In one of his essays, William Meredith observed, “What we learn from poetry is not so much the nature of experience as the force of it.” This assertion never fails to refresh my approach to the art and enhance my receptivity. Perhaps when we focus on the portrayed nature of experience, we tend to valorize the backstory. But the force embodied in a poem is bilateral: force, exerted on the poet by the world, transferred into force emitted by the poem on the world. I’m most stimulated when a poem seems to embody the transfer as it is happening and is obsessed with finding the shape and sound of that exchange.
Lee Upton writes in an essay, “An obsession remains an obsession because of intuitions that lead us to attempt to find language for what is already escaping us, for mysteries that retain their mysteriousness, for inchoate cravings that aren’t fulfilled.” The force is escaping – this accounts for the urgency. The poem embodies both the impact and the fading, both the certainty that something critical is occurring and the uncertainty of grasping it. The unmeasurable force compels the poet to take measures.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Seeing The Body, her fifth collection, begins with the event from which the book’s force emanates, the death of her mother. These are the opening lines of the title poem:
She died & I –
In the spring of her blood, I remember
my mother’s first injury. Surprise of unborn
petals curling red, then dark around her wrist.
Some fruit she cut, some onion, some
body with skin & sharp seeds. She fed me.
She lived Us & I –
She held We & I –
She kept speaking with those flowers
falling from her blood, taking her
across the sky to death …
This is a poetry that pivots between utterance and narrative, memory and envisioning. Some of the poems are unflinchingly personal, invoking recent impressions, still raw and attaining form. Some of the poems sound out a mythic, oracular address. The combined effect is one of unabashed exertion that skirts the effortful, a relentless recursion to the quaking event, the decline and death and finally the drive to persist through unseeing forces that bear down on the bodies of black women in America, mothers and daughters. The force of experience generates vectors of expression in several directions. Griffiths knows this is a complex performance, a reinvention of elegy – and so she orients us with a poem of blunt observation that tracks the wrack of pain from its source to its offspring:
Volume
On guard my mother studied her
ankles & hands all the time. Any swelling
set off alarms. Everything in our home
bolted to wet silence. Our family
could be capsized should the fluid
breach her heart. More than once
it did. Surrounded her heart
with gold liquid. Attacked her
heart with its rising flood.
I hated the smell & arrogance
of it. The way pain misshaped
my mother’s lovely muscles.
I never understood how
the body made so much of it.
She would pull fluid off her body.
Concerned for the kidney
she had received from a murdered child.
Worried that the fluid would pull her
under the hull of her own organs.
Liters & milliliters placed us
on the brink. For years after she died
I lived along a gold, raw edge
of Maybe or Maybe Not. I kept asking:
Could I have ever saved her?
I only mean that some days I was certain
there was nothing left after she died
that could fill the hollows in me. I wanted to
know how I could drown my Ishmael
of memory. Lift my life out of my mother’s
mute grave. Nothing to surround my heart,
which turned & kicked like something
orphaned in its cradle. Red-veined rage
burning itself blue with screaming.
I was so sick last January my doctors
ordered iron, multiple blood transfusions.
My blood was bad, giving up its blue air.
Yet I refused new blood. Having sacrificed
my blood to my mother’s absence,
I could barely stand to give myself
the anchor of blood that might pull me
above the waves, those years I drifted
like an empty bottle under the tide.
When William Meredith made his point about encountering the force of experience through poetry, he also said that the lyric poet makes “discoveries about certain verbal effects – sounds and ideas and feelings which exist once only,” and that these effects are often what the poem is actually about. That may seem blasphemous to some, this notion that the life depicted is secondary to the sound it makes or the poem as art object, especially when that life demands to be recognized as mattering. But I am imagining that for Griffiths, sound is matter. When she says “I am some breed of music / singeing the wires,” I take it literally. These lines appear in “Who By Fire,” a poem addressed to Leonard Cohen. She continues:
A flame returning
the anguish of a stranger who, by need,
holds my attention in the mirror.
Leonard, isn’t language a lonely slip?
Or is it a drug so distinct it tames
our tongues with faith, so that God’s
voice won’t fall apart in a mutter? …
Some might describe Griffiths’ diction as “elevated.” I find it elemental. She repeats the word “blood” over and over rather than wandering off in search of synonyms. Her hands turn up the dials of pitch and volume, not tone and its subtleties. A poem of outrage like “Good America, Good Acts” (“Yes, / America, you’ve done just about enough”) is sonically akin to “Another Age: Last Dance of Suicide” (“This is the last day you will ever see me want to die”). “In “Chronology,” she describes her mother as “a pure being of / blood, promise, trouble.” Then a bit later:
Our wounds took the form of night.
Our fears rocked like white, tearful waves against the last ships.
Our mothers rolled like shells under the raging sea.
Which means, by what I must write in blood –
my naked hand labored through the bruised dark to speak.
These tropes make no effort to come off as “original.” In fact, they seem ancient, archetypal. This isn’t a poetry of personality, wit, or irony – rather it is poised, myth-made, hieratic. The surface is radiant but also opaque: it protects. These are the opening lines from “Name,” again, returning to the core substances of these poems:
In the brilliant beginning, I waited.
In the hot wake I watched how the word of her
rolled across the horizon as it was pulled
under the body that died. I was awake
all night after she died. Awake, terrible universe,
awake inside of my blood I could hear it,
the end of the daughter who could bleed
for no good reason …
And most of all, the delivery is eloquent. Denis Donoghue has said, “Eloquence does not represent the real, it replaces it with its own voice … It is the charisma of speech, claiming to transcend the properties of law, custom, and reference: an inspired grace, a favor, like the gift of tongues.” The voice replaces its circumstances with itself — and becomes the body we are forced to recognize. The boldness of Griffiths’ presence at times may lead one to forget how much terror and how many “properties of law, custom, and reference” are being transcended. But she will remind you. In her work, the conventional aspect of “voice” gives way to turbulent but eloquent expression, the repurposing of the familiar, and declamation. Her tropes echo devotional literature, serving the desirous impulse to affirm, assert, scold, adore, and exalt.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t scant her uncertainties. In “Name”:
Sunlight & moonlight burn our brutal manners
of empathy. Beyond the song we hoped would go on
because we needed it for ourselves. Eternity has nothing
to do with us. Our seizures of imagination provide us
with language, civilization. Introductions of the super ego.
The condition of grief is an empty storefront. The paper of the map
but not the map itself, not the wishful drawings that promise
that we will neither be lost nor discovered …
There are inventions, too, such as the conjuring of mythic characters, as in “Arch of Hysteria, Or, the Spider-Mother Becomes a Woman,” wherein “Our sex / clings to the map of the web, the sperm set / upon gossamer threads until we are prepared. / We, who do not touch but only open, we, / whose children don’t remember what it took / for us to free ourselves.”
In “My Rapes,” the dilemma of language becomes the story. The lines below, from mid-poem:
This is for the women who were my teachers who told me
to be safe & leave my rapes out of my poems,
who said, “I think I always knew this about you” or
“Now I understand why you’re so difficult” or
“You seem more real to me since your mother died.”
Once I remember my mother, yes, asking why
I listened to white girl shit. How could alternative music
hear a black cry like mine? So I searched the standards
where a sad black girl could sing her story from her bones
without her own family closing the doors of their eyes.
The lens of “seeing the body” widens to include “Whipping Tree” and the black bodies roped there: “In the tree, I see which way the master / snapped his wrist, turned directions, changing / his mind when the body didn’t scream loud / enough, when the eyes of the slave refused / to look away from the master she once nursed.” Then, in “Myth”: “Seven days after my mother died / America aimed her myth / at Mike Brown. / Her grave was still new / when I went back to be sure / she was really there. I whispered / his name against the barrel of August / that shot through the blue clouds.”
Griffiths incorporates 18 photographic black-&-white self-portraits with the text, many showing the body in positions of extremity, isolation, or expressive gesture. She describes them as “woman as body, geography, and imagination, woman as a self, as a resistance, that is ever tense in the progression of frames, woman in the perpetuity of language, and woman in the sanctity of intuition.” I regard the spoken gestures of Seeing The Body as designed to make the same impression – a determined progression into embodiment. I don’t mean to diminish the power of the images; the photos are variously moving, evocative, and beautifully wrought. But in my world, a gaze can be averted — while my ears, my hearing, cannot. When a train roars by, you can shut your eyes, but the sound will shake you. Sound is an index of what I absorb and ultimately acknowledge.
In his essay “Writing Like a White Guy,” Jaswinder Bolina says that “it’s because of the historical convergence of race and class in the U.S. that we associate the language of the educated, ruling classes with a particular racial identity. To decouple the two … is to realize that what’s being described isn’t the language of whiteness so much as the language of privilege – the privilege, in this case, of not needing to consider what others are forced to consider …” Again, the force, what others are forced to consider. Thus the force of Seeing The Body in response, a much more generous force than its antagonist – and one that conditions the reader through unique sound to reconsider how to listen.
While drafting this review, I happened to notice a blurb on a forthcoming book of poems that reads: “X navigates between those most suspicious extremes, despair and ecstacy, without ever seeming to be dependent on extremes.” But the intolerance for — and a bias against — overtly demonstrative expression (which is not the same sound as “stridency”) are themselves both extreme and narrow reactions. Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Cecil Taylor appear in Griffiths’ poems – but also Anne Sexton, who made “suspicious extremes” her métier and whose work was often critically dismissed while obliquity, the connoisseurship of tone, and the cerebral “I” took over in the decades following her death in 1974. But when rupture, churn, upheaval, shock and death choke off one’s breath, recovery may retaliate with its own vigorous and commanding sound – which, for all its externality, also vigilantly protects the private life.
“For years I photographed myself / in a white dress. Terrified by my belief / that I might be a ghost,” she writes in “Husband.” When she refers to “my estranged affair with the present,” I catch a glimpse of that interiority – and avert my gaze from the page out of discretion. While the sound resonates.
[Published by W.W. Norton on June 9, 2020, $26.95 hardcover, 137 pages]
