BROKEN UMBRELLAS
by Nick Sturm
But I don’t set much stock in things
Beyond the weather and the certainties of living and dying:
The rest is optional.
-
John
Ashbery, “Houseboat Days”
I recently started following Neil Young on Twitter. In
December he tweeted “I like weather.” “Driftin’ Back,” the first song on Psychedelic Pill, the second of two new
Neil Young & Crazyhorse albums released in 2012, is over 27 minutes of
rough-fuzz fuck you to expectations about trimmed up, digestible music. “Gonna
get me a hip hop hair cut,” he sings between long stretches of trembling
distortions, “Gonna get a hip hop hair cut / Gonna get a hip hop hair cut.” “I
might be a Pagan.”
*
I really like seeing broken umbrellas. I have for a long
time. The weather in Florida guarantees their appearance more frequently than
any other place I’ve lived. Especially here in the capital where appearances
reign. I walk through downtown after a storm and there they are, angrily
discarded. Large trashy flowers. Someone got wet. I am being told something
about value and meaning, about form.
*
“The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness
of the world and is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it, in
that case.” – Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure”
*
It isn’t as simple as saying the umbrella is significant or
beautiful because it’s broken. I’m not interested in the object so much as the
forces it reveals. Of course the poems are necessary, but they point to
the something beyond them. “Merciful, purple, my night hammer reeked” – Anthony
McCann. Sometimes we get close to that something. Traces. Tears. There is an
affective residue that comes off it. I have to acknowledge my own unknowable
coordinates in relation to it. An aporic referent. The inexplicable. What happened
or what made it happen? I don’t know. It’s not that easy. I don’t feel
something because the umbrella’s brokenness puts it at odds with utility. I
feel something because somebody’s life was altered, because they lost control,
had to make a choice. And that life can be very far away, in all the ways that
means, but now it has a shape. It won’t close.
*
“Aesthetic experiences are all I have.” – Jon Woodward,
“Uncanny Valley”
*
I have two umbrellas. One is American flag patterned. It was
in a closet in my apartment when I moved in. Sometimes when I’m restless I’ll
open it and walk from room to room. I’ve done this a few times. It’s calming.
Do you ever do things like this? Lay down on the kitchen floor? Take balloons
to the beach? I think it is a way of saying to the world you haven’t got me figured out yet. To be inexplicable. Not for
effect. But because you are being honest. With your artifice. Or otherwise.
*
In an essay called “The Esthetics of Ambiguity: Reverdy’s
Use of Syntactical Simultaneity,” Eric Sellin quotes another essay called
“Creativity and Culture” by Morris I. Stein:
The creative person has a lower
threshold, or greater sensitivity, for the gaps or the lack of closure that
exist in the environment. The sensitivity to these gaps in any one case may
stem largely from forces in the environment or from forces in the individual.
Associated with this sensitivity is the
creative individual’s capacity to tolerate
ambiguity…. I mean that the individual is capable of existing amidst a state
of affairs in which he does not comprehend all that is going on, but he
continues to effect resolution despite the present lack of homeostasis.
I think what is most compelling here is that the description
is not relegated strictly to process, but to all experience. These ubiquitous
“forces.” Internal and external. At odds. But also a radical synchronicity.
Which is also a dissonance. Sellin continues: “The creative experience is at
once a self-realizing and a self-destroying process.” How true this is seems to
depend on what we find valuable or meaningful, or how we even talk about those
words. Like, is the poem a thing you make or a thing that makes you? Do you put
the world in the poem or is the poem a world, worlds? How true this is seems to
depend on how your attention then tunes itself. To be clear, without knowing.
*
Keats sits down to write his brother a letter.
*
The other umbrella I acquired in a bus terminal in Charlotte
a few months ago. My flight had been cancelled, due to weather, and I’d spent
the night on a friend of a friend’s couch. The next morning I walked downtown
to catch a bus to the airport. I was standing in the wrong line when a woman on
her phone, running by, knocked into my backpack. I staggered a little and
turned to see her, still going, adjusting her purse onto her shoulder. She did
not look back. I walked to where I was supposed to be and felt something
swinging from my backpack. It was an umbrella. Black and white. It had somehow
hooked on when she bumped into me. But a pattern I can’t describe. It was brand
new. The woman was gone. It was tightly wrapped with a slipcover, which seemed
unnecessary. I got on the bus. There was weather. I got on the plane.
*
“The rest is optional,” as Ashbery says, “the rest” being
our weak grasping at certainty, our illusory belief in control. The poem
continues:
To
praise this, blame that,
Leads one
subtly away from the beginning, where
We must
stay, in motion. To flash light
Into the
house within, its many chambers,
Its memories
and associations, upon its inscribed
And
pictured walls, argues enough that life is various.
Variousness. To look closely, but also widely. To have a
feeling, but to allow it its own wild autonomy. A necessary openness. An
endless inscription. There is no third term synthesis between certainty and
uncertainty. There is a 50% chance it will rain today. There is a 50% chance it
will not rain today. There is your door. There is your chance. And you walk
through it. Not necessarily over and over. But continuously.
*
“I enter the poems as I entered my own life, moving between
an initiation and a terminus I cannot name.” – Robert Duncan, “Equilibrations”
*
Jon Woodward’s Uncanny
Valley is a book made of waves, breaks, dissipations, static, magic, fire, charges,
accumulations, flows, overflows, currents, circuits, spirals, dissolutions,
echoes, pours, wrecks, crystals, swirls, gushes, blasts, transformations,
clatterings, unconnections, dismemberments. It foregrounds the impossible
architecture of the image. “Put my hand / Outside a real horse.” It is a
machine with skin on everything. “Everything is a receptive sensor.” The book’s
first poem, “Huge Dragonflies,” is seven pages of holy stuttering fire around
the phrase “Hope dwells eternally there,” a line repeated, distorted, and made
so referentially manifold over the course of the poem that its promise of
salvation is as terrifying as it is enigmatic. “The stars eat her body on the
air.” Trees are syntax enough. The weather in grammar’s bodies.
Frankenstein’s
women who sing an inside-out melody
Whose
throats are haunted by stairwells’ throats
To form the
buzz-golemesses of speech
Speech
insects rub legs together who
Make use of
the stairwell but never the stairs
To fill the
stairwell with legs
The footnotes are numinous, too. Numerous. Instructions are
included and/or (dis)assembly is required. “Lines notated like the previous two
/ Are repeated (as a pair) / As many times as the reader desires, / From zero
to 255, before continuing.” This is how I know I am not “making” sense. I am
participating in larger ineffable patterns. “Simply an enunciation.”
*
“I keep hoping you will interrupt me.” – Darcie Dennigan,
“Funeral for a Wallflower”
*
Some of my friends have confused the overwhelming joy I
experience when I see a broken umbrella with a hatred of umbrellas that are not
broken, or with a loathing for people who use umbrellas. This is not the case.
I’m on the satisfied side of indifference knowing that people, including
myself, have the ability to avoid, as much as possible, getting wet when it
rains. It is important to know when to be practical. I think metaphors are very
useful, too. I have more than two of them. But I don’t “make” them. I’m in a
poem and there one is. Or I am trying to do something else and one latches on
and I have to stumble around for a while before I know it’s there. I don’t know
what they’re doing or where they came from. I don’t even necessarily want them.
But I am using words, which know more than me, which are already spilling the
energies of comparison, which already contain every accentuation of similarity
and dissimilarity. I am humbled in the presence of the larger, uncontrollable
patterns at work in and around me. When I am paying attention they come down on
me. Not as metaphors really. As a sound. A gap. A force. A pattern. Plural of
all these things. But those are already metaphors. They break. I am soaking
afterwards. I don’t want to plan on it.
*
“Metaphors are not for humans.” – Jack Spicer, “A Textbook
of Poetry”
*
“is the mouth where you live? is the mouth where you live
like a push down on the land?” – Carrie Lorig, “c a t t l e h u r t e r”
*
What if I don’t want to make things easier on myself? What
if I’d rather be wrong? Not as a position against, but because that’s what
feels true? My least favorite poetry term is “controlled metaphor.” My least
favorite poems are poems that are only poems. Poems are machines, not pets. And
the most interesting things happen when they do not happen the way we expected
them to. Forces are at work. Beyond our control. And as Dean Young asks, “What
can’t be made more beautiful by an out-of-order sign?”
*
A number of René Magritte’s paintings include images of
umbrellas, such as Hegel’s Holiday.
In MOMA’s 1965 book on Magritte, James Thrall Soby claims this painting
“typifies Magritte’s deliciously subversive wit in that an umbrella supports a
tumbler full of the water it is meant to repel.” Sure, but what’s more
subversive is that no one is holding the umbrella. Ontologically, you could say
it’s broken.
*
Chris Martin in an interview at The Conversant about his
book, Becoming Weather:
I am interested in weather as a figure
of humility enforcement. Nothing eats us anymore, or at least very rarely, and
the only non-human thing tempering our pride is weather. And viruses. But I
wanted to talk about weather. And I wanted weather to be inside our bodies. And
I wanted weather to be linguistic. And I wanted weather to signal, once and for
all, the inherent disequilibrium of existence.
*
Everyone knows what the umbrella and the sewing machine were
doing on the dissecting table. But no one asks about the dissecting table. It
was only the occasion. It very quickly became unnecessary. This is unfortunate.
*
Poetry workshops can be great. They have been very important
for me. But they tend to be based on a performance of separations. Poetry from
prose. Understanding from confusion. Completion from incompletion. Literature
from art. Language from experience. Questions like, “Does every line end with a
strong word?” are being asked. Is that how I’ll know I love you?
*
In Northern Florida there are signs along some parts of the
highway that say FOG SMOKE. They are huge signs. They want you to know there is
or was or is going to be FOG SMOKE. One part weather, one part transformation.
A precise, exciting kind of incongruence. Like riding into Carrie Lorig’s nods. I am in something thick and
turbulent and holy and untranslatable. A belief in difficult combinations.
Where you came from and where you’re going are semantic concerns, if concerns
at all. It is a feeling. More importantly, more potentially, Lorig’s poems are
the monsters most of us avoid breathing into. She is brave enough, cares
enough, to sing in the color of their mouths. THEY ARE ALL STRONG WORDS. It’s
true, it’s not clear if FOG SMOKE is a warning or a warming up to how the world
overwhelms us. But to be enveloped in that confusion, developed by it, to allow
your whole body to confirm it, to be formed by it, is to have faith in the not
knowing that gives opaqueness clarity. What you can see depends on how you
define seeing, how you defire seething.
i
am funny wet i am so stupid and wet.
the pain
cattle at last spit
blood when it rains. i made them crowd.
i made them warehouse. i made them dots. i made them swallow cow magnets. i
made them much. i made them much that don’t go. i made them in front of a
flower standing that bust went out of. their body is not cleaned, but it is fed
into a place sometimes language goes all the time.
Language, like the body, stores and leaks a lot of pain. But
there is a desirous optimism rooting Lorig’s poem-fields. They are weather
sounds. They are the broken umbrellas crawling out of the gutters and into your
window. Reading these poems I am convinced there is no such thing as an excess
of feeling. Only a continuous inseparability of language from life, word from
body. I don’t need to understand. I can hear you.
*
Julie Andrews witchily descends from the sky with an umbrella
in the 1964 version of Mary Poppins.
A later scene includes this dialogue:
Mr. Banks:
Mary Poppins, what is the meaning of this outrage?
Mary
Poppins: I beg your pardon?
Mr. Banks:
Would you be good enough to explain all this?
Mary
Poppins: First of all, I would like to make one thing quite clear.
Mr. Banks:
Yes?
Mary
Poppins: I never explain anything.
*
“Indeterminacy.” – John Cage
*
The weatherman is the literary critic who only talks about
the future. He is a complete failure. I love him.
*
When Gene Kelly famously dances through the rain with an
umbrella in the 1952 musical Singin’ in
the Rain, he doesn’t “use” the umbrella, or he doesn’t use it like it’s
intended to be used. Rather, it becomes the thing beside language, his song,
that heightens the effect of his love-struck whimsy. The early height of the
song, and Kelly’s close-up in the scene, comes when Kelly takes off his hat,
closes his eyes, and holds his arms out singing “Come on with the rain, I’ve a
smile on my face.” Later, a cop approaches as Kelly splashes and stomps through
puddles to the beat of the song, music that is obviously inaudible to this
sudden manifestation of the symbolic order. Kelly steps back to the sidewalk,
smiles, shrugs, closes the umbrella, therefore acknowledging its
impracticality, and the last verse becomes his innocent explanation to the
figure’s stern silence: “I’m dancin’ and singin’ in the rain.” The scene ends
with Kelly handing the umbrella to a passer-by, an act of generosity that
confirms to the audience he is worthy of Debbie Reynolds’ love. My students are
often baffled when I suggest they write using language as if they don’t know
what it’s for. It takes them time to see purposelessness as a kind of purpose.
I tell them there is a feeling behind it. However vaguely, the desire to be
transformed. To say “the rest is optional” is more than to shrug at the cop,
it’s to make the cop powerless.
*
Clouds, big
ones oh it’s
blowing up
wild outside.
Be
something for me
this time.
Change me,
wind.
Change me, rain.
-
Alice Notley, untitled
*
The “X” in the title of Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X is that drenched, potential
referent that guarantees the uncontrollability of our transformations.
Inconsummate, unidentifiable, sexual, forbidden, multiple, a mask, a feast. It
is both omission and content. Excess and absence. Content. There’s no
keeping the words safe from their own weather. Or us, for what (that)
matter(s): “This is me typing – Darcie. I am a human. / At least, when I am not
a monster, with boobs and mouth and fingers.” Indeterminacy. Being people being
trembling things leaking out of it. To be brave, and not, in not knowing. With
our surety, over ourselves and what we make, so terrifyingly unsure. With that
in mind, Madame X has catastrophe in
mind. Titles: “The Atoll,” “The Contaminants,” “The Shooter,” “The Drought,”
“The Half-Life,” “The End is Near.” Many of the poems are filled with ellipses,
those trails into the ether:
It’s
hard to tell the difference … if … you talk enough … I donned these black robes and lived in shadows and … It was time
for a rhetorical gesture … Of course of course I nod with a nod … a nod
magnanimous … a nod sagacious … a nod to a slide of particularly dark … trees …
Of course the wilderness spreads woe unto
him … who carries the wilderness with
him … and the audience member … I had him … I knew … Thus … I parted my
robes … to show … marching in and out of my cunt … the ants … Then … the robes
… I shut … He … the audience … was no longer standing … very close … Goodness …
! I chided … Such distance …
Whitman, who also so irreverently took possession of the
body, its meaning and value and ability, touches what can’t be touched with the
ellipsis: “All this I swallow and it tastes good …. I like it well, and it
becomes mine,” “I dilate you with tremendous breath …. I buoy you up; / Every
room of the house do I fill with an armed force …. lovers of me, bafflers of
graves,” “Confused …. a pastreading …. another, but with darkness yet.”
Permeability. Performance. Perforation. Dennigan: “I think it has something to
do with asking to be broken”…
*
Poems that allow the possibility of being damaged by the
forces they should supposedly be in control of. How they accommodate that
possibility. Exacerbate it. When I say my least favorite poems are poems that
are only poems, I mean poems that don’t allow this possibility. Then I don’t
feel anything. I do not experience the world in a controlled manner. I am alone
in the produce section when a head of lettuce rolls off the shelf onto the
floor and a void opens around us. Two weeks later at a wedding someone tells me
a story about a lettuce farmer they know, about how much he loves growing
lettuce. The void opens further. I am experiencing a metaphor. Synchronicity.
Dissonance. A llama in Virginia looks up to a dropped cell phone call. I see
something inexplicable. A kind of trembling. A few minutes later I tell Kelin
about it. She says, “There’s magic here.”
*
“And the human witness of this passion is rightly stunned by
the incongruity of it. Lifting a human being into a metaphor.” – Jack Spicer,
“A Textbook of Poetry”
*
A song called “Broken Umbrella” appears
on Martina McBride’s most recent album, Eleven. An
obvious fusion of “Let it Snow!” and the YOLO sentiment of Kelly’s dance scene
in Singin’ in the Rain, it is
horrible. Yet, in the midst of its poorly grafted pop sentiment there is a
welcoming of darker circumstances: “With your hand in mine, / The sun always
shines, / No matter what the weatherman says. / I don’t mind the flood.” The
flood. To be consumed. Even here, though it’s quickly swept away, is the
recognition that our undoing is simultaneously our becoming.
*
“FLASHBLOODFLASHBLOODFLASHBLOODFLASHBLOODFLASHBLOOD” – Carrie Lorig
*
I recently met a poet. This poet graduated from one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country. We were at a bar. I told this poet that I take theory classes over workshops because they tune me differently, more dynamically. I think they are better for the poems, for now, for me being a human and a body in the world, which then goes back into the poems, which then goes back into being a human and a body, etc. I said this knowing it is not a common thing for a “creative writer” to say. Then the poet asked me, “Aren’t you worried about the theory affecting your poems?” I changed the subject and drank more beer. Behind that question is the thing I write poems in an attempt to obliterate: the failure of the imagination. I went outside and stood in the parking lot for a long time. For no reason.
*
“[T]he imperative of herdlike timidity: ‘At some point, we
want there to be nothing more to be
afraid of!’” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil
*
“When I wake up in the morning and it’s raining, I feel like
rolling in the mud.” – Lyn Hejinian, My
Life
*
I wasn’t in the “wrong line” in the Charlotte bus terminal. Wrong in relation to what? I had an intention. But more powerful patterns were already at work. Does every wrong line end with an unintentional umbrella?
*
Before any of the poems in Chris Martin’s Becoming Weather you have to walk
through words from Alice Notley, Joan Jonas, and Friedrich Nietzsche. To be
populated by voices. “I might be a Pagan.” To welcome the saturation.
Agitation. Not over and over. But continuously. The alternative is an untenable
single-mindedness, an illusory stability. “And I wanted weather to be inside
our bodies. And I wanted weather to be linguistic. And I wanted weather to
signal, once and for all, the inherent disequilibrium of existence.” To
recognize yourself as not apart. This is an act of humbleness. Of compassion.
“I’m asking you / to accompany me // through the deformations.” The hand absent
in Magritte’s painting is recognized elsewhere.
In
this abundance, this dance of answers, one answer was the form from which the
others emerged. This answer, of course, was the body. And the body, of course,
is full of answers. We called it corporeal order: that which speaks volume in
overspill, excess, slip, and surprise; that which will not be still. We learned
perpetual rearrangement, learned to stray from the dictates of convenience.
It is not a coincidence that all of these poets so acutely
and relentlessly think from the body. (I didn’t plan this part.) “[W]hat is it
a body does?” asks Martin. It
repeats. It opens. It emphasizes. It always shifts along with “the shifting
limit / of equilibrium ceaselessly / lurching askew.” It gets wet. I know
myself, however indeterminately, because “repetition is desire.” Desire in all
the connective ways possible. Am I worried the theory will affect my poems?
Enter Ronald Barthes and that active (act of) be-coming. Am I worried that if
it rains I’ll get wet? Enter Audre Lorde:
Another important way in which the
erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity
for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response,
hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens
to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a
bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
This opening is the foundation of my enthusiasm for the
broken umbrella, that connection to the ineffable, to those patternless
patterns my own necessary structures manifest themselves in relation to. I am
always trying to become better through these moments. To be with Hejinian in
the mud. To not set much stock in things, beyond (…). To be more than an
audience. To love, however uncontrollably.
I am becoming weather
and
I
don’t
plan
on doing
it
alone
Jon Woodward's Uncanny Valley
Darcie Dennigan's Madame X
Chris Martin's Becoming Weather
Carrie Lorig's nods.
*****
Nick Sturm is the author of How We Light, forthcoming from H_NGM_N Books, as well as a number of chapbooks including, with Wendy Xu, I Was Not Even Born (Coconut) and, with Carrie Lorig, Nancy and The Dutch (NAP). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Typo, jubilat, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. He is from Akron, Ohio and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
