Theoretical Introduction: the Poet’s Main Themes and his Ways with Words

4Furthermore, what we know is transient, as transient as the moments of connection between those doing the knowing, and as transient as thoughts themselves, which appear only for a time at the surface of consciousness, or in the public realm of ideas, only to sooner or later evaporate from the mind of the individual, or be superseded intellectually, socially or culturally. This is why, for Schlossberg, it is the act and process of knowing, not the attainment of the known, that matters most. The concept of the known, like Julia Kristeva’s concept of archivism or archivistic language (7, 15), Schlossberg holds to be misleading because it suggests that language and the attainments of epistemology reflect permanent truths.

7Notwithstanding his paradigmatic shifts in the consideration and use of language, Schlossberg also frequently chooses to communicate in more familiar poetic forms and idioms. For example, such passages as the following from the Knowing Not Known series (exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, in 1997) exemplify what the poet himself referred to as “weightless lyricism”:

Your map of the stars /
The field with the trees /
Your child’s hand (From “Lenses”, 28-30).

I wrote about moonlight settling on the sea like a wish (From “Perception”, 29).

Struggles are outside the boundaries /
But they are there, inventions for tomorrow /
Flowers for another wind (From “Stillness”, 29-32).

8In summary, Schlossberg’s poetry is a “poetry of insight” in which both radically new and traditional means serve to connect the poet and his readers together in the celebration of the many dimensions of subjectivity, the closeness of the present and its promise, the collective capacity of all of us beyond individualism and the stunning immanence of nature. To the poet’s various means can be added his use of synesthetic devices, which, however, Schlossberg conceives of and employs in ways consistent with his own unique poetic purposes and at variance with most uses of synesthesia by other poets of note. Consistent with his emphasis on insight, conceptually significant references to synesthesia outweigh particular instances of cross-sensory imagery.

Synesthesia in Schlossberg’s Poetry: General Overview

9Multi-sensory poetic constructions are different than cross-sensory ones; they are not necessarily synesthetic; and by some definitions, including the one preferred by this author, they are not authentically synesthetic at all. Even as there are many multi-sensory combinations in Schlossberg’s work, for example, the printing of words in colors, and the interspersing of words with representational drawings or abstract gestures (as in the Conscious Alphabet series) I will not consider them in this essay. Schlossberg does however employ a variety of genuinely synesthetic devices as strategies to bring his meanings to the reader. Similes and metaphors, conceptual articulations of the poetic/philosophical significances of synesthetic capacity and experience, and even the use of a medium in the creation of the works themselves that provokes a synesthetic experience for the viewer all occur in the poems, where they are testimony to the poet’s interest in the cross-sensory.

10Visual-auditory crossovers like the following from Schlossberg’s “To See Into The Intricacy” (from Knowing Not Known) are familiar territory to anyone familiar with synesthesia:

Even casual glances over the horizon /
grey and white mixed whispers of red (25-26).

11Even more compelling visual-auditory crossovers can be found in “With hands without thought” (from: Maps Songs Lenses, exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, in 1987):

a thought […] and twice we heard it /
It became starlight (9, 11-12).

12and in “Intention” (from Knowing Not Known):

and we […] stare back at the void /
in earnest, in whispers (12-13).

13Also to be found in Schlossberg’s poems are tactile-olfactory crossovers:

A fire is started […] we sit one after the other /
And stare as the flames splash into the air without other light we toss stones pieces of wood smell the heat (from: “Clarity,” 30-31, Knowing Not Known).

14Schlossberg’s interest in synesthesia can be found in discursive passages in the poems about synesthesia as well as in instances of its use. In one remarkable passage from Knowing Not Known Schlossberg expresses his convictions and feelings about the relationship between synesthetic experience and the creative insight of genius:

IMAGINE just being born…every signal crosses light sound smell but stays as a single impulse /
not knowing not being joined every small thing feels like the ocean /
to separate one thing, one impulse from another only happens after a while /
soon, sooner than you can differentiate, parts emerge and you reintegrate them /
learning is not adding but differentiating and singing /
genius returns to the ocean but with a timeless vibration everyone can share /
the effort to realize the range of the universe /
is the effort to listen with everyone’s ear and as your own (From “Imagine”, 7-14).

the lense of intelligence associates processes and holds them in pattern only to then disassociate by changing /
the evolution is measured in the degree of complexity of the pattern /
complexity is measured in the extent and range of implication of the metaphor employed /
and in the number of people who can share in the pattern depicted (4-7).

16For Schlossberg it is in the very nature of intelligence and genius to be sharable and here we learn that their level or magnitude seems directly proportional to the number of people doing the sharing; that is, in a sense intelligence and genius are communal rather than individual, and the larger the community the better.

Seeing hearing smelling tasting touching orienting /
six senses orienting is a sense pattern detecting strategy /
that I think is as helpful as a description as the rest /
moving around these are the categories my cellular self /
uses to translate the world (From: “Perception,” 3-5, Knowing Not Known).

18It takes imagination, specifically scientific imagination, to create such a sixth sense:

dreaming of a different sense /
beyond those familiar /
gathered by logic /
placed within our understanding (From: “Of what use a sign” 10-13, Deep See Poems).

As the bare green hill /
When some soft cloud vanishes into rain, /
Laughs with a thousand drops of sunny water/
To the unpavilioned sky! (181-184)

Realms where the air we breathe is love, /
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, /
Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above. (95-97)

Amidst the hardest struggle to assemble /
a picture reflective of the passion /
and wonder to discover, my hands ache /
my legs are exhausted, and pushing outward /
my senses must close, cross and reassemble
(From “Discover” 33-37, Knowing Not Known).

21For Shelley, the inanimate (the bare green hill) becomes animate (it laughs) and the most cherished human emotion (love) becomes the very air we breathe and is therefore just as essential to life. The auditory-visual synesthetic crossover (laughing is metaphorically compared to the sparkle of the sun in droplets of water) and the crossover from a kinesthetic sensation (breathing) to an emotional one (love) serve to melt away sensory distinctions and build toward the experience of mystically apprehended unity (“harmonizing the earth with what we feel above”). But Schlossberg longs to struggle to make a picture of the world (not to receive one that is mystically given) which is achieved as a result of maintaining contact with his “passion and wonder to discover”; that is, with uncompromised curiosity and uncontrolled by preconceptions about reality. This accomplishment entails synesthetic crossovers (“my senses must close, cross”) but for Schlossberg these make possible a different kind of contact with the world than Shelley’s, a contact more like that attained by scientific imagination.

22There is another respect in which Schlossberg’s apprehension of synesthesia could not be further from the mysticism of Shelley or the cross-sensory personal phantasmagorias of Baudelaire and E.T.A.Hoffmann. For Schlossberg it is a question not only of the radical reframing of the nature of thought but also of his desire to open roads of connection between peoples’ awarenesses to create collectivities of understanding. A remarkable synesthetic transfer from sight to sound in his work can serve to epitomize his social purpose; in a poem from the recent From Here series the following simile occurs:

[…] the light on the buildings and lakes /
were lit like the last act of a stubborn opera that /
sounded like how we all sing when we long for /
change (From “I Saw The Beginning Of Something” 16-19).

23Even though the simile crosses over to the auditory to enrich the description of something seen, it is far from an indulgence for its own sake in sensuous extravagance. Rather, it reveals that the poet hears the possibility of social change in light (for him a constant source of, and frequent metaphor for, insight or insight possibility). This cross-sensory reach makes the possibility of change seem more imminent: the vision of its possibility, like a suffusing light, emerges everywhere. This is hardly similar to Baudelaire’s famous line from “Correspondences”: “like the sweetness of oboes,”- a simile that seeks to access a new quality of sensory experience by opening up sensory boundaries.

24In another visual-auditory crossover, the concluding verse paragraph in “Like Light” from the Deep See series, Schlossberg leads his reader through an experience of synesthetic intensity to insight (metaphorically), the lights in peoples’ eyes (literally), and the necessity of the unbroken pursuit of both:

You are listening to a symphony /
being in a room /
flowing with constellations /
shining and flickering /
count on the lights in your eyes /
there is no intermission. (15-20)

Touching Changes: Synesthesia in the Fort Meyers Mural

25In 1981 Schlossberg created Touching Changes, (figs. 1 and 2), a mural for the Art Wall at the Barbara B. Mann Performing Art Center in South Fort Myers, Florida. Curated by Robert Rauschenberg, the installation was painted directly onto a wall with materials that included liquid crystal. Spectators were encouraged to touch the mural, which changed colors in response to the warmth of their touch and recorded the shapes made by the pressure of their contact. The mural’s response to the interaction with the spectators was synesthetic in that it automatically translated from the tactile to the visual. The spectators’ response to their interaction with the mural gave them an experience beyond sensory compartmentalization suggesting perhaps to the youngest among them that such cross-sensory occurrences are a matter of course. To be sure, Touching Changes, with its sponged-on surfaces of liquid crystal, as Schlossberg said: “enabled peoples’ presence to change the work” (Savko 1D, 3D). The spectators were even encouraged to press their bodies on the mural. Schlossberg’s strategy here was to employ synesthetic experience to dramatize the spectators’ creation of the content of the work itself in interaction with it. And what is “touching” is the change in the viewers as they become aware of their contribution to the meaning of the work. Once again for this poet it is a question of the celebration of subjectivity and the inevitability of its presence in experience.

26Schlossberg also used liquid crystal as a material in Warm Memories, a series of twelve poems created in 1981 and exhibited that year at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. This series of works, created with conte crayon, pencil and liquid crystal, were drawn on dark paper, which makes the words and gestures stand forward as “lights” (i.e. insights) against their background. As was the case with Touching Changes, the viewers of the exhibition were encouraged to “please touch the works of art”. In the poems of this series many of the words themselves refer to the process of being read by the viewer and literally transformed by the viewer’s touch. In the poem “Touching Relation” (fig. 3) occurs the phrase “For You I Am Invisible.” Here Schlossberg means that the self of the poet is invisible because it is the viewer who has created the very meaning of the words through touching them. The words could not mean what they mean (or even exist as they are) without the viewer, and this is why the poem concludes with the phrase “As I Am,”, that is, the poet is invisible as he is, like an unknowable Kantian noumena behind the creation of the work, unreachable because of the viewer’s overriding contribution to its meaning.

27In “Beneath Around” (fig. 4), also from the Touching Changes series, the phrases “Reveal No Edges” and “Spreading Present” describe the transformations of the words when touched into soft, almost organic and growing clouds of color (nonetheless still legible as words) created by the viewer’s physical warmth. Edges for Schlossberg are arbitrary, both perceptually and conceptually; things no more than people need not be seen as separate from one another, and the viewer’s touch in softening edges underscores this point kinesthetically, synesthetically and visually. The phrase “vanishing limits stories” (which typographically reads as a syntactical branch: “vanishing limits” and/or “vanishing stories,” depending on which “fork in the road” one takes) refers to the liberating consequences of overcoming edges and boundaries in every sense. And the present is spreading in additional senses: the possibility of living in the present is enhanced by the realization of the arbitrariness of edges, and this possibility is a gift (i.e. a present).

28In another poem in the series, “On Into,” the concluding phrase “gather expanding lines” refers both to the transformation of the words and letters as their edges dissolve in response to the reader’s touch and to the conceptual expansion of their meaning, while “lines” refers to both the words’ and letters’ physical boundaries and edges and to the lines of the poem. And “gather” implores the reader to reap the harvest of the realization of expanded possibilities. Thus in the Touching Changes series Schlossberg created a kind of synesthetic ultimate in viewer participation which he then explores thematically.

Kinesthesia and Synesthesia in Schlossberg’s Poetry; Kinesthesia as a Sixth Sense

29Schlossberg has said “it is important to me to consider reading as both a metaphysical and kinesthetic experience”(Baker,”An Artist on Art”). As we have seen, he regards metaphysical ideas as impermanent at best. However, his poetry is filled with opportunities for the reader to experience the texts kinesthetically. In this respect the Tidal Gestures series (exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, in 1990) is an epitome. In the works of this series Schlossberg has applied fragments of vinyl letters to panels or sheets of transparent plexiglass suspended behind one another, the effect resembling in a general way the appearance of hanging Asian scroll paintings were they transparent (Baker, “Edwin Schlossberg at Feldman” 53). Parts of each letter have been placed on each transparent plane so that the words cohere and can be read only when the viewer faces the poems straight on. When viewed from oblique angles the alignment of letter parts changes and the words transform entropically into insistently abstract patterns of suspended shapes. Schlossberg has long employed this format. For example, in 1978 he created a predecessor to the Tidal Gestures series, “Where Light Revises,” made of lettrasign on three vertically positioned vinyl sheets suspended one behind the other (figs. 5 and 6). In considering all the works of this format the reader is asked to re-assemble letters and words from the abstract patterns of fragments. In this way Schlossberg makes his point about the subjective construction of meaning by his use of the concrete force of words and their components: the reader’s synthesizing the letters and words stands for his or her contributing conceptually to the very sense of the words. For example, in “Where Light Revises” the last two lines of the first verse paragraph can be made out as “Today Tomorrow Is Between”, a celebration of the “is” as what is: a full experience of the moment (see fig. 5). But from oblique angles these lines cannot be made out as letters and words (see fig. 6). If the reader were to approach this poem in a gallery the experience would be one of coming upon something that at first made no sense but gradually did make sense when approached “straight on” in both the physical and conceptual senses; so the reader and Schlossberg together make the very words as well as their meanings.

Fragments
form parts
become words
that catch
in distance
resolve
thoughts
into thinking

31Because the fragmentation is insistent, in that once assembled by the reader the letters and words inevitably tend to break apart again, the kinesthetic experience also dramatizes the impermanence of thought (in general) and individual thoughts (in particular). This meaning is explicit in the iconic “These Words” (fig. 8):

These words
will fall
apart
to be sure
in light of
because of
what is
to become

32Also, the kaleidoscopic shifts as the viewer’s perspective changes from “straight on” to oblique yield glimpses of compositions of arcs and gestures that are reminiscent of the geometrical intricacy of Analytic Cubism and of its multiple and shifting points of view (Baker Ibid). The poems in the Tidal Gestures series create meaning by a process similar to Analytic Cubism: breakup leads to breakthrough, as in “Fragments” (fig. 7), where the complex and shifting composition is inseparable from the meaning it yields.

34Another high point of the supercharging of conceptual abstraction by means of perceptual, and even kinesthetic, contents in the words themselves and in the process of reading them is Schlossberg’s Figure: Ground series (exhibited at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, in 2000). In order to situate the poems of this series in the conceptual landscapes in which they belong, a comparison with the sculpture of David Smith is helpful. For Smith, placing his sculptures outdoors in a field at his Bolton Landing studio on Lake George was a way of putting his three-dimensional “drawing”, his gestures and forms, back with and into the nature of which he believed they were a part. Through the sculptures and around them, the natural prospects change with the spectator’s point of view, and these changes enrich infinitely the references and relationships of Smith’s creations to what lies outside and beyond them, in a sense bringing the environment inside the work of art.

36The things one sees through the stenciled words are seen to be their referents but these referents change with the physical position of each poem and with the point of view of the reader. For example, in the poem “We Are The Reason” (visible on the left in fig. 9) as it is shown displayed in the gallery the vistas through the stenciled words are blank. But this need not be the case; the poem could be placed before a window, with the result that the view through the words would give referents to each of them, referents that would change once again were the poem facing the interior of a room with its contents. And for that matter, even the view through to blankness in the installation photo (fig. 9) gives meaning to the words. Each word, by virtue of its stenciled inscription and shifting position, has an infinitely large number of meanings that are experienced as two-way streets where both the words and their referents condition each other, create each other’s meanings. And these meanings are in a significant sense free of the poet’s intentions; the reader finds them/creates them in each present moment of exploring the poem: “Walks in the woods /strong currents” as Schlossberg himself puns about living in the present, where he urges everyone to dwell and not just as readers.

38In another example, “Outside Eyes All Ways Through To True” (reproduced here in a drawn version--fig. 10), the different sizes of the typefaces lead the reader to structure the syntax sequences both vertically and horizontally, with consequent enrichments of the themes of superseding the limitations of the self (“All Ways Through To True” in a larger typeface) and reaching the present (“Being Present Amplifies Presence” in a smaller typeface). The concluding line of “Staggering Light Across Eyes” (fig. 11): “To Engage Across Eyes”, accomplishes a similar thematic statement and with the same pun: “across eyes” refers not only to eye contact but also means across “I’s”, that is, reaching across selves from one person to another. Also in this poem meaning branches proliferate: another syntactical possibility is “pity without perception eyes”, in which the poet laments the isolation of selves (“I’s).

39Perhaps the most rhapsodic of the meaning branches in the Figure: Ground series is the line “Bereft Within Indelible Joy Growing Awake Through Every Wave” (from the poem “Seem”). Here the beautiful concluding pun (wave in the ocean but also the wave of the hand of another human being) expresses Schlossberg’s deeply felt aversion to egoistic isolation and his commitment to both human connection and absorption in natural splendor as redeeming possibilities, if only we can choose them. And for this line in “Seem” there is another syntactical possibility, which includes the word “conscious”: “Indelible joy awake through every conscious wave.” In the process of discovering each and every one of Schlossberg’s syntactical ambiguities and possibilities the reader’s kinesthetic sense is awakened. Cytowic’s concept of the “sensory percept” might be applied here to see a synesthetic significance in the very act of realizing these syntactical options physically as well as conceptually.

40With regard to his means, that is, his moment by moment and line by line practices and choices, Schlossberg’s accomplishment certainly is similar to what O’Malley says in summary of Shelley’s accomplishment through synesthetic imagery: “that practice […] reveals a sustained, consistent effort to discover and celebrate values inherent in the coordinate expansion and sharpening of all human faculties” (177). In his poem “Radiate” from the Deep See series Schlossberg seems to be referring to just such a coordinate, or synesthetic, expansion:

It is our wish to touch /
when we are close to understanding /
the processes that cause us /
we are within reach of a sense /
so large that even all history /
cannot sustain it […] (23-28)

41But for Schlossberg, beyond Shelley, the focus is most often on what is possible for the human community. For him, in the utter subjectivity of the process of composing reality there is the greatest promise imaginable because the substance of reality can be suffused with our own aspirations. And Schlossberg is never far from reaching to his readers, exhorting them about the prospects and caring about them. As he so eloquently puts his commitment in the concluding lines of “The Distance In Order”, the last poem in the From Here series: “the promise extended as long as it takes.”