On beginnings, the perpetual exile of the poet, and beauty
Welcome to this weird experiment and my ramblings. Today we're thinking about discomfort, excessive beauty, and the work of Sharif and Mahon, and poets writing novels
This Substack shall serve as a kind of conversation with the self—I miss the blogosphere, it’s true; but I want to begin by acknowledging the loneliness of blogging (What a gerund! So rarely used now!), because speaking to the ether is easier than speaking to someone directly, to touch their hand, and feel their mind drift elsewhere or towards the next thing they can say. More recently, I started admiring those who really make space for the discomfort of silence and uncertainty to exist—a discomfort which feels distinctly American, anyway, since in Germany discomfort is the status quo of social interactions. You walk into a grocery store and the clerk will refuse to smile at you. Politeness and warmth are not taken for granted, are not encrypted in the realm of symbolic exchanges. And I’m not speaking about the friendly banter of associative leaps and sometimes brilliant somersaults which lead from one topic to another. I’m talking about the hastiness with which certain people––mostly Americans––rush towards the next question, the next thing to fill in the blank, as if a timer is set on the meeting, leaving almost no room for an actual conversation to occur, for a real answer to be unfolded. Real conversations, I think, are conversations of inquiry––you don’t have the answer prepared. You search for it, often with your interlocutor. Isn’t that why we speak to each other, anyway? To discover?
So I’ve been leaving friend dates and social gatherings feeling drained, or dissatisfied, or perhaps just a little disappointed. The pandemic is “over” or it’s the new normal, and we are back to business as usual, and yes, yes, we are all extremely busy: we work full-time jobs, and we have babies, and we have books to write, and ex-partners whom we run into, and current partners with whom we fight and fuck and discuss taxes with, and Succession to catch up with and homework to do and also dinner to cook and cat poop to scoop. But sometimes I look at friends, and even strangers, and yearn to stop them in the street and say, wait a minute. Let me touch your face and hold you. Speak to me. I need the world to slow down again.
Perhaps what I want is not an interlocutor, but an audience—an audience the way an epistle had an audience once. Or an audience for the diary of an emotional exhibitionist, like the imagined audience of Anaïs Nin’s writing. Perhaps what I want is to perform a dance of narcissism, the way an analysand performs their interiority. To allow my stream of consciousness to take a shape that is traceable and material. I go to therapy, yes, so I enjoy the small theater of my own neuroses on a weekly basis, but I never manage to keep a diary or a journal––I never created that way. It’s just iPhone notes and post-its and the backsides of receipts which will get thrown away.
Anyway—I’m trying to work something out.
**
Partly, what I am grieving is not just human connection, but a connection to the page that feels secret and uninterruptedly mine. I recently sold my book, with the help of angels and an angel of an agent. It’s a novel, which I have been working on for a long time: the book I wanted to write, and needed to write, even before Hard Damage. It feels like the real début of my life. And the haunting and annoying and unnecessary question that pops up, ad nauseam, is not WHY DO YOU LOOK SO TIRED? though that too is a question I hear more often than I’d like to admit––but WHY DO SO MANY POETS WRITE NOVELS?
Well, why would the hypothetical poet write a novel? Why not? And why did I write one? Because I can. Secondly, I do not consider myself a poet per se, but more generally a writer—a collector of impressions and images and emotions and sensations. Someone who writes things, regardless of the form or generic boundaries of said things. So I don’t really feel the need to justify this endeavor, and I didn’t take a long and scenic walk and asked myself “Could I write a novel?” I knew quite immediately that this particular book had to be a novel. It could not be contained within the scope of the poem; it was sprawling, and maximalist, and it relied on narrative. I didn’t want lineation, stanzas, or enjambments. I wanted dialogue and characters and scenes and a story. There are also many other aspects, some of which have to do with the economic reality of being a poet, but they are secondary to the integrity of the project itself. But those are things I’ll talk about another time…
The answers to “why do poets write novels” are often simple, yet highly individual, so it’s not a particularly riveting question to me––but the question betrays a curious and almost suspicious attitude towards poets as an otherworldly or unnecessarily serious breed. “Only a poet would write a sentence like that,” a fiction writer said recently in a conversation about fiction workshops, referring to a line from a novel by Ocean Vuong, and I couldn’t detect the exact tone of that person, since it wasn’t someone I knew, and it was over email, and perhaps the person didn’t mean anything more than that––but as poets are wont to do, I thought about the sentence for hours, then days, and now I’m thinking about it again. I feel defensive of Ocean Vuong’s work, which I respect and love, and the sentence irked me, not necessarily due to what it imparted about Vuong’s work, but due to what I projected onto it: my own insecurity as a fiction writer. I for one have never been in a fiction workshop. For years, no one saw my novel draft; I guarded it like a secret black stone I polished and polished in the dark, then held up to the light to see what it reflected––and the only person I eventually shared my little black stone with was my agent. That kind of protection and guardedness over a draft is powerful––it engenders a heightened intensity between artist and artwork, an intensity which feels spiritually pure and yet erotically charged––but it also creates a gamble with your own estimations and intuitions, leaving you vulnerable and insecure.
But at the heart of that sentence––only a poet would write a sentence like that––lies something else, too, something I find morbidly fascinating. Therein lies a judgment about what other writers don’t do, and what poets do exceptionally well. First of all, poets write with line breaks, i.e., they literally break the line––they rupture the integrity of the sentence and paragraph. Writing with lineation is what we have deemed the unnatural, lyric, and circular form of writing (rather than prose, which is supposedly faithful to linearity and logic and the delivery of information). A poet can and will do unnatural things to language, which is to beautify it, estrange it, strip it bare, or bend it into deformity. Poets defamiliarize language. Poets change language.
Yesterday, I walked through the heat in LA from Silver Lake to Echo Park, and listened to a podcast episode between Solmaz Sharif and Negar Azimi, two writers I admire greatly. I was thinking about seriousness, and I was thinking about poetry, and discomfort. In that conversation for Carnegie last year, Sharif said that “the role of the poet is to agitate language.” In some ways, I believe that is my only role as a writer: to agitate language. Do I agitate language enough? Do I worry the word, as June Jordan says? There are many devices with which poets change or worry language, some of which are syntax, lyricism, figuration, formal loyalty or formal experimentation, bi- or tri-linguality, or other types of grammatical or intertextual invention and intervention. But all of those come post-hoc, after the looking at and caring about the world. The poet needs to pay attention. I need to really see it before I can name it, no? Sometimes, a poet says a thing so simply it will burn itself into your consciousness like a commandment, a reminder to be a better human, and you know that an entire lifetime of being attentive and thinking deeply reverberate beneath that sentence. Like when Sharif writes in the eponymous poem to her first book LOOK, “Let it matter what we call a thing,” and thus calls on me to change. She demands that I, the reader, am intentional––careful––about my use of words. Sharif’s poetry restores my relationship to language.
As I’m writing this, I’m remembering Gail McDonald, my incredible poetry professor at Goldsmiths College. She was a lover of poetry, in an old-fashioned and reverent way. Really, she made me realize that living as a poet was possible; that there were poets who were actually alive. It was in her class I first encountered the poems of Louise Glück and Sharon Olds and Yusef Komunyakaa and Anne Carson, all of whom later became my teachers. I remember her teaching Derek Mahon’s poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” and after reading the poem out loud, she smiled, and exhaled, and said rather dreamily, “Another person would just see mushrooms. Only a poet would look through a keyhole and see the history of humanity in those mushrooms.”
Something happened in that moment. I remember the cold London light through the window and the carpeted floor and the white laminate of my desk, the coffee breath of the girl next to me, and I experienced an urgent mimetic desire for poetry through her love and fascination for it; and I felt jealous of not having written something that could produce that kind of dreaminess in my professor. But I also felt changed, utterly, by Mahon’s vision, the same way that Sharif’s poem altered my life. These poems teach me about the world, about how to look at things, and at each other, even if this looking injures me. Viktor Shklovsky famously notes, “Art exists so that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”
As they are perceived and not as they are known… So the poet’s role is to speak truthfully, objectively, simply, to open the reader’s eyes to what is, not how it is deformed by thought... To restore life, to return us to the absurdity of being on earth, with other people. It’s no accident that Shklovsky, Mahon, and Sharif all believe in the political power of language and art––of art’s power as cursor pointing towards what needs to change. To see the world as it really is would hurt us; and this hurt would eventually transform, in an ideal scenario, into a knowledge, and the knowledge into a call to action, and so forth. So the hope is, then, that the poet does exactly what I need: she slows the world down, tears through the artifice of the symbolic order, and shows us the Real.
**
And yet poetry is hated, frowned upon, ridiculed, or thought of as excessively ornamental. There is a tendency to call the writing of certain poets––among them Vuong, but also me––too beautiful. Perhaps that’s why the sentiment in “Only a poet would write a sentence like that” felt irksome to me. It pointed towards an excess, a deformity, an otherness. This problem transcends poetry and also extends to prose writers who borrow from poetry. Some people call the work of my favorite writers, like Michael Ondaatje’s, or Garth Greenwell’s, almost too literary; too ornate; too complex. What does that even mean? And why is this too-muchness a bad thing? Evidently, this is not a question of purple prose or bad craft; these are some of the best writers we have. But I think of them when people tell me I write “too beautifully.” You can’t really choose your style, or your music, or what comes out of you. It’s intuitive, messy, and unique like your thumbprint—and apart from agitating language, my other job as a writer is to stay faithful to my music. Thinking of the writers who influenced me and my novel, I’m thinking of Ondaatje and Greenwell, but I’m also thinking of Nabokov, and of the poets of Sturm and Drang, the German Romantics, and I’m realizing that an excess of beauty can be hurtful and uncomfortable, too. The sublime––or the search for it––is not easy; it’s violent. Often, this style of writing scrutinizes the body and its abject desires, the material world, the rooms and smells and tastes of our daily life, in such a detailed and profoundly attentive way that it destabilizes the reader, who has numbed down his experience of the physical realm. It turns the stone stony, yes, but a writing of excess also draws attention to itself; it draws attention to the materiality and artifice of language, and hence it performs an aesthetics of CAMPINESS. A performance so heightened it puts language into drag.
The more I think about the excess of beauty, the more agitated I become. I want to put language into drag, I want to excessively draw attention to the materiality of language, because I do not feel at home in it. If language is the container of my daily life, if it is the structure of my subconscious and my consciousness, if the limits of my language mean the limits of my world, as Wittgenstein says, then what does it mean if I am always in exile in this language, and in every language I speak? I am always on edge, always uncomfortable, always, always translating. But this discomfort, this sense of exile, eventually made me want to do to language what the world does to my mind––to create a heightened, nervous, and estranged container. With the novel especially, I wanted the music to feel as strange and distressed as the thrumming sound of my own consciousness.
Prefacing the Carnegie conversation between Azimi and Sharif, the moderator says that the poet is in a perpetual state of exile, and perhaps there is a real truth to this: the poet cannot rest in the comfort of daily language as many other people do. He is outside of society, functions as both real prophet and false prophet, as oracle and madman (Plato knew this, so did Björk). He is not gifted enough to be a pure entertainer, like the musician who only channels from the other, boundless world and is not shackled to the boundaries of language––no, the poet goes to a protest and listens and keeps watch of what is said and what isn’t; he looks through a rotten keyhole in an abandoned hotel building and remembers Pompeii. He is called upon for death, and disaster, and weddings, and birth. Why? Maybe the poet writes sentences no one else would write; but more than that, the poet, day after day after day, experiences the world in a way no one else does. The poet sees what no one else sees but what is always there: the poet has one eye on the living, and one eye on the dead. And that’s why they’re always so goddamn tired, probably.
***
Let’s end with some lines of the Mahon poem, a poem on mushrooms growing amid ruins:
“Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.’”