#gap gardening

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

got up early left the house immediately tore out grass bits of leather in his pockets hit fences with his handkerchief answered yes and no to his own questions lies under the grass wilted flowers in his pockets at the fence I pull my handkerchief he liked to say no "I'm no longer the same man" and "nothing is happening to me"

Rosmarie Waldrop -- “Like Hölderlin” from The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger collected in Gap Gardening 

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

To see darkness the eye withdraws from light in light the darkness is invisible the eye’s weakness is no weakness of the light but the eye away from the light is eyeless its power is not-seeing and this not-seeing sees the night do not dismiss your darkness or you’ll be left with vision’s lesser angles it  fills the eye entirely

Rosmarie Waldrop – “Dark Octave, for Edmond Jabès” from The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger collected in Gap Gardening

[liliesofpur-i-ty]

Two voices on a page. Or is it one? Now turning in on themselves, back into fiber and leaf, now branching into sequence, consequence, public works projects or discord. Now touching, now trapped in frames without dialog box. Both tentative, as if poring over old inscriptions, when perhaps the wall is crumbling, circuits broken, pages blown off by a fall draft. Even if voices wrestle on the page, their impact on the air is part of their definition. In a play, for instance, the sentences would be explained by their placement on stage. We would not ask an actress what anguish her lines add up to. She would not worry what her voice touches, would let it spill over the audience, aiming beyond the folds of the curtain, at the point in the distance called the meaning of the play. The difference of our sex, says one voice, saves us from humiliation. It makes me shiver, says the other. Your voice drops stones into feelings to sound their depth. Then warmth is truncated to war. But I'd like to fall back into simplicity as into a featherbed. Voices, planted on the page, do not ripen or bear fruit. Here placement does not explain, but cultivates the vacancy between them. The voices pause, start over. Gap gardening which, moved inward from the right margin, suspends time. The suspension sets in, is set, in type, in columns that precipitate false memories of garden, vineyard, trellis. Trembling leaf, rules of black thumb and white, invisible angle of breath and solid state. She tries to draw a strength she dimly feels out of the weaknesses she knows, as if predicting an element in the periodic table. He wants to make a flat pebble skim across the water inside her body. He wonders if, for lack of sky, it takes on the color of skin or other cells it touches. If it rusts the bones. The pact between page and voice is different from the compact of voice and body. The voice opens the body. Air, the cold of the air, passes through and, with a single inflection, builds large castles. The page wants proof, but bonds. The body cannot keep the voice. It spills. Foliage over the palisade. He has put a pebble under his tongue. While her lips explode in conjectures his lisp is a new scale to practice. He wants his words to life, against the added odds, to a truth outside him. In exchange, his father walking down the road should diminish into a symbol of age. The page lures the voice with a promise of wood blossoming. But there is no air. No breath lives in the mouth or clouds the mirror. On stage, the body would carry the surface we call mind. Here, surface marries surface, refuses deep waters. Still, the point of encounter is here, always. Screams rise. Tears fall. Impure white, legible.

Rosmarie Waldrop -- “Prologue: Two Voices” from Reluctant Gravities, collected in Gap Gardening

[mshocklee]

The Waldrops have, for decades, operated Burning Deck Press, one of the most important publishers of experimental poetry in the history of the United States. Until the mid-eighties, the two of them hand-set text on an old letterpress, a laborious process that encourages caution and thrift. This is handwork, the happy collision of ink and paper. It circumvents the ear and the voice, those ancient conditions of poetry, and makes the material page an end in itself.

from “Mind the Gap: the Poetry of Rosemarie Waldrop” by Dan Chiasson