The Anxiety of Interpretation: On Niina Pollari's "Path of Totality"

Niina Pollari | Path of Totality | Soft Skull Press | 2022 | 144 Pages

Sentences that might represent a life-altering pain, the ongoing experience of that pain, are not the tragedy itself. Does tragedy, without generalization, come close to describing the moment and its afterlife through subjects and predicates; if yes, does one read their own tragedy? The sentences that might represent this memory are sometimes lineated, sometimes grouped together in stanzas, and never incomplete. The sentences that represent this moment do not represent anything, really; they transform real life to an utterly new experience, manifested on the page as a poem. Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality, her second collection of poems, the transcription of before and after one moment—what precedes and what follows the loss of a child—instructs both maker and reader how to move through it as a book, these poems which transformatively represent nothing: how to remember a subject and its predicate. 

Early, a long poem titled “How to Read this Poem” might also be titled “How to Write this Poem.” The poet gives a rule to those who encounter these sentences, herself included, in the first line: “In this poem we don’t remember the past.” It’s not that we simply do not remember, of course, but that we do not remember the past: to what moment do we turn our attention? While one might suspect the answer to be another moment in time, we are immediately required to break our rule: a past is all we can remember, so we remember the past as transmogrified, as something like and unlike itself. “The past is like dark water / Around an algae bloom / It holds the whole thing together,” and just as the past holds the whole thing together—what surrounds the figurative bloom—the past itself is held together by our attention. By refusing to remember the past, one turns to metaphor to see what’s past as yet another iteration of itself. Just as the past holds the whole thing together, the poem is held together by the impression that more than one person—the person who transcribes this language in the first place—moves along with it: “And we don’t notice / I have a hard time saying we in poems / Since I don’t think I can tell you anything.” The poet has been we and you, then the reader is we and you alongside the poet. In the admission that the poet can’t tell us anything, one acknowledges there is no story to tell: there is only the record of the past. 

The lines of “How to Read” are largely organized according to grammatical phrases and short sentences—a moderate pacing which, in this case, seems to increasingly pressurize how exactly the poem articulates its rules for reading—but some poems here are not lineated at all. At moments when lineation is removed from Path of Totality, the poems tend toward memory without the figurative bloom, without the past transmogrified:  

I once wrote a poem about learning to trust. It was a complete fiction; I don’t trust anyone. But now I attend a support group. We pass around cards or flowers. I see everyone’s face and I look at their relic. 

A poem which remembers the writing of a poem—was that poem lineated, does it matter? These sentences from “Halloween” likewise conduct our sense of a strategically generalizing fiction. One hears the personal pronoun “it” and looks backward to its referent. What here is a complete fiction? Is it the poem, or the act of learning how to trust as described in the imaginary poem’s narrative, or the experience of trust itself? In the turning of “but now,” the referent is made physical in cards and flowers, in the relics which come to stand for memory. Objects cannot be fictional in “Halloween,” the holiday of fictionalizing, yet following the physical manifestation of their support group trust, the poet is given more to carry: “If I see something, does that mean I am trusted with the information?” If we are trusted with the memories of one’s life, do we recognize that as information, or perhaps: if we see something—if we transcribe our pasts—is there information at all? A poem does not carry with its language data to be learned, though in our transcription of the past—as Path of Totality moves us to observe—one finds the fact of real life without interpretation, without transformation: “It’s midday, Halloween. Thirteen days ago I saw the smallest hand.” The fact of real life which cannot be interpreted, only observed: thirteen days ago, this person saw the smallest hand, and tomorrow it will have been fourteen days. 

Do the patterns and pulse of memory—time passing, the next day it will have been fifteen—change how fact impresses itself on grief, on the loss of a child? Midway through this collection, the poem “Facts and Memories” begins with a distinction: 

All I have are facts and memories. Facts are things that cannot be changed, and memories are impressions of a time when I did not yet know my own voice contorted like this. 

Facts are: her weight and length.

Memories are: My loneliness.

Here the categories of fact and memory are physical, and being physical they are made public: Path of Totality, in its self-reflexive distinction between types of language on the page, refuses to interpret itself while grappling with the anxiety of being understood correctly, or understood at all. The next sentence continues, “After the fact, I invent a narrative. I see the story, its rising action, its fall. We all do this.” The parts of a story, the rising action and fall, give shape to the hostilities and similarities of fact and memory for the person making the story, and in making the story, in writing the poem, we are likewise asked to hold that making. Just as the poet instructs at the beginning of her collection in “How to Read this Poem,” elsewhere, in “Self Portrait as New York Geography,” she again addresses how we might be reading, interpreting, the story that she’s making: “Sorry this metaphor is so on the nose / And if you’re still following well thanks” In real time, in the time it takes to read the poem, the metaphor comes to impact us less than the apology for the metaphor: the moment after the fact when one looks at what they’ve made and realizes it does not represent, precisely, the facts and memories. 

A “path of totality” refers to the long trail on Earth where one can observe a total solar eclipse: the path of the Moon’s shadow. When positioned in this narrow path, one can see what they’ve intended to see; when positioned elsewhere, viewers will only experience a partial eclipse, only a fraction of the experience. Like the ritual spectatorship of a solar eclipse, these poems invite their readership to watch—while self-consciously navigating the fear that the narrative, what the poems are “about,” somehow gets made into novelty: “Pregnancy is a public ritual, made public the body’s betrayal of intent by growing. By participating in it, I had already indicated interest in witnessing myself as a mother; the death of my baby was a humiliation of my desire.” The ways one might intellectualize memory and the facts of life, Pollari’s work shows us, risks self-destruction with the face of self-interpretation. The experience of reading Path of Totality, of paying attention to its formal movements, is almost like the experience of writing a poem in the first place: one might briefly think about meaning, about the story, only to realize that, as a poem, the language on the page is much larger, much more effective, than meaning. The categories of fact and memory combine in their dissimilarities to make a new experience for readers and maker alike; Pollari asks in “Ursa Minor” and then answers: 

How can I tell anybody what I mean? 

That I didn’t know I would have to love you like this. 

That I didn’t know we had to die to meet.