Poetry, White Space, and the Letters of the Alphabet

I've been thinking, lately, about those elements of poetry we tend to ignore: the actual letters used to write the words, and the white space that surrounds a poem on the page or screen.  I wrote a little something about the first of these some months ago, and another piece, on poetry and white space, has just appeared in the most recent issue of Plume.

The piece on letters and alphabets appeared in Ilanot Review.  Here's a sample:

In the kingdom of poetry, the letters, like many immigrants, tried hard not to draw attention to themselves.  They were, in a sense, invisible, at least most of the time, and were resented if they asserted themselves—a situation that continues even now. The other day, for example, I spoke to my publisher, Marc, who complained about another writer he published. “He’s impossible!” Marc said, “he spends hours asking us to try new fonts, or to make them a point larger, a half a point smaller. It’s driving me mad!” Letters aren’t supposed to be that important in a poem. Indeed, while a poem translated into a different language is only the same poem in some qualified, limited sense, a poem in a different font, a different typeface, a poem written out in cursive script or printed on a page, is always considered to be the same poem. The letters do the work of making the poem appear, but they, themselves, are unimportant, interchangeable.  They’re like the seamstresses whose nimble fingers make possible the fashion collections we see on the runway, people we pay no attention to whatsoever as we clap at the name of Ralph Lauren or Vera Wang. 

Letters. Can we imagine poetry without them? Even the spoken word poets draft with letters. But we usually see right past the letters, ignore their shapes, let them be invisible.  Humble and happy just to be in such glamorous company, the letters don’t complain. They ask for little, demand no attention. 

Except for when they do.

The whole essay can be found here.

Here's a sample of the companion piece to the essay on letters, the essay on white space or, perhaps more properly, on the semiotics of white space:

White space comes first, for the poet and the reader.  I don’t mean anything as interesting as the idea that poetry exists primarily in the space of whiteness, conceived as a racial identity, as a field dominated (at least in these United States) by white people, white norms, the white past, and white structures of power and privilege.  That’s certainly the topic for an essay, and an essay more substantial than this one—a topic for a book, really, or more: a topic for a field of academic study.  If it were a book, perhaps it could begin with a meditation on how very easy it is for someone like me, ensconced in the citadel of my whiteness, to brush the question of poetry and white identity aside and proceed to another, more literal idea of whiteness: the white space beyond the margins of the text, the white space that physically surrounds the poem. 

There may well still be poets who still compose the way Wordsworth did—without paper, without pencil or keyboard, trudging the gravel trails of Cumberland, “Scattering to the heedless winds/ The vocal raptures of fresh poesy.” I imagine they feel as proud of this ancient practice as any writer of beautiful longhand feels about the letters he self-consciously seals into envelopes and hauls to the post office—letters unreadable to the young, whose thumbs type faster, and with more immediate consequence, than anyone can wield a pen to write in cursive script.  All honor to these holdouts and their ancient ways.  But the poets I know all begin with the white space of the blank Word document or the white space of the unmarked Moleskine page.  White space comes first for them, and comes first, too, for the reader of poetry—or for the reader who, seeing by the presence of white space around the lines on the page that she is confronting a poem turns hastily away.  It is by the space surrounding the lines, after all—by the margin of whiteness—that we know at first glance, even from a distance, that the words before us constitute a poem.

The whole essay (quite short) can be found here. 

Poetry and the Alphabet

Years ago, Ron Silliman wrote an essay called "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," where he claimed that popular fiction sought to make language disappear, putting words together so innocuously that they disappeared, letting a kind of movie play in the head of the viewer (his example for this, if I recall correctly, was a novelization of the movie Jaws).  There's something to this line of thinking, and I tried to push it a bit further in an essay on the use of letters (alphabetical letters, not epistolary ones) in poetry. It's called "Immigrants and Kings: The Letter in the Empire of Poetry." Here's how it starts:

The writing of letters is an art as old as any other, and came to us, if Berossus, Priest of Marduk in Babylon is to be believed, when Oannes, a great fish with the head and feet of a man emerged, speaking, from the Erythraean Sea. Oannes taught the ignorant people of Chaldea not only how to write, but how to build houses, found temples, compose laws, collect fruits, and distinguish between the seeds of many different plants.

As venerable as writing was in the tale told by Berossus, it is more venerable still as described in the pages of the Sefer Yetzirah, the first great work of Jewish esoterism. Reading this ancient work we find that God created nothing—not mankind, not the seraphim, neither the earth nor the heavens nor seas—until he first created the alphabet. “Twenty-two letters did he engrave and carve,” we read, “he weighed them and moved them around into different combinations. Through them, he created the soul of every living being and the soul of every word.” The letters, fixed on a wheel of 231 gateways, precede and give birth to all else in creation.

We don’t know exactly when poetry began, though we have, from a few surviving totems and similar relics, a sense of when symbolic thinking came about—some 70,000 years ago—and we can surmise that poetry, in the form of ritual incantations, funeral rites, and tales of tribal origins, emerged around the same time. Writing, even in its most primitive forms, came about many thousands of years later, after the agricultural revolution created a need for contracts and tally-sheets for merchants in grain and cattle. Only later still did writing become sophisticated enough to record poetry.

All of this is by way of saying that letters come late to the great and ancient kingdom of poetry, a kingdom that accepted them begrudgingly. 

The whole essay is in the Ilanot Review, and you can read it online here.