A poem by Monroe Lawrence
From his book About to Be Young, with original commentary.
There is a dark, crowbar of paranoia Passive against the drilled sky of my arms Bleeding traditional stillness. And it is In my breast to react. And it is the same sorry beep of a trap. And it is in the mind of the line, such predilection for the lucent artery Brilliant with dark comprehension to Bear me, with extraordinary disgust for it, so I sleep as the slender Tool
x
Am I reading this right?
It’s a question I suspect many readers find themselves asking when they encounter language that is fragmented, disjunctive, or strange. It’s also a feeling I have had for years not just about poetry, but about many aspects of life: does my experience count as legitimate? To explore this, I wanted to write poems that didn’t necessarily affirm one’s experience as legitimate or real, but celebrated that very common fear of illegitimacy.
This poem isn’t interested in delivering a solvable puzzle or a coherent narrative for the reader to “finally arrive at.” Rather, it aims to create a catalyst for perceptual attention and an opportunity for the reader to attend to the natural resistances of their reading. As soon as one realizes that the actual experience they are having of the poem is the right one, revealing associations they alone possess, they might enjoy themselves more—and move on to other, deeper, yet also “right” experiences.
In the poem’s first line, a centrally located comma aims to make the word “crowbar” a second, coordinated adjective. It also produces a kind of punctuational crowbar—cracking the central image of the poem down the middle of the line.
There is a dark, crowbar of paranoia
Punctuation is generally a machinery that recedes, inhabiting the quiet interstitial spaces of a sentence. When I first read poetry by P. Inman and Leslie Scalapino, I saw the way this quiet tool might instead operate as something more foregrounded, tied to breath and eye. When I read the British poet J.H. Prynne, I began to see a way forward that took these techniques from their use in service of disjunction and fragment and sought instead to deploy them in service of emotion. Elsewhere in my book:
. . . the front, seat There is a panic dialectic. I stepped Into it
Here, the language repeats the comma placement in the crowbar example; the comma is used in the same “way,” prying open the descriptor-described relationship, adding a stutter in the (recall of?) the “front, seat.” Here is another “type” of use of the comma:
in the air behind my conception of, you and the long grains . . .
What would be called a “hard break”—breaking the line on “of”—hardens further when the comma ruins the grammar of “my conception of you.” Obviously the speaker can’t vouch for the accuracy or fluency of their conception of “you.”
But in the sequence:
. . . And it is In my breast to react. And it is the same sorry beep of a trap. And it is in the mind of the line . . .
it is mainly line and stanza breaks that control the speed of the utterance. So too do capitals, which across About to Be Young betray the ruins of classical poetry, essentially producing a residue from a tradition much of poetry has left behind. Before a certain point in time, most lines of poetry began with capital letters, which indicated the formal lineage of the line agitating against the paradigm of the sentence, in which poems were (nevertheless) mainly composed.
In this poem, capitals exist mainly at the left margin, but one migrates into the final word of the poem: “Tool.”
Poetic tools don’t have to be complicated. A capital letter can be a kind of “boost”: I like thinking of the rainbow jump pads and speed boosts in Nintendo Mario Kart . . . driving over capital letters, not-quite flush with the ground (page), shunted whooshingly along . . . If your experience has trained you to react to a capital letter a certain way—as the beginning of a new thought, idea, or sentence—poetry can hijack that accreted meaning and recast it in service of something new, something differently urgent.
. . . such predilection for the lucent artery Brilliant with dark comprehension . . .
Maybe the commas, the capital B in “Brilliant,” the repeated l and rhyming -lection / -hension sounds enable your “comprehension” to be “dark”; when the light is low, perhaps we see more, grow suggestible, and might fragment, by depriving us of connective tissue, supply the clink of bone on bone? (“Blind only to see god better”) What is the trap? What arms, what stillness, what apology . . . ?
A writer I admire, one of my favourites, once wrote that the most natural unit of meaning is the sentence. I guess I believe that to be untrue.
Thanks so much for reading Monroe’s email, and in advance for purchasing his book here:
About to Be Young, Elephants Press, 2021,
and for reading his recent interview with Vi Khi Nao here:
Monroe Lawrence in conversation with Vi Khi Nao in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine.