John Spiegel Reviews Winter, Glossolalia by John James
When John James announced that his new chapbook, Winter, Glossolalia, was coming out, I was excited to read the follow up to his full-length manuscript, The Milk Hours. I asked him if he’d be willing to meet online to discuss his work. Unfortunately, the recording of that conversation was lost. What follows is a combination of my memory of that original conversation (doing my best to preserve the intent, if not the wording), James’s generous written responses to the questions which he provided later, as well as my commentary and examples from the chapbook.
If John James’s new chapbook had just been more of what made The Milk Hours good, it would have still been a welcome collection; and to be fair, there are components which harken back or allude to things seen previously, but it never seems to be wallowing or reusing past ideas. Rather, James uses ideas and forms as a jumping off point to explore new mechanics or techniques. The most obvious example of this is the collages James incorporated into the end of The Milk Hours. The three collages in his full-length collection have become six figures interspersed throughout the chapbook, a sort of calling card in his work.
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JS: On a practical level, how did you create them? Were they photographs? Did you manipulate them during development? I’m interested in the other arts that poets pursue and how they align in their mind.
JJ: The raw material for the collages comes from the British Library. They’ve dumped a veritable treasure trove of copyright-free material onto Flickr Commons, which anyone can access and use. I started creating these collages toward the tail end of writing The Milk Hours, which also includes several pieces (some from the same series). There, I thought of the collages as visual poems, in part because they followed a similar logic of association and juxtaposition as some of the poems in that book. I am thinking, especially, of “History (n.),” “Klee’s Painting,” and so forth. First, I created a series of five triptychs: pieces where the primary image is bisected by another, secondary image. In Winter, Glossolalia, an example of this would be “Sur Les Terrains.” Several of these pieces were published together at Quarterly West. Organizationally, however, I could only fit three of them into The Milk Hours, which is what — on a practical level — inspired me to incorporate them here. In the meantime, I continued to create similar collages, which made use of a similarly associative logic, if a different juxtapositional form. Eventually, I had created quite a few of them, which prompted me to include them together in a book, one split almost evenly between image and text.
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The figure James mentions, “Fig. 2 Sur Les Terrains,” is an example of visual symmetry. The collage is broken into 3 sections, where limbs and branches in the top portion extend into underwater roots on the bottom. None of the images are identical. At times, the branches going upward seem more like roots, but the lines are clearly aligned, moving in tandem the way our brain finds words which appear similar, even when the meaning or image the word represents differs drastically.
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JS: Those images walk this line between juxtaposition and alignment. They feel similar to visual rhymes, in a way. I see a lot of visual rhyming happening in your work.
JJ: When we met, you mentioned the examples “noon moon” and the near-rhyme of “rise” and “tide” in “Wintering,” though I suppose there are others: “dusk” and “suck” (“Gradient”) or even “circle” and “pistil” (“Glossolalia”). I hadn’t thought of them explicitly as visual rhymes, but I love this observation. The simple answer is, I think, “play.” I wanted to follow a free play of sonic and visual association. By visual, I primarily meant image, in the more traditional sense — the way a poem can evoke the sensory visualization of a bird flying low over a marsh, or of vultures orbiting in the sky above a turning spit. But I am quite picky about the shape of my poems, and on a less than conscious level, I probably was attuned to the visual similarity of these terms, which is also sonic: words that look the same usually rhyme.
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Visual and sonic similarity is laced throughout James’s work. The sonic textures range from assonance and alliteration tucked into the line, as in the title poem “Glossolalia” (“fog clots the air, almost / absent, nasturtiums denuded / in the small distance”) (13), to quicker slant rhymes placed next to each other, as in the poem “Gradient” (“dusk sucks pigment / from a canvas of land”) (18). The range of sonic characteristics and mechanics create a breadth of emotion in these pieces because of their variety and also their density. The punchier rhymes give the impression of a quick eye and mind observing images, plants, and landscapes perhaps faster than they can be processed; the result is a poem that feels almost like a stream of consciousness piece. However, the chapbook ends with more traditional end rhymes, as in the final poem “From A Plane”: “Its depth collects the dawn, the day. / Your feed eats the time away” (39). This nod to formal poetic mannerisms and true rhymes frames a sonnet-like piece, creating a sense of closure. The sound play is deliberate, intentional, and best of all, surprising.
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JJ: I love false homonyms, though: words that look like they should rhyme but, sonically, do not, as in “close” and “lose,” or “cough” and “plough.” I’m not sure, now, whether there are any such examples in the book (probably there are), but I find them in poems I’m teaching and reading all the time, and it often comprises a large part of the conversations with my students, especially when we tackle more rigidly formal poems, such as the villanelle or the sonnet. In fact, these sight rhymes can be a way to manage difficult rhyme schemes for a readership that is, in the wake of Pound, largely allergic to rhyme.
JS: The title, Winter, Glossolalia, brings about connotations of worship and spirituality. With that in mind, there’s so much imagery surrounding nature, animals (birds in particular), and the like; it feels much like a praise poem or a psalm to nature. Nature speaking in tongues to us, or us responding to nature in tongues, poems that aren’t complete language, but are a language in of themselves that needs translating.
JJ: I love this notion of translation, as well as the modality of hymn or psalm. While I am not religious myself, I thought of the poems in Winter, Glossolalia — or, rather, I experienced them this way — as speaking themselves into existence, and in that process, rendering or “translating” the surroundings of the speaker. Of course, some version of this translation inheres in perception itself. There is the phenomenal object — let’s say, a bird — but then there is our sensory perception of that object. Only later comes conscious awareness of that perception, and yet later, artistic rendering of such. So the object — again, the “bird” — undergoes multiple layers of translation in order to emerge on the page, and that’s assuming this is a perceived rather than a purely imagined bird. Of course, as Walter Benjamin tells us, no act of translation occurs without also leaving something out. The imperfection of translation opens the potential for slippage, which is what makes translation so interesting.
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This slippage was a large focus of my initial conversation with James. Language itself is an imperfect medium for conveying thought, and at a certain point, that imperfect language meets subjective observation. Considering the chapbook’s psalm-like, hymnal musicality, the poem is more a kind of sheet music to be reinterpreted by the reader, the way a musician would determine how to play the notes on the page. James plays around with this idea; he provides undeniable detail, language which cannot be reduced any further in every piece, and yet there are also notable omissions, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks. The first lines of “From a Plane” reads, “roads unspool…Mountains serrate the prairie’s face” (39), which is beautiful in its specificity but also in what is not said.
None of these observations break new ground. Saying that a poem’s meaning is up to the reader’s interpretation is well trodden ground, I get it. But as James said, we live in the slippage, the gray area between words and meanings. The poems speak themselves onto the page, yes, but the poem is not the final act nor the destination.
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JJ: Not unlike an original poem, a translation is an artistic product, though one tied intertextually to its source material, and the process of play inherent in any artwork manifests in that process. In terms of the psalmic or hymn-like modality of the poems, this was crucial for me. The poems indexed their subjects by naming them — that is, by framing them in language — and often located those subjects by way of sound, rather than, primarily, by sight. There was an improvisational aspect to this process, a spontaneity, which reflects — though is not necessarily the same as — the protestant notion of “speaking in tongues.”
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One way this improvisation ties into James’ work is in the spacing of the pieces. Each piece certainly interacts with negative space, but there is also a conscious breaking or segmenting of the poems. And James experiments with nearly every method of breaking the poem: Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, page breaks, asterisks, etc. What may at first feel like inconsistency comes to feel like improvisation, a jazz-like interplay between sections and poems.
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JJ: …I admit, I wasn’t entirely deliberate about it all. I was fortunate in this case to have had a light editorial hand, in terms of my publisher, who did not question these decisions. And so, they come through, somewhat unfiltered, from draft to page. I will say this, though: space is of great importance to me. When we begin a poem — quite literally, when we place the first word on the page — we create through division, breaking up the silence of empty space and entering for the first time, as far as the poem is concerned, into temporal experience. A poem is a song, after all, so it unfolds in time. The empty spaces in the poems are, for me, silences, which pace the time of the poem, not unlike measures in a musical score. This is as true for silences within lines as between them, or between sections. At points, spaces function as caesurae, though at others — as in the section breaks — they mark more dramatic pauses. Some typographical marks signal stronger pauses, though. I think of Roman numerals as rather insistent, almost militaristically enforcing a break, as in “Mountain Song.” These appear in contrast to the Arabic numerals, which feel lighter, more neutral, as in “Toward.” Others use the page as a section break, as is the case in “Wintering,” which is a harder stop, but somehow more permeable…[I try to] tailor each of these breaks to the temporal demands of the poem.
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James’ improvisations interact with formal poetics throughout Winter, Glossolalia. There is no better example of this than the final poem, “From a Plane.” It, along with “Mountain Song,” a poem in seven parts, gives the impression of an informal sonnet. Part i of “Mountain Song,” titled Slight, contains several shorter stanzas about the act of observation itself. “Red. You called the mums / phosphor red, tongue eclipsed / in a cluster of Os” (31). The poem ends with an unrhymed couplet, tipping its cap to its heritage: “Flowers exchange / with the bee” (31). Another poem in the “Mountain Song” set, v. After Neruda / After Tranströmer, is written in stricter tercet stanzas, much akin to a terza rima. The effect is a poem just as much about playing with form as with topic.
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JS: Recently you taught a class on sonnets. If my memory is right, you taught the class after composing a lot of the work here. How has the sonnet influenced your work, both past and present? I even consider some of the pieces in this chapbook to be sonnets.
JJ: That’s right. The class was for the Ruth Stone House and it was called “Love’s Damage: Writing the Sonnet in a Climate of Duress.” There, I tried — as I am trying to do in a book I’m rather casually writing on the sonnet — to apprehend this notion of “duress” from various angles. Why, I asked, does the sonnet as a form have such “duration”? It has been around since the Renaissance, after all. What makes it so “durable”? In other words, how is it so exquisitely tooled for dealing with conflict of various kinds, be it romantic conflict, political conflict, or our current environmental disaster? This was more of a critical question than a creative one, but those two sides of my brain inform one another, and so naturally I found myself composing sonnets. You’re right, this was after I had completed Winter, Glossolalia. I’m not entirely satisfied with many of them, but one, “What Hallows,” has made it into my current manuscript. Readers can find it, with a smattering of other new poems, at Tupelo Quarterly. I think of it as an unrhymed sonnet. In terms of the pieces in Winter, Glossolalia, there is one that, though short, feels rather sonnet-esque to my mind, and that is “From a Plane.” Interestingly, it was the last poem composed for the book and the only one written in California. (The others were almost all written in a span of just a few months, in Washington, DC.) There’s something about the precision in that poem, the compactness and the near rhymes, that reminds me of the kind of work a sonnet does, though again, I didn’t think of it as a sonnet when I wrote it. Maybe we can call it an “American sonnet.”
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The piece ends, “Memory’s a thin horizon; so, too, is the sky. / Its depth collects the dawn, the day. / Your feed eats the time away” (39). There is a density to these lines which represents James’ work well. The subtle use of iambs gives a natural rhythm to the lines. The assonant interplay between words like “horizon” and “sky,” the dramatic consonant punches of “depth,” “dawn,” and “day,” add to the work’s musicality. Finally, the true end rhymes in the last two lines, nodding to its origins, turn the way a sonnet does, the way we turn the final pages with finality, decisiveness.
When I returned to Winter, Glossolalia for a second or third time, as one often does with chapbooks, I found myself not rereading individual pieces or going back a page or two; rather, I began back at the beginning and experienced it in its entirety. In a lot of ways, it encapsulates the natural rhythm and progression of nature. Just as seasons pass, move on, and return, so too did the pieces in this collection. I ended the book feeling content, but I came back just as surely. Animals and plants in nature, people, social issues, these things all pass and fade away, but just like the poem, they are not the final act; just like art, nature is an ongoing process, and when we are done experiencing it, others will come along to dwell there.