Two quick notes to start:
In one of the more surreal things to happen to me, somehow I’m doing an event with one of my favorite poets, Catherine Barnett, and one of my favorite actresses, Dianne Wiest. Dianne Wiest! We’ll be celebrating Catherine’s very wonderful new book, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, and talking about loneliness and its uses. It’s on Wednesday, May 8 at 6:30, at McNally Jackson Seaport. You can RSVP and get more info here.
Small Rain finally has a cover, which FSG released on its socials this week. It was a very long road, full of misfires and rights refusals, but I love where we ended up. The design is by Thomas Colligan, who also made the image. I love that the single vertical line is something like a rip or tear, something like smoke, something like maybe a single drop of rain on glass. Suddenly in the past couple of weeks I’ve felt like the machinery of publishing a book has started cranking into gear: I have my first interviews next week; my US publicist and I have started talking about tour; my tickets for a week in the UK in September are booked. I feel nervous about all of it, and nervous about my nervousness; the only way out is through, I guess. In any event, I hope you’ll read the novel. Preorders really do very powerfully help a book; please ask for a copy at your local bookstore, or here are some links for online retailers: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page. And if you write about books and would like a galley, I think there are still a few available. Please just reach out to Brian(.)Gittis(@)fsgbooks(.)com to ask for one.
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I remember the first time I encountered Frank Bidart’s “Overheard through the Walls of the Invisible City,” from his great collection Desire. It was in 1998, and I was a junior at the University of Rochester, taking my first poetry class, a workshop with James Longenbach. I’ve talked about that class before in this newsletter; it’s amazing to me how thoroughly it redirected my life (from music to literature), and how firmly it set my aesthetic compass. Many of the poets I first encountered with Longenbach—not just Bidart, but Glück, Walcott, Henri Cole, Carl Phillips—remain among my favorites. But I think this particular poem was seared into me more deeply than anything else I read that semester. It was the first poem I had encountered that I experienced not just as verbal or intellectual construct, or even as music, but somehow as a material object, a kind of sculpture. It did something to my mind; it did something to my body—something I hadn’t known to that point poems could do. It became a kind of talisman; in some ways I feel like I’ve been chasing after it in my own work ever since. Here it is, with apologies to those of you reading on your phones for the messed up lineation:
Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City
…telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,—repeating, chanting,
Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeahuntil, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached
consummation.—Until telling those who swarm around him begins again
(we are the wheel to which we are bound).
I’ve taught this poem many times—including earlier this week; I still don’t know how to talk about it. Where to begin? With paraphrasable content? It’s true that subject matter was probably one of the things that impressed me when I first encountered it, and it’s paraphrasable enough: a guy is in the center of a crowd of other guys, getting thoroughly fucked. He chases consummation; consummation arrives, or seems to; then the cycle begins again. But that doesn’t tell us much of anything at all about how the poem works; certainly it doesn’t bring us close to the effect of the poem, the power of it.
So where to start? The diction is weirdly unsexy. That first verb, “swarm,” places us outside the realm of the human, almost: insects swarm, zombies swarm; people invested with recognizable consciousness do not swarm. Things don’t get any better as more verbs appear: fill, invade—one neutral, one militaristic, violent. And it isn’t just a question of word choice; also the fact that we’re in the verbal mood of the subjunctive feels oddly formal, removed from the actions described: “his desire is that an appendage … fill, invade.” (The mandative, I think that use of the subjunctive is called.) Nor is the speaker of the poem involved in the action; whoever the speaker is, he (I do think it’s probably a he; we seem to be in a world of hes) is not even viewing the action, but only overhearing it—and overhearing it from beyond a wall, even, a kind of absolute separation. The nouns are even less sexy than the verbs, if that’s possible: that first “desire” is followed by “appendage” and “orifice.” I don’t know what kind of orgies you frequent, and God knows I’m all for variety; but this is far from language I associate with sex parties. And the poem is careful with that language: “appendage” isn’t just a euphemism, a way to avoid gutter talk; the sense is that whatever’s going on is polymorphous: anything that can penetrate is penetrating anything that can be penetrated; bodies are being combined in unconventional ways.
I brought the poem into my class this week because we were discussing the Colombian novelist Giuseppe Caputo’s very remarkable debut, An Orphan World (translated by Sophie Hughes and Juana Adcock), which has some of the most exciting writing of sex I’ve encountered in recent years. The book is about a father and a son; it’s also about a community blasted by an act of devastating violence, a massacre of gay men; it’s also about a young man’s use of erotic adventuring as a tool of self-discovery. Each chapter except for one is built out of short, fragmented sections that alternate between two narrative strands; the result is a book that feels like a labyrinth, twisting through time in unexpected and sometimes bewildering ways.
In the novel’s amazing third section, “Roulette,” this labyrinthine narrative structure is literalized in both virtual and physical space. In the first narrative strand, the narrator (he’s never named) spends hours on a Chat Roulette-type cruising website, endless virtual windows and doors opening onto different interiors, different cities, different images of desire and need. In the second strand, at an earlier point in the book’s timeline, the narrator wanders the physical labyrinth of a bathhouse, each room opening onto a different erotic tableau. In one of them, “the red room,” there’s a leather swing, in it an old man waiting to be penetrated, who—in one of the book’s many perfect touches—glances at his watch every time a man rejects him. Both narrative strands of this chapter constitute very remarkable, acutely observed phenomenological accounts of cruising, both the inner experience—anticipation, anxiety, boredom—and sharp external detail, like the feel of discarded condoms under bare feet.
Finally the old man, perennially unchosen, gives up for the night, and the narrator takes his place in the swing. A man starts fucking him; the room fills up with watchers. Eventually someone fills his mouth up, too; he’s penetrated by multiple men at once. A bottle of poppers is pressed to his nose, and after huffing the narrator has an experience of abundance, of being multiplied:
The glass grazed my nose; I inhaled. A thousand dicks entered me. I inhaled again. A thousand more. ‘Ah, ah.’ A thousand hands all over my chest. A thousand-mouthed kiss. And oh, the cocks: once inside, there they remained. ‘Ah, ah, ah.’
The narrator remembers this night as a series of transformations, “totally unforeseen,” “which I immediately recognized as both monumental and definitive.” Among them, he says, “I discovered infinity, which is not the same as excess or repetition, by entering the labyrinth and going on the swing.”
Something like infinity is what the man overheard in Bidart’s poem is after, too, I think—his longed for “consummation”—but the poem is much less sanguine about reaching it. We’re told he does reach it, but everything in the poem undermines that statement, suggests that the vision he’s been chasing turns, just as he grabs it, chimerical. That chanting in the second stanza, for instance, which is electrifying—speak the line out loud, try to give each statement of “Oh yeah” its own weight—well, it’s a line that goes nowhere, that consummates nothing, in which nothing is transformed. It’s the overheard man who’s saying “Oh yeah,” I think, not the men who swarm around him; that’s what the syntax allows, at least, though I’ll have more to say about the syntax in a bit. What’s going on when you say yes again and again in this way? Is something (pleasure, say, satisfaction) being affirmed? Or does affirmation drain away? Does the chanting transform what’s happening into ritual, does it point toward metamorphosis? Or is it a grinding, a deadening? I’m not sure.
I’m fascinated by the images in the poem, the two moments of figuration. The first comes just after the chant, the poem’s most beautiful, most affirmative moment: “until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached / consummation.” As if in darkness he craved the sun: I’m not sure how many times I read this—how many years I read it, I mean—before I realized that the promised image of consummation, the sun appearing out of darkness, is actually not present in the poem. “As if in darkness he craved”—all we have is the craving, the desire; the line doesn’t ever show us the sun. The image for what the overhead man desires, the vehicle for the figurative image, is withheld even the poem declares the tenor (“consummation”) achieved. That lack of image undoes the statement. Wild!
The poem’s other great image is also tricky, though in a different way. It comes in the last line, the weirdly sequestered parenthetical final statement, which is also—we’ll get to this in a minute—the poem’s only syntactically autonomous unit: “(we are the wheel to which we are bound).” I take this to be what’s sometimes called a Catherine wheel (after the saint) or breaking wheel—a torture device that breaks a bound victim’s bones. [Edit: The singer and writer Ty Bouque was reminded of Lear’s “but I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.” I think this is absolutely right—and given Bidart’s references to Lear across his work I think it may well be a direct allusion. I also think Lear’s image references a Catherine wheel, so the two readings reinforce and enrich each other. I’m very grateful to Ty for this comment.] The image makes grammar complicated, confusing instrument and object: “we” are both the “wheel” and the victim bound to the wheel. Bidart is fascinated by images like these, in which agony, instrument of agony, and sufferer of agony are all smooshed together. Think of the second and third of his three versions of Catullus’s Odi et amo, recasting the same dynamic with variations on a single image:
I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails
itself, hanging crucified.
and, even more bewilderingly:
What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds
the nail that now is driven into itself, why.
The hand, already crucified, holds the crucifying nail that only “now” is driven in. Subject / object, before / after: they’re all blended or bent together, not so much like a snake swallowing its own tail as like a snake that has swallowed itself entire.
We’ve come a little closer to accounting for the effect of the poem, but the crucial, brilliant element of the form still lies ahead: syntax. I’ve already said that the poem’s last line is its sole point of syntactical stability. This isn’t to say that line doesn’t present its own difficulty, or its own excitement: we’ve already talked about the way the image collapses agent/object/instrument distinctions. It also introduces a new subject pronoun: from the third person pronouns “he” and “them” we’ve shifted to a universalizing first-person plural: “we.” But what I mean by “syntactical stability” is that the line presents a clear, unambiguous independent clause (with a relative clause branching to the right), a complete, stable unit. You can read that line from beginning to end and it feels complete, you aren’t shuttled back or forward looking for a missing piece.
Everything else in the poem is unstable. You can see this without any fancy analysis; even the shape of the poem suggests it. Bidart likes irregular stanzas—for much of his career, alternating couplets and single lines was a kind of default form—but I can’t immediately think of another poem in his body of work that winnows quite like this one: from a three line stanza, to two couplets, to two monostichs. What’s more, the poem’s punctuation suggests a kind of puzzle: we begin with an ellipsis; there’s a period at the end of line seven; line eight begins with a capital letter.
Leaving the final period at the end of line nine aside for the moment, it seems clear—it seemed clear to me the first time I read the poem—that we are meant to connect the end of line eight with the poem’s first line. That is, the poem begins in the middle of a sentence, reaches the end of the sentence with the period in line seven, and gives us the beginning of the sentence with line eight. This sets the poem in motion, it makes the poem turn—and so the poem itself becomes the wheel that provides the image in the final line. This is part of what I mean when I say the poem becomes sculpture, a kind of material object—though it would be truer to compare it to a Calder mobile, maybe, and truer still to say it’s a perpetual motion machine. I loved this effect when I was twenty, and I love it now.
But is it true that the end of the poem (we’re still leaving out the last parenthetical line, which gums up the works a bit) links with the beginning? It almost works, especially if we imagine a comma at the end of line eight, a kind of stutter as the poem restarts. What if we wrote it out (this is sacrilege, I’m so sorry) as prose:
--Until telling those who swarm around him begins again, telling those who swarm around him his desire is that an appendage from each of them fill, invade each of his orifices, --
As I say, it almost works, but not quite. Why not? Well, for one thing, though several words are repeated (“telling those who swarm around them”), in fact they aren’t the same words. What do I mean? A quick grammar refresher: verbal forms ending in -ing (what we usually call the present participle) can have a few different functions. They can function as adjectives, modifying nouns; they can also become nouns themselves. (I have vague Latin memories of the first of these, the adjectival use, being called the gerundive, and the noun use the gerund, but don’t hold me to it.) This is easy to see when you put them side by side. Consider these two examples:
That man running over there is my teacher.
Running is very good exercise.
The first sentence is about a man, and it tells us that he’s the speaker’s teacher. “Running over there” is just modifying “that man,” specifying him. The second sentence isn’t about a person at all: it’s about running as an activity. There’s no human agent.
This is what happens in the Bidart poem, too. In the first line, “telling” is an adjective, modifying, as participial phrases must, the subject that finally arrives with “he craved” and “he reached.” (“Repeating” and “chanting” are also functioning in this way.) But in the repetition of the poem’s opening words, “telling” becomes a noun: the activity has detached itself from the human agent. It’s “telling” that “begins again,” not the overheard man who begins again to tell: the human subject has disappeared. I find this amazing. Is the disappearance the sign of consummation? Or is it the sign that consummation will never come?
Whatever the case, that’s only part of the reason there’s no way to combine or rearrange the poem’s lines to make a complete sentence. This next bit gets a little nerdy, so apologies, I guess. Again, it took me years of reading the poem to figure out why the syntax was so unsettling, so slippery, why I couldn’t make it stay still. It’s because—again, leaving the final parenthesis out for the moment—the poem has no independent clause. You might remember from high school English that a clause requires a conjugated verb (meaning a verb with a subject), and that a clause becomes dependent (or subordinate) if it’s introduced by a subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun, which are like little hooks for joining clauses together.
By my count, there are eight conjugated verbs in the poem’s first eight lines. Here they are by line, with their subjects:
line 1: (who) swarm
line 2: (his desire) is
line 3: (an appendage) fill, invade
line 6: (he) craved, (he) reached
line 8: (those who) swarm, (telling those who swarm around him) begins
But none of these verbs can stand alone. The “who” of “who swarm” is a relative pronoun, making the clause subordinate. “His desire / is” is part of an objective complement, saying what the overheard man told those who swarm around him; you can see this more clearly if you make explicit the subordinating “that,” which sometimes we can leave out in English: “telling those who swarm around him [that] his desire is.” As we’ve already said, “fill” and “invade” are subjunctive, and they’re also introduced by a subordinating “that.” “He craved” comes in an “as if” clause, so that can’t stand on its own, either, and the “who” in “those who swarm,” just as in the first line, is a relative pronoun that makes that verb subordinate, too.
That leaves “he reached” and “begins again.” I think for a long time I felt like “at last he reached consummation” was an independent clause. It seems like it should be, both because of what it says—the man is reaching consummation, the sentence should too—and also because what comes after the comma does indeed constitute a stable syntactical unit. But look back before the clause (“as if in darkness he craved the sun”) set off by commas: there’s a conjunction, “until,” and that conjunction makes the clause it governs subordinate. This is so canny on Bidart’s part. If you’re caught up in the moment-to-moment experience of reading the poem, taking language as it comes, it’s easy to feel “at last he reached consummation” as, indeed, a consummation. But that’s not the syntactical unit the poem actually gives us. That unit is instead “until at last he reached consummation,” which can’t stand on its own at all: it needs an independent clause to prop it up, but there’s no independent clause to be found. The same subordinating conjunction, “until,” governs the last verb, too: “Until telling … begins.” Nothing stands up! Everything keeps falling down!
So: it’s not just that the poem’s parts don’t neatly fit together; it’s that the crucial part, the independent clause that would make this seeming sentence a sentence, is missing. The poem has no fixed point: it keeps turning and turning and turning. But it doesn’t turn seamlessly, in part because the second-to-last line doesn’t really hitch on to the ellipsis of the first line, and in part because of a very cool metrical thing that Bidart does. The first line has an even rhythmical pattern, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. (Some of you might hear “desire” as two syllables; I’m embracing Americanness and scanning it as three.) Apologies again to those of you reading on your phones, where scansion marks and syllables won’t line up:
/ u / u / u / u / u / u
…telling those who swarm around him his desire
That’s what a seamless wheel sounds like: an even, uninterrupted pattern. But look what happens when those words repeat:
u / / u / u / u / u u / u /
--Until telling those who swarm around him begins again
That isn’t a smooth line at all: at both ends, with “until” and “begins,” the rhythmic pattern is interrupted, creating what prosodists call “clashing accents.” If this is a wheel it’s a wheel out of balance, a tire that’s been punctured. Or maybe it’s a wheel that’s breaking bones. It’s an ideally awkward line: it makes the poem more perfectly enact, become, its culminating image: a Catherine wheel.
Which brings us finally to the last line, sheltered from the rest by parenthesis. Here we do have a syntactically complete sentence, but it isn’t punctuated as one: there’s no capital letter, and the period is—kind of maddeningly, I think—placed outside the parenthesis. What’s going on? I’d like to ask Bidart how he thinks about that period; I wonder if he has an articulable justification for it, or whether it’s just something that felt right to him. I do think it’s right; it lets the line at once serve, in its syntactical integrity, as a kind of stable foundation for the poem—the platform on which the wheel / poem spins—and also, since the punctuation undermines that integrity, add to the sense of off-kilteredness, of the wheel meeting resistance as it turns.
And what to make of the title? It strikes a unique tone in the poem, different from the weird formality of the first stanza, the ritualistic chanting of the second, the lyrical grandeur of the third. It introduces surreality; it suggests fantasy or ideality; it suggests a speaker who has imagined his own exclusion. I wonder if this has something to do with historical circumstance. Desire was published in 1997, just a couple of years after protease inhibitors were made available; the poems that fill it were written at the height of the early AIDS crisis, and many of the poems are elegies. (Maybe that’s a way to make sense of the disappearance of the human agent in the poem’s repetition, as a way this poem participates in the book’s elegiac project.) Maybe the kind of group sex the poem presents can only now be imagined, and only imagined as an exclusion, an impossibility, something locked behind walls. I don’t know if I think that’s right; I don’t think I understand the title yet. There’s a lot about the poem I don’t understand yet, I’ve only been reading it for twenty-five years. Maybe if I get to keep reading it for another twenty-five I’ll have a better sense of it.
What I do feel sure of, what I felt sure of from the first moment I encountered it, is that this little poem is a whole philosophy of desire, a philosophy made not out of propositions—the only proposition comes in the last line—but out of the experience the poem is. A longing for intensity that promises consummation, consummation that slips free even as one grasps it—that feeling was familiar to me, as a twenty-one-year-old new to poetry. Maybe I had felt something like it in music (hard to imagine a work of art more different from the Liebestod than this poem, except in the way consummation keeps approaching and melting away), but never before in words; and certainly I had never before experienced words made as material a medium as a breaking wheel.
As I say, I’ve been chasing that effect ever since.
As always, thank you for reading—
G.
I've learned to understand your use of the word "nerdy" as a signal that we've gotten to the really good stuff. I will never get enough of your close reading and the comments and chats it generates. Thanks!
I appreciate how much you uncover in this short poem. Not to disagree but to add another possibility -- one could also interpret the "wheel" as the Buddhist wheel of samsara, the cycle of desire that keeps us bound to suffering. And yet, even if suffering is the price of being a self, most times we prefer that to the nothingness of full enlightenment. The period sits outside the parenthesis like that end point of nirvana that we are really ambivalent about reaching, because it's also a death -- the little one or the Big One.
I had to read the first line multiple times to get the meaning because "those who swarm around him his desire" is confusing without a "that" before "his". Such is the genius of the line. It seems like the phrase has two competing subjects, side by side: "him" and "his desire" are almost the same thing but not quite. That's what led me to the Buddhist interpretation.