I am constantly drawn to
poems of departure, be it in the form of elegy or poems navigating love lost. Last
year I had been working on a series of poems espousing supposed valediction
lessons. Of course, that’s silly; there is no way to learn how to say goodbye
(if there is, please reply in the comments section below—I won’t spend any more
than $20 on reading material or online courses), and this poem certainly
realizes that futility. “Valediction Lessons: Flora” is a breakup poem. It
seems like poets never want to say things like that. We’ll say it about other
poets’ work. We’ll talk around it (we’re so darn good at that!), but we often dodge specific occasions. My apologies
for the generalization.
This poem came
into the world because of a quote from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking
eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening
here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.” The absurdity of this statement stuck
with me, and helped to create a speaker who goes on to spout off equally absurd
statements. Although the speaker in the poem is vitriolic, is transgressive
(forgive me, I had been reading a lot of Sappho), her observations are not
arbitrary. The landscape becomes a backdrop for loneliness, for lamentation.
She compares herself to bromeliads, sea grass, sea urchins, and a part of the
brain. Through the displacement of surrealism, the speaker—and the world around
her—becomes unstable. And form followed function: this poem builds from the
shortest sentences to the longest in hopes of creating a feeling of welling up,
a breathlessness, a claustrophobia.
But there is hope. Bear
with me here. In 1958 Paul Celan delivered a speech for receiving the
literature prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. In a brief discussion of
language, Celan argued for its closeness, its approachability. Despite all
tragedy and loss, he believed language had benefitted from doubt, from
terror. This belief led him to a
definition of a poem. “A poem,” he says, “being an instance of language, hence
essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with
the—surely not always strong—hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere,
perhaps on a shoreline of the heart.”
This has always seemed a
somewhat hopeful statement, one that requires poems to be reaching toward something, or someone. Now I
don’t pretend to view any of my poems as uplifting or joyful, but I found
solace in Celan’s view of poetry. Despite speaking in a language that was the
same as his mother’s murderer, despite having nearly nothing after the war,
Celan still viewed poetry as a form of communication, a form of hope. Even if
the bottle thrown out to sea is never found, it was put out into the world. And
that’s poetry, isn’t it? That faith in the ocean’s buoyancy despite its
vastness? The art of making trumping the poem’s reception?
I digress. In the end of
the poem, my speaker looks up, looks outward. She imagines a place just for mourners.
She imagines other uses for tears. And, finally, she realizes the masturbatory
quality of dwelling on love lost.
***
Corey Van Landingham recently completed her MFA at Purdue University, where she was a poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. She has been awarded a Bread Loaf Work-Study Scholarship, the Indiana Review's 1/2 K Prize, and a 2012 AWP Intro Journals Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Best New Poets 2012, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She lives in Houston, TX, alongside a fig and a kumquat tree.
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