douglas.basford

On Two Sonnets by Karen Volkman
Originally published in The National Poetry Review, Fall 2007 
A response to "Nice knuckle, uncle..." and "That's what it says..."

"He deciphers my plain lines badly." No more explicit and worrying caveat explicator could be imagined than this one, courtesy of Karen Volkman's second poetry collection, Spar. What exactly Volkman means by "plain lines" is subject to debate, as most readers tend to believe themselves immersed in obscure language when reading her work, no less the case with these two immensely complex sonnets from her forthcoming third collection, Nomina (BOA Editions). Immediately apparent stylistic difficulty, however, should be distinguished from the deeper "difficulty" that the former implies must exist. A truly "difficult" poem is only difficult once it is understood, as Allen Grossman claimed in a lecture on Hart Crane. If we would own up to what poems address—that is, human problems, human difficulty—we will read until we understand.
        A poem is a way of thinking, claiming the possibility of a way of thinking peerless among other genres and disciplines. For Volkman, as for the Metaphysicals she continually reads and consults while composing, a poem is a multiplier and intensifier of thought, no mere trace of what Eliot called "a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling." Though reluctant to gloss her own work, feeling perhaps as Rilke did about his Elegies ("They reach out infinitely beyond me"), her poetics statement in Reginald Shepherd's Iowa anthology reveals much, asking "How is the poem a kind of thinking body?" This immediately calls to mind a passage in Mallarmé's letter to Eugène Lefébure: "I think the healthy thing for man—for reflective nature—is to think with his whole body," like strings vibrating with the violin's hollow body.
        Volkman's poetry aspires to a Mallarmean ideal, a kind of pure poetry that seeks a "unified vision of the Universe," and which perpetually asks, as Paul Celan did in an essay quoted in John Felstiner's biography of the Romanian poet, "How should what is New now come up Pure as well?" Being so grand in scope, her work resists interpretation on a poem-by-poem basis. Each of her books are conceived of as whole entities, individual poems "tensed against each [other]," giving the "sense of a movement of mind from poem to poem, a range of articulations and engagements being played out and tested." She cites the intensities of certain precedents: the "dance of tonalities" in Herbert's The Temple and the "constant touchstone" that Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus proved to be. Volkman's move to the sonnet reverses to the other extreme her deliberate drift from lineated free verse in Crash's Law to prose poems in Spar, stemming from a curiosity "to see what happened" if lines and stanzas were not present to shape her poems. This particular "breaking of style," to use Helen Vendler's term, mirrors that of Mallarmé, who had turned to the sonnet after two relatively unproductive years, as Roger Pearson explains: "Given the extraordinary complexity which his new approach to language entailed, the short, fixed form was to prove an ideal 'grid' upon which to place his lexical lacework." Coeval with her thinking about sound, tradition and language, their history, patterns, and future, the sonnet emerges as "an angry little machine" for Volkman:

        It seems an ideal form for exploring the slippages of meaning and complexities of relational systems; in its orientation toward argument, it is immediately a figure for the conflicted mind. The resolute character of its syntax and the solidity and decisiveness of its rhyme scheme embody a passionate movement toward a certainty that its conflicted stance questions and resists—in this, it strikes me as a form of anguish, longing for, but never fully believing in, the solace of its own intelligent system.

        Turning to the two poems in question, we find that "Nice knuckle, uncle. Nice hat, hornet" stands unique among the sonnets' first lines, being jaunty and ironic, self-contained, and polyvocal, recording verbatim some implausible conversation. More common, syntactically and texturally speaking, is a line like "That's what it said to the bloomingest more," though both lines embody in quite different ways Heidegger's ideal beginning: "an undisclosed abundance of the unfamiliar and extraordinary." In each case, a busy silence predates the first articulation: in the first, at least two entities (human and animal) meet and exchange pleasantries, and in the second, something is said but we are told subsequently not to ask further what it might be.
        "Nice knuckle, uncle" plays off the same phonemic anagram as does Kay Ryan's speaker-confidante advising submission, or perhaps admiring the daily persistence of the addressee in the face of adversity: "You will / say ankle, / you will / say knuckle; / why won't you / why won't you / say uncle?" There are also echoes of Little Red Riding Hood, perhaps: "My what big teeth you have!" she exclaims to the wolf disguised as her grandmother. The whole line has something of a children's book feel to it, with a hint of Ant and Bee having lost their hats, but the undercurrents are darker than Grimm: for one, knuckle and hornet imply violence and anger, and for another, a compliment—a rudimentary pattern of communication—is one likely to be uttered disingenuously or carelessly. Polite exchange rests on unsteady ground, as it is not possible to discern whether these are two voices conversing or one buttering up the "uncle" and the hornet.
        "Nice is nervouser than eye or at" and "bloomingest more" both participate in another common thread throughout Nomina: intensifiers and correlatives abound, such as fullest, sweetest, shyer, shyest, palest, and whitest. Is it better to be "nervouser" or not? Being "nice" requires listening and responding to codes of respect and the will of others. The "eye," on the other hand, and ironically so since it receives light, can be assertive, self-defining, directional, voyeuristic, taking in all it desires without the assent of the other, and "at"—like so many of Volkman's "syntactical swervings"—provides another contrast as well, indicating a direction of movement or intent, even aggression.
        In the lines that follow, as elsewhere, Volkman's syntax is primarily accretive or agglutinating: clause by clause is added, syntactic coherence emerging from the parataxis of list-making. The catalogue hardly new to poetry, Volkman appears to make specific claims about the eye's tendencies: "that house of am // loves its numberables" resonates elsewhere in the book with measurement: data, auction, numbers, scales, lexicon, manifest, list, and so on, but almost always in some relation to eyes, sight, blindness, vision, etc. From these deceptively simple acts of naming, charting, ordering eventually arises the "blooming" of knowledge, of certainty, but these come from what she calls "a submission to the unknown," a feature that Paul Otremba speaks about at length in his overview of Volkman's work. In the third line of "Nice knuckle, uncle…" the dead or departed ("the gone"), and even the representation of such (as we will see, in Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo"), "get going"—here again her sense of humor comes through in rewriting the commonplace carpe diem, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." There is a call to be heeded, the source of which cannot be identified, the impulse to move from observed or lived particulars to the imperative, "You must change your life."
        The Rilke appears in full generative power in the fourth line, the "procreation that flared" in the now-absent genitals: "a lawful loin, an iridescent sweet // glows its grid-iris." Many of the compound words in Spar (there are none really to speak of in Crash's Law) are compound adjectives vaguely reminiscent of Hopkins: "mist-mad birches," "every-eyed field," "doll-faced Tuesday," and so on, but there were hints of Volkman's having read Paul Celan's Breathturn and Threadsuns: "grief-arc of anyheaven hope," "mind-weals," "Hey bleach-blink, sheen-gaze, pearl-pith—root of worlds." In Nomina, the pressures of compression have perhaps wrought further invention on this front: hive-sieve, pearl-petal, harrow-vowel, sever-augur, blame-blooms, pain-rhumes, pause-pearl, aleph-iris, always-motion, world-scar, mind-ire, hobble-harrow, double-dwindle, heaven-quotient, sky-pelt, pierce-pulse, and so on. The alliteration and internal rhymes recall Hopkins, the radical and surreal juxtapositions channel Celan, and the largely non-Latinate diction and authoritative tone sound like Anglo-Saxon kennings, all in all a show of masterful stylistic control. In the case of "grid-iris," dichotomies abound: abstract/concrete, inanimate/animate, mathematical/organic, imposition/imposed-upon, static/growing, permanent/ephemeral, and so on. It plausibly refers to Mallarmé's aforementioned experience in the sonnet's "grid" and to the anagram of "gird," which has its cognate in biblical commonplace "gird the loins," taking us back to Rilke's "where procreation flared." There is a touch, too, of sly humor there, the echo of the "grid-iron" epithet for football leaning against "girding one's loins" yielding a kind of harmonic of jock-strap and cup. The remainder of the second quatrain continues the descent from Parnassian heights where flowers wilt in intense heat, a voice like an indecisive lover makes the listener freeze ("stay go come stay"), and "red meat" is contrasted with what almost sounds like a flower ("white nunca" or "white never" like "forget-me-not"). This stultified, barren stasis, very similar to that found in the other sonnet's second quatrain ("These and those" seem rooted in place with a tether and the sky appears clouded-over), is like the calm before the storm of as-yet incalculable proportions.
        As we move into the sestets of both poems, a series of claims about "green" and a "polyphonous store" draws us to the margins of hope, the anticipation of change, transformation, renewal. The white, red, and green resemble in shorthand the carefully marked sequence of colors as can be found in many Christian visionary texts, as Ernst Benz has convincingly discussed elsewhere, and in Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditation, another frequent reference point for Volkman, comes this vision: "The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things."
        For all the positive connotations of green, a resonance with a natural regenerative power in Dylan Thomas's "The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," even in Thomas we find a deep ambivalence, as the same inhuman force that "drives [his] green age" also blasts tree roots, dries up streams, turns blood to wax, and stirs up quicksand. An extended passage from a letter to Henry Reece grants not merely Thomas's process of composition and theory of image but also a sense of latent kinship with Volkman:

I make one image—though 'make' is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be 'made' emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make of the third image, bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time . . . The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the center; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions.

Volkman may not permit images to linger as long as Thomas does, but there is a sense of the cascading effect, the self-substantial and self-effacing quality of each image, as can be seen in the first two lines of the sestet—"green is the color of time or green is gram / green as mold is the house of oblivion"—which yield a sequence of relations, provisional relations between which the speaker appears to be weighing a response and which we can only absorb part-way at best before syntax impels us onward. Is there a syllogistic basis for the first metaphor? Green is the color of money. Time is money. Therefore Green is the color of time. Volkman would not consider herself above such jesting, but the Thomas-like ambivalence toward time seems telling. The second—"green is gram"—is more challenging, seeming either to have lost an article or been otherwise curtailed. At the very least one feels an unfettered, perfect one-to-one balance has been achieved in this metaphor that is nevertheless disrupted by the syntactical difficulty and the momentum of context and rhythm. Gram (from Greek gramma, little weight) could be the metric weight, glancing off the scientific (and by association poetic) language of measure and measurement, the recording of wavelength of light, the observable becomes abstract. Gram could be "grammar" (from Greek gramma, letter) with "mar" cut off, grammar marred. Gram could be short for something having to do with green (from Old Teutonic grô-, grow), or gram-, as in graminivorous (from Latin gramen, grass); in other words, an apparent metaphor that rests on a pedestal of metonymy. Whatever the case, central to this saturation of green, though, is a rarity in Volkman, a direct quotation in the next line: "Green as mold is the house of oblivion" leads off a six-line poem by Celan, "Sand from the Urns," the rest of which is as follows:

Before each of the blowing gates your beheaded minstrel turns blue.
For you he beats his drum made of moss and of harsh pubic hair;
With a festering toe in the sand he traces your eyebrow.
Longer he draws it than ever it was, and the red of your lip.
You fill up the urns here and nourish your heart.

Celan reconstitutes poetic effort in the face of the decreative (to say the least) effects of the Holocaust, repudiating Adorno's famous claim that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but Celan's work still bears the mark of that struggle—forgetfulness is an awful state, but idleness is far worse. Better to "fill up the urns," the forms of poetry, than to stand blankly trying to forget the horror. Dread of a lesser sort is conjured up as well in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (another of Volkman's acknowledged sources) in the green faces of children.
        Given the charged but problematic color green, then, what are we to make of the speaker saying "Green how I want you green"? It is, after all, the only instance in the two poems where the traditional I-you relation of a lyric appears. If such a crisis is present, there is no solid self through which it courses, for as Volkman admits, "In my new sonnets, I've tried to suppress the 'I' as much as possible." We might react in attributing this to a certain postmodern stance very popular among poets emerging from the Iowa Writer's Workshop during a particular timeframe, heavily under the sway of Jorie Graham in her Swarm days and after and influenced by the Language poets, but I sense that Volkman has stronger bases for her elision of the lyric "I" than a trendy disruption of traditional lyric modes. She takes cues about impersonality, however, more from lyrical sources, from Rimbaud's famous "Je est un autre," and from Mallarmé's claim in "Crisis in Poetry": "The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words."
        In Gravity and Grace, one of Volkman's acknowledged sources, Simone Weil gives us a more unusual direction to pursue with Volkman's impersonality: "All the things that I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat; all the beings I meet—I deprive the sum total of all that of contact with God, and I deprive God of contact with all that in so far as something in me says 'I'." Here, then, we see both social and theological rationales for the loss of the "I" and a critical conundrum: how much should we read Volkman's attraction to Weil, Herbert, Traherne, and other religious writers? Without fully answering this question, I will say I find Volkman's work the closest I can imagine to what a prototypical post-secular, post-metaphysical poetry might look like. Indeed, Volkman's "poetics statements" reveal her thinking in these systematic terms: "What is the relationship of a musical structure to other systems—natural, divine, physiological?" Jean-Luc Marion, perhaps the preeminent contemporary writer on philosophical and theological systems, has made claims that such a path for post-secular thinking lies in St. Augustine's conversion, his utter yielding of himself to the divine, and hence a preemptive strike against the Cartesian cogito ergo sum—instead we might say, "I speak what I am given to speak, and there is no claim made about my independent being." At the end of the second sonnet, does the speaker yield to the authority of the "rouge reine" (the red queen) who exerts her dominion over the subjects, "the wrack and motley mien / the rain of faces, flesh figured, dead green"? By observing these subjects, the speaking voice distinguishes itself from them, but stands in awe of the power that so reduces them. Despite the horrors of authoritarianism that such an image suggests, it's hard not to flit back to the Queen of Hearts (La Reine de Coeur in the French version), and Alice, gamely and nervously submitting to every whim of her hosts, whomever they may be, buffeting her from locale to locale like so many gusts of wind.
        In these sorts of spaces, in which the "I," the self, appears so challenged and adrift in the will of another, how is it possible to talk about making, poiesis? We are called by Volkman to "follow the plume / to its fullest expression" (plume as of smoke, or as a feather, or a quill) as a kind of leap of faith into something we might approximate as automatic writing. But I find Volkman's playful drift on the wings of chance anchored, as though parallel to Simone Weil's description of man's moral core having an external source:

        The source of man's moral energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air etc.). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion—as on the physical plane—that his being carries the principle of its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible.
        There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light.

Finding the means by which to process this light is perhaps our one vital imperative, for "There is only one fault: incapacity to feed on light."
        How do we know if we are feeding on light? If we are even able to? How do we know what the progress of the soul looks like? How can we be certain that what we perceive as growth is truly growth and not merely biding time? It is a matter of some vague and inarticulate faith that we do as Rilke did, "We frantically plunder the visible of its honey, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible." We may counter the terror of facing our own limitations, our delusions, our uncertainties, in this way. "Whether he like it or not, and often," Hölderlin cautions us at the end of "Homecoming / To Kindred Ones," his great poem of origins, "a singer must harbour / Cares like these in his soul; not, though, the wrong sort of cares." Karen Volkman does harbor the right sort.

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