In Their Own Words
Anna Gurton-Wachter on “Poem from Hypnosis”
Poem from Hypnosis
(for Peggy Ahwesh)
imagine a listener
a woman diversion sex driven
that which is sick or well in me
separates, I crowned myself
earthquake shatterer poetics king
origin earth admixture
yes, you get it, I had to crown myself open
so open the listener’s whole attention seeps back
pigeons overtake the part of the house
where the roof caved in
other animals coo now from the basement
whole rooms, territory lost, taken over
ever-present the listener and I sequestered and I
in my woman treasure futile form
on the floor holding an electric saw
up over my head, a song emanates from it
power off, in fact you could tell I held nothing
in the vicinity of suggestion, laceration
the failure of writing implied, I realized
to be female and genderless nonmaterial throat
I had to hold the paper in my hand drooling
rub it against my face
lick the blank sheets
with my eyes closed
I thought I saw you
in every word a formula
every word tasted empty, possible
and seeing you live this way
has made a big impression on me
changed for me
each room that I enter
seen through red glass on the factory floor
blue shards, green time of day
the trick is to just keep going
forget how we made it all up
how I’m still here taking notes
though still I have nothing to write with
no implement or tool, I petted an animal
that was not in every sense there either
wrestled with a bear one moment, then a rat
in this process I learned how to speak the terrain
the stand-in for the stand-in
the wrong person persuaded
but I didn’t mind the lapse
being older than the world, thus tasked
I call out to all of you: please hold this appetite
can you hold this bull’s eye
rabbit milk proliferation dream can you please
hold this while I measure, let me at least measure
what space if any we have left
From Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
On “Poem from Hypnosis”
This is the first poem, or proem, in my first bookUtopia Pipe Dream Memory. It encapsulates many of the themes that appear throughout the book: imagined intimacies, invocations, conversations with the world of material objects, hallucinations and visions, animal worlds colliding, the carving out and claiming of space. Like much of the rest of the book it also functions as an homage to my influences, the artists who have shaped my understanding of these themes.
This poem, dedicated to the filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, was written while thinking through an experience I had as an actor in Ahwesh’s film The Ape of Nature. For this project each actor was hypnotized before being filmed—a nod to, and meditation on, Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass, which followed the same procedure. On the first day of filming the hypnotist arrived and began working with the other actors on a scene that I was not in. I was to be just an observer, and I sat nearby with a notebook of lined paper in my hands, curious what this unusual specialist would do to hypnotize my fellow actors. As I listened, I found I had started swaying my body back and forth, rubbing the notebook pages and smiling joyously. It was as though I could feel in the blank page, the unwritten words, the entire concept of possibility, of before. I’m a bit suggestible generally but I was also in an environment that Ahwesh had created where I felt that her vision for the narrative of the film remained open as we moved through making it, and that is a really joyful thing to experience. I like thinking about all of the variables that go into making a work of art happen. Sometimes the motions we go through look recognizable, integratable into regular life like measuring things or handling construction tools, but what we are building is play and unreality. There is also a relationship between the hypnotized person, drooling and blissed out, and the creative mind that needs to shut off judgement and editorial tasks until later.
So for me, this poem returns me to the site of openness, a feeling that is older than the material world could be. Yet it returns often to an idea of architecture, of structure, of what would it mean to let animals take over part of your house? To acquiesce to them rather than view them as pests to be gotten rid of? To relinquish traditional attitudes towards property and authorship?
The poem also introduces the reader to a few stylistic moves I do throughout the book, namely piling together a group of nouns to see what hybrid forms I can devise and how much weight they can hold. Utopia Pipe Dream Memory. Origin Earth Admixture. Earthquake Shatterer Poetics King. My sister remarked recently that we are all clinging to nouns, to the stable material thing-ness of them, in times when it is harder to understand how anyone makes anything, says anything, when so much pushes us towards not speaking. As the nouns pile up they become slippery. This thing-ness of language that is so attractive can also shift and make visible the gesture of reaching for words in the face of the unutterable.
