Asymptote (Regarding Small Consonants1)
No [poem] is an Iland, intire of itself…
My corruption of John Donne’s words, meaning, & intention, found unmarred originally in “Meditation 17” of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, serves me a small purpose here, in many ways summarizing my abandonment of the lyric poem, & full-on engagement with the serial poem, the poem sequence, the long poem. I suppose it also explains my distaste (save for the exceptions of Beckett & Borges, amongst a very few others) for short fiction, but I digress….
I dislike & distrust the closure immanent in the lyric, its self-contained start & finish. I see such closure as a kind of death, an extinction. Closure suggests the lyric is wrapped within a membrane that blocks osmotic processes & possibilities that lie outside its linear structure. Impermeability suffocates, stifles, & stills. The lyric can resolve in but one way, & resolution is a completion that drains away tension & potential. Energy is dissipated as the text settles into the comfort & sureness of singularity, of intentional meaning, of reassurance, of the warm bath that all is right with the textual world, that it all coheres. In the kinetic moment of such sureness, the poem dies. Donne again: “Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone…” Donne intended those words to reflect the grief & confusion of a world view being torn asunder. But I see them, read them, as suggesting another possibility: that the certainty of a specific poetic resolution can collapse, that a singular dominating world-view can be sundered, & that the potential for others to proliferate can be restored.
No matter, really. For me the lyric has become a dead-end.
Also a dead-end: the poem as report, or the poem as a kind of textual contour gauge (Google it) placed up against the world, against experience, against thought, to make measure & give shape to the text. “The very idea of reference,” wrote the late poet Lyn Hejinian, “is spatial: over here is word, over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows2.”
I find the trajectory no longer feasible.
“Make it new,” commanded Ezra Pound all those many years ago (though not as many as the actual source of those words apparently some three millennia previous), and early on in my journey I listened. Pound’s noxious politics and antisemitism drove me away, but the command he had borrowed & foregrounded left its mark.
Make it new.
That command has meant a number of things to me/for me, primary amongst them being the belief that a poem should be porous, should be open to absorbing elements well outside of anything intentional. I would argue that what the writer writes is in no way more significant than what the reader reads.
Now, that’s obviously not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one I subscribe to. I’m not here trying to describe something for you, trying to explicate, trying to convince you, trying to impart some small shard of worldly wisdom so you can turn away feeling the satisfaction of completion and closure. “The real qualities in knowledge,” writes the philosopher Graham Harman, “come from the beholder rather than the sensual object of knowledge itself3.” And make no mistake: the text of a poem is as much an object as a bottle of ketchup.
So I guess here is what it boils down to: I insist on your freedom. In reading my work, what the reader brings to the table is as important (if not more so) than what I proffer. We are all, every single one of us, interpreters, seeing, reading, hearing, tasting, feeling aspects of a realm that is really forever beyond our reach. Experience is the quality of phenomenal interpretation. What meaning we derive from it is personal & unique, & of our own making. A poem, I would argue, shouldn’t be interpretively singular and closed, but rather open & of myriad potentiality – & primarily of the reader’s making.
The metaphor I keep coming back to regarding my work borrows from geometry: the asymptote. Wikipedia concisely says that “an asymptote of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the x or y coordinates tends to infinity,” but I prefer the simpler, less mathematical notion of the asymptote as something that gets closer & closer to, but never touches, never intercepts. Interpretation, for me, is just that: getting closer & closer to the poem, to the vowels & consonants & words & where they point, but never touching them, never intercepting & kinetically dissolving into a singularity that evaporates away the vast potential of proliferated meanings & transforms the curve of the poem into something asymptotically linear, into an arrow.
Never the victory of the asymptote, never the arrow.
Always the myriad many of the poem’s curve.
Always the curve skirting stasis and closure.
Always the curve.
Always making it new.
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1Oh, the showy vowels. They get all the attention.
The quieter consonants. They hum away in the background, doing the heavy lifting, bridging the gaps, holding things all together.
The consonants do adhere, keeping the sing-song vowels rooted in place. They quietly mutter amongst themselves, cleft as they are into discrete, independent bits of sight & sound by the intruding vowels, vocal & eruptive above the soft, consonantal white noise.
2Lyn Hejinian’s words are from her essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (1984).
3Graham Harman’s words are from his book, Object-Oriented Ontology (2018)
Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, and curator currently living in North Bay, Ontario. He has written critically in the visual arts for decades, some of which was collected in the book Gravity & Grace: Selected Writings on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) His most recent book of poetry is Long Division (University of Calgary Press, 2020). Small Consonants was published as a chapbook by above/ground press in 2024.
