Meteoric Flowers: Visual Image Becomes Metaphor

In Elizabeth Willis's collection, Meteoric Flowers, the complexly interconnected visual images become metaphors for existence. 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. The language is so strikingly personal 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)

Post-Structuralism

I'm reading This Is Not A Pipe in preparation for my review of S/Z in July. I'm also reading and reviewing Meteoric Flowers next month and there is a sense that these texts are interconnected. The threads curve out from the images in the 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" or rather to counter the way in which language itself becomes conflated with the ideas it seeks to represent. This is the dominant idea within The Order of Things--linguistic orders construct reality and become static things rather than fluid ideas. This is writing as noun rather than verb. The IS rather than is-ing.

I'd rather think of writing as a verb. I think this helps us to remember that all writing, all language use, is representational. It is a thing but it is also a doing. As my dear friend said to me, "an old antagonism exists between those who assign priority to nouns and those who assign priority to verbs; nouns = gods, verbs = tricksters..." 

Let's be tricksters.

The only thing

This blog isn't about my life, it's about my writing, but sometimes these intersect. So, after reading countless blogs and reports, I'm just going to say this about the incident in Steubenville, with thanks to my friend Kate for boiling it down to its most basic core:

When you see a human being passed out on a cold concrete floor, alone, all you have to do is pick her up, maybe put her in a chair. Perhaps, if you are in a really kind mood you could find her phone, dial the number for Home, and let someone know where she is.

What you don't do is rape her.  And then take photos.  And then text the photos to your buddies.  And then make jokes about it.
How did rape ever become an option for how to handle a human being in distress? 

Insert Futile Existential Rant Here

I'm currently trying to do too many things at once. I'm also a ridiculous, perfectionist, control freak so this juggling act is making me somewhat crazy. At some point I'll be back here playing with form and structure in flash fiction stories of failed romance but I honestly don't know when that will be. À bientôt!

Go visit my etsy site!

I make jewelry as well. Please go visit my etsy site and buy something. I need the $. I can also do special orders. Thanks!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/KimberlyWineMadeThis

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

 

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

 

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

 

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

 

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

 

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

 

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

 

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

 

 

(New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

A New Beginning and an End

She had a striking tattoo. A black and white horse, in full gallop, ran along her right side from the top of her thigh to her breast. As might be surmised from the tattoo, she was an equestrian; her large muscular thighs beautiful, powerful. She was voluptuous in every meaning of the word. She was also distant, cold. Her interior hidden behind an artifice of warmth. Her beauty, though difficult to define, was instantly apparent to all who met her. I loved her. But this love was a betrayal. It was not the kind of love that she desired from me. Ultimately, this was our undoing.