The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three): Jane Zwart [by Angela Ball]

Poem with a Hole in It

My great-aunt had a typewriter that knocked the belly
from every O she wrote. Every poem has a hole in it.

A rifle’s sight, the peg of lens in a motel door. The circle
cut in a kaleidoscope so we can see colors petaling

down the straw that cores the tube. Your pupil guzzling
data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light.

I think of the divots left in a birthday cake when the kid
uproots the candles. I think of the pocks Christmas lights burn

into a porch rail’s ruff of snow. We are on different sides
of this eyelet. My great-aunt taught me that. Every poem

is riddled with holes. But I am threading two tin cans’
punctured floors that you might know me yet.

--Jane Zwart                                                           first published in South Carolina Review

 

This poem is one I would not have written were it not for the poet Amit Majmudar, my closest sibling in the literary world. “Poem with a Hole in It” is a product of what Amit’s named “mirror writing”: for a number of days running, we take turns sending each other titles. We each improvise a poem to suit each title within 24 hours. Then we swap poems, the only hard and fast rule being that you cannot read the other person’s verse until you’ve sent them yours. – Jane Zwart

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. She also frequently writes book reviews, most recently for Plume.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Three): Jane Zwart

The product of collaboration, Jane Zwart’s “Poem With a Hole in it” not only invites us to consider apertures of all kinds, it asserts its own shape with mysterious ferocity, as if contracting in response to our gaze.

The two gazes, ours and the author’s, meet at the poem’s center: “Your pupil guzzling / data and light, my pupil guzzling data and light,” as if somehow one person’s dominant eye could join another’s to form a new set. The poem encourages the possibility that every poem does this, and also that every poem resolves into the image of both reader and writer—not as composite, but as possible wholeness. Unlike the convexity of John Ashbery’s extended self-portrait, this poem is concave, drawing us in through the accuracy, the acuity of its descriptions: “the peg of lens in a motel door”; the kaleidoscope cut “so we can see colors petaling / / down the straw that cores the tube.” Its taut yet playful (“knocked the belly,” “rifle’s sight”) declarations, subtle yet resounding, encircle our attention.

How apt that after beginning with the great-aunt’s wonderfully flawed typewriter—with its “O” that fails to complete its concentrated syllable of surprise, of grief—the poem brings the great-aunt back near the end to deliver this clinching insight: “We are on different sides / of this eyelet.” (Collaboration works within the poem, as well as in its inception.)  “Eyelet” is kin to “inlet”—place for ocean to thread land. This separating eyelet calls for filling, and the poem closes in the act of doing just that, “threading two cans’ punctured floors / so you may know me yet.” Jane Zwart’s elegant “Poem with a Hole in It” fashions from two holes a device from childhood, the tin-can phone: primitive, flawed, yet a welcome and sturdy connection.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Lindsay Doukopoulos]

I was working with a group of physicists to redesign a lesson on lenses for their students. They wanted to teach them draw ray diagrams which help you determine the location, orientation, and type of image that is formed when light goes through a lens. I kept asking them why lenses are so interesting and one of them said they are the key to observing things bigger than ourselves and smaller than ourselves. I love this poem and your reading of it--"it invites us to consider apertures of all kinds"--a metaphor that reads a poem as lens that focuses life in the same way a scientist uses a lens to focus light. I'll be sharing it with my Physics colleagues!

[jim c]

Lovely poem. Last two lines are great.

[Denise Duhamel]

Such wonderful description throughout Jane's poem...it made me think of all the circular punctures I've ever seen...and "O" as the poet's cry, "O, Captain! My Captain..." Thank you, Angela, for your smart commentary...

[Angela Ball]

Lindsay--many thanks for your interesting and happy-making comment.

Jim C., I'm so glad you enjoyed the poem.

Denise, thank you for this evocative comment and your appreciation.

[J. Zheng]

Imagination plays fantastically to show the uncommon from the common. So, O is round and perfect in that matter. As Angela says, this poem "invites us to consider apertures of all kinds, it asserts its own shape with mysterious ferocity, as if contracting in response to our gaze." Couldn't agree more.