Breaking the Form, Mending the Field: Jos Charles’s feeld
by Stacey Balkun
The language we have can’t always tell the stories we need to tell. Traditional syntax, punctuation, and form can structure a poem but also trap one, too. In his essay on poetics, “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson calls for a radical break from tradition. He believes that form is an extension of content; as opposed to the “inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the ‘old’ base” of verse. To consider “open” verse, or “composition by field,” Olson calls for us to consider poetry at its smallest unit: the syllable. According to Olson, the two “halves” of poetry are “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” For him, sense comes through the sound of a line, most simply through syllable, and emotion comes through in breath and line. Syllable and line are rooted in—and move through—the body.
In her beautiful book feeld, poet Jos Charles reinvents the syllable, disrupting language by restructuring it from its smallest units. Charles creates a new language, part Chaucerian, part text-speak, dependent on homonyms in a way that just about forces us readers to read the poem out loud and feel each word in our mouths.
A “whord // beguins in the stomach,” Charles writes. feeld moves beyond the head and heart, deeper into the body. Words begin in an incredibly intimate space, deep within the self. About the self, she writes, “lorde i am 1 / lorde i am 2 / lorde i am infinite.” This line revises itself as it moves across the page, but without negating each previous thought. The self remains in constant motion, and all three thoughts remain true. Later in feeld, Charles even goes further to reject the boundary between (and binary of) sound and silence: “2 be lyrick / with oute // sound.” To be lyric—to make an utterance—is impossible through traditional approaches to communication or to poetry.
The impulse of feeld feels internal. It begins in the innermost places of the body (the stomach) and reaches outward from that intimate space. feeld is not only a poem about the body but also of the self; about gender, identity, and the boundary between body and context. In feeld, our speaker finds herself “inn a feeld / onlie there was no feeld.” What is true on one side of a line is no longer true as it continues. All observations of the world beyond the body—namely the field—cannot be trusted. As readers, we learn that perception cannot be trusted; that a deeper truth may lie beneath the surface of the self and of the field.
As the lines of feeld project across the page, they are interrupted by backslashes which both trouble the syntax and incorporate an extra beat of silence into each poetic line. In his essay, Olson emphasizes this method of disruption as part of projective verse: “If [a poet] wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma—which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line,” then that poet could rely on caesura, using white space or even punctuation like brackets or a backslash. Incorporating such punctuation rather than breaking a line allows for “a progressing of both the meaning and the breathing forward” (Olson). Jos Charles uses the backslash throughout feeld. As readers, we see the break in a line ( / ) as our eyes move across, allowing the rift to be physical in a different way than a usual line break, which makes our eyes return to the left and down. The content of the line is fragmented.
The backslashes of feeld are fraught with violence. These slash marks cut through the lines, rupturing otherwise cohesive thoughts into segments reminiscent of the breakage our speaker often describes feeling within herself: “pockes in the pewter agayn / gashe in that sintacks,” Charles writes, “a tran / her nayme sum flynt all redey inn the ash.” Here, Charles’s diction reinforces the violence wrought by the constant slashes: a “gashe” in “sintacks” is a vicious break within an attempt to communicate. The gash in the “tran” becomes bodily as well as syntactical, insinuating a shift or change in gender—denying a traditional binary—as well as an open wound, helpless as a “flynt all redey inn the ash.” In these lines, our understanding of logic is subverted: though a “flint” is a precursor to fire, “ash” comes after everything flammable has burned. As readers, we are left feeling unsure of where we stand in time and uncertain of what’s to come.
The slashes also seem to represent a field being worked or tilled; each line is a field broken into rows. The ploughing of a field, sexual nuance aside, precedes growth or rebirth. Each backslash as a pause indicates breath in the face of violence—to keep breathing is to defy death. Each breakage then becomes an act of survival; recreating punctuation, syntax, and even language in order to tell the story of a body in transition, which seems impossible to communicate in any other way.
Our speaker survives. She attempts to be “hewman” in all of its multiplicity and fluidity and she succeeds; she lives, the “hole whorld / off thynges before” her. feeld is a book of translation, transition, and transformation. Charles manipulates syntax, syllable, and punctuation to open up the field of the page and to enter the larger conversation about gender, identity, and the boundary of the body. This is an incredible, important book that embodies the poetics of projective verse while creating its own language, syntax, and structure through not only the ear and the breath but also the stomach, the skin, and the non-physical essence of what it means to exist within a human body.
Stacey Balkun is the author of Eppur Si Muove, Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak, and Lost City Museum. Winner of the 2017 Women's National Book Association Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2018, Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, Muzzle, and elsewhere. Chapbook Series Editor for Sundress Publications, Stacey holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches poetry at The Poetry Barn and The Loft.