Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple

Curves to the Apple by Rosmarie Waldrop, 196pp, $16.95

New Directions

A few days I ago brought in a prose poem from Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle to show a group of my students. I was not sure what the response would be. All too often, poetry which is in some way ‘experimental’ will meet with polite, but sceptical comments or even with downright hostility. (Excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons are still capable almost 100 years on from their publication of provoking outrage from one or two of my students.) I was pleasantly surprised to see students’ faces light up when they read the following:

I badly wanted a story of my own. As if there were proof in spelling. But what if my experience were the kind of snow that does not accumulate? A piling of instants that does not amount to a dimension? What if wandering within my own limits I came back naked, with features too faint for the mirror, unequal to the demands of the night? In the long run I could not deceive appearances: Days and nights were added without adding up. Nothing to recount in bed before falling asleep. Even memory was not usable, a landscape hillocky with gravitation but without monuments, it did not hold the eye, did not hinder its glide toward the horizon where the prose of the world gives way to the smooth functioning of fear. If the wheel so barely touches the ground the speed must be enormous. (From Accelerating Frame in Lawn of Excluded Middle.)

One student pointed out that there are so many hooks here that a reader can get hold of. It would be difficult for any person with some degree of sensitivity and imagination not to be able to identify emotionally with lines such as ‘I badly wanted a story of my own’; ‘I came back naked, with features too faint for the mirror’; or ‘Even memory was not usable, a landscape hillocky with gravitation but without monuments’. There is nothing ‘difficult’ about this writing: the imagery and sentence rhythms (the prose poems are wonderful read out loud) seduce the reader at every turn.

Curves to the Apple is a trilogy of prose poems that were previously published in three separate volumes: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities. In her Introduction, Waldrop states that ‘the poems of this trilogy try to navigate conflicting, but inextricable, claims of body and mind, feeling and logic.’ I know of no other writer who manages it so well, who is able in her work to enact philosophy.

The Reproduction of Profiles, the first book in the trilogy, relies heavily on an incisive, mischievous and subversive use of Wittgenstein’s philosophical notebooks. Waldrop draws out the poetry of Wittgenstein’s texts, which has been always there glittering just below the surface, but which we as readers do not attend to, partly because our expectation is to read Wittgenstein as a philosopher, not as a poet. When I came back to reading Philosophical Investigations after reading Waldrop, I found I could no longer read it in the same way. Waldrop had turned the texts topsy-turvy into a kind of Alice Through the Looking Glass universe. It was almost as if sprites had come during the night, sprinkled some fairy dust and changed the look and order of the world irrevocably.

The manner in which philosophy becomes ‘real’ in the writing of Waldrop reminds me, among other philosophers and writers, of Sartre, especially Nausea. When Roquentin, the hero of Nausea becomes aware of the flimsiness of what he has hitherto known as ‘reality’, the result is quite terrifying. Familiar everyday objects are no longer solid. The boundary between what is inside and what is outside starts to dissolve. The same sense of loss of self and identity is at the heart of much of Waldrop’s work. The result can be disturbing. Here are a few extracts:

‘I thought I would die if my name didn’t touch me’.

‘Words took on meanings that made them hard to use in daylight’.

‘I was not sure I had understood. I was naked enough to disappear in shop windows.’

‘I tried to understand the mystery of names by staring into the mirror and repeating mine over and over’.

Yet the result is also curiously liberating. If the ‘I’ - as Nietzsche pointed out a few decades before Wittgenstein – is the result of a grammatical construction, then we are also free to explore beyond the limits of ‘unquestioned subjectivity and identity’ (Introduction). We can travel with Waldrop on a fragmented but exciting journey. ‘Everything,’ as she puts it, ‘is on the verge of happening.’

One of the marvellous aspects of Rosmarie Waldrop’s work is that it can be read at so many different levels across the borders of philosophy and poetry, in that country defined by Waldrop as ‘the excluded middle’, which creates a meeting point between the mind and the body, ‘between true and false, black and white’. The different ‘I’s that speak here may be ‘grammatical’ like the lyrical ‘I’, or they may belong to a man and a woman, or to a male and female within the same self, or they may be different aspects of the same voice. The highly intellectual quality of the prose poems is inextricably bound up with primitive and powerful emotions: fear, sadness, anger, a feeling of loss, a sense of betrayal… Yet the emotions are skilfully undermined by a continual playfulness:

The black hulks of the tanks began to sharpen in the cold dawn light, though when you leaned against the railing I could smell your hair, which ended in a clean round line on your neck, as was the fashion that year. I had always resented how nimble your neck became whenever you met a woman, regardless of rain falling outside or other calamities.

Indeed, a humour is present throughout. For example: ‘Way down the deserted street, I thought I saw a bus which, with luck, might get me out of this sentence…’ Or: ‘The body is useful. I can send it on errands while I stay in bed and pull the blue blanket up to my neck. Once I coaxed it to get married.’ Or: ‘You think you see but are only running your finger through pubic hair.’

Quite often a prose poem will start with a statement or opinion and end with an evocative, oddly moving image: ‘It is best to stop as soon as you hear a word in a language you don’t know […] As I looked up, a boy approached me and offered to carry my bag because it was raining. Wet laundry flapped in the wind.’ It is this inseparable combination of philosophy and poetry which works so brilliantly and uniquely in this trilogy.

This brief review in no way does justice to the rich complexity of Rosmarie Waldrop’s work. For that a full-scale study is needed. In the meantime, one can do no better than to start reading Curves to the Apple.