Dialogue:
Barbara Duffey & D.W. Baker
Sense Tools: D.W. Baker on Barbara Duffey’s “Epistemological,” “More nothing will happen,” and “The Wilderness”
I. Body Reins
“thoughts need a / body to cling to.” —Epistemological
“Something drew the curtain back, slid off the lid, our reins slipped.” —The Wilderness
loose thoughts
electric need
home a
different body
receptive to
static cling
unbeknown to
When Barbara Duffey wrote that “thoughts need a / body to cling to,” I was struck by the verb “cling.” What about thoughts enables them to cling? Is it their character, our nature, or the hopeless entwinement of the two? The title of the work, “Epistemological,” also points explicitly to a concern with knowing. How do we know ourselves? How do we know where our selves begin, and where our environment ends?
What we know depends on how we sense. Conscious cognition relies on sensory input: our minds can only reflect on things that we can perceive. Since the amount of sensory information in our environment is too hopelessly vast to process everything, we truncate, represent, infer, predict, and a number of other tasks requiring language. Over time, our words become artifacts, evidence of assumption on a cultural scale.
In “The Wilderness,” Duffey’s final poem, she writes that “something drew the curtain back, slid off the lid, our reins slipped.” The text is full of word choice that elides singular sense and definition, instead favoring sound and relational space. How does the animal know when to move? The reins of semantic precision fail to contain the musical experience of Duffey’s text, as a list of reasons may fail to contain the unmistakable feeling of the gut.
What can this poetics teach us about ourselves and our world? If we loose the reins of inherited language from the body, if we pull back the curtain on other modes of knowing—on other sense modalities than the “big five” commonly taught—might we discover things that our truncations, representations, inferences, predictions, and other artifacts of language have omitted or gotten wrong? How might this inform a sense of self and other: a politics, an economics, a spirituality?
II. Eye Hooks
“One lens magnifies all the hooks / in their eyes” —More nothing will happen
only one
per lens
-ish magnifies
-able all
me the
-mory hooks
de in
-cisive their
many eyes
Duffey’s imagery of “hooks / in their eyes” prompts me to consider the power of the image as a cautionary tale, as a sticking point: the baited hook where one is liable to become fatally attached.
The sensory input of imagery is often considered primary by those who can see. External visual cues drive behavior. We also possess internal imagery, for we rotate apples in our minds' eyes: even the blind must form mental images in order to develop vocabulary, access oral language, and think critically about a communicating world.
Yet, images are fickle. Lens settings and brush strokes can change our perceptions of a person’s portrait. Memory is fallible, influenced by emotion. Propagandists have relied on images and their manipulation for as long as technology has been available to do so.
Yet, underneath the dizzying stream of visual input are many other sense domains. The total number is surely more than five, although I do not know exactly how many. What would we experience if we were to follow the biblical injunction and pluck out our eyes? What if poetry, instead of showing us a new way to see, could un-hook us from the eyes by which we live, and instead show us new ways to sense?
III. Sound Vise
“Bitten by sound like two boards / by a vise” —More nothing will happen
bug bitten
or by
design sound
poisono- like
us two
dart boards
punctured by
habit a
rhythmic vise
The vise of sound—the powerful connective pressure of euphony—is not only referenced in “More nothing will happen,” but also demonstrated as the driving force of Duffey's final poem, “The Wilderness.” I find it curious that both her work and mine use a turn to sound in order to render relationships to nature in the final poem of three.
The sensory input of sound can persist across time. Unlike the image, to which viewers can simply shut their eyes, sound’s physical presence cannot be easily inhibited. Sound's ability to override and overwhelm the other senses even means it can be used to torture and coerce. The body and its brain will be sent into nervous breakdown if one extends, for sufficient length of time, either the pressure of sound’s presence (e.g. sound fatigue and permanent hearing loss) or the vacuum of sound’s absence (e.g. anechoic chambers and solitary confinement).
Sound is also crucial to language learning. Auditory processing disorders can have downstream impacts on the separate processes of reading fluency and comprehension. Phonics programs can effectively develop reading skills. Rhyming ability is a standard feature of early childhood curricula. Tone, pitch, timbre, and volume can make meaning.
In poetry, I believe this means the power of sound is not only lyrical, but cognitive: activating connective pathways in the brain that mere images do not. This unity between connective form and connective content in Duffey’s “Wilderness” prompts me to consider: Does the natural world contain rhyme? How can we learn to listen, and to sound in harmony with it? What socially constructed dissonances inhibit the way? Can rhyme in language be a tool for priming the brain to access rhyme in life?
“fallen species / etched in song”: Barbara Duffey on D.W. Baker’s “Proverbs 2:22,” “[ringed death],” and “There Was a Forest”
A golden shovel, like God, knows how it will all end because that’s its writing process (John 1:1). Writing toward a known end feels to me like looking into my son’s eyes and seeing my own, his instructions fulfilling themselves while reflecting my own coding back to me. Thinking about how my DNA relates to his mimics the theorized process of a mother gaining male DNA in her blood, brain, and bones from carrying the fetus of a son, DNA shared across the umbilical. Golden shovel poems share the DNA of their end words’ first poem with their new second poem, and that led me to think about how DW Baker’s poem illuminates Proverbs 2:22.
I had been reading the proverb backwards, I realized from DW Baker’s poems. The break from the land is itself the wickedness, not the consequence of the wickedness. The wicked will be [what is] cut off from the land. The tree doesn’t care whether you intended to kill it with climate change, it dies all the same.
When the world is too much with us it accretes like dust, and like dust layers time in trees, that filing system for each year the sprit denied the dust, laying its soot and other carbons against bark in a series of caresses until they accrete and the spirit succumbs.
I hear “There Was a Forest” to the tune of Madonna’s “Vogue,” the way Dickinson’s poems, a school-age skeptic of her talent might point out, can often be sung to hymns and sea shanties, such as the theme to Gilligan’s Island, but this confluence is crucial to meaning. This similarity indicates the writer is reusing rhythms from the popular consciousness to knock the reader out of their usual assumptions, seeing the snag in the new congruence that allows us a fresh perspective on current modes of making music with writing. To me, what DW Baker is asking us to see afresh is our own death-courting behavior, whose effects are measured in “parts per million,” our pollution of the planet. Our behavior cuts us off from the land. Fighting climate change has, thus, a religious imperative. The forest is already in the past tense.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
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