Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Danielle Rose is the author of two short books: at first & then and The History of Mountains. Her work can be found in Palette, Hobart and Grist.
A poem is a bundle of ideas all bouncing against each other. Forget cadence and meter, forget counting feet or searching for music. Ideas rubbing against other ideas, rubbing off on other ideas. Sometimes there is an explosion, or a coalescence. Truths, stitched together with thread fashioned from our little lies and aggrandizements. And then they slam against a body, a whole collective of differing ideas and different little lies. There is force, there is impact.
Perhaps this is what Spinoza meant when he spoke of affectus and affectio, that there is a force that slams against the body, and then the impact that is left in its wake. An impact that lingers, as Kathleen Stewart explains, “The affective subject is a collection of trajectories and circuits.” We inhabit them, or see our desires as a resultant quality, or become stuck, spinning around like a carousel ride you cannot leap away from. Agency? Another way to become stuck. Another way to lean back and ask the question, “What is missing?” Because there is always something missing. And we are always searching for that thing that is missing.
So what? Stewart might call these little pieces of writing a “self-making project”. More precisely, she might locate numerous loci of self-making within the lifespan of a poem. The poet, bringing forth their agency to arrange and choose; the reader, using their agency to interpret that arrangement of choices.
What does this mean? That we are constantly proliferating our agency, our self-making. This world is full of things we encounter passing through us like a storm. The question is what to do with it when agency decides to do the same thing again, expecting a better result. We step outside to meet the rain and wind head-on, or huddle scared and hidden in the basement of the house. A poem tucks neatly into our ever-present crisis. Providing something that appears stable before it tears us away again, an impact directing the body somewhere else, somewhere new. I want to make a reader feel — think — speak. At this point, my job is finished. I am working on the next, next thing. My mind isn’t even here—it moves on after its own affective impacts: It, too, feels, thinks, speaks. To plug into that, just a little. Enough so that a reader can pick up where I left off, spin up their own agency, their own self-making. Get stuck in their own cycles or seek out that missing something because this time will be different.
And Lauren Berlant says this is all a distraction from what really matters, which is politics.
Husband as Balloon Flying into the Clouds
Husband as an Eyeball, Wandering
Husband as the Same Conversation We Always Have, But This Time Will Be Different
Husband as Godzilla, Wrecking My Intricate Sandcastle
Husband as a Kitchen Sink, Full of Grease Overflowing
Wife as a Thing Husband Once Desired But Now Does Not
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