What is YOUR fragment? Poets explain this technique as it appears in their books (see the original questions HERE and an elaboration on my reflections HERE). Responses 1-10 have been supplied by (click names to see their posts): Lisa Pasold, Marthe Reed, George Vance, rob mclennan, j/j hastain, Michael Ruby Jennifer K Dick, Afton Wilky, Pearl Pririe and Tilla Brading This week poet Laura Mullen responds.
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books: Complicated
Grief is forthcoming from Solid Objects in 2014. Recognitions for her
poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships
and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized
and is included in Postmodern American Poetry, and American Hybrid
(Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les
Figues). Undersong, the composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of “The Distance (This)”
(from Subject) was released on Mode records in 2011. Mullen is the
McElveen Professor in English at LSU and a contributing editor for the on-line
poetry site The Volta.
THE FRAGMENT by LAURA MULLEN:
‘Brevis oratio penetrat celum’, ‘A short prayer pierces
heaven’—a phrase from late medieval England. “Schort
preier peersith heven”--from The Cloud of
Unknowing. Or, Woolf, from The Waves:
“I need a little language such as lovers use…”
The fragment as broken blade, as shrapnel, or something softer,
virus, pollen? It enters and goes on entering: it works its way in. Because it
halts it continues…
Working.
In the place where an absence abrupt calls attention to itself
(there’s something missing) there’s a sharpness, an edge we can’t help running a
thumb over and then pushing into the skin.
At the site of the _____________ the possibility of something
else there, marriage of what is and what could be: cyborg, hybrid thing, it’s
the excited site of the active join…something made by writer and reader (and in
this way all texts are fragments, fragmentary…).
The “readerly” text is made “writerly,” as starred—by Roland
Barthes—in S/Z. A starring or
scarring that makes of the text a collection of bits and pieces. Look up
“analysis.” Break it down for me.
Shattered by attention, mended by attention. And vice versa.
Anything, as Gertrude Stein noticed, is interesting if you read
it one word at a time.
The fragment is history’s gift, time’s present, the astonishing
evidence of care and carelessness—from Sappho’s poems down to the phonemes
found on the blotting paper in the library in a detective novel which become
the clue or key (absolving, betraying) and on to all our willful contemporary
erasures…
Isn’t the fragment “Antifragile” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s great
word)? It gains from disorder, from the chaos of possible interpretations, from
the force that eroded the original intention, from the creative power of the
questions we bring to the encounter with the incomplete. Time and hard use are
its friends and further destruction only opens further possibility… Maybe?
With each loss what’s left becomes more meaningful—up to a
certain point?
Insofar as the fragment gives birth to the archivist, detective
and scholar at once, it is the productive site of an ardent engagement
involving memory and imagination, selflessness and an exquisite delight.
My first experience of the fragment in all its mystery / mastery
was (I think) that one sentence chapter in a William Faulkner novel—(“My
mother…” I could not believe what I was reading, I knelt as I finished the
sentence “is a fish”)—my first experience in Art, that is.
In Life? Ah…
My most recent experience of the fragment is The Gorgeous Nothings, that transformative
collection of Emily Dickinson’s aphorisms, scraps, drafts, explorations: short
prayers still working their way inward in me, each with its pale wake of
spacious quiet, each stillness, each stop, awakening “that awful stranger,
consciousness.”
Murmur and Subject, the start of my love affair
with what passes out of reach (oh I’m lying: that “love” would have begun when
I was four, yes? With my parents’ divorce?): in Murmur the unfinished phrases make a constant enactment of the way
even those of us not stopped mid-sentence by violence rarely get to see
anything finished… But after beginning to think seriously about Stein, and then
after “the Federal Flood” (in which my notes on Stein dissolved) I wanted more
than ever to make openings (I think so, I think I think so, I think this is
what I remember): writing
instead
of
des
closer
not even now knowing the
letter
by
let
And then there was Zong!
It takes so much courage to stay at the site of the phoneme
where the wronged begin to talk back to communicate in what wat
Fragment: I fall upon that
Fragment: rough splinters of smoke caught my
Fragment: half here or half gone, denial and suggestion
Fragment: souvenir site of some trouble to remember
Fragment: half silence
Fragment: at the end at the beginning
Fragment: at once ancient and young
And then, then…life. All this thinking and the giddiness of
speech or rather writing and then recalling the face of the young woman who
confessed she’d been molested, felt “sick,” about it didn’t know how to speak…
Haunts me. The fragmented lives. The places where, torn open, silence
intervenes, where shame shuts down the rest of the…the…
“I hate eloquence,” Helene Cixous said, in another language, a
translated phrase that stays with me. The smooth power to assert put only to
the exploration of safe topics.
Fragment: I stilled under the unwanted caress and stayed there
Fragment: sickened
Fragment: then it seemed
Fragment: this thing I wasn’t to speak of wasn’t sure had to no
words for ashamed
Fragment: that it was not chosen is
Where the promising beginning was
by greed by lust twisted
power cruel and
. Or further, at the grave of the
or suicide.
Life itself as something we struggle to understand from the
shards left to us, left in us…
Where we don’t even get to dream
in the sentence, or where that notion of where we might have been able to go is
only a ghost, lost phantom clause that could have, you have to believe me, would
have, if only
Fragment: where was it you first learned to think of it like
that?
Fragment: in celebration and mourning
Here is the hole, the holy broken edge of heaven, all we’ve been
left, all we will leave.