Nathan Hoks | November 2020

Nathan Hoks

1

As I was reading Sarah Arvio’s new translations of Lorca’s Poet in Spain, I was struck by something I hadn’t much noticed in the past: Lorca’s frequent use of the appositive, that lovely sleight of hand that slips in a definition or explanation of a noun phrase with another noun or noun phrase constructed in parallel, such as the second phrase in “Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet.” Here are a couple examples from Arvio’s translation of Lorca:

My soul
one delirious
flower¹

Goodbye
            green bird
So big and so little
Wonderful chimera
Of lemon and narcissus!²

Initially, I felt it was easy to dismiss the appositive as an insignificant stylistic device, a kind of minor rhetorical flourish, something one would only analyze on AP exams and close reading exercises. However, in reading Lorca it seemed suddenly much more: I saw the appositive instead as a figure that evokes a lyrical state of mind because its structure embodies two vital elements of lyric poetry, metaphor and parallelism. By metaphor I mean the general tendency to foster imaginative connections between dissimilar things. With parallelism I have in mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sense that parallel structures account for both the musical effects (rhythm, rhyme, etc.) and syntax of poetry. Even though scholars have made a thorough case for the importance of apposition in epic poetry (e.g., Fred T. Robinson’s Beowulf and the Appositive Style), it rarely features in discussions of lyric. For example, not a single essay mentions it in Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins’s Lyric Theory Reader. I hope here to offer a preliminary sketch of some of the ways this double effect of apposition can work, charging the lyric poem with a uniquely fluid syntax and enthralling imaginative breadth.

2

Contrary to its technical function, apposition in a poem is often not a simple matter of clarification or definition, but a parallelism that quickens metaphor. Such is the case in the examples above where Lorca uses the appositive to assert a vision of one thing as another. This is because nonrestrictive noun apposition allows for a layering of referents. The word comes from apponere, to place near, and we also have the word “appose,” which means to place in juxtaposition or proximity. Juxtaposition tends to dominate discourse of poetries of the 20th and 21st centuries, as the early Anglo-modernists and French surrealists frequently relied on a shock or “jolt,” to use Roger Shattuck’s term, which may be produced by setting two unrelated images or statements next to each other, or by constructing a metaphor out of seemingly incompatible terms.3 This method stems largely from the collage aesthetic pioneered in the visual arts movements at the time, such as Cubism.

So what’s the difference between apposition and juxtaposition? Appositions can be juxtapositions, it would seem, though a juxtaposition isn’t necessarily in the form of apposition. Juxtaposition implies no particular form—it does not have to be syntactically parallel like an apposition. Juxtaposition merely needs two things, of any category—image, sentence, phrase, word, etc., to be set against each other. Apposition, on the other hand, must be grammatically parallel, at least in the rhetorical sense of the word. In the above passage from Lorca, we can see both in action: the surprising contrast of juxtaposition along with the swift syntactic movement of apposition. In using apposition, Lorca can elide the linkages (“like” or “is”) so that the soul-flower or bird-chimera relations are seized upon more suddenly and intuitively, not unlike the fusion of faces in a crowd and petals on a bough in Pound’s famous “In a Station of the Metro.” There’s a simple delight in adjacency and in the way adjacent objects mutually define each other. And, moreover, as in Pound’s theory of the image, the appositives in these examples from Lorca provoke that “sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”⁴

3

But apposition has more varied usages than simply quickening the poem’s assertion of likeness. It channels or constructs freedom and growth in many ways depending on the poet and poem. Sometimes a poem’s appositions will initially seem more conventional, redefining a noun here or there for a clarification, which can have the rhetorical effect of a speculative discovery. Ashbery does this in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Here’s an example from the beginning of the poem where Ashbery interrupts a quotation from Vasari to clarify the word “all”: “‘...he set himself to copy all that he saw in the glass,’ / Chiefly his reflection once removed.”5 Ashbery is making an important clarification since the entire poem meditates on the play of reflections at various removes. This dislocated appositive is Ashbery’s manner of casting reflections, redistributing a noun or noun phrase, defining, clarifying, and refocusing our sense of it.

A few dozen lines later, another appositive appears, but with a more expansive effect:

...that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.⁶

The poem leaps from the soul’s “hollow” to its “room” (presumably Parmigianino’s room as represented in the painting), then defines “room” as “our moment of attention.” Space becomes time and the personal spiritual element (soul) becomes the collective focus of contemplation. These are hefty moves, yet the parallel form of apposition provides a tidy syntactic rhythm and brisk imaginative pace for Ashbery to modify and clarify images and ideas. The rhetorical focusing corresponds with one of the poem’s repeated concerns, that of mental focus or attention in the whirl of time and sensation. Not surprisingly, the motif of the room, which the above passage introduces, reinforces this sense of focus. Ashbery later describes the room as having a “flow like an hourglass,” which brings about “a focus sharpening toward death.”⁷

4

The appositive occurs frequently in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and usually has the rhetorical feeling of a clarification or a redefinition. But as in the examples from Lorca, and even the last passage from “Self-Portrait,” the device also tends to open up associative leaps in a poem. These moves often feel like digressions, as at the end of Ashbery’s “The Ice Cream Wars”:

...A few black smudges
On the outer boulevards like squashed midges,
And the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known,
A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say
Where it comes from, or how long it will stay—

A randomness, a darkness of one’s own.⁸

“The truth” = a “hole” = “something… always known” = “A heaviness in the trees” = “A randomness” = “A darkness of one’s own.” I think it’s important to redraw the lines in order to chart Ashbery’s movements of mind, movements that are given a distinct quickness by the parallel form of apposition and dislocated syntax.9 His redefinitions here oscillate between the abstract and the concrete. While the general thrust of the appositive is usually to zoom in, to focus, here it fluctuates until finally settling on a redefinition of truth as personal “darkness.” However, the pleasure of the form (and maybe its primary poetic value) is the way it supplies a parallel syntactic pattern and thus a rhythmic and rhetorical footing for a poem’s more daring metaphoric leaps. And I think the charm of this ending comes, at least in part, from the way Ashbery mixes these parallel structures with an imaginative wandering: the appositive’s syntactic parallelism and the rhyme scheme’s musical parallelism bestow a firmness on the movement from truth to darkness.

I think this passage illustrates one of the most dynamic, poetically rich aspects of apposition: the paradoxical tendency to both digress and stay in one place. Theoretically, with an appositive, we’re always talking about the same thing: the apple, this red one, the Gala in the blue bowl, the one from Joe’s farm, the one you were about to eat. But even when I keep the focus on the apple, other aspects intrude and pull the focus elsewhere. Who’s this “you,” and isn’t that the person I really wanted to talk about all along? The appositive’s wonderful double capacity to define and digress allows the poem to narrow in on a focal point while also opening itself up to the digressive “noise” that channels the lyrical state of mind into poetic discoveries.

5

These two contrary motions (i.e. the logical clarification of defining a word, and the digressive movement of associative thinking) make a lot of sense for a poet identified with the avant-garde, such as Ashbery, in whose work we would expect such logical aporias. In a very different way, though, these contrary motions create tension and urgency in the climactic stanzas of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck”:

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck¹⁰

The first sequence (from “something” to “ribs”) dances on a stylistic ambiguity: are these noun phrases appositive definitions of the vague “something,” or are they each individual elements in a catalogue? The answer, I think, is yes and yes. Parallel form gives us the startling effect of simultaneous multiplicity and singularity. Rich is both cataloguing and redefining the “wreck” of traditional gender relations, and both of these gestures are lyrically vital to the urgency of the situation. Like Ashbery, Rich’s appositional catalogue oscillates between general and specific, between that vague “thing” and the particular items (wreck, face, ribs). This oscillation triggers a multiplicity and creates the rhetorical atmosphere in which the new mermaid-merman can appear, a compound figure, who implies that the work of confronting the damaging myths of gender requires a subject who is androgynous and multiple. The “we” of the final two lines suggests that this new subject, the “mermaid-merman-we,” emerges, poetically speaking, from the appositive’s formal multiplication of the same.

6

A.R. Ammons may be the most appositional poet of the latter half of the 20th century. Especially in his long poems, he constructs vast parallel structures that seem to unspool endlessly as they pursue their thinking. Like Rich in the above example, his parallel noun phrases often teeter on a border between catalogue and apposition so that they harness that enthralling contrary sensation of both narrowing down a concept and casting out a more inclusive net. Here are some examples from his well-known early poem “Corsons Inlet”:

But Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond account
     ...

the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event
     ...

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders
     ...

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory¹¹

Ammons returns constantly to these themes of natural order, motion, and force. Apposition, and other forms of syntactic parallelism, such as subordination and simple catalogues, play a crucial role in the momentum and shape of his poems. They give the syntax the sense of a fluid running down a channel, or a thread unspooling rapidly. That’s to say, the material moves quickly, but there’s a sense of order and direction in it. I find it interesting that in the first passage, Ammons defines the “Overall” as the unknowable sum of events, then the ledger, then the accounting. The appositive’s gesture of defining or clarifying cuts against his assertion of the unknowableness of nature’s designs so that the rhetoric and the statement are paradoxically at odds with one another.

The second passage presents the flock of swallows as a metonymic renaming of autumn and then drifts off into several synonyms for a group of birds (congregation, order), thereby emphasizing a paradoxical mixture of singularity and multiplicity. In the third and fourth examples, the appositive shuffles in an animated way through restatements of the idea of order itself. For Ammons, these appositional lists tap into that motion of mind that seeks order even as it is beset with the constant threat of disorder. The sensation, I think, is thrilling—like racing down a street in the neighborhood go-kart held together by duct tape and rubber glue. At every moment one feels that the poem could fling itself recklessly into unrelated pieces, yet something about that parallel structure, flimsy though it may be, keeps the mental vehicle intact.

7

To start to wrap things up, let’s zoom out and consider a larger picture. If we follow the logic of apposition, we see that it is created by eliding a linking word or phrase (such as “is” or “like”), technically called a copula. The copula creates identity between two or more things: X is Y. The sun is hot. I am a fish. Georges Bataille, the influential French intellectual, had this to say about the copula:

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading into its own labyrinth.¹²

 

From this grammatical point of view, all things are tied to each other, all things reflect each other, all things define each other. Poetic apposition, reduced to its structure, potentially reveals the entire world as identity, as a great thread of redefinitions which, in the lyrical state of mind, can create a dazzling swirl of inclusion. To circle back to the problem of juxtaposition that I touched on at the beginning of the essay, it seems noteworthy that the grammatical rhetoric of apposition tends to smooth over the radical jolts of difference that juxtaposition implies, or to insist upon an (invisible) linkage despite the apparent divergence in terms.

James Tate picks up on this expansive, inclusive notion of identity in some of his ars poetica poems where the appositive functions as a kind of motor propelling the rapid associative movement. He begins “Poem to Some of my Recent Poems” with appositions that rename those recent poems as “My beloved little billiard balls, / my polite mongrels, edible patriotic plums….”13 The appositive sparks the lyrical imagination and one feels that anything could fall in line and redefine those recent poems. Tate’s poem, called “Poem,” functions similarly, but it listens to itself and corrects itself as it moves forward with appositive redefinitions of the title:

POEM

A silence that tunnels forever
through your eyes no no you have
no eyes an eyelash caught in the door
jamb see I am crying I know
you are in there inside one of
these tears your body the color
of drunk water water thrown out
of a rocketship that’s the only
water that quenches this thirst
your cricket blue body sizzling
like a sky of cinders a galaxy
born of laughter the cliff of
scent your own body is making
with each sigh you must guide
me elsewhere through the rain
a small man from another world
I am the canary that strangles
itself with joy and you my widow
floating through this mirror.¹⁴

In my reading, “A silence” is an appositive renaming of “Poem,” which the speaker objects to, then modifies as “an eyelash,” which in turn provokes a shift into the image of the poem as a body inside a tear. The poem is then reimagined either as a body or as water until the speaker redefines himself via apposition as “a small man from another world” (our world, I take it, as distinct from the world of the poem), and the poem becomes his “widow / floating through this mirror.” Back to the mirror because, with gestures of the appositive, a poem gains a crucial reflective emptiness. Tate’s mirror is a figure for that lyrical state of mind in which all things resemble each other in form or reference, in sound or sense, in music or image, that lyrical mode in which the rhythm of utterance accepts the diverse stuff of the world and channels it into song. While the poem seems to have digressed from its starting point, it has in fact operated rather like a hall of mirrors, affirming reflective identities in its myriad reimaginings of that initial “silence that tunnels forever.”

8

I have focused mostly on familiar contemporary American poets of the last half century, but a deeper look at canonical texts or even very recent writing could yield further discoveries of the way apposition fosters lyrical states of mind. I think, for example, of the famous image in the first quatrain of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73” where “those boughs” become, via the appositive, “bare ruin’d choirs.” Or in the next quatrain where the apposition slips in the conventional epithet “Death’s second self” as a name for the night. Not surprisingly, the figure is vital to the rhetoric of many odes. Keats’s “To Autumn” begins with two appositives for the autumn (season of mist, close bosom friend). “Ode on a Grecian Urn” gets cooking with three appositive renamings of the urn: bride, foster child, historian. Likewise, several of the first stanzas of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” commence with appositives for the wind, that “breath of autumn’s being.” Similarly, the first two lines of Hopkins’s poem “The Windhover” renames the bird via apposition three times. Here it is in Dickinson’s “There’s a certain Slant of light” (320): “‘Tis the seal Despair – / An imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air.” The appositive helps to create the cinematic perceptual gestures in William Carlos Williams’s work, and seems to me crucial to the ways that Stevens is able to make his poems feel at times like “deep air, / The heaving speech of air, a summer sound…” Plath uses the appositive in “Daddy” to rename the father, effectively channeling her anger into monstrous reimaginings.

As for very recent poetry, the first poem in the January 2018 issue of Poetry contains at least two pivotal appositives. Jennifer Givhan’s “I am dark, I am forest” reimagines the Little Red Riding Hood story in terms of a granddaughter’s relationship to her immigrant great-grandmother. Here’s the final quarter of the poem:

 

I stirred the menudo / my belly the pot / & scalding into the forest I carried / & that tree I chopped down chopped into a boat & carried my mother & my bisabuela across the chile-red sopa the blood-water broth / named her daughter / what forest have made for her I cannot see / I carried darkness into the forest & sliced it out.¹⁵

 

The appositive enables these grotesque imagistic redirections: “my belly” becomes “the pot” and “the chile-red sopa” becomes “the blood-water broth” so that the poem presents a symbiotic image of the speaker and the great-grandmother’s food as fundamental to the speaker’s heroic and sacrificial gestures. It’s worth noting that menudo is made of beef belly, so Givhan seems to imply that the speaker is both an ingredient and a container for the soup.

9

I do not believe a good poem must have apposition in it (though it is remarkable how common it is once one begins to look for it!). Rather, I have pursued this essay in order to suggest that this syntactic figure’s unique mixture of renaming and parallelism constructs a vital, enthralling version of the lyrical state of mind that both narrows in on particulars and opens itself up to a radical inclusivity. Perhaps because of how easy it is for a gesture of definition or of renaming to slide into metaphor, poetic apposition often treads the line between strict apposition and the catalogue. But even in its simplest form, as a noun slipped in to replace or modify another noun, the appositive redirects a poem’s syntactic energy, redistributes its meaning, and opens up its referential inclusiveness. In a poem that plays with strings of appositives, it can feel as though the reader is a frog leaping from one noun to the next as if from lily pads on a pond. Though the leaves are nearly identical and linked rhizomatically, there’s a great deal of excitement in the playful jump across the water and the tenuous balance offered by each pad.

Nathan Hoks has published two books of poetry, Reveilles and The Narrow Circle, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. A chapbook, Moony Days of Being, won the 2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Hoks teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is an editor and printer for Convulsive Editions, a Chicago-based micropress. His third book, Nests in Air, is forthcoming.

 

NOTES

1. Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain, trans. Sarah Arvio, (New York: Knopf, 2017) p. 55.
2. Ibid., p. 39.
3. Roger Shattuck, “The Mode of Juxtaposition,” French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), p. 19.
4. Ezra Pound. “‘A Retrospect’ and ‘A Few Don’ts’ by Ezra Pound,” Poetry Foundation. Accessed June 04, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts.
5. John Ashbery, Selected Poems, (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 188.
6. Ibid., p. 189.
7. Ibid., p. 193.
8. Ibid., p. 242.
9. Technically, “A randomness” in the last line, if read as a redefinition of “truth” / “it,” is a syntactic dislocation, which is then followed by a final appositive of “a darkness.” Dislocations, which are usually delayed parallel clauses that serve to clarify something, can be a variation of nonrestrictive apposition. They differ primarily in the verbal distance between the initial point of reference and the clarifying phrase, a distance which alters the poem’s rhythms of syntax, association, thought, and perception.
10. Adrienne Rich. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, (New York: Norton, 2013), p. 23–24.
11. A.R. Ammons, The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition, (New York: Norton, 1986) p. 44–46
12. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 5.
13. James Tate, Selected Poems (Middletown: Wesleyan, 1991), p. 209.
14. 14. Ibid., p. 72.
15. Jennifer Givhan, “I am dark, I am forest,” Poetry. Vol. 211, No. 4 (January 2018), p. 315.