Babydoll
I can’t quite hear you.
It’s hard to say how.
Everything is fast and slow.
I think you are someone.
A loud silence, the dawn.
The sound of rushing toward.
Everything is quiet when my.
Sitting on the bed before.
On the couch, we both.
I’ll call as soon as.
But first I have to.
I have to go to.
Driving slowly in the left.
Bright orange in the east.
A fast stillness creeps over.
I will never see you.
Your life captured in only.
I have to talk about.
But we can’t forget about.
Am I being clear now?
Bob Perelman, Image Source: Jacket Magazine
This poem is an imitation of Bob Perelman’s “Chronic Meanings.” I was immediately drawn to this poem and I found it so interesting. I found a quote by Perelman who, when speaking about the poem, says that “it is an attempt […] to see what happened to meaning as it was interrupted” and that he wrote the poem when he found out a friend had AIDS (a link to the interview can be found here). My poetic imitation, “Babydoll,” is about hearing the news of a loved one dying and then being tasked with writing the obituary. I kept the five word lines, with four lines per stanza or section in the same manner as Perelman’s “Chronic Meanings.” Where the lines in “Chronic Meanings” are always cut short mid-thought, the lines in my poetic imitation sometimes end in a way that makes syntactic sense, most notable in the first and last line. I also diverted from “Chronic Meanings” by ending the last sentence with a question, directly addressing both the reader of the obituary, but also of the poem.
I think Perelman’s use of language works well to express big emotions like shock, grief, and sadness. The sentences cut short work to represent the feeling of not being able for fully absorb what is happening or moments when we are unable to express our thinking. It seems like this is an example of using language to express those moments when language seems to fail us. Lyn Hejinian, in her “The Rejection of Closure,” speaks to this perceived failing when she says that:
Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it, and, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. (895)
Hejinian goes on, though, to speak to the many virtues that lie behind language’s perceived shortcomings.
In light of this notion of what might be perceived as language failing to fully capture feeling, I think “Chronic Meanings’,” conscious look at interrupted meaning (something I tried to capture as well) and how to capture what it means to interrupt meaning through language, is a very interesting move and, I think, a good example of the notion that this perceived inadequacy is just virtue in disguise.
In all honesty, I grappled a lot with many of the poems this week and often struggled with the concept of the Language School. Bob Perelman’s “Chronic Meanings”was the first poem that really clicked for me and doing this poetic exercise helped me to unpack some of what is being expressed by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.
Did anyone else find clarity in a specific poem this week?
Works Cited:
Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.”
Perelman, Bob. “Chronic Meanings.”
You end on a really great question, as I often found specific poems that served as gateways or invitations to thinking about poems in ways that can’t just be reduced to some core tenets of Language poetry. In this case, your reading of this poem, and your research into its contexts, was really surprising. I would never have though of this poem as an elegy, and I would not have considered its trope of meaning-cut-short or redirected to carry a certain existential weight. These poems so often end up, well, back in the poem–it is language about language. The idea that this poem has an external referent (a friend’s death) that can then secure the meaning and color the emotion is fascinating to me. But then again, this is the irony of language poetry: the external referent is often language-poetry theory itself, so we tie these language games back to, say, a critique of capitalist instrumentality. In this case, though, the referent is so traditionally poetic, so clearly within the elegiac genre. Not sure what to do with that recognition, but it does force me to rethink the archness that I sense in so many of the male poets of the language school in particular.