Broken English. Heather McHugh
poetry's place.
II. The Part of Poetry
The poem is a space of time. In it occur patterns for eye and ear, our curious catchers of frequencies. To my eye and my ear, the poem has always been a graph and score.
My work as a writer and my work as a reader are similar: I study and then remark patterns: occurrences, recurrences, currents.
When I call poetry a form of partiality, I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked. The frame of the still photograph, and its eventualities in time, are a poetic frame.
The poem occurs in an old time (the undone) and in an old language (the penultimate). It contradicts itself, is true twice. The forked tongue, second face, double bind got bad press: everyone's from two. And poetry is of two minds: it is language's way of being of two minds.
That is why I say it's broken language. In poetry, by definition, the making of lines is the breaking of lines (in this way poetry's deeply unlike prose, the units of which are sentences, defined grammatically by their completeness). Poetic language is language in which meaning refuses to be single-minded: the transitivity of meaning splits, as we mean more than we intend. More like evidence than judgment, the well-crafted poem can present several versions at once; it is the site of possibility. Having so many ends, it remains open-ended.
But some of the richest constructions were always the sparest. That is how Dickinson and Celan both amaze. Their lyricisms are fuller for the spaces, their structures a math of the missing.
It is the space that defines the words, the skull the kiss, the hole the eye. Among the essays collected here is one paying homage to the way silence deepens around Celan's language until we feel life itself is only briefly spared. One essay is an appreciation of Dickinson's characteristically terse structures, which generate so many mutually resistant yet simultaneous readings. (How much smaller would her sums have been, if all their plusses and equals had been signed, as her first and tidiest editors wished, making her more accessible, assessable, and smug.)
One piece is a reading of the photographic diptych “Tour de France” (that circle of circles, seen through two squares); and one is a piece on pieces, taking for its occasion the artistic fragment, both archaic and (as garde will go) avant. The fragment essay included in this book considers the implications of broken language in very literal ways, and queries the idea of the whole (an idea always just behind the thought of fragments).
There is a little theme and variations on a and the: a tribute to the differing integrities of grammatical articles (the definite's presumptions, an indefinite's permissions). There is an admirer's inquiry into works of Rilke and of Valéry, whose fluent senses greaten the senses of meaning. Through Rilke we can learn to attend, rather than intend, what we mean; of Valéry it seems true, as Emilie Teste said of her husband, that “his eyes are a little larger than visible things.”
For it is not that the eye (or the first person singular either) holds the whole; rather, it sees how deep things are, and sees no end of things. (No infinity but in finity!) Finally there is a celebration of the work of translator Ulli Beier, who studied Yoruba songs. Even in our ignorance (of the shadings of drum-language, nature of praise-naming) American poets can close-read these transcriptions to advantage; salutary cautions and encouragements abound.
I am interested in ways language can suggest or provoke (though never surround) an endlessness. Exclusionary practica of meaning, no less than convictions that the whole is sayable, seem to me to impoverish poetic means. I prefer to think of partiality as something greater, paradoxically, than comprehending. For a whole (which is a sack of intent) is too tidy, too bounded, for the extent, the portent, the attent, of the poetic…
Poetry is a declared partiality, a love of (not entirely in) words. The line is by definition broken. If you yearn for wholeness, maybe you need fiction. Unadulterated feeling is a freak of reason or intent: in the chemistries of real life, feelings are always being mixed. How to set off the reaction in the reader—with its whiffs of the ineffable, its shifts of solubility, its dusts and distillates? The work of poetry, the poet's work, takes its place in the reader.
The poet works by feel for the physical materials of language, and by dint of sympathy. Poetry is a discipline of attention: we must not just re-use but re-materialize the language; no old saw may go unsharpened, no old privilege be presumed. For nothing is foregone, for poetry; instead, everything is gone, again and again: at the end of each line another nothing.
So there was never only one nothing, never only one everything. The poem keeps recasting those unlimiteds. It is a framer's art, and the frame is a part (not apart), a way (not away). With great care, not only the poem but the line, not only the line but the word, and not only the word but the letter, can remind us of the space in which they rest. Recalled to our attention is the very medium of media: all those deepening split-seconds we spend decades (glib, or destination-greedy) missing. The poem trips us up. The trippage, the breakage, is not only how, but what, its metric means. There is no of-course about it, and (in its course) no end of ends.
The Store
“God knows what will happen, but permits himself to forget.”
—Anatole France
“My object is not what I'm looking for, but what I've found”
—Picasso
We come to acts of experience, in particular to acts of art, with a store of unexamined premises—time and space among them. At the moment we speak of a present, we create a past. (“Just now,” says an American, and means a certain moment in the past.) In the very act of language we incur the language's forethought and afterthought; and generally, to that extent, we abrogate for ourselves an independent or unpredictable present.
As a grammatical category, that is, as a taxonomic entity, the present operates as a range within the temporal field: accorded for its operations one third of the stretch, it works like the past and future, and is distinguished from them only by its operations’ imputed location-in-time. But even as we say it, we know a greater mystery is involved.
For the future feels inherently unpredictable to us; that unforeseenness is its essential incommensurability with the past, in this triad of wrongly-parallelized constructs. The present extends not even a split-second backward or a split-second forward, and has the feel of a constantly slipping location. It is enormous (we can never get out of it) and yet tiny (it can't for a second keep from becoming past) and seems, at times, to mark only the—split—border between past and future, and not a separate range at all. The space of time is thus, as phenomenal experience, suggestive of a very different kind of construction, with none of the divisibility or structural equitability of the tidy grammatical fields.1
For the writer, as for the photographer, the paradox of the attempt to capture the Now arises immediately and pointedly. In many senses, the finest feature of art is its raising this paradox to view, that it offers to the looker (the audience) the prospect of another looker (the artist) whose presence is both gone and going-on. The “store” which I take for my title here is, first and foremost, that store or warehouse of prescriptions or recapitulations we bring to the experience of a moment. For the present is both a monumental moment (from which we get the sense of the momentous) and a molten flow or constant loss, which breaks down unities and gives us the nomenclatures of seconds, always already split.
Though we sense these paradoxes, now and then, and must face them in the moment in the act of art, we operate as a practical matter in the world as if looking forward were symmetrical with looking back. We frame the moment in the economies and containabilities of the grammatical taxonomy, and forget that, framing our way of seeing, we've framed some possibilities out. For all our wish to cover and recover everything in language, still it turns out what's