So in the car, I begin my poem with things: all eyes to avoid the lie.

Yet where do things end? My grandmother passes away some weeks after the draft of my poem. The burial commences an influx of revived memories; the solemn ceremony reshapes them, wipes a veneer over them. Then the funeral itself becomes another memory for the dusting. Memory always menaces present experience, because it’s never fully reconstructed, no instant is ever finished. Just like a well-constructed guitar wood vibrates in response to harmonies in the room, the last line of the poem excites the first line of the poem, and the later draft excites the earlier. But the things of poetry — the statements, the vivid experiences — are ubiquitous and inexhaustible. As such, they are always subject to the arguments of poetry — its methods, its forms. The “I” and its role is at the center of the aesthetic inquiry: how objective? how confessional? We chisel stone looking for the David, unsure if what we’re finding underneath is just more stone.

I’ve called the grandmother piece my first poem because it was my first sincere use of language with no expected return. It was that unself-consciousness a young writer loses when he faces readership, sophistication, and the anxiety of influence. Years and drafts later I come across Marianne Moore’s “burning desire to objectify what is indispensable to one’s happiness to express,” which I recognize as an endeavor back to prelapsarian sincerity, the cultivated absence of the insipid “I.” This is, vaguely, the objective art shucking off — like Stevens’s “authentic and fluent speech” with “its single emptiness,” like Eliot whom Moore named “master of the anonymous,” even like Coleridge and Shelley becoming wind-strummed Aeolian harps — the objective art shucking off caprice and insecurity, an art that merely is, just as our bare and sweating selves merely are. A Tai Chi instructor once told me, “The hardest part is ziran: the being self-so.”

Memory always menaces present experience, because it’s never fully reconstructed, no instant is ever finished.

Consider Marianne Moore for example, a frigid poet if ever there was one, with her syllabic forms, her obscure animals, her terribly Latinist phrases — all this resulting in an effaced poet and reader. She accomplishes with grammatically logical sentences what lesser poets need the koanic jazz of fragments to achieve. Let’s take for granted the modern theory that words are unfixed approximations, sliding texts without a resting point. They’re fingers pointing each at different moons. If the goal of the poet is to see the moon and not the dancing fingers, I believe there are two diverging roads. One is to silence words and reach comprehension by some alternate, non-cerebral path: the clarity of physical exercise, for instance, or music (although these are problematic because how then to understand/direct feelings without words?). The second road is to do the opposite: find a written aesthetic which so overloads language that we start to hear not the words but the modal spaces between them.

Here is a long sentence from Moore’s “The Pangolin,” bookended with two short sentences, which I have converted (and thus violated) into prose, to make the syntax digestible. I trust the reader will compare with the original from her Collected Poems:

To explain grace requires a curious hand. If that which is at all were not forever, why would those who graced the spires with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious low stone seats — a monk and monk and monk — between the thus ingenious roof-supports, have slaved to confuse grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt, the cure for sins, a graceful use of what are yet approved stone mullions branching out across the perpendiculars? A sailboat was the first machine.

The inattentive eye glazes over the prose block. The delayed and dangling tension between “why would those who” and “have slaved to confuse” is a technique taken directly from Latin, in which words can be linked many lines apart by corresponding declension. In the original, line breaks and tabulation further stretch the tension; Moore uses this to make a peculiar music in English. Not only do internal rhyme and repetition move us along like octave notes, the syllabic lines in the original give an immutable structure to her verse, a stanzaic architecture. And converting the passage to prose actually highlights the metrical cadence that her jarring enjambments are meant to minimize. As W.S. Di Piero put it, “If, as the maxim goes, poetry teaches me how to live, it does so in its mysterious effects of completed form.” Inasmuch as form is personal style, Moore teaches us a personality that has no recourse to autobiographical detail. The “I” is merely the inquirer and the formulator; the reader can share in the reproduction of her vision precisely because it is impersonal.

If we read the poem cerebrally, with Wordsworth’s “meddling intellect,” we find the fruit rotten or plastic; but read it with Negative Capability, self-so, and it undulates over us. It’s like taking in long stretches of James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover or Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew in a single sitting; the suspension of a passage like Moore’s yields a fugue state, that misty feeling of losing ourselves to an alien other-language. We trust the art, D.H. Lawrence said, not the artist.