by Vasiliki Katsarou

Eating Her Wedding Dress contributor Andrea Potos’ latest collection, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves is an exquisite volume.  The poems slip seamlessly into and out of the voices of women poets of the past, including the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath.  The poems are bolstered by the beautiful lexicon of the nineteenth-century poets themselves, whose brief quotations are in italics. There is a silence—a primal hush–that surrounds Potos’ poems that touches on the silence of great poetry itself.

Broken into two sections, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves takes up the question of genius—and specifically, female genius–a perennially debated subject, especially in the world of contemporary literary fiction.

(W)ho can say what happens / to a woman alone in her room, asks the poem “Two Emilys” and later, the poem “Charlotte Brontë, Student” alludes to the creative dynamism of the female psyche:

what we are not given to know,
what cannot be reduced–
woman’s mind bursting the bounds of breads and puddings,
of embroidering collars and bags.

And even in the less equivocal voice of Brontë’s biographer, Mrs. Gaskell:

She must not hide her gift in a napkin, (…)

she must bow to the word, the God-
appointed pen.

I appreciated Potos’ savvy emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon component of English in her use of crisp, monosyllabic words like heft, shun, turf, hew, sheen and capitalization of abstract nouns like Real, Infinite, Possibility, Imagination, Repair–along with unabashed references to Divinity–which make these poems feel situated in the world of the mid-19^th century.

I was also surprised to find that this luminous volume, in its voluptuous interiority, reminded me at times of the lyrical poetry of a poetic mentor– the expatriate American poet Gustaf Sobin, born in New England, and living in Provence where he passed away in 2005.  (His poems were collected recently by Talisman House, Publishers.)   This, for example:

to dwell on pristine
dunes of mind, each wind-
lashed grain afire

(From “Being Emily Dickinson”)

In the second half of We Lit the Lamps Ourselves, the contemporaneous persona of the poems is more distinct.  This voice addresses the past in a more evident, less conflicted way, with references to the gym and the mall, Reeboks and the cineplex.  Has her excursion into the past given the contemporary poet some sort of leave?

(…) permission
to empty our boxes of Milk Duds
and JuJu Bees, our Good ‘n Plenty
and tall cups of Hi-C,
the dark velvet drapery rolling open,
manuvered by careful, invisible hands,
while far away on the walls–the relief sculptures
of gnarled, windswept trees,
cliffs where a heroine might perch
awaiting her story.

(From “At the Mall Cineplex”)

As an erstwhile filmmaker who herself wrote and directed a film set in 1843, I found Andrea Potos’ collection, We Lit the Lamps Ourselves, to beg the question of whether it might feel necessary today– in our media-saturated age of IMs and technological neologisms–for the artist to immerse herself in a bygone era in order to approach poetry’s more timeless underpinnings.

Vasiliki Katsarou

This spring, just before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, I went to hear Rae Armantrout read and discuss her work with Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer.  The program was organized by Poets House in New York, at its new, glistening home in Battery Park City.  The evening program was entitled “Lyric Persuasions”and its purpose was to discuss the contemporary lyric poem.

Armantrout is a West Coast poet who has been peripherally attached to the Language Poetry movement.  In recent years, there has been a development in her poetry towards an exquisite collage of “found language.”  From her latest book, VERSED:

The outer world means
State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando?

Thoughts as spent fuel rods.
—from “Outer”

The child fights cancer
with the help
of her celebrity fan club,

says,
“Now I know how hard it is
to be a movie star.”

*

“Hey,
my avatar’s not working!”
—from“Operations”

Armantrout began her talk with a nod toward the lyric as generally understood:  a refraction of personal sensibility and emotion through the singular consciousness and language of a “privileged” speaker:  the poet.  Armantrout went on to say that since the confessional poetry of the 60s and early 70s, this personal emphasis in poetry has essentially gone out of style, to be replaced by other concerns: be they political or more narrowly “linguistic.”  The philosopher Theodor Adorno’s warning “how can there be poetry after Auschwitz?” was reflected in an audience member’s observation that “language is always suspect and meaning is almost exclusively associated with propaganda.”  In the second half of the 20^th century, and certainly since the Language poetry movement, contemporary poetry has been more and more infused with a sense of itself as a construct—and not any sort of transparent conveyance of the voice of the poet into the mind of the reader.

Armantrout gave an example from the poetry of Michael Palmer (an influential Language poet).  These lines are from his poem “And Sighs Again (Autobiography 15)”:   Did I say father and son // when I meant / farther and farther from the sun // Did I say fold / when I meant fault

Any meaning suggested in the poem seems to be undercut by the words themselves.  Meaning proffered is simultaneously meaning withheld, compelling the reader to step into the breach and (re)construct the poem for him or herself.  Armantrout described Palmer’s poem as an example of “artful self-erasure,” and Fischer agreed that this was essentially what Armantrout herself accomplished in her own work.  Armantrout noted that poetry that “opens meaning up” is preferable to poetry that “closes meaning”—that narrows it down to the personal intentions of any individual author.  Understood in these terms, poetry is theoretically more “democratic” in that it is open to the approach of any reader.

In the revealing Foreword to Rae Armantrout’s collection, VEIL, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001, poet, critic and sometime collaborator Ron Silliman noted that Armantrout works with her poems over years, gradually eliminating personal indicators, and especially pronouns like “I, you, he, she.”  He observes that the resulting experience of reading her poetry is more “interior” for the reader.  Whereas at Poets House, Armantrout and Fischer framed their work in the context of the lyric, Silliman calls her poetry in his Foreword, “the literature of the vertical anti-lyric”; a “machine made of words”; “meaning management”; and poetry that is “directly opposed to the vignette school of suburban verse.”  Given the untenable speaker in her poems, they “don’t ever propose resolution.”

During the Q & A, I asked Armantrout and Fischer about implications:  if meaning is not “fixed” in any definitive way, how to know whether the poem one is writing is “done,” and how much responsibility and work is expected on the part of reader to “complete” the poetic process?  In answering the question, both poets gave a nod to Octavio Paz’ belief in poetry as something that protects an aspect of language that would otherwise be consumed by the everyday uses of language in media, advertising, and propaganda.  Fischer went further, referring to a sacred element in poetry that is offered up as if toward a god, and that as such, he imagined a reader as “overhearing” this one-way dialogue.

The contemporary poetry world is a vast place indeed, filled with myriad poetry circles that collide, cause friction and delight, but are not absorbed by or readily reducible to each other.  For some poets, language is a time-tested tool whose soundness has been long-demonstrated.  Like a shovel or a pail whose contours are recognizable to all, language can be counted on to support and move meaning from one location (poet) to another (reader).

For other poets, there is some wariness toward the tools themselves, some awareness of the cracks, the patina, the weaknesses.  These poets set out to create something less recognizable than a wall or a tower, but a more singular, imperfect, vulnerable structure—something like an artifact of our time.

—Vasiliki Katsarou