brimming in the utterance
It’s about peeling the paper up and putting the rabbits back in it again. And I’ve met another, very actual man. When he undresses for the evening, he belly flops from the heights of comedy by shrieking, “Eek, a ma-an!” A damsel a la 1950’s animation, mortified by the carrot-waving rascal in her boudoir. I call my mother all the time and tell her such stories. As if she were my baby. She hears them to sleep.
baby baby
means I intend
nothing but to say
made you small enough, everything
in the sameness outside inside your name
your name to carry with me
in this instance
the soft parts
the hard parts
of speaking
bring us into
Ellen McGrath Smith
“HEARING A PEAR”: THE POETRY READING
ON A NEW FREQUENCY
I’ve been going to the National Poetry Foundation conferences at the University of Maine for the past fifteen years. Located on the UMaine Orono campus, the conference comes along about once every three or four years. It’s four days of readings, panels, discussion, debate, soft-footed walks along tall pine trails. Each conference I’ve attended has focused on a specific decade in poetry. The most recent one focused on poetry of the 1970s. Since I more or less came of age in the 1970s, this conference made me feel, if not as prehistoric as the Maine landscape, a lot more dated than I’d felt when I attended prior ones on the 1940s, 50s, even the 60s.
Maybe this sense of datedness had something to do with it, or maybe it’s just that I face up to my hearing impairment more now than I have in the past, but this last conference in Maine, three years ago, taught me as much about my own hearing loss as it taught me about what was happening in poetry during the 1970s. The Language poet Bruce Andrews gave a reading on one of the first nights. Long a fan of his manifesto, “Poetry as Explanation, Poetry as Praxis,” I looked forward to the reading, a plenary session in an auditorium with, I assumed, suitable acoustics and a more-than-adequate sound system.
But how does one define “suitable” or “more-than-adequate” when the room is sprinkled with people like me who have mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss that more often than not has more to do with frequency than with volume? It’s always a gamble. You go in thinking, “Will he have the kind of voice that falls inside that cookie bite on my audiology chart?” If you, as I do, have hearing aids, you might put them in and cross your fingers. But the sad truth is that if the voice falls outside of that “cookie bite” even the hearing aids are unlikely to help. Here are just a handful of consonants I’m likely to miss on the bad side of that gamble: P, H, G, K, T, F, S...or the blends: CH, SH, TH. There’s a good chance I won’t be able to tell “chit” from “chinola.”
The humor and wordplay make it less daunting. In fact, when I spoke briefly with Andrews after the reading, explaining that I’d enjoyed what I’d been able to hear, but that much of it got away from me because of my hearing impairment, he swiftly made poetry out of the exchange: “You’re hearing a pear?” he asked, in a mock-confirming voice matched by a smile. As far as I was concerned, I’d missed much of his reading but gained a bounce by the exchange. His response, in a sense, showed his understanding of what my hearing life is like: a mixture of misapprehension and generative creativity, of word-tag and wordplay. Of loss and gain.
Maia Boswell-Penc, in an essay published in Women and Language (2001), writes of this paradoxical relation to her own hearing impairment: “It is paradoxical that I sometimes perceive myself to be ‘different’—somehow ‘wrong’ or ‘limited’—while I also embrace my ‘loss’ as a ‘gift,’ as a mark of special awareness, a portal into an ‘other’ space offering ‘other’ perceptual encounters and insights” (p.47).
Call it maturity or just resignation, this most recent Maine conference was all about embracing. For perhaps the first time in my life, rather than fighting or denying my hearing impairment, I adapted to it. “Adapted” may not be the right word; I believe I’ve been adapting to it all my life—with one of the biggest adaptations, which I’ll get to later, being my immersion in reading and writing, first as childhood interests, second as adult occupational pursuits. Rather, it was one of the first moments when I allowed it to enter into my experience as a positive, rather than negative, factor. This isn’t to say that I didn’t want to see Bruce Andrews’ words on paper. I did, and when I did, it brought the same sense of recognition and relief to me that words on paper always have in the wake of a session of struggling, unsuccessfully, to process those words through air, bone and nerve.
One way in which I began, at that conference three years ago, to consciously allow my hearing loss into my creative experience emerged shortly after the Andrews reading. We’d gone on a bus from Orono to Waterville (no moose sightings) to see an exhibit at Colby College of some of the artwork of Joe Brainard. After browsing the exhibit, we gathered in a bright shiny room to hear Bernadette Mayer read. I could have told you—just by looking at the surfaces and dimensions of the room and sensing the degree of echo potential—that this was going to be another frustrating listening session...unless, by some miracle, Mayer was going to have the voice of James Earl Jones. Two minutes into it, I pulled out my notebook. “Damn it,” I told myself, “I’m going to be an active listener if it kills me.” The way I had through countless elementary, high school, college and grad school classes and lectures, I turned to an old friend—the page right under my nose—but with a different attitude. In those prior times, I’d doodled incessantly in my notebook as a way of working off the energy and frustration of not being able to hear. This time, I wrote as if trying to transcribe what I thought Mayer was saying. I was listening to a poet read in a way I’d never listened before. The experience was full of stretches when I really was hearing her and writing down what I was certain she was saying...and moments when our paths divided but I went on and she went on... It was as though we were hiking in the same woods. “What is this process?” I thought to myself. Laughing, I called it “Hearing a Pear,” and I’ve been doing it ever since: whenever I’m at a reading that matters to me but which poses the acoustical challenges that, in the past, would make me simmer with rage (Whose fault was this? Was this all because of one ear infection too many? Why wasn’t something done about this when I was a child? Couldn’t she just speak up?)—challenges that, on really bad days, used to make me get up and leave with a sense of failure.
These experiences and others have made me all too aware that there are likely to be people in most poetry reading audiences whose frustration due to hearing impairment is goading them, silently, to get up and leave. According to a recent survey of U.S. homes by the Better Hearing Institute, about 11 percent of the population has some degree of hearing loss, and this percentage has grown significantly over the last twenty years. Among poets and writers, there’s always been a good deal of discussion about ways to make literature relevant to readers; in poetry, the notion that the genre is all-but-extinct in the culture is so commonplace now that it spawns a steady stream of essays and ideas for keeping poetry alive by finding new ways to engage audiences. Fortunately, for those who are hearing impaired, a lot of these new ways tap into the capabilities of electronic media, generally drawing on the visual capabilities of the computer. Still, in poetry especially, the reading is frequently invoked as a key vehicle for keeping the genre vital, insofar as the reading preserves its roots in orality. For instance, the critic Charles Altieri (in a 2007 issue of the litmag No) calls for innovations in reading styles and formats that aim to counter what he characterizes as “the alienating effect of seriatim presentation”(p.315). The cultural era in which the traditional format evolved has passed, Altieri believes. Now, that format only works well “when the performer’s presence on stage affords a visible supplement to the poetry, when the work is readily comprehensible in the hearing because the institution of performance is built into its
diction and syntax, and when poets are not fighting various ideologies of immediacy but embracing them”(p.314).
For the purposes of this essay, I would focus on Altieri’s second condition: “when the work is readily comprehensible in the hearing because the institution of performance is built into its diction and syntax.” Here, Altieri is assuming an audience without hearing loss. Even so, he argues that much of contemporary poetry, in its diction and syntax, is not “readily comprehensible in the hearing.” This is all the more true when one considers that 11 percent I mentioned above.
The irony of all this is that, as I look back on my childhood struggles with hearing (we just thought it was a matter of “bad ears” from infections and swimming), I realize that it was probably the gift of my hearing loss that led me, unwittingly, to love the printed page and the written word. I couldn’t wait to learn to read; seeing the phonetics of the world that so often confused me clarified and stabilized by graphic presence gave me a confidence and security that I all too often missed. It still does. I might even say with a degree of certainty that I have made a career out of writing and reading because of my hearing impairment. And, although I’ve not come across much that connects print literacy and hearing impairment, I suspect that many others in my position have found their comfort and competence in writing and books. This makes it all the more crucial to think about what might be done to provide more access for audiences of spoken poetry who, with or without sound systems and hearing aids, struggle to comprehend what often is, even for audience members with normal hearing, difficult to comprehend.
While Altieri’s focus is not on the hearing impaired, his essay suggests various innovations to the traditional reading format that would serve listeners with hearing loss very well. For instance, he posits that:
...a more systematic shift might take place if poets are asked to imagine their performances as the acts of educators who carry out a distinctive mode of research. . .The first step is to recognize that it is fine to present poems more than once. In fact I imagine readings with only a few poems read, then discussed by the poet, then read again, or even read by audience members to see if they can catch the particular nuances the poet brings out (p.317).
Altieri’s model would have a poetry reading function more as what we now call a “master workshop.” This is not so feasible, though, in the large, auditorium-style readings we’ve come to accept as the norm. For readings such as these, accommodations could be made such as on-screen simultaneous projection of poems. Distribution of work to be read is a tricky business, given that authors want to sell their books or, for works in progress, don’t want draft versions to be in circulation. A way to address this might be to hold more book signings prior to rather than following readings, with loose copies of a few of the leading poems from the book on the book table (providing those new to the author’s work with a sample that might lead to a book purchase). With the Internet, a few key poems that will be read could be posted prior to the reading date. I cannot express enough the joy I feel when I can look at a poem while an author reads it, especially when frequency and acoustics are major factors.
For much of my life, due to the lack of information on the nature of my own hearing loss, I have been silent about my struggles as a listener, primarily because I thought that they were solely my fault, my responsibility, my problem. For a long time and especially during my youth, I thought my condition was temporary (conductive rather than sensorineural) and that all my problems would just go away with lavage (irritated siblings shouting, “Just get your ears cleaned out!”) or the reduction of pollens in the air. Later, as an adult working as a university teacher, when I learned that my hearing loss was sensorineural and not temporary, the blunt advice of playmates morphed into more tactful suggestions that I get a hearing aid. I now have two hearing aids, but, as anyone who uses these devices will attest, they are far from foolproof for a variety of mechanical, situational and (still) acoustic reasons.
Speakers often ask, at the beginning of a reading or lecture, whether everyone can hear them, but that often is perceived by people like me as more of a rhetorical gesture than an actual question seeking a real answer. Perhaps more important is the need to generate awareness about hearing loss, particularly the very basic fact that hearing loss is not only a question of volume but of frequency. In terms of improving hearing access to poetry, it would help if poets themselves were more honest with themselves in assessing and adapting their speaking voices to audiences. By this, I do not mean learning to project and enunciate as if all poets were hereby ordered to also become thespians! But I do think it is important to know what sort of voice you have, whether it is treble or bass heavy, and to make the necessary accommodations for that in different reading situations. I hope this doesn’t sound as though I’m shifting the onus for my disability onto others. Rather, my message is more of a plea to poets (and to all who speak in public) to imagine that, within a given audience, there are people who want to and are trying to hear you, but can’t, and that the number of these people appears to be increasing over time.
Afraid of the Rake
A man was raking, in white-collar clothes, raking the remnants of a year ago, taking care to make sure, once he’d raked them, they’d never come back. A woman who’d decided she wasn’t a writer was writing. Needles from her Christmas tree clung to her doorstep afraid of the rake, whose shirring stirred the street. She was writing as she always did—beginning. Like Rilke, like Stein, she began and began for the sake of beginning again. For this reason, her poetry was prose. It was a cold she kept catching. The shirring was not autumn but spring. Which meant renewed hope in the sequence of the sentence. Subject verbs object. I cupped your smooth cheek. The man with the rake was a man with a rake, nothing more. That was the beauty—the moot declaration more likely to take root. She had chanted her way to Chicago and back, chaperoning the painful crudescence of love. Refereeing perhaps. Om namah shivaya, they droned, we droned, he/she/it droned, stopping only for gasgourmetcoffeetopee. Then she’d translated the Sanskrit to late-sixties pop, whereby life would be ecstasy, you and me endlessly—and all four wheels did their duty, and she, who dubbed herself third wheel, felt her ego downshift. All declarations would have to be kept, she decided, in the tinderbox that loss had left her. Just below the navel. She’d renounced writing, but remembered what was happening to Jack, whose poems always turned her inside-out. He was forgetting, dispersing; he was losing the left margin. Coherence was a rake, like a fence around the self (which is not given). Words like leaves blowing out beyond the property lines. There was loss, and there was joy, and there was a state in which both of them were one. But she wasn’t ready to go there yet. She wrote, finally, as a way of clinging to the doorstep, afraid of the rake, whose shirring stirred the street.
The Magic Word Is Partager
French. Infinitive. Means to share.
A cousin to the English, partake,
as in particles given to everyone, everyone
being a particle, taking part in. Part by itself
and in English is sad; it’s so separate and final,
and partake’s too focused on taking,
while, somehow, the French is an infinite
giving; it ends with an open vowel—Piaget
parting the shell of a mollusk to see something
still soft in its being, not to eat but to stare at it,
wondering at its mute life (like the insides of cheeks,
which take part in the structures of carapace, bone;
taking part but apart from devouring or being
devoured). Ager is what we’re all doing—
we grow old—and we share this,
we live, we depart; it’s an art.
Piaget did partake in the progress of children
—the aging of children, his children his subjects—
infants so like unshelled mollusks:
they sprawl in their soft, tender nudity over
the
palms of whatever hands hold them.
Spelling Down
I wanted bad to advance to Washington, D.C.
I wanted bad to be anyone but me.
The nun who had trained me for the spelling bee
needed a ride, and I was so worried all the way across town
that my dad would start swearing in front of her,
I couldn’t really think straight, so when
I got to the tie-breaking round with a Central Catholic boy
in an argyle sweater, I nearly tripped on the way to the mic.
“Hoo-ist,” the word-distributor announced.
I couldn’t hear, could never hear, so I asked him to repeat.
“Hoo-ist,” he said again. I took a stab at it and spelled it
H-U-I-S-T, and the man in the toupee shook his head
and turned to Chip, who whipped out, “Whist.
W-H-I-S-T. Whist.” He smiled before the judge said yes,
because of course that was the word—whist! whist!—
what on earth had I been thinking?
It was quiet as we drove over the West End Bridge.
I couldn’t wait to drop off Sister Simon
so I wouldn’t have to simmer in the back seat
with my mother, both of us praying he wouldn’t break into
his grating vernacular. “She spells a lot better than me,”
he told Sister. “But all I write is police reports,
and spelling don’t matter.” She cocked her head
as if he were discoursing on John of the Cross.
Now I stand above the city. There’s a murky line
Beauty Is a Verb Page 24
