on Poems Not Written / Virginia Konchan
When I think about the poem or poems I have not written, I think first of three things: the opening line of Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” (“I, too, dislike it”); Arthur Rimbaud and other poets’ renunciations (at age 20, after completing his Illuminations, Rimbaud fled to Java, Cyprus, Yemen, then Ethiopia, to work in various commercial trades from coffee to firearms, before dying at 37 of bone cancer in Marseille); and lastly, of Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue,” published in 1948 and considered one of the greatest post-war lyrics for its masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp.
The poems I have not written are born out of this space, or non-space: the unwillingness to participate in an originally musical form of language that has been reduced to ornament or decoration in the face of widespread tragedy; the desire to abandon said vocation for more seemingly-honest labors; and the utter despair and senselessness Celan describes with his reference to “black milk” in “Death Fugue,” to describe what happens when the unthinkable comes to pass.
The poems I have not written, however, engage not only with Celan’s “black milk” (which I imagine as the ash of a living writing or people, incinerated), but also with French literary theorist Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine (or “white ink”), a form of female writing that is by its nature transgressive, rule-transcending, and intoxicated, for its expression of jouissance: a form of women’s pleasure or sexual rapture altogether mental, physical, and spiritual, bordering on mystical communion: “explosion, diffusion, effervescence, and abundance … takes pleasure (jouit) in being limitless,” says Cixous. By this I mean, the poems I have not written are also the poems that I have internalized a formal stricture against, to forbid or delimit their material embodiment of pleasure or joy. I take seriously the quote by Theodor Adorno “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” so I am constantly moving between these pulls of various modes, affects, and influences (silence; merely marking time or space with a kind of post-traumatic death rattle of language; and the spiritual imperative to sing, whether for one’s supper or in Niezschean celebration), while recognizing that traditional lyric forms are ill-fit to approach any kind of commensurability post-Auschwitz (or, one might argue, another contemporary horror, such as 9/11, the Vietnam War Mỹ Lai Massacre, or Trumptopia).
When poetic language is reduced to redaction, erasure, rhetoric, or reportage, then jouissance — an ineffable engagement with the other, or self —is lost for me, along with the sensuous nature of words as sound-objects and concepts (Saussure’s definition of a “sign”) and I no longer want to write poems, or write at all. Thus, the poems I have not written come from a deep fatigue or suspicion in the poetic endeavor, and the poetic, speaking body as reduced or annihilated to dust or ash. I have written several epithalamia, and recently, I wanted to write another love poem: an epistle. But only nails came out of my mouth: depictions of violence and sacrilege done to the beloved. I tried instead to write about nature, the evidence of life’s cyclical renewal, a lieder song of resurrection: that, too, failed. This poem of love, of celebration, of justice restored to the outrages and sufferings of the 20th and 21st centuries and the ensuing historical amnesia, is the poem I cannot write, or did not write.
But I would like to. I would like to write it in black milk, white ink, and blood. I would like to dedicate to those who labor tirelessly without vision or hope, those who have died alone or in the face of tyranny, and to my mother and all who persist in giving, serving, and loving, despite, or rather against, all odds. And I would like it to end with at least a fraction of the haunting beauty with which Celan ends “Death Fugue,” in witness to the “gang-boss” of Death:
your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite
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“Poems Not Written” is a recurring feature On The Seawall. Perhaps there are as many reason for not writing a poem as there are unwritten poems, though this project was inspired by a sentence in Louise Bogan’s 1923 essay “The Springs of Poetry”: “The poem is always a last resort” — as well as by Photographs Not Taken: A Collection of Photographers’ Essays, edited by Will Steacy (2012).
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