Gap Gardening Read online

  also by rosmarie waldrop

  from New Directions

  Blindsight

  Curves to the Apple

  Driven to Abstraction

  A Key into the Language of America

  Reluctant Gravities

  The Reproduction of Profiles

  contents

  Introduction by Nikolai Duffy

  The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger (1972)

  The Road Is Everywhere, or Stop This Body (1978)

  When They Have Senses (1980)

  Nothing Has Changed (1981)

  Differences for Four Hands (1984)

  Streets Enough to Welcome Snow (1986)

  The Reproduction of Profiles (1987)

  Lawn of Excluded Middle (1993)

  Reluctant Gravities (1999)

  Shorter American Memory (1988)

  Peculiar Motions (1990)

  A Form/Of Taking/It All (1990)

  A Key into the Language of America (1994)

  Split Infinites (1998)

  Blindsight (2003)

  Love, Like Pronouns (2003)

  Splitting Image (2005)

  Driven to Abstraction (2010)

  introduction

  edmond jabès has commented how “we always start out from a written text and come back to the text to be written, from the sea to the sea, from the page to the page.”1 There always emerges on the page a blank spot, a blindsight, that experience where, according to the neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio, a person actually sees more than they are consciously aware of. It is, strangely, an experience of dissociation, vision without visual consciousness. It is analogous to the French term acousmatique, which, in the words of the architect Vincent Cornu, denotes “listening to sounds whose origin one cannot see, the acoustic equivalent of indirect lighting.”2

  For Rosmarie Waldrop, writing corresponds to a lens, “a frame wide enough for conjunctions and connotations. And the music of words, with its constant vanishing, to fill in the distance.”3 “My key words,” Waldrop writes, “would be exploring and maintaining; exploring a forest not for the timber that might be sold, but to understand it as a world and to keep this world alive.”4 A poem is always in movement, “the way a dancer moves within music.”5

  Throughout Waldrop’s connected careers as poet, translator, and publisher, the world is established, tentatively, via a constant negotiation between languages, texts, cultures, histories, between forms and grammars, between familiarity and strangeness, self and other, word and silence, just as, also, it is a negotiation of those more knotty fissures between home and refuge, life and writing, matter and transcendence, tradition and innovation. Waldrop’s is a poetry of betweens, of crossings, of differences and relations. Metonymy takes precedence over metaphor; differences become contiguous rather than equivalent. “I enter at a skewed angle,” Waldrop writes in the notebook, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” “through the fissures, the slight difference.”6 “Gap gardening,” Waldrop calls it, “the unbedding of the always.”7

  Born in Germany in 1935, but resident in the United States since 1958, Waldrop is both an American poet with a continental European accent, and a European poet whose foreignness is one of her principally American characteristics. It is also for this reason that it is difficult to know quite where to place Waldrop: her work shares and develops many of the concerns of the post–second World War American avant-garde but at the same time it does not quite fit neatly into any of the critical molds or theoretical pronouncements of American experimental poetics. Similarly, Waldrop is closely connected to innovative poetries in French and German, but she comes at them, despite her own German roots, at a cultural and linguistic remove. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that, situated somewhere between America and Europe, one of the central axioms around which Waldrop’s poetry turns is the very personal sense that language, the world, can be experienced only as gap or aperture, the stutter of syntax.

  In her early poetry Waldrop was interested in exploring the tension between word, line, and silence by complicating the distinction between subject and object. “I propose a pattern in which subject and object function are not fixed, but temporary, reversible, where there is no hierarchy of main and subordinate clauses, but a fluid and constant alternation,” Waldrop wrote.8 Since the 1980s, however, Waldrop’s primary form has been the prose sequence. Prose shifts the differences from the outside to the inside. Waldrop is interested in the bluff where prose and poetry meet, or, more properly, where the one falls into the other, prose into poetry and poetry into prose. It is what Waldrop refers to as the “between-genre,” such that “the prose paragraph has a spaciousness where form can prove ‘a center around which, not a box within which.’”9

  The poetic sequence becomes the model poetic form. It allows an extended project, commentary, or exposition but it does so without making universal gestures. The episodic quality of the sequence enables disjuncture to become a central part of both the poem’s form and content. Order is everything. Gesture is a fragile art made of many pieces, the majority of which go unnoticed; it is what Stefan Brecht, in another context, has called a “non-verbal, arational communication,” an interlinear interchange.10 Life is registered formally, like cracks in the pavement, like mortar. “My sequences,” Waldrop comments, “make a tease of narrative. They have a narrative structure, but I don’t really wrap anything up.”11

  For Waldrop it is the clash of singular, and singularly imperfect, edges that figures the world, in the kind of jarring that exposes loose ends, that gardens the gaps. First and foremost it is a question of finding a form that projects outward, that layers and lays down a topography manifold and open on all sides. It means establishing a poetic method aimed at the adjacent rather than the equivalent. It means finding a way to show, in language, in form, how one perception follows another perception but also how they are not the same and that there is no necessary correspondence, causal or otherwise, between the two. It means “not growing inward, deeper, by finding more to say about the same thing, metaphors for it, symbols, analogies,” Waldrop writes, “but instead turning to the adjoining thing, contiguity, further perceptions”;12 it means “exploring the sentence and its boundaries, slidings, the gaps between fragments, the shadow zone of silence, of margins.”13

  The poems in this book span five decades, including poems from each of the eighteen collections Waldrop has published since 1972. They are presented here in chronological order. In interview, Waldrop has commented how continuities, smooth transitions, tend to be false. The sense that one thing follows on from another is bluff, an illusion of order. “There is always,” she says, “the feeling that I never have enough information. The process is not so much ‘telling’ as questioning. This implies interruption. And in the gaps we might get hints of much that has to be left unsaid — but should be thought about.’”14

  nikolai duffy

  1 Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993) 40; quoted in Lavish Absence, 109.

  2 Vincent Cornu, In the Thick of Things (Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2009), 32.

  3 Rosmarie Waldrop, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” Dissonance (if you are interested) (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 219.

  4 Rosmarie Waldrop, “A
larms and Excursions,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990), 46.

  5 Waldrop, “The Ground is the Only Figure,” 232.

  6 Ibid., 223.

  7 Pam Rehm, quoted by Waldrop in “The Ground is the Only Figure,” 242.

  8 Waldrop, “Thinking of Follows,” 209.

  9 Rob Mclennan, “Twelve or 20 Questions with Rosmarie Waldrop,” Rob Mclennan’s Blog, 11 January 2008, http://robmclennan.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/rosmarie-

  waldrop-was-born-in-kitzingen.html.

  10 Stefan Brecht, The Original Theatre of the City of New York: From the Mid-60s to the Mid-70s, book 1, The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978) 278.

  11 Jared Demick, “An Interview with Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop,” The Jivin’ Lady­bug, http://mysite.verizon.net/vze8911e/jivinladybug/id53.html.

  12 Waldrop, “Charles Olson: Process and Relationship,” Dissonance, 69–70 [58–80].

  13 Waldrop, “Form and Discontent,” Dissonance, 200.

  14 Joan Retallack, “A Conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop,” Contemporary Literature 40, no.3 (Fall 1999), 341.

  the aggressive ways

  of the casual stranger

  Dark Octave

  for Edmond Jabès

  To see darkness

  the eye withdraws from light

  in light

  the darkness is invisible

  the eye’s weakness

  is no weakness of the light

  but the eye

  away from light

  is eyeless

  its power is not-seeing

  and this not-seeing

  sees the night

  do not dismiss your darkness

  or you’ll be left

  with vision’s

  lesser angles

  it

  fills the eye entirely

  Between

  for Ingo

  I’m not quite at home

  on either side of the Atlantic

  I’m not irritated the fish

  kept me

  a home makes you forget

  unaware

  where you are

  unless you think you’d like

  to be some other place

  I can’t think I’d like to be

  some other place

  places are much the same

  aware

  I’m nowhere

  I stand securely in a liquid pane

  touched on all sides

  to change your country

  doesn’t make you

  grow (a German doll

  into an image of America?)

  it doesn’t make you change so much

  you can’t remember

  I remember

  things are much the same

  so much the same the

  differences are barbed

  I try out living at a distance

  watching from a window

  immobile

  not all here

  or there

  a creature with gills and lungs

  I live in shallow water

  but

  when it rains

  I inherit the land

  Like Hölderlin

  got up early

  left the house immediately

  tore out grass

  bits of leather in his pockets

  hit fences with his handkerchief

  answered yes and no

  to his own questions

  lies under grass

  wilted flowers in his pockets

  at the fence I pull my handkerchief

  he liked to say no

  “I’m no longer the same man”

  and

  “nothing is happening to me”

  from As If We Didn’t Have To Talk

  I want to stay and look at

  the mess I’ve made

  spills over

  context

  I’m always on the verge

  or seeing it

  there

  on the edge

  of the horizon

  with doubt in the foreground

  anything may

  hence the troubled

  periphery

  the curve’s lost

  incomplete

  incompletable

  wind over the plains abandoned streets

  general amnesia the vacant breath of sky

  breath of sky

  I might as well claim it’s a rag to

  wipe my hands

  but as long as we’re

  it doesn’t matter

  in spite of constant variations

  what we say

  Afterward

  the first time lead grey sea

  seems to explain

  the horizon

  exists and doesn’t

  if I could

  find again the precise place

  solid

  under my foot

  but memory

  black wind from one place to another

  the same oblique

  emptiness as

  “lived”

  space

  I don’t know why I say all this

  except

  that openness

  within your touch

  My memory open

  you’re there

  scenes I’d hardly been aware of

  our faces touching

  give way to slaughter

  of a surprised beast

  my body vast

  unsure territories

  it would take a long

  I mean images

  what they mean to me gets lost

  vibrations

  distant heat

  it would take a

  long walk through mounting sand to reach them

  I’m sure I’ve never known

  anything in any

  language

  The air swollen

  moisture

  spiderwebs mildewed shadow

  if only I could feel real drops

  against my lips

  spills over the edges

  a woman leans out of the window as if there

  were anything to see

  a hundred yards off

  cars race and a jackhammer tears

  not even my feet

  can hear it

  you’re walking somewhere

  toward me

  and in a while we’ll

  as if things could be touched

  teeth against tongue

  as if we didn’t have to

  talk

  _____

  In order not to

  disperse

  I think each movement of

  my hand

  turns

  the page

  the interval has all the rights

  The belly of an “a” and

  vertigo

  throws the words I stand on

  into the white

  silence charged with

  all the

  possible rains in the world

  go on

  fall back on

  words always already there

  the precise spot

  available

  as in a fog that

  eyes burn

  I carry your name
away

  from our intersection

  The years in my face

  no spectacular stories adorable

  improbabilities

  the road just

  goes on

  without asking

  for approval

  opaque pulsations

  the quality of light not much different

  in the distance

  it’s enough that we’re

  you don’t have to

  frenzy of moths close to

  while you touch me

  _____

  Nothing started yet

  silence holds

  my breath

  waits to speak

  to be able to

  open

  the essential detour

  The way this city plays

  with our bodies

  so much rain the smell of wet

  cement stays in the streets

  out of the old shell

  we’re always walking in a crowd

  bookstalls river iron work

  on balconies

  nothing has stopped over

  the years (surprise)

  light seems to lean against

  absence of gesture

  is a move

  what’s said is out of the game

  it hangs on

  but that proves nothing

  like everyone we adjust

  to just those questions

  we choose to see

  boats on the East River

  barges on the Seine

  garbage in the Seekonk

  float on into the sky

  in my dreams too we walk

  along the roadless widening

  angle of light

  or run

  legs spider long

  breath in our ears

  driven by some force again

  and again

  to the same sentences

  Air rises

  blue

  irresistible with distance

  place to stay

  immobile

  a long time

  at the edge of

  _____

  The room’s no longer

  dissolves in a rhythm from

  inside my eye

  what we just started to talk of