Where is the heart I am calling?
Heart become eyelid
of an eye on its way to where I am.
The eye is not here yet and already I can see.
Before there is a heart I am made of beating.
I am calling in an open doorway.
I am calling from inside.
(Roberto Juarroz, 1st Vertical Poetry, trans. W. S. Merwin)
(The above come across while skimming through book looking for the below:)
The stone is a clenched lap
where the bird’s open maneuver is in peril,
but also it is an open memory
where the bird’s clenched fist
plummets like an unexpected threat.
There has to be a point
where the journeys of forgetting stop
and the forms remember.
(2nd Vertical Poetry, ibid, ital. mine)
Which is worth reproducing in the original:
Tiene que haber un punto
donde cesen los turnos del olvido
y las formas recuerden.
Opposed to or juxtaposed with Derrida’s concept of the poet as hedgehog and the poem as something both wounded and wounding – or as Hoa Nguyen so brilliantly came up with an extemporaneous line during an exercise, “porcupine ball, fun to catch†or some such thing – I propose the poet as shark. Now I don’t know a lot about the shark but I know that classic thing about movement, the shark must keep moving or die, and therein it seems to me lies both its greatest strength and deepest vulnerability all at once – imagine, the need to keep moving, even in sleep, in order to breathe.
And I can think of a number of levels on which the same might be said of a poet. Keep moving within the poem, mind heart breath, logos, line, image, sound, and so on, in order to give that swiftness or torque even to the most seemingly static form (for example the first poem by Juarroz above, with its heavily end-stopped lines). Also keep moving without the poem, perhaps (one might imagine) like a basketball player moving without the ball, in order to confuse the defense, wear it out, break open for the pass and the easy slam dunk. And in a larger sense, keep moving so that one never arrives at finality, so that one is not pinned down in parody (self or otherwise) and stagnation.
But keep moving means one is never settled or comfortable or secure. One might be comfortable in the water and the king of the food chain so to speak but what is the water – a question it would be interesting to ask a shark. The poet must then be a shark aware of what the water is, is made of, how it changes, as deeply and on as many levels as possible – locality, speech, sound, environment, self, other, light/shade, aware and at once willing to “accept loss forever†and move on through to new waters – or not to trust – imagine the urgency of a shark suddenly realizing it wasn’t in water at all but mud or confetti or “excelsior†(of the kind I always think of when Bogart is cutting open the package containing Maltese Falcon) can’t breathe and must get to water fast or die.
Or – this is getting interesting – how about a poet as shark that must somehow breathe in that false water, a kind of Plato’s pilgrim who has ventured out and up from the cave to the “real†light but must come back down to the shadow-world and why? Is it only to do that which Plato describes as so preposterous, to preach the Real in a world of shadows and echoes and reflections, to endure the ridicule, to be whipped, scorned, etc. and what could be more “wounded and wounding†than that. And does one go up/down, in-out, overunder to get to the Real light/water and does even THAT change one moment to the next.
Thankfully there are these poems by Juarroz which I don’t pretend to understand but which seem to mark so beautifully this movement. On the facing page of the second poem, above, I read this:
The center is an absence,
of a point, of infinity, even of absence,
and it can be located only in absence.
Huh? But it feels right somehow, doesn’t it? There’s a tremendous vulnerability there in going into the absence “even of absence†and certainly MOVEMENT which I had never noticed to such a degree in all these poems being a condition of that. For in the next stanza:
Look at me after you’ve gone
even though it’s only a moment since I was there.
Now the center has taught me not to be here
but later this is where the center will be.
If “to be†can ever be said to have tension and force it seems to me to be here, where the very thing not mentioned is what’s behind every word, between every line, and that’s movement. And he seems to have had to say it this way, not only because “the center is an absence,†but because he’s explaining it so straight one almost can’t believe it’s real, but there it is, bang. I was here/I will be there/in that absence constantly occupied a moment ago lies the center I’m moving away from/towards. Against that a tremendous freedom; a baby being tossed up in the air of its own volition trusting that even as the “journeys of forgetting stop/the forms remember†– the forms being the light, the Real, Water, arms of the mother to catch it. But a vicious baby, a shark baby, a hedgehog baby that might bite or prick or at any moment get squished flat into another dimension.
