4 What is the poem?
The poem is the failed azalea. Expectancy, anticipation, disappointment—this is the poem’s terrain. Language is the vehicle but it is also the poem’s limitation. The poet considers how she is reading the azaleas through an imaginative paucity that demands plenitude, in light of her own desires and socializations.
Similarly, the critic wonders what expectations she has brought to the book, which would constitute the book’s alleged failure. Since beauty carpenters are the basis of aesthetic relationships, we want nature to deliver the beauty we’ve known. But poetry gives the most when it refuses to fulfill our hunger and offers what could be otherwise—the possibility of otherwisdom.
Criticism is the art of writing about one’s relationship to reading. Critique is a conversation with a particular text in relation to other texts. Both the poet and the critic are tasked with seducing the reader’s ear and securing their attention. I value the non-neutral, exposed speaker who challenges convention by bringing themselves to the page. Mary Capello does this with Awkward, a “discursive autobiography,” a digressive romp through words, etymology, personal experience, and misunderstanding that relates books to the speaker’s life.
And Rosemarie Waldrop’s translations of Edmond Jabès turned into a critical engagement with his poems in Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès. Re-reading, here, constitutes an intimate critique that makes use of their conversations, dialogues, and meetings. And re-calling evokes the way in which correspondences carve a relationship with ghosts, a way of speaking to their texts. To quote Waldrop quoting her own translation of Jabès: “There is no place not the reflection of another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the place. I write at the mercy of this place.”
Waldrop’s re-view involves re-seeing, or seeing again, and seeing in light of how one has seen prior, and this gaze is rendered more intimate by the multiple levels of exposure. The re-view assumes this intimacy of re-reading has been earned.
The exposed speaker dialogues with their scars as much as with their tattoos. To write from one’s experience risks misunderstanding, or illegibility. The act of reading challenges the stability or fixedness of authorial intent. The reader imbues the reading with their own fears, experiences, culture, and biases. We may, in fact, take it the wrong way, which is to say, not as the author intended.
Reflected places illuminate. Due to a traumatic brain injury and seizure risk, I wasn’t able to learn to drive alongside my peers. When the moment arrived, I was consumed by the freedom of chasing a whim down a rural road. Shortly after receiving my driver’s license, I parked near a meadow to feel the unknown world as a stranger, and sketched a poem about the redness of Alabama’s dirt roads. The poem emerged from images of fire anthill blisters written on my wrist with a pen. It became