Epistrophy by Ted Pearson

Epistrophy is a serial work comprising seventy poems that explore poetics in light of its resistance to an authoritarian State. It begins with an epigraph from Charles Baudelaire: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable.” This keys several of the major themes explored throughout the book. These include such pairings as poet and tyrant, music and silence, language and thought, the long past and the immediate future, art and politics, permanence and change, and relations between the living and the dead. At present, with humanity’s future in doubt, we may be facing the end of history, which can only cast its backward glances because it believes in the future. Meanwhile, the current regime employs widespread chaos to mask its repressive endgame. But, if history ends with no future to speak of, where can we look for a guarantor of meaning, especially the meaning of existence?

Epistrophy argues that “The gift of life is the search for meaning, / not the presumption that meaning exists.” Many of these poems cast poetics and the State as antagonists in our struggle for a democratic society. While the emphasis throughout is on poetics, there are passages dealing with the current regime. “Those who choose to ignore bad history / are destined to make even more of it.” Against which, the poems insist that “the impulse to see through the subject / leads to a richer discourse.” Which leads in turn to an informed electorate. “And just when you think you’ve seen it all, / you see it all again.” The practice of poetry exemplifies a peaceable alternative to state-sponsored violence and repression. To the gross if constant abuse of language – which degrades the commons and stunts public speech – poems are built on their material base and the diction best suited to tell the truth. There is no ersatz tradition to constrain the poems. They have no truck with warped ideologies. No time for a tyrant’s lies. Rather, poems function as credibility-discerning-and -affirming structures, designed, as Blake says, to cast out falsehood forever.

Epistrophy is also the title of the Thelonious Monk composition I was listening to when I first began work on this book. The tune’s verses, with their midline caesurae, made me think of couplets. So I owe both my title and the stanza form I chose for these poems to Monk, may he rest in music. That said, his piece is more upbeat than mine, and his rhythms recall (as mine do not) the rhetorical figure of epistrophe – the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive phrases. For my work, I encourage the reader to adopt an attitude of relaxed attention. Best to read slowly – and aloud,  because sound and rhythm influence how a given line or sentence becomes available to meaning. Yet “Critics disdain what escapes them” leading to “another death by interpretation.” In other words, does the total syntax of the poem support whatever claims you make for it? Once a book is in your hands, it is truly “in your hands.” For my part, I try to translate my thoughts as clearly as possible within the constraints of the work under construction.

Epistrophy, as I noted earlier, is a serial work. The poems in the series are linked by their internal logic as well as chronology. The book is the sum of the resonances that result. To grand narratives I prefer to focus on the thoughts that arise in the course of daily life. The quotidian, in large part, is our “life.” Given that these affects and effects are subject to conceptualization. It is  “not the symbol, but the scene” we seek, as George Oppen reminds us. The scene, for example, where ghosts are invited to enter the poem. I assume we’re all haunted by something; for economy’s sake, I call them ghosts. The “great dead” among them, or rather their words. Which we come to take for our own. In the end, my hope for my readers is that they make these poems their own. That comes from repeated readings, which I encourage by writing to be re-read.