The Master Letters, by Lucie Brock-Broido.

CONCEPT

I felt seduced by this writing more than any other we've engaged. Now that I've got a bit of the syllabus under my belt, I can start to compare my reactions to the different pieces and use that itself as a gauge. I've pretty much have enjoyed everyone so far. I had difficulty understanding Frank O'Hara, but came away from class feeling like I had a set of interpretive tools available, including sometimes the (maybe necessary) tool of leaving interpretation aside. I appreciated the O'Hara, but a returning interest, outside of class, would be intellectually driven, and my list of "things to read" gets longer every day. And while I could really swim in the words and ideas of Cummings and Pessoa, I also felt that I thoroughly understood them. Pessoa, in particular, struck me a bit like skydiving or bunji-jumping; a good thing to do once in a lifetime and a unique perspective on the world, but not one that necessarily benefits from frequent repetition.

Brock-Broido was unique among the poets we've read so far in that I felt a mingling of access and inaccessibility.

On the one hand her words, cadences, themes, and structure all drew me in. The structure, erratic as it may be within each poem, has all the signs of careful planning and symmetry. A preamble divided into four sections corresponds to the division of the poems into four (roughly equal) parts of fifty two poems evenly divided into groups of thirteen. Within each sections, there is a more irregular (if no less frequent) division of poems into short pieces divided into couplets ("Carrowmore," "And You Know That I Know Milord That You Know," "A Glooming Peace This Morning with It Brings," "Moving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There Is No Course, There Is Boundlessness") and epistolary prose-poems ("To a Strange Fashion of Forsaking," "Her Habit," "Rampion," "I Don't Know Who It Is, That Sings, nor Did I, Would I Tell"). Internally the poems seem just as meticulously sculpted to include a battery of allusion and reference ranging from Dr. Faustus to the Rolling Stones, and behind this is the ultimate backdrop of the life, writing, and letters of Emily Dickenson. Even beyond this, I found a range of motifs; the piece was almost gothic, not in the sense of a conventionalized plot but rather in an almost obsessive preoccupation with medieval harvest cycles, sewing, and rural life... which was all the more interesting given the abstractness of place and time within the poems. That is, time was usually specified within a season (typically autumn, never summer), and space was acknowledged through allusion, but rarely specified within the poem itself. This is truly an intimidating amount and diversity of structure to reckon with.

I therefore expected this class to echo our take on O'Hara; I'd walk in not understanding and leave feeling foolish for having not understood. In fact, the extent of structure strongly suggested to me that all I was missing was the resonance of the choices, that it would be a real slap-myself-in-the-forehead moment when Liesel or Eric pointed out what was under my nose the whole time. Instead, the class seemed to be stuck with general impressions, perhaps the individual meaning of specific poems and an encompassing texture for the rest, but overall people were neither more nor less enlightened than I.

I still don't think that the structural choices are arbitrary; there are too many points of intersection between the actual references, the epistolary style (writing to a master), the doom and gloom of the seasons, the choice to be inspired by a spinster recluse, and so on. There must be a uniting principle, or at least a uniting impulse. At the same time, I don't think Brock-Broido is a tease. Which might be erroneous confidence on my part (I certainly can't prove it), but the gravity and intensity with which she renders so many of these moments (from "Unholy": "Last night I slept in Mutiny, woke surrounded by the scent of citrus, just as day dilated like an eye peering telescopically over a rough sea of Sentimentia...") spares both the cheek of irony and the culpability of sentimentality. The weight of the language convinces me that something is trying to struggle through in this writing. That an idea tries to assert itself, and that the compromise that would be suffered in a more explicit rendering would be too great a sacrifice of substance.

I do feel that I can accurately assert what this body of work is about. It's about the great struggle in establishing contact, much less communication, the contradictory difficulty and ease in dying, the validity of resignation and militant revolt against dying, and the nestedness of what we hear and touch and what we fabricate in our minds. But what a bullshit summary is that?! If I told a friend all this, her response would be completely determined by her confidence in my judgment, because I've essentially told her nothing solid about the writing itself.

So... if I want to understand The Master Letters for real, I'll have to read and reread. And the last incentive to this is propulsive and easy; the language is difficult, propulsive, and vivid:

I am alive, this morning—
& am alive—numbed

By field gray halcion, dulled by the gift
Of boiling water, the freedom to descend

My own glassed stairs, to wind
The century clock, to know

I am old enough to know—a long time Ago.
I remember Everything, remember everything.

That was "Gratitude." It's very seductive.


END OF POST.