Acknowledgments
Sections of this book were written while on fellowships provided by Lannan Foundation and the Graduate School of Georgetown University. I remain deeply grateful for their generous support.
Poems in the book previously appeared in Hambone, Iowa Review, Critical Quarterly, Obsidian, the Academy of American Poets Daily Series, PEN Poetry Series, and Another Instance: Three Chapbooks. “The Drums of Marrakech” first appeared in Harper’s (March 2016).
The Fragility of Writing
Notes on a Trilogy
The Book of Landings consists of the second and third volumes of a trilogy. The first volume was published as Entrepôt in 2010. Around the time this volume was going to press, I started to think of lyric poetry as dubiously fragile and apt to crumble over time, to become vapor. The wordiness of the poem acted subversively, because the more words you have the further you are from the hard core of perception. But at the same time, confusedly, more words appear to lend weight to immaterial thoughts. To reach a state of durability, the poem needed fewer, not more, words. You needed words to act like stones, an indivisible geological unit. Or, you needed words to act like a mark made by the hand on the wall of a cave, like a physical cutting into a surface, such as a mark formed by cutting into a sheet of vellum with a sharp stylus. You needed a mark unifying the deformation of a surface—cutting into a block of wood—with its meaning. How to make a poem consist of such marks? What would such a poem be like? It would be brief, even fragmentary, for the operations of ordinary syntax would be minimized. Ideally, and also impossibly, such a poem would consist of one word, one mark only, a mark exactly equal to, and indistinguishable from, what it represented: a symbol. But obviously for the word to be durable it must be related to other words and to a sufficiently forceful perception of the world. A poem must consist of more than one word, and yet this plurality increases its fragility; but a word by itself is hardly anything at all.
Thoughts such as these led me to draw a grid of rectangles and to try to see by what relationships of “sight, sound, and intellection” the grid might be filled in with 12 words. I looked back at a page in Volume I of the trilogy from the poem “Gadji Beri Bimba,” where hand-drawings are imposed over text. My reason for making those drawings in “Gadji Beri Bimba” had to do with a desire to efface the previously inscribed language on the page and to accentuate the presence of alien, non-verbal forms. But for Volume II, the impulse was not to efface but to transfix the word, to isolate it, to give it due respect, to heighten its word-ness, by placing it inside a rectangle. The geometry of the grids, and the graphic markings on the page, were what drew me at first, the permanence and materiality of marks as opposed to the immateriality of verbal meanings. The defacement of the two pages in Volume I left more to do.
I must have started by writing down a word in the square of a grid—a word like souk.
To write down any next word I tested several words in my mind against words previous selected, mainly for how they might coexist and throw up an imaginary field without encroaching semantically or phonemically too much on the terrain proposed thus far by the words already present in the grid. I paid no attention to choosing words that, together, could simulate the behavior of a lyric poem, or sum up to a narrative of sorts, because what I wanted to do was counteract the lyric poem’s fragility. But there is a “logic” to the array of words inside any of the grids; the words belong together, and when read either horizontally, diagonally, or vertically, one word follows after another, but as a vector might bear away from a given trajectory.
The filling in happened intermittently, but the lexicon, or reservoir, was present right at the start. It came from the world engaged by Volume I and by the idea of an “entrepôt.” In common usage, an entrepôt is a place set up for the trans-shipment of goods. Charting a multitude of separate in-bound vectors, objects enter the entrepôt from different external sites. The entrepôt collects these objects, formerly stationed or manufactured elsewhere, in one place—arranges a temporary meeting, as it were, of the disparate and the strange. But then, the objects are dispatched from the entrepôt onto new, outward-bound trajectories, towards their final destinations.
In my elaboration, an entrepôt is not a proper place, but a noman’s-land. Entrepôt exists apart from—on the outside of, or in between—places where national identity takes root and where nations have their durable geographical dwelling. Entrepôt punctuates the passage of bodies in space from one location to another. As such, the space of entrepôt is related to the refugee camp and to the ground bordered but not occupied by warring factions. The area around the port of a city is an entrepôt: polyglot, fertile ground for the emergence of hybrid tongues and argots. A slave ship is an especially violent entrepôt, a node in a network of other sites of gathering and dispersal: the dungeon, where slaves were temporarily housed on the West Coast of Africa; and the auction blocks of the Americas, whence