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46 Chris Forhan “Without Although,Without Because”: Syntax and Buried Memory A decade ago, I was growing tired of my poems. They felt suspiciously tidy and knowing—even, at their worst, smug. Perhaps their ironies were necessary responses to life’s confounding mysteries and paradoxes, or perhaps they were just cowardly feints and diversions.My poems were elegant little boxes that shut with a click, but I began to wonder whether something was suffocating inside them. Then, in the summer of 2002, I wrote, quite quickly, a short poem called “Once.” I liked it. It felt genuine, alive, and meaningfully strange; it felt weighty with feeling,but its meanings remained,happily,just beyond my grasp.I noticed that the poem’s syntax was spare, stripped down; the poem spoke in short, declarative sentences, even fragments. There was only one conjunction, a coordinating one: but. There was no subordinating conjunction—no because or while or since or unless. There was no conjunctive adverb—no however, no meanwhile, no nevertheless. I was surprised that the poem referred to my father, who took his own life when I was fourteen and who had been a troubling mystery for years before that. It had been a long time since I’d written so directly about him. Then I wrote another poem, this time consciously avoiding subordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs. My father showed up again. I wrote another poem; my father was in that one, too. Why was the man no longer lying silent? The new syntax I was employing was acting as a pickaxe, striking the hard ground of my consciousness and causing experiences, long buried but still alive, to bubble to the surface. “It’s about time,” they seemed to be saying. This was “Without Although, Without Because” 47 exhilarating and terrifying: exhilarating because suddenly I was confronted by subjects I felt an urgency to write about, to interrogate and honor in poems, and terrifying because I did not understand the force that made me need to write about them—terrifying, too, because I knew now that these griefs and tumults were still within me, that I had managed to live for years without being fully conscious of them. But now I was conscious of them—simply because I had stopped saying because. It makes sense that this change of syntax would lure such feelings out of hiding. The conjunctions I was avoiding signal the operations of the rational mind; they communicate judgment, discernment, a comprehension of the relationships among things. They are words we use after the fact, when we have figured something out. In forging relationships between things (because of this, that; after that, this), they imply a kind of narrative, a sequence of events in time; the absence of such conjunctions allows for utterances in which time seems to be arrested and in which multiple—even contradictory—experiences can exist simultaneously, without explanation or resolution. What is free to come rushing into a sentence, then, is not understanding but bewilderment, astonishment, anxiety, grief, and love. Those are feelings that marked my childhood and my adolescence in the aftermath of my father’s death. I had allowed them to lie sleeping. As I examine Black Leapt In, the book that resulted from this altered way of writing, I find only a few subordinating conjunctions—an if here, a when there. In a poem about teenage boys being at a loss for what to do with themselves, and about themselves, I mention that they are “without / although, without because.” The syntax itself had become a theme of the poems. In a way, of course, none of this is news. Hemingway understood the power of simple syntax, of conjunctions no more nuanced (or, sometimes, no less strange) in their implications than and. Modernist poetry as a whole is, largely, a poetry of fragments, of pieces whose authenticity is born of the artist not forcing them to fit together. But it became news to me when such fragments rose up and spoke from my own memory. For years, I have told my students to allow a poem its meaningful mystery and complexity and to do so by repressing for as long as possible the urge to decide what their poem is about. I have told them to trust the language of the poem to help them discover that. But always I have been thinking about images, rhythms, sounds. Now I think, as well, about syntax, which led me to sense not just what...

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