Poetry

Memory Bags

By By Thom Jurek., drawings by Jacques Karamanoukian Ridgeway Press, 1995, 32 pages

Often, it seems, the best poetry requires no special literary devices. It invites us with its accessibility, it affects us with its precision. It approaches those aspects of lived experience which resist language, though by resisting tend to warrant their exploration with words. "Memory Bags" is this kind of poetry:

"From spinning in schoolyards and gutters to

this splintered table,

I've come back here, to place each of your utter-

ances

collected in a frayed leather bag - in sequence

Prying apart the strands and detritus in order to separate from my memory, the projections of yours."

This ten-part poem invites us to the slow pace of feeling - as if feelings must be digested slowly to be truly felt. The poem is also a meditation to a loved one by way of grieving for the death of another. This interaction makes a space for reflection on the themes of desire and longing, loss and remembering.

The poet sets up this reflective space in a unique and interesting way. Through a relation to objects the beloved other is summoned, in what may be called "incantations," which give the poem its rhythm and musicality. Bits of broken glass, pictures on bureaus, burned out candles and locks of hair all decay too quickly , thus requiring the word by which the loved one can be invoked.

But the poet also reminds us that language itself struggles with the intimate realm of feeling, is itself often subjected to a violent silence. As if nothing will soothe but the loved one's own voice in our ears. Knowing this, he writes anyway, hoping for the best: "To carry, yet to speak

as song, as stutter,

as lamentation, as remembrance;

as certainly as now is past enveloped firmly

in present, toward mercy, enveloped fully in silent future.

What is, and what remains unspeakable, remains even in immemorial sorrow in full view of terror and history, awake in the violent tenderness of possibility."

The other amazing aspect to this beautiful little book is the series of ten "napkin drawings" by Jacques Karamanoukian. They interweave with the text, embellishing it , but also add a visual dimension to the "unspeakable" evoked by the words. They exude intensity while resisting interpretation, providing a model for what feeling (and perceiving) without words might look like.

The drawings, too, appear unhurried and invite us to spend some time there. Like the poem, the drawings point to an "outside" where the creation of forms helps to carry life's feelings and perceptions. Ín this way, they appeal to the artist in us all, even sending us to our own writing drawing tables.

It is rare to find fine writing and artworks together, at the same time, in the same space. In a way, that's what happens on First Fridays at Gallerie Jacques: A poet reads surrounded by paintings by Sanfourche and Roger Ha yes. "Memory Bags" recreates that aesthetic in book form - a rare treasure indeed.