An APR In the Studio column, from American Poetry Review, May / June 2008
In what computer people call the meat world, I wrote always in a place that had a window. Otherwise there's not much to say (a door rests on top of two filing cabinets that have been moved from window to window). Of more interest is the internal studio. What to call it—encephalic? Virtual? Made-from-meat-yet-not? The broodio? The stain?
Here's a picture, because what we find most titillating about this column is the image that gives us a glimpse of the poet's actual furniture and rugs.
Though I am not enough of a scientist to be able to work out the mind-body correspondences, like anybody else I start in the deep hub that's said to be reptilian. It's also where the doctor saw something anomalous when she looked at my brain scans, a wispy streak like the tail of a comet trailing across my corpus callosum (I knew it was bad when she called it interesting). So the generative reptile center is defective, and what comes out of it is scrambled, gnarled, free? (the hospitable way to say it) from conventional language. Or you could say the place is a wreck, and what comes out of it is gibberish.
Snaky gibberish: you can see that a childish sensibility is responsible for the design of the studio. There's a room with spongy walls, a gag that the child of me was threatened with: The men in the white coats are going to come and lock you up in a rubber room. The good thing about the broodio is that it's transportable, but the bad thing is that it can't not be ported. You're locked up to smash your head against the walls, trying to make sense of the reptile fragments—you're not supposed to be able to hurt yourself here, though I often find the early stages of a poem painful. (The doctor reported that I had encephalomalacia, which I discovered meant soft in the head, another phrase from childhood, my grandmother's expression, which corroborates my figment of the rubber room.)
And there's a chamber where the walls creep inward to crush what's inside (must be derived from my childhood obsession with Secret Agent 99). That's what happens when an acceptable strip of language is finally produced; it gets crushed and uncrushed, crumpled and crunched (to jump again from mind to body, the pictures of my brain show some hard black granules that ought not to be there. I think of them as a residue of this crunching process.)
Like my real rooms, the studipod has a window where I take the crinkled shape once it's dusted off. There I am indeed pleased with myself, though the light somehow (as in that childhood lemonjuice trick) turns my lines moronic, and I slink back to the reptile hub to sulk. The broodio is an echo chamber where I yell out questions: Who are you, anyway? What do you sound like? The questions just bounce back. I am almost 50 years old by the calendar, I should know who I am by now, but I am still not fully pupated.
There's a nook with a bathtub, where the paper goes limp and my skin goes wrinkled and pink so that I am part baby and part old man. There's a nook with the bower made of leaves and a nook with a lumpy mattress on the floor. Of course this list is only partial—when I try to imagine the encephalic studio, what comes to mind is Borges' infinite library, a complex hive.
As far as meat-world studios go, I like the description of Walt Whitman's, in the bedroom of the house he finally acquired at age sixty-five, in Camden, New Jersey. He kept everything strewn about, poem next to receipt next to shoe on the floor, and he stirred this dusty soup with the crook of his walking stick when he needed to extract a fragment. The necessary scrap always rose to the surface, or what rose was made to suit his purposes. Whatever arrived by chance was right.
In the mess of my encephaludio, I keep company with the crunched shapes until I finally acquiesce to them. It's less a place where I write than it's a place where I relent to what I've written. This takes time. Most of the square footage is devoted to waiting, a waiting room without comfortable chairs.
At last the acquiescence happens, sometimes, and then it's time to move into the more forgiving studio of the mouth, with its nice soft tongue. La la la—ouch. Don't forget the teeth.
About the Author
Lucia Perillo has published four books of poetry, most recently Luck is Luck (Random House, 2005), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts prize from Claremont University. She lives in Olympia, Washington.
Philadelphia
Editors: Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Elizabeth Scanlon
Assistant Editor: Lauren Rile Smith
Copyright © 2008 by World Poetry, Inc.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
