When a reader once called me a research-based poet, I was startled. I had never thought of my poems in that way. Though I know that something I call “poetic thinking” drives my work, I had never written a poetry book based, for example, on historical manuscripts or an archeological site. Distinct from the empirical drive of research, poetic thinking feels more imaginary. As Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” In a different metaphor altogether, Robert Frost describes poets as people to whom knowledge “stick[s]…like burrs” — piecemeal, without the complete intellectual coverage to which scholarship aspires. Poetic knowledge as irritant: burrs irritate a poem into being.
Can burrs have a place in poetic research? Or in ekphrasis, the genre of poetry that focuses on the visual arts? During the writing of my forthcoming book The Right Hand (Tupelo Press, October 2024), I did extensive poetic research for the first time. But this research was severely condensed, much like poetic language itself. It was limited to just one sculpture: Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa,” in Rome. Bernini’s work illustrates a moment in the saint’s autobiography when Teresa of Avila feels an angel’s arrow “plunged into [her] heart several times so that it penetrated to [her] entrails.” Half of The Right Hand is centered around that vision as Bernini interpreted it: a woman draped in turbulent folds from her head to her ankles, lying back in thrall as a cherub aims his gold arrow at her heart.
I began this study in Rome during February of 2020, just before the pandemic devastated Italy. I hoped that the poetry I was about to write would complete and even intensify my then-unfinished manuscript of The Right Hand. The first half of the book was about chronic pain, acupuncture, and bodywork, focusing on the tactile and emotional relationships some of us have with our bodyworkers — the people who pierce, massage, and manipulate our bodies to relieve our pain. Now I wanted another, more iconographic point of entrance to these unusual couplings. Still, the intensity of the focus I proposed was a risk. Would the sculpture be able to carry the whole second half of the book? Would it sustain a reader’s interest?
My approach remained anti-research in the strictest sense: I knew I didn’t want to write Teresa’s history, or Bernini’s, in this poetry book. I didn’t want to try to speak in their voices. I didn’t want even to reference the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who had famously made this sculpture into an emblem of female sexuality (“she’s coming”). What I wanted instead was an experiment in looking and listening: to the sculpture, to the ambient multilingual voices within the church that housed it, and to myself as an everyday witness.
Bernini’s sculpture portrays an altered state: the state of ecstasy, when a human is emptied of her organs and filled instead with the love of God. But I am not Catholic, nor affiliated with any religion. My temporary cohabitation with the sculpture was far from ecstatic; it was instead quite workaday in nature. I would arrive with my notebook, sit in a pew, and rapidly scratch out lines with my pen. Or I’d snap photos with my Samsung phone. Despite my humble methods, the sculpture seemed to grow exponentially, almost geographically, in the words I found. “Teresa’s dress is topography, a country,” I wrote. The Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria also provided a micro-climate for Bernini’s work, and I wanted to record these environs in addition to the sculpture’s visual details: tourists’ laughter no less than the prayers of the faithful.
Such ambient moments, I thought, would complement my microscopic observation of the sculpture itself. I photographed it from every possible vantage point, even zooming in once on Teresa’s bare toes under her robe. I wanted to make this amateur camerawork an explicit part of the book’s concerns, as in this early section:
my first photo of Teresa and the angel:
a column intrudes like a left-hand margin
or the ultra-authoritative spine of a book
the porphyry the marble scripted in veins
it’s a doctrine — it tells me
to yield is a power
This “first photo” focuses not on the sculpture but on the column that partially occludes it from the phone camera’s view. Here, the column becomes a metaphor: both an imaginary book’s spine and a notional doctrine that speaks to the power of yielding to someone or something else: an angel’s arrow, or perhaps a bodyworker’s needle or hand. Because the statue is housed in an architectural and social environment, we see it through what “intrudes” on our own experience of the sight. Such layers of nesting architecture invoke what Paul Fry once called “museum-specific emotions.” And this architecture-as-intrusion wears the mantle of wisdom (“to yield is a power”), even if its “doctrine” may or may not be true. After all, anything that presents itself as “ultra-authoritative” should be suspect from the get-go.
White space also helps to create the poem. The fullness and fulguration of this Baroque statue could only, in my view, be taken in via verbal fragments. This is partially due to the human eye’s limitations. Looking closely is exhausting, and it comes with a necessary whiff of failure. In one of the poems, I called myself “a spider on Bernini’s marble,” with the attendant myopia that phrase implies. Such a spider would be reverently close to Teresa and the angel, but unable to take the long view. Fragmented looking also exhorts its own aural rhythms, which the poems absorbed and recreated or, at times, recalibrated.
But the poems’ fragmentary forms only underline what I’ve long believed about ekphrasis and its relationship to visual art. The ekphrastic poet’s job is not to recreate the visual artwork she treats. Horace’s dictum of ut pictura poesis, often translated as “let a poem be like a painting,” actually means something different when read in the original context of Horace’s letter. He is saying that, like paintings, poems sometimes need to be seen up close and sometimes from far away. Thus the poem can be both a spider and a Samsung camera. And it creates a new relationship with the visual artwork—a relationship in dialogue with the poet’s memory, association, distractions, and so on.
In its own dialogue with Bernini’s Teresa, The Right Hand both adores and resists the statue’s portrayal of mystic wisdom. The poems are as much about the technologies of looking (including the technology of pen and paper) as they are about the euphoric content of Bernini’s sculpture. They long to take in what can never fully be assimilated, and they try to love that longing in and of itself.
And for me now, they also mark an historical moment-before-the-moment: what in narrative painting is called the “pregnant moment” before an incident happens. This was the moment just before COVID-19 ravaged not only Italy, but the world. When I return to The Right Hand, I see myself unmasked in the church, not yet threatened by infection, spinning my broken word-webs around Teresa and her angel. When I boarded the plane home from Rome to Chicago, I put on my first mask. I didn’t know then that, as I had recently written in the book, “it’s the skin of the world that [would] puncture” — with IVs and eventually with vaccination needles. COVID would change my life, and it would change my relationship to public spaces for years to come. The Right Hand is my memory of the beautiful, dogged, transporting moments before.
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