‘On Borders, White Space, and Saying the Unsayable’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
It’s relatively common to rhapsodize the literal-yet-ephemeral qualities of poetry, such as white space, line breaks, and such. I mean “common” in the sense that poetic writing about the act of poetry is its own genre, really—a rich and circular genre.
Sasha Pimentel’s addition to the genre—her essay ‘On Borders, White Space, and Saying the Unsayable’ on LitHub—is resonant, timely, and poetry unto itself.
So as a public, we understand more than ever how crucial the sharpness of words and what they exact. So poets, whose medium is half in language, half in silence, must more urgently than before understand how an utterance plunges into and against that which is unspeakable—it hurts so much to say (in fact it is impossible ever to fully say)—but it must be spoken.
When we speak, we ascend into the terrible partitions of speech.
Overall a meditation on borders, immigration, identity and violence, the essay accomplishes something difficult: treating poetry as incredibly serious and important without bringing the genre to state of collapsing self-regard.
If whitespace is “powerlessness,” the poem’s virtue is in its lament against such powerlessness. The line, rippling into whitespace, says: this is unbearable, what is happening is unbearable and I cannot change it—and in so saying, knows: all I can say is that it is unbearable.
And against that powerlessness of what is unsayable, is the poem’s small power to record, yawp, and grieve.
I want to stay with this essay, but it’s time to break from the page, time for meetings and appointments and emails. But the break isn’t clean; the border between the text as experience and the text as something that now lives in my memory is inexact, as it should be.