Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham

What is it to go into an abstracted state? When I find myself abstracted 
or lose myself in abstraction, my self blurs at its boundaries but nonetheless retains a capacity, an enhanced capacity to accept whatever comes across. Memories, freaks, phrases, and passing thoughts escape judgment as to whether they deserve retaining. Even if they hover and unravel trains of thought, they do not cancel or dislodge anything already contained or passing through this elastic “abstract scene.” Contradictions and other dissonance which would become jarring if sentience rose to active reaching, can coexist so long as the mind stays abstracted. What sustains such abstraction may be constitutional, environmental, or even economic. Woolgathering ... (Here I go) transhumant shepherds ... Cornish downpour ... 

Let me pause and drift a little as in the automatism of reaching for a cigarette. In such a sentence, between intentionality and its abjuring, my “I” has been minimally embodied, even while an act deploys according to script. I hesitate (for to hesitate is entailed in some kinds of abstraction) to choose whether I situate my abstraction inside or outside, whether the “me” is dispersed within my abstraction 
or merely a point roaming it, or if I am a psychic skin surrounding it, or what fades at its extremities. Or is the uninterrupted nexus of automatic behaviors: breathing, walking, reaching, what reflection, always belated, comes to acknowledge as the self? What then abstracts? Is abstraction consciousness released from the automaton? Something outside or something within? Imagining a cigarette break, the smoker I once was tells me abstraction can be learnt — or relearnt, since so much of childhood is abstracted or its negative, bored.

Until recently, the garden I look on from an upstairs window as I write had been little more than a backdrop I glanced at or walked through, a present pleasure scarcely noticed, and if I paused outside, it would be to crop an herb, or sometimes in early autumn to gather apples, pears, medlars, damsons, or plums. But I am woolgathering in an English idiom. Abstraction and pastoral have an affinity in England. In autumn the abstract garden gives way to use-value, to selective picking, although some purposeful activities can trigger an abstracted state — a woman pauses with an apple halfway to her mouth, or stands with her hand resting on a fork as she listens to an attendant robin.

A different yield of plums distinguishes the years, but I shall find it hard to remember what flowers flourished or were disappointing this year, to predict which return with a certain season, or even to identify what was planted recently and where. The garden’s visual 
intricacy offers a welcome depth for my study window, and sometimes wildlife is noticed in its seasonal passage: migrant birds, the dragonflies and damselflies, squirrels, and an infrequent muntjac deer. The cooing of wood pigeons makes for a persistent background noise by day; but there are no bats at twilight this year, perhaps nearby building work has dislodged them or they have been afflicted by a fungal disease. I have become late middle-aged. And I admit a marshy bleakness is more typical of an English summer than my bucolic fantasy. Although I am woolgathering, wooly clouds can be sharp-edged with sun setting behind them. It is possible to remain abstracted and nonetheless reflect; these mental states can dress themselves to coincide. That’s where I am. The turning of abstraction like a crystalline and involuted space, set in motion by birdsong, or a continent away by jazz leaking from an apparently vacant warehouse in Brooklyn, coexists with flashes of insight, sidelong links, assessments of risk and practical decisions — although these may be carried out by that embodiment of autonomic and learned behavior others give the name 
I bear. Abstraction might comport with habit. Abstraction and reflection in lockstep.

Now it is twilight and there is a poem I am called upon to read, a poem calls on me to read it. How can a poem call from its perfected internal space? How could my being here for this poem have been anticipated in its advent? This is a poem I have read many times because I wanted to or because professionally I had to, a poem I have talked about in classrooms and informally, a poem my wife read at a celebration of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s life on September 26, 2009, as a little program folded into my book and bearing Eve’s face reminds me. At my sister’s funeral in 2012 I read a few lines from a poem by the same poet. This aquamarine book of his New Collected Poems feels eventful in itself, collecting my reading of these poems over three decades, if not in this particular edition; it accumulates too my reading of other poets who have felt close to this poet, his friends and contemporaries, or those drawn close through later discovering this work as I did. In a state of professional reading, I could scrutinize each word and its relations with surrounding words, both within the particular poem and across a wider range, searching out tracks others have left through their records of reading. I could listen intently and might sound aloud some lines. I could read with others in a class. And if engaged in inquiry I might seek earlier versions of the same poem, thinking how it has changed and why, or thinking what writing on poetics might extend the scope and heft of these poems, enriching, contesting, exemplifying.

But for now I hover about questions of time and space. The spaces this book constructs are bleak, beautiful, and rock-obstructed in a way unique to a landscape the poet dwelt in, even while its spaces 
are drawn toward “pure” abstraction. When I incline to write about the scope of these poems, inclination goes beyond metaphor to the landscape I shared with my sister in childhood. Although my feelings about the poems are intimate, they are experienced by a 
person coexisting with the person who eats, works in his study, and suffers the loss of those he loves. It is the I which is another whom this poem entreats. Scope, for this person brought into being in its space, sends tense cables and grapples and sinews through the medium bringing him to life, and as he reads he feels reconfigured, as though by the dragged vertices of a psychical simulation in 3-D modeling. Such scope does somewhat envisage a Scottish poet in his Penwith peninsula ordinariness, encountered in these poems where he fetches coal and blags drinks, but more urgently entreats me into being from across the page where the poet writes; Graham scratches or taps like a prisoner hoping to hear an answering tap as the start of a communicative code. The time of these New Collected Poems by W.S. Graham may be variously the poet’s and mine and others’ in its details and waymarks, such as the seasonal flowers; but it is also abstract in its swiftness, its suspension, its gathering and its dispersal, abstract in its disclosures. Still, I fear I shall betray this poem, as I open my professional armamentarium. Can my reading still be interlaced with abstraction, can I leave off for a moment, look away from the page in honoring a bidding that commands my attention down toward the poem’s narrowest interstices? Pausing in a caesura I feel the song again, opening beyond boundaries; attention opens into abstraction.

•

Last summer with the previous paragraph I stopped, and now resume in a wet and mild winter, with the improbable blossom of a winter-flowering cherry in the foreground of my gaze. That is what there is to it, a tree commands attention and releases it. I hear the surprisingly violent crepitation of a woodpecker at work beyond the next garden. It is time to write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” by W.S. Graham, this poem I have looked at through the seasons, a poem not addressed to me but, its title announces, to a painter. I recall this poem was written 
soon after the painter’s death in 1975. Memory of an involuntary kind is characteristic of abstraction, a feature separating it from a meditative discipline of “emptying”; how far though can concentration and external reference be tolerated by abstraction, without puncturing the reverie? (Is abstraction a return to being held in a maternal reverie? Is a fact a thorn?) Can abstraction permit a systolic-diastolic rhythm, an expansion and contraction?

I am not yet ready to write about this poem. Fortunately I recall this was not the first time Graham addressed Wynter in a poem (or seemed to), and I shall write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” after finding a way of approaching through an earlier poem. And rather than saying I shall “write about” a poem by W.S. Graham, I shall write toward the poem. I can zero in on what I wish to say, although that may change as I go along, through an indirect route resembling a direct address to objectified texts, an exercise in close reading. Here, though, reading aims to comprise a practice toward, a set of gestures of recognition abstracted and refigured in the interest of entering the communicative space of “the object / Adrift stationary in its Art law.” This practice can serve a further thinking through of what the poem adds to my self, although such traces may stay hidden between the lines. I want to follow the dynamics of W.S. Graham’s peculiar lyric art-making, with its thickets of words, its abstractions, and the way it stages the poet along with contriving an addressee out of features abstracted from a person dear to him.

•

When a child, I did not enjoy the privilege of being visited directly by an imaginary friend. My imaginary friend spoke from my sister’s mouth, since from an early age she rapped fantastic inventions, prompted by the monkey puzzle trees abundant in the south of Cornwall where we lived. “Monkey puzzle tree sing song” was the formula which launched her raps, spurred by the sight of a tree from our car window. Catching sight of these trees (more kitsch than natural in their bungalow front gardens) sparked improvisations that may have been germinative for my poetic imaginary. Propinquity of loved language is a precondition for lyric acts, once invited and translated into the space of internal propinquity. This sort of constructed linguistic space is not at all the same as the repertoire of phatic speech shared in the company of someone loved, loss of which feels like a deprivation, recurring in frequent small aftershocks. But a person’s death does not shut down communication in that space of internal propinquity that concerns a poet; such a shutdown would only follow the withdrawal of the Muse brought into being by the space the Muse brings into being. For me that space has had a spatial analogue in Cornwall, as I have come to recognize since my sister’s death, and an aural analogue in her monkey puzzle raps. W.S. Graham’s poetry overlays an imagined Cornwall geographically and sonically, and its propinquity to that space tears me apart and gives new names and shapes to the vertices plotting my imaginary. Space though is not to be reduced to place, although they can coincide. I hear wind surge through the high trees in this flat inland country and become abstracted, the child stands beside a boathouse in high wind.

Space constructed either through linguistic propinquity or by abstraction from empirical particulars does not prevent new particulars from breaking through. Yesterday a kestrel landed on a jardinière by the kitchen window where I was making tea. This was a flash, an instant, a freeze-frame, before the bird flew off. The day before a jay presented itself on an eye-level branch, obtruding its incomparable colors of mild pink-gray and brilliant blue. Does too sudden an incursion puncture and collapse the insidious or constructed space? The jay’s song (or outburst) is no thread into reverie, but a harsh interruption. Can abstraction be violent or can it entertain violence? Why does abstraction in painting lead Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian to mysticism and Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell to savagery? Are these definably different kinds of abstraction, and do they produce different spatial formations? Do they stage different selves in a viewer; who is evoked in a response to them; whom do they entreat?

Painters often embrace analogies between abstraction and music, and a founding myth of abstraction in modernist Western painting 
derives from Kandinsky’s account of his first abstract painting as directly inspired by a Schoenberg concert he attended in January 1911. The sound of lyric poetry induces an abstraction which compromises the urge of language toward its self-abnegation in what it denotes; it makes language both more abstract and more substantial. Recognizably organized sound does gentle violence to language’s 
signifying. Even so, flurries of fantastically dense information demanding fleet receptivity can accompany the visual, sonic “object / 
Adrift stationary in its Art law.” How we read fluctuates between temporalities and focal lengths. When returning from infinity, staring out of the window, back to what Graham caused to be set on an octavo page, the adventitiousness of wildlife in a city garden might help in understanding a further move made in Graham’s late poems, beyond objectified abstraction toward a communication at once intimate and strange, in a space suffused with an unaccountable love for creatures and things. An elsewhere is established in a restored materiality.

The work of abstraction in its less expressive modes induces us to reflect on our own situatedness. I thought I had been reconfigured as another when reading Graham’s poems, but find that other is better memoried than the drifter, the woolgatherer. More myself. Notwithstanding this recoil into reflection, I still am pressed and impressed by the density of foliage, of paint, of verse, intensified in an intricacy of refigurement that can bracket beyond its spatial dilations and extensions, the determinants of my gender and culture. Constructed space extends past the edges of the poem or canvas; 
after abstraction has suspended symbolic operations, the restitution of a foxglove on a wall can concentrate a shocking affective power. “Dear Bryan Wynter” cannot bring back a friend made inaccessible by death, but it does restore creative agency through refiguring the friend who was there in the poet’s imaginary even before he became Bryan Wynter — refigured in the fullness of time and space where we find ourselves among the poem’s ends.

•

At the bus stop a teenage boy is body-popping. His body does not move but is all in motion. The backward flick of a wrist sets muscles dancing in clusters, glissandi, echoes, waves. The stolidity of us who are set on going to work sinks us sadly in the moment, while the body-popper’s body loves its pure potential, and the indifferent light and the dull eyes turn toward him and recognize this is morning, not the commuter time of 7:18 am, and morning is an opening to which we are obtuse. Before leaving bed I might stretch, but the indulgence of stretching has now been adopted into disciplines of health linked to readiness to serve at a moment’s notice, or to stem physical 
decline. The body popper’s is a discipline of joy. It is a gratuitous discipline that gives the bus stop line a joy in beauty and a transient sense in everyone of his or her possible beauty, however locked down or smothered.

When gales were high I would struggle against the wind to the boathouse at the top of the beach, a wooden structure cupped against the cliff face in, as it were, a niche of winds. Before it the air pressure could at times achieve a perfect balance of extreme forces so that 
I could lean my bodyweight in any direction and remain tremblingly still.