I had to take about a week off from the blog while I successfully secured a full time job. But I'm back, now. I doubt that I will be able to keep it this up as well as I have been, but I hope to post about three times a week.
The recently published Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia Books), begins with a quotation from Joris' early poem "Antlers," and for good reason—it is a memorable poem, perhaps a defining one for that era of Joris' poetry.
What follows is a series of observations, notes, and glancings relative to my personal experience with the poem. Given the particulars of my trajectories through this world, what does "Antlers," especially the sections collected in Joris first selected poems, Brecchia, do for me?
Early in the long poem, Joris mentions buying some reindeer antlers that
" are still
& not mounted,
mildewed
next to the cracked flower
pots"
I grew up on a street of deer hunters, although my family was not one of them. In a special room or the basement they had gun racks and a deer head sporting antlers high on a wall. Though my friends, they were a breed apart from me. They told me of misdirection.
You could hunt by walking a glance through the woods, over trails common to deer, and searching for tracks. Or you could hunt by waiting in a stand attached to a tree. There, you hoped to capitalize on the deer's wanderings: misdirection.
One way of hunting had nothing to do with misdirection. A phalanx of hunters, about 10 feet between each, marched through a wood, flushing. Such work may be efficient killing, but it can coax no truth.
Coaxing arises from dancing. Truth—quick, effervescent, quickly camouflaged—stems from dance.
Even moving straight ahead in a certain fashion—alert, noticing, wondering, coalescing the manifold—can turn into a form of misstep, misdirection, sidestepping into truth. What was that in the corner of my eye?
Any truth is provisional:
(where rhythm
means death
there is no
such thing
as rhythm) (35)
In this moment, toward the end of the poem, Joris comes to realization, statement, insight. And, I think, he means what he says, philosophically, but equally importantly, he keeps moving. No concluding couplet, no Wallace Stevens wrapping up "The Idea of Order at Key West" with just such an idea. Where Stevens states, Joris enacts.
No ideas but in dance
of form
of line
of myth.
How do I approach the Classical and European allusions such as Artemis and St. Hubert? T.S. Eliot once snottily said that to understand "The Wasteland" you already had to have read a foot-wide selection of books. But, in a way, he's right: poetic allusion doesn't work well unless it reverberates in the marrow of the reader's bones. These myths cannot do so for me, because they are not my myths—not George Washington and Betsy Ross and Martin Luther King.
When I come to these allusions, I look them up, but they can penetrate me no more deeply than the upper level of epidermis, which I will soon molt.
I can only touch by misdirection; the myths are pieces of stories I overhear: compelling, involving, absorbing. I strain my ear in their direction, desiring a fuller rendition, and then Joris
moves.
Misdirection.
Tangent.
Torque.
Feint.
The best dancers turn up where you don't expect, ever.
"We kill
deer
& make of their antlers
knifehandles."
Before reading this, I could not have guessed that humans played a crucial role in deer (who are herbivores) cannibalism.
A misdirection.
A dance.
A weirdness at the heart of misadjustment
" The young man's
initiation:
to break
open
the slain deer.
My bone-handle knife." (22)
Joris not only alludes to various mythologies, he creates his own. Above, the young boy is initiated into death, rhythm, butchering, sustenance. Initiated into his place in the cannibalism of deer, into the cannibalism of earth, of the universe.
The stag's pearled antlers impale the hounds tracking the prize. Cannibalism. Hounds dying to get the antlers for the hunter, who will carve up other deer with them. Die to die. Die for killing.
Kill for the venison. But mostly for the antlers:
" I learned all this
early
I was eager
wanting antlers."
The antlers, of course, symbolize the hunt, masculinity (at least traditionally), and dominance over nature. But it is important to remember that Joris only gets to discussing the hunt and the butchering after he has undercut the very aura of antlers: he describes them early in the poem as sitting in a damp room, gathering mildew, rather than being mounted. Then, he mentions how women asked for the mounted deer heads to come down because they scare the kids.
Misdirection: decentralization: parenting concerns determine the home, a home partly fed by the hunt. Trophies must gather dust or mold: they represent a climax, but any climax is dependent upon anti-climax as background. Nurturing kids takes precedence over the symbol not of simple sustenance, but dominance. Over time, such symbols become a little bit empty, display yesterday's tired story, a story as impractical as a dead deer's head when the kids need food and care.
Before the hunt even begins, Joris announces the dissipation of the suspense.
But if we find those antlers in the attic, "spiderwebs span[ning] / the distance / from point / to point," a feint aura of hunting remains, and not only a hunt, but The Hunt: sustenance, glory, initiation, and, finally, prioritization. Put the glory in the corner where it won't scare the kids.
Joris ends the poem by referring to how antlers grow with the years and record change and time and rhythm. But ends with a reference to the wiping out of the Delawares and
" the tail swallows the head
for a change."
This difficult image echoes how change is enacted throughout the poem on all sorts of levels: with philosophy, poetics, narrative, myth, and childhood.
I guess Joris asks us to re-imagine an almost clichéd image, to see the end as the beginning, the tail being the hunter and eater rather than the usual head (face, mouth, brain.) Does the body cannibalize the head? Does the dance take over reason? Does the jittery, zig-zagging quality of Joris' lines and the misdirections and glancings of his observations, stories, allusions, turn into a dance both particular and whole? part of a universe that eats itself, not "at the barn-dance / of chaos," but in the multivalent admixture of all that can and will, turning and torquing, rhythm and death and dance and change? Any climax eats itself.
_____________________
Pierre Joris, Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (éditons phi, Station Hill, 1987)
Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan UP, 2001)
Peter Cockelbergh, Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011)
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