Loaded Verse
Our favourite accomplice, Bazzi, returns with a poem or two.
Dead Syntax
I can smell death outside
on the freshly cut lawn, and in the air-
freshener, hanging by the coffin
in the parlour. Next to my friend
whose father dies: tragic,
the congregation mutters with drawn faces
and vowels that reach me
like fully formed emotions, ready
to be dispatched without
hesitation. He speaks, and I
listen, as the consonants
cut through the dead air
with a veracity betraying life,
who can’t speak, but lingers
somewhere there: between
the spaces of a syllable.
*
THE GRAB: I hope it's not insulting to hear me say I usually have to unpack your stuff, really ask myself what I think the lines mean. They're riddles, certainly, so it's an odd thing to wander through their darkness for just that moment of sensory impact; since that's what (really) ought to separate lyrics from prose. Am I right?
So Dead Syntax, to me, is maybe about the way a person's words, all the shit they said while they lived, sort of lingers in the air after they're gone — like a smell — like the air freshener at the beginning there. This is doubly the case, I guess, if the person who dies is a writer. But then the words suspended in this particular mid-air, in this poem, are other people's … so that made me think about how if you're the person categorically experiencing loss, all the words, all the syllables, lose their meaning; become 'dead syntax', like particles just wafting through the air and maybe gently grazing past your skin.
Is this really deep down a poem about literary legacy, about who a person was (really) lingering somewhere in the spaces between what words they spoke? I want to say no, cause it all seems more molecular than that. I think, really, maybe, what we're talking about here is the reason I'm mindful to turn off music in traumatic moments, or not focus on specific visual elements of a room, for fear that I'll retain some sonic or visual photograph of a moment's despair?
I think that.
BAZZI: I have been thinking about the difference between prose and verse for some time — and I believe that these poems reflect that tension in my mind. The usefulness of verse is twofold in my mind: it allows us to transport ourselves seamlessly across time and place; and, it doesn't require proper narrative form. Of course, prose does offer a transportation of sort - but it is never beholden to the rhythms of verse; there is something to be said for the lyrical/rhythmic pace that poetry offers. That is when sensory imagery becomes important, or impotent enough to become intimate with?
As far as what the poem means, the intention was definitely to to have a doubleness of meaning. The most obvious would be the visual and spoken language of death: the air freshener is a harbinger of death, and so are the long, extended vowels. These are the things that surround death, and in that way it is (accidentally) descriptive. The other, not unrelated meaning is a question of legacy — of words and emotions as they pre-empt and exist long after death. For beyond the physical we do not have souls but memory, and the language of memory. That memory belongs to no one and yet everyone also.
Somewhere real, emotional hurt is supposed to operate, but it still does so according to the dictates of language. So I find your suggestion that Dead Syntax is really about the loss of words interesting — because it is. They hang and drop and fill you up, and then they disappear. Our ability, in some ways, to feel depends and outlives the words we use.
So I would then say, by intention, that no — this poem is not directly about someone's literary legacy. It’s about the suspended-ness of death, its continuing effect, metered out by our memories, which is what you might be talking about. I think the poem intends to do that.
*
Milton
I found paradise
lost in the backyard
of our two bedroom, amongst
the lawn chairs and lawn. There
nestled awkward-like I could
count the slow tick-tock
of grandpa’s wall clock, who would speak
in the tongues of heirlooms.
The hands get stuck around half
past six in the afternoon, falling over
one another in the hope of resurrecting
the future and banishing
the past. Till eleven o’clock
the sun streams in, a sombre
tribute to the present
on a patch of grass where we once loved.
I loved Milton
then, as she spiralled through
a thesis on belonging in this age
untouched by the profane. She rolled over
and traced her dreams in the sky,
on my shoulder; I could feel her
rub up against time as she counted
the ticking of my grandfather’s wall clock.
*
THE GRAB: I think this one's about losing both your physical and creative virginity, how the euphoria is the same — how both sort of commence you as the person you're going to be.
It's probably of no consequence that the poem describes these things as sort of having happened in the same place. I would say the connotation there is metaphysical, and the grandfather's clock chimes for both because there's an innocence, a youth, and thus a kind of time, that is immediately lost forever.
The moment itself is 'paradise'; the one after is 'paradise lost', because more likely than not one never gets to experience exactly that euphoria again. One becomes a man: a skeptical lover (sex) and a cynical bastard (art).
Maybe I got it all wrong; but if I did that means you've nailed something. The more meanings (and pseudo-meanings) the better.
BAZZI: Yes. This poem tries to recreate — in that visual summer-in-the-sun, holidays-by-the-water (an enduring aesthetic) — losing one's virginity. The loss of innocence, paradise lost — the fall from grace endures to create us as something anew. It is a coming-of-age, of consummation of desire, that transcends the physical and is ultimately spiritual; it is aesthetic too.
That is the one thing about poetry: it allows you to imagine the world as a series of instincts, so we can understand without really knowing. I believe we are instinctual creatures — rationality comes later, after the fact. In many ways that mirrors the notions of time in this poem — the present is already always lost, the past and future never fully in our grasp.
The grandfather's clock is supposed to reproduce a sense of rhythmic time, and it gets lost forever as we move onwards. But the poem is also about the intrusion of the past and future on the present. It is that un-belonging which is our only condition.
I do like your designation of paradise as an essentially historically construct — a constant rewriting of the euphoria that we have lost. Here, paradise, paradise lost, they are all the same. They are aesthetic possibilities, completely instinctual.
THE GRAB: I like that description you have there, of poetry as this process of instinctive melody, and I think many dead poets (ah, the dead ones!) would like that you compare that spontaneity to life itself. (Lots to unpack here, by the way ...)
The first part of that reminds me of the childish joy I personally felt when I picked up a guitar for the first time, I think I was 24?, and insisted on not learning the chords because I wanted to just see where the sounds would take me. It seemed more interesting that way, like I could be my own listener, partaking in the mystery, and that's kind of how I feel about poetry too and my personal rejection of meter ... You can be your own reader as you write the stuff down, because all you really have to trust, or to hang onto, is that melodic jangle of syllables.
This belief that we are all instinctive creatures, though ... (and feel free to disagree or whatever) ... that sounds to me like the life we lead when we're not using our calendar apps, not making five-year plans, not meditating and keeping ourselves abreast of time's passage. This seems like such an odd thing for an historian like yourself to say! I wonder what it's like for you … but one of the things I enjoy most about solitude, long spells of it, is my heightened ability to accept time's passage. That I could procure a chronic disease, possibly, and die slowly, and not read every book under the sun, and miss a lot of baseball games, and probably never see New York ... these seem like easier things to accept, time's whole canvas, when I'm alone and able to tell myself that there's only so much I can possibly do in one life. Would you agree that existence is a more instinctive thing when the presence of other people, thus, is requiring you to react to things? Their needs, their feelings, their words?
BAZZI: I think life is instinctual. On the one hand we have learnt a series of instincts — our bodies and words are proxies of the social institutions that have created them. But on the other hand there are moments, perhaps in an unintentional meeting with the eye, or the synaptic impulses that create impossible linguistic connections in your mind, that are moments of brilliance, of beauty. Whether this is wilful or not really does not matter; it kinda takes the poet out of the picture. Sure, you're good at this gig, but you function something like a prophet — speaking words that aren't really your own. (Poets have often thought of themselves as prophets, and vice versa).
I know this sits uncomfortably with the notions of ourselves as wilful, creative creatures — that we have carved out existence for ourselves, but maybe we're far less in control than we like to believe. And you're right, it allows us to partake in the mystery of creation: as moderns we might have done away somewhat with the idea of a god, but now we crave the mystery of creation within ourselves. That shift in subjectivity towards ourselves (I don't know how the bards of yesteryear would have felt about it) has left us groping at a meaning for concepts that don’t even exist yet. I don't know if it will ever be there, or here, for that matter. But that's not really the point, is it? Every person becomes the storyteller and the story, the narrative arc, is lived out billions of times everyday — confined within lines and words and vowels and guttural mishaps.
I like your reversal of instinct. My first thought (my first instinct?) is to imagine (any) one life’s narrative as a function of personal prerogative, because it is a way of navigating the world. And so in that way, existence is more instinctual when we’re in the presence of others. It would then follow that learning, about others, about the world, is a process that begins or is guided by an instinctive reaction. But what of learning about oneself? If instinct is as an outward projection, then it fails in this; in helping one make inward deductions and inferences.
And this is where you place solitude as something that offers pace, and thus timelessness, to a person. Acceptance that the world will always pass us by (I think Mahayana Buddhists claim something similar: that the world is always ungraspable) allows us to conduct ourselves with a little bit of dignity. It cloaks us with a certain gravitas, affords us an existence valuable in and of itself; but also with something that is essentially whimsical. It is a knowledge that things will happen and pass us by, and much won't change. In the delightful rejoicing of our own mortality, we may learn something about empathy — about the instincts needed to live life in the midst of others at least sometimes.
There is always more to add, but I will stop here, as I’m afraid I will double back on myself somehow. Talking to oneself is a dangerous thing.
*
