“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”
Valerie Witte’s skin-deep collection from Airlie Press is a tonic for those allergic to avant-garde poetics. Its first section, “In the Coils,” begins with ambiguous simplicity:
[
The
invention
of skin
a preliminary
sorting when
what lies
dormant
recalling the loss
between
opening was
a simple
mouth
]
The poem’s rapid visual descent sets the pace for a relatively swift journey through issues of skin, its marring, dissolution, regeneration. Yet we have questions. How can skin be invented? Who invented it? Why is it being sorted? What does a mouth have to do with it? Poetry being poetry, all questions will be answered, but not necessarily in the order they occurred, or in the way we want or expect. To proceed, we must lean toward the poem, trust its good intentions.
Readers who encounter linguistically adventurous verse sometimes suspect that they are being had or simply that the investment in “cracking the code” of associative chains of phrases is not worth the effort. Is what is being offered obfuscation or tantalizing mystery? Even seasoned savorers of more conventional poems may accuse a bolder author of being gratuitously abstruse, of reveling in nonsense or liminal sense, and feel that a betrayal of sorts has taken place. They forget that Percy Bysshe Shelley, in “A Defence of Poetry,” enjoins poets to “awaken and enlarge the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”
Lifting that veil requires scrambling of routine cognition, in minds deadened by the hardening of everyday language into stale phrases. Everyday speech is an endless exercise in dull repetition. That is the poet’s essential problem: how to make language and, therefore, thought fresh, and the exacting rigor required of that task often consigns the genre to secondary or coterie status in the world of art. But connoisseur, too often taken to mean “snob,” or “specialist,” simply means “one who knows.” That title is open to anyone with the ardor to claim it.
That is why the avant-garde exists: to shake us back awake, so that we all, if we wish, can become connoisseurs. It took me a while to learn to love Susan Howe’s 1987 brain tease Articulation of Sound Forms in Time, which is sometimes referred to as “a book about books” and contains “grids” that could be described as conceptual poetry. But love it I did, in the end. Here is one.
Untraceable wandering
the meaning of knowing
Poetical sea site state
abstract alien point
root casket tangled scrawl
Mistletoe arrow
ascetic hero-shadow
Shelter secret in heart
were wound drawn out
Rhyme of heaven open
Collision with human protection
The first line shows a “meta” sense of humor about what the verse is doing, as if commenting ahead of time how the poem might be received by a skeptical reader. “Sea site state” is simply good old alliteration, reassuring us that yes, lyric lives here. “Abstract alien point/root casket tangled scrawl” possibly gestures toward the poem’s aspect of thought and how its particular way of achieving that might be off-putting or “alien.” Not everyone wants to think about thinking. One might say that the text stages its anxiety about being a poem, the way a person might worry about coming off as deathly neurotic at a cocktail party. “Mistletoe arrow” wants to pierce our heart through our understanding and asks our indulgence to do so. Stand close, and I’ll kiss you. “Ascetic hero-shadow” could be a question about the status of knowledge in a post-heroic age, where the closest we can come to an epic era is to sit in Plato’s cave looking at the shadow the hero casts. And so on.
I could be right about all this, or I could be wrong. All I am doing is reading the textual clues as they appear, without secure outside referents to guide me. If I had ever gone to ask the author, she might have answered, with justifiable tartness, “You tell me.” William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” by contrast, provides easy metaphorical equivalence and is not so taxing on our minds. It does not act as if it wants to stump us. We easily understand how loneliness can look like a solitary cloud drifting across the sky. But not all poetry needs to be cloud poetry.
Part of the charm, if one will, of the indeterminacy in Howe’s poem is its drive to stimulate the free play of our mind across the poem’s surface, in an equivalent act of imagination rather than hurry to figure it out and get on with our day. It has enough organizational features to keep us in it, but it does not yield up its overall significance so easily. Some people do not enjoy crossword puzzles or a Rubik’s cube, and they will simply put them down. Others will find in them a source of unexpected pleasure. There is plenty of method in Howe’s poetry, but it takes getting used to, as she is working with signs and semiotics in somewhat unusual ways. In a sense, the poem does not care if you decode an ultimate meaning, as much as it wants you to engage in a process of reading.
Here is the first half of Witte’s next poem in the sequence:
Made in sand, ash or mud, we are clay | sheets assembled
a recruitment of parts volcanic: a rupture in the interiors | splintered
repeatedly the invention of skin | As the body brought her edges
steady, allowances given | for artillery a cartridge, ribbons for tires |
and she proved ideal for parachutes, performed well
in surgery | where sutures joined lips of wound stitched |
Is that poetry? Yes, it is. The human condition is being spoken of, as if we were mere effluvia of the earth (parts volcanic) or raw material for industrial purposes (for artillery a cartridge, ribbons for tires). There is now a “she,” a defined presence for us to focus on, one who, like silk, is “ideal for parachutes.” People often refer to skin as “silky,” so that comparison makes perfect sense. And this “she” seems to be a surgery patient, getting a “wound stitched.” How quickly the poem comes into focus with a little patience!
This slanting approach (Emily Dickinson’s word) is nothing new in itself. To cite a more extreme example, the prankish Dadaist Tristan Tzara, in the 1920s, produced many deliberately confounding poems, and their value and technique are still debated a century later, long after he passed into literary history as an ultimately serious artist. Here is one:
Tzara caused equal amounts of excitement and consternation, as if he had set off a fire alarm in a police station merely to amuse himself. But the varying typography, the spacing, and the incongruity of the phrases become weirdly pleasant upon closer inspection, as when one begins to pick up different pieces of amethyst, aquamarine, citrine, garnet, and onyx stored in bins in a gemstone shop. How do Tzara’s lines all fit together? Well, that is our job.
In A Rupture in the Interiors, Valerie Witt, while boldly experimental in form, gives us more to go on than either Howe or Tzara. She provides a convincing case of how a moderately challenging method can be precisely what is needed to take up Shelley’s challenge to create “the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”
This book, while demanding, can be read by simply opening it up and becoming attuned to its particular frequency.
[6.1]
Was she always discolored | synthetic, fragile or adequately
crossed | what a face must do to produce
expression | Where she encountered moisture, tarnishing | flexibility
methods, cartilage might fail
The patient encountered at book’s beginning is with us still, halfway through. There seems to be a conversation in italics going on about her skin, possibly gossipy friends, family, or strangers. Others, seemingly medical personnel, are debating what is causing “tarnishing,” or “tarnishing flexibility” (the unusual “extra” line breaks offer two ways of reading many phrases) while the speaker adds commentary of a speculative or scientific nature. Or some of it might be the “patient’s” interior speculation. As in a modernist novel, a telegraphic scene has been created, voices without attribution, identifiable by their timbre rather than their names. We, the readers, use our inductive powers to follow this “conversation.” It is what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. The more we read these dozens of poems, the more they converge, make sense, and the more we realize we are being told a very specific and poignant story about the chronic suffering of an individual.
Witte’s interview in Full Stop from earlier this year, quoted at length below, sets out how Witte, like many a lyric poet, above all wants to convey a set of easily relatable emotions. She is not bending form simply for the sake of it. Her explanation could not be more straightforward:
“The traumas explored in the book relate to two elements of my life, both of which are common occurrences for many people and that are also rather embarrassing and unpleasant to talk about. First, around the age of ten, I developed acne and spent my adolescence—and many years beyond—managing this condition…For around thirty-five years, the condition of my skin is something I have thought about and dealt with almost every day, so it inevitably has affected my perception of myself and likely how others see me, too. In particularly bad periods, I have even had well-meaning people ask what is wrong with my skin, out of genuine concern.
On the flip side of the hormonal/aging coin, I noticed in my mid-twenties that my hair was thinning. I have since spent many years seeking treatments for androgenetic alopecia (age-related hair loss), but nothing ever really works. I have tried acupuncture, microneedling, supplements, various shampoos and conditioners, serums, etc. I am currently taking two oral medications, which probably aren’t working either…I thought this was a topic worth exploring in writing. Hair loss is another surface-level condition that likely has no real impact on my health. . . and yet, the long-term effects are real. This has led me to feel depressed at times and to question my attractiveness and femininity, and to feel that I’d lost my youth even at a young age. We live in a society in which a woman’s hair is a measure of her value as a woman. Every time I am involved in a conversation about a woman’s hair—which is often—I can’t help but think of my own deficiency in this area.
So, in the book, I am trying to address these traumas and make something out of them by examining them in a new way. Through the inclusion of silk, I am able to bring another natural—and beautiful—element into the discussion. In a way, the book functions as a form of therapy; it is a way to shed light on these conditions that are generally not discussed in ‘polite society.’”
As for most poets, Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No “experimental” poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of “examining in a new way” matters close to her heart. Knowing these simple facts, one may understand even better her chosen method, one that simulates the common-yet-strange dysmorphia of having one’s life in key ways ruled by two “minor” (her word) but profoundly dislocating chronic physical conditions. If anything, I began to appreciate how she, unlike many memoirists or writers of personal essays, transformed this biographical material into something transcending the self as complainer. The interview is mildly interesting but no substitute for the poetry it describes. Manner and mode mean everything and change the status of what gets said. In poetry, how = what. One of our literary culture’s current chronic and widespread maladies is an uncritical and even narcissistic obsession with the self, due to an excessive faith in the proposition that our traumas are inherently interesting. Witte in no way takes hers for granted, instead creating a shifting ground of meaning that tantalizes us into dis-encrypting its shifting signifiers. In one moment we key on “her,” in the next we key on the world that swarms like bees, a crowd of single-minded chaos with a defined, blind purpose. In that way, we “live out” the chronic discomforts that have pervaded her existence. A conventional description of her suffering does not adequately capture the quality of her experience. She is astute in creating an aesthetically orderly yet disjointed poetics that rings true to the flux between clinical order and emotional disorder in the grueling experience of having skin constantly worked on as it does its best to blemish, disintegrate, and otherwise bedevil her well-being.
[9.6]
When we begin to cede
To our bodies’ limitations | sweat collects in ducts
Of the chest | an icepick: superficial or suicide diminished
At the site of the blockages | on the temple…
we are all
receding |
So ends this fascinating book, with a communal call to readers, to fellow beings, many of whom may share similar disintegration, and if not, other maladies—because one way or another, we are all sick, we are all suffering ‘minor’ ailments such as psoriasis, warts, rashes, skin cancer, death. With steadfast patience, one discovers in Witte’s poetry the reflection of a deeply humane soul who despite—or rather, because of—chronic discomfort, is able to offer a poetry of verve, one that disturbs us into empathy.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
