On Accessibility
Feb. 14th, 2006 01:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousI've been enjoying Matthew Cheney's essay on accessibility in prose and the various responses that are popping up all over lj.
I've also been carrying Sophie Cabot Black's first volume of poetry, The Misunderstanding of Nature around in my bag for the past week. When I'm waiting in line for my pretentious frou-frou mocha beverage at Starbucks, or whatever, I usually have time to read one of her poems the three or four times that feel necessary. At the end of the fourth reading, do I feel like I have access to the poem? Ha! Black doesn't just take Dickinson's advice about telling all the truth but telling it slant. Black evokes exactly the mood the truth would produce in you, if you could bear to know the truth, and then leaves you both relieved that you've been spared the worst, and awestruck that she can pull it off while shielding you. If that's what you permit the book to do to you, then that's what it will do. It's very strange that poems that have this effect should also be stunningly beautiful.
Could I get access to the poems? Oh, yeah, I still have my old safecracking tools for books like this. If my life depended on giving a paper on sacramentality in Black's poetry at the MLA, or on prosody in Black's poetry at the AAR (no, not that AAR, the other AAR), I could do it on three days' notice. The training I got in my other life means I can have almost exactly as much access to these poems as I want.
Right now, what I want is something entirely different from access. So the safecracking tools are still in their black bag.
The thing is, I'm not in a hurry, because I trust the text. I know I'll be keeping it indefinitely, barring house fires, and that I'll almost certainly read it again in the next five years--two to four passes per poem then, too. And probably a third time, sometime this decade, because that's just the kind of girl I am. I don't have to get it this time, which means that, this time, I don't have to be a thing that happens to the poems. The poems can be a thing that happens to me. An as-yet-unnamed thing that happens to me--a Mystery. I have The World's Longest Attention Span. If twenty years pass before I understand these poems, that's just fine. Life is long, and there are plenty of quick-fix, easy books for other moods to fill the time between.
A few weeks ago, Dan was on one of those housecleaning kicks--you know, the kind in which he implores me to cull my books, because we're drowning in them. He pointed to the stack of slender little volumes of contemporary poetry I keep meaning to get to, and said, "Can you name even one of the books in this pile?"
"Sophie Cabot Black," I said. "The Misunderstanding of Nature."
"Oh, yeah?" He flipped through the books in the pile until he found it. "Is it really good enough to be cluttering up the coffee table right now?" To bibliophiles, this may sound like a barbaric question, but if you could see our coffee table, you'd ask, too.
"I don't know. Flip it open to any page. If the poem sucks, the whole stack goes."
Dan flipped the book open to "The Woman at the Other Grave."
When he'd finished reading it, we sat there in the living room, stunned. "This one stays," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Might as well take it out of the pile and put it on the shelf of keepers."
Dan said, "Do you mind if I read another one first?"
We had no idea what the poem meant, and no doubt that it meant something vast. The poem was a thing that happened to us. Most writers can't produce that effect for wanting to. I'm pretty sure fixating on accessibility is not the way to accomplish it.
I've also been carrying Sophie Cabot Black's first volume of poetry, The Misunderstanding of Nature around in my bag for the past week. When I'm waiting in line for my pretentious frou-frou mocha beverage at Starbucks, or whatever, I usually have time to read one of her poems the three or four times that feel necessary. At the end of the fourth reading, do I feel like I have access to the poem? Ha! Black doesn't just take Dickinson's advice about telling all the truth but telling it slant. Black evokes exactly the mood the truth would produce in you, if you could bear to know the truth, and then leaves you both relieved that you've been spared the worst, and awestruck that she can pull it off while shielding you. If that's what you permit the book to do to you, then that's what it will do. It's very strange that poems that have this effect should also be stunningly beautiful.
Could I get access to the poems? Oh, yeah, I still have my old safecracking tools for books like this. If my life depended on giving a paper on sacramentality in Black's poetry at the MLA, or on prosody in Black's poetry at the AAR (no, not that AAR, the other AAR), I could do it on three days' notice. The training I got in my other life means I can have almost exactly as much access to these poems as I want.
Right now, what I want is something entirely different from access. So the safecracking tools are still in their black bag.
The thing is, I'm not in a hurry, because I trust the text. I know I'll be keeping it indefinitely, barring house fires, and that I'll almost certainly read it again in the next five years--two to four passes per poem then, too. And probably a third time, sometime this decade, because that's just the kind of girl I am. I don't have to get it this time, which means that, this time, I don't have to be a thing that happens to the poems. The poems can be a thing that happens to me. An as-yet-unnamed thing that happens to me--a Mystery. I have The World's Longest Attention Span. If twenty years pass before I understand these poems, that's just fine. Life is long, and there are plenty of quick-fix, easy books for other moods to fill the time between.
A few weeks ago, Dan was on one of those housecleaning kicks--you know, the kind in which he implores me to cull my books, because we're drowning in them. He pointed to the stack of slender little volumes of contemporary poetry I keep meaning to get to, and said, "Can you name even one of the books in this pile?"
"Sophie Cabot Black," I said. "The Misunderstanding of Nature."
"Oh, yeah?" He flipped through the books in the pile until he found it. "Is it really good enough to be cluttering up the coffee table right now?" To bibliophiles, this may sound like a barbaric question, but if you could see our coffee table, you'd ask, too.
"I don't know. Flip it open to any page. If the poem sucks, the whole stack goes."
Dan flipped the book open to "The Woman at the Other Grave."
When he'd finished reading it, we sat there in the living room, stunned. "This one stays," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Might as well take it out of the pile and put it on the shelf of keepers."
Dan said, "Do you mind if I read another one first?"
We had no idea what the poem meant, and no doubt that it meant something vast. The poem was a thing that happened to us. Most writers can't produce that effect for wanting to. I'm pretty sure fixating on accessibility is not the way to accomplish it.
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alternative uses for stacks of books
Date: 2006-02-14 06:55 am (UTC)Stacking them _beneath_ the coffee table?
I know, it it was not the point of your entry. I haven't looked for a sampler of Black's poetry in the public access free world, but I will.
Let me see if I understand how this goes. If you are making several passes at a single piece, you get an impression on the first read, then other slightly different ones the second, and third reads, depending on where you are at the time (different); then, if you value the piece sufficiently, and think it's a good idea, you go into some more depth with it while recalling the several impressions it had. Black's work sounds like deep water.
Re: alternative uses for stacks of books
Date: 2006-02-14 10:48 am (UTC)This isn't usually the way I read poetry. It's certainly not like any of the ways I was trained to read poetry. But then, my motivation for reading this book, this way, is to feed it directly to the unconscious.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 08:48 am (UTC)unless she's dead, in which case she should be the prophet of one we found. ;)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 10:38 am (UTC)It's clear that there is meaning, but the meaning's not the only thing going on. Why cheat myself of the other stuff in a rush to meaning, when there isn't a hurry? It's not a newspaper or a state referendum. Clarity is not a poem's only job.
Now that the Atlantis cranks are polished up and mailed out, I'm turning my attention back to the Stisele project. I've been wondering, in an idle sort of way, what I did right in the big book that allows it to insinuate itself into people's dream lives. At one point, I actually tallied up on my fingers and toes who all had read parts of the ms, and who had said they had dreams set in Beltresa. One in five readers, I concluded. Obviously, whatever quality in the work does that is a quality worth cultivating, but I'm not at all sure how I did it. It's a virtue entirely different from accessibility, that's for sure.
Sophie Cabot Black is an extreme case--of whatever she is. The only way to find out whether it's an extreme case of the same thing I'm trying to cultivate is to read as a reader, not as an artisan, and see what it does to me.
oh, and on accessibility...
Date: 2006-02-14 08:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 10:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-14 10:49 am (UTC)Dan's become addicted to selling his books on ebay. The dollar amounts are small, but apparently it confers a gambler's thrill. The other night, he eyed the shelves in my study and started calculating the value of my books in dollars per foot of shelf space. If I do find another wave of books to get rid of, you may have to fight him off with a stick.