Seiferle & The Dual Narrative

Poetry is most commonly the realm of a single speaker, and the line serves as the primary unit of the poem. However, examples of the primary unit being subordinated, subjugated, or challenged by the presence an interlocutor are close at hand, from Poe’s outspoken raven to Eliot’s multivocality. The dialogic tension of conversing lines can serve a number of purposes in the poem, including exposing an internal, provocative, or verboten perspective, and releasing the speaker from the subjective experience and allowing contradiction or ambivalence to reign.

In contemporary writing, countering a primary narrative with an alternate voice can be an attempt to capture the fractiousness and schizophrenia of contemporary life – one impossible to corral in traditional line and syntax. It can work to recreate thought more realistically – that is, less linearly, as, for instance, David Foster Wallace’s fiction allows an alternate voice (the voice usually subordinated by footnotes, for example) its freedom. Dual narratives can also call attention to form and language, thereby shifting aesthetic interest from the speaker’s perception to the means of conveying perception.

Stichomythia, meaning literally “line speech,” is the term for a line by line conversation between two characters. In its original use in Greek drama, the technique allows for rapid fire dialogue, and can function as debate, as a Q&A platform, or as a vehicle to interrogation. It comes as no surprise that it is on the stage where its dramatic value pays off. In Hamlet, stichomythia heightens the drama in Act 3 when Hamlet first confronts the Queen about her transgressions. Even her “Come, come” is hurled back in this verbal joust as “Go, go”:

Hamlet: Now, mother, what's the matter?

Queen Gertrude: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

Hamlet: Mother, you have my father much offended.

Queen Gertrude: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.

Hamlet: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

Queen Gertrude: Why, how now, Hamlet!

Hamlet: What's the matter now?

Stichomythia has been contemporarily broadened from this vocal sparring to include rhyming couplets and split lines that join to form one metrically correct line. A stunning example can be found in leadbelly vs. lomax at the modern language association conference, 1934 by Tyehimba Jess (recently featured on a Poetry Foundation podcast). Here, each voice has a clear (and as it happens, nonfictional) source; it is not an investigation of a single psyche, but the interrogative function works similarly. Each poem can be read separately; each one radiates out from a center margin, but they easily be read across the page, thereby merging the two poems and their respective voices. When read from left to right, the tension between motives, social class, and race between the titular artist and “manager” of the art becomes powerfully evident.

In Seiferle’s poem Night Music, from her new collection Wild Tongue, two poems also create a third, and as Jess uses margins to separate the poems and offer a third reading, Seiferle’s italics and indentations serve a similar purpose. The lines in Night Music are in a state of constant collision. The syntax of the traditional sentence structure pulls us forward while the opposing line pulls us back. The syntax is simple; many lines are self-contained prepositional phrases or assertions, and they are end stopped, yet some offer the option of enjambment because they are married to their alternative line. Where unambiguous syntax lends surefootedness, syntactical ambiguity results in unsteadiness. For Seiferle, it also suggests the mercurial quality of realms of existence.

In part I, the river does double (then triple) duty as metaphor and thing fished in; the waterbird suggests an “absence of form,” and the narrative shifts between the corporeal and the metaphysical, then seem to amalgamate as in an Escher illustration. The word “radio” in part 4 inveighs against Cesar Vallejo’s “rule,” referred to in the competing line, that everything would change if the word were used in a poem. Ultimately, the dual narrative echoes the unity and the separation of loss as one voice accepts “you” as the “body of night,” while the other simultaneously touches the hand in the physical realm.

To a reader confronted with the dual narrative, there is a choice of pattern and meaning – the two voices can be apprehended independently or together. It is this choice that might be the most interesting aspect of this technique. The speaker’s relinquishment of authority serves to intensify the reader’s ownership of the event – that is, the event happening on the page. The poem is not simply a prior incident recounted, or an emotion articulated, but is instead something that discovers itself, in real time, simply through our participation as a reader.

Night Music

by Rebecca Seiferle

I

“voice” is not only a matter of utterance

................there is so much light in the dark water

but a mater of being,

...............the water bird seems to be fishing for nothing

so that form, even the apparent absence of

................but light, its beak, a thin needle of splendor

form

................threading the waters

is the attempt to create

................all the dark at its back, luminous,

another order

.................like that river which was believed to circle

of time

................the ancient world where we are still

that river which is full of prehistories and intoxicating

................watching for the winged messengers

drinks offered to lips of water

................so that we always begin with the simplest of faiths

naked or the color of blue berries

................full of the dust of ourselves

2

that word, like many words,

................I kept confusing

has a person

................the vessel of the supposed

buried within it

................hero with the monster he went to kill

so the mask is fashioned

................its eyes as many as mercy, its mouths as many as death

until we forget ourselves

................trying to stay alive as a happy animal

though at moments in another’s eyes

................for what is a love but that

we still glimpse the face of the beautiful daughter

................night music

peering out beneath that white skull

................of the human heart

a strange and terrible prize

3

there was this ancient rule

.................full of a pain

that words could not be

................as I am now

uttered

................my own horned toad

as a thumb jammed into a mouth

................weeping tears of blood

would choke off crying,

................out in the garden,

piercing the ear of that most distant angel

................the fear of love, the fear of death, the fear of not

who falls to the ground like a dead wren

that idle cat brought home

4

he said that everything would change

................I was listening to the radio

if the word radio were used in a poem

................dancing not in body but in mind

because what is a poet

................when suddenly I am, oh, somewhere else

but a night music

................in another realm of being,

so full of pain and sounding so much like you

................and in that world, too, I love and love you

for what are ‘you’ finally

................and I’m holding out my hand to you

but the very body of night,

................your hand resting lightly on my palm

a folded wing,

................our fingertips just touching

a tree full of birds

.................as we begin to move…

A music

................So close and reserved

It will not show itself

................Except by a dark light

5

where am I

................I’ve gone miles past the turn back

when I’m absent-

................to my life, to the errands of the hungry

minded?

................cats and dogs, which I do easily, mindlessly

my mind, humming,

................loaded down

with bags and papers,

................walking into the house

my skin still strange and full of that night music

................into the bright and busy rooms

Copyright 2007 Copper Canyon Press

Maurice Manning & the Job / Hamlet Archetype

Maurice Manning writes captivating characters, and the single speaker in his collection Bucolics is one. He is less character, however, than figuration – son of an archetypal foundation laid by Job, and Job’s derivative, Hamlet. While to place the overlay of archetype on any work is to simplify it, the collection’s many intersections with such archetypical heroes prompt useful discussion from which blooms Manning’s own unique hero.

The collection is a petition of poems, titled numerically, spoken in appeal by a lowly field worker to the higher power he calls “Boss.” The collection urges provocative questions about the usefulness of a higher power that is apathetic, negligent, and cruel. While Job’s struggles stem from a wind-and-lightning-bolt-wielding caricature of God, it was Job, not God, who emerged as the deeper character through the poetry that illustrated these tensions. Similarly, by giving voice to his shame, pain and wonder, Manning’s speaker unwittingly creates a three-dimensional world in the face of an absent leader who is void of dimension.

Much like Hamlet, an outgrowth of the Job archetype, Manning’s speaker seems forced into verbalization; he is someone who likely lacks the natural proclivity of expression. His lot in life is a humble one, he is naïve, and his speech is a jaunty collage of unpunctuated low diction that has a tone of spontaneity. He seems to be composing as he speaks, at times finding beauty in what he witnesses fortuitously, at other times inflamed with a frustration he is unable to mask. The lines, spry and variously rhymed, betray this jazz-infused spirit; it is a lyrical evolution of biblical verse.

Both Job’s poetry and Hamlet’s soliloquies comment on themselves, and Manning’s speaker acknowledges the vortex his own questions create (I never know what’s going to cross / my path O never what will make / me ask another question that’s / a question in itself.”) Fixed in the monologic form, the speaker’s internal wonder and doubt necessitate his expression, and create his poetry. The act itself precipitates the ongoing argument of poetry and religion. A didactic read of Bucolics leads to the conclusion that poetry is a figuration of religion and that religion, take away the compelling force to make it fact, is no more than poetry. (Perhaps read “tragedy” for religion for a more Platonic, less biblical reading.)

The monologic form also establishes the grand irony of the collection, which is emphasized by the speaker’s often desperate appeals to engage the mum Boss. Boss’ silence becomes a mounting obstacle as the collection progresses; at times it is even tyrannical. The speaker wonders about Boss’ trousers, what he keeps in his pockets, and his seasonal schedule, and accuses him of being a birdbrain, a gambler, and a heartless manager. (His habit of familiarizing his god is also suggestive of Job.) The dramatic irony creates the gap in which the reader can comfortably turn the questions asked by the speaker on herself.

It is a dramatic, not a verbal irony – the speaker himself seems to be a victim of irony, as Job is a victim of an ironic God: Job’s own lack of irony only serves to exacerbate his struggle. Free from irony, Manning’s speaker’s hope at times undoes him, and at times it is his lifeline. The question of how human beings can become slaves (the servile, impulsive use of “Boss” implies both this power structure and racial divide) to an idea is inescapable. The speaker provides one answer as he admits he needs Boss to “tell him what to do.” Boss is in many ways a necessary fiction.

In the following poem, the speaker’s dream seems to accentuate his own powerlessness against understanding, that is, the limits of his own head. The desire for freedom played against confining boundaries is a recurring theme for the speaker as he struggles to know what is outside of his only known realm.

XVIII

there was a fox Boss in my dream
last night a fox the color of
the field before it wakes to green
I didn’t know there was a fox
about until it moved until
it moved like it was sliding Boss
it slid across a furrow then
I barely saw it sliding to
the woods sliding to the river Boss
I never know what’s going to cross
my path O never what will make
me ask another question that’s
a question in itself I’d like
to know why everything is stuck
in the middle Boss of something else
why the fox was stuck inside my dream
though it was making for the river
do you make nothing Boss but questions
did you set that fox inside my head
did you lay that field behind my eyes

(c) Maurice Manning

This poem courtesy of Harcourt Inc.