stephanie adams-santos

The Poet’s House

Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness; I am also a girl, here in this room.
—virginia woolf

The house of the poet is a substandard apartment in the neighborhood of the oppressed, or else it is a trailer forever broken down at the foothills of oblivion. One must know this right from the start; if there is opulence, it is a perjury against the oath of dolor. For as soon as the house protects too much from the elements, the whet of the animal ceases to provoke an edge, and from that the duende flees. This fact startles many, especially those who imagine the poet's home to be a museum of curiosities, Bacon, and Gauguin. The truth is there is no art in the poet's house, nor is there artifice, because the inorganic solvents would not endure the night. That is not to say that the poet does not herself carry Spirit of the Dead Watching or Study of a Baboon in the permanent imagination. Neither is it to say that the poet does not covet a cloche turned over the forms of a doll, a Halloween apron, or Akira in a lamp. But those types of things, like taxidermy, are only shadows of desire.

As the house of the poet is not rent-controlled, the lords of such places are known to make inconceivable demands without warning; so in such times the poet, like a hermit crab, must make haste to escape the pinch of the old dwelling for another. Between one home and the next, the dissociated poet anda vagando y impermissible como La Llorona, buscando algo que aún no existe¹ 1. Indicates a spiritual hunger.. In the symbolism of the Tarot, the tower that falls to ruins is often touched first by lightning, and justly so is the poet's archetypical house a target for electrical surges and other savage inspirations from the skies, earth, sea, and cosmos, who detest a stagnant form.

Despite all that's been said, what ambiance exists in the house of the poet is not squalid. A primordial fire crackles and transfixes at evening, and the simple cot is exactly a kayak in dreams. The simplicity of it is not like a Christian church, but like a Bear's den—the distinction of which lies in the difference between a wall that purports to be plain and a wall that plainly is. And if the rain slithers in like a snake through the tin roof or unsealed jambs and is followed by the din of angry skies, then the home is all the more cherished and clung to, for in such moments of grace, its few amenities are held in perfect balance in the ledger of the world and the poet sees he owes nothing nor is owed anything.

Urban or sylvan, the view is what counts. From the vantage of the rooftop one can watch the crystal arc of a firehydrant cascade over las cabecitas oscuras y rebeldes de aquellas criaturas hermosas² 2. A roving pack of animas. and the cyclopean shards of a mortal architecture. Or from the mosses at the window one hears the insects calling to his bones with names long thought forgotten, names like the nautilus curving in stone, or the salt marrow of the sea unhinged from itself in the voluptuary of dunes. The house of the poet is naked, as the poet is naked, and only the true weather can dress it in eaves or fronds, rust or ochre.

joseph spece

A Reply

Anonymous:

Whether your query stems from pluck or nonplus (or nonplus at the sudden currency to which this question lays claim), iterations of 'Is ______ dead?' are little more than sensationalist baiting or question-begging. The interrogative is all the more loathsome when regarding an art form ('Is sculpture dead?' 'Is poetry dead?') because it is patently disingenuous: it is asked by the very individuals who assume or depend upon the long life of the discipline in question, or those completely daft about art’s purport.

In any event, you queried. Fix the sails fast, Starbuck.

A casual reader of poetry gives off asking 'Is poetry dead?' because she knows it is literally ridiculous. Death is 'the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions in an organism’; ‘extinction’; ‘destruction'; and she intuits that, for art, previous hale presence (can poetry ever ‘die’ after Keats has written? Riding, Thomas, Herbert, the Gawain poet?) belies death; and that, in the case of poetry, it is written and written about as profusely as ever. So no art is ever 'dead,' dear Anonymous, if it has ever been truly executed; and nothing is dead that is filled, presently, with rankest life.

A more sincere version of this query asks 'Is contemporary poetry effectual?,' and even this query reads a touch hollow. Who imagines he has exhaustively reviewed contemporary poetry, and thus dares venture an answer? Even the intrepid scholar who had read all poems published in America in 1867 had not read Dickinson. We've already established, additionally, that the audience for poetry is, between material books and the Internet, incalculably large—poetry affects someone every minute. The best one can say is ‘The last two issues of such-and-such periodical had poor showings in poetry,’ and such a diagnosis hardly reflects the state of contemporary verse.

As an aside, Anonymous, go in fear of any man who claims he’s got the ‘best American poetry’ or ‘best of the small presses’ between covers. Not even a posse of the wisest and most clockless readers could accomplish such a task with any surety. It’s a rather fantastic and unnecessary bit of hyperbole! Even if an editor rooted out ‘a good deal of the best she’s read’—and called it just that—she’d likely produce a collection worth reading.

Ah, Starbuck. All this naming and definitive proclamation isn’t making us wiser.

Talk about poetry's death is really talk about poetry's place in popular culture and 'movements,' and thus mistakes how poetry effects in the first place. Let's be straight: what is popular is digestible, generally at a half-sitting. What is popular is thinking (presently, passively, dumbly) that substantive attention follows from a bucket of water on the head (or even from the money that follows such idiocy); what is popular is 'athletic' violence, nudity, too many pictures of oneself, grandstanding, punning, televised bad behavior, kitsch, and worse. Poetry simply does not affect this way, and its effects cannot be calculated with such divisors. And while our particular symptoms of cultural embattlement may be unique, the battle itself is not: even a poet of some celebrity for his time, like Robert Frost, had but a fraction of readers—a fraction thereof who fathomed his meaning. Which is to say, further: art does not mobilize as usual; art effects singularly, even with an audience; the effect of art is never sounded with the clarions that robotize or call us to drone attention. Art cannot popularly or politically die because it exists simultaneously—and majorly—on a different plane of reckoning, and effects us there also.

As I've hinted previously, Anonymous, art is not obliged to dance in the theatre of quasi-critical fuckery. I dance here as her bad proxy, and say, with gusto: poetry is quite a starry blackguard, and is living and can never die. You knew that.