Let’s take a look at this short poem from A Several World, for instance: “Eclogue in Line to View The Clock by Christian Marclay.” Marclay’s twenty-four-hour-long film is built out of clips from more than half a century of cinema, arranged to feature every minute on the clock. It was a sensation when it was released in 2010, even though it was shown primarily in art museums.
Okay, but now imagine someone,
one of fifty, say, in the queue, fiftieth first
and advancing little, somewhere within
the seventy-two-hour window of efficacy
for post-exposure prophylaxis, and, later,
in the screening room watching The Clock
with the few dozen others in rows behind and ahead
who had waited too. He knows he has to
but he hasn’t yet. We pick it up there.
It is two thousand eleven a few more days.
The movie tells what time it is.
In poetry too we all face forward.18
This is one of three poems in A Several World called “Eclogue,” and while none is pastoral, quite, they do all keep faith with the earlier, more literal meaning of the Greek and Latin words eklogē and ecloga, “selection,” or even “draft”: like the poetic version of an essaie, an attempt. The poet’s attempt, in this case, is to see if his imagined protagonist can simultaneously keep time and keep calm. The poem quite deliberately never says “HIV test”—inasmuch as it assumes you know what “post-exposure prophylaxis” likely means, it assumes you passed at least slant through the queer 1990s. But it revolves entirely around the disturbing unknowing of the interval between possibly unsafe sex and the results of that test. The subject of the poem “knows he has to” take it, “but he hasn’t yet,” and so time has come to feel like a weight: Is it ticking like a bomb, or just ticking?
What I love about the poem is that it chooses to answer this question by generating a different figure altogether for the time of waiting to be tested. It’s absorptive: it’s sitting in a theater in the dark. Or, more precisely, it’s sitting in a theater in the dark with others. It’s not a reverie: the poem is keeping rigorous time. It has twelve lines, like the numbers on a clock face, or like a sonnet cut short by a couplet. But it also blinks and misses time: at first the “he” is inching forward in line “Advancing little,” then, in a flash of “later,” he’s enveloped in the theater’s dark. And this is how he disappears: into us. “We pick it up here”—his narrative, and possibly his burden—and sit down next to him.
I find it impossible not to read this poem alongside Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” from 1977’s Geography III. In that poem, the poet remembers her childhood self, just about to turn seven, reading a National Geographic at the dentist’s office while her aunt has a tooth removed or a cavity filled in the next room over. The far-flung locales, and the pictures of people unlike her, send the child Elizabeth into a panic about the contours of her specific self. Abruptly she hears her aunt cry out on the other side of the wall, and for a moment the child’s panic deepens into actual loss of self: Was it her aunt crying out, or her? The process by which the young girl regains her composure is obscure, but it involves a mixture of hard judgment (she finds her aunt “foolish, timid”) and a burgeoning curiosity about whether she’s like or unlike the gray New Englanders in the waiting room alongside her, like or unlike the black woman she sees photographed in National Geographic, whom both she and the magazine exoticize. Her gaze never gets higher than the trousers and the skirts of those around her—perhaps she is more like her aunt than she is willing to admit—but it’s enough to bring her back to the room, to the world (“The War was on”), and to calendar time: “it was still the fifth / of February, 1918.”19
Both Bishop’s poem and Blanchfield’s set a character in a time of waiting, proximate to medicine, and plunge them into darkness. In Bishop, it’s a blend of racial and existential darkness all too familiar in white writers: “black, naked women” whose “breasts were horrifying” blend into the “cold, blue-black space” of not knowing one’s self. In Blanchfield, the dark is a relief, and it’s familiar—it’s the medium of subculture, what John Ashbery calls “the equalizing night.”20 Both poems, meanwhile, also place poetry alongside other media: the magazine, the movie. In Bishop, the magazine triggers a terror that is alleviated by the clarity of poetry, with its power to extend itself into speculation and then bring us home. In Blanchfield, the film is medium and a surround, in which to get lost is not to lose self so much as to lay down the burden of individuation. And finally, both poems are indexed to numbers—seven years old, the fifth of February, 1918, in Bishop; 2011, fiftieth in line, the seventy-two-hour window in which the body may seroconvert, in Blanchfield. For Bishop, that numerical data serves as a stay against “blue-black space”; in Blanchfield, the numbers are written out as words, and absorbed into the games that poetry plays with them. “It is two thousand eleven a few more days” is meant to take an extra moment to be recognizable as a date, just as the poem’s length is only meant to be discovered on reflection. Bishop’s poem deploys its clarity to separate herself from others and find stability, inviting us to share in the power of its clean, stern, specifying language; Blanchfield’s keeps us out until we find its password, and then welcomes us in with a “we.”
Blanchfield’s poem is also, of course, a cheeky rewrite of Plato’s allegory of the cave, which depicts an imaginary premodern movie theater. You could say Blanchfield pits the allegory against the tradition of the nocturne, in which night and darkness, rather than an imprisoning ignorance, represent reprieve—from representation, from glare, from what Wallace Stevens called “the weight of primary noon.”21 Or Ashbery, again, rewriting Stevens: “The summer demands and takes away too much, / But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.”22 Blanchfield takes up the ancient question of the media-character of poetry throughout A Several World. But he never takes the ancient questions literally: in “Ut Pictura Poesis,” the final poem in the “History of Ideas” sequence, the structuring analogy is not between painting and poetry, as in Horace, but between poetry and drama—on screen, and on stage.23 The poem opens with an observation about something like fandom, about tracking the continuity of a film or theater star from role to role (“The Fortinbras in one is the avenger we follow / in another”), nodding later to Tony Kushner with a passing suggestion that the actor in question has gone from playing a part in Angels in America (“Act III: Not-Yet-Conscious, Forward Dawning”) to taking some sort of role in a military action film: “eventually we would decide to merge forward-dawning / with mission creep.”24
In other words, the poem doubles down on the question of transition between arts raised by the tradition of ut pictura poesis, asking not only what happens in the movement between poetry and the image-arts, but also, what happens when the images on screen and stage are themselves always in transition? Like the third l in “skillless,” superadding is part of the poem’s playfulness and mischief. And indeed, there’s a third layer of thinking about mutability in this poem, at the level of the phoneme. While the poem’s narrative tracks the way its “we” engages in celebrity gossip, especially gossip about the mutability of the stars, its sonic surface is gaming around the digraph “ch”: not only does the poem contain a remarkably high number of words containing it—“crouch,” “patchy,” “scheme,” “anachronism,” “vetch,” “arch”—but it asks, throughout, which groups of letters sound most like “ch.” There are a few nominees, including perennial front-runner “sh” and its sound-alikes (“ambush,” “mission”), but the winner, coming from behind, is the surprising “-ge”: as in “stage” and “image.” It sounds just enough like a “ch” that its phonic continuity and graphic difference can blur as actors blur from role to role, or as poetry productively blurs when it dips itself in cinema. “Image,” “stage,” “avenger,” “portage,” “foliage”—they populate the poem and give it its juxtapositional texture—a
s do, tellingly, “ridge,” “merge,” and “edge.”
Once again, meanwhile, gay male subculture has a role to play in reconfiguring the ancient questions. The poem’s coordination of “ch”-gaming and celebrity gossip takes place in a gay bar—“Or at least it used to be a gay bar”—and converge around the action-movie scene of crouching in ambush, tracking an enemy, being ready to pounce. The poem also explicitly analogizes this ambush to image consumption, to sexual adventuring, and to poetry. Unlike the characterizations of fandom that, since Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment at least, see following celebrities as a mind-narrowing disempowerment, Blanchfield’s poem taps into a gay male history of gossip about stars—especially male stars—that is assertive, even predatory.25 The gossip about which male celebrities are gay, to be sure, has always been a way of bringing the stars down to earth; the poem goes further and suggests that there’s a zone of consumption that gives access to power, even aggression. In this scenography, the viewer in the dark is less the passive recipient of the image-stream than a protagonist in camouflage, ready to pounce. This scene is analogized, in turn, to the relationship between poetry and images: “like a poem in which ambush / I crouch.” Not only does the cinema’s darkness facilitate a viewership in which the observer can pounce on the image, but the dark of the poem—the darkness in which the sounds and syllables can shape-shift—the dark of the poem provides a camouflage, a “foliage,” from behind which poetry can leap upon its cousin art and bring home bounty.
By comparing itself to the structure of other media, the queer mixed-media darkness in A Several World also tells poetic time. We see this take literal shape in “Eclogue in Line,” but in “Ut Pictura” we can see it from another angle, as the poem placing itself in history, and literary history, by taking stock of its relationships to other media. We think of the movies as drowning out poetry, but Blanchfield seems to want to suggest that the very dominion of the visual over the verbal, with its midcentury connotations of mass cultural flattening, hides other relationships, and other kinds of time. Rather than being starstruck, the audience in “Ut Pictura” is pouncing on the stars; rather than being drowned out by film, poetry can hide in its shadow and flourish there, gathering material. Elsewhere, in a poem called “Smalltown Lift,” Blanchfield miniaturizes the movie theater and reverses its image-flow, placing two characters on a first (or first-ish) date in a bowling-alley photo booth. The closet-like dark of the space, again, is the opposite of suffocating. It opens things up; it opens time onto the future. “In here,” says the one with the photo-booth idea,
we have to tell each other one true thing. You first. Click.
This is the best way I could think to have my arm around you.
Click. Click. Click.26
These lines are charming but also rhythmically startling: the first line concludes with a quite unusual six stressed syllables in a row (“one true thing. You first. Click”), followed by a line so long it’s impossible to decide whether it represents a rush of thought that happens too fast for rendering in regular stresses, or a kind of unheroic Alexandrine. Then three more stresses, right in a row: click, click, click. The density of single-syllable feet seems to indicate that the two characters (Blanchfield renders them as a “they”) are being happily compressed into a single space—not just near each other, but into each other. And the poem sets us up to see that this produces more speech, more true things, a whole possible series of such things, indeed a future. “Click. Click. Click.”
What I’ve been trying to describe, without funneling too much of the poetry’s inventiveness into a single theme, is a kind of deliberately difficult Whitmanianism. You’d think that was an oxymoron: Whitman is nothing if not directly accessible to us, however uncomfortably ballooned we may sometimes feel by his exhortations. But I think Blanchfield’s genius is to reach back through time, and across media, to come up with surprising mixes of unlike elements: modernist density and open-hearted brotherliness, for instance, or the nocturne and the ars poetica. To read the poems is to experience a narrative in which gay literary history is not an uncomplicated march of progress, but a kind of looping back through older modes to sense the promises kept and wishes unfulfilled. It is to feel that maybe old stories about poetry’s relationships to other media—from ut pictura down to Frank O’Hara’s remarks that only Williams and Crane were better than the movies—have missed something. It is to suppose that maybe poetry’s survivance, because it happens in the dark, is easy to miss, and that maybe its hiddenness in dark’s plain sight is a good thing. When Blanchfield was asked in an online interview, “Do you think poetry is still important, relevant, and vibrant in today’s culture?” his response was, “Important in. Irrelevant to. Vibrant notwithstanding.”27
NOTES
1. Brian Blanchfield, Not Even Then (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 3.
2. Brian Blanchfield, “Turner Canty Interviews Brian Blanchfield,” interview, OmniVerse, omniverse.us.
3. Blanchfield, Not Even Then, 3.
4. Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Tiffany, My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
5. James Schuyler, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 3.
6. Ibid., 3.
7. Brian Blanchfield, A Several World (Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2014).
8. Blanchfield, Not Even Then, 55.
9. Blanchfield, A Several World, 64.
10. Ibid., 9.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1986), 301.
13. Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855–1892, ed. Gary Schmidgall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 230.
14. See, for instance, Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998).
15. Whitman, Selected Poems, 138, 139.
16. Blanchfield, A Several World, 103.
17. Ibid., 9.
18. Ibid., 53.
19. Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
20. John Ashbery, “As One Put Drunk into the Packet Boat,” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Penguin, 2009), 1.
21. Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 288.
22. Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1.
23. Blanchfield, A Several World, 80–81.
24. Ibid., 80. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1993).
25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
26. Blanchfield, A Several World, 94.
27. Blanchfield, “National Poetry Month Featured Poet,” interview, Entropy, April 25, 2014. Available online at entropymag.org.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Brian Blanchfield
BOOKS
Not Even Then. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
A Several World. Brooklyn: Nightboat Books, 2014.
Essays
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. New York: Nightboat Books, 2016.
DANIEL BORZUTZKY
POEMS
FROM The Book of Interfering Bodies
The Book of Interfering Bodies
I’ve noticed that writers who are superb at making love are much more rarely great writers than those who are scared and not so good at it.
MARGUERITE DURAS (translated by Barbara Bray)
The book begins with an epigraph: “every body that is not my body is a foreign country.” The reader opens the book to find bodies with words all over them. And when the reader finds these bodies, the words make her feel fearful, as if she is speaking to a master bureaucrat, a police officer, or
a doctor. The words project authority, but this is an illusion. The words do not have authority. It is the bodies, soaked in simple words, which make the reader feel inadequate. On the first page of the book a body wiggles in a grave, and words ascend out of his mouth and hair. There is an electrical current running through these words and from one page to another. On the second page, the words illuminate the paper, and out of the light appears a bureaucrat whose eyes are two television screens inside of which there are two writers trying to make love, but there is something on the TV screens that comes between them. It is the carcass of a dog, and then a man in an expensive suit who falls out of a window, and then a baby lifting her head out of the desert sand, then a disembodied arm, then a starving body sleeping on cold streets, then an African war, an Asian war, a European war, an American war, then radiation poisoning, polluted baby formula, children with missing limbs. And this goes on for pages. Each page is an image that prevents the bodies from making love. A strong wind starts to blow through the pages and a young girl appears with television sets for eyes. The wind makes the light turn neon and now in the two eyes that are television sets the reader sees her own body opening up like a volcano and flooding the pages with ash and lava and all the small animals that she inadvertently trapped as she went about the business of life. Two more young bodies with television sets for eyes appear inside the television in the eyes of the young girl, and in the blue screens the reader sees herself trying to make love to another reader, but their bodies are blocked by cities, highways, religious institutions, languages, doors, automobiles, curtains, valleys, frontiers, oceans, wars, scientific advancements, clocks, weapons, forests, darkness, collapsing nations, and light. A man comes into the television screens. He opens his mouth and a famine falls onto the pages. He is an emigrant, and through his eyes he communicates that he is homesick for his former body, for the wool rags he used to wrap himself in, for the hair they cropped before they threw him in the river, before they sunk him in the mud and made great economic advancements as he dropped to the bottom of the sea. I am not an individual, the man says, as he steps between the bodies who wish to make love. I am a dead mountain; my mouth is a bloody carcass; my belly is a dead river; my face is a city drowning in a storm. Perhaps I better go back to the valley, he says, but as he tries to step out of the television screen, he falls to the ground with a thud, and lays there like a pile of rocks.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 12