WORKING NOTES by Jennifer Martenson
It is often the case that I learn more than I intend in writing poems. Preoccupations do act as magnets, but I am most interested when accidents show me something I hadn't thought of in any explicit, conscious way and allow me to read my work as if someone else had written it. Sometimes these "accidents" do seem to address questions that I circle around more consciously, and to do so more effectively than any of my "conscious" attempts. For example, in "Cast" I stumbled onto the form simply because I was convinced that the lines which now occupy the position of margin notes belonged to the poem. The challenge was how to work them in. The mechanical act of placing them on the left side of the page exerted an influence over the final stages of writing and also suggested numerous readings of the form which became evident to me only after the poem was written. The relation of the synopsis, commentary, or interpretation to a text or an event; who speaks and who is spoken for; how authority is suggested or achieved in writing are among the things this form seems, at least to me, to suggest. While these issues are often present in a conscious way, finding a form to enact them happened largely by chance and on a dare. Hopefully there are more ways of reading the form than I have here suggested.
Five poems
A vocabulary handed
down through
letters twined in nature
nurture's alphabetic double
helixes where opposites attract
a myth encoded to protect
the public from the audible
expression of neologies
which propagate
recessive points of
view and threaten
to disorient the language
tangled currents,
dark
submerging dark
reflections
wave as they tug
at their roots
a few weeds
plucked
from the unsteady
fragile braid, the
sensate
strung together, self
within a sheen of self
the voicemight be a line
that gropes toward
surface
dangling
in the foreground
solids where the
gaze
might rest
a raft tossed out
the glittering
thread
(back to top)
All the cherished
certainties
are dangling here
The
distance seems
a
little asymmetrical
My
name is
an
haphazard shelter
it
is propped
on
the conditional
it
does not keep me
warm
Most words
I
do not understand
their
lattice
structure,
and the stillness
they extract
This silence is meticulous,
enduring. Touch
/ don't touch
is what it
says, and that is
what we did,
blacked out
entire chapters
at a time
so we were
always partially
submerged in
pools of ink --
legal
by default
in
the regime
of
connotation
I
have tried
to
tell you but
my
code is broken
clarity
has
consequences
so
we live
in
the ellipses
on
the line
where
one tongue meets
another
nowhere
crafted
into pitch
Why am I surprised
that they
still write
us into sickness.
The atmosphere
is lined
with odes to
information
wildly detached
from any
actuality.
Have I not also
sung along.
| I had thought that definition was a chamber | |||||||||
| where ambiguous desires take on shape, the way | |||||||||
| a hand will trace its own reflection in pursuit | |||||||||
| of perfect forgery. And that this is why | |||||||||
| Stuck in the silver | the category of the lesbian is useful. As if without it | ||||||||
| between two rooms | I could no more think to kiss her than ignore | ||||||||
| that pressure at the edge of my vocabulary. | |||||||||
| Or climb down from the hyperbole to find my way | |||||||||
| through the complexities of such a statement. | |||||||||
| Perhaps the "I" could function as an anchor, | |||||||||
| or a frame. Although it binds | |||||||||
| She wanted to escape | nothing to hang onto. Notes decay | ||||||||
| her own reflection, or | to the fragility of gesture as you reach to touch | ||||||||
| she wanted to inhabit it | the contours of a face as seen through cloth | ||||||||
| and even light slows down when traveling | |||||||||
| through the fibrous metaphors | |||||||||
| mistaken for the native language of the psyche. | |||||||||
| In fact, it is a system of gravel paths | |||||||||
| that never hook up in a clearing. All night, | |||||||||
| we paced the edges of what looked like solid ground, | |||||||||
| Loose on its hinges, the exit | deepening the grooves instead of repositioning | ||||||||
| alludes to itself and is | the lines by which we'd been partitioned | ||||||||
| reversible | into speech. Or mapping out a more accommodating | ||||||||
| theory of attraction. Soldered to the this/that | |||||||||
| scheme of things in which -- | |||||||||
|
| How to say, "This picture does not seem | |
| to coincide with my internal sense" | |
| if the mirror's closed over your head? |
BIO: Jennifer Martenson lives in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Re: Chapbook 4 (Reference Press, 1999).
