Half Starts and Trail Offs

Criss-crossing chutes of white space

Apr 27

MeredithPoetry, Reading andrea hollen, guest blogger, isabel fraire, national poetry month, the importance of the absence of words, white space 1 Comment

I love curating these guest poetry posts–it’s thrilling to get a glimpse of the ways in which people I know interact with poetry, because it forces me to step back and look at poetry in new ways. With that in mind, I’m excited to introduce today’s guest, Andrea Hollen, whose life as an engineer grants her a unique perspective on Isabel Fraire’s use of white space.  Andrea is the Director of Analytics & Research for Case Commons, a technology startup incubated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.  She served for ten years as a Signal officer in the United States Army, and will always consider leading soldiers a singular privilege.  She enjoys urban planning, Civil War history and nature kayaking, and loves living in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Incapable of reading a novel, she is grateful for poetry, short stories and essays about equations.

I discovered Isabel Fraire years ago when I was searching for the perfect love poem. I found it: Fraire’s “Mi amor descubre objetos” – “My love reveals objects.” I was captivated by her imagery. I set out to learn more about her life and work.

“Pendulum” is from Fraire’s second book of poetry, Poems in the Lap of Death, beautifully translated by Thomas Hoeksema. She wrote the collection, which won Mexico’s prestigious Villarrutia Prize in 1978, with the support of a Guggenheim grant.

I’m an engineer by trade and at heart. I feel at home with equations, not so much literary criticism, so I’ve been struggling to convey why I love this poem. I settled on explaining how it speaks to me in my day-to-day pursuits.

Click on the poem to see it larger.

What draws me to “Pendulum,” and Fraire’s poetry in general, are the intense visual and sonic affects of how she uses white space. Hoeksema sums it up nicely: “All of Fraire’s poems are spread orthographically like bones – intricately patterned verbal ligatures.” I would compare her use of white space to how gifted urban planners use space – plazas, view corridors and solar access, for example – to make vibrant public places. In my experience as a planning commissioner, inspiring and sustainable site design is less about what gets built and more about what gets left out. I submit that poetry is much the same. In The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach captures how the criss-crossing chutes of white space in “Pendulum” remind me of the built environment:

Every poem is based at least implicitly on a choice to do something rather than something else, and, as a result, every poem takes power from its exclusions as well as its inclusions. [p. 120]

“Pendulum” also moves me in the way it explores the oscillation between thought and action. When do we have a duty to act? What holds us back? What should hold us back? What shouldn’t? These questions are central to my work in Analytics. As a data scientist, I help public human services systems visualize and explore their data so that they can more deeply understand what services work best for the families and communities they support. Frontline human services caseworkers make life shaping and often wrenching decisions every day. What tools do they, as expert problem solvers and storytellers, need to share their insights in ways that contribute to a larger statistical narrative and ultimately shape public policy? How can we make day-to-day practice more reflective, even meditative? How can we ground social policy research in “the necessary action” that unfolds minute by minute as caseworkers do what they must to strengthen vulnerable families? As I read “Pendulum” I have an affirming conversation with Isabel Fraire about how my colleagues and I might begin to answer these questions.

Thank you for this opportunity to share the meaning I find in “Pendulum,” and my fascination with what Isabel Fraire does with language.

Editor’s Note: “Pendulum” is and remains the intellectual property of Isabel Fraire. We include a scan of it here for instructional purposes and to illustrate Andrea’s discussion of the white space, which is difficult to convey otherwise.