David Koehn: On Arthur Sze’s Syzygy

The following essay is an extension of a review of Arthur Sze’s book Quipu, originally published in American Letters and Commentary.

“Even without understanding intricate details of a theory, the fact that it has supersymmetry built in allows us to place significant constraints on the properties it can have. Using a linguistic analogy, imagine that we are told that a sequence of letters has been written on a slip of paper, that the sequence has exactly three occurrences, say, of the letter “y,” and that the paper has been hidden within a sealed envelope. If we are given no further information, then there is no way that we can guess the sequence—for all we know it might be a random assortment of letters with three y’s like mvcfojziyxidqfqzyycdi or any one of the infinitely many other possibilities. But imagine that we are subsequently given two further clues: The hidden sequence of letters spells out an English word and it has the minimum number of letters consistent with the first clue of having three y’s. From the infinite number of letter sequences at the outset, these clues reduce the possibilities to one word—to the shortest English word containing three y’s: syzygy.”

syz•y•gy (sĭz′ə-jē)
n. pl. syz•y•gies
1.      Astronomy.
      a.      Either of two points in the orbit of a celestial body where the body is in opposition to or in conjunction with the sun.
      b.      Either of two points in the orbit of the moon when the moon lies in a straight line with the sun and Earth.
      c.      The configuration of the sun, the moon, and Earth lying in a straight line.
2.      The combining of two feet into a single metrical unit in classical prosody.

“Syzygy” by Arthur Sze is quintessential Arthur Sze. The word has a meaning in astronomy, a discipline explored deeply in Arthur Sze’s work. The word also has a meaning in classical prosody. Most do not associate Arthur Sze with classical prosody, but from the first line of this poem we are not only set in the domestic, but also something almost iambic. I’ll also toss in that the word syzygy shares a sonic quality with Arthur Sze’s last name…in the same way that edge is turned into edgy, we get syzygy from Sze. Before you dismiss such trickery, let’s take a close look at what might be at work in the poem.

The scan of the first line of the poem, “I notice headlights out the living room window,” might be o- / o- / o- / o- / o- / -o or perhaps o- / oo- / oo- / o- / -o. But we are already clued in by the title that, perhaps, a blurred foot is involved here somewhere. A quick scan ahead to the second line, “then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.” And then the clearly tetrameter third line gives away how to scan the initial line and how to scan what follows.

The first line reads, and scans, o-/ oo- / oo- / oo-(o). The trickiness is that final foot with the feminine ending.

The second line, “then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by,” at first seems to scan regularly but the “in a pickup” is elided into a single foot. So the scan without typographic modifications to my scan symbols would be something like: o- / o- / oo-o / oo–.

The third line is a long time to wait for establishing the fundamental underlying prosody of a poem, but with Arthur Sze, rarely is anything standard or simple. The third line reads, “I am shocked to learn that doctors collected” and it sounds as if it will scan regularly; and this time, it does: oo- / o- / o- / oo-(o). That is a pretty standard tetrameter line with a feminine ending. Here I gain some comfort that my insight into his use of syzygy is accurate.

But the fourth and fifth lines put to the test my read of the prosody. The fourth and fifth lines read: “the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract/ gonadotropins. And is that what one draws.” Here I am pressed to elide many syllables to get back to a regular tetrameter. My ear hears something like, oo- / ooooo- / ooo- / oo- // ooo- / o- / o- / o-. You can see the intention, and the joke. Since the English language and its prosody was never meant to accommodate spoken American colloquial nor the hypertensive Latinate constructions of scientific jargon, one can easily justify moderating syllabic count against word use to satisfy an American prosody.

Rather than continue to unravel the poem for you, I’ll leave the scan of the poem off here and let you resolve the rest of the poem into its tetrameter and its syzygy. I will add, be assured—it does resolve neatly.

I like the word “resolve” when used in reading Arthur’s poems. In the tension between a scientific theory and its experimental validation, there is an onus on the scientist to resolve one with the other. In mathematics, the connection between two disparate theories can be resolved by looking for the deeper connections between them—not what disproves one or the other but what reveals them to be as parts of a larger truth.

Arthur’s poems are like this. They seem to wrestle with disconsolate images and motifs, and yet in their underlying nature there is an intuitive mind resolving their differences into harmonies.

Just as in physics, the harmonies are not discovered logically but rather intuitively. The beauty of their harmonies is not understood but intellectually, but rather is deeply felt. As in physics, the greatest minds of our age express their joy at uncovering the fundamental parts of the universe as “aesthetic,” as “deeply felt,” and as “inspired.”

I feel the same way about reading Arthur Sze’s “Syzygy.” Even after I have wrestled away the prosody I feel the poem’s images, its surfaces, elide, mis-align, and then re-align into a harmony. In the quote from The Elegant Universe, the reduction of possibilities through disclosure of new information as in the example of cosmological probability, offers an approach to Arthur Sze’s poem “Syzygy.” This passage from The Elegant Universe is about the power of symmetry, the “ability to nail down properties in an indirect manner—something that is often far easier than a more direct approach.”

For example, the poem begins in the “window” of a home. Lights from a passing pickup truck enter through the window…so we know of the pickup truck from the sound of its engine, from its lights, and we even get sense of the person driving it from the “bass” sound of the music. But we don’t observe the truck directly. We don’t see it. Yet neither the reader nor the poet doubt that it is there.

Like the lights through the window, appearing as if randomly out of nowhere, the nuns and their gonadotropins make an appearance in the poem. Gonadotropins stimulate growth of the gonads and the secretion of sex hormones. Their appearance seems broadcast, and the speaker’s shock seems pretty ironic. I’d gather that this information is the result of a TV program in the living room. There is nothing in this poem preventing me from accounting for the tone and the detail in this way. The poem’s lack of fixed axles forces the reader to provide the connections that keep the poem grounded and give it a stability.

From the nuns, the poem moves to its central question, which is both humorous and direct. The choice of the word “infinitesimal” suggests even though we are talking about nuns’ pee, we are also talking about the connection between the desire for sex and the exploration of the universe. The universe in the Whitmanesque romantic tradition is a mystical place of sex and beauty. In the world of Arthur Sze’s “gonadotropins,” it appears the pursuit of deep science is also the pursuit of the essence of sexual pleasure. In jest? In truth? Both?

The next move of the poem is out of the present, out of the living room, away from our nuns on TV to memory:

Here memory and perception merge A thing observed directly is difficult, in a certain way of thinking, to “discern.” But things observed in motion, from an adjacent perspective, are easier to detect. My use of adjacency here picks up on ideas of peripherality and emergence—even anthropological ideas of what is in the frame of the camera as less noticeable than objects observed that move into the frame. When the frame of a camera moves—the objects in frame feed through fluidly. When the camera frame is still and something flickers into and then, possibly, out frame—while less observable that intrusion is more noticeable. This trope is an extension of our never-observed pick-up truck, and the overdirectly-observed nuns.

This section considers how attention is caught. Why do things catch our attention? If we are attending to the thing we are looking at, then why would another thing catch our attention and pull our attending facilities towards it? The answer is that as light catches the blue mold or the falling apple, the changing light at the periphery attracts the eye. The suggestion is that the eye explores nature because it catches our attention through its peripheral changes more so than the changes we watch over directly.

A kind of consciousness emerges and harmonizes the disparate images of the pick-up and nuns from the present and the memory of the splinter and its implications about awareness:

In this section, a partner to the speaker is added to the composition of the poem. In this reverie there is a direct observation through the two headlights of the binoculars. This observation of the moon has the full attention of the speaker and what appears to be a lover. An attention, despite the evidence of the poem so far, rewarded with a change, an eclipse. Have we been tricked again? The argument has been building towards that quality of the indirectly observed over the directly observed. So what is going on?

Well, an eclipse, while dramatic, is actually a harmonic alignment, a syzygy. The observers do not see the underlying astronomy that puts the “ferrous red” moon in play. While the dazzle of the crimson has their attention, the planets of the cosmos, unbeknownst to our lovers, have aligned around them. In addition, while they weren’t looking, what they weren’t looking at or thinking about: their bodies have aligned. Indirectly, their feelings, their sensory experience have come into tune with the image of what they are observing. This is to say, the observation of the eclipse enacts a physics on the bodies of the observers. That while the observers admire the beauty of what they watch, the cosmos, the universe quietly harmonizes the lovers to itself. The observer takes on the essential and invisible qualities of the observed.

The poem closes in a twist of sensuality and multi-dimensionality:

The lovers glow like the moon. The speaker’s fingers are sensitized to his lover’s presence by the observation of the moon. The consciousness of the speaker and the lover are melded together as if they are not separate consciousnesses of the same moment, but one consciousness that recognizes the other in itself. The “we” asserts the synergy. The word “syzygy” takes on the phenomenological quality of the alignment of the cosmos with the lovers.

The “we” here implies an “our.” What I mean is that the duality of syzygy slips back over the poem like a membrane unveiling the poem as not only an expression of harmony between lovers but a suggestion about poetry. Is this poem not a turn on Dylan Thomas’ “In My Sullen Art or Craft”? Thomas was not keen on subtlety. Not the way Sze is. In Sze’s subtle and unique hands this age-old proposition takes on a quieter and deeply resonant quality.

The epiphany on the surface of the poem delights. The veiled resonances that emerge and vibrate along the seams of meaning harmonize with the surface of the poem so elegantly one becomes like the lovers. The reader’s attention is caught by the beauty of the observed, but the reader is causally linked and made symmetric to all of the unnoticed and unobserved physics of the poem.

---

David Koehn received his MFA from the University of Florida, is a Vice President of Oracle Learn Cloud at the Oracle Corporation, is an Angel investor as part of the Sand Hill Angels, an Account Director at the pro bono volunteer organization Taproot, is an essayist for OmniVerse, and a father of five.

David has published poetry in 60 or so journals including Kenyon Review, Volt, New England Review, Phoebe, New York Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, Cutbank, McSweeney’s, 32 Poems, Third Coast, Bitter Oleander, Del Sol Review, Painted Bride, Rhino, Carolina Quarterly, and many others.

David’s chapbook, Coil, won the University of Alaska’s Permafrost Midnight Sun chapbook contest. David’s prose appears in Jacket, New Hampshire Review, New York Quarterly, and elsewhere. David translates Latin poetry and was awarded a Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language Grant to lead a Catullus Translation Workshop/Reading at Hendrix University.

For addtional info: davidkoehn.com