In Your Year: Niedecker, Celan, and Jos Charles’ “a Year & other poems”
Jos Charles | a Year & other poems | Milkweed Editions | 2022 | 96 Pages
In the last month of 1934, Lorine Niedecker was gluing a poem onto a disposable pocket calendar. It was a Christmas present for her friend, the poet Louis Zukofsky—27 pages long and about 4 by 5 inches, each page of the Favorite Sunlit Road Calendar marks two weeks of the coming year. Small stanzas written by Niedecker were pasted over the calendar’s original kitschy quotes of encouragement, the original just barely visible under her handwriting. “Wade all life / backwards to its / source which / runs too far / ahead,” the first page of January reads. The calendar-book, which she titled “Next Year Or I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous,” remains among the collection of Zukofsky’s papers.
It’s a lovely, if difficult, text, and characteristic of Niedecker’s early work: surreal, musical, and excited by the ways that commonplace or ordinary material might come into contact with the objects and figures of lyric poetry: “All night, / all night, / and what is / it on a post- / card.” I called the pages stanzas, but it’s unclear what precise relation they have to each other. One gets the sense that Zukofsky was meant to keep the calendar around throughout 1935, ripping off pages as the weeks passed, his friend Lorine’s strange and private language there with him as the year clicked past. Perhaps he did.
Even so far from its context, “Next Year” can still be exciting to us because of how it occupies the material it’s made with, and what that kind of occupation might have to say about the way we read both poems and calendars. What’s at stake is time, friendship, legibility, change: “The trouble / is: this stirs / a real mean- / ing.” “The calendar,” Jenny Penberthy wrote in a preface to the poem’s publication in 1997, “is under siege.”
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The long poem which makes up most of Jos Charles’ latest book, a Year & other poems, is similarly obsessed with lyric poetry’s capacities to put the calendar, and the time that it seeks to order, into crisis. “A Year” is divided into twelve sections for every month, each is made up of five short lyrics. What those lyrics stand in for, or don’t, becomes one of the book’s animating tensions—the months are named, but what they contain doesn’t readily map onto the standard units of weeks, days, or hours. The poetic materials of the year in question remain, as lyrics, momentary, but slant. Flashes of interiority, memory, and attention bring the space of this particular time in the speaker’s life into relation with the living that goes on happening on either side of its arbitrary limits:
The hour has an understory
I was a child pulling grass in the understory
dissembling until we met
It’s probably true that this is a principle of lyric poetry more broadly: the yoking of the everyday to that which charges it with significance, the world as it is to the world as it might be otherwise. Like Niedecker’s calendar, Charles’ third collection invokes this principle at the level of structure, and the result is a weird daybook, constantly shuttling between the temporality that passes “ceasefirelessly” under each page and the numerous kinds of relation that create alternative temporalities, to which poetry gives testament and refuge.
Grief is one kind of relation. a Year & other poems is an account of a period shot through with loss: dead and dying beloveds appear and scatter in “a garland / of changing names,” wildfires and floods loom, all alongside and entangled with the precarities of trans life under capitalism: debt, illness, unemployment, and the interminable pressing in of violence.
Earth
calendric ready to close
heedable in
again
damned your hand living
through it
When the Earth is “heedable,” it’s experienced as closing in, an anxious-making surround that damns the hand of the beloved to live through time’s passing—that is, to be mortal. A moment is an amount of time lined with loss to which we, by living, both expose ourselves and attend. And this quality of attention does something back to time. The year, in Charles’ hands, stretches and folds in like an accordion while she sifts through its erosions for a form: “not for wont of understanding,” she writes in “January,” “I place notes to turn to after this.” If the fullness of a moment were genuinely cared for and undergone, how could understanding ever become habit? That fullness—that presence—is essentially mystery; “not clarity but the shadow of something clear.”
Charles’ previous collection, feeld, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, deployed a hybridization of pre-standardized archaic English and contemporary idiom in order to stage speculative questions of language’s capacity to account for the lives of trans people. “Tonite,” one poem from that book goes, “i wuld luv 2 rite the mothe inn the guarden / 2 greeve it / & as a mater off forme / did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” feeld reads like a record of a search for a usable language, one the size of its subjects, which might shelter rather than mute transness, mutability, and unfixedness—that which remains in excess of the violent organization of the world as such. “Its / good / it meens we can change.” a Year & other poems extends and renews that search even as it moves beyond the particulars of feeld’s language and shape. Where the latter reached for strangeness on the surfaces of language (spellings, names, puns), a Year primarily estranges through a reorganization of syntax—one of the primary ways that the English language structures an experience of time.
The last poem in “March” begins:
I had not
begun to think past
testament of want
I didn’t want
I believed sentences knew their end
The whole book, I think, attests to this. There’s scant punctuation throughout a Year & other poems, and few demarcations of when or where a sentence grammatically ends. Subjects and objects fall out of a standard relation to each other; one scene or runs up onto the next. The sense is not of deferred or stopped time, but speed, continuous time. You could say opened. There’s a refusal, syntactically, to order (to, quite literally, sentence) the ongoing present into anything more discrete than the poem itself. And that this is something the speaker comes to after first pronouncing (and the failure is implicit) their not-wanting! To deny or repress desire, how is that like thinking the sentence will “know” its own limits, that the sentence has limits in the first place? Here's one of the book’s shortest lyrics, from earlier in “March”:
Tuesday first time I saw deer a corpse of rot orange burnt amberous
of inside leaping under I saw thru canopies of collapsing light
The length of these lines suspend the reader in a breathless rush of remembering. That memory, before we participate in it, is put under pressure at the poem’s very first gesture: “Tuesday first time” lays the ordinary (and abstracted) time of the named days of a week up against the experiential time of firstness, of event. How would the poem be different if she, instead, began “Tuesday I saw deer a corpse” or “First time I saw deer a corpse”? Tuesday takes on a nearness, almost deictic, which tethers “first time” to that day, heightening its status as an event by how recently it seems to have happened. Three words into the poem, the reader is being shown something about the excessive quality of this memory’s flash, even before arriving at the staggering ecstatic run “burnt amberous / of inside leaping under.” There, after first making some indeterminate number of “deer” and then maybe killing one of them to get “a corpse,” I don’t know how to make certain words behave definitively as prepositions, adjectives, or verbs. The clauses blur and fade. How many sentences are in this poem? What, precisely, is a sentence? What sort of time is accounted for there? I’m reminded of a passage in Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism, where she says that desire “marks the limit where self-enclosure dissolves.” Punctuation is calendric, imposed; in a Year & other poems, it has the unreal texture of an enclosure, the opposite of mystery.
In the midst of this unknowing, I become aware of my participation in the poem’s work; it is a warmth, almost, that I am invited into because of the way this poet renders her senses, the sort of difficulty that ask you to stand nearer to it. The words stay exposed, not locked into a readymade semantic shape. I’m aware, sharply, that I can attach “leaping” to any number of words in the poem—even the deer, who I might briefly reanimate in its having-once-leapt. Whereas some syntactical constructions in English language poetry can use this sort of dilation to hold off clarity until the end of a sentence, Charles doesn’t resolve or subordinate “inside leaping under” to any one meaning or epiphany. The poem repeats the encountering “I saw,” deepening the gaze to move “thru” the scene where the color-field of the deer’s corpse becomes “canopies of collapsing light”: an image which first offers us a shelter, then makes it fall. Nothing stays still, nothing is untangled. No simile or metaphor comes to compare or explain. The corpse and the collapsing light remain equivalently at hand and opaque, thrumming in their difference, even as they touch. It is a sense of the world as underway—a peculiar quality of poetic speech that Paul Celan called being “en route … headed toward. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality.”
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Celan is a repeating figure in Charles’ work. He is thanked in the acknowledgements of feeld and two poems in a Year are explicitly marked ‘after’ him. One of those latter two, from “December,” directly addresses him at the place of his suicide:
It it not yet noon in the port
where I live Like any a poem
that is after you Paul at Pont Mirabeau
The poem is not only “after” Celan insofar it comes after him (bearing his influence) but it is also “after” him in the sense of chasing, going after him. The depth of the correspondence between Celan’s writing and Charles’ poetry is, I think, thrilling and beyond the scope of this essay. But I’m interested in holding up what resonates between a Year & other poems and Celan’s idea of “ein ansprechbares Du,” an approachable you, an addressable you—literally, to-speakable. If syntax is how the poems in a Year enable presence in an open and moving temporality, apostrophe is often what they are becoming present for.
Heard a pool deflate
Monday you would be
twenty-eight Open
door electric fan in it
The poems are almost entirely anchored to an I, but dozens of “you” occur throughout the book, and even more common is an intimate “we” that feels mostly to be the size of the speaker and their beloveds, their addressees: “You point a hand A flood could happen / there We walk all day to / jobs shops.” In the sort of condensed lyric poetry that Charles writes, the force of an addressable second person orients a poem’s motion. It gives an occasion—a usefulness, even—to form and language, much in the same way that commonplace objects, when given as gifts, become charged with meaning and sentiment.
Who such addressable presences are changes, in both the long sequence and the nine other poems. Sometimes “my beloved dead ones” are spoken to, and in others it seems to be a friend, or a part of the self, or a lover. Sometimes a proper name will appear, as Celan’s does above, or here in “May”:
Having fled the garden the inevitable
envelopes
you Marie clung
a colt to the other side of a fence
But more often than not, the you is not named. Unable to track a continuity in the midst of shifting proper names and the plurality of particular dead beloveds, I feel like each beloved is on the edge of nameable existence altogether, receding as the speaker attempts (and fails) to fasten them to a moment. “Like any a poem that is after you.” Please be here with me, the poems keep and keep petitioning. “I put you into a poem / You climbed the giantest tree.” Every time this happens, the poem and whatever instant it intends to make or stand in for ends, and that fastening is started over again. The beloved has to be re-encountered, remade, and each poem, by calling out, becomes “a window left open / enough for you / to appear.”
That those things which are spoken to cannot or do not speak back is characteristic of apostrophe. Because “a Year” is not occasioned by a single loss but rather by the amassing of several losses, the threat of being unmade—by grief, by violence, by climate disaster—structures the relationship between I and you in every instance. The shape of each poem, too, full of caesuras and hard enjambments, looks eroded by the page, recalling the floods of Niedecker’s later work. Even where Charles strains against this threat by staging an address to someone who might be living or physically near the speaker, that other’s existence remains provisional.
You
touch long
irretrievable
beside you again
me again
In this poem from “August,” the syntax enacts and extends the distance that the touch has to cross, delaying the appearance of the I and staining that distance with “irretrievable,” ambivalently conferring a loss onto both the speaker and the beloved. But as the poem continues, the impossibility of retrieval, of rescue, underwrites something material:
in the dark of our certainty
I hold like a stone &
even you I turn
my head to a thousand possible things
gone It is all I hold
now & spring
Whatever kind of touch it is that passes between this speaker and her loved one, whether fantasized or in some way real to the poem’s demonstration of a present, it’s thrown into a kind of instability—another of “a thousand possible things / gone.” Yet it is still that which the speaker turns their head to, still clutches, stonelike. Deferring impossibility as it comes to make the beloved truly gone, truly irretrievable, becomes a matter of holding on to the addressable: it is spring, and I can still speak to you.
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“Celan,” Joanna Klink writes, “is always working to secure the existence of the thing he is addressing as he addresses it … the address calls up into life—fills out, makes concrete—whatever is lost, estranged, or helplessly removed from the self.”
What apostrophe dreams of is that time when the beloved answers. More than answers: “the limit where self-enclosure dissolves.” If this were to be fulfilled, the poem could go no further. Who would speak it? Time would have to stop. And, as Kaveh Akbar says in his blurb for a Year & other poems, “Time is the beloved.” That time continues to pass, that we move in it and are moved by it, is the condition of the sort of relations that constitute a reality, a world. It is also the condition of those relations—that world—coming to some end.
“It is falling / ash in Santa Ana falling in your year” the penultimate page of “a Year” begins. The wildfires and floods that climate change exacerbates and extends (specifically in Southern California, where Charles lives and where the poems are broadly set) recur throughout the collection. They come to stand in for, though are not reducible to, another form of the precarity on which so much of the collection hinges. How does climate change’s attenuation of a sense of future come to press on our living? What sort of limit is it that the speaker experiences watching ash fall “irrecoverably / in the evening,” holding hands with her beloved? If some of the work of Charles’ apostrophe is to try, however briefly, to secure the existence of a beloved on the verge of disappearance, that work is done over and against this other kind of vanishing. The earth offers no transcendence, no substitutions in the cycles of mourning the lost: no substitutions that can last.
“But the world is / gone,” Charles writes, quoting a late poem of Celan’s. His version, as translated by Pierre Joris: “The world is gone, I have to carry you.” And hers:
you who I
swear saw
gone round the tidepools yesterday at noon But the world is
gone But the world is
a lake the shape of
a lake
At the point that it reaches toward an other, language has to open, by which I mean become vulnerable to, time. a Year & other poems is so staggering precisely because of how relentless Charles is in her commitment to reaching despite and because of, in equal measure, loss. After all, as much as it famously heals, time hurts us. Poetry is a way of loving time. How these poems love it is suffused with the desire to be with and among others more—a desire that, if attended to, requires going to the limits of speech to imagine the world otherwise. Only a great love poet could write “In the street / they are starting fires It warms even us.”