On being (in)comprehensible
Earlier this month, I attended Zoeglossia's annual writing retreat for the first year of my fellowship with them. Zoeglossia is a literary organisation and community for disabled poets. I really have no words yet for the depth of creative community I was so warmly welcomed into. The experience was so rich, so immense, my reflections are still trickling in. So far I’ve been describing it to friends as life-giving. Writing solo is fine and usual; writing with other disabled poets is another form of magic entirely. (Hello and love to those in the community reading this!)
During the retreat, we had the privilege of being in workshop with several brilliant faculty members, one of them being “animal, artist and proud stutterer” JJJJJerome Ellis. On our last morning workshop—my poetic body well rained-in and fully flowering—he invited us to write in response to a list of questions that took the form of ‘what is _____?’ My interior brimming and swirling with four days worth of luminous conversations, readings and teachings, I wrote a poem unlike any I’d written before. I don’t mean this in a self-aggrandising way; I mean more that I was surprised by what came alive when I granted myself the freedom to experiment. I’m excited to continue tinkering with it before submitting it for (hopeful) publication!
In the past two months, I’ve been venturing into poetic territory that is less about being comprehensible through a trackable narrative, and more about… more about what, I’m not sure exactly. This opening up to experimentation—which, in practice, is listening more intently and more truthfully to my poetic body, to the ineffable passing through this vessel—is thanks to the influence of Victoria Chang, Louise Glück, Liv Mammone, Carol Dorf and the numerous poets whose poems I have read and admired for their incomprehensible, palpable truths.
In the community conversation portion of one of Zoeglossia’s public readings from last year, Liv Mammone asks Carol Dorf about the non-narrativeness of her poem. Speaking on her own working process as well as Dorf’s poem, she says:
What would happen if I stopped trying to make myself understood? Not just by able-bodied people—which is the journey I’ve been on—but just in general, even by myself. What if I didn’t sit down at the poem like, THIS IS WHAT THIS POEM IS GOING TO BE ABOUT?—which is very much how I operate right now. Your poem was so incredibly beautiful. It was one of those poems where I don’t really understand what’s happening but I can feel it in my gut and I don’t really care what this poem is about.
In her book Dear Memory, in a letter addressed to an unnamed English professor, Victoria Chang quotes Louise Glück:
At the heart of the work will be a question, a problem. And we will feel, as we read, a sense that the poet was not wed to any one outcome. The poems themselves are like experiments, which the reader is freely invited to recreate in his own mind. Those poets who claustrophobically oversee or bully or dictate response prematurely advertise the deficiencies of the chosen particulars, as though without strenuous guidance the reader might not reach an intended conclusion.
Proofs and Theories, Ecco, 1995, p. 45
Chang goes on to say: “I like the idea of the writing staying slightly ahead of thought. The way the moon always seems to be chasing a whale.”
It’s not that I sit down at a poem knowing what it’s going to be about. However, out of a desire to be legible—to whom? I’m learning to ask thanks to Mammone—to be coherent—what for? to what degree?—I can see now how I’ve been limiting myself, my poems and my readers. Earlier in my reading life, I shut down when I encountered poems I couldn’t understand. More and more lately, I’ve been leaning into the deliciousness of ambiguity, of incomprehensibility, which I suppose are really the cousins of mystery/Mystery. The poems that I am drawn to, that thrill me deep down in some un-mappable place, are ones that I simultaneously don’t understand and do.
Here is one such poem—a set of poems, actually—from 정호승 Jeong Ho-Seung, translated by Brother Anthony, from the poet’s 2020 collection Dangsineul chajaseo (Seeking You).
Bird Droppings 1
Bird droppings got into my eyes.
For the first time in my life
I washed my eyes clean with bird droppings.
It stopped me seeing the human landscape
that I finally wanted to see
but did not need to see.
Thank you.
You can read four more of his poems on Asymptote Journal’s Translation Tuesdays.
And if you’re feeling hungry, there’s also Zero Plus Anything Is a World by Jane Hirshfield, which I keep in a running document called ‘intriguing poems’.
What is your relationship with being incomprehensible?