The Fugue Poem: On C.D. Wright and Paul Celan
We will become godlike.
Open the window. That the glory cloud may come and go. —C.D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining [1]
The air gathers in a room full of bodies, dancing, swaying, or singing—as people become vessels under a net of sound, you can feel a growing static, a charge. Sweat glistens on your palms, and if you squint, you might notice the dust start to glimmer in the light. Someone puts their palm on your wet shoulder. When they open their mouth, they speak in a language you barely understand. You reply, like a mouthpiece, in that same strange language. The music repeats, the people come and go, until you get tired and go home. The next day you may not remember the particulars, but you remember that charge in the air. Whether that space had it. This charge, this transmission of feeling between bodies beyond words, is something I’m always looking for in poetry. C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining carries this charge—and in trying to understand how it works, I began to think of it as a fugue, considering its structure and impact in relationship to Paul Celan’s poem “Deathfugue.” While Celan’s fugue compresses language towards a dark center, Wright’s fugue expands outwards, increasing its capacity to hold many voices until it reaches a point of transcendence. For both poets, the fugue method is a way to reckon with the failure of language to say the unsayable, while nonetheless transmitting feeling beyond words—a technology for charging the air.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream—the best example of a fugue is one we know from childhood. A fugue begins with a subject: a melody or phrase that is repeated by multiple voices before being interwoven with contrasting countersubjects. As a fugue develops, juxtaposition and polyphony destabilize the subject and countersubject, transforming them through layering and parataxis towards some new pinnacle of feeling. The nursery rhyme, in its original form, is a subject (row...) and countersubject (merrily, merrily...) sung in unison first, then in staggered layers as vocal parts enter at different times. It starts as familiar, and as the layers build, it transforms into something stranger, cacophonous, and transcendent. [2] In a fugue, the subject and countersubject are the structure of the work itself—the weaving of the basket that holds its emotional content.
The fugue poem, like its musical analogue, is constructed out of subjects and countersubjects. Instead of melodies, the poetic fugue weaves voices, symbols, and syntax. It’s a method, rather than a received form. Unlike repeating forms like the villanelle or pantoum, the fugue poem prescribes no particular length, structure, or occasion—all it requires are subjects and countersubjects, recurring with variation.
Paul Celan’s “Deathfugue” is in four cyclical sections, each beginning with variations on the fugue’s initial subject. The first three lines of the first two stanzas, and of the sixth:
From the outset, Celan outlines how the poem will work. By grounding us in the repeating subject, he declares home base—“Black milk of morning” is the phrase that begins the poem, and is only found at the beginning of stanzas, never within them. This phrase signals to the reader that a cycle has restarted, which resets the puzzle and clears the field. This surreal and macabre subject conjures the feeling of morning in a concentration camp—the cycle restarts, the horrors of the day will be familiar and systematic. This kind of repetition encodes a closed-in feeling, aided by the fact that the section/stanza lengths are roughly uniform, and the orbit of the poem never expands further than the single day or setting of the camps.
Celan’s cycles repeat and circle the drain—each stanza is made of many of the same symbols as the others, with slight variation. When new images are added, they dial up the fugal claustrophobia, rather than offering relief from it.
By the ending couplet, Celan’s repeating images have taken on symbolic weight: blue eyes and golden hair communicating the German ideal, the greys and blacks of ashen hair, smoke, and lead bullets reaching towards the desolation of the Holocaust.
The fugue poem affords the poet the ability to contain the unsayable without attempting to resolve it. In this negative capability, the method is well-suited to subjects that refuse resolution—Celan’s fugue has the Holocaust as its fixed center; Wright’s fugue moves across the southern landscape of the U.S. haunted by many histories of genocide, removal, and slavery. Celan and Wright reach for the same method to inverse ends. By its final couplet, “Deathfugue” has collapsed into darkest inevitability—a downward spiral enacted by its compressed, brutally minimalist variations and relatively short length.
Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining expands in ever-widening orbits, growing as it moves to contain everything in its path. She repeats fragments, images in variation, voices, and themes as the fugue accumulates. On the first page we are dropped right into the movement of the poem, and encounter images that will recur throughout the work:
Wright weaves anecdotes, found language, and historical references together as the book roughly traces a road trip through the U.S. South, which she famously took with her friend and frequent collaborator, the photographer Deborah Luster. Recurring images form threads throughout the work, like the substitution of God with the name “Louise,” which I imagine is a reference to someone squinting at some nearly-illegible bathroom graffiti: “God is Louise. Is that what it says.” [9] Louise becomes one of the fugue’s subjects, appearing and reappearing also in slight variation:
Further subjects and countersubjects swing in and out of the work: a mute swan, a white piano, a person named “Thrasher” who has “a lapdog in his freezer,” [15] characters like the Boneman and Snakeman, quotations from the filmmaker Kurosawa and writer James Agee, onions, the vibrations of color, eyeballs. This cycling allows the reader to participate in the widening orbit of Deepstep as it progresses; having been primed to expect variations on each subject and countersubject, Wright’s fugue teaches its reader how to accept an expanding valence of concerns while de-risking confusion or overwhelm.
The fugue method requires some kind of musical structure in the poem, in addition to repetition. Celan accomplishes this through meter in the poem’s original German, which proceeds in plodding dactyls and trochees in an irregular pattern:
This irregular metrical pattern destabilizes the poem, signaling order through its use of meter but reflecting the chaos inherent within that order, drawing a metaphor with the chaotic, fascist “order” of the camps. Meter is a difficult element to preserve in translation, even between two languages as similar as English and German. The Pierre Joris translation preserves this sense of rhythm, but falls short in some places where the scansion is unclear or has multiple options in the English. In the German language, words often begin with a stressed syllable. English, full of loanwords, displays a wider variety of metrical patterns. Ambiguity of meter is also a choice of the translator: a pair of lines that are identical in Celan’s German are rendered by Joris into English with different syntax. Other translators do not make this choice. I believe Joris did this to provide even more variation of texture, building on Celan’s original strategy, trying to further render that destabilization into English in a way that was not available in the German language.
The musical structure of Wright’s fugue is its polyvocality. On a single page, we may receive transmissions from several voices who are unnamed but become distinct and familiar by the end of the book. The poem builds its heat along with this accumulation. Voices that sound like a southern Evangelical preacher repeat throughout the poem, juxtaposed with academic voices, southern vernacular found language, roadside signs, and asides:
The fugue poem works from a vocabulary of recurring symbols. Where Celan’s symbols concentrate attention (“your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamit”[20]), Wright’s symbols proliferate and mutate: magnolialight becomes pianolight, onionlight, Formicalight, lotuslight, alligatorlight, each one gesturing to some unique feeling. It is a kind of witness, as Wright’s speaker says:
Everything in Deepstep is connected, either through repetition or juxtaposition with a repeating image. By the middle of the book, we are in an expanding hurricane of image accumulation, with all elements subject to collision with any other. In a section describing that hurricane, Wright points to what her fugue can achieve, those intertextual connections producing moments of transcendence: “Clouds accumulate… Bertha turns inland. Multitudes of windows crossed with masking tape… Contrasts annihilated. Concealing loneliness and fear.” [22]
Celan’s fugue narrows towards magnification: by compressing the two symbolic women Margarete and Shulamit into the poem’s only couplet, he exits the fugue at its most intensified, elemental center. In the final pages of Deepstep, the paratactic form subsides, and the evangelical preacher’s voice takes over. This voice guides us slowly towards the climax, in a section marked by visual caesurae, invoking the definition of magnification we might encounter in the Bible—annihilating contrasts, concealing loneliness and fear:
Here at its final orbit, language collapses into utterance: O world world world. Sight is recast as a source of stumbling, the speaker staggering towards that gate where praise is the condition of entry. I think that Wright is gesturing to something beyond language here—that rapture, that charge, that praise-feeling that the words don’t say exactly, but that the reader nonetheless receives. Leaving the voice of the preacher behind, Wright invites the reader to take in the larger sweep of Deepstep, free from obligation to parse any one particular symbol for its meaning. Then, a wry admission:
A gracious recognition, I think, of the risks of unintelligibility that Wright has taken in this fugue. In the final line of the book, she situates us in that elevator of light, ascending towards an auditorium of light, and closes her fugue with this line:
Pull the ladder up after. [25]
Wright’s ladder is a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s closing precept of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a treatise on the philosophy of language, which Wright cites throughout Deepstep and much of her other work. In paraphrase, Wittgenstein tells us that language is only able to say the logical, the sayable. What is unsayable, the metaphysical, is best left unsaid, since the language of logic cannot truly represent or transmit it. [26]
I am no philosopher. But I think what Ludwig missed, in all his focus in the Tractatus on the words themselves and how they carry meaning, was the poet’s ability to encode the unsayable in the space between the words, or on a grander scale, in the sweep of sustained accumulation. Language requires logic, of course—without some relatively steady referent, all poetry would collapse in a Babel-esque dispersal of unintelligibility. But humans are not inherently creatures of logic. We breathe air. Our bodies contain complex organic structures that communicate with each other through self-created electrical impulses. We evolved to understand each other before we had language. Surely our hominid ancestors did not gather around their campfires to stare at each other blankly.
In my time in the charismatic Pentecostal church, I sought out and practiced glossolalia—speaking in tongues—in collective settings. I liked feeling like a vessel. A mouthpiece for an unknown language, where the emotion was mine alone. These have been among the most profound experiences of language in my life. They took place in settings of people who knew, trusted, and loved each other—and though someone may, from time to time, have offered a feeble translation, I preferred to remain in the “Word,” as we called it, itself. This language seemed to change even the air—my fellow cosmonauts sometimes reported seeing a “glory cloud,” visible plumes of shimmering particles in the space between or above us. It’s the same sensation I would experience later, surrounded by sweaty bodies in the cavernous concrete clubs of Berlin's queer nightlife scene: repetitive music, a strange language slowly becoming more intelligible to me, that same charge in the air becoming visible. Getting a taste of it once, then chasing it every chance I could get, further and further into the fugue, with urgency: It must escape its carapace. Quickly. We must all escape our carapace. Come shining. [27]
I now live without religion, can’t stay up late at techno parties anymore, and I haven’t an inkling what it would mean to make sense of it all. But I remember that charge in the air. It’s the same charge C.D. Wright invokes with the glory cloud throughout Deepstep—that human state that arises between bodies, in community with others, in a vernacular, a common culture. The fugue poem’s incantations have the power to charge—just like speaking in tongues or a night out at Berghain could.
“Deepstep Come Shining is my rapture,” C.D. Wright said in a 2001 interview in Jacket Magazine. “I don't know if I can get there again. Everything about its composition was either inevitable or serendipitous... I am always looking for my ‘one untranslatable song.’ The Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz said we were all so entitled.” [28] Both Wright and Celan risk unintelligibility in these works filled with symbols, unfamiliar or disembodied voices, and elliptical phrasings. These risks pay off.
Wittgenstein posits that his own propositions on the logic of language, when truly understood by the reader, should be recognized as senseless. They are merely to be used as a ladder towards some knowledge of the world, of the metaphysical. When that place of understanding has been reached, he asks us to “throw away the ladder.” [29] The fugue poem, like the Tractatus, is a kind of ladder: built rung by rung from repeating voices, symbols, and syntax. Deepstep and “Deathfugue” both encode unspeakable memory and transmit it to the reader, with affect preserved, and this is how I know they have both succeeded: at the end of “Deathfugue,” I am mourning with Celan at the bottom of a well, ladder in splinters between us. I have felt what he felt, even if that can only ever be a shadow. And at the end of Deepstep, having moved cinematically across the U.S. South and its polyphony, its unresolvable contradictions—I find myself raptured away with Wright, through a hole in the sky, into her onionlight. Into the glory cloud.
See here for a complete list of works cited.
Open the window. That the glory cloud may come and go. —C.D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining [1]
The air gathers in a room full of bodies, dancing, swaying, or singing—as people become vessels under a net of sound, you can feel a growing static, a charge. Sweat glistens on your palms, and if you squint, you might notice the dust start to glimmer in the light. Someone puts their palm on your wet shoulder. When they open their mouth, they speak in a language you barely understand. You reply, like a mouthpiece, in that same strange language. The music repeats, the people come and go, until you get tired and go home. The next day you may not remember the particulars, but you remember that charge in the air. Whether that space had it. This charge, this transmission of feeling between bodies beyond words, is something I’m always looking for in poetry. C.D. Wright’s book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining carries this charge—and in trying to understand how it works, I began to think of it as a fugue, considering its structure and impact in relationship to Paul Celan’s poem “Deathfugue.” While Celan’s fugue compresses language towards a dark center, Wright’s fugue expands outwards, increasing its capacity to hold many voices until it reaches a point of transcendence. For both poets, the fugue method is a way to reckon with the failure of language to say the unsayable, while nonetheless transmitting feeling beyond words—a technology for charging the air.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream—the best example of a fugue is one we know from childhood. A fugue begins with a subject: a melody or phrase that is repeated by multiple voices before being interwoven with contrasting countersubjects. As a fugue develops, juxtaposition and polyphony destabilize the subject and countersubject, transforming them through layering and parataxis towards some new pinnacle of feeling. The nursery rhyme, in its original form, is a subject (row...) and countersubject (merrily, merrily...) sung in unison first, then in staggered layers as vocal parts enter at different times. It starts as familiar, and as the layers build, it transforms into something stranger, cacophonous, and transcendent. [2] In a fugue, the subject and countersubject are the structure of the work itself—the weaving of the basket that holds its emotional content.
The fugue poem, like its musical analogue, is constructed out of subjects and countersubjects. Instead of melodies, the poetic fugue weaves voices, symbols, and syntax. It’s a method, rather than a received form. Unlike repeating forms like the villanelle or pantoum, the fugue poem prescribes no particular length, structure, or occasion—all it requires are subjects and countersubjects, recurring with variation.
Paul Celan’s “Deathfugue” is in four cyclical sections, each beginning with variations on the fugue’s initial subject. The first three lines of the first two stanzas, and of the sixth:
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink...
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink...
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink [3]
From the outset, Celan outlines how the poem will work. By grounding us in the repeating subject, he declares home base—“Black milk of morning” is the phrase that begins the poem, and is only found at the beginning of stanzas, never within them. This phrase signals to the reader that a cycle has restarted, which resets the puzzle and clears the field. This surreal and macabre subject conjures the feeling of morning in a concentration camp—the cycle restarts, the horrors of the day will be familiar and systematic. This kind of repetition encodes a closed-in feeling, aided by the fact that the section/stanza lengths are roughly uniform, and the orbit of the poem never expands further than the single day or setting of the camps.
Celan’s cycles repeat and circle the drain—each stanza is made of many of the same symbols as the others, with slight variation. When new images are added, they dial up the fugal claustrophobia, rather than offering relief from it.
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit [4]
By the ending couplet, Celan’s repeating images have taken on symbolic weight: blue eyes and golden hair communicating the German ideal, the greys and blacks of ashen hair, smoke, and lead bullets reaching towards the desolation of the Holocaust.
The fugue poem affords the poet the ability to contain the unsayable without attempting to resolve it. In this negative capability, the method is well-suited to subjects that refuse resolution—Celan’s fugue has the Holocaust as its fixed center; Wright’s fugue moves across the southern landscape of the U.S. haunted by many histories of genocide, removal, and slavery. Celan and Wright reach for the same method to inverse ends. By its final couplet, “Deathfugue” has collapsed into darkest inevitability—a downward spiral enacted by its compressed, brutally minimalist variations and relatively short length.
Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining expands in ever-widening orbits, growing as it moves to contain everything in its path. She repeats fragments, images in variation, voices, and themes as the fugue accumulates. On the first page we are dropped right into the movement of the poem, and encounter images that will recur throughout the work:
Meanwhile the cars continued in a persistent flow down Closeburn Road.
The refrain to the rain would be a movement up and down the clefs of light.
Chlorophyll world. July. Great goblets of magnolialight. [5]
Her head cooling against the car glass. The mind apprehends the white piano, her
mother. [6]
“Never avert your eyes.” (Kurosawa)
A photograph is a writing of the light. Photo Graphein. [7]
She will still be up when we come in. Our floating host. She will be at the door in her
pleated nightgown. Admit us into her air-conditioned nightgown. Her glory cloud. [8]
Wright weaves anecdotes, found language, and historical references together as the book roughly traces a road trip through the U.S. South, which she famously took with her friend and frequent collaborator, the photographer Deborah Luster. Recurring images form threads throughout the work, like the substitution of God with the name “Louise,” which I imagine is a reference to someone squinting at some nearly-illegible bathroom graffiti: “God is Louise. Is that what it says.” [9] Louise becomes one of the fugue’s subjects, appearing and reappearing also in slight variation:
“God is Louise.” [10]
“Did you say he met a woman there that went by Louise?” [11]
“Louise moves in mysterious ways. Coming soon.” [12]
“If Louise is god can her evanescence be fixed.” [13]
“If Louise is the answer what is the question. Are we stuck here or what.” [14]
Further subjects and countersubjects swing in and out of the work: a mute swan, a white piano, a person named “Thrasher” who has “a lapdog in his freezer,” [15] characters like the Boneman and Snakeman, quotations from the filmmaker Kurosawa and writer James Agee, onions, the vibrations of color, eyeballs. This cycling allows the reader to participate in the widening orbit of Deepstep as it progresses; having been primed to expect variations on each subject and countersubject, Wright’s fugue teaches its reader how to accept an expanding valence of concerns while de-risking confusion or overwhelm.
The fugue method requires some kind of musical structure in the poem, in addition to repetition. Celan accomplishes this through meter in the poem’s original German, which proceeds in plodding dactyls and trochees in an irregular pattern:
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken... [16]
This irregular metrical pattern destabilizes the poem, signaling order through its use of meter but reflecting the chaos inherent within that order, drawing a metaphor with the chaotic, fascist “order” of the camps. Meter is a difficult element to preserve in translation, even between two languages as similar as English and German. The Pierre Joris translation preserves this sense of rhythm, but falls short in some places where the scansion is unclear or has multiple options in the English. In the German language, words often begin with a stressed syllable. English, full of loanwords, displays a wider variety of metrical patterns. Ambiguity of meter is also a choice of the translator: a pair of lines that are identical in Celan’s German are rendered by Joris into English with different syntax. Other translators do not make this choice. I believe Joris did this to provide even more variation of texture, building on Celan’s original strategy, trying to further render that destabilization into English in a way that was not available in the German language.
The musical structure of Wright’s fugue is its polyvocality. On a single page, we may receive transmissions from several voices who are unnamed but become distinct and familiar by the end of the book. The poem builds its heat along with this accumulation. Voices that sound like a southern Evangelical preacher repeat throughout the poem, juxtaposed with academic voices, southern vernacular found language, roadside signs, and asides:
Where does this damn stupid thing go. For god’s sake. Are you
sure you want to wear that. [17]
We will become godlike.
Open the window. That the glory cloud may come and go. [18]
She had painted her trailer skirt to read: COMING SOON Jesus Christ in All His Glory. It’s her trailer skirt, she can say what she likes. What she feels. What she believes. What she sees (Coming Soon). [19]
The fugue poem works from a vocabulary of recurring symbols. Where Celan’s symbols concentrate attention (“your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamit”[20]), Wright’s symbols proliferate and mutate: magnolialight becomes pianolight, onionlight, Formicalight, lotuslight, alligatorlight, each one gesturing to some unique feeling. It is a kind of witness, as Wright’s speaker says:
I was there. I know. [21]
Everything in Deepstep is connected, either through repetition or juxtaposition with a repeating image. By the middle of the book, we are in an expanding hurricane of image accumulation, with all elements subject to collision with any other. In a section describing that hurricane, Wright points to what her fugue can achieve, those intertextual connections producing moments of transcendence: “Clouds accumulate… Bertha turns inland. Multitudes of windows crossed with masking tape… Contrasts annihilated. Concealing loneliness and fear.” [22]
Celan’s fugue narrows towards magnification: by compressing the two symbolic women Margarete and Shulamit into the poem’s only couplet, he exits the fugue at its most intensified, elemental center. In the final pages of Deepstep, the paratactic form subsides, and the evangelical preacher’s voice takes over. This voice guides us slowly towards the climax, in a section marked by visual caesurae, invoking the definition of magnification we might encounter in the Bible—annihilating contrasts, concealing loneliness and fear:
this goes out to the air
the sweet barbecue of night I want to
magnify […] praise is
the gate to enter in we need an elevator to
take our lost friends up to the auditorium
of light didn’t I call O world world world
I but stumbled when I saw praise is the gate [23]
Here at its final orbit, language collapses into utterance: O world world world. Sight is recast as a source of stumbling, the speaker staggering towards that gate where praise is the condition of entry. I think that Wright is gesturing to something beyond language here—that rapture, that charge, that praise-feeling that the words don’t say exactly, but that the reader nonetheless receives. Leaving the voice of the preacher behind, Wright invites the reader to take in the larger sweep of Deepstep, free from obligation to parse any one particular symbol for its meaning. Then, a wry admission:
Don’t need a magnifying glass
To make the feelings seen.
[…]
Not an inkling what it means
Urge to withdraw [24]
A gracious recognition, I think, of the risks of unintelligibility that Wright has taken in this fugue. In the final line of the book, she situates us in that elevator of light, ascending towards an auditorium of light, and closes her fugue with this line:
Pull the ladder up after. [25]
Wright’s ladder is a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s closing precept of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a treatise on the philosophy of language, which Wright cites throughout Deepstep and much of her other work. In paraphrase, Wittgenstein tells us that language is only able to say the logical, the sayable. What is unsayable, the metaphysical, is best left unsaid, since the language of logic cannot truly represent or transmit it. [26]
I am no philosopher. But I think what Ludwig missed, in all his focus in the Tractatus on the words themselves and how they carry meaning, was the poet’s ability to encode the unsayable in the space between the words, or on a grander scale, in the sweep of sustained accumulation. Language requires logic, of course—without some relatively steady referent, all poetry would collapse in a Babel-esque dispersal of unintelligibility. But humans are not inherently creatures of logic. We breathe air. Our bodies contain complex organic structures that communicate with each other through self-created electrical impulses. We evolved to understand each other before we had language. Surely our hominid ancestors did not gather around their campfires to stare at each other blankly.
In my time in the charismatic Pentecostal church, I sought out and practiced glossolalia—speaking in tongues—in collective settings. I liked feeling like a vessel. A mouthpiece for an unknown language, where the emotion was mine alone. These have been among the most profound experiences of language in my life. They took place in settings of people who knew, trusted, and loved each other—and though someone may, from time to time, have offered a feeble translation, I preferred to remain in the “Word,” as we called it, itself. This language seemed to change even the air—my fellow cosmonauts sometimes reported seeing a “glory cloud,” visible plumes of shimmering particles in the space between or above us. It’s the same sensation I would experience later, surrounded by sweaty bodies in the cavernous concrete clubs of Berlin's queer nightlife scene: repetitive music, a strange language slowly becoming more intelligible to me, that same charge in the air becoming visible. Getting a taste of it once, then chasing it every chance I could get, further and further into the fugue, with urgency: It must escape its carapace. Quickly. We must all escape our carapace. Come shining. [27]
I now live without religion, can’t stay up late at techno parties anymore, and I haven’t an inkling what it would mean to make sense of it all. But I remember that charge in the air. It’s the same charge C.D. Wright invokes with the glory cloud throughout Deepstep—that human state that arises between bodies, in community with others, in a vernacular, a common culture. The fugue poem’s incantations have the power to charge—just like speaking in tongues or a night out at Berghain could.
“Deepstep Come Shining is my rapture,” C.D. Wright said in a 2001 interview in Jacket Magazine. “I don't know if I can get there again. Everything about its composition was either inevitable or serendipitous... I am always looking for my ‘one untranslatable song.’ The Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz said we were all so entitled.” [28] Both Wright and Celan risk unintelligibility in these works filled with symbols, unfamiliar or disembodied voices, and elliptical phrasings. These risks pay off.
Wittgenstein posits that his own propositions on the logic of language, when truly understood by the reader, should be recognized as senseless. They are merely to be used as a ladder towards some knowledge of the world, of the metaphysical. When that place of understanding has been reached, he asks us to “throw away the ladder.” [29] The fugue poem, like the Tractatus, is a kind of ladder: built rung by rung from repeating voices, symbols, and syntax. Deepstep and “Deathfugue” both encode unspeakable memory and transmit it to the reader, with affect preserved, and this is how I know they have both succeeded: at the end of “Deathfugue,” I am mourning with Celan at the bottom of a well, ladder in splinters between us. I have felt what he felt, even if that can only ever be a shadow. And at the end of Deepstep, having moved cinematically across the U.S. South and its polyphony, its unresolvable contradictions—I find myself raptured away with Wright, through a hole in the sky, into her onionlight. Into the glory cloud.
See here for a complete list of works cited.
