SISTEMA DE MONITOREO DE LAS ESCUELAS

the instruction ‘pause’ is isolated on the line below. It feels as if the experience is frozen and silence imposed again. The pause draws our attention away

briefly from the words of the poem into the silence that surrounds it.

The title of this poem encourages us to read it as one taking place on the edges of experience by identifying the lines of the poem with a reader writing marginalia. Helen Jackson in her survey of marginalia explains how it became a common practice with readers from the Middle Ages onwards.116

However, the word itself, derived from the Latin ‘marginale’ meaning ‘in the margins’, was brought into common use by Coleridge who published his ‘marginalia’ on Sir Thomas Browne in Blackwood’s magazine in November 1819.117 _{Marginalia are now recognised as the notes, embellishments, scribbles}

and comments that a reader adds to the margins. The act of adding these marginalia reveals something of the reader’s own thoughts and character, or draws attention to something in or outside of the text. When other readers come to that text, its marginalia draw them from the text in a way that also stands to illuminates it. Oswald’s poem operates in a similar way, taking us to the edges of the evening and oscillating between manifestations of heightened awareness, the everyday and uncertainty. After the pause, the poem takes us

116 _{Helen Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press,}

2010).

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further away from the intense manifestation of the blackbird back to the commonplace activities of the human world: ‘the man at the wheel signs his

speed on the ringroad’.118 _{This surprising line, seemingly unrelated to the}

speaker’s previous experience of the non-human world, shifts to another sphere of experience. No longer do we feel as if we are with the speaker in

what Woolf might describe as the ‘exceptional moment’ of the setting sun.119

The line is a flash of a more urban place, and like the mouthing blackbird, it is

difficult to reach a full understanding of its meaning. What does it mean when the driver ‘signs’ his speed? Is it a reference to the reading on his speedometer or a sign by the side of the ring road, triggered by his driving, displaying his speed? In an undated journal entry Stanley Kunitz writes:

Poetry as a meta medium—

metabolic, metaphoric, metamorphic— articulating shifts of being, changes

and transfers of energy.120

In this last two lines there is a sense of poetry as a movement ‘elsewhere’, a movement that we have seen is also an important element of Oswald’s epiphanic mode. Perhaps this way of thinking about poetry and epiphany can account for the way Oswald’s speaker collects together the marginalia of the oncoming evening, shifting between moments of being and non-being in the

118 _{Oswald, ‘Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening’, p.27.} 119 _{Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, p.71.}

120 _{Stanley Kunitz in The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden by Stanley}

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human and non-human worlds: the sound of the trees, bath time, a bike, the setting sun, a moth, a blackbird, a fluorescent cloud, a driver on the ring road. In this poem, the reader is asked to make a succession of associations rather

than to arrive at a defining moment, instead experiencing, in Kunitz’s words,

‘shifts of being’,121 _{and the transformation of the speaker.}

Like other poems in Woods etc., Oswald’s epiphanic mode in ‘Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening’ appears to be ‘a shorthand record of

the [speaker’s] mind trying to work out its position in the world’.122 _{At the}

direction ‘pause’ on line 15, both speaker and reader perceive this process. This poem moves self-consciously through a wide range of realms of experience: global, domestic, quotidian, natural, urban, temporal, suburban and astronomical, in a way that is again suggestive of Nichols’ definition of epiphanies as ‘mind-brains in the act of becoming aware of their own

activity’.123 _{The speaker is constantly re-positioned. However, after the ring}

road we are returned to within reach of the speaker’s outstretched arms and the heightened moment we thought had passed:

right here in my reach, time is as thick as stone and as thin as a flying strand

it’s night and somebody’s pushing his mower home

121 _Ibid.

122 _{Alice Oswald in Deryn Rees-Jones, ‘Face to Face: Alice Oswald’, p.25.}

123 _{Nichols, ‘Cognitive and Pragmatic Linguistic Moments: Literary Epiphany in Thomas}

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to the moon124

The final lines turn away from the concrete marginalia of the bike, the fields, the spider, the moth, the blackbird, the man driving on the ring road, towards the abstract concept of time. The speaker imagines, paradoxically, that time is both in and out of her reach: being as ‘thick as stone’ it is impenetrable, and being as ‘thin as a flying strand’ it is elusive. The speaker balances between the two similes, as she does between the ‘here/not here’ of the opening, but can achieve neither in yet another moment of displacement. There is no teleological insight or revelation. Instead a further interruption returns the speaker to the everyday: someone ‘pushing his mower home’. But the poem remains here only briefly. The next stanza break propels us to the moon. Isolated on its own line and indented, uniquely for this poem, ‘to the moon’ is dislocated from the main body of the poem, hinting like a stage direction that might be read as an imperative. In effect, the poem directs us towards the unreachable.

‘Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening’ encapsulates key elements of Oswald’s epiphanic mode found throughout the collection. The poems discussed resist teleological epiphanies directed by the poet, instead inviting the participation of the reader and withholding the significance of the manifestations to the speaker; no indication is given of their enduring effects.

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Crucially, these are epiphanies of consciousness: a ‘tear in the veil’ of the familiar, that begin with an antecedent state of unsettling liminality and anxiety that leads to manifestations of the often-unnoticed commonplace non- human world. Engagement with the non-human world is commonly associated with the epiphanies of poets such as Wordsworth and Hopkins, and yet for Oswald, writing in the twenty-first century, these types of encounters are equally significant. But is this an important source of epiphanic experience for other contemporary poets? As we have seen in the introduction, Wheatley suggests that both Oswald and Jamie are driven by their desire to ‘see the gap between the human and the non-human as a zone of artistic

possibility’125 _{but how does this appear on the page? Thus, in the next chapter}

Jamie’s collection, The Overhaul, is analysed for the versions of epiphany that it presents in relation to the non-human world. Like Oswald, Jamie demonstrates how writing with epiphany in contemporary poetry can move beyond traditional paradigms; Sher’s call for a ‘more branching voice’ is evident in both poets.

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Chapter 3: Kathleen Jamie