I’ve been a fan of precision in poetry from the first time I started reading it as a body of work called “poetry.” I didn’t realize precision was a common thread uniting my favorite poems until much, much later.
By precision I mean the whole “best words in the best order” and “click of the lid of a well-made box” thing. This is different from concision. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a sharply honed and precise poem without being what anyone would call concise. Likewise, a precise description of an object may well be many pages long, with each page adding to that precision.
One of the reasons I find a fair amount of contemporary experimental (post-avant) poetry so dissatisfying is that the poets seem to mistake concision for precision. Being elliptical to the point of requiring the reader to do all the work in making an assemblage of words into some kind of work of art is as far from precise as a poet can get. Such poetry looks like it should be razor sharp, but it’s often just stage prop, the blade collapsing under the pressure of a reader’s weight.
Nor does precision mean predictable. Formal aspects of rhyme and meter have a precision partly based on the expectation of regularity, but that expectation–and thwarting it–acts in service of something bigger and more important. When it doesn’t, well…that’s why poor formal poems are as empty in their own way as poor experimental poems. Each unhappy poem is unhappy in its own way.
This is a long way of getting to Benjamin Grossberg’s poem “The Space Traveler Talks Frankly About Desire.” I loved it the first time I read it, and not just because it uses a number of elements I find eternally intriguing–physics and the psyche, white and dark light of sun and star, strange forces, dark matter. Upon rereading and rereading, I started thinking about the way in which this poem manages to be precise about the very abstract phenomenon of desire (abstract until we are actually experiencing it ourselves). I was reminded of Blake’s Auguries of Innocence which itself attempts to get at an abstracted but intensely human idea but in a necessarily indirect manner. Blake’s poem is, of course, larger in every way: it is grandiose in the way of the romantics and is attempting to get at (or discover) something about what humanity is. Grossberg’s concern might be just one small part of a poem like Blake’s, but that’s precisely (ha) the kid of precision I am referring to. Where Blake is trying to define the contours of (the) invisible man by tossing words like globs of mud toward the ripple in the corner of his eye, Grossberg is zeroing in on one small extremity.
I’m not sure I’ve actually said much about Grossberg’s poem so far. If that bothers you, bite me. It’s my blog; you all are just visitors.
Gravity, matter and stars are natural metaphors for desire. The word “attraction,” after all, comes from the Latin “attractus,” which means both to pull together and to draw from (as in drawing sickness from a body). Physics merely confirms what the poets already know: that for each action there is a reaction, equal and opposite, and that drawing away toward one means drawing away from another.
Grossberg uses this metaphorical matter to great effect, exposing how the heart resembles and rejects the logic of the physical world. “All gold’s forged in a star’s heart,” just as we are all made of matter from the birth of the universe. The physics do not change just because we do. We all still burn. But the heart is not a machine. We are blessed with the broken quality of understanding logic while feeling something else, the consequences of being human, we for whom “the idea must be satisfied.”
And Grossberg’s wordplay gives the work meaning as a poem with broken lines rather than a prose poem. This distinctions is, unfrotiatelyno I loved the echoes and alliterations and inversions throughout the poem, clearly shown in lines such as:
But what differentiates us, this
sentience, is that it isn’t simply mass
that compels, but the idea of it:
the weighted notion, the notion
of waiting. A physics of our condition–
The differentiates/sentience pairing is rich on the tongue; the weighted/weighting pair would be much less effective without the line break; the notion/condition pair creates a nice resonance before the poem continues.
Good stuff.
“The Space Traveler Talks Frankly About Desire”
Out here the pull of bodies keeps
everything moving. Mass desires
mass, in even the tiniest quantities.
But what differentiates us, this
sentience, is that it isn’t simply mass
that compels, but the idea of it:
the weighted notion, the notion
of waiting. A physics of our condition—
you might call it a strange force—
gives the dream of bodies more pull
than those orbiting close. It’s as if,
human, your Earth suddenly tore
itself from the Sun, flung itself
chest first into the void, for the idea
of another: a sun whose conversions
were more compelling. You know
all gold’s forged in a star’s heart?
Well, it’s as if your Earth lusted
for a sun that could generate better
luster. No matter the likelihood
of the planet spinning endlessly
forward— bowling ball (blue, marbled)
gliding on a never-ending lane toward
no pins. No matter that the star—
if it existed— might crisp it to coal.
The idea must be satisfied. But
I was going to talk frankly about
desire, wasn’t I? Well, I desire
frankly: this dark is cold, and I
distinctly remember back there, still
pulsing, the place where I left my sun.
–Benjamin S. Grossberg
–from Cave Wall
About this BAP12 Series
Occasionally Jared Stein and I will banter about the Best American Poetry anthology. We did it in 2004. And we did it in 2009. And some other times in between that have vanished down the interweb tubes. And we are doing it now.
