In Conversation with Gjertrud Schnackenberg: Part Two, The Visible Song
SUSAN GILLIS: There is a readily-heard quality in your work of the incantatory that often seems to propel it forward. You have mentioned that your process involves writing reams that are eventually discarded—this suggests to me that incantation itself, engaging in it, is part of what calls the poem into being. Is it fair or accurate to say a poem begins, for you, as a gathering of sound?
GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG: Several kinds of neuro-magic -- figurative
blindsight, rapt listening, attunement, and physical remove -- are preconditions
of poetry, for reading and hearing it as well as for writing it. Blindsight
takes precedence over listening as a precondition for poetry, because visual
imagery is the foundation of metaphor (I should say I mean figurative blindsight
rather than the affliction caused by an injury to the neocortex: I mean the
inner formation of images, conscious and unconscious, seen and
unseen, there and not there).
Because sound is not metaphorical, or at least is
not a building block of metaphor, it is fair to say that sound is ancillary to
imagery in poetry; but it would be massively difficult for a poet to divide the
inner formation of images from the inner formation of sounds -- like trying to
divide the two sides of one piece of paper, with imagery on the obverse side and
sound on the hidden, reverse side (for me, the Homeric phrase about the ability
of the blind poet Demodocus to make visible the song [Odyssey,
viii, 499, trans. Gregory Nagy], is like a vision of holding that
indivisible piece of paper to the light and seeing sound pouring
through from the other side).
Even poetry’s sounds became spectral when the
technology of writing was invented and poetry migrated from a sheerly
oral-auditory existence into the even stranger, apparitional, silent world of
written words.
As if a wand were waved over it, its sound became “sound”
(sound-in-silence, silent sounding), and its voices became “voices,” its
out-loudness evaporating into a secondary, alternative world of unheard music,
neurological and interior -- although still available for being said or sung
aloud.
But the writing of words as visible marks on the page still does not give
a material, physical status to words, which still are intangible
entities even when written and visible. And other strange properties of sound
contribute to the aura around a poem: sound’s invisibility intimates a
spiritual presence (no wonder poetry, like music, is so spiritual and religious
an art form): to speak in the Homeric religious vocabulary, we could say that
the sound is where the gods are.
And yet, of course, despite its invisibility,
intangibility, and apparent immateriality, sound has a physical impact on us
(and music can make our eyes stream, I don’t know why) -- its waves in poetry
and music are physical emanations, bending or liquefying or brushing the air,
whether barely touching our ears -- The wild waves whist -- or
hurtling Homeric lines like spears striking into us.
The sound of a poem is also
a natural outcome, a part of the world-sound, and as such
evinces spontaneous truth, a “ringing true” as genuine
and ingenuous as, again, the sounds of a buzzing beehive. And sound in poetry
isn’t, or isn’t only, an aesthetic pleasure: a poem’s sound is its duende,
delivered to us as if by a needle and syringe that injects its truths directly
and instantly into our bloodstreams. Listen to the duende of Joseph
Brodsky:
The marble portrait of the blind Homer in the
Capitoline Museum in Rome is a portrait of rapt listening, carved in Pentelic
marble, dated to the second century BCE, and attributed to
Anonymous. (Pentelic marble -- but to me the stone looks like
fallen meteorite; anonymously carved -- but to me, it looks god-carved.) The
intangible states of blindsight, rapt listening, attunement, and physical remove
are here tangibly inscribed in stone -- I can almost see the intangible lines of
the invocation in Book II of the Iliad forming in mid-air before him,
making the song visible:
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You [Muses] are gods: you are there {when things
happen} and you know everything;
But we {singers} know nothing; we just hear the kleos
(Iliad II, 484-85, trans. Gregory Nagy)
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I think the purpose of this rapt listening
amounts to a moral (not a moralizing) purpose of poetry: the poet is asking the
immortal gods to tell him the names of long-dead, forgotten, vanished mortals,
so that -- by means of ephemeral sound and intangible words -- he can recall
their existences back to the present moment and set their names into the music
of his poetry; if I may try myself to phrase this prayer, he is saying:
Flood me with their names. In fact this undertaking -- to
remember and tell the tales of the deeds of others -- is the reason for the
Iliad. Homer is fulfilling the life-devouring desire of Achilles,
that his glory be told in poetry, a desire so cosmic for Achilles that he
willingly and deliberately curtails his life in order that this fate-in-poetry
will be accomplished. Achilles wants his tale to be set to poetry
and music, and to be heard. And Homer, in the
presence of the gods, voices it.
(And then, because Homer is a truth-teller
with more unsparing truths to tell, he goes on to give glimpses of the
story-of-the-telling-of-the-story, that is, he provides
glimpses of the deathless fate that Achilles has chosen: in the Odyssey, he pictures
Odysseus witnessing the way that the reality of that agonizing war turns into a
diverting tale with which to pass an
evening after a feast, a piece of poetry set to music and performed for future
strangers untouched by that war -- and we recognize that in reading these epics
we are among those strangers who
sit unaware with the
disguised Odysseus).
I can’t help but ask a further question: what
is all this for? (which is like asking, what is the cosmos for?) I don’t know.
I don’t know what poetry is for; I don’t know why the
things of poetry and the things of music wound us as they do, and I don’t know why we have such a passion for
meaning; I don’t know why poetry and music mean so much that Odysseus,
sufficiently dauntless and indomitable to have survived ten years of war, breaks down
in tears and covers his face with his cloak when he hears the tales of
his life in that war recounted by Demodocus, the blind poet
who, epitomizing physical remove, wasn’t even there at the walls of Troy; I
don’t know why I weep in the face of these things; I don’t know why all this is
so important; I can’t probe any further.
But I do know that setting tales of
human passion to music is the absorbing concern and unfathomable work of
poiesis; and that poesis is recombinant, weaving
together the tales of others’ passions with our own passions to create an
inexplicable fabric of sound which, at singular moments, is made visible and
held up before us.
And I do know that poiesis -- if nothing else,
and for whatever reason, or perhaps for no discernible reason -- lies beyond all
analysis as a sheer fact of creation.
Read the first part of our conversation, Unstruck, here.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg's sixth book, Heavenly Questions (FSG, 2010) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2011. She lives in Boston.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg's sixth book, Heavenly Questions (FSG, 2010) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2011. She lives in Boston.