The Poetics of Absence: Retelling, Renaming, Remembering Loss and How It Defines Us

By Norma Lundberg

I was captured by the theme of absence in many of the books we read in Influency 6, noticing—and wondering about—the presence of absence. The mother of Glen Downie’s daughter in our first book, Downie’s Loyalty Management, is absent. In three subsequent books, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Sue Sinclair’s Breaker, and Phil Hall’s White Porcupine, absence is a recurring motif. I am intrigued by its different manifestations.

This is not absence as an indication that the poems in these books are “lacking” something I expected, or found “missing” in them. It is rather that the echoes in the spaces which I read as absence, or read into the poems themselves, led to my desire to explore the centrality of lack, loss, and absence in the struggle to capture lived and imagined experience in language. I understand absence as a feature endemic to poetry, resounding in its depths, connecting us to what is most peculiar about being human, and using language to express the difference between our experience in a specific culture, and the perceptions that strike us personally and bodily and which we feel an urge to articulate word-fully and musically.

I’ve also been reading a book by Richard Stamelman, Lost beyond Telling: Representation of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry. It’s not that the sense of loss or absence is peculiar to these French writers, but Stamelman’s insight into their work elucidates a more general “poetics of loss” in tune with my thoughts about these Influency poets.

Stamelman says:

Loss is the fait accompli of the modern poem, the experience from which poetry emerges into being; it is the raison d’être of poetic language. While a past event, a lost object of pleasure, or a distant homeland may be literally “lost beyond telling” . . . [t]he way in which an experience was (and is) lost can be articulated, even if the experience—in the fullness, immediacy, and presence it once had—cannot. Loss, then, is the cause as well as the subject of the modern poem. (ix-x)

On pages 94 and 95 of Zong! Philip represents absence and loss both spatially and linguistically. The spaces between the words reinforce the loss of human lives and the loss of stories of the lost ones, and the specific words she uses are words of naming. Stamelman again seems relevant: “We try to overcome loss by naming it, by representing it, and by finding new forms and images through which to retell, recall, remember, and resuscitate what has disappeared” (4). Appearing on page 94 of Zong! are names of five African languages spoken on the slave ship: Fon, Ewe, San, Lua, and Rada. On page 95, nine women’s names appear mid-page with “ru   th” followed by the others broken radically by spaces, echoing the names running along the bottom of the pages in the book’s first section, “Os.” These nine names, however, are common European and/or biblical names—in contrast to the African names printed along the bottom of the pages—another kind of haunting? Essential to the act of remembering, of witnessing the presence and the loss of life, is the giving of names.

Name-giving is important for the newly born, for the initiation process in some cultures, and for the dead on graves and monuments. Those murdered on the ship have no grave sites, and are doubly lost. But there is naming on these two pages: the naming of the concept of the law itself—ius [L. for law]—and reference to an older outrage, the sacking and burning of Troy and the subsequent carrying off of surviving Trojans into slavery. There is also naming as the work of the poet, whether the poet who wrote about the loss of life at Troy, or the poet of the murders on the Zong. “The poet writes, waits for the past to part, for the red sea, for the nation, inter pares [among equals], for the city of god, with no god; spare us” (Philip 94, 95). The words throughout this section are spaced broadly apart on the page almost as bodies were scattered on the water. They suggest a silence between their voicing. Philip names the poet as someone whose words not only bear witness, but remind us of human history and the promises of “civilization,” “justice,” and “religion” and their absence on the ship.

Stamelman writes that “what we have lost defines us … that identity, marked by the vestiges of absence and lack, is the history of survival, the history of what is left behind” (13). These words struck me as especially relevant to Breaker and to some of the discussions about Sue Sinclair’s use of the pronouns you/we/us, in preference to the first-person singular, which she proposed as an effacement of self. While it might be possible to consider such effacement as the essential absence that recurs in this collection, that’s not where I sense it. I recall few references in our Influency discussions to the “haunting” of the Breaker poems by the growing intensity of our environmental crisis—and this does require the collective first person plural pronoun our for “rien ne survit en soi”—“nothing survives by itself,” nor do we. I’d propose that Breaker works as a naming of specific damages to the land and creatures of the planet, the naming of an ongoing extinction and the continuation of “making absent” what makes life in our world habitable.

Breaker is also an act of witnessing destruction in a poetic style different from Zong! On the page in Breaker, there is no rupture of space, no visual representation of breakage, but an entrancing lyrical sequence of lines. The use of personal pronouns, questioned by some, is a choice I find compatible with the act of witnessing. In the first poem in Breaker, what is essentially a dialogic process begins with the vision of the magnificent, riderless, apocalyptic horse that enters in a burst of light demanding that “you” surrender.

Key to my reading of Breaker is the poem “Drought”: “And overhead, the birds:/chips of bone in the sky, remnants,/fact of the world’s brokenness” (Sinclair, 29).

In the following fifteen lines, the word you and variants your and you’re appear eleven times:

            You look up, asking to be forgiven for a crime

            you’re still trying to locate. You know it’s out there,

            stare toward the edge of the marsh, the welt of bright water

            shrinking before your eyes. A sky of pre-worldly clarity

            only confirms your guilt, an inherent misalignment

            that keeps you from knowing even a fraction

            of what you see.

            You cross the heat-ridden ground, the sweet, brittle scent

            of sage rising underfoot. So easy to pretend a single word

            will occur to you, and that it will do all the good

            anyone could hope. The earth is parched and lonely,

            relies on dignity to protect it. Each thing hanging

            by the thread of itself. Bleating crickets. Rustle of dry stalks.

            The silence pushes you toward yourself:

            it’s time to walk deep into the heart of what troubles you. (29, my italics)

The highlighted words suggest something at “the heart of what troubles you.” Further, in this philosopher-poet’s work, there is recognition of the difficulty of connection between what “you [we as humans] see” and what keeps us from “knowing”; that rift or absence between our perception of things and our understanding, knowledge, or certainty.

The opening “And” suggests a conversation or dialogue in process as the poem begins, and the “you” is an Other (Another human? One who “knows,”  feels “guilt,” and uses language?) addressed by the poet/witness. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas quoted in Stamelman might illuminate Sinclair’s concerns: “The relationship with the Other calls me into question, empties me of myself and continues to empty me . . .the toi roaming through the world opens the landscape to its otherness”(135). “The Other” is the phenomenon of our consciousness making it possible both to be in the world, and to see ourselves being in the world, a “self-consciousness” that is both a meta-physical handicap and an asset. The dialogic process does not imply one person addressing another — it is effectively one consciousness or conscience addressing another.

The absence that moves me in Breaker is the absence of certainty that the human self(ves) can have an effect on the greater world, the absence of faith not in a named deity, but in human ability to repair the broken world. The book’s title poem—like so many of the poems—is threaded with both wonder at the traces of beauty that continue and with a feeling of helplessness. Our consciousness has been a curse as well as a blessing, allowing us to see, and then to see ourselves seeing, but powerless to transform:

            How helpless you are yet

            on the brink of being able to do more,

            as though you could punch your hand through

            the window to rescue whatever it is that,

            trapped inside, haunts the corridors.

            You haven’t, though, quite got what it takes. (Sinclair, 41, my italics)

In this powerful and moving book, I notice how Sinclair’s specifics of the physical world, the “sweet brittle scent/ of sage rising underfoot,” “Bleating crickets. Rustle of dry stalks” reveal their musical undertones, and I feel drawn to the particularities of the birds, the sky, the marsh. In other poems, I feel a hunger for such detail, less meta and more physical with fewer numbing abstractions: “fatigue,” “failure,” “the inevitable,” “the depths” with their implied erasure of human agency. More naming of “the birds,” “the sky,” “the marsh” might keep them from slipping into abstraction. They are all part of the body of the world and connected to our ephemeral bodies, and they are not lonely, as Sinclair indeed perceives in her poem called “Nesting” (46). The ephemeral nature of experience is something I consider both a cause for wonder and a balm for despair. Loneliness is the curse of consciousness, when we see ourselves metaphysically and disconnected. Disconnection denotes a particular kind of absence.

Phil Hall’s White Porcupine seems to suggest absence associated with exile from a past that shaped, enriched, enlanguaged him in a place with its particular aura and presence. His use of the word terroir includes the notion of nurturing coming from a particular place on earth, but here also is a past associated with a place to which he doesn’t wish—understandably—to return. This is an essential absence from the past and that place, but because of this the poetry is now possible.

Hall addresses absence on the page by replacing parts of words with altered parts or missing letters, with the effect of maintaining a sense of connection to the original experience, while transforming it, making it new. We move from past to present with the shift from pain to play, and are given new meanings redolent of sound and musicality.

In Hall’s “Ink or wim” the poem recaptures the movement from then to now, from a difficult past through to poetry, with the medium being ink— that crucial letter "s" having been dropped from “sink or swim” —  the notion of depth with its doubling of meaning.

Ink or wim

it is a slow journey

home to depth from the obvious

home that insists only meaning

 has any depth

 

myth never needed our my

 (its lisp homes into the poorest corners)

 

failure’s knock’s not unkind

 

nature versions itself blank

breeze quilts swim (41)

 

Then there’s the play with myth—the story we carry inside us about our origins, and how it “never needed our my”—Hall’s my not being his own but belonging to, subservient to an our, the childhood lisp of th no longer needed. The word home appears three times, with the echoing rhyme of slow, and only, then the lone drum beat line of “Failure’s knock’s not unkind,” with the mind wanting to make of the word n-o-t its homonym k-n-o-t followed by “nature (human? wilderness? whose nature?) versions itself blank.” It is as if nature has no intrinsic version of what it is, leaves a blank page on which we might be able to construct our story, our myth, and so Hall does with the words: breeze (blowing from the “natural world” ) animating the constructed/created/comforting home-associated quilts, and the restoration of swim from the wim in “Ink or wim” as altered in the first line. For he did not sink, he does swim, a magician of serious play. Hall’s writing illustrates not only that meaning has depth, but so does memory, so does feeling, so does longing.

Meaning is not absent.