I am thinking about the relationship between poetry and duration in an oblique manner. Rather than focusing on the speed of reading or the longevity of a poem’s readerly reception, I am concerned with poetry as non-durable and self-disappearing by nature, which propels our compulsion towards and appreciation of poetry. Airea D. Matthews “Ars Poetica, 1979” is one such poem which is inclined to self-eclipse, or vanish, regardless of whether one reads it fast or slowly. The poem appears with its own verdict of self-disappearance. In Matthews’s poem, its duration is thematized by a tenuous identification with and metaphysical grasping of a person’s pain, of an injurious and personally significant event.

The central metaphor of “Ars Poetica, 1979” is a cut on the speaker’s hand which she suffers in the company of her father. The cut not only lies at the heart of a personal memory and indexes the troubled relationship between the poet-speaker and her father, but also signifies the poet’s keen attention to the difficult vocalization of address and of inviting the other into one’s personal experience of suffering. Whether one is the injured or the witness, understanding between oneself and the other can only be extended in “a vanishing line.” This imperfect and ephemeral connection informs a reflection on the work of art as similarly self-eclipsing, a composite of “vanishing” lines, which fuels the poet’s impulse to continually perpetuate the line, to write.

Digging in the dregs of trash

to find the bird my father needed

to get well…(l. 1-3)

The poem begins in the midst of the speaker’s “digging” “in the dregs of trash”; the alliterative /d/ and /g/ sounds lower us into her quest. Uncertain about its outcome, unbothered by the foul, the speaker’s digging is driven by an object, the status of which is undecided to the point of being entirely imaginary. Why does the father need the bird to get well, and why has this curative creature been discarded? Might both its birdness and value be fantastical, a belated construction of the father’s mental crisis? We do not know besides the vivid cost soon borne by the daughter’s hand:

    …I tore a vanishing

line across the length of my palm.

My hand emerged slowly,

crown of pulp, pulsing. My ex-

communicated ex-Navy father:

Come here, Boy (though I was a girl

he called me boy because

he wanted one)…(l. 3-10)

“Tore” as a verb of bodily affliction indexes both the force of violence and its fleetingness. A pang precedes a lingering soreness, as the puffy /t/ and short /o/ sounds are conjoined with and elongated by the vibratory final consonant /r/. The “line” is “vanishing,” framed by the hand no longer discernible nor categorically functional as hand but deformed into “crown of pulp, pulsing.” Matthews captures the overwhelming sensation of agony by blurring between modes of perception and their respective objects—between what is seen and what is felt, pul(p) and pul(se). Eager to “vanish” the line as quickly as the fictional bird recedes, the poet enjambs the line which introduces the palm line, so that “vanishing,” before it’s understood to modify the “line,” first disappears into the negative space on the right margin. The vanishing line across the speaker’s palm poses a series of considerations in its wake. How may a poem receive and reenact the compactness of a painful occurrence? Does a bodily inscription (the flesh tear) parallel a poetic line momentarily lyric and beautiful?

The line figures the vertical arrangements littered throughout the poem, situating the dynamics between the father and his daughter:

…He pressed

his dirtied fingernail against

the head of the valley, dispensing

some trauma he’d picked up

in Vietnam about dead bodies

not being able to feel and pain

being the only true way to know

aliveness…(l. 10–17)

The speaker is first encountered in the dig, then has her hand “emerge[d] slowly” with the throbbing cut. The father “pressed / his dirtied fingernail” down, “against / the head of the valley” in what seems like a sadist response to his child’s pulsing crown of pulp. The readerly viewpoint travels down then up, then down again, from the father as the figurative “head” in the relationship to his child later “grabbed” by “the back of [her] neck,” from the “dead bodies” laid down in the battlefields to “some trauma” “picked up” by one survivor to be later “dispens[ed]”—passed down—as hard-earned wisdom or tough love to his daughter.

Besides the vertical lines drawn in the physical setting of the father-daughter’s interaction, which is freighted with the father’s patriarchal authority, the line appears more elusively and recursively, being drawn, erased, and redrawn around the question of the father’s trauma and its consequence for the speaker. First, how the father relates to his own trauma is put under question. For the “ex- / communicated ex-Navy father” trauma can be traced back to his wartime participation: he endured and witnessed physical and psychic pains on a mass scale, which inevitably batters his faith in God and a universe of benevolent “pleasure.” Rather than treating the biographical suggestiveness as a definitive explanation for the father’s stance on his trauma—for the father as a traumatized being—I am interested in thinking trauma as a gap, a vanished line, which one’s belated responses continuously fill with affects, symptoms, and an entire body of associative meanings.

Second, how the father’s trauma can be understood to inform his familial relationship constitutes a contested line. On one hand, one may draw a straight line of causality between the father’s difficult personality as the result of his unprocessed trauma and his daughter’s discomfort in his presence. Trauma is dispensed from the father to the speaker in an intergenerational chain of mutations: the father has pained his child in at least two ways, by misidentifying her as his fantasy of masculinist reproduction, “Come here, Boy,” and by adjoining his “dirtied fingernail” to her “head of the valley,” a disfiguring pairing of pains across the father and the daughter. Pressing upon the wound as his chosen response to the sign of her suffering, the father supplements the daughter’s pain with a protraction of it, which is also the protracted expression of his own unresolved relationship with his painful past. On the other hand, the poem’s rendition of how the father relates to the significance of pains is more sophisticated than where a simple accounting of intergenerational trauma—the father “picked up” traumas in Vietnam and now dispenses it to the hurting daughter—lands us. Mathews expels pain into the space between the father and the speaker so that pain is no longer the property of a hermetic and transparent self. Against the reductive logic which partitions and explains away the father and the speaker’s struggles, the poem explores how pain ruptures the borderline between the past and the present, between two people and their respective embodiments of liveliness. The father’s motive behind pressing his daughter’s hand might seem redundant. It might be taken for granted that dead bodies are “not able to feel”; that his daughter is alive thus capable of feeling hurt requires no further proof, no fresh pain inflicted by him to test the residual power of her cries. But the father “presse[s]” upon the difficult matter of adjudicating between life and death—deeply metaphysical as this line could be—for himself and for his daughter, too. The distinction may just be a vanishing line that calls the father, in his pain-inducing way, to press on his child’s palm: “pain / being the only true way to know / aliveness.” And poetry, the written line, may be the other kind, open-ended in its claims and tenuous in its manifestations, of knowing aliveness when aliveness itself appears as no more than a vanishing line.

The vanishing line continues to capture how the rest of the poem imagines the process of knowing and relating to each other’s pain in the father-daughter dynamics. The following lines throw into relief the problem of knowledge and securing belief:

…How pleasure persuades

belief in a Heaven that doesn’t

exist and that he could prove

god was fiction and Satan

the realest motherfucka ever

made: Look around. (l. 17–22)

The proof offered by the father resides in the colon as much as in what follows it. The colon serves not only as a linkage between the father’s statement and its clarifying body of proof. It also betrays a discontinuity in the analytical procedure, the patching over the impossibility of the proof with the syntactical mannerism of a proof being introduced. There is indeed no explanatory proof here, only the spoken imperative “Look around.” As if such looking would identify and illuminate for the speaker the proper object of looking, delivering her at the logical end of the father’s premises. That Satan is “the realest motherfucka” may be understood to suggest that Satan is truest or most actual in the father’s perspective: “realest” here indexes what is there as the organizing figure or principle of truth. But being “the realest” also describes a subjective outlook and orientation: being most practical and devoid of naiveness to face head-on the variables and unpleasant derailments which life presents. The father, in affirming the “realest” Satan, refuses to alleviate or disguise the throes of the daughter’s pain but instead accustoms her to them as a reminder of her vulnerable embodiment. Realism in this light no longer judges between what does and does not exist, what is true and not true; it is rather a choice about how to conduct oneself in relation to the perceived limits and enablement, assaults and assignations, of the external world. That “realest” no longer signifies what is objectively or definitively there to be believed in but rather what emerges from within one’s practical outlook makes the “real” no longer something uncontestable to be grasped. The realness of Satan in contrast to the fiction of God, the demonstrable truthfulness of pain in contrast to the duplicitous rhetoric of “pleasure,” might boil down to the father’s personal experience and perspective, “made” by what his character has been predisposed to find—his looking around with its prewritten codes of vision and insight. The proof of the truth one finds is pre-constituted in the manner of one’s outlook. The father’s perspective, his looking around which is also his reading of the text of life, is informed by his hardships and so it affirms the hardness that’s there to be found and believed in. But because it is only one person’s line of reading which provides the proof, the proof is vanishing, tenuous, always initiating the crisis of locating an authentic truth.  

At the moment when the speaker is pointed to the father’s negative proof of God by the indexical imperative to “look around,” he searches for his own evidentiary specimen in her wound:

…He lifted

his index, the one staunching

the flow, to his lip. Tasted my iron.

I let out something—more

moan the wail—too shaken

for much else…(l. 22–27)

An iron taste flowers in the father’s mouth. As if the father wasn’t satisfied with the apparent sufficiency of looking around—the look which, as I argued just now, is informed by one’s pregiven stance rather than the initiation of objective and unbiased observations. The father must reaffirm his dispensed wisdom by tasting the physical trace of the daughter’s wound, which is also the trace of her aliveness. The poem cuts from his tasting to the speaker’s mouthing of “something—more / moan than wail.” The sequence travels between father and daughter, his inward register and her outward cry, consumption and externalization, residual materiality and traceless aurality. Stopping assistance to the child to attend to, perhaps, the question of his own ability to know aliveness, the father reenacts the flawed line which extends recognition and succor towards the suffering of the other. The vanishing line embodies the father’s interrupted identification with his daughter’s enfleshed “vanishing line.” The line both extends to the child and retracts inside his internal doubt, being self-assertive then self-recessive and uncertain. It is the same flickering line which instates the difference between states of dormancy and aliveness, the realness of either Satan or God. It is the line which writes the knowability of one’s own pain as well as of the other.

…when he grabbed

the back of my neck, pulled me

close to teach his only lesson

worth remembering: Cry, Boy,

look at that honest wound in the eye

and you betta let this mutilated

world see what she did to you. (l. 27–33)

The father encourages a second “look” as the confrontation, and frank acceptance, of the wound. The child’s looking initiates a necessary reckoning by “this mutilated world,” her visual commitment somehow enabling the world’s, transferring into the latter’s ability to “see,” cognize and confess, “what she did to you.” The interruptive line recurs not between the father’s recognition of the pain and the daughter’s expression of it, but between the daughter—cut in the hand—and the world as a total, mutilated thing. Do the speaker and the world share the same injury or partake in one chain of mutilating actions? The line running between one and the other, one and a pluralized world, is present but tenuously organized, a dotted and self-vanishing thing, which is why the poet must write.

Matthews titles the poem “Ars Poetica, 1979.” The memory of the father’s response to his daughter’s wound, dated in 1979, not only makes for a moving lyric recollection, a meditation on one’s intergenerational inheritance, but also invites reflection on poetry’s more general convictions and possibilities. I am less interested in drawing an explanatory line that reduces the father’s problematic response to his daughter’s cut to his unprocessed wartime traumas and anti-theodicean struggles, in synonymizing either the father or daughter position with a pained interiority. I am more interested in the problematic of the vanishing—dotted, tenuous, self-interruptive—line that transpires through the father’s task of responding to his hurting daughter. In his response to this task as much as in the poet’s written account of this response, the vanishing line represents the difficulty of ethically engaging with, and writing, personal suffering. The account of one’s suffering to oneself and to someone else, like a poetic line, may be a heard and felt immediacy only to be then ushered into a crisis of legibility, being eventually dissolved or vanished. The poetic line, in both its triumphs of actualization and warrants for dissolution, so self-eclipsing, reenacts and compensates for the vanishing line which winds all of our wounds, and our recounting of them together.






Works Cited

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Airea D. Matthews. “A Vanishing Line,” in Bread and Circus. New York: Scribner, 2023. 19.