Minute Effulgencies: Language as Gesture and the Spires of Form

To [the poet], the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity . . . .

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

The pleasure I find in Blackmur's Language as Gesture has to do with its intimation of throughness as a poetic sensorium and critical disposition. Throughness materializes for Blackmur in the form of a ductility, in light of which a poem seems capable of experiencing itself in a way that is bracingly not immaterial. In such moments, Blackmur imagines poetry that can be felt, for instance, like a draft of air, brightly stained like oil on a sheet, or absorbing as the tear of ripping fabric. More to the point, Blackmur imagines poetry that is present to its own feeling. The sensibility that Blackmur maps (and in turn models) is most Emersonian in its conjuring of throughness as a practice of what Branka Arsic calls "better hands,"¹ an alternative to the unhandsome relationality of objects "that slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest."² More generally, Blackmur's writing is guided by an Emersonian investment in criticism as poetic expression. It is perhaps not coincidental, then, that Language as Gesture most directly pays homage to Emerson in an allusion to one of Emerson's poems. In the collection's eponymous introductory essay, Blackmur writes,

A good spire is weightless, springing, an arrow aimed at the Almighty, carry ing, in its gesture, the whole church with it. Though it may have been as much made out of formula as the bad spire, it differs in that the formula has somehow seized enough life to become form again; which is one way of saying what gesture does in art—it is what happens to a form when it becomes identical with its subject. It does this, in the case of a spire, by giving the sense of movement, of aspiration, as a tree or a shrub gives the sense of pro cess or growth, or as a beautiful room gives the effect of extending space rather than enclosing it.³

Blackmur's spires can't help but conjure the six-line poetic motto with which Emerson prefaces his 1836 essay "Nature." Emerson's poem enigmatically moves from the horizontality of its opening circles, "a subtle chain of countless rings," to the verticality of the final line's spiral:

A subtle chain of countless ringsThe next unto the farthest brings;The eye reads omens where it goes,And speaks all languages the rose;And, striving to be man, the wormMounts through all the spires of form.

(5)

What's at stake, for this occult little poem, in recalibrating interest from x-to y-axis? If the "countless rings" give rise to the "spires of form," it is on account of a shift in axis that likewise converts the poem's two-dimensional surface—that which can be sequentially traveled or read—into the three-dimensional shape of a spire that can be not only climbed but climbed through. The poem's shift in axes is a spiral motion; more precisely, the spiral sea-change it weathers is only somewhat distinguishable from the form we follow. Emerson tells us that "the ruin or blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opake" (47). Emerson's poem is a lesson in the negotiation of axes—and like the striving of man and worm, our thinking acquires a spiral shape in its realization of the final line. This is the ethical and aesthetic work of the poet, as Emerson describes the latter in "Idealism," the essay's sixth section. "By a few strokes [the poet] delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary...