In my previous post I claimed that there has never been a more interesting historical moment in publishing than the present. “Publishing” is often understood as synonymous with the “publishing industry,” but in my teaching and writing I prefer to use the term inclusively in order to put small press publishing, self-publishing (including blogging and other forms of social media) and other forms of grassroots activity in dialogue with the more traditional commercial media outlets. Personal and interactive media have absorbed or trumped traditional mass media providers, and those that have survived the ‘big switch’ (as Nicholas Carr calls it) have done so by incorporating the paradigms and principles of emerging media technologies. While writers still embark on book tours to promote new titles, many publishers have cut back significantly on the budgets allotted to personal appearances, favoring virtual promotional tactics such as Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, FaceBook pages, and networked blogging. The fact that all of these tools are user-friendly and essentially free has done much to level the playing field inhabited by small presses and major presses. Where it would have been prohibitive for most small presses of the pre-personal computer era to send a poet on an all-expense-paid trip to promote their new book of poems, a similar press can now create an online campaign on a very limited budget.
As Jerome McGann has asserted time and time again, for five hundred years our primary tool for studying books was—you guessed it—books, and of course this extends to the marketing and distribution of printed works as well. I used to send out hundreds of postcards to promote new titles from my own Cuneiform Press, but have all but given up on that costly, time-consuming method in favor of listservs and e-marketing while noting that in doing so I am sacrificing the ephemera and other paratextual detritus that makes bibliographic research such a rich and varied field of study. Although always somewhat obscure, textual studies and bibliography have fallen almost completely by the wayside in English departments and library science programs across the country, but as McGann has demonstrated in his groundbreaking Dante Gabriel Rosetti archive and other digital innovations at the University of Virginia, the computer has revitalized these fields—the task now is for the scholarship to catch up with the technology. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms and Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab come to mind as two relatively recent studies that have taken the discourse to the next level, and though their teaching and writing there’s no doubt that we will see more compelling studies in the near future.
Although it may seem paradoxical, it isn’t surprising that many of the theorists, publishers and poets making the most significant contributions to the future of the book (again, a term I use inclusively and not limited to the archetypal codex) are deeply committed to its history, to conceptualizing the parallel proliferation of analog and digital worlds. The digital world has a long way to go before it catches up with the analog world aesthetically, which may be a significant reason for the growing interest in the art of the book. Happily, the accessibility of tools to create quality facsimiles both online and in print has made it possible to put the most exemplary innovative works of literature from our relatively recent past back into circulation. Although entirely worthy of study, I’m the first to admit that descriptive bibliography is obsolete. Working closely with librarians and archivists at UVA, Drucker’s Artists’ Books Online set in place an important, revolutionary, framework for the future of bibliography. The ability to see, retrieve, print, document, and describe artists’ books that often exist in relative obscurity is nothing short of the Gutenberg Revolution all over again, only different. Many of the books featured on the site were produced in small editions for one reason or another, making it difficult for readers to obtain or even visit with these titles in a public or private library. The digitalization of the book has decentralized critical bibliographic information, spreading the seeds far an wide—one need only invoke the Library of Alexandria to convey the advantages of doing so, yet some librarians and artists feel threatened by the move and its implications on the status of a work’s originality and value. Yet time has proven the opposite to be true: the more people know about a particular book though online exhibition, analysis, and discussion, the more likely it is to be understood and valued.
George Bowering and I have exchanged emails every so often about our mutual interest in baseball, and — although this hasn’t been the explicit topic of our casual backs and forth — about why baseball has been such an attraction to poets writing in the experimental tradition. It might just be that because there are so many fans of baseball, and because there are many experimental poets, the demographic probabilities are in favor of producing the Bowerings. But I think it’s more than that. I’m pleased to recommend Bowering’s Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (inexpensive paperback available here), but that’s not why I’m writing today. Today I want to introduce you to a book-length poem Kevin Verrone has been writing. It is not published yet but, as I understand it, is complete in manuscript. The title of the book is “Box Score : An Autobiography” and has, in addition to the fairly standard quip about our childhoods from the late Bart Giamatti, a lovely and relevant epigraph from Andrew Zawaki:
: weighted and found wanting : this unaccustomed light
Verrone’s book is a series of prose poems and here are several:
When not long ago Pierre Joris joined host Leonard Schwartz for an episode of Cross Cultural Poetics (episode #253, entitled “Celan/Bronk”), I was all ears. Much of the discussion was about “The Meridian,” which is, for me, a crucial text. The audio recording of the program, which is aired live on a radio station in the state of Washington, has been brought over to PennSound. Now, as of today, it has been segmented (by Anna Zalokostas).
The conversation began with Joris’s account of the special difficulty of translating Celan’s famous speech (10:26): MP3. Then Joris described the sense of discovery and encounter in Celan’s work — and the “enlightening” experience of translating and making The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials (5:49): MP3. Joris also discussed “tremors and hints” of the compositional process, the transparency of Celan’s writing practice, and his aphoristic tendencies (4:53): MP3.
Joris has a striking way of describing Celan as a concentration camp survivor and his vexed and, one might say, traumatic relationship to the German language, and thus how careful he was when he wrote his response to having received the Buchner prize (5:05): MP3. Then, to my delight, Joris read some new translations of Celan’s aphorisms (0:46): MP3; and reminded us again of the richness of phrasing in The Meridian and concluded with a note on the daily work of poetry (2:14): MP3.
The closer one gets to the present, the harder it gets to pontificate convincingly about the significance of it all (which might be seen as casting retrospective doubt on earlier assertions and certainties, also).
I’ve chosen for the last of my State-of-the-Nation poems peri poietikes by Michele Leggott, from her book of laureate verses Mirabile Dictu: “wonderful to relate”. Not, you’ll note, mirabile visu: “wonderful to see” – Michele is legally blind, and has been fighting a long rearguard action against macular degeneration for almost twenty years now.
I first heard the poem on a wintry night in Titirangi, one of Auckland’s western suburbs, in the heart of the Waitakere ranges. A group of us had been invited to a joint Poetry Day reading upstairs in the Lopdell House gallery, and Michele was trying out her latest device for live performance: an ipod with the poems already recorded on it, so she could recite them line by line after her own voice coming through an earpiece.
This was in succession to hugely expanded sheets of paper, with the print getting bigger and bigger each time; computer tablets with the words shining out in white on a black background; and even projectors shining the words on the walls around her. The ipod is the most satisfactory solution to date.
It was a breathtaking reading, all the way from the “Cretan bee persons” at the beginning to that gentle “surely this is something you can understand” at the end.
Luckily I knew that the whole poem was already up online, at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre site (nzepc for short) which Michele co-administers with Brian Flaherty and various other advisors. Her encroaching blindness has forced her to move much of her poetic activity to the internet, and by so doing she’s opened up new vistas and opportunities for the rest of us.
Not only was the poem there, but also a prose commentary – or rather prose counterpoint – to its words. What, then, is it about?
cretan bee persons soar above the white magnolia flower how much can you see they ask less than I could a year ago I say and more than a year ago too
The idea of the blind seer who can understand or intuit more than the rest of us is certainly a mythological commonplace: Tiresias, invoked by Eliot in the Waste Land; Homer; Milton ... closer to our own day, Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a trope which goes back at least as far as Shamanism and possibly even further back than that.
And of course that invocation of “cretan bees” does tend to put us in a mythological frame of mind, to the Cretan honey-goddess Melissa, and the Feminine Bee Oracle who preceded Apollo’s Pythia at Delphi. “How much can you see … less than I could a year ago … and more than a year ago too.”
Michele’s own commentary on this passage mentions the death and interment of Hone Tuwhare, “grand old man of New Zealand letters and pre-eminent Māori poet” – she goes on to speak of her own investiture as New Zealand Poet Laureate, an office she was clearly determined to embrace with the “grand ceremony” it entailed.
what will it be this bright morning walking into shadow walking into the bleached possibilities of inhabiting only the moment
“Heartbreak exaltation.” The uniqueness of Michele’s situation cannot be allowed to obscure the analogy between her fear of “of the edge of the dug up crossing the overhanging / branch or the children sitting in the middle / of the path” and our own teetering on the brink of uncertainty. Is it to be that leap into “inhabiting only the moment,” or walking back into the shadow of our isolation, alienation from one another?
cretan bees you are kinder than the vespas that chased us over the curve of the Trinita bridge but your questions are just as relentless
It’s not a pompous poem, though – not humourless. What would be the point of that? Bees must float lightly, effortlessly, in order to be themselves. As Michele says in her prose on this passage, “the poems see what I can’t.”
I see more than I did and the bees in their beautiful skirts dip and lift above the white flowers saying yes there is more and that is our job now go and bury the possum washed up on the beach before someone steps on it unawares
At this point the poem does a very interesting thing. It flips into a kind of inassimilable reality with that mention of the dead possum on the beach. How does Michele put it? “I am busy recapitulating early business with the bees and magnolias when they suddenly deliver a dead possum into the mix. Why? Because it is there on the beach, not the kind of thing anyone wants to stumble on, eyes or no eyes. I try taking it out of the poem. It won’t budge.”
However, the poem says:
how did that get in I ask the wind brings a terrible stink the poem is suddenly smelly and unclean and nobody will come back for the poisoned bones anytime soon
And here a little local context becomes, I think, unavoidable. There’s a classic poem by Allen Curnow called “A Dead Lamb,” which begins:
Never turn your back on the sea. The mumble of the fall of time is continuous.
and ends:
There is standing room and much to be thankful for in the present. Look, a dead lamb on the beach.
Infinite argument has been bestowed upon that dead lamb on the beach. Does it denote the death of the Christian tradition, in favour of a kind of merciless realism of utterance (one of the other things on that beach is a Japanese fisherman’s float):
You say it is a Japanese fisherman’s float. It is a Japanese fisherman’s float.
You say it is a certain thing. And it is that thing. But does saying it make it that thing, or does it constitute areality separate from speech? It all sounds a bit like Steven’s man with the blue guitar, who did not play things "as they are."
Michele’s dead possum cannot but take on some of the “terrible stink” of that dead lamb. And yet she has her own way of resolving that Realist / Nominalist controversy we were on the point of disappearing into, like the mise-en-abîme of a bunch of medieval scholastics.
the bees are silent the cicadas take over in their massed chorus that begins in the grey light before dawn around poetics you must walk without fear they chant all measure is with us in the trees and the undersides of leaves dropping cool messages on bare skin
The bees are silent before such profundities – but the cicadas more than make up for it in loquacity. “Around poetics / you must walk without fear.”
cicadas I say you roar and you shirr how is that what I am learning apo koinu they reply enigmatically jump from the join that is a possum in the corner and one hundred percent humidity cicadas I say you are not very clear
“Jump from the join.” I guess another way of saying that would be to search for the aporia, the gap, the moment of paradox and contradiction. Poetry sends an electric spark across such circuits, giving the momentary illusion of spanning our uncertainties and converting them into transformers.
Line-break is what the ancient Greeks knew as apo koinu, literally away from the join. Koinu is almost corner, apo as in apohelion away from the sun or apocalypse breaking from cover, revelation. Not that the possum, now very smelly indeed, is apocalyptic but it does give me the chance to align apo koinu with the almost-translation a possum in the corner. There are other bad jokes in the poems which are not fussy about where they scavenge for content.
A poem full of nothing but line-breaks ends up using “line-break” as its metaphor for accomplishing the “best transfers between world and language.” It is, after all, a poem “about poetry” – or poetics – if there can ever be any clear way of distinguishing between the two.
is there another way of hearing what you have to say silence
That “possum in the corner,” then, is both the point of the poem and its Achilles heel. Like Larkin's "Arundel Tomb," it attempts to prove its "almost-instinct almost true": but the last flash of connection must (as always) be supplied from outside.
about poetry we fly in a cloud of noise sometimes it is a white flower sometimes a carcase hung under the wharf when the bones are clean they will be brought into the house
Am I wrong to hear in those last lines an echo of Baxter’s “When they brought the dead child into the meeting house / She opened her eyes and smiled”? In any case, it becomes clear that Michele’s poem has been about the same things as his all along – the harrowing of hearts, the possibility of “of inhabiting only the moment.”
It might seem an unlikely state-of-the-nation message, then, but after all it is only a poem, and – like bees – what can poems be expected to do for us, finally?
we fly and sing surely this is something you can understand
FACSIMILE (again)
pt. II
In my previous post I claimed that there has never been a more interesting historical moment in publishing than the present. “Publishing” is often understood as synonymous with the “publishing industry,” but in my teaching and writing I prefer to use the term inclusively in order to put small press publishing, self-publishing (including blogging and other forms of social media) and other forms of grassroots activity in dialogue with the more traditional commercial media outlets. Personal and interactive media have absorbed or trumped traditional mass media providers, and those that have survived the ‘big switch’ (as Nicholas Carr calls it) have done so by incorporating the paradigms and principles of emerging media technologies. While writers still embark on book tours to promote new titles, many publishers have cut back significantly on the budgets allotted to personal appearances, favoring virtual promotional tactics such as Twitter feeds, YouTube videos, FaceBook pages, and networked blogging. The fact that all of these tools are user-friendly and essentially free has done much to level the playing field inhabited by small presses and major presses. Where it would have been prohibitive for most small presses of the pre-personal computer era to send a poet on an all-expense-paid trip to promote their new book of poems, a similar press can now create an online campaign on a very limited budget.
As Jerome McGann has asserted time and time again, for five hundred years our primary tool for studying books was—you guessed it—books, and of course this extends to the marketing and distribution of printed works as well. I used to send out hundreds of postcards to promote new titles from my own Cuneiform Press, but have all but given up on that costly, time-consuming method in favor of listservs and e-marketing while noting that in doing so I am sacrificing the ephemera and other paratextual detritus that makes bibliographic research such a rich and varied field of study. Although always somewhat obscure, textual studies and bibliography have fallen almost completely by the wayside in English departments and library science programs across the country, but as McGann has demonstrated in his groundbreaking Dante Gabriel Rosetti archive and other digital innovations at the University of Virginia, the computer has revitalized these fields—the task now is for the scholarship to catch up with the technology. Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms and Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab come to mind as two relatively recent studies that have taken the discourse to the next level, and though their teaching and writing there’s no doubt that we will see more compelling studies in the near future.
Although it may seem paradoxical, it isn’t surprising that many of the theorists, publishers and poets making the most significant contributions to the future of the book (again, a term I use inclusively and not limited to the archetypal codex) are deeply committed to its history, to conceptualizing the parallel proliferation of analog and digital worlds. The digital world has a long way to go before it catches up with the analog world aesthetically, which may be a significant reason for the growing interest in the art of the book. Happily, the accessibility of tools to create quality facsimiles both online and in print has made it possible to put the most exemplary innovative works of literature from our relatively recent past back into circulation. Although entirely worthy of study, I’m the first to admit that descriptive bibliography is obsolete. Working closely with librarians and archivists at UVA, Drucker’s Artists’ Books Online set in place an important, revolutionary, framework for the future of bibliography. The ability to see, retrieve, print, document, and describe artists’ books that often exist in relative obscurity is nothing short of the Gutenberg Revolution all over again, only different. Many of the books featured on the site were produced in small editions for one reason or another, making it difficult for readers to obtain or even visit with these titles in a public or private library. The digitalization of the book has decentralized critical bibliographic information, spreading the seeds far an wide—one need only invoke the Library of Alexandria to convey the advantages of doing so, yet some librarians and artists feel threatened by the move and its implications on the status of a work’s originality and value. Yet time has proven the opposite to be true: the more people know about a particular book though online exhibition, analysis, and discussion, the more likely it is to be understood and valued.
To be continued...
Kyle Schlesinger
06.29.12
More notes toward baseball and poetics
With mention of George Bowering and Kevin Verrone
George Bowering and I have exchanged emails every so often about our mutual interest in baseball, and — although this hasn’t been the explicit topic of our casual backs and forth — about why baseball has been such an attraction to poets writing in the experimental tradition. It might just be that because there are so many fans of baseball, and because there are many experimental poets, the demographic probabilities are in favor of producing the Bowerings. But I think it’s more than that. I’m pleased to recommend Bowering’s Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (inexpensive paperback available here), but that’s not why I’m writing today. Today I want to introduce you to a book-length poem Kevin Verrone has been writing. It is not published yet but, as I understand it, is complete in manuscript. The title of the book is “Box Score : An Autobiography” and has, in addition to the fairly standard quip about our childhoods from the late Bart Giamatti, a lovely and relevant epigraph from Andrew Zawaki:
: weighted and found wanting
: this unaccustomed light
Verrone’s book is a series of prose poems and here are several:
Pierre Joris talks about Paul Celan and "The Meridian"
When not long ago Pierre Joris joined host Leonard Schwartz for an episode of Cross Cultural Poetics (episode #253, entitled “Celan/Bronk”), I was all ears. Much of the discussion was about “The Meridian,” which is, for me, a crucial text. The audio recording of the program, which is aired live on a radio station in the state of Washington, has been brought over to PennSound. Now, as of today, it has been segmented (by Anna Zalokostas).
The conversation began with Joris’s account of the special difficulty of translating Celan’s famous speech (10:26): MP3. Then Joris described the sense of discovery and encounter in Celan’s work — and the “enlightening” experience of translating and making The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials (5:49): MP3. Joris also discussed “tremors and hints” of the compositional process, the transparency of Celan’s writing practice, and his aphoristic tendencies (4:53): MP3.
Joris has a striking way of describing Celan as a concentration camp survivor and his vexed and, one might say, traumatic relationship to the German language, and thus how careful he was when he wrote his response to having received the Buchner prize (5:05): MP3. Then, to my delight, Joris read some new translations of Celan’s aphorisms (0:46): MP3; and reminded us again of the richness of phrasing in The Meridian and concluded with a note on the daily work of poetry (2:14): MP3.
Rochelle Owens: Color Pool in Umbria, in Memoriam Al Held
1
First a question
then an outline
is it an anatomical form
the monumental painting
is it bearing a signature
and are the letters blurred?
Again the question
the monumental painting
is it an anatomical form
a form of optical effects
of peculiar power
is it bearing a signature
and are the letters blurred?
2
A dead man in a pool
closely and intimately the smell
of chlorine
dead in the swimming pool
of his Umbrian Villa
gorgeous the stone work
painted tiles medieval ruins
the drowned artist’s passion
his rural Eden
monumental the golden mosaic
the giant Cyclops
the gleaming brutal eye
splintering sunlight grapevines
fields of sunflowers olive groves
the drowned artist floating
circling drifting round and round
his rural Eden
a color pool of aquamarine
a dead man’s float
the full sweet lips open
Incredible the beauty
of the Umbrian maid a girl of fifteen
a farmer’s daughter
the muscles of her back
spirally arranged her honey-tone hands
slipping under layers of water
the drowned artist floating beyond
further and further
moving in circles diagonals
ovals rectangles squares triangles
moving beyond the honey-tone hands
further and further
the drowned artist seized
seized by Cyclops the giant
jittery energy the body of work
is work of the body
drifting geometries
3
Incredible the beauty
of the Umbrian maid a girl of fifteen
on her knees
moving in circles
polishing the marble floor
a farmer’s daughter
singing ‘amore mio amore mio’
the marble floor sparkling
smiling at her reflection
the full sweet lips open
In the afternoon
sipping Umbrian wine
tearing off the wing of
a roast pigeon a breast vein
as thick as a finger
4
Everyday Disturbances
in Umbrian farm country
sipping white wine
the faythful cut their tongues out
it is possible that a discarded wallet
holds the beggar spellbound
overzealous crushing the grapes
dangerous and violent the fruit
when the fish gasped Jesus laughed
the full sweet lips open
pulling off the skin of the fish
like a glove hearing a mourning dove
succulent the fillet rolled
rapturous the tongue of the monk
the volume of the fish sea water
spilled on the putrefied heart
NOTE. At age 76, the American artist Al Held (1928-2005) was found dead in his villa swimming pool near Camerata, Italy. It is believed that he died of natural causes.
More of Rochelle Owens’ work, with plentiful commentaries, appears here and here on Poems & Poetics.]
State-of-the-Nation poems (6)
Michele Leggott, “peri poietikes / about poetry” (2009)
The closer one gets to the present, the harder it gets to pontificate convincingly about the significance of it all (which might be seen as casting retrospective doubt on earlier assertions and certainties, also).
I’ve chosen for the last of my State-of-the-Nation poems peri poietikes by Michele Leggott, from her book of laureate verses Mirabile Dictu: “wonderful to relate”. Not, you’ll note, mirabile visu: “wonderful to see” – Michele is legally blind, and has been fighting a long rearguard action against macular degeneration for almost twenty years now.
I first heard the poem on a wintry night in Titirangi, one of Auckland’s western suburbs, in the heart of the Waitakere ranges. A group of us had been invited to a joint Poetry Day reading upstairs in the Lopdell House gallery, and Michele was trying out her latest device for live performance: an ipod with the poems already recorded on it, so she could recite them line by line after her own voice coming through an earpiece.
This was in succession to hugely expanded sheets of paper, with the print getting bigger and bigger each time; computer tablets with the words shining out in white on a black background; and even projectors shining the words on the walls around her. The ipod is the most satisfactory solution to date.
It was a breathtaking reading, all the way from the “Cretan bee persons” at the beginning to that gentle “surely this is something you can understand” at the end.
Luckily I knew that the whole poem was already up online, at the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre site (nzepc for short) which Michele co-administers with Brian Flaherty and various other advisors. Her encroaching blindness has forced her to move much of her poetic activity to the internet, and by so doing she’s opened up new vistas and opportunities for the rest of us.
Not only was the poem there, but also a prose commentary – or rather prose counterpoint – to its words. What, then, is it about?
The idea of the blind seer who can understand or intuit more than the rest of us is certainly a mythological commonplace: Tiresias, invoked by Eliot in the Waste Land; Homer; Milton ... closer to our own day, Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a trope which goes back at least as far as Shamanism and possibly even further back than that.
And of course that invocation of “cretan bees” does tend to put us in a mythological frame of mind, to the Cretan honey-goddess Melissa, and the Feminine Bee Oracle who preceded Apollo’s Pythia at Delphi. “How much can you see … less than I could a year ago … and more than a year ago too.”
Michele’s own commentary on this passage mentions the death and interment of Hone Tuwhare, “grand old man of New Zealand letters and pre-eminent Māori poet” – she goes on to speak of her own investiture as New Zealand Poet Laureate, an office she was clearly determined to embrace with the “grand ceremony” it entailed.
“Heartbreak exaltation.” The uniqueness of Michele’s situation cannot be allowed to obscure the analogy between her fear of “of the edge of the dug up crossing the overhanging / branch or the children sitting in the middle / of the path” and our own teetering on the brink of uncertainty. Is it to be that leap into “inhabiting only the moment,” or walking back into the shadow of our isolation, alienation from one another?
It’s not a pompous poem, though – not humourless. What would be the point of that? Bees must float lightly, effortlessly, in order to be themselves. As Michele says in her prose on this passage, “the poems see what I can’t.”
At this point the poem does a very interesting thing. It flips into a kind of inassimilable reality with that mention of the dead possum on the beach. How does Michele put it? “I am busy recapitulating early business with the bees and magnolias when they suddenly deliver a dead possum into the mix. Why? Because it is there on the beach, not the kind of thing anyone wants to stumble on, eyes or no eyes. I try taking it out of the poem. It won’t budge.”
However, the poem says:
And here a little local context becomes, I think, unavoidable. There’s a classic poem by Allen Curnow called “A Dead Lamb,” which begins:
and ends:
Infinite argument has been bestowed upon that dead lamb on the beach. Does it denote the death of the Christian tradition, in favour of a kind of merciless realism of utterance (one of the other things on that beach is a Japanese fisherman’s float):
You say it is a certain thing. And it is that thing. But does saying it make it that thing, or does it constitute areality separate from speech? It all sounds a bit like Steven’s man with the blue guitar, who did not play things "as they are."
Michele’s dead possum cannot but take on some of the “terrible stink” of that dead lamb. And yet she has her own way of resolving that Realist / Nominalist controversy we were on the point of disappearing into, like the mise-en-abîme of a bunch of medieval scholastics.
The bees are silent before such profundities – but the cicadas more than make up for it in loquacity. “Around poetics / you must walk without fear.”
“Jump from the join.” I guess another way of saying that would be to search for the aporia, the gap, the moment of paradox and contradiction. Poetry sends an electric spark across such circuits, giving the momentary illusion of spanning our uncertainties and converting them into transformers.
A poem full of nothing but line-breaks ends up using “line-break” as its metaphor for accomplishing the “best transfers between world and language.” It is, after all, a poem “about poetry” – or poetics – if there can ever be any clear way of distinguishing between the two.
That “possum in the corner,” then, is both the point of the poem and its Achilles heel. Like Larkin's "Arundel Tomb," it attempts to prove its "almost-instinct almost true": but the last flash of connection must (as always) be supplied from outside.
Am I wrong to hear in those last lines an echo of Baxter’s “When they brought the dead child into the meeting house / She opened her eyes and smiled”? In any case, it becomes clear that Michele’s poem has been about the same things as his all along – the harrowing of hearts, the possibility of “of inhabiting only the moment.”
It might seem an unlikely state-of-the-nation message, then, but after all it is only a poem, and – like bees – what can poems be expected to do for us, finally?