Elizabeth O’Brien | September 2017

NOTES

When I think about writing, I often find myself returning to the way one of my first professors described how she would grade our work in her Narrative Nonfiction class. What she was looking for, she told us, was control. She wanted to see evidence that we were attempting to achieve deliberate effects in our writing, and our grades would largely be based on the successfulness of our attempts. 

To this day, using evidence of control as a grading metric seems to me to be a sufficiently fair way of superseding matters of personal taste in the classroom, where the question Is it any good? can so easily be misinterpreted through the lens of Do I like it? As a graduate instructor in an MFA program, I parroted my own version of this “evidence of control” criteria to my students for the three years I taught undergraduate writing courses.

But in the work of drafting and revising, how to control one’s writing sometimes seems as much a conundrum as it is a worthy goal and, I confess, I still wrestle with it: how to control the writing, and how much. Like Flannery O’Connor, I write “to discover what I know,” and often my sense of control over a piece of writing is only tenuous at best. Writing is a balancing act, an attempt to control the words on the page without killing their spontaneity, their essential magic, and sometimes I question whether it is really a virtue to be “in control,” and how control positions writers in relation to hypothetical readers.

W.S. Merwin’s great poem, “For a Coming Extinction” makes a compelling argument in favor of control. Almost-but-not-actually apologetic, the poem underscores the tragedy of extinction as a man-made event, without offering solutions or judgment. The poem begins:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying¹

In the poem, the whales’ fate is already sealed, and Merwin’s speaker addresses them directly, issuing a directive for how the whales should explain human conduct to God upon their human-caused extinction. This is followed by a catalogue of other “irreplaceable hosts,” animals who have already suffered the same fate and are referred to in the poem as “our sacrifices.” Finally, Merwin asserts, the whales should “Tell him / that it is we who are important.”² Throughout the poem, his tone is argumentative, bereaved, and bitterly ironic all at once, but the poem’s power is in how it never explicitly makes a moral judgment. 

Instead, the poem makes an argument; one nearly as audacious as our collective environmental carelessness. By positioning the speaker as one who in essence demands God’s mercy while defending his own righteousness, Merwin complicates a familiar ecological storyline while neatly sidestepping the problem of trying to convince readers of his stance. In this and other poems in The Lice, Merwin writes from a philosophical perspective that leaves no doubt about his own opinions. The lines, unpunctuated and uneven in length, cascade down the pages, giving the poems a sense of visual openness, while Merwin’s straightforward storytelling and syntactic line breaks make their meanings plain. 

“For a Coming Extinction” was important to my own development as a writer; it offers a powerful example of how to write effectively about fraught subject matter, by demonstrating that withholding judgment can be more powerful than explicitly passing it. But lately I also find myself noticing the high control Merwin employs in his manipulation of how the reader is to understand his meaning. The compressed space of a poem requires precision, of course, and the deliberate language that characterizes poetry is one of the greatest pleasures of the form. But does this mean poets should always strive to create and control a single desired effect? Of course not. And I am intrigued by what happens when a poet decides to cede control to readers. 

I have heard novelist Robert Boswell speak at the University of Minnesota about what he called “authorial custody,” an idea he had developed as part of a fiction lecture for Warren Wilson. Boswell has since written:

How much effort should an author make to control what goes on in the reader’s mind, to limit the reader’s side of the creative act and insist on one’s own vision? On the one hand, the typical reader is not going to be the creative equal of the author concerning her narrative, and one does not want to permit faulty, lazy readings of one’s story. On the other hand, one does not want to deny the kind of active engagement with the story that is the essence of a great reading experience. These are issues of authorial custody, which I’ll define as follows: the extent to which the author retains control over a story after it has been put into the hands of the reader.³

Issues of authorial custody are as relevant to the writing of poetry as they are to fiction, and I love how Boswell so neatly addresses the tension between what a writer puts on the page and what the reader finds in it as a question of control, or, perhaps, intentionality. Control and intention are intertwined in all writing, because some level of control is required in order to realize one’s intentions. 

But Boswell’s remarks also bring up the issue of whether readers should be concerned with writers’ intended visions, and this starts to wade into murkier critical ground. Writing instructors aside, should a reader be expected to endeavor to discover a writer’s intentions when they read?

As a young student, I thought for a while that maybe we should, because in terms of writing, it certainly would be easier on me to rest some of the burden of meaning on my reader. And so, I tended to rile my high school English teachers and undergraduate literature professors roughly once a semester by interrupting discussions of symbolism to ask—genuinely troubled, and curious—“Did Emerson (or Whitman, Melville, or whoever) want us to see this symbol, and interpret their work like this?”

Of course, as far as most readers are concerned, the best answer to this is that the writer’s intentions don’t really matter—beauty is either in the eye of the beholder, or it isn’t. But the sincere kernel within my obnoxious classroom behavior eventually led me to the mid-20^th-century literary debate over intentionality, in which critics wondered whether it’s fallacious or not to take a writer’s intentions into account in judging the successfulness of the work. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes the intentionalist position as follows: “the author is the determiner of the meaning of her work, because without that we have no compelling normative principle for validating one interpretation and rejecting others.”⁴ This relates to Boswell’s claim: he, then, is the arbiter of meaning when it comes to his own work. 

Princeton continues, “Without some knowledge of what an author set out to do, we cannot reasonably judge how well she did it, for otherwise a critic is liable to condemn the work merely for not being the kind of work the critic happens to approve of—i.e. the kind of work the author never set out to create in the first place.”⁵ This again seems to be an argument perfectly suited to an uncertain student writer, but as the book goes on to note, intentionality as a critical practice outside the writing classroom is flawed, because it precludes how powerfully good writing can affect readers of all types in novel ways, whether those readers are aware of the writer’s original intentions or not. 

And so Boswell’s notion of authorial custody interests me in part because he subverts this entire debate, framing it instead as a question of whether writers should seek to control how readers read, rather than whether readers should guess a writer’s intention in order to judge their work. 

Although I admire the precision of “For a Coming Extinction,” the poem is also what Boswell might call a “high-custody” one. It leaves little room for any interpretation beyond the one Merwin intends. Without a doubt, this is a lucky problem to have—his poems are vivid, consistent, and moving—but high authorial custody writing limits possibilities for multiple interpretations. In poetry, as in fiction, the writer decides how much space to leave for readers to bring their own perspective to the poem, and Merwin’s leaves little ambiguity about how it is to be understood. 

Not all poets write this way, and Merwin himself is not always a high custody poet. In other poems, he cedes some of this control to wonderful effect. Take, for example, “Blueberries After Dark,” a poem from The Shadow of Sirius. It begins in medias res:

So this is the way the night tastes
one at a time
not early or late

my mother told me
that I was not afraid of the dark
and when I looked it was true

how did she know
so long ago⁶

From here, the sentences continue to bleed without punctuation through the poem.

A series of generational relationships are referenced and impossibly intertwined between the words “dead” and “brought up,” giving readers license to lose track of whether the poem is a reflection on Merwin’s mother’s death, or a meditation on the eventuality of his own. In fact, we can read both occasions in it simultaneously.

The poem’s eponymous blueberries are only alluded to in the beginning, while the metaphorical connection between the berries and death is implied through the image of night. We can’t pinpoint a single exact message for sure here, the way we can with “For a Coming Extinction.” One could argue convincingly that “Blueberries After Dark” is about facing mortality, and missing the comfort of one’s family, and marching time, and of course, the poem is and isn’t about the pleasure of eating blueberries. The poem’s rich ambiguities leave space for it to be “about” more than the sum of its parts, and Merwin’s uncertainty—is he truly uncertain? Actually, now I’m not so sure—leaves space for the reader’s uncertainty as well. 

There was a time when I preferred poems in Merwin’s former vein: paraphrasable, sure of itself. But lately I find the space in poems like “Blueberries After Dark” much more appealing. Perhaps it is the assumption a highly controlled poem makes about its reader that troubles me. 

As Boswell suggests, a high custody work seems to have at its core the assumption that its readers are “not the creative equal of the author.” This is a dangerous position for a poet to take, suggesting as it does that readers require clarity and, even worse, instruction in order to read a poem. If so, why read or write poetry at all? To this end Boswell points out, “If the danger of a low-custody story is bewilderment of the reader, the danger of a high-custody story is that it will be over-controlled, telling the reader not only what happens but also how the reader should feel about it. In such stories, the reader is passive and essentially redundant.”⁷ In poetry, too, a writer who takes less custody leaves more opportunity for readers to uniquely determine what has happened in the poem, and how to feel about it. 

And yet—although my own work has benefitted from studying extremely ambiguous low custody poems, I still tend to prefer when poetry includes some kind of narrative or lyric sense, something I can connect with. Because Boswell is writing about narrative, he doesn’t bother to mention this, but it’s worth considering in terms of poetry—that for many readers, one of the most pleasurable aspects of reading comes from recognition, from connection, and it’s much harder to relate to poems that entirely resist meaning. This, I think, is what traditional narrative poets tend to mean when they criticize experimental poetry as lacking in sincerity.

Low custody poems can be much harder to parse, but it doesn’t seem fair to claim that they necessarily lack sincerity. John Ashbery’s poetry is perhaps a useful model here: Ashbery often epitomizes a low-custody poet and he clearly places great value on ambiguity in his work. His poems drift from one idea to the next, evoking a distinctly Ashberian mood, but rarely connecting firmly to an argument or narrative. He places snippets of disconnected scenes and assertions in close proximity as if suggesting some connection between them (or not), employing shifting pronouns or removing referents from pronouns, orphaning them where referents are ordinarily required. The lovely sentences in his poems often have little immediate connection to each other, creating abstract moodscapes that leave readers to piece together (or not) what sort of statement the poem makes. All of these decisions make for poems that evade easy interpretation.

Ashbery is considered a “difficult” poet because of his ambiguous, low-custody approach, but when he speaks about his own work, he is charmingly forthcoming about sharing confusion with his readers. A New Yorker profile recounts this exchange between the poet and a student:

“Do you ever feel baffled sometimes yourself by what you’ve written?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. 
“Oh, good, because I do, too,” she said, clearly relieved.
“You’re not alone,” he told her.⁸

It is comforting to know that Ashbery is confused with us, but this can be of limited help in trying to parse his poems, because even when he edges toward the more narrative, Ashbery champions resistance to interpretation. “In Those Days,” for example begins: 

Music, food, sex, and their accompanying
tropes like a wall of light at a door
once splattered by laughter

come round to how YOU like it–
was it really you that approved?
And if so what does the loneliness
in all this mean? How blind are we?

We see a few feet into our future
of shrouded lots and ditches.⁹

Here, Ashbery neatly summarizes the essence of his body of work. At least, this is what I believe when I read the poem now—it’s how I have decided, after many returns, to interpret the poem. As is typical of his work, the poem strings together ideas that bear little immediate connection to each other. But through the lens of a poetic thesis, lines like, “And if so what does the loneliness / in all this mean?” and “We see a few feet into our future / of shrouded lots and ditches” begin to make a kind of unified sense. The poem’s conclusion, which broadly argues that words lose their power and nuance over time, even as the “blessed / sense of it bleeds through, / open to all kinds of interpretations”¹⁰ further suggest Ashbery’s thinking about the power of language. 

“In Those Days” is arguably among Ashbery’s less abstract poems, but it still employs low custody, offering little guidance as to a single intended meaning. When I first read it, I saw the poem as a wistful statement about the past; I thought it was about striving toward a specific purpose only to discover there had been no purpose all along. Something like that. The poem’s rhetorical questions, and the way the senses are muffled in scenes heard in snatches and hidden behind doors, create a “shrouded” view that leaves the poem’s sight line up to the imagination. This ambiguity supports more than one reading; the meaning here can be as much about viewing one’s past—my first interpretation—as it is also a kind of thesis for Ashbery’s work. 

In a playful conversation between Ashbery and Kenneth Koch recorded in 1965, the two poets circle around the issue of ambiguity until Ashbery finally says, “I think that if we like things that are evasive it’s because there’s no point in pursuing something that is standing still. Anything that is standing still might as well be dead.”¹¹ He seems content to let readers engage with his poems on whatever their terms may be. And he’s an exemplary model of a low-custody poet: his poetry invites confusion and uncertainty that Ashbery himself posits to experience in his own work. Ashbery, then, suffers little doubt that readers are his “creative equals.” He permits and even invites the “faulty, lazy readings” that trouble Boswell. In fact, it seems as if he believes that reading—any reading, all reading—is “faulty” by necessity.

There’s a refreshing freedom in this; in being given a poetic difficulty, and then license by the poet himself to accept or reject that difficulty. Reading Ashbery’s work, I experience intense but somehow pleasurable frustration. I find I become irritated with myself when I decide to read his books by the time I’m ten pages in. But then I’m always inspired and baffled and glad once I’ve finished, which is not unlike how I experience composing early drafts of my poems.

In terms of low-custody poems, there are also contrapuntal poems, acrostics, and other forms that for lack of a better label I like to call kaleidoscopic, which formally cede control over how the poem will be read through their complicated arrangements on the page. 

“Tin Man,” from Jericho Brown’s Please, is one such poem. Arranged as a grid of phrase units, “Tin Man” can be read horizontally or vertically, yielding two distinct effects. The first two rows are:

In my chest                 a slit of air.                  Don’t say love.

Drop a penny.             I can’t feel a thing.       Remember¹²

Readers are confronted with the question of whether to read the poem’s opening line as “In my chest a slit of air,” or “In my chest drop a penny,” and the poem as it continues offers no indication that one reading or the other should be privileged, ceding the decision to the reader. And yet there is never a doubt of the poem’s sincerity; the lonesome isolation of the snippets—“Don’t say love;” “I can’t feel a thing”—is undeniable.

Lots of contemporary poets are experimenting with grids and columns, including the Irish poet David Wheatley in “Sonnet,” and Jamaal May in “I Do Have a Seam.” These poems operate similarly to “Tin Man,” and can be read as vertical columns or horizontal rows, with different outcomes for each. However, Wheatley’s punctuation-free poem contains only nouns that cede at the bottom of each column to phrase units. It begins: 

stretch pants        cashback        pound                 shopstore card

hubcaps                 tailfin               souped-up        Escort¹³

Whether read vertically or horizontally, the effect of Wheatley’s poem is atmospheric rather than narrative, while May’s possesses an intimate self-contained story, and its effect is much less ambiguous: 

and you see it, there
                                      in the center of my chest, a string
to pull, a chrome zipper,
                                       interlocking down my sternum,

belly to inner thigh, or
                                        there is only a hole, barely
large enough for a woman’s
                                         two thumbs. Come,
press, pull hands apart until
                                      my halves, billow open [.]¹⁴

Here, there is the faint suggestion that the poem should be read horizontally rather than vertically, because the left column is offset a line above the right column. And yet both readings—“and you see it there / to pull, a chrome zipper” or “and you see it, there in the center of my chest, a string” possess their own narrative integrity. 

However, these poems cede authorial custody through their arrangement on the page in a way that is distinct from many other visually experimental forms—such as the long, serially repeating columns in Robert Lax’s “Night and Day” and “Light,” and those in which C.V. Cavafy breaks stanzas in half, as in “He Vows,” “That They May Come,” and “In Despair.” Poems of this sort seem to forfeit authorial custody initially through their visual arrangement, however, neither poet consistently privileges vertical and horizontal readings equally. Ultimately, Cavafy’s and Lax’s arrangements more closely resemble traditional poems, because there is a “right” way to read them—here, the poem becomes a visual code to be cracked definitively, rather than a mysterious ambivalence.

The contrapuntal, created by Herbert Woodward Martin and used to wonderful effect by Tyehimba Jess in leadbelly, is another useful form to consider in terms of authorial custody. In contrapuntal poems, two speakers appear instead of one, typically each in their own column. The reader may read each speaker’s part separately by reading vertically or, reading horizontally, experience the voices in a kind of call-and-response format. 

In leadbelly, Jess uses letters, songs, and other historical sources to bring to life Huddie Ledbetter, the blues musician known as Leadbelly, through a mix of contrapuntals, prose poems, and other forms. The first stanza of “lomax v. leadbelly in new york: letters to home, 1934” begins:

i am disturbed and distressed at this man messin’ with my music,
      his begining to show off     preachin’ how a songster gotta be pure
         in his songs and talk   –like he got a deed to folkways
  when his money value is   the way blues sweats out of a man
                                        to be     like prayer
           natural and sincere    set free from smotherin’¹⁵

Here, Leadbelly’s manager, John Lomax, speaks through the left column, and Leadbelly himself speaks on the right. Each voice is distinct within its column, but they combine in a horizontal reading such that Leadbelly’s column complicates Lomax’s—“i am disturbed and distressed at / this man messin’ with my music,”—allowing the poem to simultaneously give three different takes on the same story. 

Lomax and Leadbelly are both complicated, flawed individuals whose relationship was historically known to have been one fraught with conflict. Here, the contrapuntal form offers up their eventual legal confrontation in a choral form, in keeping with their shared devotion to music. Structurally, these poems also offer readers moments of lower custody in a controlled collection that otherwise relies formally on prose and traditional stanza forms featuring strong single speakers.

However, the contrapuntal is a higher custody form than some of the other experimental forms that rely on columns. The contrapuntal initially challenges authorial custody by presenting readers with the option of whether to read horizontally or vertically, and yet, the premise that the form relies on two voices instead of one limits how much control the poet actually relinquishes over how the poem will be interpreted. Readers can choose which way to experience the poem, but the overarching premise is still formally mapped for them. 

Poems similar in form that have made less pronounced decisions about the speakers allow opportunities for lower custody and richer ambiguities. “Tin Man,” for example, is obviously a poem voiced by one speaker, but the voice is a fluidly metaphorical one that blurs the line between man of tin and man of flesh and blood. 

Similarly, “I Wonder If You Hear It,” a poem by Elsbeth Pancrazi that appeared recently in Sixth Finch, leaves its speaker more open than Jess’s leadbelly poems do, and in fact, the poem can successfully be interpreted as having a single speaker or two. In its entirety, the poem reads: 

I wonder if you hear it / everywhere I go, it is
                                    a certain / difficult
                        warning in the air / not to return
                                      the books / burdened
      tell me nothing, but fill my mind / with gifts¹⁶

The poem can be read as one voice of split purposes, or as two voices, as the poem’s title and first line ask whether readers “hear” the second voice, which counters, “I wonder if you hear it / a certain / warning in the air” by complaining, “everywhere I go, it is / difficult.” Like Ashbery, Pancrazi invites more than one way of reading, though she does so through the poem’s formal, rather than grammatical arrangement. 

Poets working in a low custody mode invite readers to take a kind of ownership over the poem, to determine how to read it from multiple viable possibilities. While these poems can’t offer the satisfying sense of singular meaning a high custody poem can, they can carve out spaces of lower custody within a group of high-custody poems, which is especially powerful in a collection featuring strong speakers in conflict, like leadbelly. In narrative terms, these poems can immediately and provocatively compromise the speaker’s reliability. 

It’s possible to argue that these types of experimental poems—contrapuntals, kaleidoscopics, acrostics, and so on—rely too heavily on their form, of course. This is an easy claim to make against any poem that makes use of an uncommon or decorative arrangement on the page. But poems that formally support more than one possible reading actually require more decision-making than a traditional poem in order to be effective, because multiple possible readings must be taken into account. 

In acrostics, grids, and kaleidoscopic poems, form becomes a problem the reader confronts, and an opportunity for multiple interpretations. Readers can choose whether to read across in rows, or up and down in terms of the columns, yielding results that differ in both sound and meaning. Creating these poems requires as much technical control, if not more than writing traditional poems does, and in light of this, the criticism seems to fall a bit flat. 

In his lecture, Boswell concluded, “I’m not suggesting that one end of the scale is preferable to the other; rather, I’m suggesting that there are decisions to make, decisions that you have made without realizing it.”¹⁷ In poetry, too, writers must decide how to handle authorial custody, and poets frequently decide this on a book-by-book or poem by poem basis, giving us low-custody poems like “Blueberries After Dark” and high-custody poems like “For a Coming Extinction” from the same poet. All writers, and perhaps writers of poetry in particular, must make their own peace with their relationship to the ambiguities in their work. 

The tension between controllable language and form and its uncontrollable effect is interesting, because as readers, we so often find emotional satisfaction in poems that convey deliberate meaning or narrative sense, but we can also take great intellectual and emotional enjoyment from the interpretive and associative work that more ambiguous poems—whether ambiguous in language or form—invite us to undertake.

To find a balance between taking a high or low custody approach is a challenge writers of all kinds of work must confront again and again. “Kaleidoscopic” poems offer one way of balancing a desire for meaning with the pleasures of ambiguity. To borrow a sentiment from Ashbery, poems in this mode suggest “the blessed / sense of it bleeds through, / open to all kinds of interpretations.”¹⁸ And of course, sense itself seems to shift and transform from poem to poem by necessity the more one reads.

 

Elizabeth O’Brien earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Minnesota, and her work—poetry and prose—has been published by Wigleaf, New England Review, The Rumpus, Diagram, Tin House, Ploughshares, Sixth Finch, Radar Poetry, Best New Poets 2016, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook of poetry is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2018.

 

Notes

1. W.S. Merwin, The Lice (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017), p. 71.
2. Ibid.
3. Robert Boswell, “Having Gravity and Having Weight: On Meaning in Fiction,” Fictions Digital Lecture #85, The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, NC, July 2013.
4. Suresh Raval, “Intention,” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and TVF Brogan (New York: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 611.
5. Ibid.
6. W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2009), p. 6.
7. Robert Boswell, “Having Gravity and Having Weight: On Meaning in Fiction.”
8. Larissa MacFarquhar, “Present Waking Life,” in The New Yorker, November 7, 2005, pp. 86–97.
9. John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 13.
10. Ibid.
11. “In Which John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch Start Making Sense,” This Recording, January 20, 2011, Accessed June 14, 2017, http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/1/20/in-which-john-ashbery-and-kenneth-koch-start-making-sense.html. 
12. Jericho Brown, Please (Kalamazoo: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2008), p. 36.
13. David Wheatley, “Sonnet,” in An Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Wes Davis (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 919.
14. Jamaal May, Hum (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2013), p. 41.
15. Tyehimba Jess, leadbelly (Amherst: Verse Press, 2005), p. 89.
16. Elsbeth Pancrazi, “I Wonder If You Hear It,” Sixth Finch, February 2014, Accessed June 14, 2017. http://sixthfinch.com/pancrazi1.html.
17. Robert Boswell, “Having Gravity and Having Weight: On Meaning in Fiction.”
18. John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander.