I'm reading
This Is Not A Pipe in preparation for my review of
S/Z next month. This reading has also influenced my interrogation of
Meteoric Flowers
and I'm struck by this sense that these texts are interconnected.
The threads curve out from the images in all three of these texts to form a structure
that is anti-formal. A post-structure that rejects formal aesthetics in
an attempt to move beyond "words and things" in order to create a sensibility that counters the
way in which language itself becomes conflated with the ideas it seeks
to represent. This is also the dominant idea within Foucault's
The Order of Things--Foucault makes visible the minute ways in which linguistic
orders construct reality and become static things rather than fluid
ideas. Foucault's vision of language warns against our tendency to privilege writing as noun rather than verb--to become consumed by the IS rather than simply
is-ing.
Contrary to that consumptive vision of the IS, Elizabeth Willis's collection,
Meteoric Flowers, weaves together complexly
interconnected visual images that become mobile metaphors for existence amid the "noise of the early twenty-first century" (77). On page 75 she tells us that we all "live under the rule of Pepsi" and in the first poem in the collection she describes the world that clanks "noun, noun, noun." The clanking of the noun-infused world is an irritation, but "sand in the shoe doesn't make you an oyster" (3). There are no pearls here; life, love,
technology, and evolution collide to offer flashes of the tenuous and
fragile human relationships that form between mother and daughter,
teacher and pupil, master and apprentice, poet and reader, word and thing. The language
is also strikingly personal--to the degree that one feels
almost like a voyeur. The
collection is an homage to both Wallace Stevens and Erasmus Darwin, and
the influence of both of these writers on the collection is clear, but
at the same time the prose poems are intensely personal, almost
confessional.
The form is experimental, forcing readers to rethink ideas about the
imagined differences between verse and prose. The collection is broken
into four cantos, each canto contains thirteen prose poems (or verses),
except for the third canto, which contains fifteen poems, and, in an
explicit homage to Erasmus Darwin's 1791 publication,
Botanic Garden,
each canto ends with an editor's note of errata and omissions. However,
these notes, omissions, and errata are themselves poems (or continuing
verses depending on how you read them). Willis refers to these poems as
"lyric interruptions" to the prose cantos. In a note on the text Willis
explains:
The investigative energy and poetic ambition of his Botanic Garden (1791)
suggested not so much a form as a sensibility with which to approach a
period of political, intellectual, and biological transformation.
Darwin's poems address everything from the sexual life of plants to the
evils of slavery, the conquest of Mexico, Franklin's experiments with
electricity, and the relation of poetry to painting. In their unwieldy
asymmetries and their sudden leaps between botany, political and
aesthetic history, and pastoral romance, this work of the late
Enlightenment seemed an eerily apt model for riding out the
inter-discursive noise of the early twenty-first century. Poetry, it
says, can be at once an account of the physical world, a rethinking of
the order of things, and a caprice. (77)
And so it is. If this is Willis's contractual agreement with her reader,
then her poems do exactly what they set out to do--these poems are "at
once an account of the physical world, a rethinking of the order of
things, and a caprice."
I am in love with this collection, admittedly, but one of my favorites, possibly due to my enduring Yeats obsession, has to be
"Rosicrucian Machinery"
The past torches itself like a mummy, dear but misremembered.
What did you manage to remember of your day at the beach,
blood in the sand? We're close enough to touch the bull's horn
with a gasp. Of course I pity a boy among crows. A spectator
trawling for the roundest metaphor to counterweight the stabbing
air. What gives, or gave, to get us here, what wired fluorescence?
The treelike nerves to become all things. Turned in, reflected,
postponed. (46)
What is your favorite image? Why?
Do you see a philosophy of language at work here? Or is it just a figure of my imagination?
What do you think this collection is about? Is it about anything? Or, since Willis invokes Stevens, is it about the "nothing that is"?
