Self-appointment with wind.
Today I’m thinking about the differences between “appointment” and “disappointment.”
I have lots of appointments, all the time, and I am so very often disappointed. Are you like this? I wonder if many of us are like this.
In my own writing I have been urging toward a poetics of sufficiency, plenty, enough; but this is reflective not of my having assumed any sort of passive, self-contented stance. Quite the opposite: it is reflective of how at my poetic horizon satisfaction still glimmers as a far-off set of effects I am compelled to desire. The inclination to move to re-positioning, to adjust and inquire of standards, to test a different aesthetic register of pleasure, this is an insistent leaning in my work, rarely a punctual, fuss-free arrival.
And this allows me strong subjective access to one of the ongoing questions I have had of the poetries we have looked at in the Salon. Instead of asking what each book has nailed to the mat, achieved, what firm appointments it has met on time and with flare, I am drawn to ask: What are the deeper longings of each text, the ones that are beginning to be articulated by the book. In a way, what planned arrivals did it divagate from, and to where? What pre-scripted appointments did it flub, miss, defer? What are its dis/appointments? And in noticing these, naming them, I can begin to name the text’s pull toward new self-appointments, ones that may as well be slightly skewered, and according to such missed hits, be liberated to a shifting set of desires-in-process, inquiries, exploratory leaps, combustions, turns and resettled distant horizon lines.
2.
I have noticed with my boys that, if I want to have a real talk with them, with their complicated confusions away from which they might rather squirm (it’s possible), we are best to be in motion together. Walking seems to be best, side-long steps, a pulse of movement where we can become synchronized through physical cadence as a meeting of minds occurs more fallibly above. On soft nights we’ll walk through the narrow city streets, glancing at houses, their interiors, their lawns, their signs of life and of absence, holding in our separate consciousness some assessment of all the “others,” at the same time as we are separately trying to weigh the value and rightness of individual self, our own status, our progress, our achievement. Do we agree, or can one be persuaded to change opinion? Do we co-exist, if we can’t agree?
With your kids it seems profoundly important to land on mutual co-existence, and allow for significant wiggle room on the opinion front. Still, I am the parent, and often I have an exigency to promote. They are the offspring and there is a power hierarchy. They know I’m older, more experienced and probably have more authority to make them do what I want them to do, or at least I can exert disciplinary consequences if I am disappointed in their subtle display of diffidence, or their outright contradiction, physical, intellectual, emotional.
My sons often suggest they think I’m too critical, that I expect perhaps too much, that I am too tough. Other words for this are I am a completist, a perfectionist, a hyperspecifist, a control freak. I often make mountains out of molehills, and have said enough already, they get it, they get it. I have a facility with lots of language, whereas they enjoy a few quick sentences firming up the appointment’s terms. And after that: it’s okay mom, I get it. They want to get on with it. Get the work done and finished. Before they start though, they say, thanks mom for helping me, now I’m ready to get to it; I get it. Both these kinds of “getting it” are the sufficiency I am tasting after, at the root, the place at which enough has been absorbed to allow for new production, to prepare the moment when a writer decides she/he is ready to write. Here the term writer is meant to include both poet and critic. To be in the process of writing. Where a text goes, after that, must be up to the writer, and if the writer allows invention to occur as the very process not just of pre-scripted argument being performed but of form itself becoming argued and arduous and ardent, then the text will be poetic. It will have a made path that unfolds as it walks. Its every step will be inclining toward the path it urges itself to invent. Inevitably the path will be self-appointed, arriving where it arrives, to a cave, or back alley, or body of water.
And my boys, after completing a difficult schoolwork assignment and landing on the other side of manifesting a required text, of having kept the appointments declared by others that they must keep, of doing the thing that was asked of them, they feel various degrees of esteem and failure, of pleasure at pleasing and doing and making; I usually crow, well, good for you, you did it. You completed the thing, you found your own voice in and for it, you got through it. There is also a component of their own displeasure at having done squarely the thing asked instead of allowing the divagating new thing that entered on its own as worthy of notice, of writerly attention, of desiring gaze.
Many times I know that the thing we are each learning in this social process of forced production is that they will be asked to create many things they do not necessarily care to create, and others will critique how well they create these things they do not necessarily care to create. Appointments will be set for them so that they can be assessed on how well they keep those appointments. It is rarely ever about how well they set and keep their own appointments. This is a much deeper set of questions, for if an individual sets personal appointments, who is to know, and how is their fulfillment or unfulfillment to be assessed by the other? What is the role, the authority, the positioning of the critic when considering appointments set by someone other than the critic?
(Do you or we know what I mean?)
Criticism is loaded, from our earliest experiences of socialization, to exert a force on the subject to change. We feel, if we are the one appointed to authority, that our role, our primary task, our status, is to gently or not so gently realign how another sees the horizon so our angles more closely match. But with kids we often find ourselves on our knees physically trying to situate our gaze closer to the angled origins of the other. We adjust our body, not only our thinking. And as there is sensitivity often intensified when engaging with children, it is easy to notice the immediate effects of saying to the child, you’re shite-filled, crazy. You’re disreputable to be noticing the ants. You’re insignificant for caring about the cat and the cow and the alligator, we live in a city, we must care about other significant things, just look at the magnificent new recycling bins, don’t they hold a very great quantity of trash. Often on these walks out beside a bin is a small bike, and we instantly know it is there because a child living in that house we are walking by has outgrown the thing, and someone else can pick it up and use it. But now, we are all too big, in our house, to pick up the small bike. We are wistful and wordless about this, as we pass, walking quietly, having agreed that the appointments others have created will be met, now, with a good attitude. What we feel is a bloom of love and connectedness, walking, after talking through something that was complicated and confusing, something that did need a walk to get sorted.
3.
I am aware to discuss parenting and modalities of literary reception in the same essay, to appoint the two subjects to visit the same room at a similar time, is suspect. Critics examining books of poetry are not parents assessing and persuading adjustments of behaviour of their children. There is something though, in me today, weighing these two discourses side by side, walking with them so their pulses move under my thinking, and all the while I am looking into other people’s yards, at their colossal city-issued composting and recycling bins, at their large warm televisions illuminating their living rooms, wondering which of them would extinguish the glow of a television for an appointment with a book of poetry. Would the book in a pair of hands find itself scrutinized for its own agenda, or is it always the reader’s agenda that matters most? Is it possible to care deeply about a poetry’s self-appointments and to try to examine how those appointments are always disappointed by the text as it divagates toward adjusted self-appointments, in short, to see how it wants to change, and is in the process of shifting horizons as it is coming into existence?
For me this is what is writerly about a text, and what I love are writerly texts. As a critic, I feel my task is to walk alongside the text, letting it know I have some expectations of it. Some appointments I am hoping it will keep, for me, since these are in my opinion significant appointments. And then I am listening for the subtle or not so subtle declaration by the text of its own appointments, its agenda, its priority noticings, its angles on its horizons. I assess through reading and rereading, listening and closely inquiring, where the text is going, and I notice when it hauls off down a path to the river, because it just, it realizes now, it just needs to be by the water, moving, it wants to hear the body of water moving, into which rain and light hail are dropping, plinging, pitting its soundscape. My voice is present to the text but so is the rain turning to hail. So is the river. And so is the immense hum and roar of the city above, at a distance, always an umbrella of light and of noise and of progress being made with immense schedules of appointments pre-scripted, set by others, to keep its machines in motion.
4.
What a romantic, lyrical pile of crap. (“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”) But some days.
5.
Some further words about “disappointment.” You can see I am trying to reclaim the term from its sinking hopelessness to some glimmer of glamour, some clamour of potentiality always latent and immanent in the process of writing itself.
I am trying to find the counterpointment to disappointment.
Interpointment, maybe.
6.
“I was hoping to find such and such in the text, and I was not disappointed!” You’ll see this in a review from time to time. What’s really being claimed by the critic in such phrasings? So often in reviews disappointment has such a weight, such an authoritative confessional charge.
“But I can’t help but be disappointed….”
“But I’ll admit to being disappointed in the poem’s lack of…”
“What disappoints me about the poet’s use of language is…”
and the ubiquitous:
“This book really did not live up to my expectations.”
I find myself, within Influency Salon, wanting to sort out some new phrasings for this kind of opinion-staking. I want to find ways to say, at least:
“The text offered me such and such a path, and I did not want to take it.”
“Once I’d been down that back alley, I’d had enough. It didn’t persuade me to go along with it again.”
“I recoiled at the dark cave this poem was suggesting we go into.”
“Everyone in that poem was watching football, and you know, I prefer a cooking show if I want to put my feet up.”
“The poem was too stubborn to make any headway with; I needed to think through what I was asking of it.”
This sort of thing. These are the critical stances I am adjusting my own poetry reception modality to prefer. The fact that I’ve gone for a walk with a book, I want this to be one of the primary kinaesthetic features of my self-appointment with it. I want to make sure that along with comparing its company to all the other books that have sat in my hands before, I am allowing it to suggest it has its own reasons for existing, its own agenda, its quite unique desires, and I am rather lucky to be out alongside it on a walk, having a purposeful talk, where my own expectations can meet the sidelong murmur of the poetry’s voice saying, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”
If you’ve ever spoken to a poet who has been reviewed, you’ll hear over and over, “But that is not it, at all.” Far more rarely you’ll hear: “It is so good to be read. I have the feeling that the reviewer actually tried to inhabit the work, and so what they say, is interesting. I get it.” Here the point of criticism makes itself felt in the geography of invention. Appointments have been adjusted. There’s an unfolding of time and thinking, and one voice alongside another, gently or not so gently, making its expectations public, and allowing for the quite private persuasion of the reading-assessing self to agree to go down to the river bank, though it is off the track, though it will make you seriously late. Time unwinds in poetry, and poetry winds and wends and is a wind.
This essay was composed for the final gathering of “Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon,” in Spring 2008. It has previously appeared online in a slightly earlier version at the terrific http://www.agorareview.ca.
