Breaths' Burials by Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin closes Breaths’ Burials stating 

 

whatever utters, 

utters nothing, really. and makes of that 

nothing —lyric— its 

only 

measure.

 

These lines state an indifference towards the personal identity of whatever utters, as well as a hesitancy about attachingany meaning to the words said. Whatever utters, utters nothing; what the poem’s words do is give shape (a measure) to nothingness as it passes through. 

 

Throughout Breaths’ Burials, Sobin (the utterer) does not so much “open himself” or “submit language” to the invisible drift as insouciantly or impersonally frame it in the sounds and letters it happens as, here and now. In “Fourteen Irises for J.L.,” he writes:

Just like the poem, which “makes of that / nothing … its / only / measure,” irises arrest an otherwise invisible drift in a “frozen frame.” These irises, like the words, herald no meaning beyond just being there. Irises, words—they are, as Sobin puts it at the start of the poem, emptiness inscribed:

(Blown goblets—delicate yet shapely, glass vessels shaped by a breath—are a fitting image for the way Sobin’s poetry feels.)

 

In his preface to Sobin’s section in The Wilds of Poetry, David Hinton notes that Sobin’s work stages the naming of language separating from the single undifferentiated tissue (another kind of invisible drift) “in terms of air being shaped into meaning (word), an entirely physical process.” Understood this way, words do not aspire to “represent” or allude to physical objects (impossible in alphabetic languages, anyway) but actually become objects themselves (breath buried).  

 

Whole words are objects, but so are their parts; Sobin uses morphology and syllabification in general as a tool to demonstrate words’ status as objects that compose and decompose in that invisible drift, in a world elsewhere described as follows:

 

          there, what-

 

ever issued, only

re-

entered, in-

 

extricable as 

wind, but

viscous,

 

ballasted, the 

heart as

if walking on its

 

head.

 

Therefore, the poet is an incidental instrument (“whatever utters”) through which air-becoming-sound (phonemes) becomes graphemes, becomes syllables, and finally becomes words, which take their place alongside the things of the world: 

 

written, the 

words 

become anyone’s, no one’s. 

wouldn’t need you, 

now, the

 

flowering fruit-

trees, what 

you’d scribbled, in white

across so 

 

much 

mute scoring. 

 

Note again the indifference about who utters, here expressed in terms of words that “wouldn’t need” the “speaker.” As naturally and impersonally as irises and fruit-trees flower, the words emerge.

 

The fact that words in Sobin’s poetry take their place alongside objects, undergo a physical process like irises and flowering fruit-trees, does not somehow enhance their referential power, as if Sobin had somehow found a way to make words more referential or pictographic by turning them away from the personal, making them “anyone’s.” At points, Sobin plays up words’ incapacity to refer to anything but themselves-as-part-of-the-invisible drift, declaring things like: 

 

                                                   for here’s 

only here in the vocable’s

forced

 

re-

tention.

 

Calling here a vocable underscores the word’s status as a form and not a “meaning,” thus playing up the physical, as opposed to referential, aspect of the poetry. Furthermore, “here’s” retention or repeated insistence doesn’t make here become a place outside of language the speaker would be. Sobin writes:

 

we pretend to be here, don’t we?  and sometimes, per-

haps, we really are.  but only drawn, drafted: in the very 

instant of our own extrications.

 

Even perception is troubled, or qualified as part of the drift, with the eye at one point termed “an alveolus of wind,” its vision “so much skittering guesswork.” The eye itself breathes and changes according to an invisible drift and what it sees is not stable.

 

Olson wrote that “a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it … by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” In Breaths’ Burials, Sobin demonstrates the poem to be emptiness transferred, by way of an “ephemeral nudge-syllable,” to “the / nihil as if glittering //  just be- / yond” (as it’s put in "Domino"). 

 

For other poets who make work that tunes into, and belongs to, this force, I would use the word “natural.” This is not because “nature” frequently features in the work, it’s simply because the poets don’t force anything to mold to their experience or sense of self, they just restore the emergence of writing, as an act, to everything else that ephemerally emerges. For Sobin, though, I want to use the word “sacred,” given the work’s attachment with the “glittering nihil” and its constant rumination on brightness and emptiness. Reading these poems is like slowly being able to see “things” again after staring into the sun.

 

I also want to use the word “sacred” because the poems, for all their expressed disinterest in knowing who or what utters, for all their physicality (not referentiality), for all their meaningless drifting, betray a sense of longing or desire to know more about the drift:

sped, each time, into

    emptiness, gathering as we did —re-

flexive— against the 

on- 

 

coming naught. taut, the 

tendons, the 

 

raw curtains drawn 

onto our own 

re- 

 

leases. what if room, the 

scuttled bracelets and strewn shoes 

were 

nothing more 

 

than so much 

decor? and ourselves, massed in 

motion, but the 

figurants

 

of some abstract 

en- 

actment?

 

 

 

                           no, not nothing, had written, 

but nothing, and our limbs, 

nimble, swimming 

towards.

 

Maybe more knowledge of the drift can only come by unknowing or mystical detachment. Maybe that knowledge comes from relinquishing all reflexivity, asking no questions about the extent to which motion is a figurant of some abstract enactment and instead being emptiness itself, a place where the invisible drift can work. And yet, the question remains: what wills that drift, both to go on drifting as well as to become arrested in irises, phonemes, graphemes, syllables, words, poems?