity in the images, I am reminded of Cecily Chen’s accompanying note on Li Hongqi’s photography. “I found myself unnerved by the photo, repelled by it, although I couldn’t put my finger on why.” Seemingly inevitable, seemingly unexplainable, “less than satisfactory.” How do the aesthetics of this dream-like poem operate my own personal resonances of meaning? Li Hongqi’s writing brings to life the coming war the grandmother in Yuyi Chen’s poem prophesizes.
Functioning in a similarly dreamish wash, Lena Tsykynovska’s poem world speaks in a language slightly yet always out of reach… “calling like it can be limitless.” The “dream” is simultaneously prophecy, a personal reflection of the self, with the “roundness of a fake thing” evading clear signification. There is a narration both enacted and addressed in the poem, which functions as a sort of Ars Poetica, “I always thought it was someone else , talking over / the elaborate singing.” Voices clamour over each other, separated by these sometimes spacious commas in this poem. The poem seems to imply that the speaker is “calling” a “you,” but the syntax allows a multiplicity of meaning to be possible. The call could be the dream itself, thus the speaker is being asked to answer the call of the dream. We don’t know, so we must straddle the two possibilities, neither of which approach a clarity of what the call would mean. I find rest eventually in the unifying nature of her symbolic language “ a tree in pink shade is made” though this too is beset by a question of placement. Is the tree pink from the rising of the sun in the morning or the setting of its body in the evening? I am left just with the visual, the feeling the image of the pink on the trunk makes. Tsykynovska’s “I” dreams a world that could continue forever, but if it actually does is murky. The poem ends in sharp acknowledgement of this continuous circle of hedged realities the “I” finds themselves involved in, “arriving late / to the first knowledge we have not come to.” We must accept the journey of “life” as one with an unproveable, undefinable end.
Scout, you write on Jones’s centos something I find quite alarming, The invisible thread is the present writer. Is this not how all poems are made? Maybe not. Can we believe that a ‘traditional poem’ (should such a thing exist), even with some borrowed language, originates the words from the world the writer lives in, and the cento, in Jones’s unique interpretation, brings in people as a vector for this world? But there is something you note inherent in the process of arrangement that breaks the thread of automatic language so at home in most poetry we read. As ‘organizer’ of the world of the poem, Jones’s centos imagine stoppages as exits — a way to exit the portal of one poem and enter the portal of another. In “Pink Okra,” Jones writes, “In the photograph, I am the shadow of myself. / The horses were confused by my smile.” The line break acts as a kind of stoppage, allowing a new voice, a new line from a new poet to reign supreme. The darkness of the “myself” reaches a natural end, superseded by “my smile.”
At a legal observer training earlier this week, I take part in a simulation of an arrest. Several men don masks in imitation of uniformed ICE officers. The crowd of 600 people in the Iowan Church are mostly elderly and easily caught off guard. Several rush to pull out their phones and record, in direction of what we’ve learned, but most are frozen, fumbling with their affects. We do the scenario a second time. This time, everyone is much quicker. The ICE agents rush the arrestee away, but his covered face is recorded, the hotline is called by several people, the room rings with the confidence of several dozen peoples’ jeers. I feel a creeping despair. No one has attempted to confront the phony ICE agents with violence, no one has attempted a ‘de-arrest’ like in the videos I see on Instagram in Chicago or Minneapolis. Of course not, that is not a part of the simulation. Our task is to watch and document. The volunteer arrestee is taken beyond sight, through a side door, and returns through a different door a few minutes later. I am struck of course by the obvious, in reality we would never see her, with our little actions, so quickly.
I am thinking in this moment of our ability to create interruption, to operate our own kind of arrest. There feels to be a dawning war, this is my sense of the growingly confident fascist regime, yet I believe in our ability to halt the violence of the state with our own violence. I love the possibilities of our lives. That it may be possible to escape this world of cruelty and violence through our actions, I find daunting but hopeful. As a child, I had a neurotic fear of torture, it hung over me and seemed to be behind every corner. I feared its coming, and in that fear, contradictingly sought it out. I was so afraid of being secretly hurt by a stranger, I wanted to experience it so I could get the reality of it over with. Now, I want to be powerful. I want to be so strong that my violence triumphs over the violence of others. I want us to be ready, for whatever ‘war’ in whatever form, may be coming.
Lovingly,
Samira
1 Duras, Marguerite. Writing. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
2 Kushner, Rachel. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020. New York: Scribner, 2021.