What sound does a comma make? When is a poem read, and when is it breathed? What might the dead be writing?

Fully bespelled in italics, Edmeades’ punctuation rises to the fore of this poem like the hidden images in a magic eye picture. Spelling out the ciphered marks invites the reader to speak them (aloud or in the mind’s voice) with equal emphasis to the actual words of the text. In pulling threads of response to this poem, I found myself wondering at the intent of this experiment. Is the layering meant to be primarily a visual interaction between the components of the poem on the page, or a performed conversation?

Deliberating on the interplay between audible recital and silent reading recalls Claire Lacey’s session on sound poetry at the 2022 National Young Writers’ Festival in Ōtepoti. Lacey presented on techniques of breathwork and non-language vocalisations, and ways these could be penned—pinned as script on the page. Between screenings of raucous 1970s antics of the Four Horsemen and contemporary Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist Angela Rawlings, Lacey shared a poem of their own, both printed and performed. Slashes denoted the breaths in a poem of medical anxiety, panting and wheezing. Marks were clustered for moments of hyperventilation that interrupted verbalised thought, and drawn out for slow gulps of calming air as the poem returned to sentence forms.

Lacey’s slashes bore clear purpose—signifying the nonverbal physicality of embodied experience, introducing a specific aesthetic for held and expelled breath into their poem. The interference of elevated punctuation with the questing voice in the rest of Edmeades’ text similarly introduces a greater-than-usual emphasis for symbols that typically go unobserved in their service to words. I was struck by the way the tools of language were set up to run interference on a line of questioning which itself urgently sought what meanings there might be in the intertwined acts of writing and reading. What could it mean to write as if already dead? For reading to blossom as a rose?

In these interrogations, Edmeades’ line ‘to read as if writing’ could be a verbatim quote from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. Her poem evokes Barthes’ claim that competent conventional writing can induce contentment in a passively receptive reader, but true rapture is created by more challenging texts that require an active interpretative effort—making the reader act as writer. Barthes differentiates the pleasure of the readerly from the more potent but also more fretful bliss of the writerly text, as follows:

Musings on the hedonism of cultural conventionality notwithstanding, I venture that it’s fair to say the upturning of grammatical emphasis in this poem to highlight the various pauses of punctuation does require the reader to take a more active part in meaning-making—a less comfortable but more rewarding engagement with the fullness of the poem’s language. I’ll withhold comment on whether this thus makes a reader doubly perverse.

While the evocation of Barthes may have been unintentional, Edmeades’ poem is explicitly an echolalia after the title of a Kate Zambreno book, itself a ‘writerly’ text from an acclaimed literary boundary-breaker. Variously novella, scholarly study, notebook and meta-memoir, this text traces precarity, persona, pregnancy and the Covid-19 pandemic, in conversation with photographer Hervé Guibert’s diaristic novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—an acerbically charismatic account of his own illness from AIDs which also memorialises the death of his pseudonymised friend Michel Foucault. It is from Guibert’s determination to write with uncompromising candour that Zambreno’s title is taken.

The gist of Zambreno and Guibert’s ‘to write as if already dead’ is to unleash the pen and say what would go unsaid in polite company—without consideration of social consequence, such a drag on the telling of the most gory personal truths. Gay and feminist writing like theirs has evolved in a context where the desire not to upset anyone hasn’t just been moralising hand-wringing but also a matter of safety—and where breaking that silence can still be an exposure to risk ourselves, our relationships, our careers, our loved ones. Even now, in a heyday of confessional poetry, how do we write when it is mortifying to ourselves or others? But silence too is a kind of premature death. I think of what I’ve just given away, accidentally-on-purpose, in my freaky sestina for this same issue of remake. And I look back to Edmeades’ poem, to see how reading is written, to write as if already, as if always reading.

Whether the content of Zambreno’s book is further reflected in the poem is a question I can’t answer having not yet read it (though now it’s on my list!). Instead, I’m interested in the way the poem treats that title as the warping echo of a half-heard phrase, stretching it into loops like a taffy-pulling machine. What is the relationship between writing and death? Like everyone, all writers are condemned to the ultimate deadline. And there are plenty of dead writers, but only the living tend to be described as readers. The poem can’t forget about living—it needs the living, needs readers even more than its writer in the long run. As Edmeades expands the questions, death departs the poem, and instead the permeability between writing and reading becomes the key exchange (appropriate for remake, where writers are necessarily readers as well). But still death haunts the poem from its very title, an unspoken spectre in that closing question mark, our living bodies brief as poems or roses.

notes

Barthes, Roland. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, foreword by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, New York. Reproduced online: https://emberilmu.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/roland-barthes-the-pleasure-of-the-text.pdf

Lacey, Claire. September 2022. Sound it Out: A Sound Poetry Workshop. National Young Writers’ Festival, NZ, Ōtepoti Dunedin.

Zambreno, Kate. 2021. To Write as if Already Dead. Columbia University Press.
Zambreno, Kate. December 2022. “Once it is written, it is forgotten”: Kate Zambreno on Hervé Guibert. Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/once-it-is-written-it-is-forgotten-kate-zambreno-on-herve-guibert/

rebecca hawkes