Cole Swensen on “Egret”

On "Egret"

For many years, I’ve been interested in gaps—tiny chasms caused by fragments, juxtapositions, and other formal constructions. I’ve always thought that such gaps allow the unsayable to enter, bringing into the poem intimations and sensations beyond the reach of language, intimations and sensations that nonetheless have the power to affect us—at times more deeply than things that language can express because they’re not limited in the ways that expressible things are. And something in the simple act of the mind’s leaping over those gaps adds an additional dimension and dynamic to a poem.

So, after decades of working from these convictions, I suddenly found myself writing paragraphs of complete sentences, passages flushly paved from the left to the right margin. And though I didn’t think that much about it, I did, on the one hand, become aware that my sense of things expressible in language as somehow limited is absolutely wrong, and on the other, I noticed that these prose pieces were often absurdist, often making ridiculous claims or employing blatant glitches in logic. Again, I didn’t think that much about it except to reflect that absurdism and blatant misuses of logic seem quite in step with the world at large these days.  

Despite realizing that I was wrong and that every word is a limitless field, my faith in the unsayable as a mine of potential innovation and possibility remains, and it has recently struck me that, in fact, absurdity and logic glitches are gaps in their own ways and similarly allow intimations beyond language into the poem. Absurdity demands a leap—it’s based on two things that don’t quite meet, and that’s a gap, and the same is true for logic glitches, which are, in themselves, a form of absurdity. Perhaps gaps in an apparently unbroken pavement are more charged than those occasioned by fragments because they’re hidden—we see the fragment-gap coming and we’re prepared for it, and preparation in this case is a kind of resistance, but the absurdity-gap catches us unaware, and thus the force of the unsayable is that much stronger.

I’ve also been thinking a lot lately of poetry as a vehicle to move outward, to extend the senses beyond the body, so that instead of the senses bringing impressions into the body, poetry sends them out to penetrate the things of the world, allowing one to think and feel with things rather than about them. The danger is, of course, anthropomorphization, which I try to avoid and usually fail. And I fail because anthropomorphization is, itself, a case of the absurd, and as such, I can’t resist it.

This piece began, as my work often does, in sound, or in a combination of sound and observation. I was watching an egret and couldn’t help thinking of the word regret—so again, the absurd, the incongruous linking of the unalike, real thing with abstract word that has nothing to do with it—and from there, the words egret & regret seemed to unfold into grateful and then on to get for, which is a phrase I’ve always found curious—“Well, that’s what you get for being in a hurry …” as if minor errors, impetuosities or oversights, call down gifts—but ones we’d rather not be given. And the poem just carried on from there, braiding observation and speculation, with each short paragraph seeming to unfold from the one before it. Unfolding is perhaps the basic operation of the book.