I dwell in Possibility – Emily Dickinson

Unlike prose, which adheres more nearly to linguistic habit and causal determinism (linearity, denotation, univocal meaning, unambiguous reference, etc.), poetry endeavors to cut through the habits of language and our expectations about worlding in order to say – not old thoughts and feelings in a new way – but new thoughts and feelings altogether – new possibilities.

Poetry differentiates itself utterly from reportage of the actual. It does not seek to represent a past experience or give elevated words to things already known. Nor is poetry the mascot of identity, a tool for manipulating the world. Rather, poetry invokes a future experience – its cause unknown, its recipient undetermined. At the limit where the mind and its expectations break down, poetry promises a reality not yet come. The poet who dives into the pursuit of such, does not yet know what to say or how to say it. And so we might wager a definition: poetry is the on-going discovery of the not-yet-sayable.

To better imagine my thesis, I wish to invoke the clinamen or swerve. The concept originates in Lucretius (d. 55 BC) who thought that, were it not for the swerve, nature would not produce anything. Atoms would merely fall through the void, were it not for the collision between them. Moreover, the swerve is what explains free will among living things. It is the very principle of inauguration – of the “new start” that can “sunder the covenants of fate” (De Rerum Natura, Bk II. 254). Cause does not succeed from cause everlasting, nor are we led on in a straight line; rather our desire leads us on, at our mind’s urging. Our decisions have the power to revamp the world. Encounters between new lovers or friends, a horse bucking its rider, a serendipitous accident, the decision to write a poem – all swerve-like phenomena introduce indeterminacy into what might otherwise look like a deterministic system. Better yet: they introduce a new causal chain, a new sort of (in)determinacy, a new chance which breaks however subtly from all the causal chains preceding it. The swerve is thus the creativity in things – the risk of life, the very courageousness of ‘to be’.

The most potent poetry, which changes our very conception of what language can ‘do’, is a phenomenon of swerve, for it reveals all these powers: by the freedom and fresh determinacy it introduces, our perception of reality is intensified, the discourse of the possible is altered and, finally, we merge with the movement of the unknown, we say the not-yet-sayable so it sings.

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In the following meditation, I wish to convince you that poetry is a listening for the swerve of potent-being through the falling atoms of words. I hope you will bear with this metaphor, as I believe it can bring a greater adventurousness to our poetry and our process of writing it. My use of abstract vocabulary is not meant to overtax your patience; I only mean to enact the spirit of poetry myself in precising my thinking.

By potent-being I mean something as-yet-unknown and unmanifest. Potent-being is first only an inchoate possibility, a nothing that is nowhere and doesn’t exist (yet). We might call it an idea or an intuition, a whisper from the beyond or an explosion from within, but however we figure it, one thing is certain: If we do not listen for its swerve and find words for it, it will never manifest. The knowledge and vision it contains in potentia will never emerge, never impact human thought, if we do not give its incipience traction, if we do not cinch the swerve into words. Incidentally, this is the vital importance of practicing poetry. How many poems have never come to be, just because we did not listen to their potent-being when it called? How many potencies of language have we let lie fallow? One trembles to think how much beauty is lacking in this world, simply because we did not heed its potency…

The potent-being that swerves through words is, before we set to work, not yet actualized in any discourse. Unlike a real object, it cannot rely on factual existence. It is not an object of language, nor do other objects of language refer to it. However, it is not a matter of ineffability or any alleged inadequacy of language – the poet’s very vocation refutes this hypothesis. It’s not that we don’t have words for potent-being; rather, potent-being forces into language new modes of ‘putting words to’ as such.

Potent-being, faithfully listened to, forces into existence that inaugural arrangement of words we call the poem. Every poem is inaugural in this sense: it manifests something – a thought, a sense, a feeling, an imagination – that did not exist before it and could not exist without it. That is why, in principle, the poem resists all paraphrase, and why the best ones so resist translation. Only this poem corresponds to this potent-being, and vice versa – any other arrangement and you will have actualized something else. Poets will recognize this fact of the craft: Only this sound corresponds to this sense, and vice versa. Only this image corresponds to this idea, only this experience to this spacing on the page, only this word (in all its polysemy) to this semiosis of thought (in all its paratactic prismation) – and vice versa. Every element in the poem – whether of the rawest material nature or of the most rarefied and spiritual – redounds causally upon every other element.  When all these elements swerve together to capture the swerve of potent-being, the poet succeeds, for then the manifestation of the previously unknown is complete. The finished poem – this novel collision between words – actualizes the potent-being that inspired and gave rise to it – and that the poem now is.

In sum, potent-being convokes a possibility that does not yet correspond to words. Creating this correspondence will be the poet’s task. Its existence will demand our creative participation. The referent of the poem is sui generis: it emerges only in writing and perfecting the poem. Only the act of poetry puts the potent-being there – on the page, in our notebooks, in the ruins of our manuscripts – finally, in the unique potency we will have actualized in language as our life’s work.

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Having set this theoretical groundwork, I would now like to explore the writing of poetry, with a specific emphasis on the maturation of poetry’s swerve through the editing process.

When, as poets, we labor over the right word choice for a passage – when we seek the right enjambments, the right rhymes for our meaning and tones for our passages – when we select for the right matrix of metaphors, the right epiphanies to match our idea or intuition – what are we doing if not listening for the potency we discern behind our drafts and sketches, behind the words that are already there on the page or floating in our heads?

Let me offer a simple example. Say, in the course of listening, we hear the sound ɛər or ɪər. We sense something in that phonemic area ought to exist where we hear it in the flow of the poem. So, we think and listen in – both at once, in the same creative gesture – for which word best fits. Not just sonically, but in all the registers that communicate in the Gestalt of the poem: phonemes, graphemes, morphemes, noemes, etc… Is it glare, share, fair, bear, blare, repair, pair, stare, tear, beware…? This swerve through the falling atom of words concludes only when we collide with the most fitting word, the word that best corresponds to the potency we know lies latent behind the sound we heard.

The poet keeps listening to the swerve for the poem – then listens even more, until the end. At times, the right word (or the right anything) is not forthcoming. Some other thread must be tugged, recolored, or torn – perhaps at the very opposite end of the poem – before we can discern where the swerve is really taking us. Perhaps we get lots of things wrong about it along the way – but that is to be expected. It takes time to hear the swerve into words. The swerve of poetry must mature from approximation to exactitude, from latency to manifestation – from the kernel of its future expression to the full expression of its possible.

At first, the swerve can only be approximated by words and sounds we hear as we listen. We cannot do better than to write down what we hear – though without any assurance that what we write down is what we hear. Perhaps I write down “glare” but can’t yet decide; so I run through a list of plausible ɛər or ɪər words, until suddenly it dawns on me: “forbear.” The example is primitive, but we could extend it to any element we like – an element of enjambment, signification, tone, etc. Out of the innumerable, we first choose possibles, then plausibles, until we have found exactitude. We begin with approximations–and no matter how we might be pleased by them in the moment, they are all approximations until the poem has been heard in full. For while approximations draw from the lexicons we know, from the extant set of thoughts, ideas, images, associations, etc. – from all the actualities floating around bedazzled in our writing brain – the poem, as the vehicle of a potent-being (and certainly not of our brain), has much more to say than all that. And so the poet must trust that behind the approximation – behind the kernel futural of the not-yet-sayable that the drafted poem on the page represents – there is the swerve itself, calling us and the poem to an exact and unprecedented articulation.

The swerve – the dynamicof the poem-to-come – never stops swerving through the poem’s extant approximations. In this maturation process, the poet must recognize which elements are to be eliminated for the poem to gain in proximity and resemblance to the swerve. The poet seeks that arrangement of words that will give access to the listening to the swerve. If we trust it, if we listen to it, the swerve will transport the poem past every extant sense, past all of our own thoughts and experiences, indeed, past every known world and into the futural. It will usher in the exactitude of the swerve itself.

So, by now, we’ve listened, and there is something on the page – the kernel futural generating sayables out of the unknown. These new sayables are only swervingly dependent on the extant grammars and syllables that approximate it in the course of our work. Surprising poet and language, they are emerging from trusting listening – the poet synthesizing attention to the kernel futural (the poem in process) and the swerve itself (the potency). The swerve edges grammar, nudges the poem into the grammarless. New sayables swarm conception and page, gilded with strikes, carets, dashes, slashes, marginalia, rewrites – the whole punctuation of trusting listening in action. The not-yet-sayable there burgeons. It awaits its full emergence and final ordering. At our behest, in virtue of us, it plays freely within all the determined elements, lending indeterminacy to every approximation and inventing its own precision. This invests the work with the authority, not of an authorial voice, but of the swerve maturing, for it seeks sayability: its language is yearning.

To edit the poem, then, is to rehear the kernel futural in light of its great yearning. It is to let the approximated swerve mature into actuality – to birth its fecund fantasy and truth as a new seeable and hearable. Gradually, the poem transcribes exactly the grace in the yearning – the gift of words for a new seeing and hearing. Then the approximation nears being the swerve. Potent-being itself is becoming language – and we are dwelling in possibility.

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If we want a genuinely inaugural poetry – a poetry that can spread wide its “narrow Hands / To gather paradise” – we must learn how to listen to the poem, rather than trying to make it say something.

In its vocation as Dweller in Possibility, poetry does not steward actualities (opinions, trends, identities, etc.), rather, it restores us to the genetic moment of language – its genesis as the genesis of the human. Then poetry can become a force for the imaginative transformation of linguistic habit, rather than losing itself in mirroring extant selves and worlds. Then, words do not just fall through the void predictably saying things we’ve already heard, but collide for the inauguration of the unheard-of, in the tension between the not-yet-sayable and the poetically said.

Past the grammatizable, past the interpretable, past all paraphrase, the poem’s destiny is to conjure a not-yet-sayable potent-being. The finished poem shelters it in a husk of words. Its reader strips away and devours the husk, leaving the revelation of that potent-being which only this poem swerves into. The poet’s task is to discover, not their own voice, but the swerve of potent-being that the poem yearns to express, the sayable it sings to invent.

Every poem, therefore, is an invitation to swerve. There is no restriction on how this is done or its content – except to say that the poet must listen not to self but to the poem for the swerve it sketches, and so let the swerve of poetry mature. Then the not-yet-sayable will unleash an open pleroma of affirmations of potent-being – the on-going discovery of poetry.