The Wit of Their Strange Appearance

During an event at Poets House NYC, in the fall of 2016, Sylvia Legris mentioned that she had spent six or seven years researching for the poems that ultimately formed her collection The Hideous Hidden. “Four years doing research and you end up with nine little lines,” she joked. Those nine little lines, it turns out, are bound together by a deep reading of Hippocratic texts. It might be stating the obvious that poets are attuned to the nuances of language, yet some highlight attention to their métier more than others. Legris is among the most committed, with a vertiginously precise ear for a word’s potential semantic modulations. Through the five books she has produced from circularity of veins to her most recent there is a fascination with the vocabulary of the natural world; the lexicon of birds, of the body, and of disease predominate her verse. But her attention to language has been particularly acute in her most recent works. Take the first poem of The Hideous Hidden, entitled “Articulation Points (a preface),” which functions as an invocation:

Renounce the vestibule of non-vital vitals.

Confess the gallbladder,

the glandular wallflowers,

the objectionable oblong spleen.

The poem articulates anatomical, spatial, and even liturgical vocabularies; each word contains shadow meanings. Perhaps the most obvious example is “spleen,” which echoes both the irregularly shaped organ as well as the long history of associating the word with madness, creativity, joy, and depression, especially in the poems of Charles Baudelaire, whose work Legris frequently quotes. . .

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Language Seems to Stoke Itself: A Conversation with Sylvia Legris

Alexander: You made allusions in your earlier message, but what are the areas of experience through which you engage in order to fertilize poetic instinct?

Legris: Often I find that merely moving through the world fertilizes poetic instinct, walking around and being open to discovery or to seeing things in ways I haven’t previously. I’ve been a big walker for a lot of years and I’m always paying keen attention to everything—people, the natural world, stuff on the street. 

The areas of study that inform my work are, at least in the early stages of a project, less deliberate than a reader of my poetry might assume. Every poem in Garden Physic refers to botany in some way; my reading for this collection is wide ranging and includes technical books about plants, as well as literary or visual art-related works that touch on plants, either directly or obliquely. Some of the anatomical poems in The Hideous Hidden sent out shoots and suckers into botany; so even when I was working on that book I was already doing some research about plants, if only tangentially. (It’s impossible to do in-depth reading about glands and not notice the places where glandular terminology parallels that of botany.) The realization that my collection following The Hideous Hidden would focus on botany happened not while I was reading or writing—or even thinking—but while my hands were deep in earth, wrestling with an impossible tangle of volunteer elm roots and daylily rhizomes. My first attempts at gardening, outdoors as opposed to indoors in pots, happened while I was finishing The Hideous Hidden and was still immersed in the history of anatomy and dissection. The formidable task of trying to eradicate a sorely neglected flower bed of roots so tenacious they were causing a driveway curb to buckle and crumble felt like something closer to surgery than to gardening. And I imagined I was doing surgery, my hands working their way through the muddy tendons and intestines of a huge body. My poem “Pedanius Dioscorides in His Backyard Plot” contains the line “The limb-sized roots.” In the section of the yard dedicated to vegetables, there was one area where nothing would grow. I thought I’d dug up this area thoroughly and removed all the crap, but apparently not. I dug deeper and hit something hard—what I first worried might be water pipes turned out to be the roots of a blue spruce that had been cut down years earlier. And limb-sized these roots were. I felt like I’d unearthed human remains, some of these roots the length and diameter of an adult’s legs and arms, their surfaces pulpy—flesh-like—from decay. The more I dug, the more I wanted to know about plants and gardens. As I roamed around in books about gardening and horticulture, I was amazed at how many plant names contain anatomical references: bladderwort, kidney vetch, boneset, liverweed, lung moss… this is just a sample. My long poem “The Garden Body,” which went through several incarnations over three years, was sparked by my thinking about how cool it would be if you could arrange a garden anatomically—bloodwort interspersed throughout, the “organ” plants occupying the central “torso,” lungwort and heart trefoil surrounded by ribwort, lady’s fingers at the extremities.

The finished poem is very different from how I first envisioned it, yet now I can’t imagine it being anything other than what it is. The poem that emerged from this lengthy germination, starting and stopping and restarting from scratch, is a concoction of instinct and association, sparks flying back and forth between garden and page, doing and pondering, plodding and plotting. Of course, there’s also an element of serendipity in the mix; what poems might have emerged if I’d started with a pristine patch of earth? What you say about language being “not unlike foliage, it accrues simultaneously like a magically lit vapor” seems apt to me. My poems seem to develop organically and unpredictably, music, meaning, and texture unfolding with what seems like synchronicity. Just as I always find it magical that a flower I’ve planted blooms or that my peas look like real peas, the process that results in a finished poem also seems magical and mysterious. . .

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Writing the Body

The following is excerpted from Jesse Ruddock’s “Writing the Body”:

A cautery pen cuts through flesh with a hot-wire tip. Unlike a scalpel, it does not only cut as it goes but seals blood flow. Cautery pens are also called cautery pencils, which feels insensitive. A pencil has a lighter touch. It can be easily erased. It cannot make legal markings. The truth of the cautery machine lies somewhere in between pen and pencil.

The first time I guessed at the body as palimpsest was attending the botched surgery. The next time was watching a nurse write “NOT THIS LEG” in black Sharpie on my left leg before a right-leg anterior cruciate ligament repair. But it has only been through reading Sylvia Legris’s poetry that understanding the body as palimpsest has proved revelatory. Before, it was only softly shocking.

It’s one thing to taste or bump into an idea, another thing to follow a poet’s decades-long epic journey writing her way into the obscurity of the body. The body emerges through Legris’s poems, literally and metaphorically, as an unruly subject and an even more unruly text. One we only ever co-author. As Legris allows, breaking taboo, the body—my body, your body, any body—is a text that its co-authors, however well-intentioned, never control or finish.

In The Hideous Hidden, each poem is a theater of anatomy in which the poet is anatomist and her pen a scalpel or cautery machine whose lines perform dissections of human and animal bodies. The body as palimpsest—written on, written into, and rewritten—is explicit here, but I am interested in where and how this technique emerged. It is found in Legris’s very first publication, Ash Petals, a nineteen-page handmade chapbook of tight open verse. . .

To read this piece in its entirety, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 9.