essay
“The Surface That Isn’t a Surface”: Of Water, Prefatory Notes, and Alice Oswald’s Radical Attention
This is an essay of surfaces, in-betweens, and the interstitial imagination of Alice Oswald. This essay is not concerned with negative space—for example: as a sculptor is, when they pour concrete into a parlor room to create an impression of the room’s air—but alternative space: space that you only enter by going through something else. Here I would like to attend—as the poet Alice Oswald attends—to what occurs over and under and through not only the text as an imaginary and dramatic object, but via the physical world as a dramatic and creative locus.
The title for this essay comes from Oswald’s second lecture given as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Interview with Water, and when I first heard it, it struck me as the truest thing I had ever heard said of either water or poetry. In a sense, text is water—a troubled, shifting and expressive surface. T.S. Eliot wrote, “Our gaze is submarine, our eyes look upward / And see the light that fractures through unquiet water.” [1] In Oswald’s poetry, the gaze is not only submarine, but super- and intermarine, interested in what rests at the level of the text’s surface, and in how perspective is shifted and changed by looking through that surface.
David Naimon, host of Between the Covers podcast, recently posed to Oswald the following prompt:
You’ve described the 215 extended similes in the Iliad as almost an entire second hallucinated poem hovering over and above the main poem[;]
that the extended simile is Homer’s particular doubled-over style of thinking. I was hoping maybe you could talk a little more about the suggested
similarity between water’s reflectiveness and that of human reflectiveness, that perhaps there’s something about water that tells us about thinking
or tells us about the human mind and that there’s something about thinking itself that might be doubled-over.[2]
Oswald responds: “I’m wary of using the verb ‘think’ because I don’t think poetry is necessarily about thinking—but it gets hold of questions, and reveals them as questions, and then reveals what’s underneath them, and then what’s underneath that.” Here Oswald approaches the creative and critical notion of surface—and along with it, the related notions of depths (or at least layers, and boundlessness). If “thinking” as an action or a process exists in Oswald’s poetry, it is as a reflective and reflexive, responsive engagement with the physical world. In Oswald’s poetry, readers and listeners can find and explore the praxis (rather than the theory) that if you get physical enough with the world around you, you get spiritual—that there are ghosts in the physics, there are resonances and presences to account for and respond to in the natural world.
Because, as Oswald’s reader, I am interested in surfaces and in radical, alternative imagination, my aim here is to approach Oswald’s poetry not directly, but thwartwise—as you might swim across a current to avoid a riptide. I’m particularly interested in the literal and metaphorical wateriness of Oswald’s work when joined with prefatory notes, as in her books Dart (2002), A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009), Memorial (2011), and Nobody (2019). Why link water and paratexts[3]? Because even bodies of water (rivers, lakes, oceans) have texts or names attached to them—many of them from Indigenous peoples long before the arrival of European settlers. As the poet Solmaz Sharif has written: “Let it matter what we call a thing.”[4]
I’d like, then, to offer Oswald’s prefatory notes to the above book-length poems as their own small poems, as examples of approaching the world with a radical spirit and imagination:
From Dart:
This work is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I’ve been recording conversations
with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters—linking their
voices into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes
into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings.[5]
From A Sleepwalk on the Severn:
This is not a play. This is a poem in several registers, set at night on the Severn estuary. Its subject is moonrise, which happens five times
in five different forms: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon and moon reborn. Various characters, some living, some dead, all based
on real people from the Severn catchment, talk towards the moments of moonrise and are changed by it. The poem…aims to record what
happens when the moon moves over us—its effect on water and its effect on voices.[6]
From Memorial:
This is a translation of the Iliad’s atmosphere, not its story,” it opens. “This version,” Oswald’s note explains, “in trying to retrieve the
poem’s energeia, takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.” Oswald
closes with the words: “I write through the Greek, not from it—aiming for translucence rather than translation. I think this method, as
well as my reckless dismissal of seven-eighths of the poem, is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry, which was never stable, but always
adapting itself to a new audience, as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.[7]
From Nobody:
When Agamemnon went to Troy, he paid a poet to spy on his wife, but another man rowed the poet to a stony island and seduced her.
Ten years later, Agamemnon came home and was murdered. Odysseus, setting out at the same time, was blown off course. It took him
another ten years to get home, but his wife, unlike Agamemnon’s, had stayed faithful. This poem lives in the murkiness between those
stories. Its voice is wind-blown, water-damaged, as if someone set out to sing the Odyssey, but was rowed to a stony island and never
discovered the poem’s ending.[8]
The presence of prefatory notes in Oswald’s work should not be taken to argue that Oswald’s poetry requires an explanation. “I hope it doesn’t need too much context,” Oswald writes of Memorial, “I hope it will have its own coherence….” What the notes do is indicate that the poems are the glistening trace left by the poet’s foot.[9] Or to use another metaphor: the poems are the crown of the tree when, below, there is so much more tree: branches, trunk, roots (tap roots, lateral roots, fine roots). Oswald’s prefatory notes announce the names of the players, as one might do before, or after, a performance.
The note accompanying Dart, for example, sounds at first like sheer transcription, like note-taking or documentary. But it is instead imagination—a “sound-map,” a “songline,” “the river’s mutterings.” Oswald listens to people in order to listen to their environment, to the elements around them. It seems to me pertinent that water as a form of matter can assume all three states: solid, liquid, gas. Like particles in the air, there is a visible and invisible component to all of Oswald’s projects. There is also an earth-element to Oswald’s watery transcriptions that I read as attachment—the conversations she attends to are of those who “live and work on the Dart.” The space of Dart is literally liminal: the riverbank where land and water meet, site to both laborers and pleasurers—oyster gatherers, fishermen, dreamers, boat builders, naturalists, walkers, rememberers, ferrymen.
A Sleepwalk on the Severn also sounds, from the prefatory note, like it might be a recording or transcription—but of what? Of “moonrise,” and of the effects of the moon on “water and…voices.” One of those two things is simpler to record than the other. The other is slippery, like a fish in the hands. A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a shadowed text, an overheard-in-the-dark poetry. As a “poem in several registers,” A Sleepwalk on the Severn gives the reader dramatic scenes, such as “Two Sleepwalkers struggling along, one invisible with eyes closed, the other writing. That’s me. I’m always out here. Moving over the night-map with the Moon my close friend following. A kind of dream-secretary, always recording myself being interrupted, trying to wake myself by writing.” The book-length poem in five moon phases is “not a play,” Oswald’s note reminds her reader—an encouragement to approach poetry as a generous listener rather than an analyst—although you will recognize the poem’s work and its creative incarnation best by understanding its engagement in other art forms, such as theater.
Memorial is—in accordance with the oral traditions it invokes—a poem against stability, attaching itself to the literal and figurative bodies of Homeric similes, joining itself to the lives held within the recorded deaths. Each simile offers a name and a gasp, a moment of attention turned to the singular fallen. There are bells ringing throughout Memorial: “death, death, death,” they ring, and “life, life everlasting.” One is reminded that memory and repetition are essential to the life of oral traditions. One is reminded of variety, and that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was desired by Shakespeare’s Antony because she was “full of infinite variety,”[10] changing as the sky. As “atmosphere,” not “story,” Memorial reads like the very heartbeat of Homer, transcribed and interpreted by way of sound. The American poet Robert Frost wrote in a 1913 letter: “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words... It is the abstract vitality of our speech.” Oswald’s Memorial is the antithesis of “abstract vitality of speech,” as it is laden with images and performs a veritable feast of specific vision. The experience of Memorial is like drinking the cream of the Iliad, a condensation of poetry, rich in its particularity.
Nobody is another kind of creature, described in Oswald’s note as “liv[ing] in the murkiness,” and both “wind-blown,” and “water-damaged.” Nobody is remnant-like, fluid, a song scattered by a the seawind. It requires imaginative generosity towards not-knowing, elision, gaps, inevitable tears in the veil of experience as well as an ear for alternate stories. That’s what makes Oswald’s work so surprising: that it is tuned to the frequency of those not listened to—the not-main heroes, the not-protagonists or antagonists, the fishermen, the birdwatchers, the rocks on a shore. We have heard so much and so often from those set up as the “main cast”—what does the chorus and those appearing in cameos have to say? Who is listening to them? The answer is Nobody.
I want to propose here, in this too-brief essay, that what makes Oswald’s imagination radical is that it is fundamentally and historically tuned towards the other—and not only the human other, but the other of the physical world, as her Oxford Lecture, “On Behalf of a Pebble” illuminates. Oswald thinks differently than the rest of us—she wonders past the surface idea of the “other” into the causes that make or affect the “other,” such as moonlight, such as the river Dart, or Hellenic war, or erosion.
Oswald is a profound listener. As a teacher, I have experienced that it is easier to teach a set of facts (or a set of anything) than to teach a person to still themselves and listen to others. Oswald demonstrates how to listen to the sound of water or how the moon changes human voices, how not be bound solely to the carapace of “the visible,” which—as Jorie Graham has written—“we love.”[11] Oswald’s imagination is a musical seismograph of nature, noting tremors that most of us do not feel, her poetry a phonograph.
Oswald is tap-tapping telegrams to us from another sphere, from a mystic ocean of attention. How lucky we are to be on the receiving end of Oswald’s missives from the river Dart, the Severn, Homer, and much more. May Oswald dwell with us longer, keep sending her messages to us, teach us to also give our attention to others.
Works Cited
[1] Eliot, T.S. In Choruses from “The Rock.”
[2] Naimon, David. Between the Covers Alice Oswald Interview. https://tinhouse.com/transcript/between-the-covers-alice-oswald-interview/
[3] Paratext refers to all the texts accompanying the text proper, such as introduction, dedication, notes, epigraph, blurbs, etc.
[4] Sharif, Solmaz. “Look.” https://pen.org/look/
[5] Oswald. Dart.
[6] Ibid., A Sleepwalk on the Severn.
[7] Ibid., Memorial. An excerpt, as the full note is a page and a half.
[8] Ibid., Nobody.
[9] I am absolutely thinking here of Aracelis Girmay’s poem “Ars Poetica” :”May the poems be / the little snail’s trail.” https://poems.com/poem/ars-poetica-2/
[10] Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.
[11] Graham, Jorie. “Prayer Found Under Floorboard.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/prayer-found-under-floorboard
Han VanderHart lives in Durham, North Carolina, under the pines. They have poetry and essays published in The Boston Globe, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Rumpus, AGNI and elsewhere. Han is the reviews editor at EcoTheo Review, the editor at Moist Poetry Journal, and the author of the poetry collection What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021).