Window Poetics

I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numerous of Windows -
Superior - for Doors -

What's a window, to a poet? For Emily Dickinson, above, the act of writing is compared to being inside a structure. From inside the houses of their respective genres, Dickinson's poet and her prose writer need openings through which to observe the world they write about. The quantity and quality of openings to the world (numerous windows, superior doors) lend poetry its edge over prose. Their presence elevates it from simply prose's opposite — poetry — to something else, to "possibility." This is how we usually consider the writer's position: windows frame the scene the writer observes. The pensive author sits at the window, pen in hand, gazing at the world outside. Through windows come narrative, action, drama, history, the outside world, alternative worlds. From windows, poets yearn, long, catch glimpses of. We imagine that windows show the poet what's coming or passing, what the weather is. They let in light at certain slants. A window is great for serial poems: what's outside my living room window, for example, is familiar and constant, except for small miraculous changes — one day last week the yard was full of cardinals. Another day, it was full of bluebirds.

But I'm interested in other ways of thinking about poets and windows beyond the model of the poet at a window, looking out and writing about what they see. Here's a different window poem, by Alice Notley. It's just called "Poem":

St. Mark's Place caught at night in hot summer,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now.
Tompkins Square Park would be midnight green but only hot.
I look through the screens from my 3rd floor apartment
As if I could see something.
Or as if the bricks and concrete were enough themselves
To be seen and found beautiful.
And who will know the desolation of St. Mark's Place
With Alice Notley's name forgotten and
This night never having been?

What interests me about this poem — besides the mysterious appearance of Ezra Pound's line from Cathay1 — is that the importance of the window isn't quite the view of the outside world it offers. This is not a particularly great window. Notley looks "as if [she] could see something," which probably means that she can't. Instead of a transparent opening through which the poet or someone in the poem looks, this window is a stubbornly opaque presence. Not only does the poem foreground the material presence of the window — Notley looks "through the screens" — but it opens onto materials only, onto a shape made of "bricks and concrete." The poem ends with the classic trope of the poet fretting over future memorialization, acknowledging that both her name and the desolate night she perceives will eventually be lost to time. Yet before this, the poem has bestowed a certain aesthetic significance on even this drabbest of scenes: "as if the bricks and concrete were enough themselves," through those screens, "to be seen and found beautiful." To my mind this gesture represents a wistful counter-recognition, a counter-balance to the oblivion the end of the poem describes. "Seen and found beautiful," this material shape of screens and bricks and concrete may outlast even Alice Notley's name, standing beyond the night she describes. In this sense, the poet becomes the form of her window.

Thinking about the poet-as-window, rather than the poet-as-looking-through-a-window, takes us back what to we're doing in this forum: considering poetry's social forms. The model of the looking poet, the inside poet, places the poet at a remove from the world, behind glass, inevitably at least initially distanced. Or to put it another way: the poet is a site of subjectivity, separated from the world by the mediating window. Of course there's an alternative here, which is the poet as window-breaker, the poet whose imagination, gaze, or rock shatters what keeps them from the world. A poetics of smashing: "I shall create! If not a note, a hole. / If not an overture, a desecration," says Gwendolyn Brooks's "Boy Breaking Glass," a poem that ends in a "hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun." Here too, though, the poet-self is the locus of looking subjectivity, both eye on the world and agent of their own contact with the world into which they rupture or venture.

But I want to keep thinking about the poet as window-form, which means moving away from the poet as "I" or as any kind of subject at all, looking or breaking. In so doing, I'm following the lead of Sarah Dowling, who in her essay "Supine, Prone, Precarious" (on the work of Bhanu Kapil), "responds to a variety of contentions that the pressures of the present have put the 'I' in a precarious position." Rather than focus on the "I" in its various imputed states of historical or present distress, though, Dowling "shift[s] attention away from the 'I' [. . .] to attend more carefully to the material that remains after its undoing."2 This is not a move away from identity or history; instead, it is an alternative response to identity and history, one that does not necessarily grant poetry superior knowledge or standing — any privileged seat before the window on the world, as it were. It is a re-orientation towards a material poetics, a poetics of social form, the poet or poem as body or shape or thing in the world. For Dowling, via Kapil, this form is a body lying down.

Like bodies, windows are also materially — and unevenly — situated in the social world. Not everyone has a window. There are windowless cells. There are windowless offices. There are expensive windows and cheap windows. There are picture windows and bay windows, barred windows, boarded windows. Broken windows. There's clean glass, dirty glass, fogged glass, old rippling glass. In her essay "Emily Dickinson and The Poetics of Glass," Xiao Situ discusses how Dickinson's "contact with the world, and her understanding of her own relation to it, was framed and mediated by the windows of her home."3 Situ cites Isobel Armstrong on nineteenth-century glass:

To look through glass in the mid-nineteenth century was most likely to look through and by means of the breath of an unknown artisan.  The congealed residues of somebody else's breath remained in the window, decanter, and wineglass, traces of the workman's body in the common bottle, annealed in the substance he worked.4

Situ's work underscores that looking through a window is not the same as just looking. It's framed looking, shaped looking, looking through — and the frame, shape, and not-quite-transparent material of that looking might itself be enough to constitute the poem's form. Rather than the linguistic record produced by an observing subjectivity, we could think of the poem as a material substance, a formed slice of the world marked out through the congealed product of a poet's breath and thought and labor of craft. Rather than telling about what an "I" is seeing through transparent glass, through the window's mediation, this kind of window-poem asks us to look at the window and the poem themselves as object of social and aesthetic contemplation, as a social form. Or, to re-write Notley slightly: as if the panes and frames and sills and bars and whatever else are "enough themselves / To be seen and found beautiful."

As an example, John Ashbery's "The Instruction Manual" both has a window and a poet who sits at it, observing, and is a kind of window. The poem opens with a poet who sits "looking out of a window of the building," not wanting to write the instruction manual he is supposed to write: "I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace / And envy them — they are so far away from me!" In the rest of the poem, the unhappy manual writer daydreams his way to "dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers! / City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!" In one sense this poet is an imaginative window-breaker, moving across the spatial and economic barriers to encounter the city and its denizens. On the other, though, the poem is also a record of the separation between the poet and that world: it ends with the speaker's wistful but inevitable return to the task at hand. And even the figures the speaker does encounter are a little stock, perhaps even cartoonish — the poem contains a sense of dreamy surreality, as if what is seen is suspected to be only imagined after all, as if this window is not quite working correctly. We could call this the social form of Ashbery's window. The window of an urban U.S. publishing house — the form produced by a New York poet in it — will only admit some things.

Or there's Jenny Xie's 2017 collection, Eye Level. While there are some windows in here — like Notley, Xie looks at one point through a "window [facing] stone and glass" ("Square Cells") — Xie herself is a kind of window. Eye Level both shapes and questions the poetic self and what that self sees — or the window, and the view it gives. The first poem in the collection, "Rootless," is a window in motion:

Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.

I mean, no three —
See, counting's hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet

over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.

[ . . . ]

I sponge off the eyes, no worse for wear.
My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns.

At present, on this sleeper train, there's nowhere to arrive.
Me? I'm just here in my traveler's clothes, trying on each passing town for
size.

In the midst of all this motion and visual difficulty, there's a convergence of elements into what I want to think of as a window-form. We have the looking speaker, exploring questions of identity — Xie was born in China and raised in the U.S — in this and other poems; we have the reciprocal shaping of the poet-shaped aperture for looking and the view seen; and we have the form of the poem itself, concisely parsed, tight lines often in couplets or tercets. Countering the traveling speaker's sense of "rootlessness" is the firm material, shaped presence of this window opening onto places and selves.

A final example, which not a poem but an actual window. In a 1967 interview, Gwendolyn Brooks describes the scene of her writing:

In my twenties when I wrote a good deal of my better-known poetry I lived on 63^rd Street — at 623 East 63^rd Street — and there was a good deal of life in the raw all about me. [. . .] I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side then on the other. There was my material.5

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this corner window. Two windows are different, for a poet, from one. These windows are surrounded by the passing street life on multiple sides. There's something in this, in turn, that reminds me of Brooks's own verse, which is both tidy and wild. It's framed in its rhymes and tercets and also it turns these, overturns these, vis-à-vis a multifaceted and living and present history. Neither window nor form nor poet as her window / form is removed from the world. Instead, as the social form of her window, the poet is out in it.

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Lindsay Turner is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads (Prelude, 2018) and the translator of several volumes of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy. She currently teaches at Furman University and will join the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver as an assistant professor starting in fall 2019.

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