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Read:
New Security Technologies by Jen Currin; reinterpreted by
William Stobb
William
Stobb Commentary
I guess I’d say I often “use” some stimulus to
start writing, so “using” Jen’s poem was a familiar experience. I think my writing practice is mainly a
form of ekphrasis—whether I’m looking at a piece of visual art, like
Oldenburg and Van Bruggen’s “Spoon Bridge and Cherry,” or whether I’m simply
attuned to the sensation stream the body and mind constantly
provides—constantly is, really—there’s always some material I’m taking in to
open my writing process. Because writing
this way is familiar to me, I didn’t find it unusual to read Jen’s poem and
follow sparks off of it into new language that opened in me.
My writing process was originally ignited by
something that’s not really visible in my poem: my sense of “New Security
Technologies” as a living organism. I
see its very distinct stanzas/sections, which don’t speak directly to each
other, as something like organs carrying out separate functions to help
maintain an overall pulse. The
homeostasis the poem achieves isn’t entirely available to summary or paraphrase,
yet the poem lives, urgently and vividly.
I think this sense of embodiment
in my reading of “New Security Technologies,” really sprung from the word
“system,” in its second line. My
poetry collection, Nervous Systems,
was just published when Jen’s poem arrived.
Maybe excessively, maybe narcissistically, my book was in my head and
hands a lot—the title phrase like a kind of mantra I was continually
processing. I began writing by
looking up dictionary definitions of words like kidney, neurotransmitter,
lymph—I was trying to get at some very physical
metaphor to move forward with, but wasn’t getting past the isolated
definitions of these “parts” of systems I was researching. A couple of flat, uninteresting lines
about spleens came before a moment of frustration opened the parenthetical
where the poem now begins. At that
point, “No Dictionary” kind of righted itself and walked down its
sidewalk.
The most literal relationship of my poem to Jen’s
is probably in the scanner imagery in the final lines of “No
Dictionary.” That image stayed with
me through the whole process of the poem and then appeared, un-planned, as an
ending. Also, though, the cell phone
image stayed in my process to echo in the middle of “No Dictionary.”
A poetry muddle around the ideas “place” and
“world” figured centrally in my writing.
The words “the place” at the beginning of Jen’s final stanza probably
triggered this thinking: I had recently drafted a poem that attempted to reconstruct
a place that mattered to me. In that poem, I worried over the nature of
“place,” the sense of something essential
at the center of the concept of “place,” the implication of something
static and pure that we’re supposed to contact when we experience
“place.” As part of my miPOradio column,
“Hard to Say,” I had recently interviewed the poet Claudia Keelan about a
concept of “exile” through which she conducts her work—an un-placed ethic, a
way of living outside the bounded-ness of “place.” In her discussion of the concept, she referred to
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
which opens with the dictum, “The world is all that is the case.” Not only is this a proposition that stumps
me—what are we poets and philosophers talking about when we say, “the world”
over and over again? It’s a little
wistful, isn’t it? A little
nostalgic? Maybe the sound of Jen’s
use of “the place” simply chimed with “case” in my mind. Maybe that simple little bell set up my
whole approach to this “translation.”
I thought very seriously about the word
“translate,” and what a same-language translation might entail. I can understand how a poet more oriented
toward the material of language, and less to the flow of image and idea
through an imaginative plane, might do something more literal with the
physical language of the poem. In
fact, “New Security Technologies” seems very open to this approach. Its ending provides a perfect leaping point
into some new usages of the word “paradise,” and who knows what delights might
follow such a beginning. An approach
like that, I believe, might produce a more legitimate kind of “translation,”
by dwelling specifically on alternative constructions of the poem’s language
plane. But I wanted to see this as an
opportunity in the most liberating sense—I wanted Jen’s poem to open my
writing process. That may be a
selfish approach, but it’s the one I took—with its compelling collage of
identities in systems, “New Security Technologies” stands beyond
same-language translation, anyway—and I don’t regret it.
*** time
elapses ***
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Read:
Poem of Reconstruction by William Stobb; reinterpreted
by Jen Currin
First I went through and tried to do some “sonic
translations”—riffing off words/phrases to come up with similar sounding
words/phrases. From “high winds” I got “sigh hinge”; “debris” became
“chagrin.” A lot of these sound translations I wasn’t able to keep in my
poem, but they helped me to deeply hear the rhythms/cadences of Bill’s poem.
Some of the sound translations led to lines—for
example, from “sigh hinge” and the line that inspired it, two lines emerged:
“In high winds/Cherry hinge & creak.” They were changed later to the
lines that now comprise the beginning of the poem: “Looking in high
winds—/hinge and creak.” There is a “Cherry” in Bill’s dedication, and the
word also shows up a couple of times in “Poem of Reconstruction.” I ended up
taking “Cherry” out of my poem and keeping her only in the dedication. One of
my sisters is named Cherry, and this poem became--in many ways--about her.
After I worked with sound, I went through and
stole some language. I love to try on another poet’s vocabulary, so this
is one of the funnest parts of “translating” for me. I read the poem
backwards (which was really reading upwards) and this produced some
interesting combinations, such as “yellow trouble,” “teenage & illegal,”
“orange boxes,” and “closed garden.” Reading back down, I came up with “Loose,
aging sky,” “lovers beyond views,” and “swallow trouble.” Certain words
jumped out at me--“intensify,” “orange,” “illegal,” “teenage,” “caution”—and
I knew I wanted to work with them. Some of them—such as “teenage”—I just
couldn’t manage to make work in my poem. Some of Bill’s combinations are so
beautiful and interesting that I wanted to keep them intact: “adolescent
weathers,” “teenage wind,” “when detail as loose,” “lost: what.” The only one
that ended up staying in my version was “lost: what.” Probably because it
sums up what is at the heart of nearly every great poem. The ultimate thesis
statement!
I wanted the word “story” to be in the poem
somewhere because Bill uses “stories” twice in his poem—and storying seemed
an important idea for both poems. But I found it hard to use the word—I often
do, although I love it—and had to, in the end, cut it.
Once I’d mined all I could, I started to work
with the lines I had jotted down. I kept the poem’s sparse style, but didn’t
keep the spacing. The words I borrowed or riffed off of engendered other
words. There were some sound-companions—“chagrined” and “caution.” I took the
lamp from “streetlamp” but left the street. This lamp went nicely with
“enlightenment,” which is what became of “yellow.” The sky showed up twice.
So did the line “Now she lifts the spoon,” which seems a nod to the original
poem’s repetition of “spoon.” Also, since “gold” arrived at some point (I
think after “aging sky”—an image of sunset), it went nicely with “spoon”—the
idea of being born with one in your mouth (here I was thinking of the passage
“(name the baby),” and also my sister Cherry’s birth and childhood). And
naming came through in my version as well—in the title.
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