The Poem as Time Machine

Once, at an auction in upstate New York, I watched two men carry a mahogany box with a crank handle onto the lawn. One of the men turned the lever until he was satisfied and then put a large black disk into the box and opened the front of the box so the little doors, spread wide, made the whole contraption seem as though it might fly away. But instead, a chorus of voices, recorded many years before, scratched and muted by all that intervening time and space, drifted out over the crowd.

Before anyone in our group knew what I was doing, I had signaled my way to ownership and the two men were approaching us carrying the Victrola, its record still turning above their heads.

In hearing the phonograph I had not forgotten life in the jet age; in fact, the simultaneity of jets and handwound phonographs had only amplified my amazement with both inventions. A few months before, I had been in Iowa; then in hours I was in New York. The morning of the auction I had spoken by telephone with my parents on the West Coast. That night I would watch a TV news reporter in Egypt, another in Israel. Still, all these inventions for transcending time and distance had not kept me from the original magic of the phonograph music. I did not exclaim: “See how they used to do it,” but rather: “Voices out of a flat disk, human voices singing out of a mahogany box!” I was like an astronaut dropped suddenly into my own moment.

I remember the day my father came home from the neighbors’ in 1949 and said they had a radio with talking pictures. It was his way of explaining television to us in terms of what he knew: radio. Several years later I would sit on the rug with half a dozen neighborhood kids at the house down the block, watching Flash Gordon and advertisements for Buster Brown shoes.

Such early space-travel films may have marked my first encounter with the idea of time machines, those phone booths with the capacity to transpose one into encounters with Napoleon or to propel one ahead into dilemmas on distant planets. I was six or seven years old and already leading a double life as an imagined horse disguised as a young girl. I had long brown hair and a young friend named Koene Rasanen who suffered from the same delusions, which were, oddly, tolerated by our parents. There were several ridges behind my house which our horse-selves delighted in. Some of my freest moments still exist in those images of myself standing silhouetted on the highest knoll, pawing with one foot, tossing my thick pony mane and neighing for my friend with such authority that a real horse pastured down the block began to answer me.

To be called to the house to run errands or peel potatoes for dinner was to suffer a temporary malfunction of the time machine. Adults were those creatures who had suffered permanent malfunctions. If you neighed at them, they put it down to a sexual phase, or took it as a practical cue to shop for a horse.

When I got my first horse, at age ten, it was strangely unsatisfying. Already that exchange of the real object for the imagined embodiment had begun to disinherit me. I hadn’t wanted a horse to ride, I had wanted to be a horse, and had, in the nearest human proximity, managed it.

Flash Gordon never became a horse by stepping into a time machine, but he could choose any one of countless masquerades at crucial moments in history or in the futures he hoped to outsmart. The whole idea of past or future being accessible at the push of a button seemed so natural to me as a child that I have been waiting for science to catch up to the idea ever since.

In the meantime, there have been a few wonderful gimmicks—Polaroid cameras and, lately, Polaroid movie cameras: instruments built to surprise the moment by reproducing it as close to its occurrence as possible, thereby extending the past as present, a spectator’s present at that. So we have Mother tying the bow in Polly’s hair. And if we like, we can run the film backward and untie Polly’s hair. We have then an ongoing past as a spectator’s present.

With the country in a state of constant mobility, we depend more than ever on telephones to keep friends who have been left behind at the last outpost. We can be in immediate touch. Two disparate people living in the “now” may hook up across the miles, talking their pasts into the present up to that point where the pie is burning in the oven or where someone has knocked at the door. We may hurtle the body through space into exotic places on jets. It costs a lot not to be where you’re expected to be . . . that trip you took to get away from the familiar faces, those phone calls you charged to make up for having forgotten those people who are truly living too far away to be held constantly in mind. Already we are shaking ghosts like shaking hands, meeting ourselves as has-beens where we stand.

I can still see Mark Strand shuffling the poems on his knees in a classroom in Seattle, Washington, in 1970 and saying in that ironic, ghost-ship voice of his: “Time, that’s the only problem.”

Octavio Paz defined the poet’s time as “living for each day; and living it, simultaneously, in two contradictory ways: as if it were endless and as if it would end right now.” Stanley Kunitz has written a poem entitled “Change,” which gives this dual sense of impermanence and the desire to be eternal. He also includes memory as it comments upon the present moment, often painfully.

Always, as a maker of poems, I have been witness to the images, have been led by the poem as it speaks into and with itself and opens out of its contradictions to engage the reader. But the reader is also the maker of the poem as it lives again in his consciousness, his needs, his reception, and even his denials. The poem is in a state of perpetual formation and disintegration. It is not at the mercy of pure subjectivity, but, as Ortega y Gasset would say, it is “the intersection of the different points of view.” This, then, brings about a succession of interpretations of which no single one, even that of the poet, is the definitive one. In this way the poem enters and becomes time. It becomes, as Paz phrases it, “the space that is energy itself, not a container but an engenderer, a catalytic arena open on all sides to the past, on all sides to the future.”

This conception of time as an atmosphere, as the “now” of the poem, which Paz calls “the Historical Now” or “the Archetypal Now,” is what I would like to call “the point of all possibilities.” By this I mean the point at which anything that has happened to me, or any past that I can encourage to enrich my own vision, is allowed to intersect with a present moment, as in a creation, as in a poem. And its regrets or expectations or promises or failures or any supposition I can bring to it may give significance to this moment that is the language moving in and out of my life and my life as it meets and enters the lives of others.

“Poems,” says Paz, “search for the you.” In America we begin to ask who will colonize the “I,” that island of cannibals, of separations, of endings and be-alls, of my turn, of better-than-you, of privilege and sweatof-the-brow rectitude, of I own this and you own that, homeland of the civilized heartbreak where, if you leave, I shall get along anyway, I shall do perfectly well without you. There are others and others and you will not be one of them, where if your coat were drowning, I would not save it. No, the “I” without its search for the “you”—either by implication as the “I” in each of us or in a direct reaching toward the other—this “I,” whose reaching in is not at the same time a reaching out, is like a character in a novel who is running on empty. We cannot long be interested in its roadside reveries, its monologues with the vast interiors. Even if you are speaking to a “you” that will not listen, it is better than no “you” at all. This includes the “you” that is the self, of course, but as “other.” We remember Yeats speaking endlessly to Maud Gonne; Emily Dickinson talking to Death as if to a suitor; Hamlet confiding in a skull; Colette, who, when her mother died, saw no reason to stop writing letters to her.

The time of the “I” is expanded when it considers the “you,” and perhaps it is in the time that the poem makes that we can find courage enough for the risks yet to be taken in our “walkingaround” lives. The poem not only makes time, it is time; it is made of time as is the bee who dances out the directions that are and are not the map of a place, the remembering of a way back to the flower feast that belongs to others, to the hive, and to the very moment that way is given.

I have, in a poem, called a man back from the dead if he has not answered me fully in life. Yeats, in “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead,” even rushes ahead of the fact to gain the right urgency in which he might be granted forgiveness.

The time of the poem is not linear, is not the time of “this happened, then this, then this,” though I may speak in that way until I am followed and the language leads me out of its use into its possibilities. No one is buried so deeply in the past that he may not enter the moment of the poem, the point of all possibilities where the words give breath, in a re-imagining, so we know what was as what it is now and what it can become. If the language of commerce is a parade, then the language of the poem is that of a hive where one may be stung into recognition by words that have the power to create images strong enough to change our own lives as we imagine and live them.

The poet between poems is like a child called into the house to peel potatoes for supper. The time of the house is enigma to him. He cannot wait to be out the door again. Time Is a River Without Banks is the title of Chagall’s painting of the winged fish flying through the air above the river. The fish is playing a fiddle above a clock which flies with it. In order to indicate the river there are houses and lovers and the reflections of houses. The lovers are not looking up. They are in love and at the point of all possibilities. They have transcended time, which is all around them like the unheard music of the fiddle.

It is the poet who refuses to believe in time as a container, who rushes into the closed room of time, who plunges through the bay window and slashes a hand across the harp, even if what results is not music so much as a passionate desecration of a moment, which, like the photograph in its effort to fix us, excludes us from our own past. The poet is always the enemy of the photograph. If she talks about her own appearance in the group smiling on the porch, she will inch her thumb into the lens to indicate that she has escaped. She will assault the image with words, changing the bride’s dress into a cascade of petals. She will make sure the train pulls away from the platform.

The poem as time machine works in an opposite way from the time machine as used in H. G. Wells. In the latter, one is sent out like a lonely projectile into time past or future, casting the present into a future or a past. The poem, on the other hand, is like a magnet which draws into it events and beings from all possible past, present, and future contexts of the speaker. It is a vortex of associative phenomena. “A baby is crying./ In the swaddling-pages/ a baby,” says Bill Knott. “‘Don’t cry. No Solomon’s-sword can/divide you from the sky./ You are one. Fly.’ ” We move from baby to swaddling pages to the threat of Solomon’s sword dividing the baby not from itself but from the sky, then to the baby metamorphosed into the sky itself and told to fly. We remain in the present moment of the crying baby, but we are in touch with babies past; the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes, the baby who is being fought over by two women, each claiming to be its mother. And beyond this, we are given the possibility of flight, of a nature that is as indivisible as sky.

In poem-time, the present accompanies memory and eventuality; it is not left behind, since the very activity of the words generates the poem’s own present no matter what tense the poet uses. The poem’s activity in the consciousness of the reader is a present-time event which may, nevertheless, draw on his past, his expectations and hopes.

When Yeats says this in his “Quarrel in Old Age,” it is more than salutary. It is an acknowledgment that the past is not a burial ground but a living fiber that informs and questions what is and will be.

I sit in a Montana café having a meal with my mother, who is visiting from Washington State. Suddenly she remembers a time when she was beautiful, when she had the power of beauty. I realize I never knew her in that time, though often she still acts from it, as from some secret legacy. I see that I have failed to make her know her present beauty, so she must return endlessly to that past—a reservoir. Even as I see her, I see myself, my own aging. I walk with her into “the one color/of the snow—before us, the close houses,/ the brave and wondering lights of the houses.” It has been snowing during our meal, and the houses have been transformed by a covering of snow, as though time in the form of snow has softened all contours, has fallen down about us deep enough, white enough, to put everything on the same plane spatially and temporally. The girlhood beauty of my mother accompanies us as we leave, gives the houses their brave and wondering lights, causes them to drift in a white sea under the covering of night.

Perhaps it is our very forgetting that allows these past images significance. If we remembered constantly, the time-fabric of our lives would remain whole and we would have no need of the poem to re-involve us in what was a part of what is and may be.

“Forget! Forget it to know it,” Robert Penn Warren says in his poem “Memory Forgotten.”

How long
Has your mother been dead? Or did you, much older,

How much do we forget that is ourselves—

So Warren connects forgetting with what we feel to be true, the smell or the sound from afar that, if we knew its significance, would give us back some essential part of ourselves. He makes forgetting a positive accident, like the money found in a coat you hadn’t worn for months, an accidental payload. The truth that we are is bound up, it would seem, with our partiality, our inability to hold everything of ourselves in memory as we go. Every time we remember some forgotten moment in a way that illuminates the present or causes the present to mediate some past, then the boundaries we thought were there between past, present, and future dissolve, if only for the time that is the poem.

It is believed that in the infant’s first consciousness of the events and objects passing before him, he does not separate himself from them, but experiences his own identity simply as an endless stream of stimuli. Even his response to events is not so much toward as in them. The infant is immersed in objects, and their time in space continues with him, is infinite.

The Hindus have a name for this continuing or fourth dimension of “being across time.” It is called the Linga-Sharira, that which remains the same in us though our cells change completely every seven years and we are not in fact the same in body that we were. Part of what the poem does is to restore us to consciousness of the Linga-Sharira which continues through change and which is immeasurable.

The poem, because it takes place at the point of all possibilities, in that it can intersect with all past, present, and future expectations, is able to accommodate this fourth dimension, the “something else” of the Linga-Sharira, which allows us to change yet to remain the same through time. “The same,” in this instance, means the overview that can look at the total life at the same instant that it looks at any one point of the life and say, This is she as she is, was, and will be.

Proust reminds us that “perhaps the immobility of things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conception of them.” The past and future are linked to our apartness, our identity as beings cut off from this original immersion in a time without succession. In that time, the time of the infant, there were no landmarks apart from us to signal our departure or arrival, our movement toward or away; no forgetting or remembering was then possible.

Even the stopped moment of a photograph paradoxically releases its figures by holding them because the actual change, the movement away from the stilled moment, has already taken place without us, outside the frame of the photograph, and the moment we see ourselves so stilled, we know we have also moved on. This is the sadness of the photograph: knowing, even as you look, it is not like this, though it was. You stand in the “was” of the present moment and you die a little with the photograph.

Octavio Paz speaks of the poetic experience as one which allows us to deny succession, the death factor. “Succession,” he says, “becomes pure present. . . . The poem is mediation: thanks to it, original time, father of the times, becomes incarnate in an instant.” The poem then represents an overflowing of time, the instant in which we see time stopped without its “ceasing to flow.” It overflows itself, and we have the sensation of having gone beyond ourselves.

“Poetry,” says Paz, “is nothing but time, rhythm perpetually creative.” In the time of the poem we are held, not as the photograph holds, but as in a simultaneity of recognitions which wake us up in the middle of our lives. The poem causes an expansion of the “now.” Archibald MacLeish’s “Epistle to be Left in the Earth” is a poem which expands the “now” by including the speaker’s and the reader’s deaths as encountered by those who live after.

Part of the recent popularity of the writing of poems in prisons, grade schools, poetry workshops in universities, and the wards of mental clinics has developed from the sense that we are traveling too fast through a time which has fewer and fewer of the future-maintaining structures with which we grew up. I mean the structures of marriage, of the family, of the job as a fulfillment of one’s selfhood. These allowed one to look ahead into the near and far future of one’s life with some expectation of continuity, which is a part of one’s future-sense. We now have serial marriages, separations between parent and child, as well as jobs that come and go as the technology fluctuates even more crazily to accommodate a product-oriented society.

It may be that the poem is an anachronism of beingoriented impulses. It is an anachronism because it reminds us ironically that we stand at the point of all possibilities yet feel helpless before the collapse of the future-sustaining emblems of our lives. This has reduced us to life in an instantaneous “now.” The time of the poem answers this more and more by allowing an expansion of the “now.” It allows consequence to disparate and contradictory elements in a life. The “I,” reduced to insignificance in most spheres of contemporary society, is again able to inhabit a small arena of its own making. It returns us, from the captivities of what we do and make, to what we are.

When the “now” expands, it includes before and after. The poem reminds us that the past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not. The future, says Ouspensky, in a similar way, holds not only that which will be, but everything that may be. He reminds us that if eternity exists at all, every moment is eternal. Eternal time is perpendicular at each instant to successionary time, which is time as we misperceive it. An example of an unrealized future enacted in a poem is Gene Derwood’s “Elegy,” where we read that the boy “lamentably drowned in his eighteenth year” will not fulfill the expectations of adulthood:

All time is during. That is why it is so hard to exist in the present. Already we are speeding ahead so fast that we can only look back to see where we have been. I once said to a group of students that the poet is like a tuba player in a house on fire. Crucial events surround him, threatening to devour, while he makes inappropriate music with an instrument that cannot help causing its serious manipulator to look ridiculous.

This speeding up of the time-sense in contemporary life, through the technology of mobility and through the disintegrative nature of human relationships, has affected the language of the poem as a time-enacting mechanism. The poem has begun to move in simple sentences, in actions and images more than in ideas, to speak intensely about the relationship of one person to another, to attempt to locate its subject matter or its speaker, if only during the time of the poem, very specifically at 142nd Street on July 23, 1971. Many contemporary poems have opted for the present tense and a great suspicion has fallen over the past and future tenses. If they are used at all, they are converted into a present happening in order to insure immediacy. The sentences are simple perhaps because this slows the time-sense down and makes the language more manageable. Though some wonderful poems are being written with this pacing, I am often nostalgic for a more extended motion. It is no secret that the contemporary reader has begun to balk at the periodic sentence. The atrophy of even short-term recall in America has caused the mind to resist holding much information, or even verbal structures of the slightest complexity. When my Irish musician friend tells me of singers who can sing hundreds of songs that have been passed on to them, I see how far we have come from this kind of memory.

The poem as time machine has inherited a heavy responsibility from these strains on the language and on the human figure’s diminishing stature among its self-perpetuating creations. The poem is expected to tell us, not that we’re immortal, but simply that we exist as anything at all except contingencies. It has the old obligations to carry experience memorably in the language with few of the formal structures to maintain it. Its voices have become a chorus of one, the personal “I” venturing as far as the patio or the boathouse. But as regards man’s relation to time, the poem has shown itself valiant. I am no longer envious of Flash Gordon and his time machine. The poem is the place where the past and future can be seen at once without forsaking the present.

In a poem I consecrate all that forgotten life which allows the incidence of memory, cast like a light on my life and the lives of others. The poet is the Lazarus of the poem, rising up with it. In the time of the poem it is still possible to find courage for the present moment. The life imagined in the poem has been known to affect the speaker, the reader, their sense of what can be salvaged or abandoned in a life. However, if we are like the blind man whose reality in the instant of “now” ends at the tip of his stick as he walks along the cliff, we must still believe in falling. The poem, for all its bounty, is a construct, and though the words in it may give the fiercest light, we cannot live there. Poems are excursions into belief and doubt, often simultaneously.

Mostly we are with the child peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. We are too short for the view out the window except when we stand on the kitchen chair, which we are not supposed to do, but which we do. The time in the poem can be as useful as a kitchen chair, helping us to be the right size in a world that is always built for others. If I did not grow up to be a horse, I will not hold it against my life. I could not think fast enough to keep my two-leggedness from setting in. Still, I know there is a young girl in me who remembers the language of horses. She is with me in the time of the poem.

With all the modern time-savers, we have no better machine for the re-invention of time than the poem. I would not trade my least-loved poem for a Polaroid snapshot. The real time-savers are those that accommodate the mind, the heart, and the spirit at once. □