LINEATE ME, DOC

a LitCafe🔥on the part/whole relationship, thanks to Annie Lighthart

Why do poets chop things up? What’s wrong with a nice SENSIBLE continuous phrase? Why do they have to get their raccoon paws all over perfectly good sentences and shred them into tiny-linies?

But oh, friends, if you took away the many-ness of stars, there would be no galaxy. There could be no phenomenon to behold, to encounter.

If speaking, or knowing— no, if meaning itself— were just a big old wash of oneness, with no edges, with no articulations, joints, or parts, how would it be able to exist at all?

Just as you can only know the parts of a flower because there’s a whole flower to behold, so too the flower cannot occur if it does not distinguish its parts, one from the other, as it grows. Oneness has to emerge from something, and we can only see or gain the coherence of oneness if we first perceive the discontinuities or differences that call it up. It’s the differentness of the facets or parts that allow us to know there can be such a thing as a whole.

It just so happens that most poems have lines, or distinct parts. Poet Annie Lighthart is an expert line-maker, or lineator. She brings the galaxy of the poem’s experience into being by setting up and supporting the interplay between the one and the many, the stars and the swirl. I want to look at one of her poems as a study, or dance, in exquisite sensitivity to how the pieces and the whole need, and create, each other. Bonus: she’s not douchey or performative, so we get to experience the bell-like ring of humble deftness as we go.

Fluency

by Annie Lighthart

The face among the flowers was not a face but a flower

that blurred the edge of comprehension until everything

became a face, everything had eyes, everything had a mind

with secret thoughts inside, and so the barn with its smudged

windows stood aware of impatience and time, and the trowel

with its small head in the dirt plotted how not to be found,

and the old dog, who of course had her own old grey face,

came to have another one, and shifted and sighed on her rug

while thinking about philosophy and the stillness of God,

and then the depths of the afternoons she had passed alone

crossed into my heart, and the ants climbing the table stopped

and looked up, and I fell away blind into a softer knowing

as if into the flowers who took me as one of their own.

I often say to beginning poets in creative writing classes that the best way to make sure the poem has real presence is to create a world inside every line—to make every line its own poem, however slight, or gravitational, that smaller poem may be. As in: if you were to cut the poem into little strips, with one line on each strip, would the reader be able to have an experience inside that one little strip, inside that smaller cosmos, such that the whole could be felt more fully when we arrive at its event horizon?

What better way to fill the roles of parts and whole to bursting than to make sure each star in the galaxy burns?

If brevity is the soul of wit, then you have a perhaps rather witless warrior on your side here (yours truly, not Annie), but your word-warrior-companion is steadfast. She will take each line of the above poem, number it, and proceed to read it as its own poem, taking a dose of her own medicine so that when we reencounter the whole in the end, we can feel it in all its miraculous, fractal, paradoxical, luxuriant many-ness. Which is to say: its full expression.

1.

The face among the flowers was not a face but a flower

Look at the immediate deftness, the great skill and intelligence of allowing here: confusion, elision, the dream-state of noticing with the sudden freshness of a mortal mind stripped of its daily filters. What is asserted as a face, so that we can know it as such and orient first, is then immediately asserted as flower, so we can know it as such. We feel the slip, the slide, that sensual dilation of re-orientation.