Intervening Absence

Carrie Olivia Adams

Susan Howe asks in The Birth-Mark, “Is a poetics of intervening absence an oxymoron?” It would be wrong to say that these poems were written as a response to her question, for the majority were already breathing when I came across it while writing my master’s thesis, an extremely flawed, but earnest, conversation between myself, Howe, and Maurice Blanchot. Instead, it seemed an inquiry from a sympathetic space. The same vibrating flux of knowledge and denial. Of touch and ether. Of voyeuristic empathy. Research and method. Of resigned impatience.

I have a visual handicap. There are those who rotate objects in their mind. I cannot picture my kitchen table. Or any table. If I tried I might see the curve of the leg. I might see the grain of the wood. Or even just a knot in its grain. But I could not hold the picture still. My mind flickers so. From this, comes a hands-on precision. There were years when I dreamed only in words.

I cannot write without speaking aloud. Even now, I have recited the above paragraphs four times to myself, making edits here and there as I go. This is inconvenient and embarrassing in the office, though co-workers adjust. But for poems, it means they are a conversation, or a prayer, or a letter. They are addressed to you. And I know exactly how they feel on my tongue and chatter across the drum of my ear.

I fear their tiny spaces might appear solipsistic. But I do not know how to explain that the poems began somewhere outside. The faces of the immigrant workers in the back of a pick-up truck one night on my commute home in Georgia. The woman with the stroller at the subway station whom I saw cry nearly every weekend in the winter when the air was thick with the smell of chocolate from the factory. I think of Heidegger: “In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured.” Though I cannot count myself in the ranks of Heidegger’s ideal like Hölderlin, the speaker in these poems originates in that night, searching for a way to see in the darkness.

I fear I could tell you the things I love and you might look to find but never find them in the poems. You would likely not see how my fascination with a scene in The Graduate—where Mrs. Robinson is rain-soaked and dark and captured in great contrast against a very white hallway wall—might become a shadow or an angle of an image or a mood. I love reference books. I have been known to linger over the dictionary taking notes. I get excited in butcher shops when I hold that paper-wrapped parcel of veal shanks in my hand. There is a mysterious process of condensation—a gathering of observation, sensation, even supposed fact.