Word Worn

 

even your doggerel-scratch
has a beat to it

and the heart condenses into rain
if I take the time to listen

in the firmament a fake
come-hither solitude

still takes my breath away
or is it just another star advancing

as atoms thrown
into a dervish spin closer

stretch out an index
to an indifferent twinkle

 

the first line writes the poem
but you can’t get it back

here and there signals sent
one digit to the next

in time life gives in
to affirmations

family outings birthdays bent
round the clock

but the sky doesn’t stare back
the town is not tucked inside the valley

nor do hills roll except in words
these luminous beacons of indiscretion

 

Of the four poets included in my test of poetry one week ago, Charles Borkhuis has been active the longest & in perhaps the most diverse set of roles. His first book, Hypnogogic Sonnets, came out 12 years ago, his first play was initially published 22 years ago, he himself has been in New York since the 1970s & has been part of the rotating team of curators for the reading series that started at the Ear Inn, moved to the Double Happiness & now is at the Bowery Poetry Club every Saturday afternoon for at least a decade. His work appeared in both volumes of the famous O•blēk Writing from the New Coast anthology, and more recently he’s had poetics pieces in both Telling it Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics from the 1990s & We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics.

 

In short, the man has street cred as well as a résumé that is as deep as any poet in his age cohort. “Word Worn” strikes me as a pretty fair example of Borkhuis’ work – the elegant & confident handling of the stanza, the wry humor, the surface residue of a deep reading in surrealism, the perception that’s so right on it makes you rethink something you thought you’ve known all your life (“the first line writes the poem / but you can’t get it back”). Yet of four poets I included, nobody was more thoroughly misidentified – even malidentified – than Borkhuis. Readers who responded seemed to think that “Word Worn” was written by a woman – a “hot” one at that, according to one email I got – or by me. Hey – I have my feminine side too. Jonathan Mayhew, having gotten both of the first two poets right, speculated that the poem “isn’t dissimilar to Rae Armantrout or Pam Rehm, or Norma Cole,” three writers who are completely different from one another.

 

There is a tradition in American poetry that doesn’t get cited as such that much, largely because so many of its practitioners prefer to work outside of clusters or scenes, and because they themselves are a most diverse aggregation of poets, that arises from the confrontation of various tributaries of the New American poetics of half a century ago with surrealism. It’s the Ed Dorn of ‘Slinger, the visual dazzle you find in Jerry Estrin’s work or that of Daniel Davidson, it’s never that far from home for many of the contributors of Exquisite Corpse. It’s a focus or anti-movement or what have you with its own history of lost masters – the poetry of the late Jim Gustafson, for example. It could be seen in the writing that emerged out of Chicago around the Yellow Press in the 1970s (and which was quite different from Franklin Rosemont’s doctrinaire & tedious implementation of surrealist techniques). And you could find aspects or hints of it in everything from some of the Actualist poets to the early writing of Barrett Watten. But as this list should serve to suggest, it wasn’t exactly a femme phenomenon. Indeed, the closest instance I can imagine of a woman’s writing to add to this roster is the long-out-of-print work of Victoria Rathbun, part of the Actualist scene.

 

There is a historical relationship between surrealism & langpo that’s worth exploring, tho I’m not at all certain Charles Borkhuis is the best point of entry for the discussion – better to triangulate Estrin & Davidson (both of whom saw themselves as critics of langpo rather than practitioners) with Watten & Tom Mandel, and then branch out from there. My sense of Borkhuis is that he comes to that debate somewhat after the horse has left the barn, and that, so to mix metaphors, he has different fish to fry.

 

I picked this poem because my favorite couplet here (the aforementioned “the first line…) throws you back to the beginning right when you’re in the middle & heightens your awareness of what a deliberately minor note Borkhuis has chosen to start with & how effortlessly those first two stanzas in particular operate – the second one in particular is a masterwork of economy. That central seventh couplet also sets up the next to last – the movement after the seventh is consciously flatter right up to that moment when Borkhuis throws out the second “back” & brings it all in for the finish. That reiterated “back” pulls the poem to a halt, setting up the discrete focus on the next line. It then appears as if this will be the first of a series of almost parallel constructions cast around not & nor, only to have the end of the first line in the last stanza slide elsewhere, the poem closing with the flourish of a dependent clause.

 

A major factor in how different readers might respond to this poem, I think, has to do with their reaction to some of the devices Borkhuis’ inherits from surrealism, especially its love of adjectives. The gaudy redundancy built into luminous beacons – as distinct from the other kind, I suppose – exists in order to create the contrast with the quietness of indiscretion, the poem ending on a note as muted as the one on which it began. As they say in the software industry, that over-the-top element is a feature, not a bug, of this writing.

 

Borkhuis strikes me as a poet who works in stanzas as least as much as he does in lines & several of these – the second stanza, for example – are just breathtakingly well done. Borkhuis runs the risk, both here & elsewhere in Savoir-FEAR, that individual stanzas will be, literally, too fabulous, distracting from the poem as a whole. But I sense here, as I have in Borkhuis’ earlier books, that risk is something he values, maybe even seeks, in the poem, the way that long cosmic chain in the first half of “Word Worn” – firmament to star to atoms to twinkle – will exhaust the reader right at that last word, before the couplet that actually announces the closest thing this work has to a topic. Just to reinforce the point, Borkhuis reproduces this same sleight-of-hand all over again in the poem’s latter stanzas – the luminous beacons of indiscretion are an exact parallel to the earlier twinkle.

 

One aspect of the New American poetry Borkhuis has taken on is the desire to create a poem that is this carefully crafted & give it very much the unfinished air of something “just jotted down” – no capital first letter, not terminal punctuation, a tone that harkens to speech. This is sort of the literary equivalent of prewashed jeans & the aesthetic behind them is not dissimilar. What separates Borkhuis out from a lot of writers whose work I see online or in little mags, poets that treat that casualness as literal, is that Borkhuis knows the difference.