About a year ago, while preparing to write a review of Annelyse Gelman’s Vexations that never quite came to fruition, I read an (electric) interview she did with Mandana Chaffa for the Chicago Review of Books in which she said the following:
“The contrast between a poem as an ‘object’ (a static, stable entity, with one form and fixed boundaries) and an ‘event’ (a dynamic, ongoing, mutable performance) has always intrigued me. Is a poem more based in space or in time? Is it more like a sculpture or a film?”
I had no answer to those questions—which is, probably, why they stuck in my head so fungally. I do remember that the talk of sculpture reminded me of a quote of Rodin’s: “Never think of a surface except as the extension of a volume.” (Also, Nietzsche: “There are no beautiful surfaces without terrible depths.”) It was fun, then, thinking through how that sculptural concept could apply to poetry’s materials: maybe the surface of a text, the skin of a poem—that hairy, cellular layer over which, when reading, we run our fingers—is still attached to the emotional musculature, the human volume, burning underneath it. Those muscles writhe, and, for a moment, we can see their brackled presence press, bloody and moonless, through the skin; we can see the enjambed veins, the metered fascia. And that is the poem, I thought. It is the impression that the mind makes on the page. Robert Hass, defining form: “The way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.” It is the thinking mind made thinkable. It is the surface of a terrible depth.
Still, that didn’t really answer Gelman’s questions. It’s easy to say that a poem emerges from, is the present surface of, a long, dynamic, emotional past. But Gelman is asking about their stability—the fixedness of their boundaries—and thus, in a way, about their future. Is a poem static or ongoing? Once a poem has been written down—or worse, put into print—how, exactly, does it change?
Enter “the sensation is without artifact” by Kelly Hoffer, a multimodal, extra-textual triptych published in Issue 14 of Ghost Proposal, a journal/press run by the multidisciplinary artists Nora Claire Miller, Kelly Clare, and Alyssa Moore that publishes “work that transcends or sits outside of traditional notions of genre.” (If you’d like, they sell a sticker in their store that says “GENRE IS FAKE”).
As someone most comfortable writing in nice, even-tempered couplets or little biscuits of prose poetry, a pretty common form these days, I don’t think I could ever be accused of being a genre-buster. And yet, the world being as full of delicate mysteries as it is, Ghost Proposal is one of the journals I most look forward to reading when I’m searching for poems to run on Poetry Daily. Refreshing is probably too sweet-toothed of a word to use to describe the effect reading their issues has on me, considering the radical breakages of form happening in so many of the poems, and yet: I do feel refreshed—perhaps recalibrated is a better word—after reading it. But why is that, exactly? As a kind of explanation, I’d like to offer a quotation from Johannes Göransson, written in a recent review for the Cleveland Review of Books of Patty Crane’s new translations of Tomas Tranströmer, regarding the effects translated works can have on their readers:
“This is in part why poets like Tranströmer or Garcia Lorca had such a profound effect when they were first translated: they opened up US readers to writing beyond the enforced and normative canon of the moment (the New Critics and their disciples). And it is precisely when the status quo has been dislodged that we can be truly vulnerable to poetry.”
I think that’s worth saying again: “…it is precisely when the status quo has been dislodged that we can be truly vulnerable to poetry.” That is, for me, what makes reading Ghost Proposal, and much of the other “genre-less” work happening today, of which there is quite a lot if you know where to look, so re-invigorating. Such work rearranges the reader. Whether one’s own work partakes in such experiments, one still ends up in the lab with them, breathing in the loosened fumes, having one’s own chemistry—one’s own ways of thinking—changed both for the better and for good.
That is, at least, my own explanation for why, after I clicked “Play” on the second portion of Hoffer’s triptych, I found myself so totally ensorcelled. Even beside the kind of hypnotic whir of the sewing machine, I found it quite moving, seeing a poem stripped down like that into a kind of fragile, material thing… not the monolithic product of a monolithic “speaker,” not an inevitability of ink, but something mutable, to use Gelman’s term, something at the mercy of outer conditions: the sewing machine’s idiosyncrasies, the random placements of the hand, not to mention the whims of light and shadow baked into the cyanotype itself (more on that later). It seemed to say that there couldn’t be an “authoritative” version of this, or maybe any, poem. As if a poem is not a product of “mastery,” not the product of an individual will, but something like a kind of chance encounter between the poet and the world, a collaboration between the page and the light that passed through the poet to strike it. The light that will continue to strike it long after the poet is gone.
But let’s start at the beginning. Kelly Hoffer’s “the sensation is without artifact” is a multimodal triptych made up, in Hoffer’s own words, of the following elements:
“This triptych is formed from three different manifestations of the text of a single poem—’the sensation is without artifact.’ The first manifestation, ‘cloud cover’ is a cyanotype of the text printed on a cloudy day. The diffuse light and uneven substrate combine to blur entire swathes of text leaving behind undulating legible stanzas. ‘stitch meter’ is a video of another cyanotype print of the text that has been cut into strips and then fed through a sewing machine to produce lined paper yarn. ‘knit slip’ is the textile that I knitted from that paper yarn. In the process of knitting, I slipped stitches and carried the yarn over in order to reveal selected phrases.”
I’d like to begin my analysis with the title “the sensation is without artifact”—beautiful, of course, in its own right. Taken at face value, it is a statement of loss. And a statement of inner loss, at that: the sensation in question is said to have passed through the mind, like the flight of a bird—Li-Young Lee: “The sky never fills with any leftover flying.”—and left nothing behind for the speaker to study. Has left nothing behind, I suppose, for the speaker to keep: nothing to store, catalogue, and make note of, as one normally might with an artifact. And while this statement is, of course, a gesture toward inner landscapes, it is also an outward one: toward the touch, the felt presence, of other people. Because that’s what an “artifact” is, isn’t it? It is evidence of other people. It’s a thing that someone else has touched.
“the sensation is without artifact” is, as well, the first phrase of the first section of this triptych. After that, what follows is a complication of that statement: “the sensation is without artifice the sensation is without art”—the phrase “the sensation is without artifice” just barely legible through the “undulating” artifice of the cyanotype itself.
For those who don’t know, a cyanotype is a form of early photography in which a pair of photosensitive pigments are applied to a sheet of paper; when exposed to light, those pigments bristle into a lovely, quilted blue. Light’s is not the only presence that the cyanotype records, though. If you place an object onto that treated sheet of paper, the pigment also snares its shadow, the shadow being all the little places that light is not allowed to touch. The cyanotype is, therefore, an archive of touching. It is, if I may, an artifact. A record of light’s touch.
I mention all this, mostly, because “the sensation is without artifact” is a poem obsessed with touch. The poem continues, “interrupted” often by the cyanotype’s blurring:
…but the touch is a thing moved I moved I touched folded [ ] touched this I touched this I
touched this and this and this and this this and and this this this this this this this this this with my finger with my tongue this with the tips of my brain and [ ] I touch while holding my my
my breath this part I touched while holding this part
(Forgive me for borrowing Anne Carson’s use of brackets, from her translations of Sappho in If Not, Winter, to describe the blurring in this text. I think her own words justify my choice: “Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event…”—or, in this case, cyanotypical event—“…rather than an accurate record of it… Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp—brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.”)
I agree with Carson in that there is a drama here in the interaction between—in the textured collaboration of—medium and maker. I am willing to call this a polyvocal text because of the blurs, which read to me as anything but moments of silence. Though it’s tempting, at first, to think of them as places where the text is just missing, places where the poem goes quiet, I think it is more true to say they are the places where the medium is speaking, where light’s voice is laid over the speakers, momentarily overwhelming the original song.
But back to the text itself. About mid-way through the third line, we see a new kind of touch introduced. The speaker that has spent so much time describing their own touching is, all of a sudden, touched back:
I am holding onto a notion of the body as a doll and you pinned me from a remote emotion [ ] this and this and here I was
still and here I was and here I here…
Thus far, the poet has made productive use of repetition. And while these repetitions do serve as a catalogue of action, of being—“I touched” & “I moved” & “this” & “here—partially, perhaps, to make the poem itself a kind of artifact, something one can hold onto, a kind of living proof that one existed, that they both touched and were touched back, I also read this use of repetition as a kind of searching instinct, a way to call into the darkened self, and its personal-historical distances, waiting for something to call back. And all this reaching out, in the next line, pays dividends, as the repetition slows and we settle into a somewhat more focused remembering:
…and I told her about something momentous and she thought maybe I was married but how how how quaint [ ] speckled and ridged with
calcium telling age and water and I was here and here and hear hear the light comes to the paper o and yes the p[ ] was a thing too mulberry [ ] something was revelatory the
thing revealed a moon lit by nothing more than a candle the dark makes even a faint tongue [ ]
The presentation of these human images, these small photons of recollection—“I told her about something momentous”—directly alongside the ‘meta’ moves in the second quoted line seems, to me, to be no accident. An important equivalence is drawn there: just as “the light comes to the paper,” flooding it with art, with artifice, so, too, do these images bubble out of the poet’s fingers. These phenomena are paired together as if there is no difference between them; words pour from the speaker just as light drips from the sun. This forces the reader to remember that the speaker, unlike in “traditional” lyric work, is never alone, here. The page is marked, always, as a collaborative space. Yes, the poet is braiding the rope of her thinking. But light has ahold of the other end.
Of course, the text is still full of the evidence of a lived individual life; it is simply that this life is not the only source of light coloring the paper. Still, the particular emotionality of these details give the piece a human depth:
…and do you have a moth-
er and is she dead and what is you but a relic my ovum a relic each one present in [ ] before [ ] was a person not even a not [ ]
Or, just a few moments later:
…what earth have you sought out and found artifact artifice article the sensation is without artifact [ ] news for the coming [ ] wish it were about a baby
Or, nearing the end:
…and if I could calcify the cloud in my body like a stone a silhouette a stone silhouette a shadow the artifact [ ] and so not one at all [ ] this and it was and I knew I
wanted no one else to talk to me in coded sexts for the rest of my life because one body is enough…
The way a poet turns their life into an artifact, paginated evidence of having lived… one of the key masterstrokes of this poem is that its form enacts the realities of its making, of the position that the poet, over and over, finds themselves in: that one must constantly unearth one’s life if one wants to keep it whole. The present falls onto the poet’s past like shovelfuls of dirt. If you want to take life with you where you’re going, you have to dig it out yourself. (Heaney: Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it). That is what I mean when I say there is a drama between the medium and the maker, here: as the poet attempts to bring their past into the present, into the poetic medium, attempting to make it a keepable artifact, we can see it being buried by the world, by outer artifice, just as the past is buried by the present. The key pathos—the beauty—of this poem is that as we see the poet speaking, we also see her disappear. So, to amend a previous statement: yes, the poem is full of evidence that the poet has lived. But it’s also evidence that she, like everyone, is disappearing, too. It’s a sign that she is speaking, that she will continue to, no matter how much light falls in her mouth. That is what the line “the sensation is without artifact” means to me. It’s that life disappears inside of us. If one wants to re-join reality, one has to write that reality down.
This is one way, I think, that Hoffer’s triptych serves as a rather beautiful answer to the question of Gelman’s I began this essay with. Is this poem “static” or “ongoing?” Is it “more like a sculpture or a film?” Well, what if there are other options? What if a poem, this one especially, is something more like a piece of outdoor theater? Something where the edges between the stage, the page, and the world “outside” the piece’s present artifice are blurred? The script may be the same, but the light is always different. And that light, too, becomes part of the artifice. It’s a poem that is more than just its words.
Like a play, too, this piece is interested in “re-staging” the same text in different contexts. The second portion of the triptych, titled here “Stitch Meter,” is, as Hoffer tells us, “a video of another cyanotype print of the text that has been cut into strips and then fed through a sewing machine to produce lined paper yarn.” And there’s one thing worth emphasizing, here: because it is a different printing, new text has been revealed. When light approached the paper, this time, it had something else to say. And while the text may be the same source poem, it’s been spoken differently. In a way, it’s continued beyond itself. It’s proved its own ongoingness.
The first thing we see in the video is the first line of the poem being pushed through a sewing machine, the camera zoomed in on the needle plate, little stitches of red thread quickly sizzling their way through the blue “paper yarn.” Once this line’s been needled through, a second line slides into place, and the process continues. And I admit I do love how the slow reveal of information, here—something more akin to the way a “regular” poem works, where one has to take the art in line by line—contrasts with the blue totality of the first cyanotype, where the reader’s eye is allowed to swim where it wants to, is perhaps even encouraged to do so by the page’s lake-like blurs.
If the first section of this triptych is interested in making its makers—and the circumstances of its making—apparent in the text, this section is even more so. It isn’t just that the writer’s hands are visible in the video, actively—and literally—sewing the utterance together in front of our eyes; it’s also that the reading pace, its stops and starts, the moments of slowness that precede the times the poem zooms into near illegibility, is forced upon the reader. This does more than play with the reader’s attention: it traps it. If one wants to read the poem, here, one has to give up all control.
This attention is, of course, rewarded. As I said before, because this is a different cyanotype, there are at least a few dozen lines here that were not legible in the previous version. Interestingly, though, at the same time these “new” lines are added, they are also quickly, in some sense, destroyed. Every line, once it’s been made visible, soon falls off the screen—and not only that, the thread that is supposed to, and does, hold each line together also in a way crosses them out. I’m reminded, by the red of the thread, of the strokes of an editor’s pen, something that marks the poem, even as it’s put together, as a thing that isn’t yet finished.
And in the triptych’s final section, “Knit Slip,” that ‘cancellation’ of the text is taken to its temporary terminus. After the reader has glimpsed the lines in “Stitch Meter,” Hoffer turns them away from the reader for good. As she said in her description of the piece, Hoffer purposely “slipped stitches and revealed selected phrases” when she put the textile together. And when looked at from the front, one can indeed see a main ‘cast’ of phrases, their blue countenances facing the audience, the largest of which is seemingly the poem’s first line:
[ ] without a[ ]act t[ ]sensation is with[ ]artifice the sensation is without art but the [ ] a thing
To my eye, here is a sampling of some of the other “main” revealed phrases:
wrapped in velvet she
a fever can be [ ]
sensation burned up on
[ ]nd here I touch
[ ] i am holding on
[ ]ve the artifact of [ ]ch
the [ ] eggs speckled
his light touched
Between all of these sit many little streaks of language, sometimes just a few letters or so, along with some major tracts of white or blue where the lines have been twisted away from the reader. We are, though, allowed a glimpse of these turned-away lines in the second photo of the “Knit Slip” section, which, according to the file name, is indeed the back of the textile, but the photo itself is both slightly out of focus and reveals only a portion of the work. As well, there seem to be very few whole phrases on the back of the work at all—just a foam of letters, a scrabble of upside-down meanings, a few loose hairs of thread.
What this piece takes part in, then, is a kind of productive destruction. The piece is made of its own loss—in that, though some of the poem is no longer available to the reader, has been some might say “lost,” that loss is conjugated into art, into material artifice, into, in fact, an artifact that exists on its own in the world. The poem had to die for this to happen, though. It had to be made new.
One of the special things about this work, the whole triptych, is what it has to say about “artificiality” in general, a word I do not think, in this case, should be thought of as a pejorative. In a literary culture that prizes “sincerity,” immediacy, where a poem is often talked about, in Wordsworth’s famous definition, as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” what this piece reveals is all the touching that makes that outflow art, as well as the precarity of the enterprise in general. The past is the source of all poems—Paul Celan: “For the poem does not stand outside time.”—and also their destroyer: it is the poet’s job to turn that disappearance, that destruction, into a kind of future in their work. And if they want to do so, they have to do it with their hands. They have to give us something artificial—something full of art and artifice. That is, in the end, I think, why this project moved me the way it did. It made me a part of a poem’s lifespan. It showed me a hand-made ongoingness. It showed me something beautiful. And I do think this work is beautiful—because it’s covered in fingerprints.
