A Protocol for Touch

Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry

by Constance Merritt

"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose ‘the tyranny of names’ with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its ‘protocols of touch’—tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion’s contradictory occasions. Merritt’s prosodic range is prodigious—she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: "The heart’s insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live?" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that."—Eleanor Wilner

Between us, how we wrestle over words
Strain to wring some blessing from the silence,
Deliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,
The tyranny of names: night day,
Sable and alabaster, flint shale,
Steel and lace. Who among us can afford
To speak the language—any language—rightly?
As if it weren’t enough to bear one heart
Eternally divided in its chambers?
We stand close enough to touch. We do
Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,
A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas in 1966, and educated at the Arkansas School for the Blind in Little Rock, Constance Merritt is the author of three collections of poems: A Protocol for Touch (University of North Texas Press, 2000), winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award, Blessings and Inclemencies (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), and Two Rooms (forthcoming from the Louisiana State University Press in 2009). In 2001 Merritt received a grant from the Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2005 Merritt served as the Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. Currently, she lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her beloved and their two beautiful cats.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved these poems. From beginning to end, though the very first one was my favorite. There are lots of goodies in this collection, brilliant rhymes, use of language that sometimes caused me to laugh out loud…brilliance flowed from these poems. Brilliance that brought things into the light that had been hiding.

[EIJANDOLUM]

“Forgive my breath, my loneliness, my eyes;
Absolve me of myself, the many lies
I've told almost daily, and further sin
That flowers on my face and tints my skin.
Forgive me that I've lain in bed all day
Reading poems and nourishing betrayal;
That I can find no thing I love, no friend
To moor me here, a weight against strong wind.
Forgive this rootlessness, my solitude,
The light I've squandered wandering this dark wood.
Harden the hearts of those that I would grieve;
Remove from me this hundred-weight of love.”

The poet I've been waiting for.

[Louise Chambers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constance Merritt blind from birth has a different "viewpoint" from which A Protocol for Touch is based. Excellent! I highly recommend this book. I found it while browsing the shelves of the Denver Public Library.

[Rita Reese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good formal poems here, including pantoums and sestinas. Particularly liked Lullaby and Undersong.