I ended up sitting
front and centre on a folding chair at the Vancouver launch for Elise Partridge’s new
and last collection, The Exiles’
Gallery, to a packed house on Thursday evening, March 21, at the Cottage
Bistro (formerly the Rhizome Café, near the
intersection of Kingsway and Broadway). Many writers – connected to or mentored
by Elise – as well as members of the English Department at UBC, where she
studied and where her husband Steve teaches, turned out, along with fans of her
poetry and other community members, to hear a dozen of (mostly) her fellow
poets read a poem or two each from the new book and to celebrate her work.
Christopher Patton, Rob Taylor, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Rhea Tregebov, Gillian
Jerome, George McWhirter, Jordan Abel, Elee Kraalji Gardiner, Caroline Adderson
(reading both for herself and for Aislinn Hunter), Barbara Nickel, Elizabeth
Bachinsky and Miranda Pearson each chose poems that connected in some way to
their relationships with Elise, both personal and poetic. There were a few
moments when readers found themselves buffaloed by stifling tears, but most of
the texts – while caught up in the pervasively elegiac tug of her poems – drew not toward lament but instead toward the celebration of the particulate textures of both language and
experience in which her writing characteristically engages, her finely-attuned
pursuit of “one-liners, testaments, inventories, chants, condolences,” aspiring
to “see just so much,” both whelming and delicate, risking the fiercely
precious, a sharply-faceted and vatic immediacy (see “Waltzing” and “The Alphabet”).
Even so, the poems – each producing what she calls “a landing strip for
particulars / of uncertain provenance,” and deliberately opening themselves to
(her word) love – also frame a tension around their vestigial metaphysics that
often feels like a yearning toward absence, not so much to fill it in as to
embrace its lyric provocations. In “A Late Writer’s Desk” – a poem issued as a
broadside by Anansi to mark the
publication of The Exile’s Gallery –
she both describes and celebrates the cobbled, awkward and uneven construction
of a discarded “escritoire”: “They couldn’t give it away, I guess, / so left it
beside the road, / where, obdurate, it warps.” Gesturing, in her allusions in
the poem to the doubled play of a
Midsummer Night’s Dream, at a Shakespearean mutability that confuses
entropy and alchemy, she uncovers in the desk’s decrepitude and in its
weathered reabsorption into natural substance, a decreative attention to the
work of poiesis, of unmade making.
Its surface pollenated by “catkin loads,” the desk as she describes it might
seem neglected and abandoned, but in fact it has been both recuperated and
redeemed – a kind of “scrap-yard rescue” as her text puts it – by her own
poem’s haptic observance: its reciprocity, its attunement, its listening.
Uneven, broken surfaces, with “not a board true,” nonetheless manage and can
only manage to bear welcoming witness to “the true,” to the small but
miraculous uncertainties of our own brief and all-too-human presence in this
world. Listening to Elise Partridge’s poetry read aloud by those who cared and
who care for her, I felt I might have caught a little of her drift.
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
14 January 2015
Isabelle Stengers, "the most amiable of philosophers"
I’m intensely grateful
to the Graduate Program in Science and
Technology Studies (STS) at UBC for inviting Isabelle Stengers to
lead a seminar on her reading of Alfred North Whitehead’s
Process and Reality, and on what she
calls “cosmopolitics.” In practice, she didn’t really lead a discussion so much
as aim to foster spontaneous interchange and to interrogate and even challenge
some of her own thinking; her recent book is called Thinking with Whitehead (2002, trans. 2011)—rather than thinking about or explaining—and the character and practice of that with-ness, of a
reading that involves co-creatively being with
a work rather that staging some sort of magisterial (professorial?) exegetical
mastery of it, is what I think for Stengers makes philosophy matter.
Still,
the seminar involved less mutual interchange—less a practice of collaborative
speculation, a discursive echo of the “open ontology” she wants to address—and
became more about participants posing questions to Professor Stengers about her
work. She had offered two papers for participants to read ahead of time, in the
hope, perhaps, of avoiding professing, although given the opportunity of having
her present in the classroom, it’s certainly understandable why a rather formal
question-and-answer session might happen. Describing, in one of those papers,
the emergence of her term “cosmopolitical,” she points to how “gripped by
worry,” by what sounds like anxiety over philosophical reach, she “needed to
slow down.” That slowing is not a diminution of attention but rather its
intensification—an attention, moreover, that remains iterative and hermeneutic,
but that also aspires to a reading practice that is co-creative rather than derivative
or, in the mundane sense, rather than merely critical. “It’s better to read
slowly,” she said in the seminar, “in order not to have understood everything.”
Reading doesn’t aim at comprehension, but to actualize the creative potential
in careful misprision.
She
doesn’t really articulate an aesthetics in Thinking
with Whitehead, if by aesthetics you mean a theory of art. But what she
calls the “adventure of the senses,” of aesthesis, pervades her meditations on
Whitehead’s writing and thinking. What Professor Stengers wants a seminar to
become, I think, is something that Whitehead describes, in Process and Reality,
as “intense experience without the shackle of reiteration from the past. This
is the condition for spontaneity of conceptual reaction” (Process and Reality 105). The active mind slows into the present
tense, but that spontaneity—I want to call it improvisation, but Stengers does
not—is not without relation to a past, without any iterative purchase on
(reading) history. Rather, the active, embodied mind, as one reads, becomes (to
borrow a few metaphors from both Whitehead and Stengers) an electromagnetic
resonator, an amplifier, an interstitial matrix: “It receives from the past, it
lives in the present” (Process and Reality 339). The interstice—the fictive and
material space “between the lines” of tissue, of both flesh and text—is a
crucial trope for Stengers, marking both a material and a societal openness, a
biological and a conceptual betweenness (betweenity?) that offers the condition
of possibility for communities of difference, for community as difference, the
unresolved and contrary, risky situation of the speculative seminar itself:
“speculative presence, and the eventual efficacy associated with it,
constitutes the wager of the interstice” (Thinking
with Whitehead 514). “Life,” as Whitehead puts it, “lurks in the
interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain. In the
history of a living society, its more vivid manifestations wander to whatever
quarter is receiving from the animal body an enormous variety of physical
experience.” (Process and Reality
105-6) Those “vivid” intensities don't and can’t happen all the time, and I’m
not even sure what a seminar conducted along those lines of sustained risk
might look like, might feel like, but in the classroom yesterday, what for me
was notable was how often Isabelle Stengers laughed. Her laughter was never
nervous or imperious or cynical—although she did make it clear that she doesn’t
abide thoughtlessness or “stupidity”—but manifest moments of vital warmth, her
celebratory enthusiasm for thinking that matters, in the present. I couldn’t
help but hear, as well, the nascence of an interstitial poetics, an ecology of
writing that attends to some as-yet-unapprehended upwelling of life between its
own unfolding lines.
Books
Isabelle Stengers, Thinking
with Whitehead: A Free and Wild
Creation of Concepts. 2002. Trans. Michael Chase.
Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2011
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected
edition, ed. David Ray
Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne.
New York: Free P, 1978.
12 June 2014
“So many small things I still want to see”: Elise Partridge and Robert Lowell
The expanded edition of Elise
Partridge’s remarkable collection Chameleon Hours (2008) reprints poems
from her first
volume, Fielder’s Choice (2002),
including a brilliant set of four brief dramatic monologues based on lectures
given in the last year of his life by Robert Lowell, lectures
Elise Partridge attended and for which, she notes, she “took detailed notes on
his remarks about nineteenth and twentieth-century writers.” Her poems are much
more than reiterated transcriptions of Lowell’s classes, or ventriloquisms of
his voice. They trace their way through a mesh of intertexts, expanding
Lowell’s own iterative method in Notebook
1967-1968 (1969), History (1973)
and other of his late volumes, colliding elocutionary rigour with colloquial immediacy
to create a vital admixture – characteristic of Elise Partridge’s finest work –
of the confessional and the objective, of the personal and the formal, of the serendipitous
and the exacting.
Most
of the poems in Chameleon Hours are
elegies: meditations on loss, on the art of losing. They draw their passing,
brief intensities from a heightened awareness of lived material detail, of
“small things,” that comes in the wake of absence. Robert
Pinsky praises this practice as her “art of noticing”: “Absence and failure
are described [in Elise Partridge’s poetry] in a way that takes pleasure in
accuracy: a considerable and original accomplishment.” Her poems, for me, evoke
much more than mere pleasure, much more than an enjoyment of pretty craft, and
her accomplishment is more than considerable: the crisp particularity of her
characteristic line engenders a keen pathos in restraint, and unflinchingly
confronts the hard expressive limits of her own mortality—“pretty or not,” as
she puts it. In “Chemo Side Effects: Vision,” one of her pieces that Pinsky
singles out for praise, she notes how there are “So many small things I still
want to see”; the modulating vowels distilled from the long-I—the withdrawing,
observant subject at the heart of this particular line attenuated into phonemic
shivers, ī becoming ah-ee, then lightly drawled into aw and ĭ and braided
through commonplace consonants, s’s and m’s and t’s—produce a palpable set of
articulated, glassy shards on the teeth and tongue, small bursts of sense.
Vatic wonder, under Elise Partridge’s pen, doesn’t so much diminish as gain a
tensile acuity, a closeness.
Her
Robert Lowell poems recall not only Lowell’s voice and approach, his recurrent
plea for “the grace of accuracy” as he writes in one of his last poems, but
also the voices and recalibrated transcripts, the “notebooks,” that fill in his
absence, his retreat; she also gestures at Elizabeth Bishop’s
memorial for Lowell, “North Haven,” which describes Lowell’s meticulousness as
a compulsion to revise, to “derange, or re-arrange” his poems obsessively, a
reflexive craft arbitrarily halted only by his sudden death in 1977. Partridge
took classes with Lowell that same year, and her poems are in one sense
gatherings of some of his last words. Day
by Day, Lowell’s last collection, also appeared in 1977; its final poem,
“Epilogue,” acts as a contingent self-elegy, in which Lowell laments what he
hears “in the noise of my own voice” as a “misalliance” between imagination and
memory; the last lines gesture forward, with a caveat, at this unsatisfied
poetic desire, his “want to see,” to keep noticing:
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems
a snapshot,
lurid,
rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened
from life,
yet
paralyzed by fact.
.
. .
We
are poor passing facts,
warned
by that to give
each
figure in the photograph
his
living name. (Day by Day 127)
The recalcitrant egotism and
decrepit masculinity that persist in Lowell as “poor passing facts” of his
existence are gently shifted in Elise Partridge’s reimagining of his lectures;
like History, each poem takes up the
biography and the voices of other poets, here Hart Crane, William Carlos
Williams and Walt Whitman (twice), but has Lowell tease out moments in all
three of fraught grandeur, when they could each be “operatic” or “awfully
eloquent,” and when their robust poetic authority, their masculine assurance,
is undone by “something . . . personal.” When Partridge has Lowell recall that
Williams thought Crane “was all rhetoric,” the chain of spectral, layered
voices at once resists poetic heightening and aspires, despite itself, to a
feeling of living presence, of spontaneous immediacy that exceeds the limits of
its own cleverness and craft: “And often rhythmical musical things / aren’t
good, they’re padding for not feeling” (Fielder’s
Choice 74).
The
verbal music that Partridge characteristically seeks is perhaps closer to
Elizabeth Bishop’s version of Lowell than to Lowell himself; in a 1964 note,
Bishop asks for an art—I want to say a poetry, but she doesn’t—that consists in
“some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring,
glaring world.” Against heightening, Bishop wants the “delight” of exacting
“living” diction; in “North Haven,” she catalogues local flowers, capitalized
as if each were given a proper rather than a generic name, “Buttercups, Red
Clover, Purple Vetch, / Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright” (Poems 210). In the poems of Chameleon Hours, Elise Partridge deploys
a related tactic around “souvenirs of the world,” building tenuous recollected
cascades of words—as in the last lines of “Thirteen,” looking back on backyard
gatherings of teenage girls:
And before we bounded off Kate’s trampoline
our teams were redivided:
pretty or not.
Earthward, staggering, reaching, reeled, thirteen.
(Chameleon Hours 6)
Part of her poetic gift,
derived from Bishop but hardly derivative, is her capacity to frame a lightly
dissonant clash of sound and texture as aspirant lyric, as an approach to the
condition of song that delights in its almosting, its edgy shortfall, reaching.
(Like Bishop, too, she has a thing for birds.)
“Four Lectures by Robert Lowell, 1977” voices this
shortfall, in its opening description of Hart Crane, as a gibe at idealism:
“He’s taunting you with paradise.” Discussing Crane’s “Repose of Rivers,”
Partridge’s recollected Lowell locates a poetry in the dissolution of memory:
The river speaks the poem;
the
river’s washing out to sea
like
your own life—the river’s doomed,
all
childhood memories, washing out to sea
to
find repose.
This last broken cadence
approaches an iambic scansion, but that rhythmic surety dissolves both in the
looseness of Lowell’s everyday speech (as if his talk were nearly but not quite
subtended by metrical tics from his poetry) and in the refrain-like repetitions
that suggest a mind feeling its way forward into words. The poem itself, like
the other three “lectures” here, is also thoroughly reflexive, and we feel
Lowell’s words diffused through the filter of Elise Partridge’s ear and hand,
as she reconstructs his voice against the washing-out of whatever it was or is
that speaks this poem, that refuses to let it repose in tacit oblivion. Against
the plain speech he seems to value in Williams’s “The Yachts,” her Lowell
laments how “anything beautiful” goes “trampling over all / it doesn’t notice.”
Close attention and artifice are at odds in this conception—“[b]eauty’s
terrible,” he tells us—and yet he values (as opposed to Crane’s seductive
“thunder and obscurity”) the beauty of “careful description.” Care, in
Partridge’s lectures, amounts to an unobtrusive reiteration of what she thinks
she heard, what she write down.
And
yet, each of Lowell’s talks is re-lineated by her, as if to discover the poems
lurking behind the everyday in his recollected words. Re-appropriated, and then
sculpted rhythmically and spatially into contingent poems, his texts become
what he calls, in the third lecture (a reading of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle
Endlessly Rocking”) a “loose writing,” enacting and negotiating a tension
between form and formlessness, mastery and relinquishment:
The beginning’s all one sentence, highly
organized musically, but loose writing,
as Whitman
practiced. Tempting to scan; you can’t.
What Partridge gives us is
the work of formation, of revision, an organization that wants but also refuses
closure, that tempts us with a poetic monumentality, a Whitmanesque vastness,
that its improvisational looseness inevitably belies. Just as Lowell’s epilogue
functions as self-elegy, so too do each of these four poems confront the
spectre of the poet’s own death:
“’Goodbye My Fancy’ he intended as
his
last poem . . . you’re too sick to write your last
poem,
when the time comes. Clear and elegant —
except
for some of the language, and the meter,
it
could be seventeenth-century.
Your
eyes water, reading it.”
The layered quotation marks
suggest the complex embedding of voices, but also point to an understanding of
the poem as a lecture, as a reading
of other texts. Clarity and directness, as virtues of descriptive facticity, of
an attention to small things and poor passing facts, are both enabled and
impeded by poetic line. But for this particular Lowell, what matters isn’t so
much the airless perfection of form as the loosened vacillation between craft
and sense, what Elise Partridge confronts in her poems as an essential human
want, as wanting still to see.
I
can’t help but hear her own difficult confrontations with cancer and with
mortality, through which she writes the poems of Chameleon Hours, each one becoming something like her last, as it
addresses its own passing, but still—as she has Lowell say of Hart Crane—“unusually
full of life.” In a valediction, “Farewell Desires,” she asks the “Goddess of
discards,” her muse of loss, to
let me be a waterfall
pouring
a heedless mile,
stride
barefoot over the drawbridge
to
the plain road.
The gift of Elise Partridge’s
poetry, one of its many gifts to her readers, is its careful affordance, its
clear- and open- and watery-eyed encounter with a world replete in visionary
plainness and casual miracles (“Seems supernatural, doesn’t it?”), awash in the
small flashes that like her we still want to see.
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