The Universe in Whoosh: Reflecting on Keith Waldrop and his work
Agnosticism
“I’ve always thought that uncertainty was more interesting that certainty.”
—Keith to Laynie Browne
I begin with an acknowledgement that shapes the way I read Keith Waldrop’s writing. My innate orientation to the world is spiritual. I am always trying to navigate into some region of “belief.” This is also and always a negotiation laden with ambivalence and doubt. In this regard, I immediately recognized Keith Waldrop as a fellow traveler. I expect that this statement would have appalled him, or at least caused him chagrin. Still, pervaded, polluted from an early age with his mother’s religious mania, I experienced Keith as a melancholy, reluctant agnostic. (At one point, my thesis project had a title that made a biblical reference. I asked Keith if he got the reference. He sighed, and looked into the distance. “Oh yes,” he said.)
At the beginning of “Poem from Memory” from The Space of a Half an Hour, there is an epigraph from Saint Augustine: “A lost notion, then, which we have entirely forgotten, we cannot even search for.” What, however, can be entirely forgotten? The presence of the forgotten thing lingers and reasserts itself, haunted with “melodies, un-/placeable because somewhat/mis-sung” (ITSOHH, 15). Like Keith, I recognize that we “live/in ghost states, caressing/imaginary substances. Moments/ smear” (ITSOHH, 20). My sense is that we both, Keith and I, sit on these continua of an agnosticism, just different sides. I have spent my life wondering if my attraction to those positive pulses was a defect—a spiritual tinnitus that insists on hearing what isn’t there.
Keith’s agnosticism, I believe, had less to do with doubt than with his inability to doubt completely. Ephemeral, tortuous presence: “My knowing with-/draws, unknowable amid/widening rings of/devastation […] A universe/in whoosh.” (ITSOHH, 26)
Order/s
Then how to make poetry of agnosticism? The orthodox practitioner of art (or faith) may believe that patterns exist—stable and with enduring meaning. I see in Keith’s writing a simultaneous attraction to and doubt of order. From “The Quest for Mount Misery”:
When he walks, his world reshapes, in exact relation to his own displacement. Disproportion follows every movement of his eyes, plunging before him, an erratic and inevitable pattern, restructured by each irregularity. (QfMM, unpaginated)
Order, then, is not valuable because of its formal or semantic durability, but functions by its own displacement in a world that is endlessly subject to change. Rather than become seasick with this mutability, Keith engages order as possibility. Hence his participation in Oulipian poetics, where procedure is foregrounded over product—with sometimes felicitous eruptions of meaning. Once Keith handed me a sequence of poems he was working on, an early draft of “Falling in Love Through a Description,” only to take them back a day or so later and give me another version. “What did you change?” I asked. “They weren’t working right, so I alphabetized each section on the basis of the first words in the stanzas.” The operation brought new life to the poems; even I, a novice poet, could see this clearly. The act of removing or muting intention (intention typically being a vector of meaning) enlarged the associative agency of the poem. You could say that displacing the order made the poem more vulnerable, more porous; the covert presences in the poem could then manifest themselves. That seems like an apt agnostic poetics: what’s not there melding with what is and thereby enlisting the arrival of what could be.
I went to Brown for the graduate writing program principally to work with Keith. He was a notably low-key teacher, but his skill should not be underestimated. As I struggled leadenly to make individual poems coalesce into a manuscript, I just barely stepped beyond presenting my thesis poems in the order in which they had been written. Keith and Rosmarie offered to publish a chapbook with Burning Deck Press, and I have a vision of Keith sorting through ragged pages nimbly, with no hesitation. He suggested little to nothing in the way of line edits. His effort was toward positing a whole. The resulting chapbook, and the way that Keith arranged not only single poems but sections within sequences transformed what I had written such that I had the pleasant shock of witnessing myself as a far better writer than I knew myself to be. Could Keith tell me why and how he had made the decisions that he had? I certainly asked. But no, he never gave me much of a response except to enact this reconstitution-toward-a-whole again and again in classes, in his editing, in his collages, in his writing. I learned that poems (and parts of poems) read each other multi-directionally, and that no reading is ultimate. My undergraduate poetry teacher had had a much more assertive approach to editing my work, cutting words and lines, altering line breaks. This could be revelatory, but it also seeded my poems with a suspicion that there was a right and single way to make them. Keith’s refusal to do that may be the signal gift of my creative education, though I was initially frustrated by it.
In the making of things, the wrong way may be the necessary way. Not a triumphal order; instead, art as segue. Poems, and collages, embrace and eschew orders: “something/steady on which to/map the random”(24, ITSPOH). I still have a French metro ticket Keith had made into a collage and given to me. He had used the ticket for some kind of urban journey and then mapped it over with pixilated paper peeled from a billboard, all roughly outlined in ink. “Elizabeth,” it says, “Bon voyage.”
Depression
Keith to Susan Bernstein: “Depression’s okay; just don’t let it get you down.”
I have seven collages made by Keith, two on Paris Metro tickets, another tiny one that is ¾ the size of my thumb. They were made with things Keith found. One collage has a misty aura, an effect achieved by peeling a two-ply tissue apart, saturating it with Elmer’s Glue, and then laying the soaked tissue over the collage. Another is composed of what seem to be torn photo fragments of striped textiles. Still another includes, among other things, part of the marbled endpapers of an old book and the interior print of a security envelope. The collages, in other words, are made of detritus. Yet these rescued fragments are reabsorbed into strange and lyrical gestalts. Keith’s collages often have a beautifully absurd, mobile quality as though they might slip away in a breeze or slide off the surface if washed with a light rain. Here is another iteration of the problem of making things coalesce, of gesturing toward but not confirming an order.
One piece in my collection, Keith told me, was not strictly speaking a collage: a single strip of paper glued diagonally across a page that is otherwise heavily marked with mottled black and blue crayon. In the gut of the piece, slightly to the right side of the glued strip is an unambiguously black rhombus. It is as though the whole piece is cinched together by this paper belt whose buckle is a black abyss.
Any time that I asked Keith about his collages, he told me that they were a product of depression. He might show some delight at having captured and subverted materials in their making (security envelopes, tickets, Kleenex, tear-offs from Metro billboards), but my questions did not yield much further response than that the collages found their genesis in a dry spell in writing, and in depression. Given the vast quantities of collages Keith produced, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to his ongoing conversation with depression. But hearing this, witnessing this, I have gratitude that Keith was so frank. I experienced his frankness as a generosity. As one who has a history with bouts of despair, I read Keith’s work in collage as shaping an alternative: depression not as a movement of endless gravity pulling one downward, but depression as a lateral movement.
I believe this lateral movement is modeled in the poem “Between the Straits” from Haunt, and so I offer these excerpts (concluding with the last three sections from the poem):
dark sky day
dark
*
upturned soil under lowering
sky hand-
fuls of seed—well,
clouds
bristle with
storm, meaning
spills across
mind, dark over
all the earth
*
last body the
body at last
a clod a
stench the flight of
self to
more important signs
*
distance remote telescopic far off faraway wide of stretching to yon yonder
*
contingency, deep
trench
blind
across palisades
*
in reference to
land never
sighted
gate, paving
stones
signal
movements of imaginary
islands
chartless
water
flowers
water
*
if in a
dream the so-called
conscious
organism if in
dreams
the shadow of a
body if
sense selects as
of a galaxy or
galaxies no
interest in the
past behind us, if there is
another way of saying this
*
for good, for
ever so long
*
then there are currents
—Haunt (42-44, 47, 53, 60-63)
The poem, written in the shortest of segments (sometimes as short as four words long) acknowledges the stench and finitude of mortality while resisting the temptation to move vertically to a heaven or hell. Rather, the poem eschews the trench and reaches outward to horizons: to palisades, imaginary islands, water, galaxies. The poem’s conclusion leans heavily into contingency: if, if, if, if four times, culminating in “if there is/another way of saying this.” In conclusion? Forever, “for good”? No, that is too eternal, but “if there is/ another way of saying this/// “for good, for ever so long.” Here, we can alight on the contingency, the “if” as it leans into the last section and last line of the poem, “then”: “then there are currents.”
Despair, I learn from Keith’s poems and collages, may in the immediate moment feel entrenched, but it too is subject to movement. There are currents. Nothing lasts forever—grief and consolation commingle.
Generosity
Generosity is a central virtue in the Waldrop household. Anyone who has made the acquaintance of the Waldrops knows that. Observing that generosity has been significant in the formation of my own ethos of creative work: if this practice is meaningful, then we should share the wealth—and not out of duty, but out of pleasure, engrossedness, and gratitude. Like, I suspect, many who read this, I have received untold numbers of envelopes from Burning Deck and left 71 Elmgrove with armloads of books.
But let me get more specific about the ways I experienced Keith’s generosity. When I applied to Brown, I submitted a long poem that I thought was really pretty good. Fortunately, it is now lost and no one else will ever be able to evaluate its worth. But Keith made a point, at our first meeting, to note that he recognized an obscure William Carlos Williams reference and the quote from Chaucer’s “Troilus and Cresseyde” in the poem. His close attention made my heart glad. Keith gave me many books, often to my puzzlement. They included poetry by William Bronk, Michael McClure, Heather McHugh, and the occasional Victorian novel. He professed to like everything he gave me. I didn’t like all of it, but it helped me to relax my tight grip on experimental poetry orthodoxies. When Keith and Rosmarie gave me a book of poems by Jeremy Prynne for my birthday one year, I was so enthusiastic with friends that, I was later told, Small Press Distribution saw a decided uptick in sales of Prynne’s work. Keith and Rosmarie, for they colluded together in generosity, made sure to ask me to go pick up Barbara Guest when she came to Providence, so I would have the opportunity to talk to her one on one. This led to an association with Barbara that continued over many years. Similarly, when I was heading to Southern California to visit family, they carefully wrapped one of Keith’s collages—it contained a sun and a moon—and told me to bring it to Douglas Messerli, thereby effecting a meeting with the publisher of Sun & Moon press. I was too abashed to do this and held onto the collage for years, still wrapped. When I finally confessed that I had never given the collage to Douglas, Keith only said mildly, “I wondered why he never mentioned it.” It is now hanging near my dining table.
I experienced Keith’s generosity as nourished by a delight in absurdity. His work with Oulipo procedures might be one manifestation of this, but it also manifested in his ability to enjoy oddities of all kinds: for example, deviled eggs he was pleased to have seasoned with tea leaves. I remember that I had a pair of velvet, pointed-toe slippers while I lived in Providence that had a small ruffle near the toe cleavage. Somehow, Keith and I discovered that we had the same shoe size, and thereafter, when I came to the house, I’d remove my shoes and Keith would put them on. I remember Keith leaning back in his chair, legs crossed with my velvet slippers on his feet. We agreed that they were very comfortable. This kind of silliness seems clearly an expression of generosity: absurdity as the most mundane kind of epiphany. It expands the realm of the acceptable and therefore the possible.
Agnosticism again
When I first received a copy of Ceci N’est Pas Keith, Ceci N’est Pas Rosmarie, I remember reading along in Keith’s section. He states on page 37, “In life so far, there are two compliments I experienced with particular pride.” One came from a professor in Emporia who told him that he performed in a play as the Pooh Bah with “not too little, not too much […] contempt for your audience.” And then, later, on page 52:
The other compliment that I remember with much pleasure came long after the first. One of my students […] meaning it—I think—as a compliment one day, after class, said,
“You are a master of the antidote.”
Reading this, I recognized that this person was most certainly me. And I was mortified, for I had been misheard. Should I contact Keith and clarify? But then in an agony of doubt, I began to wonder if it had been me after all. Would I embarrass myself further by trying to clarify when I was no longer entirely sure what I had been trying to say?
Of this event, Keith goes on:
I thanked her.
Satisfied, I did not ask for an explanation, uncertain to this day if she had intended to say something else—or if, in fact, she did say something else, and I misheard.
And here we are, back at aporia and its friend agnosticism. I never did say anything to Keith about this. Only in rereading the passage twenty-one years after the book was published do I begin to register that this remark was one of two compliments that Keith cherished, even if he did not know exactly what I was saying and I, after all, harbor a faint doubt that I was the one who said it. Keith in “Planned City,” “I would like to deny that from/here to here is always the same/distance “ (37, Ruins of Providence). These several forms of miscommunication needed time to ferment into the kind of irresolution that lets my statement live on as a compliment. I accept this as one iteration of an agnostic poetics: Doubt is fecund. Keith in “Scape:” “What I hear is/not always what/I have listened for” (42, R of P).
Keith, you taught me this: the remedy for agnosticism—generous, despairing, absurd, improvisatory—is more agnosticism. You are a master of the antidote.
Works Cited
Keith Waldrop, In the Space of Half an Hour. Providence: Burning Deck Press,
———The Quest for Mount Misery, Turkey Press, 1983.
———The Ruins of Providence, Copper Beech Press, 1983.
———Haunt, Instance Press, 2000.
Keith Waldrop and Waldrop, Rosmarie, Ceci n’est pas Keith/Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie. Providence: Burning Deck Press, 2003.
