The Loire (1896), Alfred Sisley

Insurgent: Notes on the River and the Line

I.

In 1998, Robert Pinsky asked a question about the line: 

What vocal reality underlies the typographical convention of stopping at the right margin and returning to the left margin?

Writing an essay on Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe seems to answer that question:

In the precinct of Poetry, a word, the space around a word, each letter, every mark, silence, or sound volatizes an inner law of form—moves on a rigorous line.

I understood the poetic line simply as this question and this answer, that is until I moved to the Mississippi Delta and heard the river rushing.

II.

Like a choir of one note, the river continues. I live in the bend of the Mississippi, which moves 593,003 cubic feet of water per second. Here I can only see a glimpse of it, a single syllable of the soul of the North American continent. The river troubles my notion of the line. (Note: let’s talk about trouble more later.) It’s kinetic; it’s dividing; it’s never-ending; it’s autonomously inscribing its own livelihood with itself. It’s rushing to fill the space of itself with its own substance. It’s insurgent in both definitions: 1. Rebellious, opposing authority. 2. Of water, surging or rushing in. 

III.

If we understand the river is a line, what are its poetics? There are four elements I’m interested in articulating as a kind of craft: voice, landscape, desire, body. Watching the river I see the ecological interdependency of it all. A case can be made that every line has these four elements, but the river sees these four things as not separate at all. Voice, landscape, desire, and body are all at once able to speak to each other, sometimes one can be confused for the other. To experiment with one is to ask a question about the other, as Dan Beachy-Quick has said. I want to understand how these four things can tangle together to make a line.

Voice. Hard to say anything about voice; harder to define it. A spectrum of syntax, tone, and intent. Watching the wind blow the tall grass of a meadow all one direction and then the other is a kind of voice. Its syntax is a kind of machinery—a grammar, a consciousness. Its tone gives away its intent—obvious what’s happening, isn’t it? I like this idea, because I always want to be aware of the way voice (however soft) is a kind of force. The body makes our voice with the work of muscles. Our voice is tethered to and dependent on our bodies. The labor it takes our body to make our voice means that at some level there is always a form of intent.

Landscape. The landscape is our backdrop of ongoingness, as Carl Phillips describes in The Art of Daring. A space to reckon in and a space to reckon with. The place we inhabit forms how we grammar, and in the poem we grammar a space for us to inhabit. Trouble. Who contains whom? (Note: still to discuss—trouble). The river is both a landscape and what fills in the absence of it. How is the line doing that? The landscape is where potential happens. The landscape as physical, social, and psychological potential. No, not potential—possibility. It’s possibility that tethers landscape to desire. How we call forth or write into possibility demands a vulnerable interrogation of what we’re capable of, and scrutinizes what is a restrictive agent in our lives. Like when Judith Butler asks, 

Does its constructedness imply some form of social determinism, foreclosing the possibility of agency and transformation?

And I love this question because I think the poetic line is the perfect space to enact transformation. To enact possibility. What’s a landscape, if not a space we build with this intention? The poetic line is the thing that resists foreclosure, that bucks against determinism.

Desire. Audre Lorde speaks brilliantly about this resistance to foreclosure. In “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” she says,

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

So what is possibility as questioned by Judith Butler, as articulated by Audre Lorde? How can the landscapes we fashion in our poems open us up to possibility, as poets or as people? Desire feels like an answer. The desire to show how we are sometimes at odds with our own world. The river is rushing against a stillness. Desire in the line—how it hems it up, provides a clear boundary while simultaneously we find it so open, so unrestricted. Love makes music of limitation. I find the reverse is true too: limitation makes music of love. This is one way to describe the line. Thank you river. There’s a risk in desire, though. To commit to voicing a lack of something doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The voice (the body) performs a physicality in a landscape that in some way will respond to what it’s been given. 

Body. This talk about the risks desire makes known in and outside the body brings to mind the poet Emilia Phillips. In their essay “Bone Will Adapt To Loads Of Pressure: The Body & Poetic Space” Phillips says,

We must remember that poems about the body are naturally attended by the body’s risk of existence, its likelihood of undergoing violence or trauma, to be revised by those experiences. The poet, therefore, should be mindful of this in approaching the body as subject matter, of grafting the physical body into the body of the poem. The form should always be one in which the body feels safe, so that the poem doesn’t become a stage of voyeurism and provocation, hands reaching in and pulling out the heart.

Jenny Johnson’s aesthetic statement is also of interest here:

When talking about how the brain imagines the body, neurologists sometimes use the word “schema” to describe a little map that lies across the cortex, sensing all our visible and invisible parts. . .we don’t have just one imagined schema of our bodily egos, and there is a need for “alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure.”

With knowledge of our both singular body and the multiplicity of schemas we have thought about our body, how can the body be effectively made legible in the line? To ask further, how can a poem remind us of the presence of our own bodies when reading it? At least to the second question I can say it’s more than writing I and you in a poem that makes me cognizant of my own body, but writing a poem that speaks to my body’s necessity to be safe, and touches my body where my body touches the world. Becomes so much the world it’s made a space even for me. One way the poem troubles the world is by so easily imitating it. 

IV.

To trouble—

a transitive verb. 

1) 

a: to agitate mentally or spiritually 

b: to put to exertion or inconvenience 

c: to produce physical disorder 

2) to put into confused motion.

The river is a site of trouble in some ways. It troubles the elements that make talking about the poetic line simple, but within that trouble is possibility. To fashion a line where voice, landscape, desire, and body are inseparable in their order, putting exertion against foreclosure. A line that says follow me—my desire is a crisis that rattles the body and shifts its needs. 

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Pull Quotes in order:

Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998).

Susan Howe, “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values” from The Birth-mark (Wesleyan University Press, 1993). 

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge, 2006).

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984).

Emilia Phillips, from The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice ed. by Shara Lessley and Bruce Snider (Pleiades Press, 2017).

Jenny Johnson, from Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics ed. by TC Tolbert (Nightboat, 2013).

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C. T. SALAZAR is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut full-length collection Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking is forthcoming from Acre Books in 2022. He's the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. 

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