“I collect terms with a hidden symmetry”:
On Anna Blasiak ’s Café By Wren’s St. James – In – The Fields, Lunchtime
translated from the Polish by Marta Dzivrosz, Maria Jastrzębska, Danusia Stok and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, photos by Lisa Kalloo.
Speaking of Vermeer, the British painter Trevor Winkfield writes, “And only then, if the viewer assents to the difficult task of simultaneously looking, thinking, and feeling, do Vermeer’s canvases begin to parsimoniously unfold some of their true meanings, layer by layer…” Anna Blasiak’s Café By Wren’s St. James – In – The Fields, Lunchtime, is just such a book, revealing it secrets slowly: the poetry deals with memory, the nature of obsessive love and language, the mysteries of existence and the natural world, and loss; accompanying these poems are photographs that are testament to the speed and complexity of life; sometimes they are simply a blur of light and darkness, sometimes overwhelmingly clear: they are like a magic mirror held up to the world and complement the poems since they are essentially suggestive and open-ended. The first poem in the book, “Dog Catcher” can stand as a kind of poetics:
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Luckily
in my pockets I always keep shopping receipts, torn newspaper clippings, old tickets. Otherwise so many words would work themselves free. |
Words are as common as any human implement: a shopping receipt, or torn newspaper. The poet extracts the poem, as if from the air, from the field of language, and materialize it on the page. It is giving form to silence. Furthermore, she writes, “I collect words / in which letters are reflected mirror-like. I collect terms / with a hidden symmetry.” For her, language is a mirror of the world that she seeks to read and alchemize into a whole. Like a magician, she seeks “the hidden symmetry.” In the second stanza, she concludes this poem in the following way:
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I collect unfinished sentences
to stubbornly piece them into something like a whole. |
The plurality of ideas are not burdened by the necessity for a conclusion, but, nevertheless the fragments of words resemble something like a totality, however provisional, when joined together in the poem. In life, though change is the constant: “Every evening I learn a day / by heart // Mornings I forget everything again.” The title is “Amnesia, Obstinately.” It is the poet’s way of being in the world, not bound by the past, but continually reinventing herself; and yet, in “Emigration,” she writes, “I escaped home. / It caught up.” In a very real sense, we can never escape ourselves. Any sense of totality or a hidden symmetry, reveals its manifold nature when viewed through human eyes. Occasionally, the veil of illusion is torn from the eyes, as in the poem, “Holidays. Eternity” where she writes: “Time is suntan lotion / running out // And maybe also / growing irritation.” The perspective, the frame, changes, and what is left is a “growing irritation.” The very idea of “eternity” is questioned. In “The Underground I See” she imagines herself as moving through “human reefs / rocked by the sound / from headphones. // Seas stretch / in an infinity of platforms / then again and again. // For a moment enclosed / the human ocean / like salt water / brought from holiday / in a jar.” The long shot reduces to a close up; wide open space, the ocean, suggesting infinity, is now reduced to “salt water” in a jar; framed in this way, it is something that can be handled, clearly perceived, though it remains a fragment of the whole.
In “Prototype of Love” she speaks of a different use of language, one that results from an obsessive and potentially destructive love. Words are weighed, inspected, put under a magnifying glass, placed on scales, measured. The impulse is to drain the words of meaning or rather to place a subjective interpretation on them to control the lover. It is the light of Reason as opposed to Darkness. In my essay on the poet Barbara Barg, I wrote:
In “Prototype of Love” she speaks of a different use of language, one that results from an obsessive and potentially destructive love. Words are weighed, inspected, put under a magnifying glass, placed on scales, measured. The impulse is to drain the words of meaning or rather to place a subjective interpretation on them to control the lover. It is the light of Reason as opposed to Darkness. In my essay on the poet Barbara Barg, I wrote:
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So the story goes: the active light (male) is distinguished from the passive light or darkness (female); darkness = void = hole = vagina. Furthermore, the flesh (the earth) is bad but the spirit (the heavens) is good. This formulation of religious thought has haunted the world ever since the birth of Judeo-Christian thought. There is the central problem with the creation story; for Barg, the cosmic unity separated into a duality which associated Man with the Light of Reason containing an active spirit, and the Female, who had a passive spirit, under the rule of the Irrational; thus, the female is a demonic figure, a witch. But in this poem, Barg is imagining the world before the Cosmic Egg split and everything went wrong. The lady in a red dress would say: I need the darkness again I need it so dark open eyes don’t rest on any objects open eyes go straight out to outland. I’m circling, circling my own self again. Not much weight of me floating in darkness. I’m weightless and sweetly chimed, weightless and circling, lifting the eyes of my head coming around again…
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In fact Sèvres, the name of the “author” of this poem is a type of fine porcelain characterized by elaborate decoration on backgrounds of intense color, made at Sèvres in the suburbs of Paris. There are also poems that remind me of the Vermeer painting, “Woman reading a Letter” where a woman is reading a letter alone in her drawing room; they are poems of loss, suggestive more than concrete expressions of pain:
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On the bare table
a bottle of Sardinian wine, bought as a present, a cigarette in the ashtray, coffee half-drunk. On the bare table, Hands. On the bare table Silence. |
What is the woman thinking? Is she thinking of a lover? Is she expecting her love who hasn’t arrived? Or not? We cannot know for sure; just as we cannot read the letter that the woman is reading in Vermeer’s painting. The poem is a snapshot of a mood. Sometimes “Even feelings lack focus.” The story remains untold, or, at least, is without any conclusion. It is open-ended and in that, more suggestive of possible meanings, like in real life; the ambiguity mirrors actual reality. The title poem is similar in it evocation of loneliness: “I’m sitting quietly, / holding my breath. / The pigeon veers off, / makes an arc, / potters to another table. / I’m left alone / with my crumbs.” She does not vocalize her pain; but this involves also a kind of difficult acceptance despite the “growing irritation.” As the Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, said “Man is not a bird.” How can love survive on so little? One could “touch the catkins” if one gathered the right speed on the swing; but then one must come back down to earth, despite dreams of being swept away. And things remain between the lover and the beloved like the swing of a pendulum: “The pendulum of closeness, / The pendulum of distance. Depends.” The conditional word suggests the possibility of a provisional stability in relationships. But, nevertheless, “It always rains for you, for me.”
This book is also filled with certain visionary moments or transformations that suggest changes in the self. For instance, in an untitled poem, she writes:
This book is also filled with certain visionary moments or transformations that suggest changes in the self. For instance, in an untitled poem, she writes:
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I unravel this sky
like a blue thread from a ball. And even get bored at times. Fortunately I forget that deep inside there’s a cunning end. |
In what space can this poem be said to dwell except in a moment of heightened vision? The “cunning end” perhaps refers to an unsympathetic God, or to an abyss beyond the knowledge of humans, that disturbs in its otherness. One thinks of Spicer’s aliens. There remains a certain terror of the unknown in a secular age, without the widespread belief in a god. The Silence is deafening. And “Time will creep / over my face” while waiting for the answer someone, a lover perhaps, will provide. But she writes, “Still I wait. // Even when / I’ve morphed into armchair / or bed.” Can we see beyond the veil of illusion into another world without the use of stimulants or perhaps through some heightened awareness? And if so, will this provide lasting comfort, an answer to all our questions? In this digital age, is a genuine spirituality still possible or love, for that matter? She writes, “We are so in love / electronically. You text, email, phone. // Slowly I turn into a binary / impulse. I’ll travel down / the wires or waves.” Our sense of time is completely destabilized with the creation of a seamless digital world where there is no loss, no time wasted, no decay. In this sense, the poem contains a kind of ironic paradox; transformed into a “binary impulse” can we still be said to be human? And if there is no loss, no waste of time, and no decay, can that be the stable metaphor for a perfect love?
In these poems Blasiak also examines the nature of memory; there are poems that evoke a world of the past: her memories of the time she spent with her grandmother. There is also a poem that contains a memory not related to direct experience but rather literary, which suggests something about male control. It is a feminist statement:
In these poems Blasiak also examines the nature of memory; there are poems that evoke a world of the past: her memories of the time she spent with her grandmother. There is also a poem that contains a memory not related to direct experience but rather literary, which suggests something about male control. It is a feminist statement:
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The Dead Carriages Remember
The travellers’ smell lingers in the seats. Feelings like a whip inserted into a special handle tremble on bumpy roads. The rustle of gowns on the steps, the rustle of leaves. The coachman still feels the tugs of the string. His lordship wants something. |
Feelings are “like a whip.” But the carriage itself contains the memory on the seats. Objects carry their secrets long after their owner has passed away: “Hidden in the walls / the old sewage pipes / sing at night…the screams of the injured floors…the rooms feed / on themselves.” Old houses also retain memory in the objects contained within, change their character as they age, but do not ever reveal their secrets, rather, they are evocative, suggestive. After the wallpaper is stripped, “Bare walls underneath tells an altogether different story.” Something other. There is an entire narrative beyond what can be immediately rationalized. In a portrait of a woman, in the poem entitled “Portrait,” she writes: “Craquelure penetrates / her body.” It is the cracks, the fissures in the paint that are the focus of this image, not the actual portrait. What of the painter of the portrait? Or the model? Nothing is said about this but the cracks evoke the passage of time. We are, as if, sexually violated by the passage of time. The portrait remains after the artist and the model have passed. In “Holidays at Grandma’s” after the images of nature, the smell of apples, the “sour cherry tree in the middle of the yard,” Blasiak writes, “All gone now. / Too true, the curse of the dark well / between the acacia trees and pigsty.” The spell was cast when we were born, and we face the “dark well,” the abyss of nothingness, despite the smell of apples and the smell of the pigs that evoke “a hot day in the country.” Nature also, is animated, a mirror of the poet’s emotions: “Trees also wring their hands / at this spring / in fear and wonder. // Heavy with leaves again / rows of regrets / turn green. / Stand speechless.” But she is careful not to be tainted by “blossoming.” She is not a breeder. To blossom suggests eventual decay. In a dream, she gives voice to the memories of youth, of the hope that eventually fades: “I’m floating. / I call out to my mum / to look at me / soaring all the way to the top.” Perhaps that “hidden symmetry” is only experienced fully when one is a child, when one has no sense of the future, or the past and exists fully in the present moment.
The photographs, by Lisa Kalloo, that accompany the book, complement the various moods generated by the poems: there are superimpositions of buildings and people as a result of photographing through a window; there are extreme close-ups of the stems of flowers; a door with a chain in front of it; an image of the gears of a machine; a globe that reflects the beach scene in front of it; three pigeons in a piazza; a shot of the ocean, calm, with sailboats in the distance; numerous abstract images of lights, of various shapes and tonalities on granular or smooth surfaces. The aspect they all have in common is a sense of impending movement or stasis; they are dynamic in the intensity of the colors and yet subdued, pastel-like, also; a startling transparency can give way to images that are blurred. In some respects, the images operate like those in a dream, moving between clarity and obfuscation, speed and stasis, and suggestive of a possible narrative but rarely conclusive.
In her review of Pierre Lepori’s Whatever the Name, Blasiak writes,
The photographs, by Lisa Kalloo, that accompany the book, complement the various moods generated by the poems: there are superimpositions of buildings and people as a result of photographing through a window; there are extreme close-ups of the stems of flowers; a door with a chain in front of it; an image of the gears of a machine; a globe that reflects the beach scene in front of it; three pigeons in a piazza; a shot of the ocean, calm, with sailboats in the distance; numerous abstract images of lights, of various shapes and tonalities on granular or smooth surfaces. The aspect they all have in common is a sense of impending movement or stasis; they are dynamic in the intensity of the colors and yet subdued, pastel-like, also; a startling transparency can give way to images that are blurred. In some respects, the images operate like those in a dream, moving between clarity and obfuscation, speed and stasis, and suggestive of a possible narrative but rarely conclusive.
In her review of Pierre Lepori’s Whatever the Name, Blasiak writes,
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There is something archetypal about these poems, something grounding, perhaps even something that can help deal with such issues. Which doesn’t mean that the suffering behind those incidents is any less apparent, or that the tragedy is less sizeable. It’s just that it is painted with a more subdued, almost pastel-like technique instead of screaming expressionist colours.
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Though very different from Lepori’s poems, this excerpt could be a description of her own. Anna Blasiak’s Café By Wren’s St. James – In – The Fields, Lunchtime is a book of mysteries, a world where dreams and memories glaze over the consciousness, where nature and objects are sentient evoking a past, in some cases, long gone; the poems suggests a narrative without a conclusion; they are like photographs, taken so long ago, where objects are at once clear and ambiguous. The poems record intense memories of loss but Blasiak is not sentimental; rather, she is concerned with self-transformation, wherever it is still possible in the present world; she is searching for a “hidden symmetry” in a world is receding into a kind of digital oblivion. As the World recedes, we are given in its place a seamless digital copy; a simulacrum; where Life was once discontinuous, boring, joyful, and sad, we now have the eternal hope for a kind of digital paradise, where there is no loss, where one is constantly preoccupied, obsessed, but with a sense of mourning, a sense of something missing, a lack. She navigates this lack, with great conviction, and the result is the strong and elegant poems in this book.