THE PROBLEM WITH THE FIRST PERSON
I confront silence as if it were a space,
A space altered by my occupying it,
A ragtag space, say, of a wilderness.
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
An angel bends the date palm branch within Joseph’s reach.
I am neither the angel nor Joseph, but am the hunger
One knows intimately and the other can only imagine.
BENEATH VENUS
Bled through dusk-ore—the evening star
The roads cross at an oblique angle
The way two narratives dovetail
Lit by a black and white television
A woman unbraids her hair
Each night he stops to watch
He counts the seconds of his gaze
As a boy counts the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x
© by Eric Pankey. Printed by permission of the author.
Eric Pankey is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008, available from Copper Canyon Press. A new collection of poems, Dissolve, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2013. He is currently the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University, where he teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Program.
Arts & Academe‘s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: In Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre, Sharon Cameron relates the project of the lyric poem to the story of the Fall from grace—to the awakening of human desire, trespass, and expulsion from symbiotic Paradise (where words were not needed, every need being already known and met) into the realm of banishment, hunger, and mortality: “To transgress the limit,” she writes, “is to gain knowledge and death. Transgression displaces presence whether by knowledge or its designate language. True, Adam named the animals before the fall, but he had no real use for those names until after it. The desire for knowledge is, one might say, the desire for the possession of one’s own center, the desire to know the presence around which existence circles; knowledge, in its turn, puts desire at the center of existence: death is the consequence exacted for this radical displacement. . . . Man knows death through the primacy of language—the symbol of being’s separation from itself.”
One might argue that the birth of a discreet self—of an “I”—is commensurate with this “first” banishment, and that language is implicated intimately in the experience, particularly the language of the lyric poem. The critic Roman Jakobsen asserts that “lyric poetry speaks for the first person, in the present tense—a present toward which lyric always impels any past or future events.” As David Baker puts it in his rich compendium of essays on the lyric, Radiant Lyre, “If a lyric poem is a song of oneself, what is that self? … The self exists. It is a vexed, changing, elusive, and fictive—a linguistic—construct. But linguistic constructs are real. We make the world when we say it, and it’s the only world we have.”
Each of us, then, has a moment, perhaps many moments, when we are “first” a person, sharing something akin to Adam and Eve’s thrilling, bewildering, terrifying moments of original consciousness and separateness. We realize that we are not our mothers, that we are separate beings who must learn to use language to get what we need and to attempt to recover or rediscover some of the wholeness from which we have been banished. The homes or relationships we thought secure crumble, the touchstones of our lives disappear, a bodily illness or natural disaster or struggle with our work or ourselves forces us to confront ourselves anew. In distinct ways, Eric Pankey’s “The Problem with the First Person” and “Beneath Venus” address the construct of the self in the lyric poem: its crucial paradoxes of claustral, essential solitude and implacable desire.
From line one of “The Problem with the First Person,” the reader encounters a self struggling with its own invention—specifically with its invention in language. The “ragtag space” the narrator, the “I,” confronts must, on the one hand, be the page, the nada altered by the word, the signifying “I”—but it’s an elusive self, who the moment it pronounces itself an “I” inhabiting and moving through time is already altered by the loss of that prior self to the spoken “now”—the speaker is not the self he was when the poem began, or even a syllable past. This is the lyric predicament, or one of them. As Cameron writes, “In a search instigated by longing, language is by definition a back-tracking through the space left in the wake of presence, in the hopes that it might rediscover its source. … Presence is a memory or a hallucination or a dream, a pure alterity . … It is a memory of a past before language and before the need for language, of that flickering beginning where fulfillment seemed, illusorily, to precede desire.”
Pankey means for us, I think, to feel in his lyric pronoun the specter of the banished Adam, expelled from Eden and now mortal, “muddled by time” in the wake of seductive “serpentine” powers:
Each I I add to the addendum, to the slippery,
Serpentine thens equals, for now, the now.
Who am I but fragments and accretions,
A raft built from a shipwreck’s scavenged timbers,
A man in the dark as he pulls his shirt over his head,
A malleable metal bent over an anvil’s prow
Awaiting the hammer, awaiting the hammer’s fall?
Muddled by time, my attention is drawn away,
As I aim, as I thumb the arrow’s nock, and release.
One consequence of freedom, then, is the burden of self-awareness, and the “howl” of this first person is the plaint of the thinking human. What or who am I? What constitutes a self? A hodge-podge of conditional, chance, and subjective shards? A saving remnant? A tool of the Gods? Though our speaker, who now must hunt to live, tells us he has little time to ponder these existential questions, Pankey’s stanzas have the feel of pensées. This is perhaps especially true in the final tercet, in which Pankey evokes the apocryphal story, told variously as occurring en route to Bethlehem or on the flight into Egypt, in which, again variously, the Christ child in utero or an angel divinely moves a remote date palm within reach of Joseph, so that he can pluck the fruit for the fruit-desiring Mary. This gospel evokes the primal story of the Garden and allows Pankey to conflate the “first-person” (self, consciousness) with hunger, desire, something immortals can “only imagine” and which humans, because of our mortal knowledge, know all too intimately.
Like “Problem with the First Person,” “Beneath Venus” pitches the language of mathematics and reason (add, problem, equals, counts) against the mortal, vexed “muddle” of the self in time, specifically under the spell of Venus, Eros, bodily desire. The entire poem is cast “under” the spell of Venus, what Blake in his famous blank verse sonnet called the “fair-hair’ed angel of the evening,” evoking both the star and the goddess of love for which it is named. The poem concerns the “dove-tail[ing]” narratives of beauty and death—a man pausing in his evening walk to watch through a window a woman braiding her hair by the light of a television, for example, or a boy in one temporal world counting
. . . the pages left
In a book he’d like never to end
As if a charm or heirloom
He carries with him daily his death
Half a world away bees
Build a hive in a lion carcass
On the sidewalk home he hears
A tapping he cannot place
Perhaps a metronome
Perhaps chalk on a blackboard
As someone stalls solving for x
Especially moving in these lines is the way “He carries with him daily his death / half a world away” (the boy is young – his demise, one hopes, is far off) blurs, syntactically, into “half a world away bees / Build a hive in a lion carcass.” Life is a vanitas, and death is the mother of beauty, host of new life. Surely the “tapping” the man at the crossroads, walking home, “cannot place” is not only the minutes passing, his own heartbeat, but also what must stand in for what is already lost to him: the pen sketching on paper, fingers tapping on keys, eyes transcribing the miraculous intrusion of breathtaking desire into the terminal sentence, score, and script of our lives. And what is the lyric poem, the heart’s infinite capacity for exultation within the body’s mortal equation, if not a stalling on the inevitable way to “solving for x”?
(Photographs by Alexander C. Kafka)
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