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As imagination slips into Hollander's poetry, disguised as fancy, so, in
a strange inversion of the usual practice, other persons speak through
Hollander's poetry, disguised as himself. The ability to acknowledge the
living presence of other minds, to step outside of one's own needs and
plans, at least so far as to conceive of others as ends rather than means, is
the central moral challenge of art, which so often imagines persons in
strictly conventional or strategic ways. Spenser parodied how the son–
neteers devoted themselves to a beloved who was merely a projection of
their own wishes and needs by documenting the mischief caused by an
artificial woman, false Florimell, whose lips really are rose-petals, whose
hair really is made of gold-wires, and so on. The "You" whom
Hollander so frequently addresses (and who is the poet's interlocutor
throughout
Powers oj Thirteen)
is quite frankly his own imagination. But,
strangely, the easy back-and-forth, the intimacy and continual change of
the game between I and You, grants "You" a kind of reality that seems
far removed from vulgar wish-fulfillment.
Let's call it quits: I never long for you any more.
But the matter of your voice low in the late lamplight
My heart minded over for so long, the substance of
Your morning shadow dan cing on the floor as you dressed,
The evening shadow of your body's depth, stand here
Demanding some ceremony now. Some fuss. Let's call
It quits. Addressing what I've just said, you reply then
Cheerily, "Hi, Quits' " We giggle and have done for now
With lying, not against half-truths so much, but telling
Tales against the other - falsehood - halves of whatever
We really mean by saying what we feel. " Hi, Quits"
"Qllits"
(Like all his clan of feelings) grumbles, not at the joke,
But rather at having been given a name at all.
("The Resolution ," from
Powers of Thirtef/l)
Now perhaps sometimes Hollander has simply reversed the son–
neteer's procedure, addressing a person in disguise as a fantasy rather than
a fantasy in disguise as a person. But mostly what I think he has done is
to
burst through the false distinction between projection and acknowl–
edgment, not by showing in the stale poststructuralist way that acknowl–
edgment is really only rhetorical, only an elaborate self-deceit about
what is finally only projection (or a creation of the "male gaze"), but by
showing that the unpredictability, the variegation of relatedness and dis–
tance, the intense vitality which is characteristic of imagination at its best
teaches us how to love others in their own endlessly changing forms of
