Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
New Form
That particular conjunction of events which includes the history of your body, your experience, and your art vertically, and the time and circumstances you are in horizontally, seeks an expression that is inevitably unique, or new.
A formal problem or limit represents a limit of what you can make or say or see at a particular moment. You might make a new form by following a desire or an intuition into a further, more contemporary part of you, such as varying the line length according to the horizon, embedding scientific terms into an equivocal or into a lyric context, using thought imagistically.
I find the idea of newness interesting, during a time when there is no recognized critical aesthetic. Criticism is at the edge of what it can discern or say, and so it’s interesting to seek emerging form in fashion, in the margins of the arts, on the street, in experimental physics.
I have an intuition of a new form, as a new expertise in the topology of expression, emotion, and culture.
At first I characterized this new form by an idea of the horizontal, a horizontal cut across experience and culture, synchronistically and democratically, rather than familiar vertical cut into tradition and essence.
But now I want to say it is a topological section or point of view, which could then include both verticals and horizontals along a complexity of a continuous surface, and with a new set of formal dynamics.
It’s something which might take collage further.
It’s my intuition about an aesthetic, or perhaps an intuition about a poem, and would require a new craft or form, analogous to the invention of a mathematics of surfaces.
It’s an aesthetic I’ve noticed in younger or “newer” writers that is just beyond my grasp. I have an urge to understand what they know that enables them to generate this ungraspable form, and it is an urge from the intuition which desires a way to express convolutions of experiences and meanings in me, which are somehow all rising into a present tense, or tense of one time, or one surface.
It could be a way to write a poem across fragmented concentrations, for example, if you are raising children, instead of by traditionally pursuing a single line. It could be a way to write a poem that responds to the barrage of layered stimuli in the world.
A friend tells me that, when she sees a deer next to a rock on a far hill, she learned as a child, by concentrating, to make the deer appear larger and closer, and the rock to diminish. When I ask a Yupik boy how he finds an animal on empty tundra, he tells me, you just look for the animal, until you see the animal.
The scientific notion of color as wavelengths of light—that we have in the light on our hands all possible colors—may not be true if you can call memory into being using a color. We can imagine a person inventing a color, now, seeing it for the first time, and that that new color’s entrance pertains to a new appropriateness in the environment for it to be seen, not a predisposition.
This could be how a new form takes place.
P.S. It’s interesting for me to see that this essay written almost 20 years ago still accords with my ideas about poetry. Today I might replace the word “topological” with “holographic,” because I meant both surface and implication.
Rabbit, Hair, Leaf
1
Some child left the cage unlatched
and George’s rabbit hopped out with timid interest
while they were all inside eating cake
drank from the acequia where they found prints
and got its throat torn by a dog tame enough not to eat it
Their own dogs were lapping crumbs from plates
The rabbit with the velvet nose was only one he loved
because it was gentle like him, but others, too
more responsive though less like clouds were slaughtered
or died of their hearts: birds, a turtle who hibernated
too long. He still stares at chickadees scrabbling
on the snow-patched earth and wonders if he could love one
His most sensuous dreams are of a golden horse
2
Hair scattered on bare dirt
where an old woman has combed it
instead of going straight and smooth keeps falling
and the flesh that holds it keeps letting go
what isn’t pecked away by coal-colored birds
or dragged a small distance by the coyote eating hair and all
The tiny tail-bone I found on a hill
bleached and tapered as a rat’s nose
or that big fist of cow thigh by the cottonwoods
has nothing to do with the cloud we stepped through
accidentally, or the quick breath at the back of our necks
It is the animal in you smells death
though the real smell has gone to sage
that makes you start to run, but the ghost in you
makes you stay on that tenuous patch
of meadow fog on dirt. Eerie there are no bones
only white hair thick as milkweed
and big as a man with arms spread
so clean and old most of what’s eaten it
likely dead, too
3
I picked up some yellow leaves you bled on
and put them in a book
I always thought the body died slowly
letting go as much as it understood at a time
Angry as you were in a minor way, it went to dirt
growing into something, with any water at all
But a dead horse in the stream, eyes gone
fouls what flows through it
