A teacher once advised me to be careful about using the word silence. Listen, she said, and you’ll find that the world around you is very rarely, if ever, actually silent. When Barbara Guest writes that “silence is pictorial / when silence is real,” I hear—with my teacher’s advice in mind—the silence of the still life. [1] I think of the skulls and dewy fruits in Dutch Vanitas paintings, of their grave assertions of the futility of material ambition and pleasure. I also read, in Guest’s lines, an implied statement about the poetic image, which is not a picture and is not, then, silent. Rather, it is based in sound. This leads me to the sonic textures of Cindy Juyoung Ok’s “Table of Contexts,” which demonstrate how, in a poem, sound and image can fuse.

The poem begins:

I stay outstretched in a November

coat, not abundant and not wanting

to be. [2]

This declaration limns the borders of a speaker/self, which, after being briefly suspended (“stay[ing]” in “a November”) by the enjambment of the first line, is defined in the second line both in space (by a coat) and in character (by a refusal of abundance—or, ambiguously, of existence itself). For a moment we are in the realm of the indefinite, only to be wrenched back into the realm of the specific and constrained. From here, the poem’s six tidy, complete sentences span seven open tercets. The words are mostly Germanic, but the poem is far from simple. In an essay on Barabara Guest, Cedar Sigo notes a dailiness in Guest’s poem “An Emphasis Falls on Reality,” saying that “it is as if the strangeness of being at sea in language is overly familiar.” [3] This familiar strangeness is at play in Ok’s poem as well. It demands, the way a stereogram does, that I notice and tune the automatic mechanisms of my perception and comprehension in order to make anything out.

The poem is also interested in comparing minds and mechanisms:

 

          A machine I own mistook shootings

for students in a transcript, ushering

me to tilt canals toward titles and curate

hedges into pages. 

In these first lines, the poet toes the line where traceable logics of association verge toward coincidence and where sonic and conceptual connections interplay. Shootings and students share sounds in common, which is presumably what leads to the computer’s mistake. But the two words are forced into another tragic affiliation given the American epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings. The swapping of canals with titles and hedges with pages might also seem to be based purely on sonics—if it weren’t for the fact that, together, they build a miniature arc in which physical, architectural space (canals, hedges) is converted into textual space (titles, pages). I see these lines as images of language, as opposed to words expressing images.

The verbs here stand out: when a human mind conflates, it is not an incidental error or quirk of the algorithm, but an act of “tilting” and “curating”; a mind is at work moving the world around, laboriously stacking pieces and closing gaps. Perhaps this explains the earlier resistance to “abundance”—the poet’s conflations, unlike the computer’s, are not automatic. In the mind, words have form and weight.

This weightiness might be what Charles Olson was referring to when he wrote—in a 1951 letter to Robert Creeley about Mayan hieroglyphs—of the “tremendous levy on all objects, as they present themselves to human sense, in this glyph-world.” [4] This is the same levy (from the Anglo-French lever, to raise, from the Latin levare and levis, meaning light in weight) that appears in Barbara Guest’s blurred sceneries: “Cloud fields change into furniture / furniture metamorphoses into fields / an emphasis falls on reality.” [5] Guest’s lines transpose realms of chaos and dissolution with the intimate, arranged, and static—but her “emphasis” is the existential confirmation that comes through these metamorphoses, and it lies at the heart of “Table of Contexts,” too. The poem bears its concepts, is laden with them, with figurativities neither multiplying nor subtracting elements therein as uneasy balances are struck in the distribution of weights. This is the poetic image as sonic phenomenon: Abstractions are materialized when they are expressed sonically, even if they are not expressed in concrete terms. Words are movable and mutable, but not without heft.

The poem continues,

                              I once thought

I was a shape but it is a form

of furniture, not a prop but not yet

a structure, the way I eat with pairs

of sticks and repeat the attic antics
outside my house.

There’s a dexterity required by these re-castings and negations, especially when they’re juxtaposed with the conflations made effortlessly by the computer in the second stanza. I’d posit that a non-human intelligence may wield words without levy—i.e., without sensorial, ethical, or phenomenological substance, and thus without the same rich potentialities for instability, multiplicity, play, and rot.

Meanwhile, the poem’s I careens between states of abstraction, embodiment, and objecthood. I becomes it; momentarily, selfhood is purely grammatical, only to be retrieved to subjectivity first by a bodily need (to eat) and then by the ownership and use of objects (utensils, a coat, a machine). The poem hinges, at its center, on the phrase “outside my house.” The private world is suddenly opened up; the concealed is exposed and the private is restaged in public. The lines call to mind Bertha Mason imprisoned in the attic. Or perhaps this stanza refers to the experience of reading or teaching poetry before an audience, with the poet’s process being the “attic antics” now on view. In either case, the carefully-drawn outlines of the “I” from the first stanza—and the implied closed-off interiority they contain—are now porous and vulnerable, as,

                                   Having been spit on,

sat on, I hope not to mind (mine) being

pathetic, but keep loving to be

pitied for trivial troubles. It is always

wartime here so I do render to reenter,

stir to thirst, offer this crate of skin,

roster of resting text (you can eat

the paper).

Twice in these lines, “be” and “being” appear where lines enjamb, highlighting the infrathin division between simply being—intransitively, existentially—and being the object of attention or action: being embodied, seen, projected onto, judged, pitied, desired. (A similar enjambment appeared in the first stanza, but in reverse, in “not abundant and not wanting / to be”). A first-person pronoun appears in each of the six sentences that make up “Table of Contexts,” increasingly embedded in and subordinated by clauses which contextualize and tether it in affective webs. Ok deftly places poetry’s capacities for sublimation and deposition in tension, such that edges may be blurred out toward the general or underscored to reinforce distinctions—sometimes simultaneously.

In the poem’s final two stanzas, a second-person pronoun appears—parenthetically at first in “(you can eat the paper),” then more prominently. Meanwhile, causality is repeatedly thwarted. “It is always wartime here” leads to a string of confused conflations: of body and house, making and memory, document and aliment. This series of clauses might constitute a collection of responses, all imperfect, to ongoing violence—ranging from seeking (or providing) shelter and nourishment to attempts at documentation and restoration.

The poem concludes,

                Not a performer, I know

the figure of the student exceeds—

includes—that of the teacher and I think

it is for you I wash and rotate the wish.

In contrast to the coincidental substitution made earlier by the computer, the porous poet makes an active and willing conflation by allowing teacher to incorporate into student. The labels of “student” and “teacher” could be applied to the speaker and/or the “you” in a reciprocal interplay of insight and aspiration. Similarly, because there is no possessive pronoun, the wish belongs to neither figure alone. Regardless, the wish’s maintenance, like the poet’s figurative work, is arduous. Like a plant, the wish of Ok’s poem might bend toward the light. It has material, organic substance with a contingent, unresolved structure. It may be manipulated, weakened, or fortified as it responds to a contextual world of forces, even if these are simply the forces of other words—and that is the meaning of Olson’s levy. A textual table of contents may as well be laden with bread, candlesticks, insects, violins, half-peeled lemons, and fishbones.



 


Notes

[1] Barbara Guest. “An Emphasis Falls on Reality.” The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, ed. Hadley Haden Guest. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. 222.

[2] Cindy Juyoung Ok. “Table of Contexts.” House Work. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023. 18. (Note that “Table of Contexts” appears in a slightly different form in Ok’s Ward Toward [2024]. In this essay, I will consider the earlier version of the poem as I originally encountered it in House Work.)

[3] Cedar Sigo. “A Necessary Darkness.” Guard the Mysteries. Wave Books, 2021. 89.

[4] Olson, Charles. “Mayan Letters.” Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley. New Directions, 1950. 111.

[5] Guest, Barbara. “An Emphasis Falls on Reality.” The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, ed. Hadley Haden Guest. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. 221.