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Fledge: A Phenomenology of Spirit
This book stands a) a close translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit b) a mainly at arm’s length appropriation of some poems by Paul Celan these being two extremes in language of c) a log of disasters d) a register of miracle e) also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 11, 2024
I’ve always enjoyed Wyatt’s noli me tangere poem, for the sonnet part, the proximity of love that can’t be wholly expressed as love, and what that tension does to the language. I also like Wyatt’s poem, “My Galley Charged with Forgetfulness,” the one about the port. Because it feels like a similar subject (Wyatt loves someone he isn’t allowed to love). And on top of it, he’s required to perform certain duties that go against his love, and his love is undeniable to him.
That’s what Doris’s book feels like to me. A charge between two people. Though I’m not sure the romantic tension is one the poet needs to deny. Maybe it’s a romance the poet can’t find enough ways to express, and to experience via language. Maybe it’s a lingering relationship looking for definition. Like a situationship that can’t make a decision on whether that’s where it wants to stay. The language is so dense, in fact, I might read that the poet can barely account for what she wants to experience and what she wants to say. Like the saying would take time away from the experiencing, and so she needs to keep the saying shorthanded. That’s how immediate the language makes all of this feel.
It’s an effect I would relate to Wyatt’s poems. I’m really interested in the ways a poem’s density can play up against the set structure each poet might impose on the poem. For Wyatt, the iambic pentameter line, which he is continually overrunning with his syntax, like he couldn’t possibly stay within the bounds of this meter when he’s experiencing this passion and he’s dealing with the elicit nature of his love, it must at least subvert, possibly outright deny the formal structure. Doris’s structure is more contingent on her situation. She opts for a six-syllable line. And, significantly, she avoids two-syllable words—which, for my reading, would speak to the poems’ statement on relationship or situationship. However it is, this self-imposed order provides a confine she naturally pushes against. I’m always in awe of Doris’s book, Knot: Poems, where the language feels literally knotted. A similar effect occurs in this book, further elaborated on by the tightly knit structure. And further complicated by the self-proclaimed book-length poem that Fledge is.
Granted, I don’t feel I’ve fully accessed whatever romance or non-romance the book engages with. But I do feel committed to Stacy Doris as a poet. I often think of her in the same light as Larry Levis. Both as poets who died as their poems moved into an expansive innovation.
That’s what Doris’s book feels like to me. A charge between two people. Though I’m not sure the romantic tension is one the poet needs to deny. Maybe it’s a romance the poet can’t find enough ways to express, and to experience via language. Maybe it’s a lingering relationship looking for definition. Like a situationship that can’t make a decision on whether that’s where it wants to stay. The language is so dense, in fact, I might read that the poet can barely account for what she wants to experience and what she wants to say. Like the saying would take time away from the experiencing, and so she needs to keep the saying shorthanded. That’s how immediate the language makes all of this feel.
It’s an effect I would relate to Wyatt’s poems. I’m really interested in the ways a poem’s density can play up against the set structure each poet might impose on the poem. For Wyatt, the iambic pentameter line, which he is continually overrunning with his syntax, like he couldn’t possibly stay within the bounds of this meter when he’s experiencing this passion and he’s dealing with the elicit nature of his love, it must at least subvert, possibly outright deny the formal structure. Doris’s structure is more contingent on her situation. She opts for a six-syllable line. And, significantly, she avoids two-syllable words—which, for my reading, would speak to the poems’ statement on relationship or situationship. However it is, this self-imposed order provides a confine she naturally pushes against. I’m always in awe of Doris’s book, Knot: Poems, where the language feels literally knotted. A similar effect occurs in this book, further elaborated on by the tightly knit structure. And further complicated by the self-proclaimed book-length poem that Fledge is.
Granted, I don’t feel I’ve fully accessed whatever romance or non-romance the book engages with. But I do feel committed to Stacy Doris as a poet. I often think of her in the same light as Larry Levis. Both as poets who died as their poems moved into an expansive innovation.
February 1, 2013
The subtitle of Fledge, “A Phenomenology of Spirit,” curves up the lower right-hand corner of the cover, a collaborative drawing by Doris’s two young children, and stays defiantly curled on the book’s two title pages (“my spine / your hunched entirety / of fun”). I love the implication that there are several phenomenologies of spirit, not just the single one Hegel laid claim to, and that he’s going to have to share his with Stacy’s. A sense of play breathes too in the flexible constraint she’s chosen for the poems, “mostly no two-syllable words” in short stanzas of “six-syllable lines,” paired threes divisible by only the unspoken two.
The object of the game, we’re told, is to “naively literalize nonduality” as the book moves between “two extremes of language” represented by Hegel and Paul Celan; one “a log of disasters,” the other “a register of miracle.” The series has “swells and hillocks” in place of formal sections, but there are three of them, so thesis, antithesis, and synthesis get invited to join in; since “also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love,” so does a more fleshy, affective kind of dialectic than Hegel had in mind, one where “A warmth hugs actual / warmth in skeined occurring.”
The handprints of relationship are all over the sequence, from the first line—“Please bee get my hands I / want my hands back I love / you”—to the penultimate poem: “so that we know where touch / separates and may build / the afternoon in sips.” Marx said he found Hegel standing on his head and set him upright; Doris puts him to bed in a home full of hats and shoes and hiccups and housecats and dough mix, where “Sleep and stare soothe the same / blueberry don’t you cry.” History’s loud dialectic grinds somewhere well offstage; the poems evoke an intensely intimate, carnal, tactile world manifest in toes, mouths, lips, fingers, teeth, breath, and eyes. “Our faces swell of love,” writes Doris, “the rest’s a raft of noise.”
The insight that philosophy’s most at home in the erotic is as old as Diotima; it’s her commitment to that position that led Doris to call her earlier collection, Paramour, “a very conservative book.” If that’s true, it’s the kind that conserves only what it wants to renew, and that claims the mystic’s time-honored privilege of scrambling distinctions like old and new, I and thou, part and whole: “Talk is the pool where part / has no parts, play in sink.” Celan’s an “arm’s length” presence in the compact, skipping-needle syntax, but it’s miracle, not disaster—the fledging, not the dying—that gets the last word. Like any good postmodern mystic, Doris grounds her yen for union and sublation (or for naively literalized nonduality, if you prefer) in the sensible realm of bodies and lovers and clothing and colors and, most immediately, language itself—the box of letters that enables the literal—in order to leave “There visible a praise” of our particular, transient here:
I’ll walk off this huge plack
of lawn, why not? Why if
it’s to reach that why since
our braid roots obscenely,
floods down the wonderment.
—from The Poetry Project Newsletter #233
The object of the game, we’re told, is to “naively literalize nonduality” as the book moves between “two extremes of language” represented by Hegel and Paul Celan; one “a log of disasters,” the other “a register of miracle.” The series has “swells and hillocks” in place of formal sections, but there are three of them, so thesis, antithesis, and synthesis get invited to join in; since “also this is a bunch of love poems of undying love,” so does a more fleshy, affective kind of dialectic than Hegel had in mind, one where “A warmth hugs actual / warmth in skeined occurring.”
The handprints of relationship are all over the sequence, from the first line—“Please bee get my hands I / want my hands back I love / you”—to the penultimate poem: “so that we know where touch / separates and may build / the afternoon in sips.” Marx said he found Hegel standing on his head and set him upright; Doris puts him to bed in a home full of hats and shoes and hiccups and housecats and dough mix, where “Sleep and stare soothe the same / blueberry don’t you cry.” History’s loud dialectic grinds somewhere well offstage; the poems evoke an intensely intimate, carnal, tactile world manifest in toes, mouths, lips, fingers, teeth, breath, and eyes. “Our faces swell of love,” writes Doris, “the rest’s a raft of noise.”
The insight that philosophy’s most at home in the erotic is as old as Diotima; it’s her commitment to that position that led Doris to call her earlier collection, Paramour, “a very conservative book.” If that’s true, it’s the kind that conserves only what it wants to renew, and that claims the mystic’s time-honored privilege of scrambling distinctions like old and new, I and thou, part and whole: “Talk is the pool where part / has no parts, play in sink.” Celan’s an “arm’s length” presence in the compact, skipping-needle syntax, but it’s miracle, not disaster—the fledging, not the dying—that gets the last word. Like any good postmodern mystic, Doris grounds her yen for union and sublation (or for naively literalized nonduality, if you prefer) in the sensible realm of bodies and lovers and clothing and colors and, most immediately, language itself—the box of letters that enables the literal—in order to leave “There visible a praise” of our particular, transient here:
I’ll walk off this huge plack
of lawn, why not? Why if
it’s to reach that why since
our braid roots obscenely,
floods down the wonderment.
—from The Poetry Project Newsletter #233
July 27, 2012
Finished while sitting at work listening to somebody practice Ligeti.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews