EXPERIMENTAL VERSE -
HAIBUN.........
Commentary for “Toggling
Optics”
Conrad
DiDiodato, CA
Nothing accounts, in my view,
as much for the startlingly elegant crystallization of poetic elements
in Karina’s poem “Toggling Optics” as the fact of its change from
haibun to free verse genre. In that decision to change a poem’s
“shape” is revealed a need to share an intensely private intention. In
that transition to what I would call their markedly higher poetic
form, Karina’s verses have achieved an interesting psychological and
structural congruence. But, of course, whenever the fact of conscious
‘genre’ switch like this presents itself—in other words, whenever the
reader wonders whether anything approaching real unity of poetic forms
can be achieved at all, no matter what the genres or the poet’s
needs—it is necessary that the reader (and commentator) accept the
poem's offered “sense” of truth. Karina has given us something here
that is both literally and literarily true.
I think we are
justifiably led to take Karina’s primary aim (the “psychology" of the
piece, as I’ve called it) as that of describing the terrible vision
loss of glaucoma. To reveal the “poetics” of lost sight is Karina’s
personal intention: the importance it must be given in analysis is to
acknowledge (and respect) the poet’s personal heroism and artistry.
But the grandeur of personal integrity and courage in the face of
impending blindness cannot be gauged apart from the text’s own
wonderful structuring and flowering as an oeuvre. Intention and poetic
style must therefore work in close collaboration. Let’s begin with
“heroism”, the sine qua non of Karina’s art.
The whole poem is a graphic
configuration of restricted eyesight. It is literally what it appears
to be. If the centered text is regarded as a “spreading field of
vision”, with syntax, line arrangement and diction use as poetic
markers, we soon detect an emerging pattern of distorted seeing.
“Toggling” suggests the lever-like, switching on-and-off mechanisms by
which normal sight filters in the eye relay “visual fields” to the
brain, with the optic nerve being directly affected if the “toggling
optics” should directly malfunction. Perhaps the title is meant as a
kind of causal nexus to the poem’s own initiatory impaired act of
“Looking out the big/picture window”, impaired in the sense that
whatever is to be seen from this point on through the picture window
will necessarily be registered as distorted and misshapen. All she can
really “see”, even from this home vantage point, are the “signs” of
her impending blindness. Of all the objects outside her “picture
window”, it’s the grandfather’s own disappearing "into the sky ahead"
that catches her attention first. Karina’s poem, I believe, is
revealed firstly as a lamentation, perhaps an elegy on the passing of
life and loved ones. The “blue Chevy” is contemplated as both a
disappearing and a real moving object, a way of recognizing that's
been invested at the same time with filial mourning. The pattern of
distorted “double viewing” is established, both a failed attempt at
normal seeing that is due to pathology and one that 's even more
emotionally (psychologically”) sorrowful. Hence the double tragedy of
bereavement and disease; it’s as if, and Karina’s skill is most
evident here, an implied connection is being made in the narrator’s
clouded perceptual judgment between loss of grandparent and loss
of vision itself.
“A visual” space, textual
lacuna, if you like, separates the initial looking “out the
big/picture window” and the laboured focus on a vehicle fading “into
the sky ahead” that directly follows. The poet-narrator’s strained
concentration on the grandfather’s “blue Chevy” at the poem’s
beginning forms the text’s primary “3D” visual field but it is
terribly restricted, pockmarked: besides the space separating the
poem’s largest verse units, there are other individual poetic
signifiers of failed (disrupted) seeing such as hyphenated word
clusters (“day – same color – always” and “rec – tangled”), misaligned
vertical columns (“point/of/v/ i/e/when”), interesting morphological
meldings, i.e., the shifting from substantive to verbal use undergone
by single compound forms like “lamp-stands”, purposely parodied word
use (note the use of “illusion” in fourth strophe) and the very loss
of normal peripheral reading that is evidenced in the letter-jumbling
of the word “vision” in the poem’s fifth strophe. Style becomes
paratactic; i.e., through its loss of connectives and normal
linguistic usage and sense as the narrator's eyesight slowly fades, the
poem hastens quickly to its own end in a haze of “dotted”, “hidden”
and gauzy perceptions. It’s as though the narrator pans across more
common objects, “oval marble-top table”, “rec – tangled glass/frame/a
barn and silo” quickly quickly in order to take frantic stock, one
final time, of a familiar environment before they’re engulfed in the
graying chaos of outside! Suddenly “3D” becomes “2D”, with one entire
perspectival ground being pulled out from under her .There is a
definitive closing of sight—a startlingly effective pun on the
typology of eye disease itself—in the “angles left open” of the poem’s
final frame: a terrible “closure” to the impending vision loss that it
has been the poem’s impetus to reveal. And now it has been given a
name: “ion / angles left open/in each corner of my/home/glaucoma”. I
would draw the reader’s attention, finally, to that innocuous-seeming
“ion” hanging lightly over the poem’s last strophe: what brilliant
posturing for a final flickering “ion” of light, what final solitary
vestige of sight lying among this broken field of cars, signs and
horizons, before the darkness finally reaches “home”.
And now a word on
“structure”. Karina’s is a surrealist poem; the illustration chosen to
accompany it is surrealist in design and conception too. Andre Breton,
in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism”, talks about the aim of this
avant-garde literary movement as the attaining of “a certain point of
the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and
future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease
to be perceived as contradictions.” As a surrealist piece Karina’s
poem can aspire to many figurative levels. I’m particularly
fascinated, though, by the ostensibly contradictory but
structurally compatible splicings of space and time dimensions very
skillfully developed through what I'll call the poem’s Window
framework. To talk about seeing things as prevalently as Karina’s poem
does only to end in “obscuring fields” of glaucoma is the poem’s first
real resolvable Principle of Non-contradiction! Contradictions change
surreally here into non-contradictions: past becomes present, reality
illusion, vision the camera’s narrowing lens.
To begin with,
Karina’s framed the first “picture” of her grandfather’s moving car
onto a primary childhood scene—a veritable eye of reminiscence. And
that window on childhood serves as the first of three poetic
“windows”; in fact, the whole haibun verse is, as I've suggested,
enclosed within a leading home Window perspective from which two
others, at least, can be derived. The effect of this gazing through
the main “picture window” established early in the poem is actually to
look through two windows at once. The “big/picture window”, imaged as
medium for the poem's primary focused viewing, begins to fade, even as
time passes, to its diametrically opposed sense of “window” as camera
lens at the poem’s end, a technique that successfully carries the
narrator’s attention, through a series of well placed intermediaries,
from happy childhood remembrances to the inevitability of blindness
and death. Past and present times are not envisaged here as
irreconcilables, even up to the one final "shot", strangely
enough, muted as they are in the narrator's slowly darkening
vision. The “sky” outside is the poem’s next possible Window, into
which her grandfather’s “blue Chevy” is initially described as
disappearing. The margins of a visible horizon do anticipate,
naturally, a parallel image of the afterlife into which both narrator
and reader cannot venture, marking a very formidable limit to
reminiscences rooted in a seemingly omniscient “big picture” Window of
the narrator’s home and, of course, offering a sort of
fake eternity that’s dismissed as quickly as it arises. In
blindness time passes but won't give as consolation any hope of
eternal life. So
there's the primary Window of home; a second Window of opportunity
offered to sight restricted to objects with the potential to move
beyond visual horizons; and a third heavenly Window unattainable at
practically every level of reading. The irony of a gold-leafed edition
of a Book of Heures that remains indoors!
And as if to come to
terms finally with the hard reality of “blindness” and
“death”, disclosing the cause of both, Karina’s poem takes a
decided turn to the immediacy of time itself. For all her
childhood reminiscences of fields and "stiffel lamp - stands", the
blackening moment seems suddenly to weigh heavily on her. Time now
figures as a key narrative principle; that is, persons, events
and life processes move inexorably to their end, the poem becoming an
interesting corollary reflection on the nature of time itself (or
perhaps on the nature of the relationship between time and poetic
imagination a la Bachelard!) For example, the wistful reference to
years passing between each new car purchase (“He always buys a new
one/every two years…”) gives a “time” perspective parallel to the
poem’s more important (in my view) narrative and textual “space” (of
the “big picture window”). This is Karina’s poem’s most clever
structural achievement. “3D” becomes “2D”, as we've said: the precious
childhood window has shrunk to two-dimensional size: the present is a
harsh confluence of an unattainable past and a darkening future.
Safety in space is transformed into bifurcated time. By annuling the
variegated richness of normal three-dimensional seeing, time grips
events and persons in an awful two-dimensional frame! Rilke may have
best expressed life's terrible temporal hold in the following verses:
"Thus we live in a most strange dilemma/between the distant bow
and the too piercing arrow." Life's a constant tension between
the unshakeable past ("of the bow") and the too swift
passage ("piercing arrow") of future events. Mention is made of the “Meiss Book of Heures”, in case the
point is missed about the quasi-religious necessity of coming to terms
with human mortality because suddenly time-consciousness does
set in, with clocks ticking, cows running, horns blaring, all in
this terrible two-dimensionality that is the text trying to achieve in
time (but falling pathetically short of) the perfected form of
childhood reminiscences as glimpsed through the idealized childhood
home Window. It’s not surprising that the call—almost tragic—for one
last “quick grin for the/camera’s eye” comes in archetypal (winter)
season of death. The amazing compactness and grace of this poem’s
final moment before the narrowing camera lenses! It’s almost tempting
to regard the poet-narrator as a Tiresias figure blinded by glimpsing
too closely into forbidden secrets of Time.
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