Contributor’s Marginalia: Lisa Russ Spaar responding to V. Penelope Pelizzon’s poem “Cliché”

Perhaps it’s cliché for me to note a strong connection between poetry and walking. Certainly, many poets not only take walks but feel walking to be essential to their poetic praxis. One thinks of Walt Whitman, “afoot with [his] vision” or of William Wordsworth trying to keep pace with his sister Dorothy while working out lines of iambic pentameter as they strode across the hills and dales of England’s Lake Country. Emily Dickinson, Frank O’Hara, Alice Oswald, Basho, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons—all peripatetic poets whose habits of walking shape their work. Ammons even goes so far, in an essay “A Poem is a Walk” (originally delivered as a keynote speech in 1967 to the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh), to enumerate the ways in which poems and walks are deeply kindred experiences, citing the particular physiology, unfolding, uniqueness, and style/gait of each.

I love how V. Penelope Pelizzon confronts head-on, with her title, this possibility—that one’s poetic subject, such as a purgative walk beside the sea, might be, by now, a tired one, something once original worn down and made trite from frequent use. Perhaps most astonishing in this poem, however, is that every fresh image and turn defies the poem’s moniker. Sure, the waves come up, the waves slide back. Blah, blah. But the turns, the voltas, that occur couplet by couplet create a motion more helixical than linear. Each fresh haul and retreat of the sea brings some new insight or perception.

Like the waves that crest and ebb at the speaker’s feet, weft to the linear warp of her forward walking, the lines in “Cliché” reach, retreat, and sometimes eddy, mirroring the speaker’s own mental meandering through her “protean / sadnesses” (never more than “a glass or two of wine below my surface”), ennui, regrets, and anxieties both personal and global, including the imperilment of oceans by plastics and other pollution, the “oily slabs of whale skin, or // –no, just an / edge of tire // flensed from a commoner leviathan,” a beach littered with “plastic nurdles [that] gleam // like or pearls or caviar / for the avian gourmand.”

The uniqueness of this poem about a walk along the shore (which is surely kindred to Elizabeth Bishop’s own beach walk poem, “The End of March”) owes in large part to the poem’s sonic magic, its intrepid, playful enmeshment of rhymes and off-rhymes, within and across lines. Here is the opening of “Cliché”:

Its back and forth, ad nauseum,
ought to make the sea a bore. But walks along the shore

cure me. Salt wind’s the best solution for
dissolving my ennui in,

along with these protean
sadnesses that sometimes swim

invisibly
as comb-jelly

a glass or two of wine below my surface.
Some regrets

won’t untangle. Others loosen as I watch the waves
spreading their torn nets

of foam along the sand
to dry. . . .

Consider Bore / along the shore / cure / solution for. Or Ad nauseum / ennui in / protean / sometimes swim. Pelizzon’s rich, oceanic text is full of such sonic surprises and echoes: haul / hull / wheeling above / small / diabolical, for instance, or edge of tire / leviathan / nurdles gleam.” As these constellar acoustical clusters embody the speaker’s precise physical observations—“one seal’s hull / scuttled to bone staves” or “a skate’s egg case, its horned purse nested on pods of bladderwort”—the speaker’s thoughts themselves body forth. “I walk and walk and walk and walk,” the speaker says, as, incantatory, rhythmic, the poem casts its curative spell.

This happens perhaps most stunningly in the poem’s last lines (italics mine):

. . . Hours flow off down the beach like spindrift,

leaving me with an immense
less-solipsistic sense

of ruin, and, as if
it’s a gift, assurance

of ruin’s recurrence.

The italicized words themselves create a microcosmic mantra, a distillation of the lessons and gift of recurrence in the poem at large, suggesting that repetition can be consoling, especially if one is paying attention and even if what recurs is a reminder that the earth and its denizens are always being brought forth and taken away.

Here it might be worth noting that the word “cliché,” which we now associate with words, phrases, and topics that have become predictable or patent from repetition, is actually an onomatopoeic French word from printmaking, referring to the soft clicking sound made in the printing process when a print is pulled, pressed into, or released from its matrix. And it’s perhaps worth mentioning, too, that printmaking, like walking, or writing, is a serial or sequential activity, and anyone who has worked in these media knows that the processes involved are more than merely replicative; no two prints, no two walks, no two poems—despite being pulled from the same set or type or the same zinc or copper plate, or traveling an identical well-worn route or poetic terrain—are ever exactly alike. Each is as distinctive, as necessarily flawed and original as its maker.