To smoke a cigarette, according to the scholar of French literature Richard Klein, is “to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience.” Qui fume prie was the motto of an early French journal devoted to smoking: Who smokes, prays. Or, the smoke break is sacred. This brief span of “heightened attention,” as Klein notes in his witty aesthetic study “Cigarettes Are Sublime” (1993), is much like a poem: a space or an act that permits a little sneaky transcendence. Like prayer and spells and drugs, poetry creates the conditions for “an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.”
I’m tempted to say this outsideness is the only point of poetry: the weird thrill of saying what you’d never say in regular life. The poem grants us access to a plane where we can be someone else. The poem pleads temporary insanity.
Take “Fish,” by the ever-ecstatic D.H. Lawrence. It’s one of the most unbelievable poems I’ve ever read: 100-plus lines that attempt to describe the world of fish-life to a fish. “FISH, oh Fish,/So little matters!” it begins. “Food, and fear, and joie de vivre,/Without love.” He goes on and on, in pity and admiration (“Quelle joie de vivre/Dans l’eau!” “To be a fish!”) until finally he admits, “But I, I only wonder/And don’t know./I don’t know fishes.”
Some poems feel this way in their entirety, ecstatic outbursts or tantrums. Kenneth Patchen’s short poem “I Feel Drunk All the Time” begins with a Lawrentian exclamation: “Jesus, it’s beautiful!/Great mother of big apples, it is a pretty/World!” These are its central, anthemic lines: “I don’t know how the rest of you feel,/But I feel drunk all the time.” We can read this as an utterance of the poem itself, not of a poet or speaker from outside the poem. The poem feels drunk all the time, because these 11 lines are all the time there is, as far as the poem is concerned. The poem is a closed universe, set off in cosmic parentheses.
Other poems have a moment of rupture — an ecstatic break with “reality” (as if the poem was ever reality). We can feel when the drugs of the poem kick in. These moments occur repeatedly in THE BLUE EYE OF EARTH (University of Pittsburgh Press, 109 pp., paperback, $20), Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s new collection, her eighth. “Birds of Darkness Inhabit the Night, Stars on Their Foreheads” starts in an only mildly elevated, conversational-for-poetry register: “Honestly, some nights/I’m tired. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Grief/is such work.” Over three pages, it gets looser-tongued: “Bought/some crap for dinner. After, I walked outside/and watched the slow stars rise … I saw they were bigger than the mind.”
Gradually, she approaches what mystics in the 17th century called ecstasy: “a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things,” per Etymonline. “I will never have my life,” Goldberg writes. “A few billion years/from now, they say, as our sun dies we’ll have to.” This voice is still reasonably calm — which makes the shock of the closing lines all the more ecstatic: “Anyone/who has reason to believe we’ll still be here by then please/stick a knife through your sorry heart. And talk to me.” It’s as though the poem had to get drunk enough to say this, to make this violently desperate command. (Stab yourself! Please be my friend!)
There’s a genre of song that I think of as “hysterical,” songs with sudden escalation into wildly disproportionate emotion. Hysteria of course is both gendered and pejorative, but, importantly, I mean it as a compliment. “She’s Not There,” by the Zombies, is canonically hysterical: The smoky, dopey atmosphere of the verse gives way to a shrill, insistent, panicky chorus, and the final repetition of the title line (with drums bang-bang-banging behind it) is ecstatically, orgasmically cathartic. Never mind that she’s not there.
Leaps through repetition are key in the ecstatic — incantation as an instrument of change. “War is its own peace. The sea its own shore,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes, in a new (and so far uncollected) poem called “MMXXVI.” This first line is 10 words, 10 syllables. The fifth line repeats the pattern, but using only two words: “The night, the night, the night, the night, the night.” The dark-mode version of a line from Mallarmé (“The Blue! The Blue! The Blue! The Blue!”), it conjures night by force through repetition, a ghost in the mirror. A spell repeats to stupefy the body, to open a parenthesis, a portal to the parenthetical mode. As in sleep, or a pipe dream (a phrase I heard for years before I realized the pipe contains opium), our consciousness is altered by the poem, and new rules pertain.
New truths are possible. “Does lying/in a poem feel like being honest?” Christian Wessels asks in his recent debut, WHO FOLLOW THE GLEAM (University of Massachusetts Press, 97 pp., paperback, $18.95). (The title comes from Tennyson’s poem in the voice of Merlin — “I am Merlin/Who follow The Gleam.”) These poems are near to spells. In “Sympathetic Magic From the Black Forest,” he writes:
I wheeze and out comes death, I wheeze and into the air
an imitation of myself takes shape; here are his hands, here his hair.
A little later in the same poem, he adds: “This arm replicates the arm attached/to my body.” But what is “this arm,” to whom does it belong? There’s a double of the I inside the poem — two characters, cast in this woodland scene. But the poem itself is also a double. To speak a poem onto the page creates a second, doppelgänger self. The poem projects a self outside itself, like the figure that floats up from the bed in a classic illustration of an out-of-body experience. It’s both (double double); there are lots of extra arms in the forest, including mine. “This voice is an imitation of me, body and voice./When I speak, your mouth moves.” We both say the spell. This is how reading and writing a poem are alike, are both forms of ecstasy — the poem takes anyone outside themselves.
The philosopher Richard Boothby, in his Lacanian read on religion, “Embracing the Void” (2022), describes the Homeric world as one in which there were “no things, only forces.” Greek polytheism, in Boothby’s view, allowed people to explain almost everything in terms of the capricious will of gods. Eros, heroism, rage, talent. Weather was gods, war was gods, partying was gods — “the potency of wine, sufficient to rouse the wildest spasms of dancing as well as all manner of mad, self-destructive passions, was obviously divine.”
Poetry is obviously divine. (I say this as one who has never smoked, and possibly never prayed.) Inside the poem we are outside routine time, our boring rule-bound bodies and their prosaic speech. Goldberg writes in the poem “X”:
Coyotes shriek just over there — break out in death laughter. I
find it comforting. I really do. I like the company
of something we will never understand.
Over there is where the poem’s fumes can take us, out of the realm of the “unbearably sane.”
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