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JEFF CLARK on MONIQUE PRIETO
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Jeff Clark
Against For three or four months, in sporadic, private, harried moments, I wrote a poem after Tide. I replied – to speak in terms of vulgar poles – on neither id or intellect to generate lines; instead, they derived from the only interior source not suspect to me since, roughly, 2005; emotional fury that is progressive and, crucially, self-directed. By which I mean: a refusal – even if tenuous and meagerly intellectualized, let alone genuinely felt – to locate the cause of my lifelong sorrow, angst, fear, in someone else.
The lines were rhythmic, repetitive, physical, yet would not orient themselves around anything but the concept of being against: an inescapable vision of water; and color. (A disclosure: this poem I’m attempting to describe comes after the original piece I created for Tide: a conceptual poem comprised of Samuel Pepys’s diary entry [“Monday 24 March 1661/62”] restored in full, but with “the tide being against us, when we were almost through” excised, and replaced with an extract from a statement by Monique Prieto herself: “painting of Christ being lowered from the cross.” Though clean, the poem was cheap.) The inclusion of references to the painting’s colors felt weak, but I continued to attempt to have these colors guide my composition (no real risk is taken, in ekphrasis, when material elements of an artwork are not invoked); to entertain the painting’s words alone would be too narrow, too obvious. But to entertain the words as well as what they slide and sit on, what bleeds them, seemed to camouflage, in a decorative way, the blue-black cast the poem I was making: “To bleed by a freeway, nothing to write, being against us, dark blue runs through, I can’t see the sides, against us, have not been/Red from us, being against us, on canvas, when we were almost/light blue or white comes last, the tide being against us/ Does black come last, again against, with nothing…”
I’d been working all these months, with a digital reproduction of the painting that had been pulled from the internet, printed on a color laser printer, and mailed to me. It occurred to me that I should generate a print from the high-resolution image that will be used to actually manufacture, that “poppy,” “pool blue,” “white,” “dark, chino,” “wet sand,” etc., were wrong, or a least: no longer precise. The poem began to die.
For seven years I have met with a psychotherapist twice a week. In its initial phase this relationship kept me from dying; in subsequent phases it found me reading, walking, suffering, remembering, and inventing hundreds of states, terrains, facts, crimes. Poetry – both the regular invocation of myself as a maker, as well as the occasional attempt at parsing a poem for meanings, tonalities, resonances that might expand out conversation – is often addressed, but always “protected” by me from contamination; or I’ve resisted its autopsy: there may be no corpse (there may be nothing but the documents themselves, which are not mine anymore); or it’s possible that I am not longer a poet, though I clearly have been one.
Becoming intimate with Tide as a color laser print rather than six- by five-foot canvas meant having no sense of the painting’s physical surface (the grain of the canvas; the depth of the paint; the color, on it’s sides; the relation of the paintings surface to it’s stretcher, and the depth of that stretcher; it’s brushwork in detail; its wetness; it’s aura; its smell). Left alone with the painting’s words, I began to feel against again: I began to construct trends, and most vividly, against that which plagues me. This work, all I felt and saw during, this working, and the way in which the poem came to be undone, finally ignited my desire to push against my own resistance, to know what poetry has been for me, and what it could, though has not yet, become.
Since late 2003, I’ve talked to him by phone. His face, his quiet, warm room and artworks, couch, desk, are gone. I have his voice; the rest I’m forced to remember and imagine.
It’s rumored that Beckett fled his analysis with Bion in fear that to inquire further in to his pain would be to dismantle the engine of his writing.
In the first phases of my life in poetry, I wrote in altered states exhausted, manic, high, self-annihilating, ill, down; now, as I wrote the outset, the only dangerous thing left— I think—is also a progressive thing; when I begin to set off into fury or fear I know that I must direct each back into my own self, recall it’s origins; however, at the same time, I must attempt to not let the energies engendered by fury and fear evaporate: there must be a way to still harness and make art with them. I don’t know.
“…and after that we didn’t see each other again.” How often variations of this statement turn up in Roberto Bolano’s writings.
Over the course of several weeks, we talked about the ongoing attempt at making my poem. Energies and enthusiasms, when ascendant, would produce new lines; antangonistic, interior voices would then scrutinize and disdain them. But I forced myself to persist. Then an afternoon came when, talking to him, I know that once I’d hung up the phone, I’d open the notebook, type the poem, and send it off. It would exist, for me, as not more than a record of this time being set between a past and possible future of artmaking.
I typed the poem, printed it, read it, made a few more changes (“Does white come last, again against, with nothing/Deep blue bleeds from black at the base of. We are almost through”), went upstairs to read it one last time before sleep. I awoke in the early morning from a nightmare—my first dream in perhaps eight months.
My daughter and I are in the ocean, far enough out that I’m keeping us afloat with my legs. I look out and see a big set of waves building, then turn to swim us towards shore and see an immense amount of water rebounding off the face of a cliff and rolling back towards us. The face of the first wave of the set is beginning to break. There’s nothing to do but cover her nose and mouth with my hand and dive us under the wave, but she hasn’t been underwater before – she’s eight months old –, and I know she’ll not only be surprised and terrified, but she won’t survive staying down long enough for the wave to pass.
The rest of that morning I cut words, tried to write aspects of the dream; cut more words, then entire lines. Until the poem what nothing; totally stricken through.
Near the end of summer I was relieved and happy to learn that the birds I loved most— gold finch, nuthatch, chickadee, cardinal, blue jay, dove, red-bellied woodpecker—wouldn’t leave in winter. Several weeks into winter, however, our trees and feeders are empty, save for an occasional dove or sparrow. Today, getting out of the car, I saw a single goldfinch on a thin, gray limb. I discretely stamped out my cigarette. Then I began to walk towards the tree. |
