The Poem as Photosensitive Film: Stav Poleg

Today on the blog, Stav Poleg discusses her debut collection, The City, published at the end of this month. Use code MARCHBOOKS for 20% off the collection, and register for the launch on April 6th with Lisa Kelly here.

The City by Stav Poleg, £9.59 with code MARCHBOOKS

What really comes before our mind when we understand a word? — Isn’t it something like a picture? Can’t it be a picture?

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation 139

 As a writer, visual images and colour are very important to me. I need to see the scenes I create, however surreal they might turn out to be: all the different blues and yellows, the various patterns and waves, the lights and shades. Is it raining on that particular street corner in the third stanza? Is the main character wearing two shades of red? Is that an upturned blue umbrella hovering above the penultimate line, in which the dark-iris sea gradually turns lighter and clearer just before we turn to the next page? Perhaps I’m trying to be a painter, a light designer, a theatre maker. Words can do just that: create a scene. I suspect each writer has a different way of wrestling with words in the process of writing. For me, working on a poem, I imagine it as an installation, into which the reader can enter and walk from one image to the next.

My debut poetry collection, The City, is divided into three sections, although I’d prefer to consider them as three rooms. Open the book and think of it as a sort of an exhibition, a space to stroll around between street corners and changing scenes, each room leading you into a different set of images. Indeed, the first section— Camera— evokes a chamber as well as the promise of pictures. I like the word camera because it is full of possibilities. It is a recording device with which we simultaneously go back and forth— capture passing moments as well as creating new images. It is also a room, a light proof chamber— concrete or invisible— fitted with an aperture and a photosensitive film, ever receptive to image and colour. In other words, for me, camera is language: the lens as well as the echo chamber, the recording device as well as the invisible studio in which we practice and work. It is also a mirror, however insufficient the reflected image.

A poem I go back to time and again is John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” It is a poem in which nothing stands still, least of all your own thoughts, which flit from one image to the next at full speed, trying to keep up with the pace of the images turning into new ideas and scenes. I find the process of reading it exhausting and stimulating at the same time; a bit like going for a long-distance run in the spiralling streets of a poem. I’m always captivated by the way the mirror in the poem keeps taking on different qualities, changing into a painting, a dream, a globe. Perhaps that mirror is also language. The poem creates a connection between words and mirror— a link made via etymological reflection:

The words are only speculation

(From the Latin speculum: mirror)

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Language as mirror: all we can do is observe it, observe ourselves and the ways we change in it, take pictures, create new images and try to conduct that impossible yet irresistible task: separate what we see in the mirror from the mirror itself; the image from the camera. Reading Ashbery’s Self Portrait I always find it fascinating that the poem echoes Wittgenstein’s ideas on image and word— the way we operate and are trapped in the very picture we have created. 

A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and 

language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115

Frustrating as it is that we can’t go outside the ever-expanding chamber of language, how beautiful is the process of operating in that space, of testing possibilities within its invisible confines. For some elusive reason, we constantly rely on visual metaphors as our vehicle for thought, and as a writer who somewhat delusionally imagines herself as a painter, may I say— what a beautiful process that is. Trapped in the constraints of language, at least we can experiment with images, and play.

Poetry has a great deal in common with visual art, not only in the way both artforms rely heavily on visual images but also in the way they engage with the audience. Think of an exhibition of paintings in relation to a collection of poems: just as each painting is a single work of art, each poem in a poetry collection often stands entirely on its own, rather bewildered by its inclusion with so many other poems. Furthermore, there is a sense of openness in the way an art exhibition— or a poetry collection— approaches its audience: since there is usually no strict narrative between the paintings or the poems, you— the poetry reader, the gallerygoer— are free to choose your own direction. Or, rather, as we’re talking about art and language— you are free to choose your own way of getting lost. My collection’s three sections – Camera, Another City, After-Party— wholeheartedly invite you to do just that.

And yet, hang on— is poetry so close to visual art, after all? As a writer, it is not merely the image that I’m interested in, but the way the image changes throughout the poem. After all, what is writing a poem if not the creation of a movement, however brief— a movement that inevitably invites some kind of change? Poetry— like theatre, music, film— is a temporal artform invested in change: it is not only created but perceived in motion. We understand it as we travel alongside it, constantly back and forth. Each new note reflects on the previous, altering its meaning as well as heading towards a new direction. There are two sestinas in The City, and although different, they are each connected to the world of film. I’m not entirely sure how this happened but I suspect there is something about the form of the sestina that calls for the creation of short, abrupt scenes. You start to write something, but soon enough you need to go back, and back again, to the same six words. There is only so far you can progress in terms of a plot. And so, you have to create a different kind of story, one that relies heavily on flashbacks, short scenes and sudden changes of direction.

The sestina wrestles with you, it doesn’t let you go, it says: hang on, you mentioned the word camera, didn’t you? Could you please go back to it, because surely you can experiment with it a little bit more? And so, you go back to it, stanza after stanza, in descending circles, seven times, although it feels much more than this— I’d say at least nine— and each time you come back to the same word, you have to wrestle with it and invent something completely new— yet again— something that you’ve never tried before. By the time you’ve revisited it for the fifth time you feel dizzy and exhausted. It is a bit like learning a new language— you enjoy it, sure, but you are physically drained. Language is physical, and if there is a poetic form that reinforces this it is the sestina.

For me, writing is a form of studying; of entering my invisible studio in which I can find the space to learn new languages or texts, whether it’s Homer’s Odyssey, the story of creation in Genesis, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Plato’s Symposium. Reading the Odyssey, I was fascinated by the character of Athena— the way she leads Odysseus home by changing herself into different images and characters. I wanted to explore the links between the practice of acting and the process of homecoming, between loss and site-specific transformations, between performance and grief. Some of this exploration turned into the poem-sequence “Athena Bande Dessinée.”

 
I’ve always found it fascinating that in the story of creation in Genesis, the single thing God does not create is language. Of course, the world in Genesis is created with the utterance of words and I wanted to explore this contradiction, with the help of Plato’s Ideas, some physics and the early Wittgenstein. The poem “Saturday” is the result of this study. It is the late Wittgenstein, though, that I’ve found and am still finding completely arresting. Reading the Philosophical Investigations felt to me like one of those pivotal moments— a book I found inspiring and deeply related to the practice of poetry writing. I’ve discussed some of it in my introduction to New Poetries VIII. The Philosophical Investigation reads to me like a poetry manual. There are so many visual metaphors in it, and as a writer, I often feel a strong urge to test some of the propositions in practice, in the camera of my poems. And how practical poetry can be alongside Wittgenstein! Some of the poems in the collection came into being during this process.

So here is The City, a metropolis made up of light-proof chambers fixed with apertures, electronic sensors and photosensitive films. There are countless moons and streetlights in the collection, many shades of yellows and blues, some rivers, a few roses, theatre stages, train stations, occasional flying machines. I hope you enjoy strolling between the different images and scenes, finding or losing your direction, a camera in your pocket or held up in the air, taking new pictures as you head from one poem to the next.

Watch Stav Poleg introduce her collection and read