There were two books I did not pack when I moved to Chicago from New York this summer. I kept them out on the floor when my desk was packed away, then in a tote bag, then on a hotel nightstand, within reach, driving west, until I arrived: Jen Hofer’s one (Palm Press) and Göran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser; Yale University Press). Two books impossible for me to say “I am finished reading them.” These books rest together in the same fold—writing this, I want to see how I have braided these two long poems together.
One poet, younger, a friend, from L.A. and almost local: Jen Hofer, a person who is my co-worker, who I have taken long walks with; we have fiercely agreed, sometimes disagreed, and we have sat and stitched together in Brooklyn. The second poet, Swedish, whose A Child is Not a Knife I took and studied as a handbook of poetics after hearing his difficult stutter in English, reading. We may never meet, but he often writes looking east, across the Baltic toward my father’s birth country and possibly he says something I wish my father could.
Hofer, calling out her country’s use of words as weapons and the so-called evidence to justify mechanical terror, to fuel a state’s overly-developed mechanisms of death. What to do about this? Sonnevi, from a seemingly mild socialist locale, questions his country’s alleged neutrality. He digs under a constructed innocence, turning what seem to be lovely rocks over and over again. Yet will his awareness, this Swedish “coming clean,” conquer evil? Each poet asks.
Here, in this field of writing, I mark off an experiment: Take a passage from each (technology alert: I am unable to place the caesura in Sonnevi's verse) . . .
there is no before or there is only before
not to ask unaccompanied as yet unsung
we do not know what we do not know
we eclipse recognition or turn our faces
whether wanting (or wanting) or hammered
into a shape as if to say a curt “thank you, ma’am”
as we retreat, salute, harness the cliff edge
softly jagged not solid melodically expressed
(Hofer)
Time has its instrumentarium But we
pass through it As if we passed
through all the interstices among notes
Things look at us, quietly vibrating
All things tremble, in fear or in joy;
or in a cry of pain, its penetrating sound
Your rose looks at me now; the one you gave me
Never will it vanish in the rushing of time—
How can I widen the interplay of strata, surfaces, networks,
spaces
(Sonnevi)
how much pause fragment fracture scripture shrapnel
scatter surgery flint spread shatter scrap can our conversation
sustain? how much fact to interrupt our dream? how much
de facto information, post facto notification, deployment detonated
prior to permits or ploys to posit purpose? how much sleuthing slinking
skulking scattershot buckshot shotgun shot before we pause to reload or reconsider?
(Hofer)
And if the song becomes atrocious? It has the right to be
No part of what is human can be censored
I gaze into petrifaction’s eyes Is this also
a part of me? Am I a part of atrocity?
Yes! Without a doubt! There’s no wax I can plug
my ears with The ropes of the winds bind me, even if
with a wind of mirrors Continual Whirling shards
[ . . .]
Beauty Repulsion I must not deny any feelings
I have a right to my disbelief I pledge allegiance to the contaminated
world, such as it is, in its luminous right . . .
What sort of imaginary community do I seek? Which one
is active, est agens, within me? I project the collective Sade!
The collective Mozart! As if there were no difference!
Summed up in the Gödel-face, dark Beneath the real Gödel’s
shy gray shadow In which group do I seek protection? Whom am I
excluding? Which flame of self-forgiveness consumes me?
Societies float gently, like ashes An architecture of smoke
(Sonnevi)
. . . . and stay in the between.
Between indictment, outward, and the enemy inside. Between the newspaper and the diary. Between an avalanche of words, where sounds lead to the next word beyond logic, beyond thought, so the totality is necessarily crushing and the only way out is to continue reading until the end, and unadorned sentences that do not tumble but plot a course into terror’s heart: the poet’s own. Both ask: can a poem be an essay? Yes. Between the beauty of art and pressing injustice. Between disgust at a home country who has declared war, and a voice from a country aloof with rightness, aloof with an idea of a peaceful Europe, amputating places like Bosnia into a “them” in order to create an innocent “I.” Between a rant—fast, pulsing, accumulating speed—and the music that maps slowly as it reveals. Between being in your late thirties and being of an age when your friends begin to die and death feels near. Between a shout-out record of military violence and the recognition of violence inside all borders, even those places without armies. Between lists of atomic test sites, naming them, voicing them, risking what could be heard as a beautiful music in the listing, and the folds of one person’s brain as it encounters the other, incorporates this into a third body who is not innocent, a creature who also risks being called “beautiful.” Between a document against wars and another document enfolding wars within.
Reading, I feel this Between in both books. A dizzying pendulum. Question: How not to cave into the desire to choose one territory over another? Answer: Re-read, which may be called “writing.” Asking:
“Who is your other?”
At a faculty meeting during the first week of fall we were asked to answer this question. A goal was declared on newsprint at the start, posted in the front of the room: “Multicultural Competency.” A book was passed around the room, the title was something like this: 40 Offensive Things Well-meaning People Say.
I retreated into poetry, aware that “How competent are you?” is a question perched above people, patrolling. Patrolling language, patrolling thought in order not to hurt, but ironically fostering fear. Resisting this patrol, this disciplining, I sat upright, trying to open my shoulders, my heart to this fear of being hurt now circulating around the room, everyone touching the book, some looking inside. Wondering if they were the subject or object of the book, wondering if they were innocent or guilty, some wondering if they could slip between both positions: the terror of that totality. I shuddered with this idea of myself, slipping, touching the cover, then opening to the following infraction, “you speak the language so well” and recognizing my father’s suppressed mother tongue, a tongue I have yearned for, a tongue I have been ashamed of. My immigrant grandfather’s body odor. My father’s stutter: his search for the right word while we would make fun of him. His sharp critiques of the mechanics of my writings, when I really just wanted him to read me. Mastery equaled citizenship and the daughter must enter. At school they asked me, “What kind of name is that?” and “Are you Russian?” But this pain is no one person’s fault, it is even beautiful, a source of poetry, and in an instant I knew that nothing so generative could hinge on one sentence from a near stranger. And there were jokes, too: he said, “don’t make fun of the poor refugee” as he paraded around our kitchen in a shirt with holes, my mother shaking her head and we laughed. Aware of rivers running deeper than prescriptive warnings, re-framings, and translations (if they/you say this, it actually means that; better not say that), I passed the book to my left, wondering how others sitting in the circle experience the regenerative beauty that cannot be traced to one wound.
I also wondered: are we addicted to our roles: the innocent one or the guilty one? The one who falters? The one who succeeds? The one who is “above it all” and the one who is “down in the trenches”? The one who accuses, the one who confesses? Aware of the social scientist’s and activist’s beautiful desire for reform and prevention, I know that art can point out our addictions to paradigms—asking “who are you?”—without judging.
Hofer and Sonnevi: indictment and acceptance. Violence from without, violence from within. Hofer takes newspaper quotes and ingests them into her lexicon, making music. Sonnevi takes Europe’s notions of unity, says “no,” yet still asks, “what is the meaning of my ‘no’?”
So much at stake—such vulnerability—such loneliness as they ask, “where is community?” Both poets, asking, are we willing to stay in the space between “sameness” and “difference” in order to meet “the other” and commune without the pressure of ideological conversion?
My other: falling in love with an idea of my own competency and then getting knocked off that pedestal. To know and to not know. My other: having been hurt and I hurt: recipient and perpetrator. Even if I do not want to hurt anyone, I hope to never be competent. And so I chase down the beloved, the beloved named “justice” or “lover” or “the self who writes.” My enemy: are you also my beloved? Poetry—a poetry that hunts down the sentence—is the only container I know that will hold up. Other: I hold her, penned in, for one day. I master her. She coaxes me in closer. Pure desire, pure repulsion. I meet myself. Then she slips out. Just when I think peace reigns, violence enters. Cycles of tension and release. Hearty laughter when you are supposed to sob. This is my other. I am fenced in and I hold the key. Soldier and pacifist. Beauty still encircles everything, bow pulled back ready to take aim: this space of expectation and pause, marking: this is art.
On the day before these meetings, at the end of a year of struggle, of hauntings, of grace, a year of carrying around Hofer and Sonnevi’s books, I wandered the college’s library shelves and found Hélène Cixous’ Coming to Writing (translated by Cornell, Jenson, Liddle, Sellers; Harvard University Press). Cixous begins,
In the beginning, I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalities, not defined and named beings. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off me, kindling me. Lightning-like bursts that came to me: Look! I blazed up. And the sign withdrew. Vanished. While I burned on and consumed myself wholly. What had reached me, so powerfully cast from a human body, was Beauty: there was a face, with all the mysteries inscribed and preserved on it; I was before it, I sensed that there was a beyond, to which I did not have access, an unlimited place. The look incited me and also forbade me to enter; I was outside, in a state of animal watchfulness. A desire was seeking its home. I was that desire. I was the question. The question with this strange destiny: to seek, to pursue the answers that will appease it, that will annul it. What prompts it, animates it, makes it want to be asked, is the feeling that the other is there, so close, exists, so far away; the feeling that somewhere, in some part of the world, once it is through the door, there is the face that promises, the answer for which one continues to move onward, because of which one can never rest, for the love of which one holds back from renouncing, from giving in—to death. Yet what misfortune if the question should happen to meet its answer! Its end!
So I carried this book with me throughout the week and gradually the image of the face, of love and desire at eye level (not above judging, and not below kneeling in mea culpa), came into clarity, insisting on saying, “I meet you.” I carried her book like a talisman, and trying to teach, I re-read and re-wrote this between—between Hofer, Sonnevi, my self, the other who desires to falter, to speak, the beloved.
