levelheaded: from Dear Mark

The author of this excerpt has informed us that the larger project, “Dear Mark,” is a collection of letters addressed to Mark Rothko in response to individual paintings. Immediately, we learn that the poem uses ekphrasis, and we see that Rock uses it to talk about big stuff.

The poem is very concerned with blackness and darkness. It begins with a reference to a painting of Kazimir Malevich’s. A pattern of black/dark/black runs through the first seven stanzas: “[B]lack” is in the first line of stanza one. We would intuitively consider “sleep” dark. Black is embedded in “blackflies.” “[S]hadows” are dark places. “A thick layer / of soot” is black. When something rests “over our eye- / lids & we stand / inside a giant,” it must be dark. And “briquettes” are black. But after this, the pattern breaks down. Through the remainder of the poem, blackness and darkness do not so obviously thread.

The pattern makes us question the difference between blackness and darkness. Our gut instinct is to think of blackness as a color: more artificial, an observation people have placed along the spectrum. Darkness, on the other hand, feels more primal, like it would and will exist outside of human being. Blackness is exclusive and controlled. Darkness is inclusive, is space, is extra-spatial.

Stanzas eight through sixteen open up to include “light” and a “lighthouse.” The stress of the conceptual pattern gives way to the stress of breaking it, and confusion is palpable. A tornado begins inside “your house,” and your “golem is here.” Time is confused by a “[w]e” who “are time- / travelers,” and “our bodies are full / of wormholes.”

So now we’re thinking, together with this poem, of the artificial (blackness) versus what’s natural and gigantic (darkness). We’re considering that art (artificial, artifice) refers to a broad range of human activity. We’re remembering that, in ancient times, ekphrasis was used to indicate a description of any thing, person, or experience—not strictly a description of a piece of art, which is the more familiar definition today.

There’s something here, in the pattern and in the poem’s visual art backdrop, about the power of darkness to obfuscate, and about the clarity of blackness, in naming things black, in the human capacity to describe. About the ability of description to illuminate, to take on a life of its own.

– The Editors