Ange Mlinko: On Susan Stewart

Ange Mlinko

In her Clarendon Lectures , given at Oxford in 2023 and recently published as Poetry’s Nature (Oxford, £25.99), Susan Stewart recapitulates themes that have preoccupied her for half a century. ‘The Bird in Glee: On the Non-semantic’ returns to ideas she explored in her first study on poetics, Nonsense (1979). ‘The Seasons: Paradigm of Lyric Time’ complements her most recent monograph, The Ruins Lesson (2020). ‘Motion and Turn: Water’s Ways’ and ‘The Imperceptible, or Wilderness’ could be further distillations of the essays in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), which took a maxim from Marx – ‘the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’ – and showed the way Western poetry implicitly reflected and recorded this labour. ‘Poetry expresses the passage from not-knowing to knowing through which we represent the world, including the perspectives of others, to ourselves and those around us,’ she wrote then. In Poetry’s Nature she brings this concept to the fore again: ‘A poem also might reveal in time the relation between what is outside of our perceptual and linguistic powers as it comes under those powers … poems continually approach the frontiers of intelligibility.’

For Stewart, this is what poetic process is: the closely observed emergence of empirical knowledge out of chaos, confusion, darkness. But she is not only a theorist; she has always alternated books of poetry with books about it, allowing her practice to elucidate her abstractions. (Of the many philosophers she draws on in her work, Kant is among the most prominent: concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.) It’s impossible to read ‘The Owl’, the opening poem in her collection Red Rover (2008), and not think of the first essay in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, ‘In the Darkness’. The poem begins: ‘I thought somehow a piece of cloth was tossed/into the night, a piece of cloth that flew/up, then across, beyond the window.’ ‘In a state of ignorance,’ she writes in the essay, ‘the mind must attempt to forge connections of intelligibility and recognition that will be no less than the grounds for the creation of one’s own consciousness.’ The poem may be about seeing a snowy owl in one’s peripheral vision, and slowly working out what one has seen in that split second, but panning out across her oeuvre, it is clear that this is a paradigmatic moment on which Stewart plays variations. The stakes are clear: the further individuation of the poet (a person coming to be herself and know herself through the practice of poetry) and the indispensability of the lyric as a way we, as a species, come to be and know ourselves.

Bramble is the first of Stewart’s collections to deal directly with personal suffering, and to grapple with the question of whether suffering is an unavoidable part of self-knowledge (Chicago, £18). The bramble isn’t an uncomplicated metaphor: its prickliness is usually paired with a countervailing sweetness, the blackberry or the rose (Stewart also draws on the word ‘briar’ and its associations). If every rose has its thorn, does it follow that every thorn has its rose? Must we accept that suffering is inextricable from joy, or that it confers benefits like wisdom? The collection is full of epigraphs on the bramble taken from the Bible, Virgil, Spenser and others. Stewart is interested not just in the natural metaphor, but in the meanings that other writers have attributed to it.

There can be no bloodless way to introduce a book about the shock of widowhood (Stewart nursed her husband through a long illness before his death). One may well begin by saying what one loves:

In the dark, I thought,why do I love the truth?

which is not beyond thedoor but is the door.

The truth that drivesthe nail straight,

though it’s not in the nail andit’s not in the wood.

This opening poem is followed by a series of ‘Plague Octets’, snapshots from the Covid pandemic: curfews, protests, lootings, pots and pans banged to celebrate healthcare workers. There’s a glimpse of the American president talking on TV:

That ugly face, like a floater on the retina, thatgrid of talking mouths, that cascadeof speculation, that tirade of what-abouts … and the con man’s touts, the conman’s touts. The rat-a-blab, rat-a-blab, rat-a-blab screen: our threshing machine,where I type these lines in loathing,and the room smells of sulphur and Faust.

Meanwhile, the poet encounters a fisherman on the banks of a river wearing a mask. ‘One day this song will be merely/puzzling,’ she tells herself. ‘What did they mean by a mask?’ they’ll say. Is this a kind of optimism? It’s one way to grapple with the present – imagining a future.

‘The Horseshoe Crab’ is a tender meditation on the spiny, unprepossessing creature that Stewart turns right side up after finding it stranded on its back:

What I can know about you hardly matters– that you have ten eyes (but whyshould creatures have only two?), that you are olderthan the dinosaurs (but what does that meanto you?), that you swim upside down(but from whose point of view?) and glowin ultraviolet light, and live by the clockof the sun and the moon. That you recogniseyour fellow beings despite the darkest night(with joy, then, like puppies, or with fear,like us?). My cones and rods resembleyours at one-tenth magnification.I have a booklet that tells me what to doif I find you stranded by the tide.

This plain-spoken address to the arthropod from the Ordovician period is unclear on ‘who is saving whom’. Marianne Moore’s ‘A Grave’ may come to mind: ‘It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,/but you cannot stand in the middle of this;/the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.’ Or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’: ‘It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:/dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,/drawn from the cold hard mouth/of the world.’ In that poem, Bishop talks to a seal and sings ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ to it. (Following ‘The Horseshoe Crab’, Stewart reworks a series of biblical texts in ‘Psalm Octets’, though Psalm 46, from which Bishop’s poem is derived, is not among them.) We find solace in creatures who survive in the liminal spaces our instincts tell us to flee.

Again and again the concept of the unknown is embodied in darkness or the sea, out of which emerges something that may seem alien but ultimately proves sympathetic, like the horseshoe crab. In ‘Waterfall near Corchiano: pen and wash’, watching an artist draw a waterfall is like watching a being evolve from nothingness:

Because the ink was fluid, the wash so wet, yourwrist darting as you steeredthe pen and brush, it seems as if every partof the image emerged alive, and nowthe eye can’t rest as it fliesfrom the rippling curves in the left foregroundback and around to the shadowedwood at the right upper corner

For Stewart, it is affecting and dramatic when art imitates nature. ‘Waterfall near Corchiano’ looks forward to the final long poem of the book, ‘Channel’, which celebrates a river in language that flows like one, blurring the boundary between the linguistic world and the natural one:

you’ll have no memory of melifting you back into the sea,or what we call the sea, for wehave no other word for the wild,the fierce enormity

In Poetry’s Nature Stewart writes that ‘we have a long-enduring, ever-evolving history of Western genres of nature poetry,’ including ‘the alba, the nocturne, the idyll, the pastoral, the eclogue, the georgic and the topographical poem, each of which is tied to a means of human life and sociality’. But this is just skimming the surface of forms. Going deeper, down to the morphemic level, Stewart draws on W.K. Wimsatt’s theories to suggest that ‘non-semantic devices’ – including rhyme, alliteration and even puns – bring us closer not only to the origins of literature in oral tradition, but to onomatopoeic representations of animal calls, especially birdsong.

To think of language in this way – as a natural phenomenon that co-evolved with birdsong – is to expand our capacity to find meaning in those non-semantic devices that Stewart’s fellow Pennsylvanian Wallace Stevens often deployed. As in certain poems in Harmonium, Stewart echoes nursery rhyme rhythms and witchy spells:

A bobbin, a needle, a thimble, and chalk.If it’s too far to run, it’s too close to walk.

A needle, a thimble, chalk, and a bobbin.The cheer of a robin, now what was that?

This poem, ‘Minor Musics’, recalls a series of poems Stewart wrote about children’s games in Red Rover. She returns to the subject in ‘playground’, in Bramble, where the sounds of a playground are transcribed and then veer off into a parenthesis of joyful memory:

(and thought of the yellow hotel in Amsterdam,plonked down between the canaland a school, how we lolled around in bed all afternoon,making out the lyrics of the future as they flew up –sparks from a bonfire –swirling roundthe sparse October trees.)

Here the aural memory of a playground is bound up with the memory of making love to the person with whom Stewart will soon have children. Time is simultaneously lived, remembered and foreshadowed. The plump ‘l’ sounds in ‘yellow’, ‘hotel’ and ‘lolled’ merge with emphatic velars in ‘plonked’, ‘canal’, ‘school’ and ‘lyrics’ and then morph into the voiceless plosives of ‘sparks’ and ‘sparse’. The intercourse of letters and sounds in their musical patterns calls to mind another of Stewart’s insights on the non-semantic: ‘These moments of sung sound that punctuate and delay the progress of syntax seem to appear most frequently in songs of hunting and the animal world, birdsong and bird talk, love poems, songs to and for our children, and other poems concerned with fertility and organic life in general.’

But this is a rare moment of unadulterated happiness in a sombre book. A few pages later, ‘the junkman’ forces the poet to consider the accommodation of less mellifluous sounds and less palatable recyclings:

Four a.m. on Weaver Street, belowmy window a radio jingling(‘Road Runner’, I think … Bo Diddley)and the hum of an engine idling. He’s back –the junkman

The junkman roams the city streets collecting metal for the recycling plant. A ‘high-pitched screech of metal/against metal’ is an ironing board he is trying to load, ‘ratcheting up,/collapsing, ratcheting up, collapsing’ until finally he throws it ‘against the rusted/sides of a dented dryer’. The clanking of other detritus – ‘broken bikes, lead pipes, fences/and fans, bright wires spilling from/a bashed-in TV, bumpers/and burned pots and pans’ – make for an ear-chafing lyric, interspersed with the tinny pop from the junkman’s radio. Stewart thinks of the recycling plant (‘enormous furnace by the airport/where all forms become formless/as they flow into moulds’) and the scene resolves into an updated vision of Dante’s Inferno, where the figure of the junkman, like that of Minos in the second circle, issues his judgment: not ‘it is what it is’ – our trash, our helplessness – but ‘it is what it isn’t,/it is what it will be.’

Stewart always sees two sides of the coin; in The Poet’s Freedom she confronts the human impulse to destroy one’s sandcastles; The Ruins Lesson explores our fascination with the depredations of time. Bramble reminds us that our melodies reflect our maladies. But then our maladies are assuaged by the elements themselves, our true and lasting progenitors:

Rain on the grass,rain on the sea,salt to sweet,sweet to salt,salt to sweet.

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number.