L’ Origine du Monde
Rosemarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple
New Directions Press, 2006, 194 pgs, $16.95
“Just as the title, Curves to the Apple, evokes both the organic and the geometric (not to mention myth and the history of science),” Rosemarie Waldrop explains in introducing her prose-poem trilogy, “the poems of this trilogy navigate conflicting, but inextricable, claims of the body and mind, feeling and logic” (xi). In the trilogy’s second book, Lawn of the Excluded Middle, when the poet finally declares “Everything in our universe curves back to the apple” (1.29.9), the liminality of the work is full blown and unfolds bewitchingly in paragraphs of repeated introspective complexity. In the passage, the poet regards the apple in the order-conferring light of metaphysics and unadorned, simply by looking, as a “new innocence of body on the other side of knowing” (1.29.2-3). Knowledge, myth, body, voice, language, logic, physics, metaphysics, experience, feeling—the bold scale of topics in Waldrop’s trilogy as a whole approaches what she calls “a pure figure of reach” (1.29.6), and subsequently “the transfer of visibility toward dream without abrogating the claims of body” (1.30.10-11).
Three increasingly intricate works comprise Waldrop’s trilogy: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities. The first of these works was written apparently without the intention of the rest, and consequently it is more playful in its philosophical content than the focused, honed poetic investigations of the sequels. This first book draws much of its interest from its impression of spontaneity, the sudden relevance of philosophical questions to ordinary (and extraordinary) moments. Written in the voice of a wife, The Reproduction of Profiles renders in its self-titled first part the day-to-day romantic attraction (and adventurousness) of her and her husband. Philosophical wonder at the role of words heightens this portrait of their quite physical relationship. In this part’s fourth section, “If Words are Signs,” for instance, the poet sees her husband’s body as if it were Wallace Stevens’s “genius of the sea” (1), an analogue for the material constitution of words—their embodiment as sounds and marks—but, this wife asks, can bodies of words express his body? “Nobody looked at you except for the water which, though it has no shape, is heavy with mirroring that of others. These images, however, are hard to get hold of, sunk as they are at the bottom of the alphabet” (1.4.15-18). The wife’s voice is yet more dominant in the numbered paragraphs of “Inserting the Mirror,” the second half of Reproduction of Profiles where the exchange among words, body, and voice quickens and points to the succeeding direction of the trilogy: “The light appropriates, even to the unsounded spasms of treble and flight, and the fields stretch into what, lacking male parameters, must be nowhere” (2.25.8-10). This landscape unmistakably becomes an image of a vulva as the poet ruefully comments on the traditional limitations motivating and defining masculine philosophical discourse, a discourse stereotypically dominated by male homosociality, and even homosexuality, in the form of exclusions of women’s concerns and perennial fixations solely on masculine physical and intellectual development. (see Lloyd)
The second book of Waldrop’s trilogy, Lawn of the Excluded Middle, is a tour de force. It takes up the issue of women’s relationship to philosophical conceptualization through the foundational claim in logic that “everything must be either true or false” (97) and the pigeonholing prejudice that “women cannot think logically” (97). As Waldrop goes on to explain in the ten remarks closing the book: “Lawn of the Excluded Middle plays with the idea of women as the excluded middle. Women and, more particularly, the womb, the empty center of the woman’s body, the locus of fertility” (97). In the second volume, Waldrop tropes the womb as a space where logic and emotion orbit mutually, and balances her themes on poles of meaning and feeling rather than the agon of physical embodiment with linguistic materiality: “So we reach down, although it cannot save us, to the hollows inside the body, to extend them into so many journeys into the world, so many words shelling the echo of absence onto the dry land” (1.23.5-8). Here writing is analogized with an image of birth in which both words and offspring repeat the hollow womb. Images of hollowness, absence, and exclusion are at play with those of fecundity, abundance, and discovery throughout the work, and this second volume unfolds the womb’s hollowness as both nullity and as plenum—a place where emotion and logic collide in momentous acts of invention: Newton struck by the apple, artistic inspiration, the experience of love. Part Two of Lawn of the Excluded Middle is called “The Perplexing Habit of Falling” and uses the language of physical science to explore identity and physical attraction: “My legs were so interlaced with yours I began to think I could never use them on my own again. Not even if I shaved them. As if emotion had always to be a handicap” (2.1.1-3). Gravity and the terminology of physics frame this section’s meditations, which contain the basis of the trilogy’s third book, Reluctant Gravities.
Whereas Lawn of the Excluded Middle uses images of a woman’s body to challenge the traditional absence of women in philosophical discourse, the third book of this trilogy is an elaborate counterpoint of voices. “Two voices on a page. Or is it one?” (103)—the prologue to Reluctant Gravities frames the work by raising further questions of how to read it. The paragraphs of the prologue are also an exegesis, contemplating how gendered bodies may (or may not) be a proper analogue for gendered voices:
The pact between page and voice is different from the compact of voice and body. The voice opens the body. Air, the cold of air, passes through and, with a single inflection, builds large castles. The page wants proof, but bonds. The body cannot keep the voice. It spills. Foliage over the palisade. (104)
How is voice on a page like a voice from a throat? Waldrop raises the crucial question of Reluctant Gravities by unsettling the intuition of virtually every reader that gendering pronouns refer fundamentally to bodies, and so reify “the compact of voice and body.” At one point the poet writes, “Perhaps we need to change to see what’s there, she says. And ambiguity, to be aware of seeing” (16.8-9). This conversation, “On Change,” continues, “So we should not watch each single breath, he asks, but simply take in the world and hold it in our body?” (16.13-14). The voices of the third book seek to engage one another, and, through the ensuing conversations, to complete one another in an identification bred of understanding and attraction. The apparently juxtaposed voices of Reluctant Gravities are “he” and “she,” and so superficially represent a dialogue across a divide of gender, a divide made concrete by the spacing of each comment on the page. Yet this very spacing, recalls the excluded middle of Lawn of the Excluded Middle as much as the conjugal iconography recalls Reproduction of Profiles. The uncanny gestures toward the first volumes of the trilogy make Reluctant Gravities the most difficult volume of the trilogy, and by comparison also perhaps the least satisfying. Its highly crafted surface belies a profound dependence on the prior volumes, only these volumes could stand alone, and the virtuosity of Waldrop’s writing and the resonance of ideas were the cumulative affect.
Quoting French poet Stéphane Mallarmé in an interview, Rosemarie Waldrop once commented that poems happen through words rather than ideas. If I have emphasized the ideas of her writing it is because these ideas are as provocative and complex. Ultimately, these ideas are a coherent background to this trilogy’s insight into the workings of the heart as an intellectual energy. An important and noble addition to the tradition of the prose poem, Curves to the Apples forwards the genre in a manner that is at times breathtaking. As a work of philosophical poetry, Curves to the Apple also vitally extends (by revising) an increasingly neglected though very ancient Hesiodic tradition of poetry, a discursive tradition that remains underappreciated if not invisible. Waldrop’s powerful fusions of logic and affective expression, her perceptive critiques of gender and social identity in Western concepts of intellect, her candid depictions of the work, doubt, lust, compromise, admiration, confidence, and thoughtfulness involved in being in love and being married—each of these makes this trilogy a stunningly original contribution to avant-garde letters and philosophical literature. One reads Curves to the Apple in awe of the ambitious dimensions of Waldrop’s achievement, and thinking also that some of the trilogy’s power surely lies in the possibilities of expression for poets of the future to which this work gives birth. (see Lloyd)
by Milton L. Welch
Works Cited
Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy.
Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1993.
Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed.
Holly Stevens. New York: Vintage, 1972.
Waldrop. Rosemary. Curves to the Apple. New York: New Directions, 2006.
– – -. Interview with Edward Foster. Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews.
Hoboken: Talisman House, Publishers, 1994
Milton L. Welch is a faculty member at NC State. He has completed a dissertation on representations of lynching in modernist poetry, and has reviewed poetry for numerous publications.