Chora

Sandra Doller

An author’s statement

“Conceive a space filled with moving,” Gertrude Stein wrote of the American West.

Chora is a locomotive text. It was conceived on a train. A 50-plus hour train trip from Iowa to Oakland. And back. Over 100 hours on a train. Plus an 8-hour delay at Donner’s Pass, with a less cannibalist outcome. I was en route to a wedding. And back. I missed my man. I read books. I filled three notebooks with scribbling. A year later, after my own wedding, I re-opened them. And Chora came out moving, locomoting, puling.

“ . . . but I hate being moving. If you want to feel, go to the movies, because poetry has no intention of being moving; it is perhaps one of the few things left in America that is not moving.”—Stein, “In English in a Poem”

Then there were my Quaker meeting notes, taken right after the meetings. Many pages of notes, fifty pages or more, boiled down to the size of screens. Mini movie screens. Quaker meeting is sitting waiting meeting, still collective silence. Not moving. Or movement where every movement gets its notice. Thought merely circulates around the room. Pacifist movement & non-movement & the war.

Julia Kristeva defines the chora as “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated. . . . We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. Our discourse—all discourse—moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it axiomatic form.”

Then there’s that. Pre-symbolic, spatial, sonic possibility. Rooms, poems, phantom-rides through. Before we ever said & got said. Drawn, scratched, pushed around. Non-semantic sound = poetry. Locomoting solid rooms with windows = the train. Not stanzas. Idealized vs. realized = the perfect failure of the Sistine Chapel. A vision expressed in oils. A pre-linguistic state expressed in language. The failure of the real.

There’s also a series of “line” poems. A poet I published sent me a new poem about new lines painted in the road. The poet invited me to rewrite the poem as my own, which I did several times in series, with less and less attention to the “original.” The absence & presence of line on road, signature on poem, thought scoring space. On the page. In lines.

Chora is a locomotive text. The poems are spinal tracks, not in lines but as lines themselves. Follow the lines across the land, an invitation.

The word “chora” (as opposed to the “term” for either Plato or Kristeva) is a feminine Greek noun meaning “country.” Or “the space lying between two places or limits.” Or “land which is ploughed or cultivated, ground.” To move between them, fill the space with moving. Move to the American West. Move to the movies. Sit. Move.