In his interview with Slant Books about his new poetry collection, Vanishments, Eric Pankey says: “In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.” Naturally, then, while reading through the poems, I especially noticed instances of these sorts of vanishment.
Take, for instance, the book’s title poem, which begins:
Fog. No wind. Vapor An apparition of itself. The seen disappears. Then takes form: The phenomenology Of the mutable.
“Fog,” “vapor,” “apparition,” “disappears,” “mutable”: all words in vanishment’s vocabulary.
We meet another weather-related mutability, “clouds,” in the poem “Misty Fjords”:
Degrees of impermanence Transient clouds scud above Slow geologic movement
The long (four-page) poem “Empty Calendar” brings fog and clouds together, along with their natural qualifier, the “transient.” (The ellipses are mine, indicating stanzas skipped):
X equals the unknown, which is to say The cussed, the otherwise irretrievable, A negative space of clouds and mist. What is memory but remote access? Out of fog a depth of fog coalesces.… I had hoped for a fragile transience, For the ordinary’s semblance of mystery.… On a current’s bewildered grammar Fractured ice sheets refreeze. Cloud-like, Distant lands recede as I draw near.…
That “negative space” gets a whole poem to itself, in perhaps the book’s longest poem, titled “Negative Space.” Here are just a few of its images:
Deer have carved a little basin atop the salt lick. There snow melts, pools. Lifts again as vapor. The stream carries the mountain away grain by grain, The stream that carved the cliff-edge. To render the void, I cast the negative spaces: Empty field. Open sky. Wind at a threshold, Suspended there, there in the meanwhile.
Melting snow lifting as vapor; a stream carving a cliff-edge: perfect images of the “in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium” that Pankey speaks of in his interview. Meanwhile, that “meanwhile” in the last line quoted above recalls for me other of Pankey’s images for time’s vanishments. Take, say, this from “Empty Calendar”:
For more than a second, a ghost adheres To sight, like a breath’s aftereffect on glass: No more bereft of meaning when it’s gone.
And from the poem “Afterbodings” (a fun wordplay on “forebodings”):
The past is not quite dormant, not quite latent: A crisscross of microscopic cells. A directionless space. *************** It could be any Wednesday. Tomorrow, for example, A motion that has not yet, but will perhaps, cease.
This poem is from the final of Vanishments’ five sections, which consists entirely of ekphrastic poems. Though I’m not familiar with most of the paintings that Pankey is (as he puts it) “in conversation with” in these poems, I imagine, say, landscapes with (yes) clouds or fog, or houses fading out in the far distance. I do know the series of paintings that the poem “To Paint the Circumference of a Stone with a Feather” is reflecting with: John Cage’s New River Watercolor series, which are abstract and minimalist. Some of Pankey’s lines for Cage’s paintings:
Insubstantial hills against haze: A body. A surface projected onto. : : A grit of erasure nubs Brushed aside to the-verge-of. : : To disrupt the notion Of permanence: a throw of the dice.
(Those squares of four dots are Pankey’s indications of space—and his spaces on either end of them are much larger than I can reproduce here. Spaces like these occur in many of the book’s poems, and Pankey explains their purpose in his interview with Slant Books: “The book employs a great deal of white space which, I hope, like gravity holds things, at once, together and apart.” So, another—visual—form of vanishment.)
The final poem I’ll look at here is one of these ekphrastic poems, titled “Sacred Spaces,” which recalls several of the sorts of vanishments that Pankey has engaged throughout the book. In his endnote, Pankey says that this poem “is in conversation with Callum Innes’s painting ‘Exposed Painting Crimson Lake’.” Innes actually has many paintings with this title; I count more than one hundred online. (I’ve chosen one as this post’s visual image.)
The image blurs where a solvent spilled. A veil of language lifts away Like a basket of birds thrown in the air. An arbitrary trace of the past remains: Snow through a broken skylight. Snow erasing the paths deer inscribe. Snow terse and somber on the river Where red vanishes from the visible spectrum.
Looking at this painting next to Pankey’s poem, we can enjoy his rich imagination at work. The blurred black line which the poem sees as spilt solvent is easily visible in the painting. But the next two stanzas are the fruits of Pankey’s inventiveness. Where does that delightful “basket of birds thrown in the air” come from? Or the “arbitrary trace of the past”? The “snow” stanza, though, does seem perhaps more clearly related to the painting—that is, to its white rectangle.
I want to end by quoting Pankey’s words with which I began this post:
“In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.”
Yes, that’s precisely what he has done.
Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.
