Thomas Hummel’s Letters & Buildings: On the Pleasures of Difficult Poetry
By Ryo Yamaguchi, August 26, 2015
If you are like me, you don’t like to think. You like to sit back and just let the world happen, maybe enjoy something a little salty to eat, a light breeze, some soft music. I feel that way most of the time, and when I do have to think, I like it to go smoothly—I like to look at a street sign, look at my phone, and have them say the exact same thing. I like my thinking to take place well within the confines of that which I already understand.
Poetry is supremely good at making people feel like they don’t understand. Maybe that’s why so few people read it; they don’t like the hurt inside their brains. Those of us who write poetry, who have studied it for years, are never ready enough, in my opinion, to face up to this fact. We are making it hard for ourselves, and maybe that’s why those who do casually dabble in poetry tend to do so in the comfy works of poets like Robert Frost or Billy Collins.
You know what I’m about to say, though: I love difficult poetry. It challenges reading itself as an endeavor and, thereby, meaning-making, imagination, voice, mood, psyche, even politics. And it can do so in an astonishing diversity of ways. One might, in fact, offer a typology of difficult poetry. Maybe a poem sends you over and over to the library, like Pound’s Cantos. Maybe it evades with an arrhythmia of syntax, like Berryman’s Dream Songs. Maybe it sloughs its lines off with seemingly little regard for a coherent sentiment, a voice of impulse and erasure, something like what John Ashbery does. Or maybe it simply overwhelms with language, with sound and light, like the poems of the wonderful contemporary poet, Joyelle McSweeney. The point is, difficult poems aren’t simply difficult; they are difficult in different kinds of ways.
And I’d like to argue that the poems in Thomas Hummel’s Letters & Buildings are difficult in one of the best kinds of ways, one that can elucidate why we ought ever to twist our faces over challenging lines.
Don’t get me wrong—these poems aren’t for beginners. If poetry isn’t your thing, these will probably reinforce your ill-hearted convictions. Approached the wrong way, approached without a little proofing, a little warmup, and you are in for extraordinary tedium, a semantic satiation and the distinct feeling that you have read a page for the fourteenth time and still can’t keep your mind on it. What frustrates most with these poems in particular is their discursive feel. We feel as though something is being elucidated, explained, and yet we don’t really know what the subject is—the abstraction is so great. Let’s try this little bit, from the long poem “Point and Line to Plane:”
But there is still a great difference between the two
forms of procedure: between the usual description
and enumeration of separate disturbances, such
as those of visual or linguistic performances, and
our procedure, which is primarily directed toward
the cognition of the whole, and, within this frame
of reference, seeks to analyze as many individual
performances as possible. This is not awareness but
a name of it. It can come like the fog, in silence
and almost without his knowing, for then it will
not come forthrightly as a form of a memory but as
something else, as a pure and particularized desire,
a direct and focused appetite.
“Point and Line to Plane” is a work of collage, drawing on several texts as well as Hummel’s own writings, chosen and arranged through use of a random integer generator—a kind of indeterminate literature, analogous to John Cage’s musical work, Music of Changes. What’s different here than in other collage or cut-up works one will see is an oddly robust fidelity to the source texts and their prosody: we get large swaths of clauses that seem ripped from the deepest centers of analytic execution, long runs of sentences drilling into some assumed idea—but an idea that we can’t quite see. It’s as though the clauses have snapped loose from the anchors of their theses. Frame of reference, indeed.
When Hummel takes fuller grip of the reins, as he does in the rest of the collection, the work destabilizes even further. This is adventurous, end-of-the-mind stuff, in many ways charging under the banner of Wallace Stevens’s famous line from “Man Carrying Thing” (“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully”). Indeed, look how Stevensesque these couplets are, from (one of the two poems titled) “Proportion is a correspondence among the measures:”
A nameless touch
we followed falsely on along an every
dwelling flight path, a projection
without patience and on spirals. You speak your
friction or divisive or continually
movements, and the you which speaks you
something is just another thought
shaped into an passage where
the error does not lead—its in for nothing
gives, courses through courses
together has her light or he felt.
Stevens updated, perhaps—this balloon-animal work of abstraction, of philosophy. The moments of unusual syntax form the hard rubber nodes, such as the adjectival forms occupying the place of nouns, “You speak your / friction or divisive,” or the strange inefficiency of “a projection / without patience and on spirals” (given the tempo, why not the simplified: “A spiraled projection / without patience” or “A spiraled, impatient projection”?). These nodes warp—like a hand pressing against a digital screen—the coherence of the idea. Taken together, these instabilities produce a kind of ringing quality, the fissures occurring with a frequency and insistence that warm the poems in an ambient rawness.
Another way of putting it is that these poems are in constant flux. They scrabble themselves together only to immediately tear themselves down, either scissoring their trains of thought off or squeezing them into hard vectors that pursue wending descents down the page.
What gets written—in these movements, in this choreography of thought—is a treatise on creation itself, on form, assembly, reception, perception, and alterity. Each of these elements can be seen in one of the opening poems, “The protogenesis of form is a character of compromise,” which I can quote in full:
Slight of eachness
other: grief long kept
edged behind ideal
lies: our not-willing, non-
cause (I am) not
known to know if
These are poems of maximum generalizability, of basically zero localization in scene or character, and yet within this is a huge concern for the particular, the phenomenal, the realized, the “eachness” and “other.” I can turn to nearly any page and find this insistence on the particular: “I am standing on the body that I see before I dress— / there are two and both pretend—” (“To move and the play”); “We cut away the different parts / until nothing was left but what we found / necessary to make it stand” (“Conversation in black laughs; Or, This is the way we ride the bike”); or “Disease increased / beside its sympathy: splitting each / a presence, companioning in illness” (“Proportion is a correspondence among the measures”). There is this constant sound of assembly, of cellular division, repetition, and mutation, a kind of primordial cognition (Kant, maybe, would have found much value in these poems).
Which brings us to the title, Letters & Buildings, and here we can see it, this action of construction, the laying of blocks. It is within this station of analysis, however, where all the danger lies. This zooming in on the “building blocks”—that which makes sentences and that which makes cities—suggests a microscopic scale. To borrow from the other arts, it suggests paying the kind of attention one might pay to the timbre and phrasing of a violin, the subtle adjustments of dynamics and duration. It suggests stepping forward to look at the brushstrokes. It suggests reading slowly.
But, I submit, with Hummel’s work, this will lead to disaster. Let’s try it, for yucks. Let’s look at four words, stuck like a spear into the right margin about two thirds of the way down an otherwise blank page in the (multi-page) poem “A distance of psychosomatic withdrawal:”
wrests the risen sickness.
This could be straightforward—“wrests” suggests something lodged, and “sickness” can certainly be thought of as lodged. But that “risen” modifying it. That’s a word of freedom. Of dislodging, of lightness—one doesn’t wrest something that has already risen. It’s kind of like saying “freeze the ice.” Of course, risen could mean, in this case, taking hold, as in a risen fever. But then why not simply “wrests the fever,” or, for that matter, “wrests the sickness.” It’s not just a matter of redundancy and efficiency, but of a subtle imbalance in connotative meanings.
But this short line has motion to it—and in this case, it is an effect of sonics, the trochees somersaulting over perfectly alternating vowels (the short “e” and short “i” sounds). The meaning of the lines is enacted in this prosodic movement: the redundancy of “wrest” and “risen” plays like a double tap to counterpoint the drive of the alternating vowels and stresses. It’s like snatching something as it floats up into the air on a trilling draft.
To enjoy this sense in the line, you have to keep moving—you have to employ a certain style of reading. I confess that I was taught this style. When I was young, I made it a project to understand Jorie Graham’s collection The End of Beauty. I would plod my way through lines like these, from “Self-Portrait as the Gesture between Them [Adam and Eve]:”
The passage along the arc of the denouement once the plot has begun, like a limb,
the buds in it cinched and numbered,
outside the true story really, outside of improvisation,
moving along day by day into the sweet appointment.
And I would do it with extreme frustration. What story? What plot? What is the improvisation, and why are we outside of it? The desire for grounding with these kinds of abstractions is to be expected, but they force the poem into a scale to which it isn’t suited—granularity, at times, can be noise. The suggestion—from my beloved mentor, Brigit Pegeen Kelly—was to simply read the poems more quickly. Stand farther back. And indeed, Graham’s usual pace is swift—about nine feet in the example above before we get a breath, not to mention a line break.
It’s a counter-intuitive approach when you are a student, when the poem is something you study, but I’ve come to feel it’s one of the most important things you learn as a reader. The good news is that, like a painting (and unlike music), the poem isn’t going away. You can adjust your scales, step forward and backward as you need until the framing is right, or until combinations of framing elucidate the work. You can go back to “Self-Portrait” and think, perhaps, about the sonics of “sweet appointment” or about the use of “passage” to activate “arc.” And then you can steer across and down its lines with speed.
The poems in Letters & Buildings teach this style of reading with a nearly superlative insistence. The treasure that one finds, when one finds the right pace, is a communication of impressions, tracers of intelligence that script something else, something unscriptable. There is true art to this—it isn’t nonsense, though it flirts with the idea, precisely, in artful ways. Hummel reaches a particularly exercised and successful level with this flirtation in the final section, “Twentieth Century,” whose impressions vibrate with a kind of maximum load, the shake of a muscle stretched to limit. Let’s close with a look at one page from this poem, these elegant quatrains with their snipped tops and bottoms:
“why aren’t you laughing”
when they didn’t really mean it. Heliotropes
like foam, butler in film then. Petersburg
even more touched
than before. Then again
was she sure she didn’t want to leave. Cleaning
up the seasonal, the datum at the place of it—if
it, if we stopped
it, it could only—then
yes, a summer home. Quadrant out the views
before the views go while. At their amplest there
were thousands building
We clip-in beneath/to the side of laughter (which echoes a great line toward the beginning of the collection: “the laughter, white ambush”—on the previous facing page of the “risen sickness” line) and from there start constellating particulars into a form. Heliotropes are a genus of purplish flowers—here in foamy abundance—but surely we also hear “helio” on its own—the sun. So we have purple and gold.
Likewise Petersburg could be any number of cities (maybe the postindustrial one in Virginia, or Saint Petersburg in Russia (so maybe some cold to counterpoint “helio”))—so we get a generic city that yet insists on its particularity, a pan of an archetypal landscape. Foam turns into film turns into “touched”—and we get that one narrative line that sits like a stone in the mind: “then again was she sure she didn’t want to leave.” Then we have the lines of work/activity, the “cleaning up the seasonal,” the lovely “datum at the place of it,” and this more urgent, “if we stopped it”—all landing on the respite of the “summer home” and its views (squared off, like a city-dweller’s habit), wherein there is yet more work, the “thousands building.”
Don’t let the necessary pace of my exegesis undercut what I said before: read quickly, these elements interlace: inside, outside, artificial, organic, hot, cold, work, rest, generic, particular—and running through that, the human story, just barely glimpsed, but all the more savored for its rarity. You begin to hear the music and see a running montage of a life. You can stop and puzzle over any individual line, expression, and opacity, but if that’s all you do, if you get trapped in it, you’ll miss the correspondences that work together to evoke the subtler—perhaps, more important—sense and meaning.
We like to talk about art as describing the ineffable, but it doesn’t necessarily always do that. Or maybe some things that some arts describe are comfortably ineffable—the feeling of nostalgia, of frustration with one’s lot in life, or the beauty of nature. There is a whole other layer of experience—both elemental and richly synthetic—that doesn’t necessarily jibe with these usual categories and tropes. This is the realm of the experimentalists, of poets like Hummel who challenge their materials to not only describe that which can’t be described but reify it. Perhaps, for the reader, the feat, and its discomfort, is enriching, a therapy. For me, I believe it is.
…
Ryo Yamaguchi is the author of The Refusal of Suitors, a collection of poems by Noemi Press. He writes cultural and media essays for The Hairsplitter and regularly reviews books at various other outlets. Visit him at www.plotsandoaths.com.
Photo of the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis via Flickr, from Sarah H’s photostream
Mathias Svalina's "The Hospital," a film by Nathan Young based on a section of the poem "Above the Fold," available in the book The Explosions, purchasable from Subito Press.
