Hoover's Eternal Moments

2009-08-30T15:53:03Z

5 Like the contemporary work of Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Louise Glück and C. K. Williams, among others, Paul Hoover's poem "The Windows (Speech-lit-Islands)" considers consciousness, its shifts and travels, how it freezes for isolated instants, alters our state of being, and then moves elsewhere. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale claims "only the moment is eternal", and for Montale, that eternal moment is a genesis, including all that is imaginatively inchoate. Hoover's poem intuits a similar insight. Perhaps it is in response to the ever-increasing speed of the technological age that contemporary poets embrace an aesthetic of slow motion, an almost calibrated examination of creative thought process, and an obsessive analysis of the interface between imagination and intellect. Hoover's poem, a postmodern ars poetica, reaches back to Romanticism for an individual connection to larger truths. It may very well have been Elizabeth Bishop in her poem "In the Waiting Room" who gave birth to this poetry of consciousness, though forerunners and co-parents of this poem reach as far back as Donne and the metaphysical poets, as well as the pre-moderns,Yeats, Mallarmé, Rilke, and later on, Roethke, Plath, and Sexton. Bishops's poem tells of her earliest memory realizing her individual subjectivity as a young child. American poets have pondered how the mind moves in these self-reflective states ever since. In lyrical tercets the structure of this compelling, if perplexing, piece by Paul Hoover dances down the page in the sway of concrete images and speculative thought. The entire poem posits an as-if situation writ large, so that we are immediately drawn into one metaphorical setting after another, until we find ourselves in a maze of mind mirrors. From there, imagination leaps, intellect barely hitting its stride as the mind of the poem wanders so that our own consciousness is altered within the reading of the poem. The first stanza's alliteration of hard Gs and smooth Ns, impress us with the mind's unconscious movements, its stops and starts over tripwires and mine traps. The first two stanzas present the "you" of the poem (or first-person-once-removed, so to speak) immersed in a surreal vision, the grass, "uncanny/trying to be green" as if the grass were an out-of-this world green, one not known before by the "you" of the poem, a green that promptly affects everything else in the mind's sight. Perhaps this heightened sense of color also signifies the fertility of the mind when it drifts into receptivity, allowing the right brain barriers to open the wings of imagination. The next stanzas expand the thought but change the circumstances slightly. Now we take in the speculative situation of the "you" receiving a "message unique" again "as if" like a "seeming" neighbor taking in the mail, a soldier perhaps returning from war. But this is not the actual reality of the "you." It is a postulated circumstance; we sense that the "you" is somewhat alienated from belonging to a "wife and family", indeed, alienated from his "life to give" and without a country to give a life for. The repetition of the letter F—in "if", "first", "fallen", and further down, "life", "wife", "family", "if", and, "feels", emphasizes the feather-like, ephemeral state. It appears this "you" may be experiencing time at this moment in some slightly altered dimension, held in suspension, and that the word(s) of that letter are keys to crossing this threshold. We are uncertain of what it is, although we see that this unique message is going to impact the consciousness of the "you," the "I," and the speaker so that it will be forever changed. The "you" has had an experience of loss. Although the object/person lost is unclear, we know there is enough trauma, sorrow, or longing to stun him into a momentary wrinkle of time full of tiny details and images that he sees or senses for the first time so to "read the signs" as they flash through his mind. The poem, with short lines and without punctuation, continually pushes and pulls imaginative thought. The words "had you" in the fifth stanza hypothesize specific information that is only conjectured, but create another reality in the negative white space. The seventh stanza contains the next precedented as if phrase and speaks of "unlearning how the wind feels exactly." This suggests that a habitual understanding of the wind's inner experience (as if there were such a thing) has changed. The speaker no longer can count on past interpretations of phenomenological events; the known world is untrustworthy. To unlearn the wind, one must enter a changing attitude, shift sensual, tactile perception, and experience something new. So the poem now appears to be about a whole body of charged energy around the speaker, or the "you" (meaning "I"), looking at life through fresh vision with new eyes and sentience, for it is now a different wind contacting the body "going up the spine", a different wind than the one the "you" might have identified before. With the "unlearning" of habitual perception, the "you" is now more open to magical reality, and he can sense "the wheat sinking/into the ground nearby." Whatever words are unsubmerged in their meaning, they have penetrated his being. Due to the free-flowing lines and the lack of punctuation, we read the poem in a dream state and move along with the speaker's dreamlike mind. Even the confusion of the "you"/"I" speaker leads us to question the veracity of subjective thought. The consciousness of the poem is at once inside the speculative scene and removed from it by the fact of its own reflection on the scene. The inscape of the poet's mind filters little but keeps fusing its focus; we are rushed into a more domestic image, told "the whiteness of milk" may be different, as well as a white "nearby" or adjacent to the internal landscape of the wheat. And quickly the mind floats forward, metaphorically, personifying the milk which is mysteriously wearing a skirt. This line is followed by the enigmatic naming "miss meat and miss gravy." We wonder if it is the new whiteness of the milk that alters these words to something we can taste like meat and gravy. Somehow the milk remains virginal and pure with the words "miss" used twice, as if to advertise the innocence of the entire configuration of this new vision. Paradoxically, the mysterious milk has a "mystical skirt uplifted", which suggests some intimate truth unveiled. These opposites of the pure and possibly profane are held together in the negative capability of the poem. The imaginative function appears to heal these polarities by holding them both in tension. What has the speaker learned in the unique message that has opened his window of consciousness to an onrush of possibilities? No matter, all positives, all negatives, as if electrically charged, buzz him into a larger bandwidth. When we reach the tenth stanza, we cross into territory of the third as if, which adds to the layering imagery by a superimposition. We are now introduced to a discussion of language that isnâ€™t lost in its meaning, language that floats with the speech-lit-islands, uncontaminated by dictionary definitions and mental associations. We wonder if this language is part of the unique message of the "as if for the first time" letter opening, if it is the private language of mysticism where ineffable ideas can only be approximated through metaphor. Speech is "light" (i.e. "lit") hovering above the gravitas of connotation and nuance. All is dissolved on the misty speech-lit-islands, and we meet our latest as if in the discussion of a trancendence where no doubt can curtail the expansiveness of the light. This light is known and identified in the synesthesia of Bee-singing and bell-ringing sounds. The openness of the "you" allows for a transcendent view. If the letter foretells a death of someone dear—someone at war, someone lost to the speaker—the mind, nonetheless, sweeps into a higher range of view and all the Earth is altered. To determine the speaker, who is taking in the transcendence of the imagined state, is however, challenging. One must suspend doubt of its very existence and hear through the "ear's black window" as if seeing through the glass darkly. Behind the window that separates varying realities, the speaker can "whisper to the glass" discerning the separation of one moment from another. One moment in the habitual ego consciousness feels different in the world of the ever-suspended present. Perhaps by whispering to the glass, the speaker can find solace, understanding, or merely becomes cognizant of the company of energies that are attracted to this new knowledge. The "you" observes the personified glass—or dividing line between instants—and the glass past collapses back into sand. Even this personified glass has "a past in sand" that is no longer relevant to the current consciousness of the poem, for the past is always gone. What was before vanishes and from behind the black window the "you" with its new vision watches a sentence pass by as it is altered into a voice: "someone's calling//someone's raining." Every discernment is in a state of flux, of becoming, changing in the nanoseconds of the leaping mind. In the rain of that voice, in the "creaking contradictions", we have moved from the windows to the door. This reminds us of a view one might catch accidentally through an open door, a view one was not meant to catch, but in catching, could do nothing but be caught up in that moment of viewing. The temporal world is held in check while visionary light sees through the construct of time and holds to transcendence as the eternal observer. The poet goes outside the self and asks "what bride is not disheveled", hardly an adjective we would use to apply to a bride, for the minute ministrations of her preparation for a wedding keep her from dishevelment. So what is this force of undoing? It seems to bring us back to the purity of what the bride represents: the pure being willing to undergo initiation into another state, a state where she will merge with a husband, where she will be both the nurturing purity of milk and its counterpoint, the mystical meat beneath her skirt. This merging will deliver her into a consciousness that stops time and places her above the polarities of daily reality. She is disheveled by "the world's scissors", cut from "make-shape shiftings", which would bind her to the temporal expectations. She is lost and undone, just as the speaker is undone by the unique message of the letter. But the elect consciousness of this poem explores these shiftings, which recall continental divides and moving mountains; "been a long time//since you wrote yourself in stone/auto-lithographic". Here, the "you" of the poem again addresses itself from the perspective of dual consciousness, the higher eternal knowing in the altered state, and the lower quotidian ego which hopes to pin the world into stability, permanently fixed in its dependable orbiting. We hear "stone" and "auto-lithographic" amplified as some kind of powerful force that marks history, that marks ourselves and our consciousness as it goes forward. "[A]utolithographic" also implies a vision propelled from the higher self, sealed, signed and stamped—which the lower ego would like to sign onto—while the uncorrupted soul holds court in the poem overall. Something in the "message unique" of the would-be letter has given the "you" access to the stone-carved self, but it is not as mutable as the eternal self. In the eighteenth stanza of this poem, this selfhood pushes forth to proclaim itself arrived. We are told "[I]" seems to be alone. Yet [I] may have now discovered it is not alone, that it is connected to the higher octave of mind, the universal mind. Indeed, it is connected to the "you." This uncertain [I] stakes some claims on its position in history. "[I] suffers in a crowd/but not in a yellow room/in a yellow town" where "everyone's on loan." Yellow, an ambivalent color on its own, whether the gold of enlightened knowledge or the putrid nausea of sickness, pervades the thought. Perhaps the "you"/"[I]" is functioning within these polarities as well, as if they could be united in one revelation about how "nimble people cry" and how "a bullet makes you die." We are all on borrowed time on our roads of life, as spirits loaned to bodies, impressed and manipulated by temporal, dualistic choices. And we know all too well our temporal vulnerability. Both the nimbleness and the impact of the bullet imply speed. The "you" of the poem is shot through his nimble mind with realizations that heighten his ordinary existence to an extraordinary understanding. The "yellow room" is perceived as ordinary, a different perception than the estranged green of the grass. Perhaps this "you" sees and engages this dismal territory at a distance and views the other, the one whose news resides in the letter across the whole world, in the journey across the "whole word", whatever word it is: "dead" perhaps, or "lost", "over" or "gone", and then travels that distance to the side of the other. Perhaps they join in that moment, in that collective space beyond temporality, where they can coexist and converse. "[W]hat are you thinking/conjured of a god/pears you'll never taste"; whomever is addressed is no longer here, gone, changed irrevocably as is the inquirer. And is the other really other, or do the speakers know they are a part of one another? The double negative of "no non-journey" makes the journey more certain, inevitable, crossing boundaries of the possible. Indeed, the journey is "across the whole word"— "word" is so close to world—referring perhaps to a specific letter in the word, as if that keys the plot of this cryptic story. We wonder if the speaker is not, all along, addressing himself both as "you" and "I." The unwritten lines are not found in the poem, like the pears the missing one will "never taste." But what is not written has left the writer, the "you," the inscrutable [I] and the reader in a startling new universe where opposites coincide and the mind is left alone to reconcile them imaginatively. There is the [I] and its aloneness; and there is the "you" who is "absent sometimes laughing", choosing a response to cope with all he has undergone, affected by all the contemplated as if moments. The "you" knows this change of consciousness makes all the difference on the traveling mind's less-traveled roads. He has the insight of one intuitive moment and passes through it changed. And perhaps in the transcendence, in the eternal moments of those travels, the "you" and the "I" are one and the same in the universal mind, because only through the art of poetry, through the quintessential speech-lit connective, can these islands of consciousness be bridged. Hoover's Eternal Moments

2009-09-15T06:21:38Z