Guppy-lips suck air.

[Image source: https://www.poemsearcher.com/topic/self+made .]

Florence Elon: Self-Made (1984)

This was Florence Elon’s first book of poems. I like to think of her receiving a complimentary copy from the publisher and putting it on her bookshelf. For her the title would shine out with a special naïve meaning, like those books you can get made for your children with their names inserted in the text and called My Own Story Book.

Less privately, the title refers to her experience as a second-generation emigrant to the USA, where human beings are free and make their own destiny. Many of the poems refer to this.

To many, the primary meaning of the title is something else. This author conceives her book as poems about a topic; as if her medium is a way of being a raconteur. It places her quite clearly on the traditional half of the divide that is supposed to run through American (and British) poetry. Various names have been given to the halves; I like Ron Silliman’s use of Poe’s “School of Quietude” to characterize the traditional half (Wilbur, Lowell, etc). (Silliman's Blog, by the way, contains what is incomparably the best regular commentary on modern English poetry that I have found on the web – go there rather than here if you haven’t discovered it already...)

The existence of this great divide is much attacked, virtually always by those whose own poetry tends towards pure SoQ --  for we all play this incessant and ridiculous game of oneupmanship and experience intense discomfort at the thought of being discovered in a conservative seat -- I say “we all”, but I suppose I mean, primarily, minor and insecure poets and academics who seek approval from their peers.

Still, the existence of the divide is undeniable. Only a very unworldly poet is unaware of it (though some SoQ poets affect to regard modern innovative poetry as of no great significance and haphazardly co-opt older modernists and post-modernists into a satisfyingly single great tradition). But it is not necessary to get embroiled in judgments about history. It is a present fact that there are two major audiences for different poetries with scarcely any crossover, and hence two major artforms that both call themselves poetry. (But then “poetry” has always been a blanket term that embraces a multiplicity of endeavours.)    

But enough of the intoxication of big ideas.

You think you know where you are with the poems in Self-Made. The poems are frankly about  relationships, sick-rooms, her children, her parents, death and being in foreign places – the absolutely standard fare of around a million American and British poets, some few of them published. I have read some of these poems many times and seen nothing but the standard fare. Then one day I notice something else.

In the New World

My mother in her Old World pose

sails through a shop on Third Avenue

like a steam liner, leaving froths

of lace, long white scarves in her wake.

She dons fur caps, high boarskin boots,

brocaded gowns of her Moscow youth;

like crystal, turning, decades flash

in velvet-curtained booths.

Once from her closet rack, I stole

a sequined shawl, black sash.

She laughed – to find me rouged

and stumbling in her spike-heeled shoes.

Now each, in turn, holds up a chipped

hand mirror for the other’s use.

She tucks in strands of grey.

We pick out matching pins.

It began with the rhythm and the hint of rhymes. I saw that the poem hinted at an Ur-poem which is in iambic tetrameter and whose stanzas rhyme abab. (I am using “iambic” in the incorrect but time-hallowed and useful way to refer to an accentual pattern in English verse.) The actual poem begins each stanza with an iambic tetrameter but breaks away from it, though sometimes half-returning; it creates lines that aren’t quite accepted by the ear, but are heard as unmetrical or nearly metrical. You might relate the Ur-poem to the fancied norm of behaviour referred to in the opening words: My mother in her Old World pose / Sails.... You might relate the rhythms of the actual poem to a daughter’s erratic copying: And stumbling in her spike-heeled shoes (a line that itself is formally an iambic tetrameter, but so congested with double consonants and long syllables that it struggles along).

As for the rhymes, they are displaced across stanzas (flash, sash) and dispersed into smaller units of sound (Avenue, froths, boots, youth, booths, rouged,  shoes, use). The last two lines make a quiet comment by their form alone, still resolutely end-stopped but presenting new, unrhyming, sounds to the ear  – and being trimeters with a coldly duplicated rhythm, so the tetrameter music is in the end closed out completely. 

What each stanza actually segregates is not a pattern of rhythm or rhyme but a locale: the aisles of the shop (Stanza 1), the booths for changing (2), Mother’s closet (3), a hospital ward (4). All of the locales are wintry, but take place at different times. The poem is concerned with long spans of time, in fact with an attempt to encompass the essence of two lives.

All the stanzas have complexities. The first exposes opulence and serene energy, and coming straight after the title may be taken as telling us that the New World is opulent and serenely energetic. Here the tetrameter is elongated luxuriantly in the second and fourth lines. The New World, it seems, is the Old World plus. (“steam liner” hints too at the visible breath of winter.)

The second stanza is giddier – even sickly giddy. When I listed the locales I implied that this stanza, too, takes place in the shop on Third Avenue, but a vein of suggestion works against this. “She dons” does not usually mean “She tries on” – the word is more likely to be used about one’s own clothes. Similarly “of her Moscow youth” can be accepted, just about, as meaning “like those she once wore in her Moscow youth” but the semantic discomfort is perceptible. The last two lines can be “read off” in several different ways, like the crystal itself (a discotheque mirror-ball, a crystal, a crystal ball in a fortune-teller’s booth). Are visions of decades being flashed back to them in a changing-room, or are they flashing past?

The third stanza can be read straightforwardly as a charming and familiar domestic scene, and indeed that meaning should not be neglected. This daughter, I think, adoringly emulated her mother’s style. But “stole” could be a hard-nosed little rebellion and “laughed” could be an unkind comment on its ridiculous failure. There is certainly a recalcitrance in the things themselves (the dropping of “and” in the second line suggests a dot-dot-dot...  the frustration of inconsequent clothes grabbed from a rack).    

But all the first three stanzas persist in opulence, though its satisfactions are increasingly qualified. The last stanza presents a diminution both of possessions and of physical movement. The two women are doing their hair with severe practicality, no fantasy. Is this, then, what being “in the New World” means – merely being what we routinely are? There is a tenderness, but a chilled tenderness, in the scene. It says “enough” and “not much” at the same time.  

“In the New World” uses irregular rhythms against a discerned counterpoint. “Visiting Hours” (the poem about her father that precedes it) uses an insistently regular rhythm based on two iambic feet. The rhythm at first suggests a buoyant sense of purpose. The poem begins:

These daughters that you used to dress,

whose skinny legs you pushed to run

on Orchard Street

Then the rhythm loses that meaning. It runs on, but becomes detached from the father’s questioning watchfulness in the ward:

Their hands wear polished, sharpened nails.

By the end of the poem the rhythm robotically fails to react to the changed material:

                              those mumbled prayers

they can no longer say, their mouths

whose wails you used to kiss away

have now forgotten how to speak.

The rhythm now has a different and crueller meaning, hurrying to a destination with a momentum that is indifferent to human purpose. 

In the following poem, too, rhythm remains important. It provides a means of falling silent.

From now on

Covered with sticky white –

ointment or fresh paint –

you are placed by my side

out of nowhere:

eyelids, fluttering,

can’t stay open;

breath puffs, twice

as fast as my own;

skin’s glued to mine.

Guppy-lips

suck air.

Out of the silence

your tiny voice begins

its unending sing-song.

Every time I read this poem its slowing-down to zero, to the barest minimal line of “suck air”, is more captivating.The silence then is a perfect stillness in which the mother and the tiny baby lie, for how long we can’t say, in a prelapsarian union that, perhaps, is maintained only by trance, by oblivion. Not often does one lie so close to someone whose features are totally unfamiliar. At this moment it is almost as if the birth hasn’t yet happened, as if the long embrace of pregnancy continues in its intimate silence. (For the doubled rhythm of the baby’s breathing still fits neatly within the mother’s breathing.) They are companions, for all that the sense of the poem includes the mother’s observation, its detachment which at another time could be amusement.

The final stanza enacts an effort, one of whose meanings is reluctance. Life begins again, positively charged with the child’s miraculous “sing-song”, and reflecting the mother’s adjustment to her baby’s stubborn differentness, which includes being a different person and being a baby, not an adult.

*

A leftover waif of a post, written in 2003. Florence Elon published several more books in the 1980s and in 2019 a poem of hers appeared in the magazine of Poetry Express Berkeley, but there's not a great deal of information about her on the internet. Her husband Alex Zwerdling, Professor of English at UC Berkeley, died in 1917.

When I first wrote this piece, it gave rise to a much longer Appendix (on the use of First Person Present Tense in modern poetry) that I later posted on Intercapillary Space:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/first-person-present-tense.html

*

[It was, of course, the Silliman's Blog of that now-distant heyday that I was enthusing about. Silliman's Blog has been in slowly deepening twilight for ten or twelve years. If you visit it now, first impressions are that there there's nothing much to see. Not a single post from 2020, for instance; the most recent is a passing reflection on the Democratic party race as it seemed last December. But use the search box, (type in Leslie Scalapino, say) and suddenly the big box flies open, revealing page after page of vast, fertile and seemingly effortless poem talk. The comments stream, I think, has been removed;  in the glory days it had been very vigorous.  Ron's posts were highly contestable, he had a gift for generating debate. But some commenters  merely wrested his blog to their own needs and others pretty much trashed it. (Of course you didn't have to read the comments, but somehow you often did.) Eventually, if I remember correctly, Ron had had enough, he stopped allowing comments. But by then he was fast losing his enthusiasm for blogging, he was perhaps too sensitive to the form's democratic contradictions, its vexatious authority. Silliman's Blog had been a Utopian experiment, like the Language projects he remembered and introduced to a new generation.] 

*

Reading the British poet Carol Watts last week led me to an account of her American influences . There are many signposts you could follow there. The one I chose was this:

Substantially, however, the most important writing to me has been that by Alice Notley and Leslie Scalapino, for the integrity of their encounter with language, two forms of being uncompromising. I hear the stakes of writing there.

I wasn't totally unacquainted with Alice Notley's work -- once I even blundered out a post about it  -- but Leslie Scalapino (1944-2010) has, unforgivably, been just a name to me. Anyway, I've been excitedly discovering her writing over the past week-end. It feels like a big discovery, and a week-end is not nearly enough to think of framing any words about it  -- and in this case that might be particularly counter-productive, see the quote by Emily Critchley below! -- , but I might as well start gathering some links here. (She went to school in Berkeley, so there's a vaguely unifying geography to this drifting post...)

Disbelief.  A long "performance work/talk/essay" first published in 2008. It seems a great introduction to her writing and its concerns, and also to the preoccupations of the Language poets (West Coast chapter).

http://jacketmagazine.com/40/scalapino-essay.shtml

[Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1225374.that_they_were_at_the_beach .]

One of the books that Disbelief discusses in detail, an early one, is that they were at the beach (1985). Happily a good deal of this is available to read online. It has four sections:

1. "buildings are at the far end"

Excerpt:

https://www.obookspoetry.org/portfolio/that-they-were-at-the-beach/

2.  "that they were at the beach -- aeolotropic series"

Excerpt:

https://poets.org/poem/they-were-beach-excerpt

3. "A Sequence"

https://poets.org/poem/sequence

4. "Chameleon Series"


From a later collection, New Time (1999):


from the waist–so that, turned the bulb that's oneself (thorax)
–only–then–doesn't have any existence–turned (wherever one
turns)
    as conception–at waist of magnolia buds that exist in the day
really
    sewing the black silk irises–not when one turned at waist
    sewing them, they have no shape literally except being that–
from one's hand (being, in the air)
    the irises only had existence in the black, before dawn, in fact
    a man doesn't want me to become quiet again–go into ocean
not weighed of before fighting–ever

    formation of that of narrowed to no form in one–of black volup-
tuous lip–outside–voluptuous lips that (aren't) on black dawn, or
before it when it's black.
    There was no intention–being done–with their existing.

    not weighed before fighting which is the black, weighed, air–
not the lips which have no weight–isn't following
    if one's not contending...so the inner isn't contending either...?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49997/from-the-waist-so-that-turned-the-bulb-thats-oneself-thorax
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50008/walking-person-who-has-sky-flowing-by-one-who-beside-is-as-if

Emily Critchley on Leslie Scalapino's alternative ways of seeing:
https://studylib.net/doc/6662006/emily-critchley---lesliescalapinotribute

Scalapino herself has frequently resisted critical exegesis – by  the  current  writer  and  others –complaining  that  a  reordering  of  her work precisely undoes the work’s intentions, re-instating that which she is attempting to challenge: ‘Restatement adjusting perspective [...] to an ordered sense is psychic imperialism’

Despite this,  EC avoided resorting, as other sympathetic commentators have done, to a form of LS's own disjunctive syntax, and her essay is enlightening about the Buddhist background of LS's anti-hierarchical thought.