also by rosmarie waldrop
from New Directions
Blindsight
Curves to the Apple
Driven to Abstraction
A Key into the Language of America
Reluctant Gravities
The Reproduction of Profiles
contents
Introduction by Nikolai Duffy
The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger (1972)
The Road Is Everywhere, or Stop This Body (1978)
When They Have Senses (1980)
Nothing Has Changed (1981)
Differences for Four Hands (1984)
Streets Enough to Welcome Snow (1986)
The Reproduction of Profiles (1987)
Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993)
Reluctant Gravities (1999)
Shorter American Memory (1988)
Peculiar Motions (1990)
A Form/Of Taking/It All (1990)
A Key into the Language of America (1994)
Split Infinites (1998)
Blindsight (2003)
Love, Like Pronouns (2003)
Splitting Image (2005)
Driven to Abstraction (2010)
introduction
edmond jabès has commented how “we always start out from a written text and come back to the text to be written, from the sea to the sea, from the page to the page.”1 There always emerges on the page a blank spot, a blindsight, that experience where, according to the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, a person actually sees more than they are consciously aware of. It is, strangely, an experience of dissociation, vision without visual consciousness. It is analogous to the French term acousmatique, which, in the words of the architect Vincent Cornu, denotes “listening to sounds whose origin one cannot see, the acoustic equivalent of indirect lighting.”2
For Rosmarie Waldrop, writing corresponds to a lens, “a frame wide enough for conjunctions and connotations. And the music of words, with its constant vanishing, to fill in the distance.”3 “My key words,” Waldrop writes, “would be exploring and maintaining; exploring a forest not for the timber that might be sold, but to understand it as a world and to keep this world alive.”4 A poem is always in movement, “the way a dancer moves within music.”5
Throughout Waldrop’s connected careers as poet, translator, and publisher, the world is established, tentatively, via a constant negotiation between languages, texts, cultures, histories, between forms and grammars, between familiarity and strangeness, self and other, word and silence, just as, also, it is a negotiation of those more knotty fissures between home and refuge, life and writing, matter and transcendence, tradition and innovation. Waldrop’s is a poetry of betweens, of crossings, of differences and relations. Metonymy takes precedence over metaphor; differences become contiguous rather than equivalent. “I enter at a skewed angle,” Waldrop writes in the notebook, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” “through the fissures, the slight difference.”6 “Gap gardening,” Waldrop calls it, “the unbedding of the always.”7
Born in Germany in 1935, but resident in the United States since 1958, Waldrop is both an American poet with a continental European accent, and a European poet whose foreignness is one of her principally American characteristics. It is also for this reason that it is difficult to know quite where to place Waldrop: her work shares and develops many of the concerns of the post–second World War American avant-garde but at the same time it does not quite fit neatly into any of the critical molds or theoretical pronouncements of American experimental poetics. Similarly, Waldrop is closely connected to innovative poetries in French and German, but she comes at them, despite her own German roots, at a cultural and linguistic remove. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that, situated somewhere between America and Europe, one of the central axioms around which Waldrop’s poetry turns is the very personal sense that language, the world, can be experienced only as gap or aperture, the stutter of syntax.
In her early poetry Waldrop was interested in exploring the tension between word, line, and silence by complicating the distinction between subject and object. “I propose a pattern in which subject and object function are not fixed, but temporary, reversible, where there is no hierarchy of main and subordinate clauses, but a fluid and constant alternation,” Waldrop wrote.8 Since the 1980s, however, Waldrop’s primary form has been the prose sequence. Prose shifts the differences from the outside to the inside. Waldrop is interested in the bluff where prose and poetry meet, or, more properly, where the one falls into the other, prose into poetry and poetry into prose. It is what Waldrop refers to as the “between-genre,” such that “the prose paragraph has a spaciousness where form can prove ‘a center around which, not a box within which.’”9
The poetic sequence becomes the model poetic form. It allows an extended project, commentary, or exposition but it does so without making universal gestures. The episodic quality of the sequence enables disjuncture to become a central part of both the poem’s form and content. Order is everything. Gesture is a fragile art made of many pieces, the majority of which go unnoticed; it is what Stefan Brecht, in another context, has called a “non-verbal, arational communication,” an interlinear interchange.10 Life is registered formally, like cracks in the pavement, like mortar. “My sequences,” Waldrop comments, “make a tease of narrative. They have a narrative structure, but I don’t really wrap anything up.”11
For Waldrop it is the clash of singular, and singularly imperfect, edges that figures the world, in the kind of jarring that exposes loose ends, that gardens the gaps. First and foremost it is a question of finding a form that projects outward, that layers and lays down a topography manifold and open on all sides. It means establishing a poetic method aimed at the adjacent rather than the equivalent. It means finding a way to show, in language, in form, how one perception follows another perception but also how they are not the same and that there is no necessary correspondence, causal or otherwise, between the two. It means “not growing inward, deeper, by finding more to say about the same thing, metaphors for it, symbols, analogies,” Waldrop writes, “but instead turning to the adjoining thing, contiguity, further perceptions”;12 it means “exploring the sentence and its boundaries, slidings, the gaps between fragments, the shadow zone of silence, of margins.”13
The poems in this book span five decades, including poems from each of the eighteen collections Waldrop has published since 1972. They are presented here in chronological order. In interview, Waldrop has commented how continuities, smooth transitions, tend to be false. The sense that one thing follows on from another is bluff, an illusion of order. “There is always,” she says, “the feeling that I never have enough information. The process is not so much ‘telling’ as questioning. This implies interruption. And in the gaps we might get hints of much that has to be left unsaid — but should be thought about.’”14
nikolai duffy
1 Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993) 40; quoted in Lavish Absence, 109.
2 Vincent Cornu, In the Thick of Things (Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2009), 32.
3 Rosmarie Waldrop, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” Dissonance (if you are interested) (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 219.
4 Rosmarie Waldrop, “A
larms and Excursions,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990), 46.
5 Waldrop, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” 232.
6 Ibid., 223.
7 Pam Rehm, quoted by Waldrop in “The Ground is the Only Figure,” 242.
8 Waldrop, “Thinking of Follows,” 209.
9 Rob Mclennan, “Twelve or 20 Questions with Rosmarie Waldrop,” Rob Mclennan’s Blog, 11 January 2008, http://robmclennan.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/rosmarie-
waldrop-was-born-in-kitzingen.html.
10 Stefan Brecht, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-60s to the Mid-70s, book 1, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) 278.
11 Jared Demick, “An Interview with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop,” The Jivin’ Ladybug, http://mysite.verizon.net/vze8911e/jivinladybug/id53.html.
12 Waldrop, “Charles Olson: Process and Relationship,” Dissonance, 69–70 [58–80].
13 Waldrop, “Form and Discontent,” Dissonance, 200.
14 Joan Retallack, “A Conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop,” Contemporary Literature 40, no.3 (Fall 1999), 341.
the aggressive ways
of the casual stranger
Dark Octave
for Edmond Jabès
To see darkness
the eye withdraws from light
in light
the darkness is invisible
the eye’s weakness
is no weakness of the light
but the eye
away from light
is eyeless
its power is not-seeing
and this not-seeing
sees the night
do not dismiss your darkness
or you’ll be left
with vision’s
lesser angles
it
fills the eye entirely
for Ingo
I’m not quite at home
on either side of the Atlantic
I’m not irritated the fish
kept me
a home makes you forget
unaware
where you are
unless you think you’d like
to be some other place
I can’t think I’d like to be
some other place
places are much the same
aware
I’m nowhere
I stand securely in a liquid pane
touched on all sides
to change your country
doesn’t make you
grow (a German doll
into an image of America?)
it doesn’t make you change so much
you can’t remember
I remember
things are much the same
so much the same the
differences are barbed
I try out living at a distance
watching from a window
immobile
not all here
or there
a creature with gills and lungs
I live in shallow water
but
when it rains
I inherit the land
Like Hölderlin
got up early
left the house immediately
tore out grass
bits of leather in his pockets
hit fences with his handkerchief
answered yes and no
to his own questions
lies under grass
wilted flowers in his pockets
at the fence I pull my handkerchief
he liked to say no
“I’m no longer the same man”
and
“nothing is happening to me”
from As If We Didn’t Have To Talk
I want to stay and look at
the mess I’ve made
spills over
context
I’m always on the verge
or seeing it
there
on the edge
of the horizon
with doubt in the foreground
anything may
hence the troubled
periphery
the curve’s lost
incomplete
incompletable
wind over the plains abandoned streets
general amnesia the vacant breath of sky
breath of sky
I might as well claim it’s a rag to
wipe my hands
but as long as we’re
in spite of constant variations
what we say
Afterward
the first time lead grey sea
seems to explain
the horizon
exists and doesn’t
if I could
find again the precise place
solid
under my foot
but memory
black wind from one place to another
the same oblique
emptiness as
“lived”
space
I don’t know why I say all this
except
that openness
within your touch
My memory open
you’re there
scenes I’d hardly been aware of
our faces touching
give way to slaughter
of a surprised beast
my body vast
unsure territories
it would take a long
I mean images
what they mean to me gets lost
vibrations
distant heat
it would take a
long walk through mounting sand to reach them
I’m sure I’ve never known
anything in any
language
The air swollen
moisture
spiderwebs mildewed shadow
if only I could feel real drops
against my lips
spills over the edges
a woman leans out of the window as if there
were anything to see
a hundred yards off
cars race and a jackhammer tears
not even my feet
can hear it
you’re walking somewhere
toward me
and in a while we’ll
as if things could be touched
teeth against tongue
as if we didn’t have to
talk
_____
In order not to
disperse
I think each movement of
my hand
turns
the page
the interval has all the rights
The belly of an “a” and
vertigo
throws the words I stand on
into the white
silence charged with
all the
possible rains in the world
go on
fall back on
the precise spot
available
as in a fog that
eyes burn
I carry your name
away
from our intersection
The years in my face
no spectacular stories adorable
improbabilities
the road just
goes on
without asking
for approval
opaque pulsations
the quality of light not much different
in the distance
it’s enough that we’re
you don’t have to
frenzy of moths close to
while you touch me
_____
Nothing started yet
silence holds
my breath
waits to speak
to be able to
open
the essential detour
The way this city plays
with our bodies
so much rain the smell of wet
cement stays in the streets
out of the old shell
we’re always walking in a crowd
bookstalls river iron work
on balconies
nothing has stopped over
the years (surprise)
light seems to lean against
absence of gesture
is a move
what’s said is out of the game
it hangs on
but that proves nothing
like everyone we adjust
to just those questions
we choose to see
boats on the East River
barges on the Seine
garbage in the Seekonk
float on into the sky
in my dreams too we walk
along the roadless widening
angle of light
or run
legs spider long
breath in our ears
driven by some force again
and again
to the same sentences
Air rises
blue
irresistible with distance
place to stay
immobile
a long time
at the edge of
_____
The room’s no longer
dissolves in a rhythm from
inside my eye
what we just started to talk of