Another writer
whose poetry appears in
Tabios’ prose poem “Helen”
consists of twelve single-sentence paragraphs, although one of the paragraphs
resorts to a favorite device of mine – the em dash – to create the typographic
impression of being a single unit. The poem at heart is a dramatic monolog,
although one written with such discipline that you can read it, as I did more
than once, with total interest & pleasure without even thinking in terms of
the theater of a projected persona.
Part of what makes the text
work is that it has a killer first sentence:
Part of mortality’s
significance is that wars end.
That’s one of those lines
you can mull over for days, knowing you’ll never exhaust it. The lines that
follow for the most part likewise stand on their own.
Moreover, there is enough conceptual distance between them that the reader, in
order to render it into a dramatic monolog, has serious work to do. The line /
sentence / paragraph, for example, that follows the one above, reads:
Yesterday, I determined to stop
watering down my perfumes.
The third paragraph connects
with the second principally by referring to the first person:
Insomnia consistently leads me
to a window overlooking silvery green foliage – tanacetum argenteum – whose species include the
tansy which Ganymede drank to achieve immortality.
If the first thing that
“holds” this text “together” is the two references to the first person, the
second is the binary mortality/immortality,
although they are not presented as though we were discussing a paradigm at all.
Third, the title “Helen” & the reference here to Ganymede, classic
ideals of heterosexual &
homosexual beauty, project a similar semantic field. Yet at this
moment in the text, none of these connections are intrinsic or necessary, but
rather are accumulating through what may appear to be incidental details.
There is a care &
specificity here that is fascinating to watch, for example the choice of the
Latin name, tanacetum
argenteum, a European plant. The reason
Ganymede – a.k.a Aquarius – might have been given a
tansy is that, as a plant that grows in dry soil, it could retain water in an otherwise
parched climate. Tabios takes considerable care with her diction – there is an
ever so slightly elevated solemnity to words such as determined & consistently
being deployed precisely as they are here. As a textural, as well as
textual, strategy, it’s close to the prosodic restraint that another author of
a poem entitled “Helen,” Hilda
Doolittle, used to employ.
Just as Tabios has already set
up one schema (insomnia) as a
metaphor for another (immortality)
that may at first seem rather at odds with it, this poem will be constructed
around details that operate counter-intuitively on multiple levels, even as it
will turn out in the final moments to be “about” nourishment – that tansy is
not incidental. Against the discursive formality, however, the reader is
presented with language that operates at different extremes, from the bathetic
– But to be human is to be forgiven –
to over-the-top depiction:
Soon, summer shall bring a
snowfall of daisies across these leaves whose mottles under a brightening
moonlight begin to twinkle like a saddhu’s eyes.
Summer always makes me think
of snowfalls too.
Reading the poem over, as I
have now a dozen times, my sense is that Tabios wanted to structure a narrative
with an extraordinary degree of tension – it is as though she wanted to see
just how far she could pull it apart without having the sense of its unity
dissolve, to approach without crossing some intuitive breaking point. That’s
not unlike the strategy in Zen gardening of pulling one stone out of place in
order to create a “circle” with far more cognitive power than it could have
were it, in fact, perfectly round. Thus, in the third sentence of “Helen”
quoted above, the tansy is silvery green.
This gives it a dynamic it could never have if it were merely silver or
green alone.
Narration at the limits of
cohesion is an especially challenging project. I remember once trying to read a
novel in which every single scene was constructed by focusing initially on some
detail – a lampshade, a wall socket, a crack in a
windowpane – entirely extraneous to the narrative “action.” But it was in
translation & you could tell that the translator really didn’t grasp what
the writer was doing, so the process felt like trying to focus through a film
of molasses & I gave up. Faulkner much more successfully does something
similar in the Benjamin chapters of The
Sound and the Fury, presenting “the story” in part (but only in part) from
the p.o.v. of a developmentally disabled member of the family, incapable of
comprehending the significance of anything. Unlike Faulkner, I don’t think that
Tabios grounds what she does in “Helen” in psychology, which literally is why
it’s poetry & not, say, fiction. Like Faulkner, though, she’s obsessed with
surface & texture – they are what a reader experiences directly when confronting a text.
I like writers who take
risks – taking responsibility for the whole of the text is for me the primary
test of a poem. Tabios tries for more in one page than many other poets would
attempt in 20. And she pulls it off.
