Dale Tracy : How does a poem begin?

A Poem Begins with a Social Occasion and as a Model of Thinking

 

 

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

“[T]he performance is in some sense always pushing back the moment of its inception.”

Fred Moten, Commonplace Podcast Episode 120: Fred Moten & Ronaldo Wilson

 

“An old cry at fairs, the showman having promised his credulous hearers that as soon as enough pennies are collected his donkey will balance himself on the top of a pole or ladder. Always a matter of ‘two more pennies,’ the trick is never performed.”

Kay Ryan, epigraph to her poem “Two More, And Up Goes the Donkey”

 

“‘But the Moon’ is after all the poets you think it is.”

         Nikki Reimer, “Notes on the Text,” No Town Called We

 

“[A]esthetic inquiry emphasizes the link between what is held to be reasonable and what is viscerally experienced”

         Kandice Chuh, “Knowledge Under Cover”

 

“[A]n emphasis on the uniqueness of individual experience offers little prospect for social agency or change.”

         Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, “The Problematic of Experience”

 

“Reaching out, despite ‘not knowing anyone,’ can be scary.”

         Renée Sarojini Saklikar, “Five Questions with Renée Sarojini Saklikar”

 

“So many of the poems begin with epigraphs which is a style once fashionable in Canadian Poetry, but which has since fallen by the way side.”

         Chris Banks, “Trading Poetics: A Review of Trading Beauty Secrets With The Dead by Erina Harris”

 

 

For me, a poem begins with a social occasion. Most often, this start is indirectly social, though sometimes I write in anticipation of a poetry event or in response to a prompt another poet wrote for me. Usually, I write out of a day’s confluence of texts moving me in and out of poetry, science, and philosophy. A poem begins in the shared human project of learning and knowing: a poem is my response to learning and an expression of learning. At the same time, my poems don’t directly communicate facts or reproduce ideas. Instead, they are a place I think in, or a tool I use to think with that also records my thinking, which I also reshape as communication to others in poetic form.

A poem offers something that exists at the intersection of intertextual networks and traditions of poetry, the aspects of the world I happen to learn about in temporal proximity, and my own experience of that learning and of writing the poem. The poem attaches my thinking beyond myself into a shareable form. A poem is a performance of my thinking that I don’t need to be present for, but that makes the thinking a presence, that presents it in another person’s mind.

Writing a poem and teaching feel similar to me because each is an experience of making meaning with others. Neither is primarily about me sharing knowledge, though things I know are in the poem and I have a responsibility to bring things I know to the classroom. But that’s not why I do either, even though my knowledge is involved. The reason I want to do both activities is to make meaning together. (Something I’m trying to figure out more is how to talk about the differences and overlap between “meaning” and “knowledge” and “knowing” and “thinking.”)

When I teach, I say explicitly that making meaning together is what I want, and then my actions afterward show that this is true. Sometimes I wonder if I should preview how a poem begins for me in a similar way, even though the poems likewise show what they’re doing. An epigraph, for example, can position the poem on an interesting fact. An epigraph, though, would feel artificial for me since the poem wouldn’t truly emerge in response to my learning that specific fact. A poem starts more like a dream does, out of the compression of recent experience.

Another thing that stops me from using an epigraph is the way that it might pin the poem down, as a concrete detail different from the concrete details inside of the poem. Inside of the poem, concrete details (when I’m reading or writing) float me up into the abstract, which in turn sends me back down to re-understand the concrete details. I worry that an epigraph, outside of the poem proper, would hang onto the details and prevent the mind from moving up and down the registers of significance. (But, then, I enjoy epigraphs in poems by others, so why do I feel this way? The detail in the paratext is outside of the patterns of the details in the text, so it isn’t fashioned in the same way. It’s hard to understand what it means to separate and join a poem with the rest of everything and that’s exactly what I like most. An epigraph is a gesture toward something too big to gesture to that it is desirable to gesture to.)

Using “we” presents similar worries for me. I worry a “we” in my poem will seem to be a universal, abstract “we,” as though the poem isn’t working through specific details from a particular perspective, a thinker thinking from the fact of a shared condition (unequally, differently shared). Trusting that the poem shows that it isn’t imposing an abstract concept that doesn’t care about the details and distinctions seems difficult because “we” blatantly enters the poem into theory but the poem only suggests what it is thinking without explaining. But then I also began this essay with the impossible gesture of epigraphs, without explanation.

Dale Tracy is the author of the full-length poetry collection Derelict Bicycles (Anvil); the chapbooks Gnomics (above/ground), Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery), The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground), and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales); and the monograph With the Witnesses (McGill-Queen’s). She is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Dale Tracy: On Gnomics

 

“A short pithy statement of a general truth; a proverb, maxim, aphorism, or apophthegm” (“gnome,” Oxford English Dictionary)

“< Greek γνώμη thought, judgement, opinion; plural γνῶμαι sayings, maxims (Latin sententiae), < γνω- root of γιγνώσκειν to know v. (“gnome, etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary)

I write and read poems to know about the world: this is a kind of experience and a way of learning. The poem opens up a line of thought, making it possible to think along it.

But what kind of experience and what kind of learning? Does poetry offer a specific kind of knowledge? I think so, but not in the sense that poetry is more powerful than other forms. I don’t think that poetry has special powers, except in that we need all the ways people think and create; each way has its own powers; and poetry’s powers need particular mentioning because poetry is a non-dominant form (in the time and place I write in).

The powers particular to poetry are its compression, which produces openness inviting active connection-making; its brevity, which produces a whole in which the network of connections is accessible and can be held by the eye or in the mind at once; its present-tense happening, which produces active presence that readers might feel they experience or participate in; and its self-awareness, which produces within the craft a commentary on the craft.

I’m not trying to produce binding criteria for poetry, though. This particularity can only be true in general, and not even in general for all kinds of poetry, and can also be true of prose. To discuss broad categories is only to speak of tendencies that can be anywhere but collect more here than there.

Do these tendencies collecting around the form we call poetry (at least the sorts of poetry I’m thinking of) produce a different kind of knowledge than that produced by what we call prose? I think that they do. Those tendencies—compression, brevity, presence, self-commentary—emphasize the “how” over the “what.” More than being about a subject, a poem is a way of thinking. In this way, a poem is a model for doing rather than an explanation of something, and so the experience of reading a poem can be an experience of learning from a model.

Does that sound right? (It’s a real question, and I welcome answers or other thoughts: dale.tracy@kpu.ca). In any case, this is how I have backwards-constructed an account of the poems in Gnomics.

Gnomics collects some of my most compressed poems, each mainly two or three lines long. They sound like riddles, use the form of syllogisms, or otherwise perform reasoning (sometimes faulty reasoning, testing logic’s misuse). These poems are a process of thinking or perform a process of thinking. If a poem is a process of thinking, it is this thinking (the thinking emerges from the poem as a process, animated by me). If a poem performs a process of thinking, it performs my thinking (makes my thinking happen as I write, then makes my thinking happen in you as you read, as an experience of thinking). Either way, these poems aren’t explaining an experience or subject but are or do thinking. I’ve named them “gnomes” to make us think of knowing in process.

 

 

 

 

Dale Tracy is the author of Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022), her first full-length poetry collection. She also wrote the chapbooks Lines That Open (Surrey Art Gallery, 2023), The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020), and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018) and the academic monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Image credit: from Unsplash, Shubham Dhage

Dale Tracy : On Trish Salah’s “interview”

interview

In her picture

no ghost of words

this latest episode

within the detour

don’t ask,

does she

draw a line in time

recall her mother’s house?

every day of rewind

at the clinic

our awesome fatality

front loaded,

buried or burnt out

here recitation stalls

what slow explosion

to appear?

her “after”

is condensed

dreads the heart

to differentiate

a once lover’s glance

to seize upon

other scared bodies

a long line of “I had no idea”

Trish Salah’s poem calls itself an interview but refers to a recitation and describes a picture. While “interview” implies questions eliciting responses, “recitation” means “repeating from memory a poem, passage, prayer, etc.” (“recitation,” Oxford English Dictionary). Reciting an interview suggests a repeatable self, like the fixed image in a picture. Is this poem a recitation of identity? Does it express the desire for a stable self that can be re-cited? The poem opposes these ideas with a complex account of the plurality involved in a human life.

Rather than provide answers about herself, the speaker says, “don’t ask” (5). And this poem is about “she,” not “I”: the only “I” appears in the last line as quoted speech, an appearance that highlights its earlier absence. I understand the narrated “she” as a version of this unstated “I,” and I refer to the two together as “the speaker.”

Evidence for this split self comes in the reference to “her ‘after’” (17). If she has an after, then she also has a before, two versions of the self. That “her ‘after’ / is condensed” suggests a point in time after which she finds coherent identity, the re-cited self (17-18). However, the scare quotes around “after”—which writers use to distance themselves from a word or to show they mean otherwise—tell us that this before/after way of thinking is flawed.

Even without the scare quotes, we might be skeptical of this “after” because the speaker has already said, “don’t ask, / does she / draw a line in time” (5-7). Not only does the poem not take for granted that the line between before and after exists, but it forbids the question. The other censured question is about remembering origins: “don’t ask / does she / … / recall her mother’s house?” (5-8). Her “mother’s house” could be the house the speaker grew up in or even the house her mother is (the womb the speaker grew in). Her mother might be literally her mother or even an idea of inherited woman-ness (a foremother). Whether literal or metaphorical, it is a question about the relationship of the after (recall) to the before (her origin in her mother). Does she draw a line between origins and recall? Remember, don’t ask! These aren’t the right questions. There isn’t a “line in time” after which the self fixes into the condensed self.

The “line in time” might be renamed “our awesome fatality” (11), where the plural self (“our”) ceases to exist, breaking into before (not me) and after (me). But just as the speaker might not have drawn a line in time (meaning either drawn into the medium of time or drawn fast enough), the fatality might not have happened. The fatality, “front loaded” (12), seems future-oriented, anticipated. Because one can’t recite a self that hasn’t happened, “here recitation stalls” (14).

In contrast to the censured ones about the past, the speaker asks a question about the future: “what slow explosion / to appear?” (15-16). In this slow explosion, the fatality (the line in time) becomes inaccessible. The explosion would make fatality “buried or burnt out” (13), hiding it to suggest that the self has only existed since “after.” An explosion would “appear” to disappear the break between before and after, to bury or burn out the complexities of the self, leaving only the illusion of a whole self condensed into a portion of time. But “after” is suspect because this front loaded fatality hasn’t happened. Without the fatality, the plural self keeps existing.

In the opposite direction of the front loaded fatality moves the “every day of rewind / at the clinic” (9-10), suggesting a form of healing in seeking to allow the whole life to be accessible—not buried or burnt out. The opposite of a front loaded burnt out car is a car that can drive out of this “detour.” If her picture is “this latest episode / within the detour” (3-4), then the speaker positions this part of herself outside of her actual self, as a deviation. But rewinding moves to include all previous images of herself in her self.

Her “after” doesn’t really have the heart “to differentiate” between before and after. In fact, it “dreads the heart / to differentiate” (19-20). Despite dreading it, the speaker differentiates “a once lover’s glance” (21) from “to seize upon / other scared bodies / a long line of ‘I had no idea’” (22-24). “Once” indicates no more and relegates the glance to the past. In contrast, the infinitive “to seize” emphasizes the ongoing potential for this action, without a sense of past, present, or future. Literally “a long line” in the poem, this line underscores its meaning with visual ongoingness.

This “long line” undoes the differentiation and opposes the dividing line the speaker may or may not have drawn in time. The “long line” of bodies the speaker’s glance seizes might be her own. Remember, this speaker has always been plural. Instead of her lover’s glance, the speaker seizes on herself, as on “her picture” (1), the image of her own recalled body. That each body “had no idea” opposes the re-cited self (24). In fact, “her picture” is not only without words but has “no ghost of words” (1-2). This is a vision of the self that recognizes its necessary incoherence. Salah wrote about the self’s plurality with two other scholars in the introduction to a special issue of the scholarly journal Transgender Studies Quarterly. In this introduction, they observe “the democratic plurality of bodies and genders” and “the potentially endless proliferation of imagination, accommodation, and desire that exists in ongoing intimacy with the body’s concrete material forms” (474). Gender transition highlights plurality and proliferation rather than condensed afters standing in for a re-cited stable whole. The word “transition” does not draw a line between before and after but connects them. What a wonderful concept for living.

Yet to read this poem as a celebration of life not shut off within certain lines is to read for its implications on a social register. The poem takes place on a personal register, where its implications are much more ambivalent. “Seize” is not a gentle verb, and it is so difficult not to read “scared bodies” as “scarred bodies,” a slip that makes fear permanent. While the speaker works against the line drawn between before and after, she watches proliferate “a long line of ‘I had no idea.’” There is pain in not knowing, and that’s where this poem ends.

Note to Readers

I appear here as a reader of these poems offering models of response, aiming to open up possibilities for other readers. I’ve connected with the poets, and I’d now love to connect with other readers. How do you respond to these poems? Do you have questions or comments about my readings? Or about this project? Please get in touch with me at deicticpress@gmail.com.

Works Cited

Carter, Julian B., David J. Getsy, and Trish Salah. “Introduction.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, 2014, pp. 469–481, DOI 10.1215/23289252-2815183.

“Recitation.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford UP, 2020.

Trish Salah lives and writes in Toronto and is associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston. She has published two poetry books, Wanting in Arabic, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She has also co-edited a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 on Trans Cultural Production.

Dale Tracy, a contract faculty member, is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017) and the chapbooks Celebration Machine (Proper Tales, 2018) and The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground, 2020). She received an honourable mention in Kalamalka Press’s 2019 John Lent chapbook award contest.