Noelle Kocot: Making Every Word Count

The reader’s experience of a poem can be affected by its line-lengths. In general, the shorter a poem’s overall line-length, the more a reader will need to slow down their processing of the poem.

 First some examples, then we’ll explore why this might be the case.

     The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner   (Randall Jarrell)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

(from Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems, edited by William H. Pritchard.

    New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, page 12)

Here we see a fairly constant visual length to the lines, and when read aloud, each line takes the same noticeable time to say.  So the lines have a palpable presence, whether visual or aural. Another feature of this poem is that each phrase or thought finishes at the end of the physical line. The technical term for this is end-stopped lines, because the end of the thought coincides with the end of the printed line.

Here’s another example of long lines: the opening stanza of C. K. Williams’s poem Ice as originally printed in his Collected Poems.

Ice   (C. K. Williams)

That astonishing thing that happens when you crack a needle-awl into a

block of ice:

the way a perfect section through it crazes into gleaming fault-lines, frac-

tures, facets;

dazzling silvery deltas that in one too-quick-to-capture instant madly

complicate the cosmos with its innards.

Radiant now with spines and spikes, aggressive barbs of glittering light, a

treasure hoard of light,

when you stab it again it comes apart in nearly equal segments, both

faces grainy, gnawed at, dull.

(from C. K. Williams: Collected Poems. New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus

    and Giroux, page 487)

The poem’s lines are so capacious that when printed in a book, a given line needs to wrap around before the next one begins. Once again, the lines are end-stopped: the end of a thought coincides with the end of each line (ignoring those wrap-arounds from physical printing constraints).

Let’s now move toward the other end of the line-length spectrum. Here is the first section of another C.K. Williams poem.  

     Night   (C. K. Williams)

     1.

Somehow a light plane          

coming in low at three

in the morning to a local airstrip

hits a complex of tones

in its growl so I hear mingled

with it a peal of church bells,

swelling in and out

of auditability, arrhythmic,

but rich and insistent, then,

though I try to hold them,

they dissolve, fade away;

only that monochrome

drone bores on

alone through the dark.

  

(from C. K. Williams: Collected Poems. New York, 1990: Farrar, Straus

    and Giroux, page 608)

The lines here are noticeably shorter and each contains three major beats. Unlike the previous examples, this poem’s lines are not always end-stopped: sometimes a phrase flows immediately into the following line (a feature called enjambment).

Here’s what Williams did not write:

            Somehow a light plane coming in low at three in the morning to a local airstrip

            hits a complex of tones in its growl

            so I hear mingled with it a peal of church bells

swelling in and out of auditability, arrhythmic, but rich and insistent,

then, though I try to hold them,

they dissolve, fade away;

only their monochrome drone bores on alone through the dark.

By staging the event as three-beat lines, the original version takes the reader more time to physically process what’s printed on the page. This enables an inherently short event to expand in perceived duration so that the poem’s various facets have more of an opportunity to register with the reader.

             

What might account for this slowing down of time and focus?

Culturally, we are accustomed to lots of information residing in a horizontal line—think of the typically wide paragraphs in books, magazines, emails, etc. So when a poem has a short overall line-length, the pace of information disclosure is noticeably slower. In addition, we are used to visually gleaning as much information as we can from each horizontal line, rather than incrementally building our understanding as we move vertically through a series of short lines.

We will now consider two extreme examples of this “line-length controls the reader’s processing of a poem” phenomenon. Both of them come from the book Phantom Pains of Madness (2016) by Noelle Kocot (KOH-cut). Each of its poems is structured as a series of single-word lines which are capitalized, and each poem is un-punctuated. First, here is Kocot’s poem “In Sickness”.

Look

At

How

That

Juice   

Squeezes

Itself  

Into

That

Glass              

Over   

There          

And

How

We                  

Indulge

In

Our

Caresses

Until               

The

Train

Helps 

Us                

To                   

Rest

By

Simply

Speeding

Off                   

Without

Us

                   

(“In Sickness” from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York,      2016: Wave Books, pages 94-95)

Given the poem’s architectural constraints, no single line (word) is privileged. And because we are in effect reading the poem one word at a time, we are constructing an ongoing provisional understanding of the poem which is subject to elaboration and/or correction as we proceed. Visually speaking, the poem makes each word count.

Ignoring for now the poem’s title “In Sickness”, the reader is initially asked to focus on some juice which squeezes itself (surprise!) into a glass, rather than by some human being’s involvement. This is our provisional understanding. But given the non-appearance of a human agent, the verb “squeeze” might mean that the juice fits within a narrow confined space (“let me squeeze into these new shoes”), rather than a piece of fruit being compressed to release its juice.  At any rate, the glass is “Over   There” at some remove, rather than being right here.

Continuing: “And   How   We (who?)   Indulge (surprise!)   In   Our   Caresses (surprise!)” until something else happens—“The   “Train   Helps   Us (surprise!)” to do something, namely, “Rest (surprise!)” because the train speeds off  “Without   Us (surprise!)” .

             

How does this unexpected state of affairs relate to the poem’s title “In Sickness”? Is the speaker sharing some events while in a state of physical and/or psychological sickness? Or does the sickness somehow stem from the train “Simply   Speeding   Off   Without   Us” and leaving “Us” (never identified) behind? Unlike arithmetic, there is no one correct answer, and the poem leaves open various alternatives for the reader. These possibilities are available because the reader experiences the universe of the poem word-by-word, as an ongoing understanding gets created.

Another significant aspect of the poem’s restrictive architecture: because each line is a single word, the reader may notice that some words are longer than others. Most are single syllables, although some of them have two syllables (Itself, Indulge, Speeding, Without). There’s only one instance of a three-syllable word (Caresses). The focus on individual words of noticeably different length allows the poem to subtly employ different levels of emphasis, which in turn drives the instances of surprise which we’ve noted above.

In particular, it is the visually longer words which are unexpected, given the poem’s deliberately slow-paced revelation of facts. Consider the following details, in which I’ve italicized specific words:

“(Look   At   How   That   Juice)  Squeezes   Itself” . . .  (How   We)   Indulge   (In   Our)   Caresses   (Until   The   Train   Helps   Us   To   Rest   By)   Simply   Speeding   (Off)   Without   (Us)”.

Now suppose the poem were re-lineated as follows:

Look at how the juice squeezes itself

into the glass over there

and how we indulge in our caresses

until the train helps us to rest

by simply speeding off without us

In this variant (which does not preserve the original’s capitalizations), much of the surprise has evaporated because the reader’s eyes are taking in a wide clump of words in each line. The ingredients of the poem are not released over time in the same discovery-laden manner as in the original.

Having examined the first item in our Noelle Kocot poem-pair, we now turn to a poem which presents the slow-pacing reader with an additional challenge: to become a co-creator. Let’s first visually scan the entire poem, then return to give it a closer reading.

                 ( ___ )

            The

            Day

            Starts

            Out

            Like

            A

            ( ___ )

            For

            Breakfast

            We

            Have   

            ( ___ )

            And

            For

            Lunch

            We

Have

            ( ___ )

            The

            Inchoate

            Jesting

            Tongue

            Survives

            Like

            The

            Truth

            That

            Churns

            In

            Our

            Stomachs

            Doubt

            And

            ( ___ )

            Fill

            Our

            Awareness

            No

            We

            Are

            Not

            Buried

            In

            Our

            Graves

            But

            The

            Fish

            Still

            Stinks

            Like

            ( ___ )

            A

            Future

            Full

            Of

            Holes

            The

            Intonations

            Of

            Hair

            Sweeping

            The

            Grass

            We

            Are

            ( ___ )

            Like

            The

            Word

            ( ___ )

            Swaying

            On

            Its

            Precious

            Stem

(from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York, 2016:

Wave Books, pages 54-57)

The first thing we notice is that the title and several words within the body of the poem are not fully specified: “( ___ )”.

Those “fill-in-the-blank” words are possibly nouns, possibly not. The title could be any single word. And there is variety in the seven blanks within the poem’s body:

·         Blanks #1-3 and #5 are sentence-final

·         Blank #4 is the first noun of a compound subject: “Doubt   And   ( ___ )”

·         Blank #6 is an equation—“We    Are   ( ___ )”—which is a more semantically open possibility. Is the non-specified word a noun (say, soldiers) or an adjective (say, independent)?

·         Blank #7 “Like   The   Word   (___)” could be any part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, whatever).

So we are working here with different flavors of indeterminacy.

Given the reader-supplied missing words, what might the title be? That can only be determined once the reader traverses the entire poem and mentally fills in those blanks. So the title gets determined retrospectively, unlike the usual situation in which a poem’s title appears at the top and sets the stage for the body of the poem. 

The tantalizing implication here is that the poem is never experienced the same twice: each traversal will involve a different set of user-supplied values, and thus a different notion of a user-supplied title. The choice of this particular poem’s structure enlarges the number of possibilities, rather than limiting it.

Looking next at the length of the single words which do appear, we find once again that the longer words involve a sense of surprise. The following schematic highlights some of those unexpected words (italicized):

. . . The   Inchoate   Jesting   Tongue   Survives . . . And   ( ___ )   Fills   Our   Awareness  

. . . The   Intonations   of   Hair   Sweeping  The   Grass

. . . Like   The   Word   ( ___ )   Swaying   On   Its   Precious   Stem

Lest we think that Kocot’s one-word-per-line poetic technique is applicable only to longer poems, let’s look at a “bonus poem”: the final one to appear in Kocot’s book, entitled “Opportunity” —

A

Light

Green

Bug

Hopping

From

Word

Into

Sun

(“Opportunity” from Phantom Pains of Madness by Noelle Kocot. Seattle and New York,

 2016: Wave Books, page 120)

This particular poem’s brief images have a haiku-like feeling. It also has a layout on the page similar to that of a native Japanese haiku, which is traditionally written in a single vertical line of 17 metric pulses (Kanji ideograms plus Hiragana grammatical markers), as opposed to the English-language haiku tradition of three lines with 5-7-5 syllables, respectively.

As in Kocot’s longer poems above, the “single-word line” technique in this brief poem allows for a slowed-down pace of information disclosure. The visually longest word (Hopping) sits at the exact center of the poem. And we encounter surprise when we reach “Word” and “Sun”: the bug hops from a conceptual construct (Word) into physical reality—“Sun” meaning either sunlight itself or jumping up to the actual physical object in the sky.

Once again, Kocot’s approach to a poem’s architecture makes each word count.

Translation, Modeling and Elaboration

In the previous installment of Poem-Pairs, we looked at two differing outcomes when a German poem of Rilke (“Herbsttag”) gets translated into English.

Today we’ll examine how a Spanish poem by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo serves as the basis for a new yet related poem in English by Donald Justice, rather than the latter being merely a translation of the original. Which elements from the Vallejo find their way into the Justice poem, and which do not? What new material appears in the English poem? And what does the English poem, modeled on the Spanish one, tell us about the sensibilities of the American poet Donald Justice?

 Here’s the poem in the original Spanish, followed by an English translation.

     Piedra Negra Sobre una Piedra Blanca   (César Vallejo)

   Me moriré en París con aguacero,

un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.

Me moriré en París —yo no me corro—

talvez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

   Jueves sera, porque hoy, jueves, que proso

estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto

a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,

con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

   Jueves sera, porque hoy, jueves, que proso

estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto

a la mala y, jamós como hoy, me he vuelto,

con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

   César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban

todos sin que él les haga hada;

le daban duro con un palo y duro

   también con una soga; son testigos

los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,

la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos . . .

    

     Black Stone on a White Stone   (César Vallejo)

   I will die in Paris in a downpour,

a day which I can already remember.

I will die in Paris—and I don’t budge—

maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

   Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,

as I prose these lines, I have forced on

my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,

with all my journey, to see myself alone.

   César Vallejo has died, they beat him,

all of them, without him doing anything to them;

they gave it to him hard, with a stick and hard

 

   likewise with a rope; witnesses are

the Thursdays and the humerus bones,

the loneliness, the rain, the roads . . .

(from César Vallejo, The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Clayton Eshelman. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007: University of California Press, pages 380-381)

And now for the Donald Justice poem:

     Variations on a Text by Vallejo   (Donald Justice)

Me moriré en París con aguacero . . .

I will die in Miami in the sun,

On a day when the sun is very bright,

A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,

A day that nobody knows or remembers yet, 

And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers

And in the eyes of the few friends from my childhood

And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,

While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,

Rest on their shovels, and smoke,

Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.

I think it will be on a Sunday like today,

Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,

And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;

And I think it will be a Sunday because today,

When I took out this paper and began to write,

Never before had anything looked so blank,

My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday;

And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,

Looked up at me, not understanding,

And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.

Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,

It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,

The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,

Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,        

And after a while the diggers with their shovels

Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,

And one of them put his blade into the earth

To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,

And scattered the dirt, and spat,

Turning away abruptly, out of respect.

 (from Donald Justice: Collected Poems. New York, 2005: Alfred A. Knopf, pages 158-159)

In chemistry, an "analog" is a structural derivative of a parent compound. Given the subtle yet noticeable differences between the Vallejo original and Justice’s poem, we could say that the latter is a personalized analog of the Spanish poem. Justice revisits and elaborates upon Vallejo’s model. Indeed, Justice’s title “Variations on a Text of Vallejo” (emphasis mine) reminds us of the theme-and-variation tradition in classical music. This is not surprising, given that Justice was an accomplished musician as well as a poet, and that his poems often explore musical moments and events.

We should first note some similarities between the two poems. The Vallejo is structured as a 14-line sonnet (4-4-3-3-), which is an established poetic form. A detectable form is also operative in Variations: three 10-line stanzas in which the ending words repeat the same short-e vowel and final-t sound (respěcT, slěpT, respěcT). In both poems, the opening stanza declares that the speaker will die on a particular day of the week in a particular city with particular weather. The middle sections talk about the conditions under which the actual lines of the poem get created, and the final section announces the death of the speaker and its circumstances.

More telling than the similarities are the differences between the two poems.

In the first stanza, Vallejo’s speaker will die in the romantic city of rainy Paris, while Justice’s speaker will die on a bright sunny day in Miami (the city where Justice was born and grew up). While Vallejo “can already remember” the type of day on which his death will occur, Justice focuses on the fact that others neither remember nor foresee the (type of) day on which he will die. Then comes Justice’s first instance of elaboration upon the Vallejo model: his death will occur on a day when “the sun will be bright then on the glasses of strangers” as well as in the eyes of a handful of survivors. (This stands in contrast to the speaker’s solitary state in the Vallejo poem.) Justice then offers a tip of the hat to Vallejo by mentioning the gravediggers resting on their shovels in the shade and smoking, “Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.”

Justice’s second stanza differs from the Vallejo model by stating that death will occur on a sunny Sunday (not Vallejo’s mid-week Thursday), which, unlike today, will not be a rainy and windy Sunday. Justice then adds a poetic detail: “And the wind today that made all the little shrubs kneel down” as if in prayerful reverence for the dead. Where Vallejo says that his poem’s lines come from a day unlike today on which he sees himself alone, Justice writes his poem from a place where “My life, these words, the paper, the gray Sunday” never looked so blank—and yet

Justice is not alone: his uncomprehending dog, his son busy reading, and his wife asleep are also present though separate from that moment of the speaker’s experience.

Where Vallejo’s final two stanzas recount his loneliness and suffering at the hands of others for no discernible reason, Justice’s final stanza takes the opportunity to once again elaborate on Vallejo’s model: Justice does not die in solitude, but rather in the presence of the sun shining on the bay, plus a procession of cars “Some with their headlights on” (a funeral procession), plus a reappearance of those gravediggers. Unlike Vallejo’s reported rough treatment at the hands of others, one of Justice’s gravediggers “put his blade . . .”  (shades of Vallejo’s sticks and ropes!) “. . .into the earth/ To [merely] lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami, / And scattered the dirt . . .” . And whereas Vallejo feels humiliated by how others treat him, Justice subverts that impulse by deftly stating that when his gravedigger spat, it was not out of disdain but rather after “turning away abruptly, out of respect”—with the same respect those gravediggers had displayed at the end of the first stanza by “Speaking in Spanish softly . . .”

So, what does the English poem, modeled on Vallejo’s Spanish original, tell us about Justice, whose output has been described as meticulous, careful, exacting? The understated flavor of his diction and his restraint allows Justice to pay homage to Vallejo’s model poem while at the same time allowing for a personal exploration and elaboration of his own sentiments.

I’m thinking here of Beethoven’s many pieces in the Theme&Variations form: the listening pleasure stems from the originality of the variations relative to the opening theme. Taking his 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli for piano, there seems to be no end to Beethoven’s inventiveness and variety. In some sense, we feel we know more about Beethoven than about Diabelli.

So we might ask: “After reading their two poems, who do we feel we know better—Vallejo or Justice?” Whatever the answer, it is clear that Justice is a master of using modeling and variation as a vehicle for his own creativity and expressiveness.

    

    

Translations: Take One, Take Two

    The Poem-Pairs blog awakens from a long hibernation to consider what happens when a poem gets translated into another language. In this case, the poem is Rilke’s “Herbsttag” (Autumn Day). Here is the original German:     

                Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer was sehr gross.

Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,

und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Fruechten voll zu sein;

gieb ihnen noch zwei suedlichere Tage,

draenge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage

die letzte Suesse in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.

Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,

wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben

und wird in den Alleen hin und her

unruhig wandern, wenn die Blaetter treiben.

And here is the first of two translations into English:     

                Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was so immense.

Lay your shadow on the sundials,

and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;

give them another two more southerly days,

press them to ripeness, and chase

the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.

Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,

will stay up, read, write long letters,

and wander the avenues, up and down,

restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

         (from The Essential Rilke: selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah

            Liebmann (revised edition), page 4, The Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins

            Publishers, New York ©2000)

Now that we know what the poem is about, we notice that the German version has three stanzas of increasing length (3 then 4 then 5 lines). This structure has been preserved in the English translation. The ever-increasing stanza-length embodies how the outcome of fullness in nature is not necessarily mirrored in the lives of human beings: some will never build a house and some will live alone, restless.

    Yet the poem itself has more to say. It is, after all, a prayer:

Lord: it is time. The summer was so immense.

Lay your shadow on the sundials,

and let loose the wind in the fields.

The speaker is petitioning for a successful harvest because that outcome is not a foregone conclusion.

    It is worth noting that the Kinnell/Liebmann translation closely follows the German original. But what about our second translation, by Jeredith Merrin?

                     Late Harvest

                            after Rilke’s Herbsttag

     Time, it is time.

Summer has been

long-stretched-out, full.

Go ahead, Fall:

shrink down the days

and sugar the grapes

for late-harvest wine.

Anyone still unknown

to herself will stay,

probably, that way.

Anyone unlinked by love

will be love-

left-out now—waking,

mind pacing

up and down

up and down,

restless as leaf-bits

and papers in the street.

         (from the Poetry Daily website “www.poems.com”, October 15^th 2009)

Is it really a translation? And if so, to what extent is it faithful to the German original?  

    One clue is Merrin’s epigraph: “after Rilke’s Herbsttag”. The Merrin version is modeled after the Rilke poem, yet it is a personal re-interpretation or re-imagining which contains some subtle yet striking differences from Rilke’s original. We initially notice that her two skinny stanzas do not reflect the three-stanza structure of Rilke.

    In addition, Merrin’s version selectively summarizes as well as expands on the Rilke text. Rilke’s prayerful first and second stanza get conflated into a single Merrin first stanza in which Time and the Fall season (rather than the Lord) are being addressed:

     Time, it is time.

Summer has been

long-stretched-out, full.

Go ahead, Fall:

shrink down the days

and sugar the grapes

Lay your shadow on the sundials,

and let loose the wind in the fields.

Those hyphenated phrases “long-stretched-out” (ironic in view of Merrin’s skinny stanzas) and

“late-harvest” were perhaps the creative impetus for how Merrin transforms the images of Rilke’s final stanza:

Anyone still unknown

to herself will stay,

probably, that way.

Anyone unlinked by love

will be love-

left-out now—waking,

mind pacing

up and down

up and down,

restless as leaf-bits

and papers in the street.

Instead of Rilke’s “whoever has no hours now will not build one anymore”, we find

Anyone still unknown

to herself [surprise!] will stay,

probably, that way.

And Rilke’s image

Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,

will stay up, read, write long letters,

and wander the avenues, up and down,

while the leaves are blowing.

gets transformed into

Anyone unlinked by love

will be love-

left-out now—waking,

mind pacing

up and down

up and down,

restless as leaf-bits

and papers in the street.

Note how Rilke’s physical image

Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,

will stay up, read, write long letters,

and wander the avenues, up and down . . .

becomes a mental image in Merrin’s rendition:

mind pacing

up and down

up and down

And Rilke’s concluding image of leaves blowing becomes an implied physical image in Merrin’s version:

restless as leaf-bits

and papers in the street.

    Rilke’s original German poem and the two translations above suggest that although we each engage in and interpret common human experiences and emotions, we do so in personal and idiosyncratically meaningful ways.