Draping the Sky for a Snowfall
Julian Wolfreys
Foreword
Secrets … Ellipses
It is said that the dead are the most demanding of our love. We are defenceless and delinquent in the face of them.
(Wolfreys, Silent Music)
You risked everything on this quotation: “The work of love in recollecting the one who is dead is the work of the most disinterested, free, and faithful love”. It is signed: … For your name? No, you never did that. For the author then, someone you had read; whom I cannot recall ….
(Wolfreys, Silent Music)
Draping the Sky for a Snowfall moves me greatly. It shows that Julian Wolfreys is an extremely distinguished poet. Wolfreys is also many other things: a spectacular musician (player of many instruments, composer, lyricist, arranger, performer, recording artist); a brilliant and exceptionally learned scholar (for example in his multivolume account of those who have written about life in London); a creative editor (of a series on Victorian literature and culture for Edinburgh University Press); a publisher and editor, a gifted organizer of conferences (for example one some years ago now at Loughborough University on ‘Rural Experience’); a wonderful writer of fiction (in Silent Music). How does he find time and creative energy to do all these things? He is a prodigy. I was familiar with all these gifts except, until recently, his gift for poetry. I might have known!
How can I say anything that will help you to read Draping the Sky for a Snowfall? Not easy. You must in the end read it for yourself, make what you can for yourself of these poems. I have put them in my title under the aegis of ‘secrets’ and ‘ellipses’. ‘Secrets’ for their ‘hermeneutical’ side, what is meant, das Gemeinte; ‘ellipses’ for their ‘poetics’ side, die Art des Meinens, the way meanings are expressed. In this case that means how the secrets are eloquently written about, while at the same time being kept. Draping the Sky is elliptical in both meaning and poetics. It sometimes seems as if Wolfreys is trying to see how much he can leave out and still have his readers feel they are idiots if they cannot figure out das Gemeinte, what is meant. There are reasons for his elliptical reticence.
Many of these poems concern an ethical duty: the speaker’s endless and unfulfillable obligation to render justice to the dead beloved. He must do that as much as anything by remembering her as clearly as possible: her laugh, her smile, her body, the silent looks they exchanged, events of bodily touching. On the other hand, many of these poems celebrate the idea of the beloved. The same? another? It is impossible to tell. It remains what Derrida would call an undecidable. Whoever the speaker might be – and there is no reason to assume that the author and the speaker are one – Wolfreys’ poems strive again and again to understand, from the perspective of whatever moment he writes a poem now, what occurs in an event, a crisis, and how to bear witness, to find adequate words for it.
Wolfreys’ conceptual presuppositions are made clear by way of repeated and varied formulations. A particularly explicit formulation is ‘Read’, a poem in the section called ‘Baltic Correspondance’. The other person, the beloved, even in moments of greatest intimacy remains wholly other, unreachable, untouchable, secret. Death does no more than seal, once and for all, the otherness of the beloved. Each poem is therefore:
A song that speaks of everything
In secret, in unspoken words,
And otherwise,
An afterword
An other’s tongue
The conceptual aporia of these poems is evident. As the poem cycle titled ‘Mourning’ reveals, not to speak of the dead is to betray an exigent responsibility. To speak of the dead adequately is, however, impossible. Any words for this eternal secret are a betrayal. To speak of it is to traduce it. Not to speak of it is to traduce it. Either way you have had it big time. Wolfreys’ poems hover eloquently within this impasse.
Paradoxically, the aporia of the other’s permanently secret otherness does not generate silence but lots of powerful poems that speak of it ‘otherwise’, in displaced figures or, properly speaking, catachreses. This may be the reason Wolfreys is so chary about anchoring events. One poem speaks of a lighthouse. Which lighthouse, exactly? That remains a secret.
I have cited in my two epigraphs Wolfreys’ Silent Music, which tells in lyrical prose the narrative of a love and a loss. Who knows the extent of fiction in this novel, or to what extent anything – if anything – might have some factual or historical referent. In any case, if Wolfreys had wanted to show his hand, had he wanted the readers of his poems to know that facts there were, he presumably would have made this clear. Were the novel in any way factual, Wolfreys would doubtless have referred those readers to Silent Music somewhere in Draping the Sky for a Snowfall. There is a thematic sympathy between the poems and the novels to be sure, but not necessarily a connection. Since he does not make connections, I think it is better not to know Silent Music exists or at least to pretend not to know and not to use it in explanation or presumption of missing facts. The danger of knowing ‘the facts behind’, as Wolfreys no doubt realized, is that autobiographical explanations tend to inhibit actual reading. You say, ‘Oh, I see. It’s a transcription of his life. Then I don’t need to read the poems carefully, just learn about the facts of his life’.
The hermeneutical meaning of Draping the Sky is clear enough, though some filling in of blanks and connecting of dots may be necessary to extrapolate clear meaning from what is often expressed elliptically and indirectly. What about the poetics of Draping the Sky, however, die Art des Meinen? It would seem at first that the poetical devices Wolfreys employs are just the right ones for expressing the hermeneutical meaning he wants to convey. These are modes of radical ambiguity that are especially common in some modern American poetry (which may not have influenced Wolfreys one bit, for all I know): William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Olson, or the Language poets. These features of ellipsis are also already there in Mallarmé or Rimbaud. I list some: short lines that make a phrase or word hang in the air detached from what would syntactically complete it: momentarily at least, the fragment hides its secret (an example is the words ‘A secret’ that make a whole line in ‘Up at Jack’s’); wordplay with words that have contradictory meanings, sometimes non-English words, as in the fun Wolfreys has with the word Vorspiel, which can mean the beginning section of a piece of music or of some other composition, but also sexual foreplay, as in the tongue-kissing Wolfreys’ speaker bears witness to; play with ambiguous pronouns, I, you, he, she, we, those ‘floating signifiers’; incomplete sentences; unexplained allusions, citations, or place-names; untranslated words in some foreign language, as in the bits of German, French, and Latin, or the Polish interpellations and translations throughout the section ‘Baltic Correspondance’. (Note that italicized a: has another tongue taken over, is this now French? or is this another of Wolfreys’ elliptical allusions, some indirect reference to the a of Derridean différance? This is entirely likely, knowing Wolfreys, but it remains impossible to tell. Though a thought occurs; perhaps, given the playfulness, Wolfreys’ French spelling also tells the reader that there is a dance between lovers here.) The Polish is wholly opaque to me, its meaning hidden. Such devices successfully hide their secrets. That is what Wolfreys’ speaker says he must do vis-à-vis the beloved (however many, or few, there are), so poetics happily matches hermeneutics.
On the other hand, and finally, such devices are not just ways of speaking otherwise about the secrecy of the other person, alive or dead. A word or phrase just hanging in the air, like Wolfreys’ other poetic devices, is, strictly speaking, not a rich ambiguity but just plain meaningless. It does not aid Wolfreys one bit in getting his hermeneutical meaning stated clearly. Die Art des Meinens turns into Die Art des Sinnlosigkeit, the art of meaninglessness; or, if you prefer one of these translations: futility, absurdity, hollowness, senselessness, pointlessness, purposelessness, meaninglessness. Ultimately perhaps just loss. Reading Wolfreys’ ellipses is like reading Heart of Darkness, as if it were written by Beckett, not Conrad.
I do not feel that my Foreword has got matters much forrader’, as we say in the United States, that is, much further forward. My advice: ignore what I have said (which you can hardly do if you have already read it far enough to get to my disclaimer). In any case, forget it. Better to read these wonderfully melodious and powerful poems for yourself and in your own way. Reading them has been a great, but troubling, delight for me.
J. Hillis Miller - Literary critic and Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine
Secrets … Ellipses
It is said that the dead are the most demanding of our love. We are defenceless and delinquent in the face of them.
(Wolfreys, Silent Music)
You risked everything on this quotation: “The work of love in recollecting the one who is dead is the work of the most disinterested, free, and faithful love”. It is signed: … For your name? No, you never did that. For the author then, someone you had read; whom I cannot recall ….
(Wolfreys, Silent Music)
Draping the Sky for a Snowfall moves me greatly. It shows that Julian Wolfreys is an extremely distinguished poet. Wolfreys is also many other things: a spectacular musician (player of many instruments, composer, lyricist, arranger, performer, recording artist); a brilliant and exceptionally learned scholar (for example in his multivolume account of those who have written about life in London); a creative editor (of a series on Victorian literature and culture for Edinburgh University Press); a publisher and editor, a gifted organizer of conferences (for example one some years ago now at Loughborough University on ‘Rural Experience’); a wonderful writer of fiction (in Silent Music). How does he find time and creative energy to do all these things? He is a prodigy. I was familiar with all these gifts except, until recently, his gift for poetry. I might have known!
How can I say anything that will help you to read Draping the Sky for a Snowfall? Not easy. You must in the end read it for yourself, make what you can for yourself of these poems. I have put them in my title under the aegis of ‘secrets’ and ‘ellipses’. ‘Secrets’ for their ‘hermeneutical’ side, what is meant, das Gemeinte; ‘ellipses’ for their ‘poetics’ side, die Art des Meinens, the way meanings are expressed. In this case that means how the secrets are eloquently written about, while at the same time being kept. Draping the Sky is elliptical in both meaning and poetics. It sometimes seems as if Wolfreys is trying to see how much he can leave out and still have his readers feel they are idiots if they cannot figure out das Gemeinte, what is meant. There are reasons for his elliptical reticence.
Many of these poems concern an ethical duty: the speaker’s endless and unfulfillable obligation to render justice to the dead beloved. He must do that as much as anything by remembering her as clearly as possible: her laugh, her smile, her body, the silent looks they exchanged, events of bodily touching. On the other hand, many of these poems celebrate the idea of the beloved. The same? another? It is impossible to tell. It remains what Derrida would call an undecidable. Whoever the speaker might be – and there is no reason to assume that the author and the speaker are one – Wolfreys’ poems strive again and again to understand, from the perspective of whatever moment he writes a poem now, what occurs in an event, a crisis, and how to bear witness, to find adequate words for it.
Wolfreys’ conceptual presuppositions are made clear by way of repeated and varied formulations. A particularly explicit formulation is ‘Read’, a poem in the section called ‘Baltic Correspondance’. The other person, the beloved, even in moments of greatest intimacy remains wholly other, unreachable, untouchable, secret. Death does no more than seal, once and for all, the otherness of the beloved. Each poem is therefore:
A song that speaks of everything
In secret, in unspoken words,
And otherwise,
An afterword
An other’s tongue
The conceptual aporia of these poems is evident. As the poem cycle titled ‘Mourning’ reveals, not to speak of the dead is to betray an exigent responsibility. To speak of the dead adequately is, however, impossible. Any words for this eternal secret are a betrayal. To speak of it is to traduce it. Not to speak of it is to traduce it. Either way you have had it big time. Wolfreys’ poems hover eloquently within this impasse.
Paradoxically, the aporia of the other’s permanently secret otherness does not generate silence but lots of powerful poems that speak of it ‘otherwise’, in displaced figures or, properly speaking, catachreses. This may be the reason Wolfreys is so chary about anchoring events. One poem speaks of a lighthouse. Which lighthouse, exactly? That remains a secret.
I have cited in my two epigraphs Wolfreys’ Silent Music, which tells in lyrical prose the narrative of a love and a loss. Who knows the extent of fiction in this novel, or to what extent anything – if anything – might have some factual or historical referent. In any case, if Wolfreys had wanted to show his hand, had he wanted the readers of his poems to know that facts there were, he presumably would have made this clear. Were the novel in any way factual, Wolfreys would doubtless have referred those readers to Silent Music somewhere in Draping the Sky for a Snowfall. There is a thematic sympathy between the poems and the novels to be sure, but not necessarily a connection. Since he does not make connections, I think it is better not to know Silent Music exists or at least to pretend not to know and not to use it in explanation or presumption of missing facts. The danger of knowing ‘the facts behind’, as Wolfreys no doubt realized, is that autobiographical explanations tend to inhibit actual reading. You say, ‘Oh, I see. It’s a transcription of his life. Then I don’t need to read the poems carefully, just learn about the facts of his life’.
The hermeneutical meaning of Draping the Sky is clear enough, though some filling in of blanks and connecting of dots may be necessary to extrapolate clear meaning from what is often expressed elliptically and indirectly. What about the poetics of Draping the Sky, however, die Art des Meinen? It would seem at first that the poetical devices Wolfreys employs are just the right ones for expressing the hermeneutical meaning he wants to convey. These are modes of radical ambiguity that are especially common in some modern American poetry (which may not have influenced Wolfreys one bit, for all I know): William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Olson, or the Language poets. These features of ellipsis are also already there in Mallarmé or Rimbaud. I list some: short lines that make a phrase or word hang in the air detached from what would syntactically complete it: momentarily at least, the fragment hides its secret (an example is the words ‘A secret’ that make a whole line in ‘Up at Jack’s’); wordplay with words that have contradictory meanings, sometimes non-English words, as in the fun Wolfreys has with the word Vorspiel, which can mean the beginning section of a piece of music or of some other composition, but also sexual foreplay, as in the tongue-kissing Wolfreys’ speaker bears witness to; play with ambiguous pronouns, I, you, he, she, we, those ‘floating signifiers’; incomplete sentences; unexplained allusions, citations, or place-names; untranslated words in some foreign language, as in the bits of German, French, and Latin, or the Polish interpellations and translations throughout the section ‘Baltic Correspondance’. (Note that italicized a: has another tongue taken over, is this now French? or is this another of Wolfreys’ elliptical allusions, some indirect reference to the a of Derridean différance? This is entirely likely, knowing Wolfreys, but it remains impossible to tell. Though a thought occurs; perhaps, given the playfulness, Wolfreys’ French spelling also tells the reader that there is a dance between lovers here.) The Polish is wholly opaque to me, its meaning hidden. Such devices successfully hide their secrets. That is what Wolfreys’ speaker says he must do vis-à-vis the beloved (however many, or few, there are), so poetics happily matches hermeneutics.
On the other hand, and finally, such devices are not just ways of speaking otherwise about the secrecy of the other person, alive or dead. A word or phrase just hanging in the air, like Wolfreys’ other poetic devices, is, strictly speaking, not a rich ambiguity but just plain meaningless. It does not aid Wolfreys one bit in getting his hermeneutical meaning stated clearly. Die Art des Meinens turns into Die Art des Sinnlosigkeit, the art of meaninglessness; or, if you prefer one of these translations: futility, absurdity, hollowness, senselessness, pointlessness, purposelessness, meaninglessness. Ultimately perhaps just loss. Reading Wolfreys’ ellipses is like reading Heart of Darkness, as if it were written by Beckett, not Conrad.
I do not feel that my Foreword has got matters much forrader’, as we say in the United States, that is, much further forward. My advice: ignore what I have said (which you can hardly do if you have already read it far enough to get to my disclaimer). In any case, forget it. Better to read these wonderfully melodious and powerful poems for yourself and in your own way. Reading them has been a great, but troubling, delight for me.
J. Hillis Miller - Literary critic and Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine