“SLOW FUSE OF THE POSSIBLE: A MEMORY OF POETRY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS” by Kate Daniels (West Virginia University Press, 216 pages, $22).
On the first page of “Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis,” poet Kate Daniels makes a provocative statement about the many years she spent with an analyst. “Sometimes it was like stepping into the intensely compressed words of a poem itself,” she wrote. “Eventually it became like stepping into a poem as it was being written.”
Daniels’ analysis, which took place when she was in her 40s, was what she calls the “classic form” – four sessions a week on a couch with an analyst who sat mostly silent, out of sight. Severely depressed and “a veteran of previous psychotherapies”, Daniels had sought out Ama, who was still in training at the time. At first, Daniels was charmed. Ama was around her age, and Daniels adored her two-syllable name (a pseudonym, though we can assume the original was similar). “It was a dyad, a duet, a couplet, a duet,” she wrote. They fell into a routine, “two women alone together, by choice, for long months, then for several years, in a quiet room”. Out of the silence, Daniels heard his own voice, at first “quarrelsome and irritable,” then full of images that “rose from the murky vacancy” of his mind.
Over time, Daniels has exhibited deep feelings of eroticism and hostility towards Ama, which she describes in detail. “I know I was a difficult (and very resilient) patient. I was depressed, defensive, terrified, suspicious and quick to challenge. A lot of times I was aggressive and hostile in my interactions with my analyst.” Expecting Ama’s office to look like a scene from a Woody Allen movie or “The Sopranos,” she criticized Ama’s decor, including the shabby sofa and the presence of a uncovered trash can, which made it feel like a trash can. During a seance, she intentionally broke a jar she had brought to give to Ama. Above all, she resented Ama’s refusal to read her poetry and her carelessness with words and details.
Now Edwin Mims Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of six books of poetry, Daniels brings her poetic sensibility to the project of recounting the ebb and flow of the wanderings of her mind, which she had recorded in a newspaper. His changing engagement with 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson is particularly intriguing. As a teacher, she had taught Dickinson in a typical way, emphasizing his solitary life and his perseverance. In analysis, the “emblematic facts of Dickinson’s life slipped away” and she became “a game of language and silence: pure poetry”. Epigraphs from Dickinson’s work preface most of the chapters as well as the book itself, explaining the title:
Possible’s slow fuse is on
By the Imagination —
Over time, Daniels came to realize that her analysis wasn’t working, a realization she attributes in hindsight to Ama’s lag and inexperience. Earlier therapy had been “productive and warm,” but “cold” images for Ama emerged in her mind: “a frost-encrusted refrigerator; a frozen human heart stored in a polystyrene cooler; a fan of cool air; an air conditioner”. By contrast, her stay at a writing residency, away from Ama, made her feel better, as did the medication she got from another psychiatrist. She finally ended the analysis.
“Slow Fuse of the Possible” isn’t always an enjoyable read. That’s not a criticism, because the dark quagmire of the human psyche isn’t necessarily a pleasant place. It’s a fascinating book, though—amazing in its candor and ability to capture the flow of free association, like pinning down an ocean wave.
Certainly, it offers a new way of thinking about poetry. “To write a poem or enter into an analysis is to commit to standing along a psychological edge – as fragile as a hair – without shrinking from the prospect of Terror it offers. This is where each of us meeting his Self face to face.” she writes.
As I finished each chapter, I found myself coming back to Dickinson’s quote at the beginning. It usually offered an aha insight, though rarely I could put it into words.
In addition to her work at Vanderbilt, Daniels teaches writing at the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She says the book grew out of conversations with psychoanalysts and writers interested in the connection between the writing process and analysis. Towards the end, the book seems aimed at that audience, and I found myself wishing she had more to say about being “inside a poem” and perhaps how the experience influenced his writing process.
Daniels said she enjoyed the experience of the scan, but was unlikely to do it again. As for Ama, Daniels is generous towards her. “Despite the unpleasantness of our mating, neither of us had abandoned the other.”
For more local book coverage, visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
