Dear Scout and Samira,
We’ve made it to the Spring Equinox. I’m writing from a public library in Brooklyn, where I’ve been visiting my sister. This morning, she took me to her new art studio, which she shares with another painter. I watched her paint while I read, looking up now and then to see how the painting was changing. She showed me how often she has to adjust the painting so that the colors across the composition work together. Sometimes the introduction of a new shade throws it off and certain parts will need more cream. She finally has the room to paint, so she’s been working on a series of new paintings. They reiterate an angular courtyard and a spotlight shooting out of a woman’s eye.
Last night I saw a Broadway musical. Nicole Scherzinger starring in Sunset Blvd. I cried at curtain call, because I had felt so moved by her singing, and I was also moved that I had the chance to be involved in a standing ovation. I don’t know of a pleasure I cherish more than crying while applauding a performance. In a crowd of people clapping for talent, crying feels like heaven. While I waited for the musical to start, before the curtain came up, I read some John Wieners in the dim theater. His poem, “A poem for painters,” suddenly hit me with a big wave of feeling, which might have prepared me to feel receptive to the musical. He declares: “My poem shall show the need for it,” the need for the love he’s in want of… I’ve been relieved this winter to embrace poetry that confesses emotion embarrassingly, like I’m living with the open hearts of teenagers. As Wieners’ said about his poetry, “I try to write the most embarrassing thing I can think of.”
We can write poetry about the most embarrassing things, and we can be embarrassed about writing poetry. In Patrick Morrissey’s beautiful essay on Lorine Niedecker in this issue, he writes about how Niedecker’s poem confesses a slight embarrassment about poetry: “What would they say if they knew / I sit for two months on six lines / of poetry?” But Morrissey shows us that Niedecker might also be taking pleasure in hiding the embarrassing secret of being a poet. Poetry generates from secrecy; “something embarrassing might also be a sustaining secret, something that thrives on privacy,” Morrissey writes.
I was feeling embarrassed about some private feelings I was having when I was watching the musical. I loved feeling a secret emotion in the crowd. You two, when was the last time you were hit with a wave of feeling, like when Nicole was singing and I cried and clapped? And do you take pleasure in keeping an embarrassing secret?
Love,
Hannah
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Hi Hannah and Scout,
Grateful for your email Hannah. I'm a fourth of a bottle of white wine and 4 minutes and 33 seconds into a YouTube video entitled "Elon Musk MELTS DOWN in confused tirade on air," and appreciate the reminder of changing seasons and my ability to exit things I do not like. It is always my choice to be where I am.
Hannah, your sister's beautiful posture feels like a painting in itself. Such a gesture of grace and contemplation. I'm truly taken by the strong blue of her shirt. I want to dress like that! Her painting looks incredible and exactly as you described. An angular courtyard. A woman's eye. The most interesting tokens of observation and also of being observed—each a portal to the other. I think this itself feels like a Wieners poem. I’m remembering the poem where he observes his mother on a train and then frightens her as a joke. LOL.
To your second question Hannah, no. When I feel embarrassed I think I am too insecure not to announce it. As a child I was supremely embarrassing (ugly, uncoordinated, loud, argumentative, poorly dressed, attention-seeking, defensive) and have realized as an adult the only way to really escape my self-hatred is to erase the privacy of it. I think about arguments with my ex-partner, which would only go well if I fully gave up my pride and announced my embarrassing feelings. Not always so easy for someone like me. To answer your first, when he reached out to me recently, I was hit with a smaller but similar wave. But a wave of fear. Maybe in a different relationship, the act of "giving up one's pride" would not be an embarrassment. Maybe it would just be a sweet secret. Or maybe, when I become so tough in the future, so able to handle it all, it won't feel like that, it won't even feel like vulnerability, just normal.
When I combine all of these feelings, when I think of their emblems, 'grace', 'vulnerability', the distancing of time, the choice (and lack of choice) of space, I feel a strong appreciation for Camille Roy's “Widowhood.” Written over a period of years, and brought to life first by journaling by hand, these poems study life’s realities. Her poetry doesn’t disfigure life—it enlivens life through its attention. In “page 159,” Roy writes, "I found my people / at the place after fire” in reference to the LA fires. The spareness of Roy’s language lends gravity to the lines—the absence of adjective here allows the reader to respond with their own feeling, without markers of how we should feel. Feeling is known. We can trust what organically arises in us without an adjective’s assistance. I envy her ability to journal in this way, even imagining revision: with spaciousness, delicateness.
But, like Niedecker, Roy enjoys some privacy in her writings. While we are let in on the events as they happen, in first person even, there is a limit to what can be shared between people. In “page 154,” Roy writes of language's personal origins. “I enter the long syllable // hall. Then a soft flattening,” — “soft” and “long” providing a gentle framing to an exploration of how one person forms their words. Roy’s lines stretch out from this abstraction, fuzziness. There is a privacy to the adjectives here. A reader might now have some idea of what the speaker feels performing the action of the poem, but not enough to inform total understanding. There is just enough framing to enter the grey yearning of almost knowing what feeling to feel.
I hope we can all be brave enough to know when to be silent and when to speak.
Peace to my sisters,
Samira
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Hi you two,
Hannah, I almost cannot believe that you’ve written about Wieners and the wave of feeling that arrived in the theater, as it parallels a private routine of my recent days spent traveling. A few years ago I memorized Wieners’ “A poem for record players” for a class, and then promptly forgot it. I love this poem for so many reasons — one of which being that it inaugurates the poem as its own sort of theater in its opening line, a monostich stanza: “The scene changes[.]” I felt this poem return to me this week, during the first days of spring, when I really had “the need for it,” to borrow Wieners’ own language. Though, what is this “need”? I do not believe that poems are meant to cure or therapize us. The sense of necessity that I felt was related to a desire for relief, though had little to do with rest. I needed the poem to provide a companion, but not necessarily a reassuring one. My agonizing and tiresome friend, the poem. I needed something to say to myself that was not the thought already in my own head.
In “A poem for record players,” Wieners’ “scene” begins with a haunting portrait of the poet-speaker, figured not as a producer of language but as a “muffler” — one who stifles the noisy universe into the compressed stanza.
The scene changes
Five hours later and
I come into a room
where a clock ticks.
I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound.
I can’t help but hear Niedecker in there, too. The poet as she-who-wields-negation rather than production, providing words as a counterintuitive means of cutting back and letting something else through. Coming to understand — through poetry — a muffled sound as still, with difference, a sound. Engaging God by quieting him down. The conceptual parallel between Wieners’ work and Niedecker’s feels especially present in “My Friend Tree” —
My friend tree
I sawed you down
but I must attend
an older friend
the sun
The embarrassment ensouled in Niedecker’s poetics — the embarrassment of the poet’s essential meagerness — might be something like the self-knowing embarrassment of the ruthless woodswoman, sawing down her friend in favor of letting the light in. Important here is that such “condensery” (à la Niedecker’s “Poet’s Work”) does not avoid indulgence. Both Wieners and Niedecker traffic in another kind of excess: altering the poem-forest to get a little more sun, spending a day face-down in the hotel pillow. With purpose, levity, and timid regret, the poet negates, giving way to the muffled tasks of verse. And to the responsive spiritedness and embarrassment such a life brings on. I think of these same impulses as attendant to Leah Flax Barber’s forthcoming book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. How great it is to read these poems now, when, as with my attempted recitation of Wieners, I am sorely “in need” of poems as frightening and as playful as real life while still managing to push beyond it. I suspect that this is where most of us live, anyway. Flax Barber writes of the speaker in flight, coming to occupy her character by way of escape:
My mind is pure
Of heart
I escape my alias
On the back of a mule
Our attention is drawn to the impossible yet frequent distinguishing of “mind” from “heart,” another kind of Cartesian dualism built via intimate antagonism. The poem’s heart both muddies and points to the mind, too seeking some mule that might evacuate it from feeling and into purity. The notion that such distinctions are hopeless and even dangerous to maintain is at the heart/mind/center of The Mirror of Simple Souls. “A source whose origin is unresolved remains inexhaustible,” writes Flax Barber, and we are able — through her poems — to encounter confusion, shame, and disappearance as sources of tentative liberation. The uncertain instability of persona is a kind of frightening freedom. Upon it we ride out into the night.
I love what you’ve written, Samira, about the embarrassment of speech, relations, and poems. I want so desperately to befriend your younger self with my own irritating childhood character. Those two need each other! And I agree with what you’ve said about Roy’s journal-poems within the context of this season’s arriving nexus: winter’s large, uncomfortable, annihilistic ambivalences. Roy’s poems are, as you say, “an exploration of how one person forms their words.” The bigness of the lyric “I,” or whatever we’d like to call it, manages to refuse any assumed universality via form, instead favoring the flickering shapes and ambiances brought about by the self’s gradual disintegration: “How did I evaporate into the mist / everyone walks though?” Another kind of running mule — an act of disappearance that shows us where and what we are. And with strange imagination: “Such interesting things happen / beyond the horizon / of pain,” writes Roy. I am haunted by this sentiment and geography. The place beyond pain.
Happy spring, I love you both, goodbye winter.
/ scout