Carol Rumens 

Poem of the week: A Work of Fiction by Louise Glück

Glück's prose-poem combines meditation with anecdote as she remembers the moment of loss after finishing a novel, writes Carol Rumens
  
  

Starry night
'The stars above and the tiny tobacco-star of a cigarette' … A Work of Fiction. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The expansive, leisurely poems in the new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück, are interspersed with one-paragraph prose-poems – miniature parables often framed as personal anecdotes, like this week's choice, A Work of Fiction.

"I was torn between a structure of oppositions/ and a narrative structure", Glück writes in the book's neighbouring poem, The Story of a Day. It's a moment that sets you thinking about the differences and similarities between poetic and fictional storytelling. Inspired by her "faithful and virtuous" knight – the night – Glück is a mistress of the master-narrative, the narrative-as-meditation, in which a single consciousness connects disparate experiences. In this week's poem, the meditation-as-anecdote is not exactly a structure of oppositions, but one in which oppositions potently register: water and fire, real and fictional lives, the stars above and the tiny tobacco-star of a cigarette.

The prose-poem is a fascinating hybrid, combining the rhythmic stretch and low-stress accenting of the prose sentence with the close focus associated with poetry. It can seem a relaxed form, or a relaxation of form. A Work of Fiction is formal in its matching of syntactic rhythms to action. Using the simple past tense, it describes a protagonist in motion, turning the book's last page, getting sad, walking outside, lighting a cigarette, smoking it, watching herself in night's starscape. It's as if the work of fiction lingered on for the poet-reader, and absorbed her own creative enterprise into its novelistic texture, the music of what happened next.

For a poet to choose to document the moment of loss after finishing a novel may hint at mock-elegiac intentions. The prose rhythm and colloquial diction here work against exaggeration, but allow for humour. The "wave of sorrow" seems self-mocking, especially with the neat pun on "wave". But the strong reaction is guaranteed genuine by the succeeding rhetorical question, which draws us sympathetically into the narrator's consciousness: "Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?" This is not only a question about fictional characters, surely, but those loved and lost in the real world, fictionalised by death. The breaking of the word, "enveloped", to read as "envel-/ oped" hints at the archaic "oped" (opened) and is a reminder of the way lives not our own have the power to open and enter us, as memory.

After the "wave of sorrow" there's a stretch without any figurative language. It's just good clean prose. Then comes the powerful simile of the cigarette "like a fire lit by a survivor". The narrator, again, adds an emotive question: "who would/ see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars?" A new angle of vision seems implied. Someone is looking down from above, perhaps from very far away. So the question provokes another unspoken question: how many survivors' fires might be glowing among the stars and planets, invisible as we look up from earth?

The narrator is ironical about her smoker's epiphany. She knows the tiny object is not benign, and personalises its malignancy with a telling adverb: "each breath patiently de-/ stroying me." Again, there's a point to the word-break: here, the hyphen visualises physical breakdown. Internal rhyme underlines a paradox, the contrary development of "glowing and growing small". Not a poet's licence, but a prose-writer's, allows the repetition of "small" without a jolt of redundancy. The colloquial voice should not be noticeably artful. "Lit" is repeated, too, along with "light". These help prepare the ear for the deliberate, emotive repetition of "brief".

"Brief" – the very word is like a puff on a cigarette. The cigarette shortens life, breath and itself as it burns down, a symbol of the mortality of all who breathe. The affirmation that the cigarette is "inside me now" is shocking and oddly triumphant. If death is inhaled, so is life itself, and its ultimately fictional, time-bound experiences.

Although, as sophisticated readers, we may protest that the stars are part of us, and that they're far from "infinite", the unreliable narrator's perception appeals to us with a simpler, more instinctive kind of truth, the kind that strikes the naked human eye. The naive lover of stories, finding comfort in the fictional web, consoled by a cigarette, and wryly aware of the dark humour of it all, is easy to love as a fellow-strategist, facing loss and making it endurable. Glück's prose-poem joins all those works of almost-fiction which are lost and found so pleasurably in our consciousness, as "the stars could never be".

A Work of Fiction

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow envel-
oped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette.
In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would
see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood a while in the
dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently de-
stroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now,
which the stars could never be.

 

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