Bl(H)indsite/spot: sentences “at least equally strange”
Blindsight, poems by Rosmarie Waldrop. Instress Press, PO Box 3124, Sarataga CA 95070, Ed. Leonard Brink. No Price Listed. 1998.
This slight chapbook of prose poems opens with a quote by John Kinsella: “The I undoes the field.” And it does (un) because of that intrusion of the eye-dependent I, the foundation of modernism undermin(d)ed by these poems. As Waldrop writes it: “It is perfectly natural for the sun to shine in the upper left hand corner of this page (‘Latent Settlement‘). We are, after all, writers who are readers. And this, as Thoreau preached it, is how we understand the landscape. And reading is as natural as any seemingly innocent walk out onto and into the field which, as these poems remind us, is not natural at all. The end of innocence. And why wouldn’t we want it to be over? It never was innocent.
Waldrop is a poet’s poet. These prose poems define the genre for me. I’ve never read any better ones. Each poem adheres to the gentle admonition: “Better to map the motions of the body with sentences at least equally strange.” The poem, ‘Instead of Splinters,‘ from which this sentence is taken is the saddest poem I’ve read. It is delicate in design but as precise as the machinery and the shadow tracings left by the child’s hand upon the production line, a shadow as everlasting as metal. The first sentence: “The fingers of the young child bend around every itch on the palm well before the factory whistle clocks it in.” And the last: “How can I help myself, she said, empty as a pronoun, as the baby’s puny fists pumped up and down.” As are all great prose poems, these are condensed short stories, this one the tale of the end (and the beginning) of the American Dream, the real secular history of these states, that motivating belief that here is heaven on earth.
Remove the aggressive violence from the act (hockey goon on the All-Star, tight end on quarterback) of the blindside hit (the goal scored, pass completed) and you get some appreciation for the accomplishment of Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight. These poems are a looking back at and from what has not been recorded by the direct vision, that essential distortion. These poems come more out of the side-wise glance of Thoreau and Dickinson. They point out the failure of Objectivist poetics, both Pound & Zukofsky’s reliance on vision as a guarantee for exactitude (that Mediterranean light) and the social programs of Oppen and Reznikoff: “There is always someone coming in from the street unfreezing the frame, cutting across the certainties of eye” (‘Certainties‘). In “Lens” we get an in-site (art) of what constitutes the antidote for the poison of living under the illusion of reality experienced and established through the passive act of seeing: “We harvest Dutch elm disease and retinal warp. Cows, in pasture. It was the same part of Holland from which the style of Tommaso’s painting derives. After a flood in the laboratory, the dogs forgot all conditioned reflexes.” These poems are our flood. They demand an opening of ourselves, an examination of our blindspots, hindsight, insights, sites in us where delusion is comfort but illusion is damning. Blindsight is liberation.
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