Magic Gaps: Poetry, Ecstasy, and The Movies

Guest blogger, Kathryn Cowles
 
I was thinking today about how much the typewriter changed the way poetry was written. This actually has to do with the movies. Bear with me. Before the typewriter, we, and I’m brazenly using the collective royal “we” of all poets ever anywhere, we had to handwrite everything in slow, if intimate, notebooks. Pencils, pens dipped in ink, move smoothly across the page with a slight, light scrape, like dry skin on rough sheets. Typewriters jerk. Lines feel cut at their ends coming out of a typewriter because they require that physical push of the carriage return lever. Typed line breaks are physical phenomena. Typewriters are also really, really loud. The older ones, at least. And you have to push hard on the key if you want the letter to appear. You have to earn your letters, and you have to mean them. No wonder the ampersand gained such traction. No wonder poets like Charles Olson started abbreviating words. Sd. Yr. These words had the hammered weight of a thing created by a hand-operated machine-for-writing. They were heavier. The technology had something to do with the look and feel of the poetry.
 
And so, the movies. Poets love the movies. (Frank O’Hara: “And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”). Unlike the typewriter, film is not a technology that we (there it is again, that “we”), for the most part, use specifically for writing. And yet I think film has influenced the way we (and here I mean something more like “society at large”) make meaning these days and so has influenced the meaning-making of poems, the structure, even. Film is a medium that doesn’t explain the gaps between its scenes and images. Angles shift, night butts up against day, one conversation or character contrasts with another later on, we get a flash of a face, the back of a shoe, the top of a tree, and the audience draws its own hundreds of little connections between seemingly unlike things, skirting the gaps created in the editing room and locating constellations of meaning between scenes. In some of my favorite films, cut shots, pressed right up against each other, do something that is in the same vein as metaphor, something that requires and rewards a leap of connection from its audience.
 
Denise Levertov writes about the energy that comes from leaping over gaps in poems in her beautiful essay “Some Notes on Organic Form”: “The X-factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side—that’s ecstasy.” Film provides a technological model for this ecstatic leap—a juxtaposition of image with unlike image, scene with unlike scene, to create something new and exciting.
 
Sure, poets have been splicing image with image for hundreds of years. Think of Pound’s early 20th century poem “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” And that poem was highly influenced by ancient Chinese poetry, which can splice images together in its sleep, with both hands tied behind its back. Yet something feels so modern about the juxtaposition of cut things placed side by side with no explanation and no voice-over in a poem, the edges of the sliced film almost visible between phrases. (After all, there’s also something so modern about the Lascaux cave paintings.)
 
Think of just about any Jean Valentine poem. Here’s one:

Annunciation
I saw my soul become flesh    breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down     pouring
no one to catch it     my life breaking open
no one to contain it     my
pelvis thinning out into God
 
Annunciation, soul, flesh, linseed oil, paper, life, pelvis, God. The stuff of this poem is disparate, is spliced together, but feels remarkably of a piece. Even the white space is part of the splicing—a literalization of Levertov’s magic gaps. We need something to leap over in order to have the kind of revelatory, visionary tenor at the end of the poem, in order for the poem to become more than the sum of its parts, to cover some ground, to move.
 
In the end, perhaps films and typewriters just provide a neat metaphor for me to use to talk about what I love that poems can do, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. I could have used, for an equally appropriate metaphor, an example from the visual arts—say, Picasso’s collages that incorporate real bits of newspaper or wicker or advertising tape, that mix figure and ground till they’re indecipherable. The take-home lesson is, perhaps, that we (by which I now mean we broadly, poets, artists, and anyone else who makes new things) will always incorporate what’s around us, whether it’s technology or style, stealing what we need good-naturedly from other media and artists, putting piece against piece until the whole lifts itself up above the page with buzz, leaps across the gaps between its images, becomes magic. As Levertov says, “that’s ecstasy.”

Kathryn Cowles is the author of Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bear Star Press, 2008). Her poems and poem-photograph hybrids have appeared in Bombay Gin, drunken boat, Colorado Review, Forklift: Ohio, Interim, Pleiades, and Versal, among others. She teaches 20th and 21st century poetry and creative writing as an assistant professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and she splits her time between Geneva and northwestern Ohio, where her partner, poet Geoffrey Babbitt, teaches almost identical subjects. Their dog Adeline, a great generator of joy, travels back and forth between homes, cheering up whomever needs the most cheering at any given moment.

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