BAP 2009: “Open Field” by Phillis Levin

December 6, 2009

Reading through this year’s Best American Poetry volume, it’s clear that Wagoner doesn’t shy away from the kind of meta-poems– poems about poems, poems about writing, poems about the language of poems and stories– I remain suspicious of. He also has a fondness for poems that explicitly engage grammar and punctuation: see poems by Levin, Rich and Richardson in this volume (and there may be more). If I’m feeling ambitious at some point I may take a look at all three together. But for now, here’s Phyllis Levin’s poem:

“Open Field”

Forget the comma, the crow said, darting
onto another branch, random joy being his,

being mine, being yours, depending on how
you look at a branch, which is, after all,

something essential for him, for you, for me,
his wings no more no less than the wings

of his fellow travelers, his curious, forlorn
pecking at what—a pecking for what is new.

And isn’t that what we want, to be taken
out of a sentence into the air, where conversation

blossoms into speechlessness, the bosom
of belonging, being in rather than on, in being here.

But the comma said, how dare you abandon
the curl that tells how distinctly different

one iota is from another, lifting a note a little
higher or lower, casting a shadow over whatever

may follow, or making a sudden clearing
for the future, letting it tremble, hesitate, sing,

announcing how each thing depends on another,
touching, resting, going on, dying and ferreting

too, yes, that too, did you think it impossible to do
another thing after arriving, did you forget the

moment awakening after a dark dry dot,
that jab of ending, a minuscule well sounding

no less no more than a drop of the sap
asleep in winter trees, did you believe for a split

second you could breeze on by or pass
such a point without calling out to its source?

O, said the crow,
but didn’t you know:

I
am a drop

of the bottomless well,
you are a mark in the snow.

I enjoyed the language of “Open Field” with its attention to alliteration. At one point (see below) Levin elevates that alliteration to the point of being a semantic device. Curiously, the poem moves from the concrete to the abstract, even while it structurally changes from relatively consistent line lengths to the short statement that close the poem, an arrangement I would typically associate with movement in the opposite direction.

The shifting viewpoint in the poem also interests me. The authorial voice is clear in the first six stanzas before disappearing entirely. But it’s a crucial preparation (intervention) in which the first voice starts out with the concrete observation and details– there’s a hint of Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” in:

“…depending on how
you look at a branch, which is, after all
something essential for him…

but finally runs into a wall beyond language, a kind of alliterative anti-mu moment in which one of the most explicitly-invoked but completely abstract aspects of written language, punctuation, speaks for itself:

where conversation
blossoms into speechlessness, the bosom of belonging, being in rather than on, in being here.

Very tangentially, this gives me an excuse to invoke one of all-time favorite invocations of typography in contemporary poetry, from Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red” — when Geryon and Herakles see each other for the first time and Geryon feels they are:

two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they
recognized each other like italics.

In Levin’s poem, the comma casts itself as an instrument of connection– distinguishing iotas, lifting notes, and making “sudden clearings” for the future– recognizing necessary dependencies in thought and action alike, as opposed to the period, that “dark dry dot,” the “minuscule” mark that imagines itself capable of independence and starting anew.

But in the face of this tit-for-tat of the abstract, what simply is– nature, the natural, the real– trumps all else, and emphatically. First, the crow sing-songs the Whitmaneque “O”:

O, said the crow,
but didn’t you know

before pounding his point home with the “I” that acts like a nail. Isn’t “I” the ultimate period (or exclamation mark) of this– or almost any– poem, particularly situated on a line by itself? The point of connection and and the birth and death of all poetic happenings? The crow may be only “a drop of the bottomless well,” but he is wholly a part of that well, of which the comma can only be apposite.

I’m not wholly sure what every line of “Open Field” means. I suppose my mystery could be another person’s confusion, but the near-cohesion at the boundaries of language the poem explores are an important part of why this poem grabbed, and then kept, my attention. Reading this poem not long after I’d been (serendepitously) working on my own little group of “Crow Cinquains”– some of which are of a tone and perspective very much like the final three stanzas of Levin’s poem– made the leaps and turns in Levin’s poem that much more acute and interesting.

Tags: bap09, poetry