what we breathe
in human skin
and insect parts
Chris Gordon
A number of poems we've looked at are about transformation. We started with Jim Kacian's
in a tent in the rain I become a climate
which gives us an outside look at something experienced, not so much the experience itself. That said, I have a lot of praise for the poem. Other poems also, including Tohta's, tell us about the author's experience, tell us that he or she had an experience, but again, there is a sense of being outside. And I love Tohta's poem as well, and other poems of explicit "becoming".
But there are ways, and I believe Chris Gordon's poem may serve as an example, where transformation is what happens within and as the poem itself, and we are led by the internal force of it, to undergo a transformation. To experience it.
Ambiguity is one way this may happen, a place in the poem where we are forced into uncertainty, a state in which we may experience, if only briefly, a sense of another reality. In Gordon's poem there are two simultaneous senses, and maybe more, but two are primary as I read it--
what we breathe in: human skin and insect parts
That is one reality, a somewhat familiar, if unpleasant one. The other is this one--
what we breathe in human skin and insect parts
or, to be clear about this:
there are things we breathe while we inhabit our human skin and our insect parts
This reality, which has entered through the door of ambiguity, is certainly less familiar, but because ambiguity and simultaneity act as wormholes into strangeness, we feel the truth of it-- or rather, we are less defended against the strangeness. If only briefly, until the rational mind says "yes, I inhabit my human skin, but not insect parts, forget it".
But what the poem enacts is the becoming something more than human, or perhaps something more human, if we accept that yes, we are also made in some way of insect parts. It is not a long shot from Issa's empathic haiku.
The poem works from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Or it may be truer to say it works from the inside to a place deeper in, or different.
A poem like this gives me hope that what we call haiku is still alive.
"In Gordon's poem there are two simultaneous senses, and maybe more, but two are primary as I read it--
what we breathe in: human skin and insect parts
That is one reality, a somewhat familiar, if unpleasant one. The other is this one--
what we breathe in human skin and insect parts
or, to be clear about this:
there are things we breathe while we inhabit our human skin and our insect parts
This reality, which has entered through the door of ambiguity, is certainly less familiar, but because ambiguity and simultaneity act as wormholes into strangeness, we feel the truth of it-- or rather, we are less defended against the strangeness. If only briefly, until the rational mind says "yes, I inhabit my human skin, but not insect parts, forget it". - Peter
Interesting, Peter. The first (& 'primary') reading I had (catching up a little on this thread this morning) is the one you haven't mentioned.
what we breathe (is) in human skin and insect parts
what we breathe
in human skin
and insect parts
Everything you've said here confirms my feeling that this is a ku that might be better rendered as a one-liner, if we are to find ambiguity. If line breaks are to be ignored by the reader, why have them?
If what you say is right, then isn't there a deliberate misdirection by the author?
- Lorin
