For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the limitations of the chaos narrative as it relates to illness illustrated in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller. I’ve looked at how favoring alternate narrative structures over the traditional arc might lead to meaning-making of these so-called anti-narratives. Furthering the idea that we can give chaos narratives a meaning-making apparatus, I’d like to look at structures that are not narrative at all. Poetry offers many alternatives to narrative forms, and even though there are many narrative poems, narrative is not a prerequisite to making a poem happen. For many poets, the essential meaning-making device in a poem is its lineation. James Longenbach, in the preface to his book, The Art of the Poetic Line, begins with “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines” (xi). He contends that the line itself is what defines our experience of poetry as poetry, and throughout his book he makes a series of compelling arguments about the meaning-making capacity of lines. (Though, it’s important to note that, at no point in his book, does he suggest that lines must follow a narrative structure.)
Longenbach is not the only person to suggest the connection between lineation and meaning. The poet Rebecca Hazelton writes, “The relationship between the poetic line (including its length and positioning and how it fits into other lines) and the content of a poem is a major aspect of poetry” (Hazelton, Poetryfoundation.org). We can find scores of poets and scholars who support this idea. However, the tricky part about studying lineation is that lines don’t make meaning in a vacuum. They contribute the other poetic effects simultaneously happening, or “the line’s effect depends on the variable qualities of the poem’s other elements” (Longenbach, 43). This can include syntax, sound, and rhythm, among others.
Consider Max Ritvo. His voice was snuffed out early; he lived with and wrote about his life with cancer. Because illness is specifically his subject, recognizing how his poems resist narrative yet still provide powerful, emotionally resonant accounts of living with cancer can be illuminating and may complicate existing ideas about chaos narratives and how to articulate illness experiences. As well, many of the poems in Four Reincarnations exemplify the phenomenon described by Longenbach as the relationship of the line to its other qualities. Ritvo’s “The Senses” provides us with an excellent example of how line creates meaning while resisting narrative. Close reading and attention to how line works with other elements, especially repetition, can help us unpack the ways in which illness is experienced in Ritvo’s poem.
Ritvo begins with two short stanzas, with expected line breaks. These lines, focused on the sensations of feeling as well as hearing a bit of sound, help orient the reader by playing on her expectations for concrete imagery:
Everything feels so good to me:
my wool hat,
the cocoon of dryness in my throat.
The sound of burning vegetables
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets.
(Ritvo, 6)
Here, we have mostly end-stopped lines, most of which follow punctuation in a regular pattern. We begin with an ordinary sensation anyone might recognize—the feeling of a wool hat—and gently move to slightly stranger and defamiliarized items on the list. It’s this manipulated sense of normalcy that seduces us into the poem.
Following this feigned normalcy, Ritvo chooses to stay with the same short structure: two stanzas, the first being three lines, the second being a couplet. But he moves us from physical sensation, making for easily comprehended examples, into the realm of pure thought. As he does so, the punctuation becomes erratic:
But I keep having thoughts—
this thought always holding at bay the next thought
until it sours into yet
another picture of dissatisfaction
that loves to be a thought,
(Ritvo, 6)
Ritvo gives us much to unpack here. First, in the example above, we see where the second line of the first stanza has sprawled long, where previously the lines remained shorter, more compact, one might even call them controlled. Our punctuation has become all pause-based, a dash and a comma, a run-on sentence enacting the runaway act of thought, the repeated word. Despite repeating the word, “thought,” Ritvo’s speaker does not give us the contents of any thoughts. Additionally, we have enjambment at the end of the first stanza, not the neat beat of the period featured in the first set of stanzas. Simultaneously, we leave the corporeal world and spiral into the realm of pure thought, which, not a haven, sours as the speaker goes along, becoming a “picture of pure dissatisfaction.” It is curious that Ritvo chooses to keep dissatisfaction at arm’s length by offering as his only descriptor that it is a “picture,” indicating a facsimile of dissatisfaction. What this picture actually looks like, eludes us, as the speaker does not return to the concrete images of the first two stanzas. We circle through the idea of thought, an abstraction of an abstraction.
While it is tempting to conflate the speaker of a poem with the poet himself, we can reasonably assume that Ritvo is using his lived experience as inspiration for this poem as he guides the reader through the transformation from the concrete to the cerebral. Often, in works by other authors, the mind is depicted as a place of refuge from the illness body, which experiences the ravages of disease. However, in “The Senses” we are given a very different viewpoint. The endless thinking depicted in the poem enacts the restless mind of the patient “until it sours into yet” (Ritvo, 6). With such an evocative verb, “sours,” we get not only a line but a stanza break on an adverb. This plays with gentle shadings of the word “yet,” which can mean a moment in time—as in the question, “are we there yet?”—or can also mean “even” or “still”—as in the phrase, “and yet we move on.” After the considerable break between stanzas, the reader lands on “another.” To say, “yet another” is to be emphatic, to imply a pattern, and this is where we again return to Ritvo’s “picture of dissatisfaction,” suggesting irritation, frustration, and impatience.
The next two stanzas echo the first two, in that the first is comprised of short, compact lines, again, in trio. However, a departure happens in the second of these stanzas, where the second stanza expands to five lines, the first two lines of which are significantly longer than any that have come before. These longer lines also take for their subject the idea of thinking. The first stanza continues the use of enjambment, while the longer lines in the second stanza are end-stopped, releasing back into three short lines. In this way the stanzas materialize:
another pear, ugly
as the head
of a man who is thinking.
I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;
I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm—
the crucial way it disappears
when I imagine myself flung
headlong into the painting.
(Ritvo, 6)
Ritvo offers us much to unpack in these lines, which move from compact fragment to full sentence, before boomeranging back to compact fragments. One could easily call to mind Frank’s assertion that “Chaos feeds on the sense that no one is in control” (100). In fact, we are given the image of the speaker flinging himself into a painting of a storm—not the storm itself, but (again) its representation. In fact, we know from Frank that patients often describe illness as a process of being battered, and that “emotional bettering is fundamental to chaos” (101). Ritvo enacts this process of battering, starting with the image of an “ugly pear,” which is revealed quickly to be like “the head/of a man who is thinking.” If we count the seven instances that Ritvo uses either “thought” or thinking” in this poem, we can draw a connection between the illness as battering and the repetition of forms of the verb “to think.” Battering implies the repetition of striking force to cause harm, and in the poem, repetition is Ritvo’s way of using language to batter the reader in order to understand the illness state.
Furthermore, he ends a line on “thought” or “thinking” in three of those seven instances he uses it, adding additional stress to the repeated word. In this way, word and line reinforce the battering effect initiated by the image of the speaker flinging himself into a painting of a storm. Whereas Frank insists that chaos stories resist telling, writing that “the untellable silence alternates with the insistent ‘and then’ repetitions” (99-100), Ritvo’s poem harnesses repetition and line break to put us square in the moment of “and then.” With the picture of the storm, we have a visual acknowledgement of what Frank tells us: “the body telling chaos stories defines itself as being swept along, without control, by life’s fundamental contingency” (102). Ritvo keeps talking about images of things instead of those things themselves: A picture of dissatisfaction instead of dissatisfaction; A painting of a storm, instead of the storm itself. We are at a remove from the object of his distress, and in this way he disorients his reader in the way illness disorients the sick. The act of placing the image in place of the thing itself is dislocating, hewing away from the concrete. It forces a reader into that dislocated state as well, where that which is stable or reliable does not exist. Only its image does, which is always just out of reach. Let us think of the illness body as having possible but uncertain outcomes. Is that not what Ritvo is guiding his reader to conclude? “I imagine myself flung” becomes a line that speaks to instability because of the break on “flung.” We pause a moment on this “flung body” before he gives us not illness but the painting of the storm. He begins this stanza with an idea: the vision of his suffering–a full sentence, clear and to the point–and we linger in this vision of suffering for the remainder of the stanza. Through these techniques, Ritvo enacts what Longenbach describes as the tension between syntax and line:
Deciding where the line should end in a free-verse poem might initially seem more mysterious than in a metered or syllabic poem, but in fact it is not: whether or not the line ending is determined by an arbitrary constraint, the line ending won’t have a powerful function unless we hear it playing off the syntax in relation to other line endings (Longenbach, 35).
Ritvo demonstrates this effectively in these stanzas, which both mimic and deviate from the stanzas that precede – long, end-stopped lines sandwiched between short, enjambed ones. The logic behind what Ritvo says is not in the words themselves but in how he conveys those words. The interplay between the two stanzas creates a loop of meaning-making that parses the chaos of illness in a way that narrative often fails to do convincingly.
Following the lines about being flung into the painting depicting a storm, Ritvo returns to repetition of “picture of dissatisfaction,” which sets up the next stanza. This three-line stanza, the penultimate stanza in the poem, uses elements from both his longer and shorter lines. Here, the poem takes an interesting turn:
Instead I have this picture of dissatisfaction,
the thought not rising, but splitting in half
on the unanswered question of lightning,
(Ritvo, 7)
We have two end-stopped lines with a gentle enjambment following the idea of thoughts “splitting in half.” Prior to this, we notice a change in article from “another picture of dissatisfaction” to “this picture of dissatisfaction.” We move from one of many to a particular picture of dissatisfaction, which we can read as the picture of the storm, raging but at remove. We get the sense that the words are turning in on this speaker, and that the poem’s aim is to split thought into digestible parts that can be grappled with. However, the desire to glean meaning from these parts leads to a listless sense where thought lingers but cannot fully be brought out. We still don’t get concrete images from these thoughts, and so, without concreteness, the act of thinking becomes one that folds in on itself. We will see this as the poem ends but does not resolve itself. We are left with questions of perception and reality, and the muddied relationship between the two give us a clearer sense of the speaker’s futility in either finding the concrete, or gaining clarity through cognition. While it might not resolve, Ritvo compellingly puts the reader in the state of the ill person caught in chaos.
It’s less important to have a clear, concrete way of understanding the speaker’s thoughts—we might allow that, in the chaos of illness, not all concepts lend themselves neatly to concrete image. Instead, Ritvo brings us to “the question of lightning,” which in earlier stanzas was presented as the object under study, specifically, to understand “the yellow lightning painted in a storm.” Ritvo understands that, inevitably, this momentary flash, the release of energy, is nearly impossible for him to understand. This, too, may be related to that moment when a body goes from well to sick, usually imperceptible as cells split and mutate. But the mind, supple as it is, tends not to let such thoughts go. Even as modern medicine advances, many causes of illness are, as of yet, still unknown. Still, the sick reach and grasp for explanations for a mind that, in its absence, fills the void with baroque turns characterized not through its ability to come to conclusion, but to strive for it in vain. However, we can only bring this context to “The Senses” if we read the other poems in the collection. Even as the poem is inspired, as the rest of the collection is, by his illness, the poem isn’t strictly about illness. We are given a speaker with a specific state of mind, that, being read with other poems in the collection that take cancer and the cancer-self as its subject, reveals the state of mind of the cancer experience. He gives us a speaker who fails to cleanly articulate his story, which is the point. He enacts the non-narrative of illness, and therefore creates a non-narrative reaction to the chaos of illness despite, and perhaps even because, it does not tell a story.
And, so, Ritvo ends his poem:
my mind
like a black glove
you mistake for a man
in the middle of blizzard
(Ritvo, 7)
Here, in the most compact lines of the poem, Ritvo invokes “you,” which implicates the reader in these never-ending turns and splits, not-knowings and unknowings. His speaker’s mind is suspended in that moment of “the unanswered question of lightning.” In this poem, as is often the case in illness, we are not privy to a momentary illumination. Light does not pierce the expanse. Nevertheless, Ritvo’s poem provides a compelling rebuttal to Frank’s theories about chaos and illness. Frank would have us believe that because of lack of story the non-ill are locked away from those with illness, a wall between what can be understood or not: “In stories told out of the deepest chaos, no sense of sequence redeems suffering as orderly, and no self finds purpose in suffering” (Frank, 105). Ritvo, on the other hand, does not attempt to make illness’s chaos orderly or purposeful. Through the thoughtful interplay of line and syntax, he drops us into the melee. We come to understand something about the experience not because it is rendered as an ordered story but, specifically, because it is not. If illness is chaos, then perhaps story, with its insistence on structure, order, and outcome, is an imperfect vessel for relaying the illness experience. As we see with poetry, perhaps other non-narrative forms of meaning-making can also be harnessed to the cause of portraying the state of illness.
Works Cited
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Hazelton, Rebecca. “Learning the Poetic Line.” Poetryfoundation.org.
Longenbach, James. The Art of the Poetic Line. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2008.
Ritvo, Max. Four Reincarnations. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2016.
