Quantum Verse, or: Un/Read City
Alice Wickenden (@alicewickenden) is a PhD student, writer and poet. Her first book, To Fall Fable, is out now with Variant Literature; a poetic memoir on Scouting, Thriftwood, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in 2022.
Here are some facts.
In the early 20th century, the discipline of physics was baffled by light. Newton knew that it behaves as a particle. But Huygens knew that it behaves as a wave. Nobody could decide who was right.
They both were.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the location and momentum of a particle; once we know one, we have lost the ability to know the other.
Electrons under observation behave differently to how they otherwise would. Human interaction is not unobtrusive. We are never neutral.
Here are some more facts:
Spenser’s Prothalamion was published in 1596.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in 1922.
Neither of the above dates, or anything which might be inferred from them, matter.
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August 2011. I first read Isabel Allende’s The House of The Spirits.
I loved it so much, I became obsessed with all the ways it might have slipped through my grasp. If I hadn’t seen it recommended; if I hadn’t ordered it from the library; if the library didn’t have it in; if Allende had never written it. Each hypothesis plausible — not only plausible, the reality of undecisions made every day — and yet, irrelevant, because not only had I read it, I would never be able to unread it.
At that moment of panic, though, I first became aware of a ghost-me, quantum-me, a self I had (in the act of opening the book) lost the ability to actualise: a me who would go about her life and maybe come across Allende’s book in some other situation, and how different it would be without the hard rocks of Charmouth as a blanket, the sea-salt air on the page. Two selves had div/emerged.
September 2013. I read The Waste Land. I fill the margins with notes and talk about the poem incessantly with the girl I am in love with. I am scared of Eliot’s appendices. If you started with Sweet Thames, I would finish it automatically with I speak not loud nor long.
August 2015. I read the Prothalamion for the first time and realise I am crying. I don’t know why: Spenser is not a poet I thought I had read, I am swamped with memories that do not belong to this text. They are memories of walking the streets of my home town composing verse that now seems like a poor pastiche of modernism:
To be blinded – incandescence!
The powerful fluorescence
(manufactured human presence)
of a lamp.
They are sixth-form memories of Yeats and Jeanette Winterson, the boiling-pot of arbitrary curricula. The classroom in all its stifling heat. Memories of the bitter heartbreak I expect from Prufrock.
To find them here feels like a betrayal. I did not sit in the coffee shop talking about this poem with her. It should be safe. But there it is: Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.
Taken aback, I write in my diary
‘literary theory falls down, for me, because yes — you can talk about allusion working both ways, inevitably. Just because X was written before Y doesn't mean it will be read in that order. I read Narnia before the Bible. So you can say it’s just as valid to study Spenser in light of Eliot than vice versa, which I agree it is, but either way what you cannot factor in is the individual reaction to that allusion.’
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I am 15 years old and on the phone to a friend. He is 22. I think he is amazing, a lot smarter than I am, and I am flattered by his attention. He’s talking about a bench.
(‘It’s odd that you choose a bench’, says my friend Eve when I describe this essay to her, ‘they’re like a locus of heartbreak to me’).
This bench isn’t real. Or it is. It is in a town. Or it’s not. And it represents all of human emotion.
To A, who is new here, it means nothing.
To B, it is rose-tinted, the site of their first kiss, the most beautiful piece of metal in the world.
C was recently broken up with on the bench, and the very sight of it makes them want to throw up.
There are three benches. Or there is one.
The world bends around me, suddenly, palimpsests of human experience, ways of looking I’d never even dreamed about.
Years later, I would never dream of talking to someone 7 years younger the way he did to me. But I am still fascinated by the bench.
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Everything changes depending on who’s looking at it. Down to its core, it changes.
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The Waves is almost a quantum masterpiece — Woolf was reading Jeans on ‘time bending backwards’ as she wrote it — and so a character bravely suggests that ‘nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it’. But time necessarily forces the book on. It tells a story. The story can only be what it is. You start with children, their lives open. You end with adults, their loves closed.
The bittersweetness of potential aches throughout the novel, but the Novel denies potential. That’s its whole raison d’être.
(Paul Auster’s novel 4321 explores 4 different possible timelines for one boy. Briefly, the quantum space verges on opening up. But the narrative demands its close. One by one, the alter-protagonists drop off and the true timeline is revealed.)
Poetry, however…
Poetry exists through potential. Enjambment. Double meanings. A sonnet throbs with the possibility of a volta, that sting at the end which laughs, flips the entire thing on its head and grins. Even when no volta comes, the sonnet knows that one could. It contains all states.
Delay is crucial in verse. Layers of potential meanings stacking up. The uncertainty. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…
A poem means no/every thing, until it does.
Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash