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2 7 R T h e s u r v i v a l o f s t r a n g e s o u n d s F o r m s o f L i f e i n L y r i c P o e t r y K E N N E T H G R O S S The poem holds its ground on its own margin. . . . The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. – Paul Celan The poem invites us to listen to a world which may not hear us, either because it is asleep, withdrawn from us, or because it is shouting too loudly, or too full of other noises – including the sound of things that might once have been poems but have turned into empty babble or dead letters. The poem shapes a drama of listening, the listening for a new word, or for an old word transformed . It finds for readers a new ear as much as a new tongue, a speaking ear that reshapes their hearing, invites them to listen di√erently to the world. It invites a hearing that can baΔe as well as clarify and charm, provoke forgetting as much as remembering. The young Elizabeth Bishop writes in a letter to a scholar who has inquired about her work: ‘‘Have you ever noticed how you can learn more about other people – more about how they feel, how it would feel to be them – by hearing them cough or make one of those inner noises, than by watching them for hours? Sometimes if 2 8 G R O S S Y another person hiccups, particularly if you haven’t been paying much attention to him, why do you get a sudden sensation as if you were inside him – you know how he feels in the little aspects he never mentions, aspects which are, really, indescribable to another person and must be realized by that kind of intuition. Do you know what I am driving at? Well . . . that’s what I quite often want to get into poetry.’’ Bishop opts for a modest yet mysteriously urgent analogy, the emblem of a kind of poetry in which there is a secret that at once reveals and conceals itself. The sound and the hearing of the sound are bound together in a leap of mind, a sense of knowing what another does not or cannot speak about. Here an ‘‘inward,’’ nonsignifying , opaque, even indecorous noise becomes something essential , almost a gesture, a place to abide for a moment. It provokes a knowledge both of another person and of the hearer’s own powers of intuition. Each finds out the other. There is a sound that betrays us, betrays to others a face or impulse ordinarily turned away from the world. That noise might be a gasp, a stammer, a sigh, a muttered curse, a cry of pleasure or pain. Indeed, I often think of this ‘‘inward’’ noise as Bishop’s version of the essential ‘‘O’’ of lyric address, poetry’s ambition to call out to invisible or hidden powers. The sound of the poem holds on to us, holds us open to its strangeness , including its openness to being taken up and read by others. Though she speaks of ‘‘other people,’’ Bishop’s words suggest an image of the poet listening to herself, turning her ear on her own interior noises in a kind of self-auscultation, finding herself surprised by what emerges from her own embodied unconscious, a sound both close and far away, trivial and urgent at once. (Remember that sudden ‘‘oh! of pain’’ described in Bishop’s ‘‘In the Waiting Room,’’ a sound that comes from inside the dentist’s o≈ce but also from inside her childhood self.) You can also say of certain poems that they aspire to let us hear the cough or hiccup of being itself, the murmur of things ordinarily hidden within language and history. As in Bishop’s example, the noise of the poem tells you as much about the mind of the person who hears and memorializes that noise – as when Wordsworth...

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