Question Time

Tooling around on Ron Silliman’s blog a couple weeks ago, the Pill discovered a bunch of new poets to check out. Familiar with (indeed, a fan of) Graham Foust, and on nodding acquaintance with poems by a couple of the others Silliman mentioned as exemplars of the “New Precision” (or is it “New Precisionism”?), here was a half dozen or so poets utterly new to me: Joseph Massey, Michael Heller, Donna Stonecipher, and others). It’s a great thing to be introduced to new work (or work unknown to one). But in the last week or so, as part of my work on a writing project, I’ve been having to reread some poems I know pretty well, and there’s no denying the rich pleasure of rereading (hell, according to Roland Barthes, it’s the only real reading).

Most of what I’ve been rereading is distant not only from the Newly Precise, but also from the varieties of poetic experiment typically catalogued on Silliman’s blog. Today, for example, it’s been R. S. Thomas’s “Welsh Landscape,” Seamus Heaney’s “Bruagh,” and Ted Hughes’s Moortown, while yesterday was David Dabydeen’s Turner, and last week was Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. More than that, even the twentieth-century poems I’ve been writing about I’ve been writing about in light of much older and still more familiar ones (the elegiac ones in light of Milton’s “Lycidas,” the others in light of Virgil, Marvell, and Jonson). But between my daily 300-500 words on the book-in-progress and the World Cup semi-final between Uruguay and the Netherlands, I stole an hour to reread something Sillimanesque, since it’d been a while since I’d reread that kind of thing.

Indeed, I reread something so Sillimanesque it was Silliman; driven by questions, it seemed a good idea to return to a poem composed entirely of interrogatives, Silliman’s “Sunset Debris.” I remember reading it something like twenty years ago, back when the New Sentence was really new, and being guided through it by a group of like-minded grad school friends but also by Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of the poem in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. A serious house on serious earth it was, at that time, a challenge to orthodoxies philosophical, poetic, and political, a darkly aggressive and demanding text the reading of which we would, as we did with various other 30-page chunks of difficulty (e.g. Stein’s “Patriarchal Poetry”) wear as a badge of avant-honor.

What a pleasant surprise, then, to reread the poem (it really is thirty pages, and it really is all questions) and discover how much fun it is. Here’s the beginning:

Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet?

See what I mean?

OK. On one hand, there really is something avant and aggressive in the insistent repetition of a specific syntactic form. As Silliman said about the poem in an interview, communication inherently involves power relationships (well, what he said was “To write is to fuck. To read is to be fucked.”), and the poem puts its reader in a position sort of like that of a hapless Prime Minister caught on the horns of a back-bench challenge before the House, or like one finds oneself in during a round of that old stand-by drinking game, Questions. Provoked by a wrong-footing question like “Which one are you,” it’s tough to resist answering (which forces you to drink) rather than replying with another question. Once you’re playing the game, you’ve got to submit to its rules.

Still, what really stands out for me in this poem now is its playfulness. Many of the moves among questions are non sequiturs, but often one question seems conditioned (or, better, our range of possible interpretive response seems conditioned) by the preceding one or by earlier ones. The first three quoted here establish a pattern that seems to refer to the physical, and the next three continue in that vein but with an added affective element. Taken together, that half-dozen questions invite erotic imaginings. Things might get sinister with “Is he there,” might go off in a different direction with “Is it near,” but when we get to “Is it hard,” or “Is this where we get off,” or “Have you come yet,” I think our reading is influenced by the opening questions. We can play with this in various ways – who is speaking these questions? What relationships can be imagined among the speakers? – but we’re going to be frustrated (not without pleasure, I think) if we try to impose a straightforward drama on the poem. Instead, it’s fun to follow the shift from a discourse of feeling to one we might characterize as topographical to the cliché of kids on a car trip to the intricate connection between perception and taxonomy, and so on, when all that these sentences really have in common (as if that weren’t either significant or enough) is that they’re all questions. Isn’t that cool? Cool enough for sweaters? Was Van Persie offside?