A REVIEW OF
CONSTANCE STADLER’S PAPER CUTS,
Calliope Nerve Media
By
Duane Locke
I start my response to reading Constance Stadler’s poems with the first poem in the collection, “Candlelight Meditation.” As I start my reading, immediately the musical control entices my attention. The music puts its arms around me. Her music is a poetic music that communicates connotations that are inseparable from connotations emanating from the denotations of the words. It is a music of the master poetic musicians, Chaucer (if read in Middle English), Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and T. S. Eliot, but it is not a stolen music from historic and now defunct traditional forms, not a copied music, not a mechanical exercise of received poetic forms classified and ossified in poetry handbooks and what has come to be known in popular critical parlance as formal poetry. It is an original music, her music, only a music that Connie could write. Her music pulls the reader right into the print on the page.
A word appears a disembodied word, a lonely word, “Soft.” Its being capitalized establishes an urge to move forward, enter, it suggest that something will follow, perhaps, a sentence or a sentence fragment. A lower case “soft” would cause the reader to linger in its strange, disembodied isolation. But the capitalization urges movement forward, but the spatial isolation suggest immobility, the mysterious loneliness of immobility, And a realistic feeling of contradiction is conveyed. This is not a language that is reduced to uttering static formulations of familiar feelings, but a gestural language that enacts real feelings. The feelings are not stated, but performed by words.
The white spacing surrounding the word “Soft” make the urge to move hesitant, as when a person is urged to move, but retarded in progression by a doubt, a feeling of hesitation.
There is even a sadness, a concealed sadness, and when in the poem of Jules La Forgue the lover cannot execute the premier pas. But the situation turns La Forgue’s lover into a comic, but Connie keeps her dancer silent and strange.
I will deviate at this moment of the first word in the poem, to comment on Connie’s use of white space. In this poem and throughout the book she is a master of making white space communicate deep and profound emotion. Connie’s superb use of white space causes me to thank Mallarme for introducing white space as a communicative element in his Coup de dis. After Mallarme, white space became a tradition in French poetry, but I think Connie excels the French poets such as Andre du Bouchet, Gerard Arseguel, Olivier Cadiot, and other white spacers.
Then in this poem of Connie’s comes an image of an appearance, the appearance is almost disembodied, the appearance being only a part of an anatomy--”Slim hipped.”
2.
This is not a Renoir or a Rubens’ anatomy--not even a Botticelli appearance, but more of a part of an Egon Schiele body, with its suggestion of desolation and loneliness. After the “Slim hipped” preceded by a white space that isolates the unit with its two closely juxtaposed high pitched vowels whose sounds jar and prepare for movement comes a pronounal introduction, a “she” and the she sways. The sway is strongly end-stopped, A caesura that preludes the movement of enjambment and running on, and thus a tension is created in the reader’s response, and the corporeal movement of a dancer is fixed as if a photograph and not a lifelike movement of flesh.
What was becoming a dance, even if reduced to unelaborated sway, a dance of a she, is presented unparticularized, as the dancer does not have green eyes or rust-red hair, and is not situated on a shellacked raw wood blond floor, and is not situated and founded by an audience, what is almost becoming a dance to present sensual delight and smooth the senses is undermined by the next line “Blind white” and thus an irony of expectation and then lost. Instead of a feeling of ordinary solidity, there is the feeling of an apparitional solidity, as if an unfilled passionate promise.
“Blind white” appear as what in traditional metrical poetry would the called a spondee.
“Blind” is such a heavy word, a high-pitched vowel, surrounded by two consonant clusters. The word resonates and disturbs, and thus the reader is fascinated by a multi-dimensional verbal occurent, a linguistic reality that opens to feeling of a presence of actual existence.
Then another action after the “sway,” she pulls the wick. The overtones and undertones of “Blind white” preceded, linger, do not depart, and enter and enrich the texture of the forthcoming action “She pulls the wick.”
The pull of the wick stopped me, stunned me, reverberated through me. The word “wick” did it. Connie, in this poem and poems throughout the book has a tendency to create intense emotive moments through the use of short words with consonant surrounded high pitched vowels. An interesting scholarly study could be made of her use of high-pitched vowels. Connie is an expert in the expressive use of the Signifier, selecting a poetic diction andd poetic spatial arrangement to expand the Signifier beyond its limited dictionary meaning and its fuzziness in common usage into multi-dimensional Signifieds that ascend and descend through the literal and topological levels of language to the anagogic.
I respond to the word “wick,” being suffused with its figurative meanings, and then wonder what is the literal. I return to the title “Candlelight Meditation”, and momentarily contemplate the wick as the wick of a candle. Then there is an explosion in my concealed consciousness, an explosion like fireworks, a rocket opening to reveal many colors, and I am reminded of Vincent Van Gogh in a moment of intense emotion grabbing the wick of a flaming candle.
3.
Now back to the progression of the poetry, and all poems are progressions, active organic verbal realities, autotelic, and not amenable to fixed and static thematic reduction and cancel out “the heresy of paraphrase.” Poems are élan vitals (appropriated and transvalued from Henri Bergson) and are vital forces defying the familiar and the discursive, the rational, and above all, common sense.
The progression presents
“Up
Up”
This poetic unit brought again a pause and contemplation. Connie has used two capitals ant not lower case. The expressive use of lower case was introduced into poems about the time of World War 1 simultaneously in Germany by August Stramm, in Italy by Marinetti the Futurist, and in Greenwich Village in the United States by e. e. cummings, and has become a commonplace and widely used poetic device, mostly as a meaningless supposed technical revolutionary whimper and not as a vital, poetic expressive device. Connie is using capitals as expressive, and along with the spatial arrangement, results in a Poetic “Spot of Time.”
Now, if Connie had used lower case, up, up, the movement, the ascent, would have been easy, just an ordinary climbing, but the capitals cause retardation, interject resistance, frustration, an arrestment, a hinder, and expand beyond what is literally presented into a realm that is otherwise unknowable and unsayable except in the authentic language of authentic poetry.
Now if Connie had written Up
Up
the emotive response would have been different. Her original rendition convey spatially the sense of the descending, going downward, as Marcel Duchamp descending the staircase. My rendition gives the sense of going upward, upstairs. Thus we have what Connie excels in, the doubling and extension of suggestive emotive meaning in a verbal rendition. It might be said in current critical parlance that Connie stabilizes and assert, And then destabilizes and deconstructs her verbal presentation. The spatial arrangement contradicts and thus enhances the literal presentation of a motion. Brilliant writing.
Then comes the next line, the capitalization of “Ever” suggest a disjunction from the “Up/Up,” and thus an additional tension, and the tension is reinforced by the capitalization of “Higher.” The sense of “Higher” has already been diminished by the preceding suggestions of downness, by the action of the spatial arrangement. It is if there is a dream or a daydream of going upward, but actuality pulls downward.
4.
And then in “Candlelight Meditation” appears a long white space after “Higher,” And “Higher” is end-stopped. The caesura and extensive white spacing render The word solitary and lonely. Her white spaces are speaking spaces and their speech is the shortest or longest of the blankness.
Of the whiteness, struggles a “Still,” another word with a high-pitched vowel Surrounded by clusters of consonants. It is capitalized and end-stopped, thus sadly isolated. Instead of feeling the glamour of a dance, I am feeling the loneliness of the dancer. What wondrous writing!
The “Still” is like the silence in Stravinsky’s Petrushka or the grand silence of John Cage’s “4’ 33”.”
Next after an indentation “The sheerest blue dance/ sweeps across a worn soul.” This is a summary moment, as when a painter steps back from his canvas to gaze and see what he painter was possessed by. In this poem, the reader is possessed by a “blue dance” and “a worn soul.” These two phrases become intensely emotional meaning by gathering up into their beings all the suggestions that have preceded in the flow of the process of the poem.
Words in a poem should exist with many arms, arms that reach in all directions, like the arms of an oriental goddess, and in this poem the words have many arms, and the arms reach in all directions.
In this poem, I think of a transformed, weary Degas dancer, who as she sits and adjusts a pink slipper and is unaware of the physical adjustments as her mental being is blurred and rendered apparitional in the intangible winds of an unfocused whirlwind.
Next comes a series of fragments that form a sentence, and the arrangement is the expected left-margin justification. And the longest word so far appears “glissando,” a musical word, and it near-alliteration, guttural, establishes a sound kinship with “cleaves,” cleaves peaks of torn breath. As a reader I hesitate, pause, contemplate, And in my imagination see a peak, a mountain peak or feels a Maslow peak experience, And then connects the feeling that emanates from these peaks, an expanding, an exalted feeling with the striking image “torn breath.” This is Connie at her best, expanding words to new dimensions of that defy reductive, rational, quotidian interpretation and open to poetic heights when the unsayable is said, the unspoken is spoken. It is a refusal to solve contradictions and new designations are produced. She unifies in her imagery, disparities. Her juxtapositions, her associations are often subversion, undermining.
5.
Next, comes a series of words of progressive action, the gerunds, words that name, nouns are converted into action words, verbs that serve as adjectives, and these progressive actions result in a flood of Grief’s caverns. This is vintage Connie.
What has been seen on the surface as a “Golden diva, a burning siren’ has been in the process of the poem revealed as more than a superficial, glittering appearance. The dancer is a dazzling performer, and inwardly, a suffering person. It might be said that the reader has experienced the actual presence of humanity rather than a representation, a mimetic copy of the external appearance of humanity.
She, the gorgeous one, sings, tantalizes, but she also violates, and the glorifying conclusion: “stir/ hallowed numbness’ capturing eyes/ that tears have abandoned”.
A wonderful poem and this poem is only the beginning to a book of wonderful poems.
POST-FACE
Instead of writing a standard review that abounded with generalizations that are automatically reductive of the actual poetic occurrence and are a remoteness from the flow of the river that is the poem, the river as Heraclitus tells cannot be stepped into twice, I decided to write a reader response criticism.
This type of criticism is akin to an anachronism, what was called “impressionistic criticism” before the scientific methodology and “pseudo statements” (I. A. Richards) of the New Criticism invaded and established dominance. The New Criticism defeated the source gathering of the old scholarship, and the “history of ideas” (A.O. Lovejoy) approach to an aesthetic text.
The New Criticism had it day with its Wimsatt and Breadsley’s “ Affective Fallacy and Heresy of paraphrase, Robert Penn Warren’s qualification of the opposite, and Cleanth Brooks’ explication of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” started sinking and disappeared about 1968 when Jacques Derrida delivered his lecture at John Hopkins that deconstructed Levi-Strauss and binary oppositions.
A new critical approach emerged from misreading and misinterpretations by our college
professors of Derrida exhibitionistic prose.
Along with au courant deconstructions with its aporias and differences emerge many postmodern approaches that specializes as Nietzsche in transvaluing and destroying the twilight lit idols, received poetic ideas and traditional poetic values, emerged Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” exaggeration and reader response criticism.
As Roland Barthes has said that when the reader opens the book the author dies.
Actually the old, outmoded impressionistic criticism has an affinity and kinship with reader response criticism, and I have appropriated, personalized, transvalued, transformed reader response criticism to write this account of Constance Stadler’s Paper Cuts.
Duane Locke has published, as of July 2009, 6,379 different poems in print magazines, e zines and 16 books, His latest books of poems are the April 2009 , 375 pp. Yang Chu’s Poems by the Canadian publisher, Crossing Chaos, and in July 2009, the 40 page Voices from a Grave by the English publisher, Erbacce Press.
