What you don’t say has a power.
What you can’t talk about, but do gives self and writing a power. Perhaps in part because of how it sounds secret or respectful even if it trounces because there’s still a pulled punch and compelling small-motioned animation, an attention to detail, an infusing of a mood from sidelighting more than heavily made-up theatrical faces and harsh spotlights.
In a way the most oppressed culture could make the most intense poems, by that psychological bottleneck of what can’t be expressed reaching the point where what they can’t say is less important than what they must.
Substitute personal scale of isolation, self-imposed taboos and you can replicate systemic suppression, the condition of just the right level of threat so that one only feels safe to speak slant, stylistically to the page or in correspondence that could possibly be intercepted but probably won’t be.
This harnessed tongue creates a stop gap, but for all the bind and stress of fear of repercussion, the lag before saying anyway in poetry also allows time for things to sink deeper, be ruminated longer, understood more, and grow in significance.
It is up to the person whether the weight becomes onerous or an opening. Any experience may come to have the symbolic applied. A click-shut last line in one of Ronna Bloom’s Permisso spoke to this presumed state by calling out the particular as not to be read symbolically. Poet’s first language is the double-entendre. The “marked state” is the single level of reading.
Sina Queryas mentioned in her panel of how being immersed in the U.S. culture of not allowing to question the prevailing American narrative of 9/11 or the supremacy of the automobile created an environment to press against that was formative in making her Expressways.
Poems are people we make to talk to about what we don’t get the leeway to do with those we already know, or to dialogue more intelligently than we manage in person in the demands of real-time quick jump rope (ha! typed rump joke first).
Anyhew, poems are about things to say. Even if that saying is done by spacial arrangement of shapes, about symmetry, about not permitting symmetry, about the act of refusing to make a particular version of sense or doing a particular version of sense better. It is talking to oneself and letting someone listen in on what we need ourselves to hear. Bonus cream if people show that people remember something comparable, or were in the act of nearly realizing the same thing. A Cento is a way of cobbling a dialogue out of real time and acknowledging the word-stones.
In Donna Kane‘s field with the fort took me to my field with the fort. The speed trap poem from 4 years ago, the sense of space of camping from 3 years ago. Anyway, her poem,
Dragonfly
Whatever possessed up to stop
mating on the fly, conjuring wind
with our minds, propelling our bodies
across the lake past
sail boats going no where. Remember
how determined we were to make love
in a moving vehicle? You drove.
I blocked your view. We nearly hit the ditch
in our sincerity to get it right. Call it
an evolutionary throw-back, a too-literal
interpretation or just a need
to say the earth moved, but in every corner
we didn’t cut, dragonflies
lifted from the reeds, their primeval wings
shuffling together like a desk of cards.
p. 42 of Erratic (Hagios 08)
Such a keening yearning. Love the line ending on Call it and it adding a layer. Love the line break at lake past and the bang on humour in We nearly hit the ditch/in our sincerity to get it right. Looping back from the end of line to the top, what compelled us to stop thinking we were dragonflies. Such wist. It makes one feel old and young simultaneously.
I wrote this one on the same subject as Kane. It’s from 4 years ago. All I remembered of it was the first stanza. Which is just as well. Now I’d change it to cut all but the first stanza and cut some of that too. Pah, it’ll take the full of 2 decades to get it started, like anything.