Notes on Rae Armantrout’s “The Way”

Card in pew pocket
announces,
“I am here.”

I made only one statement
because of a bad winter.

Grease is the word; grease
is the way

I am feeling.
Real life emergencies or

flubbing behind the scenes.

As a child,
I was abandoned

in a story
made of trees.

Here’s the small
gasp

of this clearing
come “upon” “again”

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A— don't think so. fact is, my reading's prospered now that you brought it up

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D— I made only one statement / because of a bad winter. I remember a point being made before that this statement might be a financial statement of sorts. Bad winter suggests an extremity. One statement could also be refer back to "I'm here" or to this poem which, although perhaps one statement (The Way), is clearly composed of several utterances, places, periods of time, and frames of reference.

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D— A "bank statement," maybe? But maybe the statement here is the aforementioned "I am here." This person has nothing to offer but herself, the winter having perhaps taken everything else away.

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D —I like how you phrased this question. Most readings usually automatically assume that a trail of pebbles ought to lead somewhere, that a thread decides the value of a maze. What if there's a trail but no destiny? A possibility, since the trail alluded to is composed of bread crumbs, the way therefore described (and created) by something both impermanent and important.

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D— Putting it that way, it seems to me now that the vision of "The Way" parallels Paris Spleen.

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D— These notes are precious! Thanks for relaying, sharing. I like your personal touch, your reflection on the process, how even the act of bringing it to us here could be riddled by mis- or missed readings, additions, over-reading. (Considering now if losing the way is, itself, the way.)

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A— "gasp" truly

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D—
ascending the stories
a tree at a time
clearing the
throat for your gasp

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A— happened to me. sounded beautiful and very true to the reader's (and her father's) life, so I said that I want my poem to mean what she meant, and that I'm grateful she had it mean that way

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A— take every poet's explanation of her poem as a performance, an annotative performance. give it some privilege, but not sole authority (even other readings by the self-same poet can be seen as another performance, like being in the theater for the same play but on another night). other readers could "perform" it, in fact every reading, even interior, undisclosed readings are already performances of the poem in the mind, an inescapable process of co-creation. like this one in particular's likable because armantrout explains her poem with little apparent restraint, supplying the sources, offering some interpretation, but never closing the circle. not every poet is capable of that. in her discussion of "I am here," it seems to me that she's also a meticulously selective reader of texts around her. wonder if this process somehow contributes to her generosity

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D— Life is what happens when you are busy making other fun. Go all out!

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D—
or as in Bergv
all, half-Way's
all the Way yo
u'll ever need

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D— Reading "VIA" and "The Way" through you as quests of sorts. And that greasy inferno sounds like a wonderfully slippery slope, not sure if Virgil's got enough virtue to drag Dante away from that eternal spectacle.

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D— Bergvall made a sort of Limbo with "VIA," keeping Dante from fully entering Inferno (but also from fulfilling his maybe self-ordained destiny) through the loop of (the conceit of?) his own translated words. Burn!

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D— Could this also apply to this story made of trees? I hope you see it as a good thing, this openness of the poem.

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A— false perhaps in that sense as you described, but also as a trail that disrupts the "flow" of language or reasoning

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A— we can only wish. as do the kids. but perhaps there's only (greasy) adolescence

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D— That threw me off. How it's framed here, it appears so. Story made of trees, the pulp of trees as paper, or through the hidden word "leaves" or out of identification with Hansel and Gretel. But the aspiration or destination that the story carries (or with which it resonates, that the story also is, how can that be worldly? At most it's (infected with) a hope to be something other than the world. So we go at it again and again, as mantras and chants (maybe Wiccan spells) promise to carry us elsewhere or inward.

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D—To end up in a place of worship after expecting a place of candy canes and chocolate sprinkles.

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D—
"as soon as" yes
but not one moment before

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A— WORD

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D— Thanks for this exhilarating view of your involvement. I am (for some reason) picturing you as that guy in the courtroom sketching the scene while the judge and the lawyers close read the evidence for the rest of us. Most interesting presence.

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Write minimally: one line or sentence per day

From a thread spun for ModPo from Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas: Would you like to "condense" your day into a line? It's just a handful of days left after all... My day's sentence is hanging wet laundry mindful of what feathers may remain of a turkey some dog left in our yard to die. That doesn't look too minimal. Give it a spin? How was your day?

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It's a migraine day of driving my family to and fro to the in-laws and back, back in time to watch a vid discussion talking a bit about a book on traffic, and another one about "shorter memory" and manatees, when what I was really looking forward to was Bergvall's spin on Dante because I'd like to know if the crew would be covering Bergvall's 700 years note in relation to Dante's intense attachment to (celestial) timing.

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A daughter trying to slide down her mother's thigh while the mother's watching "On John Cage's Writing through Howl".

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that mighty thick book you showed in the vid dicussion, must get my hands on that one

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Taking the family out for breakfast, giving the crew plus points in their Survey Form specifically in Maintenance and Cleanliness, because the kids have been disarranging chairs and were having such fun with it, running up against no one.

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"mutual taming" is beautiful, both as idea and image

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The sky over the park was heavy, but it was popcorn and ice cream and a clean getaway awaiting the family.

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Translated a mother's poem for mother's day after watching phonics songs and squishy ice cream cones with the daughters.

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On Dante's Inferno and Bergvall's "VIA"

Read or listen to Caroline Bergvall's "VIA (48 Dante Variations)"


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DE— But to be now the pop culture cultist (remember SpongeBob!), Bergvall reminds me of a scene in Nightmare on Elm St where the kids in the car wish to escape but find out through landmarks (statues, so forth, but in Bergvall, the words, the woods) that they're going on and on in circles. What's a lovely part of this scene is when a kid suggests that they refer to a road map. Clever kid, so one pulls out a road map and he/she unfolds it and it unfolds some more and there's no end to unfolding it, soon it swamps the passenger seat, threatening the driver's view. It's another Sisyphus thing, like Bergvall condemned the Dante persona to Hell even before he enters Limbo.

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DE— It could be cyclical too, perhaps? Like we find/create a groove (settling in with a person or an ideology or an aesthetic, finding yourself in religion, or in the faithful exercise of civic or filial duties) only to find yourself on the road again, the splinter of the brain tearing past the old comfort zone only to create new ones later.  In a larger view though, that's where you might find your "self" in VIA, in endless transition, staying and going, going to stay, staying to go, one liminal encounter after another, but always bound within the pages of your book. The more things change . . .

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DE— I remember your work on the timing thread, and I think this fits! Dante also tried to figure himself here as in the midpoint of his life-span and at the mid-point of the cosmic life-span (if I remember correctly, which I doubt, his journey was taken halfway between creation and apocalypse or something).

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AN— also: humans are always by definition works in progress. always crossing bridges, climbing up ladders, all fields attest to the human drive to escape its own bounds. whose grasp exceeds whose reach

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DE— I love this delicate fan notion of yours. What a lovely way of putting it but, yes, that's how it seems to me now, after you've said it this way. I thought at first that this image clashes with my own reading, one that hinges (perhaps loosely) around the idea of counsel in Dante. In this opening to the cantos, Dante had yet to find Virgil, his guide, and so it seems to me through Bergvall now how multiple and wasteful his steps are, how shadowy and treacherous (as translations so famously are) indeed these woods. Translations betray, we've so been often told, and translators make poor advisers, and it is of great significance to me that the main sin in Dante's Inferno is False Witness, the crime that makes a Satan of Lucifer, that feeds Brutus and Cassius and Judas (the most vile of counselors in his book) eternally into and out of the three mouths of this Satan

AN— this "fan" of translations could be damning us, if we read it now, again, through (whatever we believe of) dante

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AN— i believe so too. but i've been toying around with the idea that VIA could likewise be a display of the super-adequacy of language, how something so remote and distant can be brought at the threshold of our thoughts in so many ways, perhaps always missing dante's idea, but also never losing sight of its shadowy shape, across the seven centuries

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DE— I'm looking forward to the time comes when I can jog again, because I will seriously put Bergvall's audio on loop.

AN— bergvall's also among my great finds. i know most people want to see old favorites, but me, if they've got more armantrouts and perelmans, baums and bergvalls up their sleeves, I'd really really love to read them!

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AN— thank you for this thread, and for the many worthy, engaging readings already found here.

DE— My own pet intertext would be Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote," a fiction written in a shape of a review where the reviewer lists the accomplishments of this man of letters, Menard, up until he writes his opus, Don Quixote, which he doesn't translate but rewrites line per line by thoroughly immersing himself in the novel and in the life of Cervantes. There's an idea here which I will represent without the power of a Bergvall or Calvino or Borges: that sometimes, when we read, what we're doing is writing the novel or epic again in our mind. So that even something we're reading in the language of our birth is actually being translated by us right into our own psychologies, over our own situations, dreads and desires, which are almost never akin to the stirrings of the "originary" writer.

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AN— in this school of poemfish, about to disperse

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AN— gosh, indeed! these are the kinds of threads I wish to read. bergvall's sense of being in the same place and being all over the place is brilliant. borges, who was mentioned above, would have enjoyed VIA immensely, and I would not be surprised if he'd go so far as to envy it

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AN— another thing i've thought to bring to this thread was something from kung fu tze: "“It's better to read one book a hundred times, than a hundred books one time." deftly rewritten by bruce lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once. but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times." fear bergvall, indeed!

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AN— haunting. yes, that fits. that's the word i'm looking for. that's how it has been for me listening to this, reading it, then reciting it myself

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DE— This pilgrim of a poem leads me back to Dante Alighieri's Comedy, to his desire there for guidance, not only from Virgil, but also from Marsyas and Apollo, from Beatrice herself. He was himself acting as a guide, showing his poetry as a reliable compass of the cosmos. Almost every other critter and demon and character likewise try to instruct Dante (often within the limitations of their damnation), for example his old mentor attends him, as does Ulysses. As it happens, some of these guides are proven false. Here comes Bergvall. She cuts Dante off at the first stanza. He can't get to any of the guides, his first step shown to be multiple, endless, like the line in Eleatic paradoxes where any given point cannot be defined and therefore cannot be traversed (and thus the idea that we are moving at all is an illusion, and in this first step, Dante has taken 700 years and still his foot has yet to fall). Maybe Bergvall undermines Dante by short-circuiting him, reciting him back to himself (an Echo upon a Narcissus), sealing him within his first stanza before he could summon any guide, before he could himself "counsel" any reader. In this sense perhaps, VIA is a critique of Dante and other poets or philosophers (or poetic systems) with such clear and solid ideas of how life must be led, how thought ought be formed and expressed.

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DE— Maybe among those cute guys is a Dante in search of Beatrice? Haha, and scholars, indeed should be able to laugh together. Dante generates lots of differences, heated arguments, scholastic cold shoulders, and it's amazing how Bergvall could put a word in without putting any of her own words in! Shared laughter, of the non-ridicule, non-sarcastic variety, should be very welcome.

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DE— I think VIA could handle both and many other readings, could be a critique when viewed from one aspect, homage in another, and definitely as metapoetry. The woods, yes, (like the story-trees of Armantrout's own VIA) a horrible or delightful place to get lost in, or find the self. Bergvall was remarkably silent here, and I think this silence enables us to look at VIA every which way. Even her arrangement was a surrender of her poetic ego: she alphabetized! Maybe she's counterpoising her circularity to Dante's quest, her surrender of ego to his embrace of ego. Maybe it's like Dickinson's Sicily poem. You may proceed up that mountain Dante, the first (half-)step is enough of a cosmos, "infinity in a grain of sand," says Blake, "eternity in an hour." VIA could be seen as condemning us readers and translators to hell (or "saying" it was Dante who condemned us there) of reading and re-reading without coming any closer to seeing the Beatific Face. Perhaps VIA also condemns poets (Dante and others like him) who dwell in their configurations exactly because these would not exist apart from their craft, or belief. Or maybe it's a tribute to Dante's 700 years, and at heart, VIA celebrates the inherent capacity of poets/ poetry to survive, to reproduce and remain.

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DE— Thank you. Despite the "darkling woods," and the "damning" repetition, I still would like to believe the celebratory aspect of this Bergvall piece. As has been mentioned before, the poet also "finds himself" in the process.

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AN— i did not know eliot had those lines, but yes they are very fitting for VIA. i like how this poem brings us to the multiple, protean quality of language

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DE— Yes. I believe that losing your bearings, while almost never a pleasant experience, can be counted on to expand our horizons—though your third sentence here is more eloquent on this point. I love this lesson on "re-viewing," revisiting, on dwelling again and again (via VIA). If this has taught me anything, it's how to enjoy getting lost in poetry, losing yourself in multiple possibilities, in a renewed sense of vastness.

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DE— Thank you. It was a perfect convergence of material and technique, in my view. That's possibly why this "darkling wood" has become so fertile for questions and ideas.