Empathy, Resistance and the Specific and Twisted

by Sonja Greckol

 

No ideas but in things...           

The word empathy entered the English language from the German Einfühlung(feeling into) or “esthetic sympathy”  around the beginning of the 20th century and applied largely to engagement generated by a work of art and by nature. Art theorists described the visceral, bodily movement toward an art object as the basis of appreciation (SEP). In English, empathy has come to mean an emotional identification or moving toward, usually another creature, usually a human. The specific generates empathy in that it allows us to disjoin the large and obscured into comprising pieces—the small and cumulative—either overtly in the detail, the cliché made new or through the fragment requiring completion.  It is through these mechanisms that poetry of resistance effectively engages reader in the struggles of others.The poetry of resistance arises out of the movement toward or empathy, and empathy, as propelled by the specific, gives rise to the capacity to resist the status quo or conventional understanding of events and/or people.

The Moderns and Early 20th Century Developments in Poetics

Everyone who has taken a creative writing class no doubt have heard: “Go in fear of abstraction,” Ezra Pound’s warning. More elaborately, he entreated writers to

Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

 

Don’t use an expression such as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

 

Go in fear of abstractions (1913).

 

            Pound fills the haiku-like form below with modern and urban images:

 

            In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

            Petals on a wet, black bough (1916).

 

Later, rejecting the moderns—Pound and Eliot specifically—and their reliance on foreign languages and high cultural literacy in favour of a more exuberant and specifically American poetry, William Carlos Williams warned  “(No ideas but in things) Invent!"in A Sort of Song (Collected , V.II). He insisted that language must be made new and that writers must “not [rehash] the literary glories of the past.”  and wrote to Harriet Monroe in 1930,

Now life is above all things else at any given moment subversive of life as it was the moment before—always new, always irregular. Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of the impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal ... Ramazani (p.284).

           

Two of his very short poems demonstrate:

 

            The Great Figure(1921)

 

            Among the rain

            and lights

            I saw the figure 5

            in gold

            on a red

            firetruck

            moving

            tense

            unheeded

            to gong clangs

            siren howls

            and wheels rumbling

            through the dark city(Collected, V.1,174).

 

The figure/ground challenge in the detail lies in the ambiguity in what is where and in precisely what the “Great Figure” might be. Without the detail and without the puzzle that makes it new as well as here, i.e., immediate; these poems become mere sentences broken in short lines.

 

            The Red Wheelbarrow(1923) 

           

            so much depends

            upon

 

            a red wheel

            barrow

 

            glazed with rain

            water

 

            beside the white chickens (Collected, V.1, 224)

 

Apart from the details of description in the originals and the ambiguity of their application, there is the specificity of thewhite chickens, the chickens—not just any chickens but these very chickens, and they are white and maybe wet, right here on this page even. And “the figure 5 in gold,” not just any truck, the #5 truck on which the bell is not ringing, rather on which the  “gong clangs” and the “siren howls.”  These, we can agree, are more evocative of a rainy day and necessity and a farm than is “rain wets some or many tools, animals and their shit” or “a majestic fire truck rolled up sounding a bell."           

The specific is effective: it is evocative in its detail and it is present, palpable, here, now, though it could have been then or it still might be.

Two Contemporary Poets: Queyras and Philip

Expressway is Sina Queyras’s most recent collection of poetry. As the daughter of a highway builder, she is fascinated by “the road” in its many manifestations.  I am tempted to call her work a modern experimental epic. Some themes she takes up: (1) expressways erase history; (2) expressways are the new nature and the destroyer of nature; and (3) Our food production and supply chain rely on interstate and cross-border trucking.

In the fourth section of her opening poem, Queyras evokes the relationship of history and movement:

 

Solitary 4

...

 

Deltas, flood planes; what land bunching, ruffling,

What stones rolling, what wheels (wooden, steel,

Rubber), what riding out on horseback, what

 

Flick of wrist, tug of tether, blast of rock,

What melting of rubber, what extension of self, what

Squeak of progress, what eye, what level, what

...

 

Goat trail on steroids, what native path, canoe trail,

 

Wagon train, trail of tears, what aggregate composition,

What filleted history, what strata, what subplates,

What tectonic metaphor, what recoil, what never

 

Having to deal with the revulsion of self, only

The joy of forward, the joy of onward, the endless fuel;

The circles, the ramps, the fast lanes, the clover leaf.

 

Perspective of elevation, the royalty of those views

...(p.11)

 

            In “Acceptable Dislocations,” the food supply chain:

            ...

[ ]the expressway cargo and tree-lined, stretched

Radio towers, mowers its horns and hogs, its beef

 

And bread vans, hour after hour, laptops, radar

Detectors from New Mexico, Idaho potatoes, HoHos

And Cheetos, all organic grain-fed, pieces of chicken,

 

Pieces of cow, slices of pig, kernels of corn, diced carrot, (p.72)

...

 

She lulls us as readers, seduces us with the rush of details of our consumption until we get her having loaded them on the moving trucks in order for us to get them. Her details are interspersed with abstraction—“joy of forward,” “filleted history,” “squeak of progress”—abstractions and clichés that she has screwed with so as to prick our ears with the new. And she gives us specific details, the endless stream of food for carnivores and herbivores and omnivores—we’ll eat it all.

We get specificity not only from concrete images around which we construct meaning. We also get specificity from surprisingly new convergences—highways and fillets— and these are interspersed with concrete images to construct a sense, as in this example, of movement that transforms our perimeters.

M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! is a series of long poems told in eight voices that she developed out of a one-page legal text from1783 in which an insurance dispute for the cargo of the ship, the Zong, was resolved. To our horror, we discover that the dispute concerned  the disposition of human cargo: 150 men women and children captured and kidnapped from West Africa were thrown overboard to drown when the ship wandered off course and began to run out of water. 

In Zong!, Philip, bringing these 150 people to visibility, to voice, is mourning and honouring—re-membering, perhaps; I might go so far as suggest that she creates auditory fossils, reflections of absence, little monuments to the people erased by the specific practices of protections of the colonizer and slave trader, i.e. the legal decision, the only document of their non|existence.  She works here, as she did in her previous poetic works, within a language/experimental poetic.  (That scares folks who are not poets but mostly scares lyric poets even more!)  She fractures English, first the syntax, and then the individual anguish|english (She Tries, 56) words of the official record. 

Her project seeks to give voice to the obliterated women, men and children; as her tools, she takes the words of the oppressor/annihilator.  But how does one use the oppressor’s tools|words to honour and re-member the annihilated?  With Audre Lorde, we can ask: Can she destroy the master’s house using the master’s tools?

First, she constructs the fragments (p.5, 15).

 

 

Zong! #2

 

                                                                                     the throw in  circumstance

                                    the weight in want

                                                                           

                                                                 in sustenance

 

   for underwriters                                   

 

                                                                 the loss

 

 

   the order in destroy           

 

 

                                                                 the that fact

                                                                 the it was

                                                                 the were

   negroes

 

 

                                                                the after rains

 

                        _____________________________________

                                    Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi Kamu

 

 

 

Zong! #7

 

 

 

 

                                                                   first:

                                                                                                the when

                       

                        the which

                                                                                                the who

                        the were

                                                            the throwing

overboard

 

                                                                                                the be

                                                            come apprehended

 

                        exist did not

 

 

 

 

 

                        __________________________________________

 

                                                Wemusa Ilesanmi  Nayo  Odai

 

                                                                                                                       

Philip has constructed fragments of what we can imagine is meaningful speech that requires a reader to enter the text in order to reconstruct it. The reader cannot complete that fragmented text, but one can link fragments, re-igniting a current between the living and the dead, to make a|some meaning. Importantly, Philip gives us names that the drowned may have had. She renames people for whom there are no remains, for whom there has been as yet no memorializing.

Her fragmentation moves to words that the reader can haltingly reconstruct:

exit the men the king reads then dozes he holds a gold orb in his right hand

bad brew this of underwriters & loss there was

marry in greed

and profit they braved the water get

the oars there was rush there

was roar there

was water arms flail limbs un bras un pied

fail him up there a spear

in his side

thursday is stud day rut

day the crew gets up antics

me I beg you no throw ayo she

big big mi o

 

the deconstructed (p.129-130). (This reconstruction is intended as a tool to further inhabit

the text, my apologies for the violence it does to Philip's original.)

 

                                    exit the me                                                n the king reads then

                                                             doze s he hold

   s a gold o                                                                                                rb in his right

                                                                                    hand a b

                 ad brew this of unde                                                        rwriters & loss there was

                                                  marry in greed

   and profit they braved                                                                                              the water get

                                    the oar s there                                                          was rush there

                                                             was roar there

       was water arms                                                              flail limbs                                          un bras u

 

n pied                                          fail him up                                                             there a spear

                                                            in his side thur

 

 

______new page_____

 

 

sday is stud                                                                                     day rut

                        day the crew gets                                                                         up to antics

                                                                              me i be

                                                     g you no                                                 throw ayo sh

  ebig                                                                                big mi o

 

It is relatively easy to read across the breaks and spaces once the breaks become apparent, but what happens if one allows oneself to slow and drift into these breaks, into sounds, fragments of word, into other languages, into the destruction of the “master’s tools”—without full comprehension, filling instead with silence, breath and the vaguely grasped, the partially realized. I would argue that it is not the words but it is the spaces that we move into, the spaces where Philip’s water-fossils leave glimmers, traces on our lexical maps.

I have provided a range of ways in which “the specific” is used to strengthen contemporary experimental poetry of resistance. It requires some puzzling, some – at least partial – completion, of a new now on our part. The strategies of the specific include the concrete metonymic detail, unusual diction and disembedding word combinations, fractured syntax and fractured words|diction which require our continuing engagement in a new now. While Queyras brings to view the mundane and the ordinary in order for us to build new connections, Philip leads us to more obscure and detailed examination of the invisible in the spaces of the material and visible.

Connection to Poetry of Resistance

Finally, how does this specific, this concrete, this made-new and broken and unbroken work

in resistance poetics? Recall  William Carlos Williams. He writes “Now life is above all things else at any given moment subversive of life as it was the moment before—always new, always irregular. Verse, to be alive, must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of the impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal (Ramazani, 238).”

This disestablishment generates empathic engagement. It is not the lyric moment—that moment in poetry in which the puzzle is solved, in which the subject|poet’s insight reorganizes the prior understanding. Neither poet, Queyras nor Philip, suggests that she can show us what the particular felt like. Instead, in the relations of detail and spaces, the reader is opened to a continuing reorganizing that remains unresolved and that requires continuing massage, continuing wonder and engagement.  And it is out of this continuing wonder, rather than a finished knowing, that we, as readers, establish empathy, that is venture toward, inhabit words and places we have never been, that are not ours.  A poetics of resistance invites us to words, spaces remade unknown from which we might be able to make new partially known.