teaching | The Influence

This week’s poem, “White Trees” by Nathalie Handal, provided the first line to an exquisite corpse exercise I conducted with my classes this week. An exquisite corpse is a writing game created by surrealists and is conducted in a group setting. Each person writes down a line of poetry, then hands their paper to another person who then writes a line based on the previous one on the page; the paper then gets folded so that the first line is tucked away and only the most recent line is visible. The paper exchanges hands again, the poem growing line by half-glimpsed line.

Handal’s first line (When the white trees are no longer in sight) lent itself to a number of interesting following lines. One particular exquisite corpse poem started:

When the white trees are no longer in sight
I close my eyes and see the black ones
with large white fangs taunting me

black-and-white-branches-tree-high I feel the spirit of Handal’s poem lends itself to this particular exercise because of its logic and progression. Line by line, the poem deploys its images and metaphors, each one a turn down the hallway of the poem, a turn that leads to only more hallway, no doors or rooms. As the reading experience grows and the mind tries to gather a narrative from the lines, a lyrical logic takes over, and, instead of a linear narrative, what is evoked is the feeling of what is present slipping out of sight. This pattern of impression and shift of thought contains a spontaneity and surprise similar to that experienced in the writing of an exquisite corpse.

White Trees – Nathalie Handal

When the white trees are no longer in sight
they are telling us something,
like the body that undresses
when someone is around,
like the woman who wants
to read what her nude curves
are trying to say,
of what it was to be together,
lips on lips
but it’s over now, the town
we once loved in, the maps
we once drew, the echoes that
once passed through us
as if they needed something we had.

from Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Read more about the poet here.

In the summer course I’m teaching, we have been discussing ideas of writing as performance; that is, what gets going as soon as words are on the page. It’s similar to what William Stafford means when he says, “The moon you are describing is the one you are creating,” which I wrote about in a post from this Spring.

I came across this week’s poem, “The Joy of Writing” by Wislawa Szymborska, and share it here because of the connection it has to these concepts of writing as performance. From the beginning, the poem ties the act of writing to what’s being described, creating a singular conceit of “these written woods.” The metaphor is stretched enjoyably far. What I find most enjoyable of all, at least this week, is the startling nature of the last line: “Revenge of a mortal hand.” In contrast to the title of the poem which sets up low dramatic expectations, Szymborska takes us down to that last line with a sense of mortality and complication that is surprising as well as apt and necessary.

The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides 1824-7 by William Blake 1757-1827

The Joy of Writing – Wislawa Szymborska

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Happy mortaling!

José