Crisis by Andrew Wells — An Engagement with Dora Malech's 'THEN READING IN THE GARDEN'

What does it mean to be ‘making worlds rather than finding them’ (Rorty), for a poem to go beyond acknowledgements of one’s own and instead to interrogate recurring / fractured / non-linear present(s) and small narratives, and how they feature in the world. What happens when a poem or poet concerned with world-building (or teardown) meets a reader concerned with the same.  Why might constraint in poetry further and where might it hinder possibilities for / of meaning, self-criticism? I worry here about univocality and then about dismissing univocality out of hand. I worry about not finding enough meaning and I worry about accumulating meaning(s) that are not my own. I think having poetry as a part of one’s own narrative / (reading of this (not the)) world is a possible solution. I address this un-thought-through position and take a look at Stet by Dora Malech.

We begin with the most bourgeois sounding title: ‘THEN READING    IN THE GARDEN’. In selecting this, I mislead you. An underlying and flawed assumption is that ‘the garden’ is ‘my garden’. Is this a projection of the critic’s own privilege, or a presumption of “confessionalism”, or both? So much so, I read the title dishonestly, before even reaching the first line. Then, the opening takes ownership of the iris, which? And given the initial presumptiveness is whichever no bad thing?

my iris, know                           I risk my now

for you.                                              for you,                                         (L1-2)

I quote these opening anagrams to demonstrate the subtlety of Malech’s repositioning. As, respectively, frontal and terminal clauses, each dedication (‘for you’) encounters a new potential direction. Malech prioritises coherence and affectation here, and yet it is a flick of the wrist – of magic and artifice – that subverts an expectation of flowers concretely listed as commodities (most poems churn flowers out) to introduce an abstract. I am left to think, already, what does reading, in a 24/7 economy (obsessed with GDP, accounting little for happiness) risk? Indeed, it can be observed that the thinking here is already under the terms of risks and dividends and the impositions of productive ends. I am beginning to see Stet is indeed expressive of the constraints imposed upon our lives and languages by large corporations. Malech’s poem is an entanglement in and with these structures in which we are always already entangled, but which become all the more pernicious when left unconscious.

That latest point of mine, is clearly indebted to OuLiPo, and OuLiPo, who so freely appropriate among themselves (and so disdain the appropriation of them by others), would have you consider Malech to be indebted also. I do not think this is the case, because what is pernicious in the OuLiPo movement is their imposition of nothing besides total obedience. Malech’s work rebels against obedience to a system but instead acknowledges these pernicious structures to recalibrate, even recover, language following their imposition on life and circumstance. An imposition that is breaking our planet, denoted by the rupture of Malech’s lacunae (the lacunae also connotes, I think, ever widening divisions in class and income caused by these same structures (read, big tech) underpinning daily life), which demarcate the original clause from the anagrammatic clause:

pure monster, no petal                      nor stem. rope   un-leapt

dares     show,                                                         re-shadows.                  (L12-13)

Here is an acute awareness that when light reveals the monster the petal is hidden and vice versa. Constraint in poetry draws focus (Harvey), and in looking in one direction another direction is failed, the writer fails it. Malech knots both (im)possibilities here. To show is to shadow, to shadow to show. Moreover, if read linearly, the poem is moved continually away from the natural world. Is monolithic architecture responsible for the re-shadowing depicted? Let us appreciate the extent to which this poem is concerned with its consequence:

sea, a word is my bond, but                    my bonds are outbid. was                 (L36)

This frontal caesura proliferates the meaning of ‘sea’ to mean ‘see’ and the word shows two sides of a coin, that a word can be meaningful to the speaker yet squashed by capitalist overtones and appropriation. The bluntness of ‘my bonds are outbid’ moves to despair. That as much as we are bonded to one another and to language, our promises are inf(l)ected by monetary bonds that of course matter most. As automation thunders on, and the stock of writers, teachers, publishers decreases, Malech evokes a wavering defiance, what inspires this strictly mathematical form, presumably as easy to automate as any?

                                                                      tunes for nothing

spent                                                                                                            (L28-29)

The answer, I think, is the expression of a wish to defeat and to exit a system hell-bent on destroying what is human, and, more than that, on destroying consequence itself. Inevitability, and the impossibility of escape, are to be resisted through awe, love, care :

i want whatever awe

can find me sore,                end from in case                 if rose can mend                 (L31-32)

 ‘If rose can mend’, an anagrammatic solution out of Malech’s limited resources, echoes the limited resources of the natural world and our limited capacity to affect change in light of the scale on which big oil is destroying the climate. Malech looks beyond middle class notions of personal ownership ‘not my more’ (L30) and anthropocentric claim to the planet. She looks beyond any one garden in THEN READING    IN THE GARDEN to acknowledge and dispel ‘all this stupid cold’ (L41) to remind us of where, urgently, we are and what is withered by fatalism and apathy.

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I re-read and the divide between the anagrams suggests to me that the meaning is not as singularly tied to the eco-crisis as I might have thought. ‘If rose can mend’; ‘a word is my bond’; ‘my bonds are outbid’, imply an interpersonal turbulence too. This might not be unconnected to the eco-crisis, carbon costs and guilt (as well as monetary and time costs) can make relationships challenging, and so this new information, this re-reading amid an updated narrative casts doubt over my interpretation, or has the meanings proliferate, and alerts me to different meanings others hold and may in the future hold for the poem, meanings not discovered but assembled, torn-down, reassembled. Maybe a wrong reading can still be a good reading. The poem reminds me of my fallibility, whilst giving permission for re-reading and reconsidering poems and moments (political, personal, both or neither) that come to pass. Perhaps more broadly, permission to reassess priorities and methods of determining a people’s well-being, in times of world – not national ­– crisis.

 ‘THEN READING   IN THE GARDEN’ is published in Stet, available from Princeton University Press.