Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller
Literacy affords readers the benefits of selective retrospection. If one desires to pick up a novel by Bolaño or a short story from Borges, one can reach anachronistically for the text of greatest interest. The journey of writers, though, is more boring and more linear. Writers have to suffer through the act of creating their "less interesting" works, and the strain is more viscerally felt. I imagine every writer empathizes with the gut-punch that comes with reading a story written years ago, as well as that impossible-to-realize desire to try and erase all traces of its existence. It is hard not to disown the immature drafts of better realized poems, though this is precisely how Alejandra Pizarnik views The Most Foreign Country, her first collection of poems.
Although all this is true, viewing the book in this light puts it at a disadvantage. Pizarnik's earliest work may not live up to the myth of her later works, but still endeavours to make itself through the silence that later lives beside her poetry. Uniquely dazzling in its optimism, The Most Foreign Country presents a proto-surrealist/surrealist vision of oneself informed equally by the life and death of things within it. In "Reminiscences," the efforts of self-realization turns constantly against itself, the flashes of unrealized memories. "One is dying/ one is being born," but whether this "one" is the same as the "I" also present in the poem is difficult to discern. Memories, much like words upon the page, have the benefit of being subject to our imaginative reinterpretations. Perhaps that's why the self, built out of memories, "will go on existing/ in my atemporal interior," what Pizarnik seems to describe here as the mind, or the house where the self goes to restore and redefine itself.
Pizarnik's interest in the self in its moments of reconstruction and disrepair are consistent with the themes of her later poems. Also consistent are the dark, gothic imagery she borrows from Lautréamont and her other influences. The overgrowth of forests, which forms the backdrop for her later poetry, here sources the terror and thrill of living on a foreign landscape. "My Forest" takes joy in the arrival of ten horses that "will come/ to throw their tails to the black wind," at the same time as a regiment that "will come/ rounding up the verses". It's this verdancy, for all its benefits and curses, that lends the world all of its values. In "Nemo," she writes that "the day won't go far that lacks in greenness," and appears throughout the text as the origin of misery and mirth.
What makes this work different from the rest, though? The most obvious answer, and least interesting, is that only Pizarnik could say. Most writers I know have very specific visions for their writing to match. Achieving their vision by placing it into words, on a page or stage, usually crushes the dream that inspired the writing process to begin with. Getting the depiction wrong, then, tends to leave the writer incredible dissatisfaction and disappointment; usually just with themselves, and most of all, the object that symbolizes their failure most. Removing this from the domain of access makes it easier for the evidence of failure to creep back into one's conscience. There's no doubt that Pizarnik felt this on some level, though such sentiments mean little for her readers now.
A more provocative answer might lie in her later creative process. Pizarnik's later efforts are exercises in condensation of language and fragmentation. Although she wrote several longer prose works, Works and Days, Diana's Tree, and A Musical Hell all possess a fragmentary quality that preserves images within shards that complete one another when placed together. Although it would be a mistake to say The Most Foreign Country doesn't also fragment language; but that her poetry here uses longer, more complete phrases or sentences. Also, her imagery doesn't shift abruptly as it does in the blazing collages of her later works. Her use of repetition here weaves together disparate images. "Yes," serves as a refrain for the stanzas of "Port Ahead". "I Am..." has a repeated structure for each stanza, while "Dedalus Joyce" begins every sentence of its prose with "Man." Pizarnik's early poems are less ephemeral, less isolated, and more wholesome.
Taken in by "how the world was full of flowers that summer!" as Pizarnik quotes from Rimbaud, one might say her work here is less interested with cutting and chipping and polishing away at language's surface than her later work. Her work here preserves the rougher, primal beauty one finds in the earth, that satisfies less from ephemerality than from the vast, immortality lying beyond the brevity of our own lives and daily preoccupations. Thematically, one might realize this as present in the grander, vast powers detailed in The Most Foreign Country. Stars, forests, mountains, and oceans are the subject of her poems here more than the lilacs, lost ladies, and captured birds of her later work. Pizarnik mentions greenness in terms of the world, but not in terms of one's individual placement in it.
Perhaps this is why the poems make numerous mentions to forests but none whatsoever to gardens; what makes this world so unknowing and uncaring is our folly in domesticating its natural splendour, its essential inner peace. Pizarnik's later work takes her poetry to explore this indifference and intensifies the turmoil of the artist's creating of the work until this act reaches its only logical conclusion. There is something to learn here, though it is difficult to extricate from Pizarnik's personal history. Poetry thrusts the poet and their work into the greatest of unknowns. All that remains is to return with the writing intact; and as with Pizarnik's first text, this sometimes must remove the poet herself from the reader's experience.
