WORKING SPACE: READING / NOT READING [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

This is the kind of reader I’d like to be:

In the spring, as a way to keep “meeting” during lockdown, my friend Cammy and I would talk twice a week about writing.  Because we were having trouble reading anything in a sustained way—the mind would sputter or fizzle or veer away--I proposed (only half-joking) not-reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies.  Instead of fighting against it, our reading would tolerate and even embrace interruption, distraction, digression, frustration, etc.  The reading would be our zigzagging between.  So that, for example, when “The First Elegy” asks (in Edward Snow’s translation),

            Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angel’s
            Orders?

the answer could come from the jackhammers digging up the pavement half a block away, or the honk band practicing in a neighbor’s yard, or the videos of Italian balconies, or the Berklee School of Music virtual online choir singing What the world needs now is love sweet love, or the blue jay on the branch outside my window, springing up and down, up and down, as if he has read James Wright's poem and knows that “the branch will not break.”

Already, I misremember: I am sure that Cammy and I sat together on my back porch (porch for which I have never been so grateful), instead of calling each other, as we did, to read the poems.  Sometimes I’d stop to take a picture of the birds on the feeder with my phone; their comings and goings became part of the poem. The elegies themselves seemed more intense, not less, for letting themselves be broken into--and out of--in this way.  The last of the elegies, the tenth, offers this wish:

          One day, at the end of the nightmare of knowing,
          may I emerge singing praises and jubilation to assenting Angels.
          May I strike my heart’s keys clearly, and may none fail
          because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings.

It’s the emphatic repetition of the wish that strikes an echoing chord in me, and my eye keeps zigzagging:  in fits and starts, the feeling intensifies.  Is it here, the emotional architecture of the poem?

           may I,-- 
           May I,--

           May the tears,--

                                 How will I cherish,--
           Had I only,--

                                                      How we waste,--

          We study,--
                                                                   Whereas –

I try to puzzle my way through the German on the left-hand page, wondering about the wish to “strike my heart’s keys clearly” – Is that a piano? 

            Den klar geschlagenen Hammern des Herzens

Are there keys in the German, or only hammers?  I can’t tell.  While I’m leaning over the page, a little bee – a honeybee, dark, small furry – lands with a tap, precisely on the verb geschlagenen.  She stays for a while, just gently vibrating there.

Over the spring and the summer, sometimes it surprised us what was easy or hard to not-read this way.  Mrs. Dalloway, for example, leapt into focus.  Had I never registered before that Clarissa Dalloway is recovering from the 1918 flu?  Of course, there were other kinds of crucial reading going on that I cannot speak to here.

[The great John Lewis died.  I read and cannot more heartily recommend his memoir, Walking with the Wind.]

*

In August, I proposed to Cammy that we try reading John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a poem like a continuous soap bubble blown from a great big hoop, one bubble elongating, blowing through the next.  Not-reading Ashbery together was a great surprise, perhaps the most satisfying work we’d taken on. 

I knew I wanted to write about it here, for the blog—but wanted to revisit what I’d scribbled in the book itself.  It’s one of my old crumbling books, almost read to death.  If I don’t want to lose any pages, I should probably be carrying it around in a plastic bag.  Could I find it anywhere?  Not upstairs, not down.  Lucky to be at last (after retiring) in one house, one state instead of always traveling back and forth—the book I wanted to put my hand on always, by definition, where I was not.  This morning, at last, it turned up.  I had forgotten: the last time I’d read it, it was out on the back porch.  As we’d talked about the poem, a tiny gray feather had drifted onto the page, then away from the page and across the round porch table.  I’d caught it and closed it carefully into the book.

Comments

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Jennifer. I, too, love the Duino Elegies.