The Fiction We Make Between Us
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This manuscript contains two sections, “Quiet Project” and “Notes for a Memoir,” each of which could later expand into a separate chapbook, or a section of a book, of poems. In the first section, “Quiet Project”, the speakers externalize their interior realities, reflect and marvel on the quotidian shimmer of things in the world as they shift in and out of presence and, by association, of mind. These poems center around the speakers’ need, one self-reflexively close to my own motives for writing poetry, to know the world as Shelley believes only a poet who has conditioned his or her heart and mind to sync with his or her surroundings could know it. When writing these poems, I hoped I might inhabit my perceptions as I remembered experiencing them at work; I hoped I might, through these speakers’ words, encode a big-hearted sort of awareness for the reader, which might, as Shelley says, lift “the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and make familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” While the speakers in the first section appreciate memory and desire’s role in living lives that are wakeful, imaginative, and joyful, they also question their validity as a poet’s primary ontological lenses, and they acknowledge, even if only implicitly, their limits because memory’s place is always temporal steps behind presence, and desire is always pushed miles ahead into future possibility. These speakers also realize that in order to live well they have to find moments in their day-to-day in which they might let go of fixed positions which are important to the super-ego and social forces governing our shared reality; they know they need to maintain a flexible sense of self so that they might synthesize and inhabit society’s dualities. While in the process of writing these poems, I considered several aesthetic dichotomies these speakers might conciliate: the autonomous individual self and unification of self with others; the past with present; physical and psychic loss with regeneration; pain with joy; anxiety with tranquility; sadness with exuberance; and the absence of love with its sublimated presence. In “Quiet Project”, for example, the speaker acknowledges the poet’s struggle to strike a balance between opposites, and between extremes, while in the flow of the continuous, long-term project of writing poems. The world resists the poet’s words when he or she is “looking too much or too little.” I like to believe the speakers will go on beyond these poems, or into other poems I write, to arrive at an ambivalent perspective, one where a person might, through epiphany’s momentary expansions and contractions of consciousness, of valences in relation to self and world, gain insight on independence, human connectedness, and freedom from dogma and ideology. Keats, in his 1817 letter to his brothers George and Thomas, calls Coleridge’s verse’s search for truth an “irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as opposed to how the latter might have instead satisfied the poetic perception’s need, infused with a desiring imagination, to continuously “fill some other body.” Keats, and the speakers in these poems, embrace negative capability, the poet’s ability to exist “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” because the real, the unquantifiable sum of those external forces, which Lacan says we can never fully perceive, insists we find a symbolic system, a language through which we might represent it. The series of poems in the manuscript’s second section, titled “Notes for a Memoir”, employs a frame in which the speaker writes notes toward a memoir he hopes to write someday. He also writes these notes with another aim in mind: he hopes to understand why he desired a connection with a woman, and a place, emotionally and geographically unavailable to him. The long-distance-relationship the speaker and his girlfriend conducted offered him, he realizes in the years after the relationship unraveled, a sense of adventure, complexity, peak experiences, as well as a sense of wholeness, or at least it presented the illusion of him as being a unique individual self yoked in continuity with another unique individual self in their tarmac-to-tarmac theater of romance. He realizes that when his relationship with Stacey ended, so did his Midwestern City’s relationship with her city, The Grand City to the east, because they had joined his city with hers in emails, instant messages, phone and face-to-face conversation about their lives together, yet apart, in these two distant locales. In his quest for understanding, he questions the accuracy of memory and the desire that led them to one another; he meditates on presence and absence, the nature of attraction, and proximity. As he writes in his notebook, he needs to understand the dichotomy of closeness and distance, of what is real and illusory, in relation to longing and loss. The speaker, the unreliable narrator of this series, in his quest for truth, immerses himself in the type of confusion Keats hoped to avoid by embracing life’s ambiguities. Yet, within this psychic rupture, the speaker unearths shards of truth and beauty while considering how the long-distance relationship threw him back into the teleological cycle of ordinary childhood and adolescent crises, a largely imaginary space offering a field for adventure and discovery. While writing this series, I read and gathered ideas from Anne Carson’s Eros, the Bitter Sweet, Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and Georges Bataille’s Eroticism: Death & Sensuality. Even though several of these poems could fall under the lyrical category, the majority of the series is comprised of narrative poems. The narrative mode’s imperative to establish a sequence of events, assign valences to people, places, objects and ideas reflects the speaker’s obsession, his irritating search for truth, as well as his on-going struggle to jot down what happened between him and his girlfriend. While writing these poems, I tried to show how the real woman became, within their first weekend together, a partially conscious symbol for the love object he might recover, a replacement for his mother’s love, which he lost during the Oedipal phase. That he’s somewhat conscious of this substitution, which we all are to some degree, does not help him much. In “Approximate Locations,” the series’ second poem, he acknowledges how much the long-distance relationship, the way it kept him separate from his lover and how it, emotionally, broke him apart, “taught us more about love and loss than our mothers ever could have,” yet he keeps trying to understand his heartache by grasping at imagined illustrations and analogies. “For this chapter, illustrate a map of the country naming only our two cities,” he notates to himself in “Approximate Locations,” and later, in “No Curator of Small Rooms,” he states, Yesterday it occurred to me to imagine this memoir / as a pair of handcrafted miniature / rooms.” In “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” poet-critic Tony Hoagland condemns “the new poem,” a lyrical, associative mode championed by poet-critic Stephen Burt as “elliptical,” for its aesthetic embrace of experiential distance, its guardedness against the narrative poem’s attempts to cohere with an accepted reality, and its “suspicion of straightforwardness and orchestration.” Since reading the heated, back-and-forth exchanges between these two poet-critics, as well as in journals and blog posts, the summer before entering the MFA program, I have tried to write a narrative style of elliptical poem. Work by poets Burt names in his essay “The Elliptical Poets” influence many of the “Notes for a Memoir” poems, but these poems attempt to strike a balance since my project’s poems, which I hope read as fragments of dramatic monologue, have required me to employ narrative strategies. The series uses a notes-to-self, or notes scribbled in a notebook, frame to mimic the speaker’s patterns of natural thought. Obsessive and depressed, he turns over the details of the relationship, half-decayed fragments of remembered events, hoping to learn why he desired someone who lived so far away, and who would “crush him with such remoteness” (“Don’t Ask Her to Say the Word”). His notes take on directives in the form of imperative statements to help him plan the memoir he hopes to write about the relationship someday. These are private thoughts and emotions, some of which he fears are so strange or overly intense that he feels shame of being different, less than ordinary. Sometimes the imperatives address a “you”, who is he himself at first, but who often becomes the reader, or another/an other, with whom he wants to address and connect through the pages of his memoir. I like the imperative statements because they get at the urgency, and insecurity, he feels while communicating his intense feeling. His demands, on himself and on his reader, betray his fears that no one will truly understand the pain he has experienced, or take time to consider what he has to say. These imperatives also explain his need to establish and exert his agency, a sense of command that his imaginative self, as opposed to his norm-regulated self, acknowledges and allows on paper. The imperatives also amount to wish fulfillment. The speaker not only wants to direct his own attention through the haze of memory, but he also wants to direct the reader’s attention to consider something he finds beautiful and ugly all at once. Through these imperatives, he takes an elegiac position, one in which he longs to look back and clearly see his distraught emotional state at the moment his girlfriend broke up with him. Of course clarity, like his attempts at true love, elude him.
Table of Contents
Quiet Project -- To Take Them from the Air -- There will come a moment when -- A word -- Birthplace -- The World Had Need of Us Then -- Eating M&Ms in November -- Notes for an Introduction -- Notes on Regeneration -- Approximate Locations -- Connecting Flights -- Memoir -- I Booked a Flight to Meet Her -- No Curator of Small Rooms -- Don’t Ask Her to Say the Word -- The Shapes We Left in Rooms -- Notes on Shame -- Notes on Mourning -- Notes on What My Father Kept -- Notes on Splitting Wood -- When Dad Tells His Story -- A Quiet Music -- Notes on Libido -- Notes for the Afterward -- Her Spiral Stairs -- Map -- Nothings Lost -- The Next Day Opened Curious Windows -- We Believed We Shortened the Distance -- Assemblages -- The Subway -- My Green Age -- Before the Whole Thing Comes Down
xii, 60 pages
xii, 60 pages
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M.F.A.