The Difference Is Spreading

Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems

Al Filreis, Anna Strong Safford

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812299717
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Since its inception in 2012, the hugely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has engaged some 415, 000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson up to some of today's freshest and most experimental written and spoken verse. In The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have handed the microphone over to the poets themselves, by inviting fifty of them to select and comment upon a poem by another writer.The approaches taken are various, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. Yet a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, along with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the importance to poetry of community, of socioaesthetic networks and lines of connection, and of expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. Through the curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford express their belief that the poems that are most challenging and most dynamic are those that are open—the writings, that is, that ask their readers to participate in making their meaning. Poetry happens when a reader and a poet come in contact with one another, when the reader, whether celebrated poet or novice, is invited to do interpretive work—for without that convergence, poetry is inert.

1 Divya Victor

on Walt Whitman, Canto 11 from “Song of Myself”

(1855)

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly,

Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,

She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?

Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,

Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray.

---

“Song of Myself” is a coyly corseted title for the billowing expanse of themes encompassed in the poem’s 52 cantos. Neither are the cantos strictly “songs” or merely mellifluous signification set to rhythmic music, nor are these cantos merely expressions of an individual. To “sing” one’s self as a “separate person” is to also “utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.”¹ The individual is a crowd; she contains “multitudes.”² The cantos ask us to imagine a broad stave of possibilities for what a “song” might include: the speaking voice; the brook-like rush of a giggle; the voice clasped in the throat of a voyeur; the marching anthems of war; the percussive strikes of oratory; the keeling wail; the sharp gasps of orgasm.

The eleventh canto of the long poem’s fifty-two parts (which seem to count the number of weeks in any year) is especially interested in the silences and sounds of pleasure in a quotidian context. It sings itself through plain and affable speech, descriptive diction, and a full arc of action—from exposition to denouement—in eight symmetrical strophes that describe a woman watching a group of men bathing in a river, in a reversal of a more traditional structure of the dyadic gaze.

The first and last strophes are three lines each and hug six unrhymed couplets, which carry the narrative action. The opening strophe offers us exposition, describing a scene of “twenty-eight young men” frolicking in a river, watched by a twenty-eight-year-old woman, standing “lonesome.” Each anaphoristic line of this strophe repeats “Twenty-eight” as a significant number, alluding to the menstrual cycle, the lunar cycle, or the Egyptian goddess Isis’s embrace of her lover Osiris’s twenty-eight dismembered parts, linking pleasure to the restoration of life to the body. This number also documents how desire has pervaded this woman’s entire life—“Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.” Whitman’s suggestion here decouples pleasure from sexuality and reproduction, and conjugates it with ontology.

The last line of the first strophe is almost twice as long as the first, and the speaker’s attention flirts with a portrait of the woman, outlining her first only by superficial markers of class, and then slowly teases out her interiority. The second strophe develops exposition further with a couplet describing the voyeur: she is rich (“owns the fine house”); she stands apart (“by the rise of the bank”); she is well dressed; she is hidden (“aft the blinds”). She can see while remaining unseen, and she deliberates “Which of the young men does she like the best?” Her invisibility allows for discernment, thought. Whitman’s speaker draws out her internal dialogue, allowing the reader to espy its contents in this private moment.

Like the second strophe, the third opens with a rhetorical question: “Where are you off to, lady? for I see you.” Both the line break and the autonomously answered questions allow the reader and the speaker to gaze upon the woman as she gazes upon the bathers. We are no longer merely observing a dyad: we are participating in a triangle of relations. We are watching her watch them—are we jealous? Glad? Turned on?

When the poem gathers us to itself, the fourth strophe escalates action. The woman “splash[es] in the water” with the bathers even though she “stay[s] stock still in [her] room.” In the sibilant exuberance of this strophe, the woman has slipped out and slid into a different scene, becoming a participant-voyeur—someone who can “stay stock still” in one space and also participate, through acts of fantasy, in another.

The fifth strophe complicates the action: “Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather.” The strophe affixes the reader’s position to the woman’s previous location—in her room—even as her eyes rove. She is transformed by her desire, splits herself in two, projects herself to be with bathers. Her desire makes her ebullient; she multiplies herself. She is “dancing and laughing” rather than hidden, clothed, and “stock still.” Her desire makes her visible to herself and exposes her to us. She is, however, invisible to the bathers, “but she saw them and loved them.” Like the speaker in Canto 13 (“I behold the picturesque giant and love him”) and in Canto 15 (“I love him, though I do not know him;”), Whitman’s voyeurs can love (and appropriate) by looking while remaining invisible. Yet, Canto 11 offers a female embodiment for the voyeurism that is at the heart of human transactions in “Song of Myself.” There is a proliferation here—twenty-eight bathers and a twenty-ninth and a reader and a speaker. A crowd is gathering around the wet, warm, and shimmering scene. It is an erotic community building around homosocial conviviality, a splash into the selfsame, an othering frisson in an element as primordial as life itself.

Through the voyeur ventriloquized by the speaker, the reader watches on, rapt: “The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair, / Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.” The rivulets are causeways, transporting a shared gaze, from top to toe. Touch and sight are paired like “unseen hand[s]” that “pass’d all over their bodies” moving “tremblingly” downward. By the time the hands and the reader reach downward to the final strophe, the action is excited, escalating a climax of someone the men cannot see or know, someone who “puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch.” Without their own knowledge they “souse with spray” the dipping and arched body, the undulation and ecstasy of the twenty-ninth bather, who is both among them and “soused,” drenched, wet in her own room. The “puff and decline” of her body, in orgasm, is a song in the chorus of “myself”—a democracy of pleasure between self and self. Perhaps she contains multiples rather than multitudes. We see her and know her like this. The poem’s denouement, its uncurling, depends on the young men’s ignorance of this fact. They are oblivious, pregnant and floating, their “white bellies” confronting the sun with the gravid androg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Divya Victor: on Walt Whitman, Canto 11 from “Song of Myself”(1855)
• 2. Rae Armantrout: on Emily Dickinson, “The Brain—is Wider than the Sky” (c. 1862)
• 3. Ron Silliman: on Gertrude Stein, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass” (1914)
• 4. Bob Perelman: on Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” (1914)
• 5. Rachel Blau DuPlessis: on H.D., “Sea Rose” (1916)
• 6. Yosuke Tanaka: on Ezra Pound, “The Encounter” (1916)
• 7. Christian Bök: on Marcel Duchamp and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, “Fountain” (1917)
• 8. Tonya Foster: on Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” (1919)
• 9. Lytle Shaw: on Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man” (1921)
• 10. Julia Bloch: on William Carlos Williams, “The rose is obsolete” (1923)
• 11. Jennifer Scappettone: on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, “XRAY” (1924)
• 12. Craig Dworkin: on Bob Brown, from GEMS (1931)
• 13. Rodrigo Toscano: on Genevieve Taggard, “Interior” (1935)
• 14. Mark Nowak: on Ruth Lechlitner, “Lines for an Abortionist’s Office” (1936)
• 15. Robert Fitterman: on Mina Loy, “The Song of the Nightingale Is Like the Scent of Syringa” (c. 1944)
• 16. Davy Knittle: on Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955)
• 17. Jake Marmer: on Bob Kaufman, from “Jail Poems” (1960)
• 18. Danny Snelson: on Jackson Mac Low, “Call me Ishmael” (1960)
• 19. Fred Wah: on Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man” (1962)
• 20. Marjorie Perloff: on Frank O’Hara, “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)” (1964)
• 21. Aldon Lynn Nielsen: on Langston Hughes, “Dinner Guest: Me” (1965)
• 22. Sina Queyras: on Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” (1965)
• 23. Herman Beavers: on Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass” (1967)
• 24. Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué: on Barbara Guest, “20” (1968)
• 25. Tyrone Williams: on Amiri Baraka, “Incident” (1969)
• 26. Sarah Dowling: on Lorine Niedecker, “Foreclosure” (1970)
• 27. Michael Davidson: on Larry Eigner, “birds the” (1970)
• 28. Christie Williamson: on Tom Leonard, “Jist Ti Let Yi No” (c. 1974)
• 29. Laynie Browne: on Bernadette Mayer, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1976)
• 30. Charles Bernstein: on Lyn Hejinian, from My Life (1980)
• 31. Al Filreis: on Cid Corman, “It isnt for want” (1982)
• 32. Adam Fitzgerald: on John Ashbery, “Just Walking Around” (1984)
• 33. Stephen Collis: on Susan Howe, from My Emily Dickinson (1985)
• 34. Nick Montfort: on Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence” (1988)
• 35. Eileen Myles: on James Schuyler, “Six Something” (1990)
• 36. Simone White: on Erica Hunt, “the voice of no” (1996)
• 37. Mónica de la Torre: on Erica Baum, from Card Catalogues (1997)
• 38. erica kaufman: on Joan Retallack, “Not a Cage” (1998)
• 39. Lyn Hejinian: on Lydia Davis, “A Mown Lawn” (2001)
• 40. Elizabeth Willis: on Rae Armantrout, “The Way” (2001)
• 41. Sharon Mesmer: on Michael Magee, from “Pledge” (2001)
• 42. Rachel Zolf: on Eileen Myles, “Snakes” (2001)
• 43. Edwin Torres: on Anne Waldman, “Rogue State” (2002)
• 44. Amber Rose Johnson: on Harryette Mullen, “Elliptical” (2002)
• 45. Jena Osman: on Caroline Bergvall, “VIA” (2003)
• 46. Imaad Majeed: on Charles Bernstein, “In a Restless World Like This Is” (2004)
• 47. Bernadette Mayer: on Laynie Browne, “Sonnet 123” (2007)
• 48. Douglas Kearney: on Tracie Morris, “Africa(n)” (2008)
• 49. Tracie Morris: on Jayne Cortez, “She Got He Got” (2010)
• 50. Erica Hunt: on Evie Shockley, “a one-act play” (2017)
• List of Contributors
• Index