Ruminations

Poetry has often been difficult for me to understand. Of all the literary arts, it’s the one closest to the divine, to incantation. At the same time, poetry can be very mundane. The poems by William Carlos Williams or Frank O’Hara are beautiful because they’re so simple, because they’re so earthy.

What all good poets seem to show is an almost extreme self-awareness of the “writtenness” of their poems as well as of the beyond of their language. A word written or uttered—as I’ve mentioned once before—is the clang of a bell. The word said is like the hit of the clapper on the sound ring, and like the resonance created by the bell’s vibrations, the word’s connotations resonate in the silences between the words: this is perhaps similar to what Lacan called the inter-dit, the “inter-said”/ “interdicted.” A word said leaves behind it a wake that is more than the meaning of the word. Poets almost entirely rely on this excess, this beyond-of-the-word, so that even when a poem has a line that is utterly declarative and simple, like those of William Carlos Williams, we can always guess that the truth of the line lies behind the semantic truth of those immediate words. And so we say that the lines can be “deceptively simple.” It is for this reason that the poem lives in the realm of the Lacanian ab-sens, that is, in the realm of what is neither sensical nor non-sensical. If the goal of logic, as Bertrand Russell taught us, is to eliminate the possibility of error that resides in the ambiguity of natural language, then poetry is precisely the most intentionally illogical linguistic activity. Poetry is the willful manipulation of the signifier (the word) so that the signified (the meant) is deferred, magnified, distorted.

Take these sublime lines from Fióna Bolger’s collection, a compound of words:¹ 

I take cow dung mixed with water
to form pure black ink
and write myself. (“Coarse Outline,” 2)

The beauty and humility of the lines lie in the words not being literal. (Imagine if they were.) The effect relies on our acknowledging perhaps as early as the moment you sit down to read the poem that there is already a beyond to the words. The process of reading poetry is, as the Hegelians would say, a dialectical process. The words in the lines are a written positivity. But Bolger is certainly not being literal about the lines. This is the negation. So, on the one hand, we take in the positivity of the words—the fact that the words are there, posited to be read—and on the other, we negate that positivity: we must not read the words in their most present, literal way. At the end, the understanding or perhaps the enjoyment we derive from the poem is the result of the sublation: it is the elevated union of both the positive and the negative.

This is one of the reasons why poetry has always been difficult for me to judge. And, certainly, I don’t want to imply that it has to be judged. But judgment is a working part of human life; it is inherent at all levels of action. Kant recognized that even something as simple as uttering an observation was a rational judgment, one that, if the observation was “obvious” enough, would get validated so quickly it wouldn’t seem like a judgment in the colloquial sense. To pick up a collection of poetry operates as the result of judgments that are themselves the answers to questions such as “Why read this at all?” or “Why this one and not that one?” “Why Bolger and not Heaney or Rupi Kaur?”

Is this difference not what aesthetics and schools of criticism illuminate? But imagine that: how can we reach any rational judgment on poetry when, as we said, poetry relies on the negation (and thus ultimate sublation) of the pure immediacy of the word it presents to us on the page? The question is pretty similar to that posed by the psychoanalysts: “How can we psychoanalysts know that we’ve reached a correct interpretation of the patient’s symptoms when these symptoms and signs are being marshaled by a devious unconscious that seeks to mislead us at every turn?”

Still, for all of this, I wanted to delve a little into Fióna Bolger’s collection, and to explore and meander there, which is, I think, what criticism in the end is: blathering and meandering.

The skin is very important to Bolger. Her poems continuously present the link between skin and communication, or rather, what amounts to the same thing: she presents the skin itself as a signifier. In the fourth of the “Allahabadi Sonnets,” she writes,

In Wheeler’s shop she searches out the words of the naga women
who shed all shame and proclaimed themselves. (25)

The very divestiture of one’s skin becomes in these lines a form of proclamation of being since what the women do is proclaim themselves. This notion of the divestiture of skin is found as well in the poem “Coarse Outline,” where Bolger writes,

I remove my skin
I pin it in wooden stakes
near the Liffey
to dry in the sun. (2)

The lines in this poem, which are wonderfully Joycean if only in the evocation of a river that was mythologized and immortalized by the Dubliner into the character Anna Livia Plurabelle, evidence the importance that Bolger lays on losing the skin as a preparation for the act of announcing one’s being via writing particularly when when this annunciation comes in the face of some antagonism:

When the writing is done
I wrap the skin around me
my words, incantations
protecting me
against those who say
it is not so. (2)

And in “Mehendi Artist” where the speaker relates her meditations as she paints strangers’ hands with henna, she writes,

my dreams upon their palms
trace my fantasies
on their lifelines (37)

showing, again, the skin as that which receives the inscription, as that on which the writing gets done, as the means of communication and relation.

These are fascinating lines. When we put them in today’s social contexts, we become aware of a subtle discursive heterodoxy in her poetry. Today, the lived experience of the individual is taken as an irreducible kernel of being and is perhaps inseparable from that individual’s identity. When this identity and thus the “lived experience” is ineluctably determined by the pigmentation of the skin, as in the case of people of color, then to divest oneself of one’s skin is impossible and perhaps even politically undesirable. That a movement like Black Lives Matter—which is precisely a movement that depends on the acknowledgment of the otherness of black skin and how this otherness has radical empirical effects on the lives of those who have it—thrives today shows that our society has largely ontologized skin. The skin has become a form of being itself: to remove it would seem to be impossible without radical destruction.

Having said that, it’s not as if Bolger is contradicting the discursive trends regarding social justice. About half her collection comments on the horrors and oppressions she encounters in her travels precisely as they concern the gendered other. Some are just clicks away. (See, for example, “Googling Soni Sori.”) But it does add a dimension that asks us to see that skin is not a cage even if it does initially determine an immediate destiny. She asks us to remember that the skin can be written on; it can be made a letter; the skin can be poetry. In other words, like Dr. Cornel West, she can lead us to remember that there is more to personal integrity than the skin that puts us into an identity category.

It’s not surprising then that another image that runs through her work is that of “stitching.” And this image is interestingly tied to a tempered but visible brutality that runs through the collection. “I search for rags and bones among the ashes,” she writes in “Off Course” (4); “I walk the streets with scissors,” in “Pattambuchi” (5). Already, above, in the line from “Coarse Outline,” the notion of pinning the skin with wooden stakes recalls the wooden stakes with which (non-canonically) vampires are supposedly vanquished, but at a less culturally allusive level they connote crudeness, bluntness, if not a certain forcefulness, strength, even will. It is an image of the piercing of the skin which, like the writing on the skin, can be as violent (see Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”) as it can be a stimulus for creativity. And in some poems, like “Sathya’s Sutra” the stitching becomes a metaphor for the history of violence; “each swollen body is a stitch,” as she writes, “in the rough red fabric” (44).

It is this mixture of the violent and the metaphysical, this quiet but brutal mixture of the concrete horror with the emancipatory possibilities that writing poems or speaking Irish to her daughter or enjoying the sheer stimulation that an Indian mango can bring her that marks the power of her poetry.

But for all the darkness—and there is much of it in her intense collection—there is still interspersed a vivid attention to and enjoyment in concrete details, particularly as these manifest in fruits. These come like little glimmers, touches of the sour real. She describes each letter in “wajalukinat” as “supplying a side way to transubstantiation avoiding the black hole of a lemon market” (1). The sourness of citrus. The sweetness of mangoes. These are such vivid, sensorial images that they are precisely the “black holes” that tear up, to use Lacan again, the symbolic order, the order of semantic meaning, language, culture, law, religion, and so on. They are the very sensations which, in their crude but real materiality, she can escape into. Again, in “Mehendi Artist” what does the henna artist do to fix the signs on the skin of the hand: “squeeze lemon.”

Like Wallace Stevens, Bolger is able to glide from the concrete to the ideal, from the mundane to the metaphysical with subtlety. In “Viewpoint,” she sees a child’s “brown-paper drawing of East Coast Road,” which is “longer than the gods’ journey” and she writes, “I see the vanishing points are multiple / and drag me into silence” (58). A mundane object, a child’s drawing, becomes the occasion first for the noticing of a rather abstract element: vanishing points. Typically a vanishing point is the point on the two-dimensional canvas where, for a three-dimensional image to appear, parallel lines converge and merge (so it’s interesting that there are more than one in one painting: could this be the reason for the speaker’s awe?); and second, the occasion for silence.

The mixture of the elements involved—art, perspective, silent and perhaps awed contemplation—belie the Stevensian tilt of some of her poems. It reveals Bolger’s desire for an aesthetic work, though this doesn’t make her an aesthete. The social commentary is there in poems such as “Words to a New Wife Entering Her Kitchen” and the three Ghazals.

The poems also show that she’s intertextually conscious of her location in poetic history and geography. For example, her poem “The Middle of April” begins and ends with the first four lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Is she not, we could ask, connecting herself here to one of the most important works in English poetry?

Bolger is therefore very unique today for how she can weave (or shall we say “stitch” with all the brutality the word implies) her commitments to social justice and metaphysical inclinations together, particularly in a literary atmosphere that is very incredulous, to use Lyotard’s word, towards the canon and all totemic, universalizing, inherited cultural and theoretical traditions. It’s fascinating to see how little the general contemporary author deals today with metaphysical subjects. And yet here is Bolger: “I whisper them [the words] in my daughter’s ears, the essence of who we are” (6, my emphasis). Is it any surprise that her work is more at home in India than in our cynical “West”? Or take her magnificent poem “Lakshi Mittal in Zenica” where she engages in a little bit of prosopopoeia and has the Indian billionaire Mittal speak: “I make the metal which suspends your lives above reality” (41). Is this not a comment in which she weaves socio-economic criticism with ontology in order to say that capitalism is something that de-realizes our world, our life, even as it makes it all more comfortable? (And, indeed, comfortable for whom?)

And yet, for all her ambition, her poetry does not betray her humble vulnerability. There is often guardedness:

Words to me are incantations
talismans held aloft against
those who say it is not so.
They form a wattle and daube fence
against my attackers. (“Wattle and Daub,” 3)

Who are these attackers? Harsh critics? Men? The powerful? Later in the poem, she writes, “My strength becomes my weakness / I choose silence under an oak” (3), demonstrating the possibility of a poetic reversal, not a lack of confidence in the self as much as an awareness—you could even call it a wisdom—of the fact that her great craft leaves her vulnerable. It reminds me of the last line of Carole Satyamurti’s simple poem, “I Shall Paint My Nails Red,” where she writes, “Because it is reversible.” Like Satyamurti, Bolger begins with the speaker taking decisive action, sometimes even in the face of criticism or general disgust, but all the same intimating that the moment of decision carries its own negativity: it can be undone.