Sight inward seeing itself

How Indeterminacy Determines Us
William Bronk

We are so little discernible as such
in so much nothing, it is our privacy
sometimes that startles us: the world is ours;
it is only ours; others that move there,
or seem to, are elsewhere, are in another world,
their world; only, we see from time to time
—shattered, as though we were nothing, or not
stable—sometimes we see what they see,
no world we know. Theirs. Strange. As though
by a momentary shift of little bits
of charges, copper were carbon and felt the weight
and valences of carbon in a changed field
of inertias and reactions, and then were copper again
in a cupreous world. We are left to wonder at
and ponder our privacy and ponder this:
we are two unknowns in a single equation, we
and our world, functions one of the other. Sight
is inward and sees itself, hearing, touch,
are inward. What do we know of an outer world?

As the office poetry reading group goes on hiatus, I offer this poem by William Bronk as one of our last subjects of study. It’s from his 1964 book The World, the Worldless, one of my favorites. I was especially intrigued by the idea of sight inward seeing itself, and the implications similarly for the sensory experiences of hearing and touching. But what proved most fascinating to us was the consideration of privacy as a way to refer to the psychic reality—conscious and unconscious—characterizing each person’s subjectivity. One view of psychic reality proposes that deep subjectivity is limited by and contained within one body; another that privacy is in fact constituted between two or more persons in interaction; and a third which suggests that subjectivity between people is created in reference to—and perhaps because of—a social third manifesting as language, or social structure, or social order. We take our privacy for granted, assuming it belongs to us. But, who and what exactly are we?

Here’s looking to 2012.

Work of the World

To Be of Use
Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Goodbye to Kate Leslie, MSW, a colleague in the work, who is moving from the Bay Area to live and work in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She introduced me to this poem, one of her favorites, and it seems apt in thinking not only about the clinical work we do but the work of poetry.

Understory

To walk out of the field guide
and listen. To wait
for the world to approach with its dapple and hands.
Who are you?
Dreamer On A Short String.
Big Boots Chomping Through The Underbrush.
There’s an understory here, shades
of meaning, tale told by a rock
signifying everything.

To open the grammar of being seen
and let the creatures name you.
Lover Who Begins To Notice.
Figure Of Speech.



I used this poem by Sue Wheeler in a class I'm teaching to illustrate a psychodynamic approach to psychotherapy. The poem alludes to a journey, during which the speaker has the opportunity to encounter what I think is the other within oneself. Concurrent is the opportunity to nurture some sense of a complex understory that can eventually become spoken.

2011 Poetry and Psychoanalysis at SFCP

Poetry & Psychoanalysis will resume on Sunday, February 13, from 3:30-5:30 p.m. at San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis (SFCP), 2340 Jackson Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco (entrance on Webster St). We are pleased to announce that our Guest Poet will be Brian Teare (see below) in conversation with Forrest Hamer.

Poetry & Psychoanalysis features a highly accomplished guest poet in informal conversation with one of SFCP’s poet/psychoanalysts about poetry and psychoanalysis and their shared interests in language, the unconscious, the creative process and potential difficulties in that process, as well as how we work as poets (and as analysts) to gain access to and express deep and at times seemingly ineffable human experience. Following the discussion, our guest will read some of his poems and there will be an opportunity for the audience to comment and ask questions. Books will be available for purchase after and the poet to sign them.

Our events have drawn lively audiences of poets, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, painters, poetry editors and teachers, readers of poetry and people wanting to become readers of poetry.

We welcome you to join that audience and our discussion.

Poetry and Psychoanalysis is offered through the Outreach Program of SFCP. Our events are free and open to the public. If you do plan to attend, please notify SFCP by phone at (415) 563-5818 by the Friday before so we will know how many copies of the poems to be discussed should be printed and how many chairs made available.

**********
BRIAN TEARE

A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. He has published poetry and criticism in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Ploughshares, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, Seneca Review, Verse and VOLT, as well as in the anthologies Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and At the Barriers: The Poetry of Thom Gunn. He’s published three full-length books—The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, and Pleasure—as well as the chapbooks Pilgrim and Transcendental Grammar Crown. On the graduate faculty of the University of San Francisco and Mills College, he lives in San Francisco, where he makes books by hand for his micropress Albion Books.

FUTURE EVENTS:

Sunday, May 1, 2011 Denise Newman in conversation with Susan Kolodny.

O Poem, Hopeful Body

After Visiting Hours
Leon Weinmann

All unnecessary weight is eliminated….Even the brain cells needed for song are lost and seasonally replaced in some birds.
--All the Birds of North America, p. 63


At midnight, in the sunroom of the ward,
when you’re locked in your pajamas, stupid
with heartbreak, and your throat a frozen stream,
you’ll read how birds in winter lose their minds,
or lose that part that urges them to sing—
each glad cell dying in the blood, until
they know no love but the sparse, sterile seed,
the bitter pills that fatten and preserve
their hearts against this heartless cold, this dark.
And yet they seem at peace with this: they love,
they turn away from love, they wait for love
to come for them again, and trusting, sing
the song they knew was gone for good—I knew
you’d come back, I knew it, I knew you’d come.


After a long break, it seemed appropriate to return with a poem that speaks and embodies hope, hope also being the implicit character of the efforts we make to make sense of suffering.

On Delicate Unraveling

In the Tannour Oven
Brian Turner

Stitched into the gutted belly of the calf:
a fat young lamb, dressed and cleaned,
its organs removed from the cave of bone.
And within the lamb: a stuffed goose.
And in the goose’s belly: a mortar round.
And within the mortar round: a stuffed hen.
And in the hen’s belly: a grenade.
And within the grenade: a stuffed thrush.
In the thrush: a .50 caliber bullet.
In the .50 caliber bullet: seasoned
with murri, oil, and thyme—a wedding ring.

Ah, love—when you undo the stitches,
take your time. I have love letters
stuffed inside of me, these tiny bodies
made heavy by their own labored breathing.

from Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010)


I'm interested here in the complex intimacy portrayed between this speaker and his beloved, an intimacy that grapples with the violences occasioned by experiences in war. Another intimacy is the one implied between the poet and the reader or listener, the poet warning and assuring the reader about what struggles to be contained between them also. And in the context of this blog, the relationship between a helper and someone coming to be helped is finally brought to mind, especially when the latter lives with what has almost been unbearable. What a triumph loving can sometimes be!

blessing the boats

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

Lucille Clifton 1936-2010