8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 24 :: VARUN RAVINDRAN on GC WALDREP
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by five incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curator is Ryu Ando, author of the forthcoming chapbook [零] A Phantom Zero.
An Appreciation of G.C. Waldrep
I’ve had many a daydream in which, after having become a Famous Poet, I get asked by an interviewer, “Who are your biggest influences?” At this I shake my head benignly, let out a small sigh, and answer in a very weary-but-playful manner, “Who doesn’t influence me?” So, when I was approached by Ryu Ando to write this little essay about influence and appreciation, I was rather surprised at hearing myself announce to myself, immediately and definitively, the one poet I ought to write about if I wanted to write an honest essay — and because I do want to be honest, I am writing about the poetry of G.C. Waldrep.
I discovered the poetry of Mr. Waldrep about three years ago. At that time, I was going through a writerly existential crisis of sorts: the fiction I was writing and had been writing for most of my adult life, had begun to seem to me strangely void of all meaning and all fulfillment. I was working on a long, plodding novel. The narrator of the novel was a mystery novelist who had, unfortunately I thought, begun to dabble in poetry. I was working on some poems being written by my “narrator” and on a senseless whim, submitted some of these poems to the journal West Branch. Several weeks later they were rejected, but the rejection included a note from the editor, G.C. Waldrep, saying that he liked a couple of the poems. His kindness confirmed what I was very slowly and painfully realizing — painful because fiction was what I had built my self and meanings around — that poetry was giving to me that deep, necessary, sense of fulfillment which I no longer received from writing fiction. Long story mercifully short, I abandoned fiction and turned to poetry. Mr. Waldrep’s note gave me such an immense sense of validation that I wanted to know more about him. I googled his name and found the poem “What is Performance.”
“What is Performance” is one of the poems included Archicembalo, a collection of prose poems so poignant, funny, enigmatic that they’re as hard for me to talk about as music: I can name and describe chords, I can state the key-progression of a piece and label its formal parts, but these mean very little to someone who hasn’t heard the piece. What I remember distinctly upon first reading “What is Performance” is this: it flummoxed me like a koan. And like a koan it stayed with me. While I was trying to make peace with the fact that I was no fictioneer, I kept returning and returning to the poem, more specifically, its last stanza:
To be approached by the beast. And let us say the beast is hungry. And let us say the beast is rabid. And let us say the beast is blind —
In retrospect, it’s easy to say that these lines moved me so because they reflected my own sense of self at that time: hungry and blind and rabid for some meaning. But symbolism always lives easier in the retrospective; if I felt any such thing in the poem, I certainly wasn’t conscious of it. Rather, what was immediate for me was the voice in the poem, full of lightness and music, but also full of music and gravity.
And how is music conveyed across the stanza? I would like to indulge myself in some shop-talk and analyze the sounds of the words. This is how I scan the stanza when I read it aloud; bold text indicates stressed beats, regular text unstressed ones, and an asterisk indicates a small pause indicated by the punctuation:
To be ap-proached by the beast. * And let us say the beast is hun-gry. * And let us say the beast is rab-id. * And let us say the beast is blind —
The meter is relatively regular: the first sentence can be divided into two halves, one half iambic, and the other trochaic. The following three sentences are all iambic. Pauses turn out to be fundamental in fashioning its musical shape — I think I can better convey what I mean by doing a small experiment. Let’s read out loud the first two lines of the stanza, but with the punctuation removed:
To be ap-proached by the beast and let us say the beast is hun-gry…
The iambic rhythm created is regular and intuitive; each syllable occupies an equal stretch of time. Here is a musical representation of the syllables (Here and elsewhere, to indicate stressed syllables, I’ve added a major third and an octave to the initial note (F).):
Now let’s reintroduce the punctuation and read the same lines aloud:
To be ap-proached by the beast.*And let us say the beast is hun-gry…
The pause after the period takes the place that “and” occupied in the previous reading, and to compensate for the space consumed by the pause, we clip the unstressed word “and” before proceeding to the next line. A musical representation of the whole stanza would be:
I hope I’ve sufficiently answered how music is conveyed, but it’s a subtler business to investigate why music is conveyed. The first tentative step in investigating the why is, maybe, to narrow our field to and learn from a less dense line from “What is Performance” before returning to the blind beast: “Sinuous furlongs of ocean light chitter one to another in the livid estuary.”
The diction here mixes together complex, ambiguously-syllabled words with monosyllables; “estuary” is four-syllabled, for example, but the middle syllables can elide to make a three-syllable word.
Sin-u-ous fur-longs of o-cean light chit-ter one to an-oth-er in the liv-id es-tu-ar-y.
The whole line can be read without pause:
It can also be read by dividing the line into three- and two-syllable metrical patterns:
- The first nine syllables (“Sinuous furlongs of ocean light”) establish a dactylic rhythm, i.e., one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones.
- The word “chitter” is a trochee, i.e., a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one.
- The next three syllables (“one to an-”) are again dactylic but dividing them into a three-syllable pattern is awkward because the last syllable “an-” is not a finished word. What I do instead is combine one dactyl and one trochee into a five-syllable bar.
- The following four syllables (“in the livid”) are all trochees.
- Finally, I elide “estuary” as described above and make a dactyl out of it.
Here is the line with the above-indicated patterning; a vertical line represents changes in meter, and I pause slightly at these places to emphasize the change:
Sin-u-ous | fur-longs of | o-cean light | chit-ter | one to an-oth-er | in the liv-id | es-tuar-y.
A musical representation; the commas indicate small pauses:
To me both the readings are equally valid: the first crumples the line’s rhythmic skeleton into one long skirl. The second is slower, ruminative, more obviously musical. Now, go listen to the performance of the sea: you first hear a monotone. You listen and you listen and you listen, and soon your mind begins to arrange the hiss into vague musical patterns, chant-like, freewheeling, ebbing, flowing, turning, rich in counterrhythms. “What is Performance” does exactly this: the complex diction works in tandem with ambivalent rhythmic patterns and create that ambivalent almost monotone sea-hiss. The prose form of the poem amalgamates all metrical and linear divisions. It is up to the reader to extract music from the fury.
I think I’m now ready to attempt some answers to the tricky why question: why does the music matter to the poem, and more specifically and personally, to those last haunting lines? “To be approached by the beast. And let us say the beast is hungry. And let us say the beast is rabid. And let us say the beast is blind — ” We’ve seen above in our analysis of the other line of the poem, how the meter is equivocal, and how the form of the whole poem reinforces the ambivalence. The last stanza however, with its obsessive, regular iambic rhythm is anything but ambivalent; a sudden light shines on it, and it becomes transparent; we realize something has happened to the voice in the poem — the voice doesn’t describe the beast, doesn’t claim to know what the beast is; there is no epiphany articulated — what there is, is the music of the words, music made stark against its prosy context, and which sticks to the mind like a tune for which the words can’t be remembered. Logic ceases to matter — or, more accurately, our logic ceases to matter; questions like “what is the beast?” and “who is he approaching?” and “does the beast symbolize the sea?” don’t cease to be, really, but are subsumed into the logic of the poem, where the questions are the answers. What remains is the voice and the beast, the voice glimpsing the beast, the testimony of the voice glimpsing the beast, its thrall at it, and to be forever in thrall of it as implied by the ending dash. This unprepared, magical change in key — I can’t find any other way to describe the moment — must have been what struck me when I first read the poem online, and when I read it again now in Archicembalo as the penultimate poem of the collection.
Music is implicit in all the poems in Archicembalo; in Mr. Waldrep’s own words, “Archicembalo is structured after the fashion of a gamut, or musical self-instruction primer that often prefaced volumes of 19th century American sheet music.” The phrase “self-instruction” is quite important; all the poems are titled interrogatively (“What is an Arpeggio,” “What is a Bass,” etc.), and the voice finds music in its attempts to answer its own question. I would now like to examine another favorite poem in the collection, “What is an Overtone.” The entirety of the poem runs:
Skein of white wheat. A bright treat. No longer any need for windows in the palace. No longer any palace in the noonday sun.
I shall forgo metrical analyses and fixate on the voice and theme. What is an overtone? A simple definition runs: “Overtones or harmonics are the natural parts of any pitch heard when it is sounded. That is to say, that each pitch that we hear contains additional pitches within it that are termed overtones or harmonics.” The difference between the technical definition of an overtone and the poem’s definition of the overtone is akin to the act of experiencing music and simply talking about music: the definition cited above is talking about music while the poem’s definition is experiencing the music. However, the two definitions are not mutually exclusive; the voice in Mr. Waldrep’s poem is aware of the scientific answer to the question but wants to contextualize this answer with its own idiosyncrasies of consciousness. The constituents of a tone are likened to a “skein of white wheat.” Instead of clarifying the image, the voice combines the image of wheat with overtone and produces the value-statement of “A bright treat.” Why is the treat bright? Because overtones can be hauntingly high-pitched on string instruments, and high notes in common parlance are associated with brightness (and low notes with rumbles and slurred growls). Why is the overtone a treat? Because the novelty of the sound is food for the ear. Continuing, the voice proclaims “No longer any need for windows in the palace.” The image synthesizes again all associations preceding it: overtones are the exuviae, or skeins, of a tone, the things it leaves behind to be left behind. In my reading, the named pitch is the “palace,” the internal place, and overtones are external. Why is there no need for any windows in the palace, and why is the palace no longer? I can offer two answers:
(1) The voice is interested in the overtone, the external, and not the tone, the internal. Thus it doesn’t want to see inside, it wants to point itself outward, perhaps towards a surrounding wheat-field.
(2) A pitch fades away in time, and so the palace fades away into the surrounding world.
The voice seems to be satisfied with the fading of the palace, and the poem stops. The voice (which is, after all, built on a progression of pitches), or the self in the poem, positions itself within its subject, the definition of an overtone, and takes its bearings from within the subject, and a relationship is established between the speaking self and an overtone: like the overtone, the self (in my admittedly personal reading — but why am I being apologetic? Can any reading be other than personal?) doesn’t make itself, it arises, being dependent on its surroundings, the surroundings themselves dependent on their surroundings (the Buddhist term for this is Pratītyasamutpāda). The self looking out the windows of its palace, like the overtone, possesses this there-but-not-there-ness, and to describe this, transforms its language into that which it reads in the overtone.
In the fall of 2018, I heard Mr. Waldrep read his poetry at the White Whale bookstore in Pittsburgh. I was excited to hear them out loud and discover the poems anew. To my delight Mr. Waldrep didn’t read his poems, rather he came close to singing them: throughout the event, I had the feeling of being simultaneously at a performance of a virtuoso piece, and in a room in the middle of which a musician practices unaware that he’s being heard. I can think of two descriptions, one more abstract than the other, that are the aptest for Mr. Waldrep’s poetry. First, Mr. Waldrep’s poetry is generous: not only do the poems incorporate a variety of moods and styles and references and points-of-view; they leave themselves open to let the world in. The second is Mr. Waldrep’s poems are an instrument playing itself. The poems work out their own language and logic, and they’re generous enough to let us watch them. I have been watching them for a while now, and I am grateful for the new modes they teach me, and which I joyfully carry back to my own little palace.
Varun Ravindran was born in India and lives in Pittsburgh.
