Light Tactics: The Poem as Index

Abstract

What is a poem's relationship to touch? The italicised lines that open this essay come from a body of text I wrote and then manipulated to generate the text(ile) paper triptych, ‘the sensation is without artifact’.² The triptych's first section, ‘cloud cover’ (Figure 4) is a cyanotype of the text printed on a cloudy day. The second, ‘stitch metre’ (Figure 1), is a video of another cyanotype print of the same text cut into strips and then fed through a sewing machine to produce lined paper yarn. Third and finally, ‘knit slip’ (Figure 2) is the textile that I knitted from that paper yarn. In that process of knitting, I slipped stitches and carried the yarn over, holding sections outside of the fabric's weave in order to reveal selected phrases.

After completing the triptych, I knew deeply, unapologetically, that I had created a poem, even if I had not conformed to the processes of poetic making modelled by my creative education. The artifacts that emerged were not only lyric expressions of feeling nor merely records of the movement of mind. They were instead indexes of a network of activities, some the result of my intention (I typed, I arranged, I knitted) and some beyond my control (light moved, clouds obscured). Encountering the poem–object now takes me back to the moment of its making: to my hands, to the weather and to paper.

When you touch a page, what (or who) touches you? A hand floats in the margin. In Renaissance texts, the pointing hand or the ‘manicule’ was an especially common form of marginalia. William Sherman argues that these hands adorning a page's edge—sometimes added by printers, sometimes drawn in by readers—served as indexes in multiple senses of the word. They literally pointed to specific passages, allowing readers to collate the abundance of information at their fingertips in a manner we now associate with the index generally found at the back of a book. But the use of this symbol exceeded the desire to organise an unruly text; it indexed the movements of a reader's body. Although the manicule is also found in medieval texts, Sherman draws a relationship between the later proliferation of this symbol and his description of reading in the early modern period as a ‘self-consciously embodied practice, no less a manual art than writing or printing […] readers picked up their books with an acute awareness of the symbolic and instrumental power of the hand’.³ When drawn in by the reader, the manicule had a ‘gestural function’ pointing to the ephemeral and embodied nature of a specific reader's activity.⁴ The hand-drawn manicule is one index, or trace, of readerly touch that the archive captures. What other touches are uncaptured by the archive? I use my left index finger as a bookmark while I use my right hand to flip to a book's backmatter in search of a citation. My hunting leaves no trace.

Sherman's history of the manicule poses questions about the readerly relationship between body and text in early modern England. Similar questions provoke my own poetic practice, even if I approach them with a 21st-century writerly sensibility. Reckoning with the relationship between tactility and poetic process became unavoidable when, in 2022, my creative practice moved beyond the page as I explored creating poem–objects—from quilts to origami fortune tellers to knitted textiles—from cyanotypes.

The cyanotype process is a form of photography or ‘light writing’ that dates to the 19th century. In my own practice, the process begins at night. I paint a sheet of Japanese kozo paper with a UV-sensitive solution (a combination of ferric ammonium oxalate and potassium ferricyanide) and let the sheet dry in the dark. Come daylight, I venture outside to start printing with my materials, including A4-sized sheets of transparent plastic laser-printed with my desired text. I lay the transparency on top of the sensitised sheet and expose it to the sun. Any area the sun touches will turn blue; any area shaded from the sun will remain white. The opaque black text on the transparency blocks sunlight, producing white text in the final print. The optimal exposure time depends on the sunlight's intensity. On an especially sunny day, it may take only 30 s to achieve the desired reaction; on a cloudy day, it might take 5, 10 or even 15 min.

Solar prints like cyanotypes unsettle intuitive distinctions between visuality and tactility. The full title of what many consider to be the first book of photographs, Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843), hints at the slippage between vision and touch; ‘impression’ implies physical contact, as if by a stamp or seal (Figure 3). Indeed, to make her ‘impressions’, Atkins placed botanical specimens directly atop, that is touching, her solar-sensitised substrates. In Atkins's case, the cyanotype registered both how the light fell around her objects as well as those objects' translucence; grades of shadow are rendered in various intensities of watery blue. The whitest white occurs at the places where a given specimen's tissue was thickest and most opaque, or where the specimen touched the substrate directly.

I printed the first section of the triptych, ‘cloud cover’, on the brick patio of my apartment building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, one cloudy morning in September of 2023. After arranging multiple transparencies on top of the large, sensitised sheet of kozo paper (roughly 2 by 3 ft.), I stepped back to watch the chartreuse paper turn deep blue and then settle into a dull steely shade indicating the exposure's completion. I took the sheet inside to rinse it in my bathtub, but the vibrant blue print that emerged was not what I had hoped for. Prior to printing, the kozo paper had curled in response to my garden patio's humidity and the moisture in the painted solution. When I laid the flat transparencies on top of the rippled sensitised sheet, gaps remained between the plastic and the paper. On a clear day, these not-quite-flush patches would still have rendered crisp printed text, albeit stretched by the text's lengthened shadow. In contrast, on the day I was printing, a soupy autumn morning, the partial cloud cover made the sky hazy and its light diffuse. The dispersed light and the uneven substrate combined to blur entire swathes of text leaving behind undulating legible stanzas. The paper responded to the weather, and in turn the weather had selected stanzas of its own, the sunlight performing an erasure of the text I had written (Figure 4).

The transcription above distinguishes between bolded and unbolded text, the bolded text denoting the form of the stanza I, the poet, would most like to keep. Thus, the poet's desire comes through. My composing eye promotes some of the smudged language, recouping it, and demotes other portions to make a more syntactically shapely poem. Nevertheless, the poem resists any final stabilisation; under my gaze, it glimmers. ‘Glimmer’, the frequentative form of ‘gleam’: shining in and out, in and out. The poem traces a recurrent shifting at the edge between reading and writing.⁶

Visuality, here, is highly bound to materiality: the paper's tendency to curl when wetted and dried and the moisture in the air at the time of exposure both affect the final print. The artifact is a visual one, but materially particular. The image produced is the record, however obscured, of a particular moment, the weather conditions and quality of light at the time of printing. As Roland Barthes reminds us in Camera Lucida, ‘In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric’.⁷ This is to say, a photograph does not resemble or even analogise the existence of its subject; it is an indexical rather than a mimetic art. A photograph is a result of the light that has reflected off the photographed subject; it captures a literal trace of the subject's presence. Cyanotypes are photographs. The lines in this poem blur as a direct result of the diffusion of light on a particular cloudy day; the blur is an index of that cloud cover rather than a metaphor for it.

My poem-objects are restless within the textuality/materiality distinction that Michaels proposes. What would he say to the pieces that make up my textile triptych? Would he dismiss them as drawings, or worse, sculpture? Poetry scholarship too rarely considers the tactility of the poem: the glide or friction of a pencil tip as we write, the heft and texture of pages, and the motion of thumbing through a codex as we read and reread (if a blot cannot be ‘edited’, as Michaels contends, then neither can a tear or a crease). ¹⁴ Paper, if considered at all, is recognised as a printed or written poem's substrate. Indeed, the qualities of a given sheet of paper are more likely to gain notice if the paper is blank.¹⁵ When encountering text printed on paper, we are trained to let the paper recede so that the artistry of the text it holds can emerge.

Juliet Fleming has argued that the dismissal of a poem's visual and tactile materiality may be a distinctly post-Elizabethan phenomenon. She reminds us that for early modern English writer and poetry critic, George Puttenham, the line was a ‘visual as well as an aural unit’. ¹⁶ In her study of the period's graffiti, Fleming rehearses Michel Foucault's suggestion that in the Renaissance, language was a ‘thing inscribed in the fabric of the world’¹⁷, and then she proposes that the ‘Renaissance episteme … embraced and accorded intellectual consequence to the sensuous and material elements of both written and spoken language’.¹⁸ Examining the literary productions that emerge from such an episteme, Fleming pays special attention to ‘posies’ or poems ‘that understand themselves to be written on something’.¹⁹ As Fleming explains, a posy is the ‘form that poetry takes in its fully material, visual mode, as it exists in its moment, at a particular site [… it] does not hope to achieve, the immaterial, abstracted status of the infinitely transmissible text’.²⁰ Like Fleming's posies, my own poetic triptych does not aspire to the abstracted status of ‘text’; it is both site specific and material specific. This emphasis on its own ‘fully material, visual mode’ might make it more at home in a time period not its own. Fleming argues that since the early modern period, a new poetry has displaced the posy; this more recent mode presupposes ‘an originating human presence that is more or less coterminous with the suppression of matter. The different poetic frisson generated by the posy as it calls language into being as a tangible thing is now less familiar’.²¹ But the ‘frisson’ of calling a poem into touch, making language into a ‘tangible thing’, is precisely what I am after.

What is touch's relation to duration? The question itches. A touch is good for as long as it lasts. Anything I touch becomes a ‘this’. When I let go of it, it becomes a memory, a ‘that’. Deixis, if nothing else, reminds one of what is at hand. But there are touches and then there are records of touch. These records do not reproduce the sensation of touch, that is, its pressure, friction or heat. A bruise, even if tender, is only the index of contact; to reactivate the sensation you must touch the bruise again. Paper, like a body, has its own material memory. The fibres of the paper remember touch—stained by the grime of a hand, creased into folds and pocked by crumpling. A forceful touch, a violent pull or punch, may tear the paper. As Sherman reminds his readers: ‘the more heavily a book was used, the more vulnerable it was to decay … Rough hands sunder books, and over time even gentle hands will pull books apart’.²²

When I meet with the library conservator, she echoes Sherman, telling me use and conservation are at odds: touch destroys. She uses kozo tissue (a thinner version of the paper I used to form the ‘sensation’ triptych) to replace ‘voids’ and mend tears in ageing books. Made from the long fibres of the mulberry shrub's slender inner bark, kozo tissue is especially durable for its weight. The same conservator tells me that in comparison with others—wood, metal, PVA glue—paper is not a material with much ‘inherent vice’. I write down ‘inherent vice’ because I like the sound of it for a poem. She insists one should never leave paper in direct contact with wood in storage; it can cause the paper to degrade. One material a mother to another, parent and child kept on separate shelves in a temperature-controlled room. The daughter of a dead mother, I see mothers everywhere.

In contrast to paper, when a fibre like wool is handled, it stretches and returns to its original shape, making it ideal for knitting. The knitted garment grows one loop at a time; the knitter inserts a needle into an existing loop, wraps yarn around the needle and pulls the newly formed loop through the old. Knitting is not knotting. A knot arrests movement, but a knitted garment must maintain an amount of play, the yarn moving in and out of place to accommodate the movement of the wearer. Even so, every loop the knitter forms is a record of a gesture completed in a specific place at a specific time. The resulting garment is a string of time-stamped artifacts, each loop a tiny index (Figure 6).

Recognising a knitted textile as a collection of indexes invites a perhaps unexpected comparison between knitting and photography. Indeed, a photograph, Barthes argues, is the result of a relay of touches: a ray of light bounces off a face, passes through a lens before touching and leaving an impression on a photosensitive plate. Once developed, this same plate is again touched by light, which bounces off it and in turn travels to the viewer's eye. Barthes writes, ‘The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me […] light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has ever been photographed.’ This convoluted trail brings forth the tactile in the visual; vision becomes intimate, rather than remote. As Barthes insists, ‘A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’.²³

More than anything, knitting paper to create ‘knit slip’ was difficult (Figure 6). The paper proved unyielding to my manipulations; my practised gestures of knitting and purling could not help but be clumsy, the stitches mangled. I failed to twist the paper without crumpling it. The two-sided paper yarn proved quite different from the cylindrical wool yarn I was used to; I had to hold the paper just so to make sure it looped evenly, stitch by stitch. I worked bottom up as the textile grew below my needles. The first words I encountered in the yarn as I knit would live at the lower edge of the finished cloth, the last to be read. I had to choose an ending and then retreat to a beginning still unknown. I let go of the poem I was intending to write. I improvised as I went, selecting phrases as I looped the yarn, sensitive to the language as it came under my fingers. The knitting took time, maybe too much. The knitting took work. The more I handled the paper the more cloth-like it became. If I made a mistake and needed to undo a row of stitches to reknit it, I knew the paper yarn became softer, malleable and smudged. With handling, it held a fold with less vigour.

The resulting text (Figure 7) is not as stable as it would be on the traditional printed page. Again, as with any knitted fabric, this piece is a series of loops and not a set of fixed knots; the boundaries of each selected phrase flex and give. When held, the edge of a word I had hoped to make visible in the moment of composition-cum-knitting might slip further into the weave becoming illegible. Or a word I had not intended to reveal might peak through.

Unlike the knitted garment or even the photograph, most poems are not records of their making. Poems are not perfect indexes of process. A poem is revised in a nonlinear manner, the first word often not the first written; whereas the knitted garment resists revision and maintains greater fidelity to the sequence of its production. Nor does the printed poem have the relationship to the body of the poet that the knitted garment has to the knitter. Keats's ‘mortal hand’ graces pages and formats he never dreamed of, much less touched.

I loop back to the questions that began this essay: what is a poem’s relationship to duration? Where does a poem begin and end? Poet Robert Grenier once asked in conversation, ‘Is it a long poem if you look at it long enough?’²⁶ At the beginning of a poetry course, I showed my students Aram Saroyan’s minimal poem ‘lighght’ (printed here in its entirety), and we talked about it for more than an hour. One student, initially suspicious of the poem when I shared it in August 2024, later told me that she had been thinking about ‘lighght’ for over a month. ‘I’m almost ready to call it a poem,’ she said, ‘maybe in October.’ I am delighted to think that if the poem arrived to her on schedule, it would be one-word and two-months long.

Considering my own knitted poem, is it as long as it takes to read the exposed text (half a minute) or it is as long as it took me to make it with my hands (more than 10 h)? And what if, instead, we thought of duration as the bridge of touch between reader and maker, or knitter and handler (index as time travel)? Two years and counting.

The poem and the knitted garment—one's resistance to the material world, the other's tether to it—why am I moved by this pairing? The notion that the material world might hold a record of my body appeals, perhaps because it offers a connection to a future that can be recovered even after death. The insufficiency of that record also appeals … and frustrates. My mother, neither much of a knitter nor much of a writer, did not leave behind indexes of her touch aside from a few scrawled recipes and a handful of postcards.