Diaspora Sonnet as a Photograph of Me in 1977
I see a child dancing in the doorway. He is a celestial repetition—a comet on an oblong path. I watch him segment the light with outstretched hands. The hallway shadows zigzagging in his spastic delight. He is lost beyond the stasis of unsent mail, arching his ribs outward, bursting against the stratosphere of the housing complex, bright and balletic as one whose body has been lifted by guy wire above the darkened theater. And far beyond you the charts that mark our own departures, forgotten at least for now as we reckon with your joy. Dear child, may you rise, wayward, into the sky. May you stay unified by the light, spellbound. from The Diaspora Sonnets (Liveright, 2023)
The first poem I remember reading by Oliver de la Paz is titled “Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay.” To date, I can remember no poem that better illustrates the vast, painful, and wildly difficult-to-bear tension that exists between the bureaucracy of standardization and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, always entirely-its-own experience of conscious life on this earth.
In that poem, de la Paz writes:
4. DOES YOUR CHILD SPEAK FREQUENT GIBBERISH OR JARGON? To my ears it is a language. Every sound a system: the sound for dog or boy. The moan in his throat for water — that of a man with thirst. The dilapidated ladder that makes a sentence a sentence. This plosive is a verb. This liquid a want. We make symbols of his noise.
I can think of few sentences more touching, tender, or beautiful than, simply: To my ears it is a language. What gorgeous generosity, what lovely grace.
And I think it is that gorgeous generosity that drew me to today’s poem, as well — the way de la Paz chooses to use language to re-mystify life, rather than confine it to generalized definition. Look again at today’s poem. Look at some of these phrases, these words:
He is a celestial repetition
I watch him segment the light with outstretched hands
bright and balletic
one whose body has been lifted by guy wire above the darkened theater
What a word: balletic! An absolute joy to encounter it in the world. Balletic. Balletic!
In her book The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick describes the process of writing as “discovering the mysterious in the familiar.” I think, too, of how I recently read Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, where she writes about the danger of trying “to explain away mysteries and complexities” rather than “to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.” I think that poetry is a place where that work of revelation and exploration and discovery and re-discovery — that work of mystifying and wondering and imagining — is made, again and again, by and through language.
The stakes of that work are high, aren’t they? In Zero at the Bone, Christian Wiman writes:
Now I see that loneliness is general. Poetry merely gives form to this fact and makes it available—and therefore bearable.
I think that the world that both Gornick and Robinson write about — the world that situates itself against mystery, rather than steeping itself in it — is a world where the primary question we have to reckon with is how to deal with the utter loneliness that is brought upon by the fact of being aware of oneself and others in the midst of such a world. Such awareness is present in de la Paz’s poetry, in how it writes against the limitation and loneliness brought upon by the demystifying, overly certain forces of bureaucracy. When poetry writes into mystery and into uncertainty, when it plays, when it acknowledges awe, when it loves and reckons and witnesses — it gives language to loneliness. It says — through all of this various work — if you are conscious, if you are even half alive, if you are looking at all of this and wondering “who else notices what I notice,” or “is anyone else caring about this at all,” or “is there someone out there who obsesses the way I do,” or “did anyone else see that,” or “does anyone else share my rage,” or does anyone else share my love,” then you are not alone.
Oliver de la Paz’s poetry certainly does that work of poetry. In “Autism Screening Questionnaire: Social Interaction Difficulties,” a kind of companion-poem to the poem I mentioned earlier, de la Paz writes:
14. Does he use language inappropriately? (Wrong words or phrases). The world is a network of minds. Think of the tongue and the fibers that make its muscles. The branching capillary network enmeshed. Alive and cooled with a song that slides away. Tongue jammed in its stirrup thinking of itself and the blood red amanitas pushed out of the earth.
I feel, though it is not readily apparent in the language, de la Paz’s rage, perhaps, at the unfairness of such a question. Maybe I shouldn’t assume someone else’s rage. So I will say: I feel my own rage at such a question — Does he use language inappropriately? How limiting such a question is, the opposite of expansive. It feels so reductive, to declare an appropriate way to utilize language, and then to almost-weaponize such a declaration in order to assess someone’s — a child’s — way of being and experiencing the world.
And so then, what do I notice in response to such a question? I notice the way de la Paz responds to such bureaucratic limitation with poetry. I notice the way such poetry is more generous — the world is a network of minds — than reductive, how it seeks to make into mystery what is being told to exist in a box. And isn’t that, then, one kind of politics for living a life? To mystify rather than reduce? We so often think of definition and diagnosis and standardization as things that make our lives easier. We think of such things as certain in a world of uncertainty. And yes — to know something can help, can really help. It is powerful, so often, to give what you have struggled with a name. And yet, the humility of saying I don’t know, or the playfulness of responding in poetry to a question that asks for certainty — such actions feel more beautiful (and human) than the actions and questions that they so wonderfully resist.
That playful resistance to definition is at the heart of so much of de la Paz’s work. And I think it’s worth paying attention to. It models something empowering and grace-filled about how to move through the world, or respond to difficulty, or think critically. Or all of that and more.
One example of this: the book today’s poem is from — The Diaspora Sonnets — is a collection of sonnets that explores migration, displacement, assimilation, relocation, and all of the various moments of perseverance, difficulty, and love that arose out of and in response to such things. Reading it, I was interested in how de la Paz played with the formal concept of a sonnet — that fourteen-lined, rhythmic, sometimes-rhyming thing that has spanned centuries, this form that is written into and made and re-made.
Today’s poem, then, is a sonnet. And I found myself wondering how. Obviously there are fourteen lines. But there’s no real rhyme. And there are these couplets that feel out of place for the old form. And almost every line is segmented by caesura. And then, on fifth or sixth or tenth or twelfth or twentieth read, I noticed it:
And far beyond you the charts that mark our own departures, forgotten at least for now as we reckon with your joy.
Here, at the end of the tenth line, de la Paz switches the dominant pronoun of the poem — from he to you. No longer is the child in the photograph a more distant third person. No, the child becomes directly addressed. The speaker is looking at this photo, talking directly to this child — who, as the title suggests, is himself. In this moment, de la Paz is playing, I think, with the volta of a sonnet — the turn, that place where the poem leans into mystery or contradiction or something, certainly, more expansive than certainty.
And perhaps it is true, then, that the poem itself is riddled with voltas — with these moments of turning toward and away from something else. The child in the photograph is “dancing,” “zigzagging,” “arching,” and “bursting.” All of these actions imply a kind of motion, whether a turning or a bending or a kind of skyrocketing joy or music. These actions, then, serve as voltas against the “stasis” that serves as the backdrop of the poem’s setting. They turn away from, or among, or through the limiting aspects of the world — the “unsent mail,” the “housing complex.” Yes, in the poem’s opening lines, we have a child as volta, a child who turns and turns and turns, reminding us of possibility, of joy, and certainly of light.
How beautiful is this? How powerful, too? That — in a world that often turns children into adults and turns our adulthood into a way of coping, so often silently, with the loneliness brought upon by trying to figure out what to do with one’s awareness of the world — that, in such a world, de la Paz turns toward a child and lets such a child be a reminder of light. Which is to say: everything. Which is to say: so much that is lost. Which is to say: I want it to be done, all this losing of light. Which is to say: I am trying to turn this living into light.
I’m struck, in light of this, by the poem’s final line:
May you stay unified by the light, spellbound.
It is light, isn’t it, that is revealed by turning? The earth turns as it turns around the sun. The light above you now — did a switch turn it on? The lightness in you, the one where you are made lighter by desire — who turned that on for you? And the thousand ornaments of daily life — the little bits of colored glass, the speckled glint of a little kid’s shoe, the infinite depths of different reds in a just-poured glass of wine — do you notice them turning into and out of light as the light turns through them?
I think that it is this turning that unifies us as people — this turning through and with and among light. We so often think of unification as this act of condensing, this movement inward. We get smaller as we unify. Tighter. But what if it is the other way around? That, to be unified, we must allow ourselves to move outward? To twirl? To turn? To be spellbound by all the ways in which we make light, reveal light, hide light, shape light, and are shaped by the light we make and the light that reveals what we have made? What I mean is: what if it is mystery that unifies us, rather than certainty? What if it is all this ceaseless, unending wondering? What if it is awe? Remember that day, not long ago? Thousands of faces, turned upward, looking at what the light was doing in the sky? What was that if not unity? And weren’t we turning — all of us, on this great wide world — while it was all happening?
Some notes:
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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Autism Screening Questionnaire: Social Interaction Difficulties reminds me a lot of Ae Hee Lee's Conversation with Immigration Officer! They are both poems that use a generous combination of poetry and mystery to respond to bureaucratic language and reductive questions.
"... What I mean is: what if it is mystery that unifies us, rather than certainty?..."
Your post today is deeply moving for many reasons.
It's a day of coincidences. While walking by Bellingham Bay/ the Salish Sea some years ago, I would often see an older couple, about my age, taking their beloved grandchild out in a stroller. After seeing each other now and then, we began recognizing each other as regular walkers by the bay and would say hello and then eventually to stop and talk. They were the parents of Oliver de la Paz who was then teaching in the English Department at Western Washington University. There were changes in my life at that time and, as a result, I had to stop walking at that time of day and didn't see them again.
It is only since reading your Substack and a few others that I have a renewed engagement with poetry. I had not read anything by Oliver de la Paz before today.
Today is my grandnephew's 10th birthday. He is a few years older than Oliver de la Paz was in the photo that inspired the sonnet. To Pablo I say:
Dear child, may you rise, wayward, into the sky.
May you stay unified by the light, spellbound.