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My Portrait Of You
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. . My Portrait Of You “My daughter partners me in dance, we share this life as time demands. —Yet time expands. —It births a child, the herald of my own exile, a daughter’s daughter with eyes beguiled by visions I shall never see, by a future where I will not be. Her birth begets full vacancy, the haunting queerness of not-here-ness.” ...................................“But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless. ...................................We’ve always found in distance, nearness. ...................................You never stayed for long. You’d wave ...................................from the precipice of every grave ...................................you hurtled through—. The gifts you gave, ...................................steadfast in their evanescence. ...................................You always vanish! Your fleeting presence ...................................susceptible to circumstances, ...................................reverberant, an echo’s echo.” “It’s the heart of me you know. And it’s the heart of me that shows my nothingness to me—through her, her life a light that shines a hole into the emptied chamber of my soul, her birth another death I'm dying, another skin I’m sloughing—trying to breathe death in by clarifying further depths—becoming ghost.” ...................................“My portrait of you? — : here-and-lost, ...................................now-and-gone, frontier-crossed ...................................by the muscle-of-a-backward-glance. ...................................Disembodied, still, we dance, ...................................unpartnered by the realm of chance, ...................................passing points of light who’ve dared ...................................to cross the cavern that we’ll share ...................................immeasurably — an un-selfed pair— ...................................our hymn a hole through which we steer.” . . . |
For me, this is a dazzling example of how seductive meter and rhyme can be. Before I even know what’s going on, you’ve already jazzed me with passages like:
the haunting queerness of not-here-ness. But you’ve always thrived on absence, fearless. We’ve always found in distance, nearness. Later: sloughing—trying. Pure jazz. And how cool is that rhyme scheme? Triple rhymes, one line out of synch with the tercets. There are places I’d like to regularize. For example, I’d replace “with” in S2L2 with a comma and lose “by” in S3L1. But that’s my chanting habit. Not your problem. On the whole, I get the gist, and where I don’t, the music keeps me grooving. I was going to say I didn’t mind not getting the last three tercets, but after a couple shots of vodka this evening, even they made sense. I wish I had friends as understanding as this portraitist. My tendency to be “here-and-lost, now-and-gone” has lost me more than one friend. I have a special file of “musical” poems from the Sphere, and this one is going in. Too cool, Nemo. |
Nemo I was going to wait until this thread settled down to ask, but you don't seem to need much help, so I'm just going to ask it:
Do you find that writing in meter makes it difficult to reveal the core of a poem? Or, in other words, to write topically in a clear way? This is a beautiful poem that I greatly enjoyed, but I'm not able to discern exactly what you're wanting to say. And I'm curious if that's just generally difficult to accomplish with meter, rhyme schemes and the like, in your opinion. I ask as I've been taking stabs at metrical poetry lately, but my poetry has been so traditionally idea-centric that it feels like there's a conflict between how I'm used to writing, and how meter forces me to write. Does it sound like I'm on the right track with this? Would a metrical poem need to lean heavier on the side of 'beauty for it's own sake'? |
Nemo, I’ll be back when I’ve had time to allow this stunning poem to circl my marrow bones, as Willie would have said.
Nick, you should ask direct questions about your needs another way and at a different place. We’re here to help each other with our/their poems. That’s what threads are for. Consider asking such questions in the General thread. You can also direct message. A gentle push, not a scold. |
I wish you had not deleted your question, Nick.
It is germane to the poem. Nemo |
OK. I jumped too fast. I was wrong to stick my head in.
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All our heads are in, John.
There is no problem with any of it. Nemo |
I heard a dialogue between a parent and daughter, with the daughter's stanzas being the "broken" ones. I read the parent as a father but it could feasibly be a mother. The parent has recently become a grandparent, which troubles them and leads them to contemplate their own mortality. The daughter argues, and is forgiving of the fact, that her parent has always been an uncertain presence in her life and this hasn't been a detriment to their relationship. The broken stanzas perhaps belie this idea.* And so the dialogue continues. And deepens.
That seems to me to be the surface. The narrative. The poem of it is quite beautiful, profound and frightening and heartbreaking. I shall continue to let it work on me. *Ignore references to "broken" stanzas. See post below. |
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Brilliant, Mark! A lucid exposition of what I sensed more fuzzily. It does make the poem more poignant if the second speaker is the daughter, but that’s something I didn’t get, if only because the first line of the dialogue mentions “my daughter,” as if to someone else. If that’s what you had in mind, Nemo, would you consider something like “You partner me, my girl, in dance”? |
Hi Nemo,
I'm on a laptop now (I really should be working) whereas this morning I read the poem on my phone. The phone gave it an odd appearance whereby words from the indented stanzas were left out on a limb at the left of the page. I took this to be a deliberate formatting choice on your part! Oops! :) (it was quite effective, honestly...) So, to summarise, ignore all previous ramblings about "broken" stanzas. |
I read this very much as Mark does. An aging father who is aware of mortality in dialogue with a daughter with whom he has had an uneven relationship. (How could I not see that, though? Me with the turbulent daughter?) Now there is a granddaughter who will have visions "I shall never see." It's almost too much for me, me with the granddaughters I can't get enough of. (I'm putting in the disclaimers in case they're blinding me.)
There is so much to like--"the haunting queerness of not-here-ness" is perfect. It manifests so well always mystifying time. How, regardless of how simple it seems on top, it is the underlying mystery of all being. I decided a long time ago that wisdom is awareness of time and this states that beautifully. There isn't much more to say. The dialogue continues and paints a concise picture of their relationship, which is universal and uniquely theirs. It's a really strong poem, Nemo. I don't know where it came from but I hope it is or will soon be published somewhere. |
I needed Mark to steer me through my reading of this, but now he's done that I can appreciate the poem properly. It seems wise and touching. (Assuming his reading is right, of course.)
David |
I think any reading is right, especially as the mood evoked seems the same in every case; but Mark's interpretation is not quite the one it was written with.
Nemo |
As I said Nemo, I’m probably swayed by my experiences as dad and granddad.
I’ll think. |
Perfectly understandable, John. As I said, I feel like poem is leaving the same taste-in-the-mouth for most readers, regardless of how they cast it. When I wrote it, the indented parts were spoken by myself, a friend of the woman who speaks at the opening. In fact substantial parts of the grandmother's text is lifted and then adapted from her emails. I didn't know how opaque the circumstances of the two interlocutors were until I shared the poem, and I am gratified to learn that the characters can be rearranged and superimposed without the core of the poem being damaged.
It is a different kind of poem than those I usually write, and I was not at all certain that it was successful when I posted it, though I am coming to believe that it is. Nemo |
My first gasp was that it was a kind of response to Cally's own songs to childhood in the form of her granddaughter. But that is gossip gleaned by the hearsay of my mind from my tiny knowledge (that is: only, Cally) of your friends. It does not matter, really; the poem is a wonderful script for every reader to cast. I will be back when words to speak about this occur to me. It is a strange lexicon we have: "strong" poems, "successes". As if the poems were sweating wrestlers sporting for victory in an Athenian crater. It certainly is a "success" in that it says things at such a pitch and with such a resonance that I am caught up in its vortex: listening.
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Ah, I see it now. The beauty of the poem is that, while the concerns of the first voice are clear enough, all that really matters about the indented voice is that it is responding to these concerns with a clear-eyed honesty and love.
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The layout is exquisitely apposite to the relationship between the two voices, how they touch at the centre, then each text moves apart from the other.
It is a dance. A dance is a profound kind of relationship. It's like a mirror dancing with its reflection. The poem looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, is moving, moves. Quite something you've done here, Nemo! YES Cally p.s. Cameron, I was thinking about what you said about how we think about poems. I realise I always ask myself 'is it working?' Is the poem working, like...as if the poem has a job to do. A function to fulfil. The poem has to work. Like a tree works, or a heart works, or a clock works. |
Hi, Nemo—
A haunting, impressive poem. You bravely, even heroically embrace the tragic impermanence of all conscious existence. The hardest thing is to accept the transitoriness of the people we love, but you not only accept it, you celebrate it. Fine work. Glenn |
Lovely, Nemo.
I initially read Speaker 2 as being a somewhat accusatory daughter. If you would like to clarify the nature and tone of the relationship between the two speakers — and you might not, although it would have helped those who, like me, were struggling to suss out the context — you could easily turn the initial "But" of Speaker 2 into "Friend,". You might (or might not) also consider changing this somewhat stilted bit: “It’s the heart of me you know. into something like this: "The heart of me, how well you know! Editors of a certain age will probably wince at the capitalized preposition "of" in the title. |
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Most of my thoughts on this poem don't cohere into paragraphs so I'll just put them in bullets:
Disclaimer: I read this over two consecutive days, both days in the early morning when contemplation is at its best. It is a darkly optimistic poem. . |
Nemo:
It may be impossible to use "queer" without those of a younger strata not thinking of gayness. I do not think this is a strong problem here. The flurry of rhymes has a both a kind of slow wisdom and hurtling flight. Placed in juxtaposition with the more bulky first speaker, they have an urgency of reassurance. I sometimes script it as if it were a King Lear of a less apocalyptic time-line consoling and being consoled by a daughter. It is strange; most young men are not Hamlet: but almost all old men are Lear. It is an exquisite performance. Hope this helps. |
Interesting how much punctuation this poem has compared to the one by Cally currently in TDE. I wonder how it would work if the indented stanzas didn't use quotation marks (since those are the poet's own words and not quoted from letters), and if the Cally stanzas had no punctuation or caps at all. I was confused at first about who was speaking, but liked it much better when I learned who was who. The lines are so beautiful. I wonder what it would be like with no punctuation or caps in any of the stanzas, though a couple of dashes in the indented stanzas would signal "Nemo" to me.
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Well, I think the difficulty in identifying the voices here, the casting of the dialogue, has proven to be one of the poems strong points rather than a weakness. The effect, no matter who the speakers are, remains constant. I did try and steer the reader, in the title, by the use of the word my. And as for as the sex of the original speaker, I do feel that there is something feminine, something anti-male-heroic, about their insights (though that is perhaps a dangerous game to assay in this day and age when gender fluidity has undermined a lot of our presuppositions). Still, as in any poem, the reader brings to it what he or she is, what he or she has experienced, and so the re-masking of the speakers seems inevitable. The musings on mortality, however, seem to be universal enough to apply to any of a number of character pairs. That's a relief to me. I often have my own understanding of a poem which tilts and even whirls once I read more background material on the poet in question, whether critical or biographical. I did consider giving this poem a dedication, but then I decided, "Let identity fall where it may".
I confess I was rather uncertain about the poem, all through composition, and even after I deemed it finished. The impulse to write it was strong: the original email (much of which is included in metrically re-worked fashion). The communication touched something deep in me, and that sort of poetic-depth-trigger, rarer and rarer these days, is one I can never ignore. All throughout the process of writing I was worried about the lack of imagery, of descriptive imagery—yet it seemed to be something else I was trying to capture, a mood between people, a mood of falling without failing, conjuring not the concrete but rather the surrender of the concrete. Abstraction seems less a matter of merely moving words around when it involves the tensions that connect and disconnect living beings. Likewise, metrics and rhyme can elevate words, imparting a music that justifies all this talk. I did, in my uncertainty, take refuge in the poem’s formal elements, carefully sculpting all its edges. And so, Carl, I am grateful that you were so seduced by those qualities, over and beyond wrestling with the poem’s content. That music, and the utter sincerity with which the poem was written (as a gift to the voice that inspired it)—these are how I overcame my poetic insecurities—insecurities which were of mind rather than heart (which boldly soldiered on). The rhyme scheme is of a sort I often slip into. Couplets (and, by extension, triplets) have a bad reputation. Indeed, they can seem cloyingly heavy-handed. I find that the heaviness is sometimes merely visual, too much sameness in one glance, and so changing their topography, choreographing separation and collision, often shifts the emphasis they undoubtedly wield in more mysterious ways. As for that sense-revealing vodka—'I’ll have what he’s having.’ Nick, oddly enough when I first began working with traditional forms, it was Alexander Pope who was my master. And like him, I was a firm believer that the deliberation which formal composition requires clarifies one’s ideas rather than veils or obscures them. Of course, Pope was a poet of ideas, as was I then, still securely under his explanatory wing. ‘Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse’s steed; Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed; The winged courser, like a generous horse, Shows most true mettle when you check his course. —Alexander Pope It takes no small amount of precious time To find the proper words, the proper rhyme, With which to anchor thoughts in lines of verse Of such compactness—muscular and terse— That they can puncture with one swift sure stab Habitual mental flab and chronic gab. —R. Nemo Hill That was some time ago, and my poetic tastes have since gone through dozens of mutations, and yet I still find clarity in formal techniques. Of course, such clarity is poetic clarity, which may differ from cerebral clarity in much the same way that poetic logic differs from rational logic. The thing about metrics and rhyme is that they stop your voice, they make you hold your tongue, sending you on an almost endless quest toward what it is you are trying to say: offering all sorts of choices, many of which seem quite alien to your concerns at first, frustrating your momentum, laughing at your thesis, abandoning you in a wood-of-words—but ultimately expanding your choices! For often what seems a mere distraction proves to be a new navigational revelation, and you arrive at your destination from an utterly unexpected direction. The result, when thought and its complements align, is a haunting polyvalence to every word your poem speaks. What I mean is that even without being able to parse the identities of the speakers in this poem, what they are saying and feeling still comes through, softer and clearer. Could it be said in swifter, more stripped-down language? Perhaps. But the stark statements one makes are often vitiated by their own certainty; they don't vibrate, they don't reverberate with all the statements not made. It’s as if a metrical line is the result, not of forceful gesture, but rather is what’s left when all other lines have receded back into the unspoken. I can think of nothing clearer than uncertainty. [As for the little dance about the viability of your posting of your question, I am fine with your inquiry, as I am fine with John’s hesitance about it. Really, here on the Sphere, in its potentially perfect poetic world, “it’s fine” should be the only rule of thumb. We all have unanswerable questions, moods, impressions, resentments, adulations, aches, pains and ecstasies. They’re all fine and we should stop apologizing for them.] Mark, John, as for the sex of the characters, as I mentioned above, I did feel there was a somewhat feminine character to the first speaker. After the poem was finished, I even noticed that the “hole” which is mentioned twice had female characteristics, the depths of death and the canal of birth somehow singing in concert. And I did unconsciously cast myself as a childless observer, outside of the family chain. Yet those are only my personal points of reference, the scaffolding that each reader may, or even must, kick away in his or her own way. Yes, David, his reading is right. He seems to be writing along with me, moving through the poem’s world beside me, having a conversation within a conversation. Perhaps you should be a biographer, Cameron, since your instincts here are so unerring. And yet they do not blind to biography-less-ness. The word success was, perhaps, too flippant a choice, with too many winner-take-all associations. Still there is that rush of triumph when one accomplishes what one sets out to do…though we would of course agree that such an accomplishment is far more self-effacing than Olympic. The poem is about the fullness of loss, and I am, first and foremost, a loser. Cally, I went all over the map trying to lay this one out, but what started as a game of pick-up-sticks on the page finally settled down around that central axis you sense. And dance, yes, as only a conversation that dances can be called communication. And emptiness, space, is so crucial to dance, to the dancers who, without separation, can never come together. Thanks, Glenn. In a way, I think all poetry is an act of praise, of celebration. Julie, as you can imagine, I do not mind the ambiguity of identity here: it seems to spur the reader to insert themselves into the poem. As for the use of the "Friend" address, I don't know, it seems too affectedly Wordsworthian for the context. I think both speakers have fallen too far down the hole to indulge in such niceties, ha! As for the other line, I did really question it when I wrote it; and I do like the line you suggest. In the end, I like the parallelism of the line that follows too much; and I can convince myself that the strangeness of the line as is is a kind of gateway into the strange between-world of the rest of the poem. As for the capitalizations in the title, I can’t believe you’ve never called me out before. I always do that! I detest the hierarchy of capitalized/uncapitalized words. I know editors flinch, so I always upper-case my titles to try and get away with it. It usually works. It’s a pet-peeve, no more, no less. Yes, Jim, Magellan is very much there at the poem’s end. And, yes, the poem is both specific and universal. The specifics echo as far as they possibly can, before they are not specific any more. The dancer vanishes. That’s my ars poetica, from the center to the margin. I usually apprehend poetry in terms of depth, but breadth seems germane here as well...Magellan's voyage again...and again... Apropos of dancing eyes, in Balinese dance, the eyes and the hands are the principal bodily tools used for expression. Let that be my epitaph: “darkly optimistic”. Cameron, I did try and second-guess the reception of queerness, but it is a word I am fond of in all contexts. It was more common in gay-lore when I was young—now it has a bit more negativity attached to it. But I embrace the confusion of that negativity, and so it seems doubly apt here. The whack-your-ear rhyme there, well, I feel like that shoots the word out of a cannon that drowns out common parlance. Mary, a punctuation-less approach just won’t work for me here. I feel like the eye can do its work without punctuation, but there is not so much eye in this poem. Conversation is full of emphases and caesurae without which communication can be misfired. I could drop the quotation mark for the second speaker, I suppose, but really, they serve somehow isolate the two speakers from one another, making them two distinct moments of personhood. I had tried italics for a while, as well, but that wasn’t working. And I am not interested in signaling stylistic identities here. I think the riddle must remain unsolved by the writer, the solution lies with the reader, and the poet margin-alized far beyond the margin of the page. Thanks for reading, for entering the poem, all. Your comments have really changed my relationship to it in a good way. Nemo |
I am just in the corner riffing. Carry on.
Sometimes the words come rushing fast as light, And it takes all one is to catch them right. |
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I'm beginning to think that my first few met attempts failed because they didn't have a strong core, which is usually what happens with my non-met failures too. Whenever I find an idea with some meat I'm still giving it to non-met, and those ideas don't come around too often these days. I may need to re-hash some old topics for experimentation sake. The other aspect I'm running into, which you don't have to comment on but I mention for interest sake, is that I'm finding the possibilities under metrical overwhelming. With non-met, and without any constraint, the forms of my poems just seem to reveal themselves. But with met it feels like I have to move in the opposite direction, have some idea of what the form is going to look like first. It's completely antithetical to how my brain processes poetry these days. It feels like I get a kind of joy out of writing non-met, a sort of freedom. Where met is really forcing me to think and deliberate. I'm definitely up for the challenge, but time to write just hasn't been very forthcoming these days. And I totally understand the reactions to new members breaking established norms. This place has been a comfort for a lot of you for years, sometimes decades, and it's likely a bit jarring to have new people show up and do things differently. And unfortunately I've always had trouble doing things by the book. But I've learned so much from this place so far that I'm happy to take the corner seat and pick up what I can. Thanks again for your help, its appreciated. |
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