Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”

“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”

Valerie Witte’s skin-deep collection from Airlie Press is a tonic for those allergic to avant-garde poetics. Its first section, “In the Coils,” begins with ambiguous simplicity:

[

The

invention

of skin

a preliminary

sorting when

what lies

dormant

recalling the loss

between

opening was

a simple

mouth

]

The poem’s rapid visual descent sets the pace for a relatively swift journey through issues of skin, its marring, dissolution, regeneration. Yet we have questions. How can skin be invented? Who invented it? Why is it being sorted? What does a mouth have to do with it? Poetry being poetry, all questions will be answered, but not necessarily in the order they occurred, or in the way we want or expect. To proceed, we must lean toward the poem, trust its good intentions.

Readers who encounter linguistically adventurous verse sometimes suspect that they are being had or simply that the investment in “cracking the code” of associative chains of phrases is not worth the effort. Is what is being offered obfuscation or tantalizing mystery? Even seasoned savorers of more conventional poems may accuse a bolder author of being gratuitously abstruse, of reveling in nonsense or liminal sense, and feel that a betrayal of sorts has taken place. They forget that Percy Bysshe Shelley, in “A Defence of Poetry,” enjoins poets to “awaken and enlarge the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”