Swimming in Words
Going the Extra Mile
When I began writing these short essays for Georgia Writers in August of 2021, my main impetus was to preserve and promote the reasons we write: Is it not the passion we feel for words, for the act of writing that moves us from an earthly acknowledgment of our place on the planet to some apperception of MORE, of what’s beyond this—this earth, this our brief allotment of time here?
A beautiful poem, for me, is one that invites us into the trajectory that truly living with awareness provides. It may also call into question our very reality. Our sometimes dreamy substantiality.
For a deep dive into questioning reality, I suggest Franny Choi’s Soft Science. Relevant to the times we live in and with a fine touch, Choi investigated the AI phenomenon before it hit us so squarely this year, as the book was published in 2019. She opens each section with a poetic play on the Turing test questions: a test administered so that a human can distinguish between a computer or a human. In this poem, the cyborg (as Choi has named her AI mix) races ahead of the interlocuter’s question with a “listicle” of thought inside her parenthetical statement:
//what is (inside each question lies another question—a question of weight.
What brings you to the bed of this river? What is it about this planet that keeps
you running back? Each throat, for example, lets loose a river of black paint
which leads most if not all the way down to the feet, or what might otherwise
be referred to as the stem, if we couldn’t insist on staying untethered to the
molecular dirt that keeps wishing us home. In other words, the question here
is one of history, of a family tree that finally stretches its arms beyond the kind
of life that breathes oxygen into its gills, or reads most of the way through a
listicle, or lies in bed dreading the day, or falls down, down into the earth’s
oldest memory until it reaches its first quiet, the lullaby that it hums when thinking
of something else, the slow breath, the thought that almost becomes a thought
just before dawn) your country of origin
Choi’s trajectory is a spiraling down into a consciousness’s consciousness. “Weight” for the cyborg becomes gravity, that which pulls the human back to the “molecular dirt” that we try hard to deny. And the revelation of the poem, for me, comes when the speaker reaches “its first quiet”—the “lullaby it hums” that essentially becomes our “country of origin”—one that our discursive thinking tries hard to obscure.
How can poets get to that otherworldly place where language does not become too obvious, too out there?
Poet Susan Browne, in the summer issue of Poetry, uses some interesting craft choices in her poem to invite the reader into a very conscious awakening:
Romance
I swim my laps today, slowly, slowly,
reaching my arms out & over, my fleshly oars,
the water silken on my skin, my body still able
to be a body & resting at the pool’s lip,
I watch other bodies slip through the blue,
how fast the young are
& how old they become, floating, floating,
forgetting the weight of years
while palm trees sway above us,
a little wind in the fronds, children playing
in the fountains, one is crying, one is eating
a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, I’m hungry
& wonder, has everything important happened
& what is more important than this,
like a secret adventure, like an affair I’m having
with everyone I see, their soft or washboard bellies,
their flat or rounded butts, their rippling hair
or shiny domes, their fragile ankles,
their beautiful bones, all our atoms swimming, swimming
& making us visible & I shove off the wall,
reaching my arms out, embracing the whole
magic show, with ten more laps to go.
First, and most important in a poem with such depth (pun intended), is that Browne slows her reader down in the very first line with “slowly, slowly.” We are invited to take our time with the poem because the speaker so intentionally takes her time, pausing to watch the other swimmers. Her use of repetition of “slowly,” “floating,” and “swimming” keeps the poem buoyant and rhythmical.
Second, she bodies the poem—locating herself at the “pool’s lip” ironically, perhaps – where the speaker is “still able to be a body.” That choice ups the ante early enough in the poem so that as readers we are both surprised and curious about where she may go next. Where she goes next is to body all the bodies she sees and to make them part of her “romance.”
Third, she employs magical shifts at line breaks. The line break mentioned in the line above is one; the next are in the two lines: “how fast the young are/ & how old they become…” Now, time has been conflated in the speaker’s imagination and we understand that anything can happen in the poem. Other magical shifts: after “hungry,” and after “happened.” That the title of the poem “Romance” will be applied to all the swimmers in the speaker’s line of sight is something we don’t expect.
Fourth, she gives us the big idea of the poem—which she prepared us for in the third and fourth lines—not at the end of the poem but in the penultimate lines. “[A]ll our atoms swimming, swimming/ & making us visible” becomes the big thought of the poem, yet it’s cleverly hidden a few lines from the ending. That the poem embraces “the whole magic show” of life and with the Frost-like ending of having “ten more laps to go” is almost an after-thought made possible by her deeper insight.
What both Choi and Browne do so well in their poems is to make their word choice matter and to create questions about the nature of reality in the reader’s minds. Using both methods is your first ticket to exploring the “unearthly” in poetry.