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Dana Ward and Karen Weiser
On Affinity, a conversation
Dear K,
My vaporized ice polish lost to the summer means sanguine opacity conquers the icicles. Heaven is drawing kids from them & outside of those sides a likeness I'd structure is drawing itself, an affinity common as any chair here, & no less mysterious, lost to cognition, I can't really say that I 'get' the azaleas, just that I'm passing them breathlessly. I take it to be the most charming expedience, gone from the object to song by just fainting, slightly, & coming to moved. Outside of sides, & then outside of those:
Affinity
A ship that I'd love
to have built
is still, light willing
already sailing, though
this lake is small
& all the ships on it
are out of control
we reason they're pretty
ecstatic. I'll take them
to all of my motor skills. One affinity dates back to before death, back that far, where I wish my room would look out on another. Another accumulates structure, is a city, then quickly abandons those buildings. I like throwing maps at that empty spot. To record how they wouldn't return or remain, to record all their lovely transmissions.
Dear Dana,
Sometimes imbibing being moved
impressions stick-soft fruit-a thumbprint
spaces out in the indent.
It's like fainting into response-soporific casualty-
start then stop click click hum,
spiderwebbing thoughts strike out.
Language but its movement is pre-hover;
the azaleas breathe when I pass them; entire gardens rising.
Sailing is lovely transmission-
boat and landscape we are moving
inside it, moved by it. Larger forces press,
nothing but response will do. Fleeting.
All the ships I read are out of control but it's me fainting;
tightly packed ecstasies emanate from emptiness.
Look again, underground pastures. Look again,
monster watershape disappears.
Dear K,
"you ever see Star Wars?...it's very accurate."
—Sun Ra When I responded to your poem 'Forged,' I was struck by the opening stanzas. The arrangement of objects suggested a gallery installation, so there was room to move around, space to write in. The idea of 'making' moved to the foreground as I read, & then would recede, so there was rhythm there too. The poem ends with that terrific phrase, 'shark-lit,' as if the whole piece were illuminated, backward. Cloudy, bright & perilous. Maybe there's a freedom evinced by affinity, leaving an easy compulsion to act. To sing not only along but back to, with & away from, through & into. Maybe affinity is a kind of vague awe at uncanny resemblance, shared concern & connection. You hear a voice in the dark so you have to talk back, because what if the voice disappeared!
I feel like the struggle to find an adequate critical vocabulary to describe the distinctions between admiration/influence/affinity is important. I'm compelled to turn straight to verse when I do so. TheSun Ra quote above strikes me both as funny, of course, but also oddly relevant, where some improbable fiction draws an otherwise indescribable picture. Poems certainly do this. But what is it we find in one another's work in particular that promotes this?
Dear D,
I have been thinking about the work that carves out a space for response like fireworks interrupting daily life. I keep coming back to how I feel when I read something that grows beyond my peripheral vision, that opens out when I think about it. Add a layer of dimensional movement onto Victor Shlovsky's idea of "making strange" and that sensation of comprehension vertigo is what causes affinity for me.
There is something else though, that makes affinity, and I think you are right when you say it has to do with a sense of ease. I want to try on some aspect of the work I am reading to see what happens. This can only happen when the language or rhythm of the poem is intimate with language I use or could use.
There is a short story of Virginia Woolf's called "Kew Gardens" which I love for its vertigo. In it she describes these moments where people in the garden kind of melt. Here is a quote: "Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women and children, were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles."
Affinity for "Harry's Sonnets"
Steep drop
backwards
it's luck-vision
blacked out
in action-
resonant water
your flash-
foot fits
stolen goods.
Perhaps Pom2 is a record of response to vertigo?
Dear K,
Imaginary Vertigo Notebook
Sun., Oct 7, 1982
First vertiginous walk. Fell, but landed in leaves. There wasn't a sufficient canary population in northern Kentucky. Some other birds (less yellow, stronger) descended in a team & with beaks drug me up by the collar. Exhausted, they couldn't fly me any further. I staggered home. (made up those poems.)
Fri., July 21, 1985
Vertigo again. Saw fifteen soap bubbles. I fell out the first story window into some hydrangeas, (luckily). Once awake I wrote this & recovered.
Mon., June 8, 1992
Finally, more vertigo! Fireworks briefly stopped traffic. A stranded commuter helped me to my feet. I felt a few stitches wade out of my head, then reconvene in the gash.
Sat., May 10, 1999
No vertigo really but beautiful poems. Probably an outdoor film festival.
Mon., July 21, 2003
Vertigo! Karen says you're ostranie, shuttled in excess, eclipsing the whole field of vision. I agree, & can read along fine. In a locked room exploding with fireworks, here's how the doors fly open...
Issue #4
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