‘Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
As someone who reviews dance and performance arts, I spend a lot of time thinking about what is lost, or missed, in the act of speaking about an event that has passed. Dance, in particular, is less likely to leave behind a public archive of film (or even photos), so a reviewer’s role is precarious, to a degree.
When I review a book of poetry, or talk about writing in this space, there’s at least the ability to look at the evidence I use to say what I want to say. A Wilds post links to the writing in question; a review will quote some of the poems from the book, and you can usually find some of those poems in full in individual literary journals.
Both acts—reviewing poetry and reviewing dance—can quickly cast an anesthetizing glaze over the art. The critic is speaking in somewhat of a transactional role: you should go see this, or go buy this, or at least spend some of your time engaging with it. It’s easy to lose touch with something fundamental about the art in question.
Which is why Carl Phillips’ wonderful essay in At Length hit me so hard. After a close, physical read of two poems—‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop and ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden, he writes:
Why don’t we talk about poems in this way more often? As living things made by living beings, as assemblages of parts working in various combination to convey both thought and feeling? As bodies, with a body’s ability to betray the feeling beneath language, even as we will tell a friend sometimes that we’re doing fine, but what the friend sees is that our hands are shaking, or our eyes are watering, as if we’ve either just stopped crying or we’re about to. So the shifts toward the end of Bishop’s poem show an emotion that belies the speaker’s otherwise calm. So the changes in Hayden’s poem reveal a sense of personal culpability that the detached delivery elsewhere had seemed to suppress.
In answer to Phillips’ question, I’d venture to say it’s more than a little terrifying to go inside a poem—a body—in such a way as to speak for/of/to it. To say, this is a body and this is what’s happening.
It’s a good kind of terror, though. It should be a good kind of terror.