ROBERT KELLY Engages
Waters Of by Billie Chernicoff
(Lunar Chandelier Collective,
2016)
Foreword
What are we to make of such grace?
The great poets of the last half-century rediscovered for us the
musical power of the poetic line, the actual line in an actual poem. Not a counted beat but a rhythmed tune, a
muscular (the heart is a muscle) limb of sound.
From the line we make music, and we shape lines by the silences between
them.
We learned from Creeley and Duncan and Williams (for me, in that
order) how the interruption of syntax indulged that deepest of all qualities of
poetry, what Shklovsky and the Russian
Formalists called ostranenie, its
strangeness, its subtle or not so subtle difference from ordinary speech. From that strangeness our poets made music.
When I read Billie Chernicoff’s work, though, for all its quiet,
tuneful suspensions of syntax over visual gaps, I’m conscious of something else
at play. I want to tease out here, if I
can, what that difference is. Or not so
much difference (from what I and a million other post-New American Poetry poets
are doing) as something added to that process, a different way the music is
being used.
Provisionally, I think it is a mode of making visual. Look at the longish poem in the middle of the
book, “Gradiva,” and you’ll find a scrupulously lucid description of the image
of a ‘walking woman’ — which is pretty much what I take the Latin word to
mean. That poem, its summoning of the
image, is my clue to what’s fresh, very fresh, about Chernicoff’s work.
To say it as clearly as I’ve been able to think it, she’s trying
to turn the hesitant, graceful movement of music into a visual apprehension of
physical movement. The silences at the
ends of her lines are not just rests in the musical score, rests in the
measure, they are the geometric points that outline the shape of a person, or a
Chinese bronze— it is as if the shape of the poem says: when you see this, know that there is a
curve, a salient, a deep embowerment in what the sound of me is summoning you
to behold.
Something like that. I feel
it in the persistent visualization that goes on in Chernicoff’s work — things
say look at me. Even when they seem to
say touch or taste me, I see more the hand reaching out to caress, rather than
the feel of bronze or flower beneath the fingertip.
In this sense, Chernicoff’s work is profoundly shaped by, part of,
the visual culture we more and more inhabit.
She casts the image on the mind’s eye — as poetry has always been doing,
that’s what an image is — Brakhage’s ‘eye-mage’, Pound’s phanopoeia, all
that. But Chernicoff’s process is not to
cast the image by describing it in so many words, but by setting the name of it
in supple motion in the silent air around the poem — we see the shimmer.
Something like that, again.
I started out by noticing the grace, the dance–like suavity of her
tunes, her sequences, especially the order
of things she notices for us to observe or inhabit. Quiet, slow, unhurried as any object, the
spectacles her poems unfold are sumptuous in their giving.
The book’s title itself starts us off with just such a seen
silence. The waters of. Of what?
Of Babylon where we wept, remembering? Of Siloe, where we hold our
tongues and meditate? The Housatonic that flows through her neighbor
fields? Sea that washes all away? That of
makes us see something, a place or word, just as so often the line will end,
startling as a knock on the door. We
hurry to open it to see who’s there.
*****
Robert Kelly, currently the first Poet Laureate of Dutchess County, is the author of many books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His most recent publications are A Voice Full of Cities: Collected Essays; Uncertainties; Opening the Seals; The Hexagon and Heart Thread and The Secret Name of Now. His website is http://rk-ology.com/ and his blog is http://rk-ology.blogspot.com/ . He teaches in the Written Arts Program at Bard College, and is married to the translator Charlotte Mandell.
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