stay in the florid calm

· she wanted to eat yellow rose petals ·      · she wanted to draw
silk from her pores ·                  · and suspend a heartweb
between rock and stone · she would deposit purledlines · a festival
of droplets and foam | and this game is committed · to heterogeneity

|      & was a civilization?
an impasse

nouned · the sky contracts into its blue · and ghosts boo you      
the maize blossoms · despite muteness      
the poplar tree trembles · haunted by photographs      
and if you tour the wars · you will obviously become      
an asthmatic      
and if you've danced on a ryestalk · you'll love this
“    as cautiously they advance     verbs touring your chastity    |
green aspected leaflines    tracing      your chlorolatencies    |

tongued capacities tripped            infuse                        a wounded trust”
as you touches       a passion in andante         rogues 

die Himmelwracks

she swam through the clouds (dreams — lessons of shadows)
clutching in her hand · three duchess-red roses | her fingers had spun
the spiral of fortune out of its axis of accusation so · you entered
the other night · and to read the other book |

|      small street in paris he animated
the task of the park was to provide      
a bed for      
homeless echoes      

his eyes were the fallen acorns      
his is as curved as a      
banana until he left it      
on mont blanc to freeze · black-      

print — waiting for <the imagination delights in filling up      
those parts of the picture      

which the eye cannot see>      but the noise of chainsaws
|                      |      alphabetical losses — a template imposed on
relations abandoned     
indicisions  |
a tension continues       peels . . . “you recognized incessantly        
our lateness                 venues my
initial chorea(      )graphies”|       tonight she characterized
and cannot   it        |

Le pesanteur est en elle

| the only university chair in switzerland for the protection of nature
and landscape · will disappear | hold this dark-green frame
of waking memories | <this purpose> | eleven sisters
having rotted into the horizons of that taste of grass and earth
that sometimes took in love <time · neglect · and accident ·
will often produce
unexpected beauties>

enter and night will give you      
situations you cannot pass      
on the faces you forgot      
the curve of an angel’s temper      

your silence born from a shadow      
accumulates a desperate sky      
clots in an unread message      
(you will be my death for life)      

and under the angel’s wings      
night gives you a flower      
with six fatigued petals      

(you dreamt :     as a red shrew       venomously nominal . . .
you caught propositions  
and excreted                                            waste niceties
you as shrew    assimilated a lot . . . of very naughty
insectiles       
a softness mixed with the world :
are lines of hope        industrialized musks?      )

Elle fait chanter

at the fade of an unexchangeable day · thoughts wash across a sketch
of working friendships <the great secret of true happiness —“not
to wish for more”> the effort evaporates · to leave a residue of generic
and superfluous tones · dreambreaks · to create openings · of
one’s own flesh · desires · limits

fond impossibles :      
you helped me to pass      
hold onto the minutes      
fall out of each hour      
with the sand pains      
and a greyer light      
borrowed from donkeys      
sourcing a face      
sourcing a suite      
at the end of a deadend      
in needles and spins      

don't make a desert · of your life · don't expel from it    little
and awkward — your shoulds
maybes                                                   and orifices
basel greets beirut across a virtual limit       of indestructible change   
“   you shaved voices out of         
heaven 
we shingle      only if regrowth . . . is chartered      ”

Manos enlazadas

<intricacy contrives to ‘lead the eye a wanton chase’> give me
· a few words · flowers · for a woman · perfumes · to sing · birds ·
a truth · fish men shells · allowing us · to imagine each syllable
without stopping to build a house <producing variety
without fritter> headsashes embroidered with ashes <and
continuity without sameness> the heart is on the side of life

today is · the finesse of our love      
as i lay out a word garden in the prospect      
sweep the path with sunfeared leaves      
dreamblistered hands ·      
there were camp fires · there are campfires      
but tonight · rain · softer than silence ·      
(you know the sang of songs?      
and the accordion that breathed olive green?      
the snakespin of a red skirt?      
the planet that unmeasured its orbit?      
i too have eaten bread and emmental      
i know there are holes in water where mourners dive)      

lying on an acquired bed of latin       instead of   
past-
assumed  rituals                                                                         &  ash-
fast                                                                                 ruptures
madderlined ·
thymelined           orchid&ordchidlined         inscapes                    
   hands wound in haustorial light       having taken part
in                alephatic reactions

Notes

Anne Blonstein’s poetry has developed a deep and integral sense of encryption, which may be to say that, in her work, poetry extends its propensity to code, its hospitality to the cryptic. All poetry is coded, in the sense that it observes conventions, of metre or rhyme or whatever. To read poetry one must come to terms with those codes; the reader is prepared to negotiate language that is true not to what a speaker wishes to say, but is true to the codes of its writing. Experienced readers of poetry look for complexities and refinements of the code. In what we know as avant-garde or experimental verse (since Mallarmé and Pound), those codes have shifted markedly from the phonetic to the graphic. Typographical possibilities now extend beyond the shape of the stanza; Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913) may be the earliest poem to use a typewriter’s double space within a line of printed verse. Modern poetry, its development of free verse and open forms, has given shape to print, and has made a significant space of the page, most obviously in what we know as concrete poetry.

Graphic experimentation puts the emphasis on space; by contrast, phonetic experimentation, such as we find throughout the history of poetry, not least in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has designs on time. Rhythmical variation in Tennyson, consonant clusters in Browning, the sprung rhythm of Hopkins, the lexical isolates of Hardy, all use the codes of metre, including the conventional pauses at line-endings and middles, to disrupt expectation and to force the reader to renegotiate the ratio between language and time. Pound and Eliot remain primarily concerned with phonetic effects, that is to say with designs on time, not least on the reader’s time, and sense of timing. Poetry that foregrounds graphic experimentation solicits the eye to take cognizance of shape, of visual patterns. In doing so, time is suspended, or deemed irrelevant: there is no chronic measure by which to order the experience of a painting or a sculpture. In Anne Blonstein’s use of notariqon, notably in “worked on screen” (Salzburg 2005), the reader must pick up the initial letter of each word in order to compose a new word or ‘hypogram’. Such spatially distributed words keep the eye busy, but they leave the ear somewhat frustrated.

A challenge for the contemporary poet is to reconcile space and time, to realize the compounded or compacted power of words both spoken and written, whether arranged in sequence for the voice or disposed as pattern for the eye. This is, of course, no merely poetic challenge, nor is it a whimsical indulgence. Our sense of time has been largely constituted by the rhythms of spoken language, as our sense of space is given by the activity of reading, whether what’s read be a situation or a page. There is nothing fanciful or obsolete in Shelley’s claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators; the less acknowledged they have become in modernity, the more powerful their legislation.

The poems in this issue of Salt are from “and my smile will be yellow”, a sequence of 66 poems written through the Hebrew year 5766 (spanning October 2005 to September 2006 in the Gregorian calendar). There is one book in the Hebrew scriptures that has just sixty-six chapters and each of the sixty-six poems in Blonstein’s sequence is thus coordinated with one of the chapters of Isaiah. Each poem encrypts time, not rhythmically but calendrically. The number of lines in the second section (stanza, verse paragraph) varies from one to twelve, and discloses the month of the Hebrew calendar. The number of words in the poem’s title indicates the day of the week, running from Sunday the first day to Saturday the seventh. The number of words in italic in the entire poem is not the day of the month, though it gives us a clue.

What has all this to do with poetry? There is nothing Kabbalistic or hermetic in Anne Blonstein’s practice: there is no idea of a secret message being buried deep within these poems, to be extracted only by the most determined reader. Encryption to serious purpose masks itself behind or within the banal. Here is nothing banal. This poetry celebrates the joy and inventiveness of encryption for its own sake. The aesthetic aspects of encryption have a value quite apart from any message or information that might be therein encoded. What matters is the life that a cryptic device methodically applied gives to words: ‘lying on an acquired bed of latin'. Naive readers, those who are resistant to poetry, will always protest that if something needs to be said, it can and ought to be said plainly. Those who enjoy poetry are in on the open secret: that in a poem, any poem, it is the code, not the message, that matters. The art of poetry, the trajectory of its newnesses and renewings, is to be plotted along the line of shifting and sophisticating codes and encryptions. The only ‘real’ secret embedded in these poems is the date of each one’s composition. Hardly a state secret; yet it is a trade secret, or a craft secret: in the history of poetry there has never to our knowledge been a sequence of poems each of which embodies the date of its own making.

Thus these poems, spaced and shaped in ways that are hardly amenable to fluent articulation, yet conceal a temporal aspect. And it is a temporality that searches far beyond the poetic line. Language in its graphic emphasis makes for words embedded and embodied, not to be dissolved in the ephemera of voicing. Anne Blonstein’s sequence suggests that if the embodiment of words is not to be a slack and vapid figure, words (and phrases, and poems) must be reckoned within time, as organisms that come into being on particular dates. A poetic sequence is a conventional term, slightly technical; however, now that computing and genetics have made of the root a verb and a gerund — sequencing — we are brought to realize how close, how all but inseparable, might be the cultural and the natural, the physical and the mental, the organic and the inorganic, the word and the thing. These constitutive distinctions of all western thinking are rendered vulnerable by what we are learning about our selves. And when we think of DNA and genetic sequencing, we will also attend phrasally to the encryption of genetic information. Such information includes the marking of time; and of course every transaction on the internet is chronically encrypted. Anne Blonstein’s poetry, of sequence and encryption, offers us a model of how we are.

Charles Lock
University of Copenhagen