Susan Mitchell's Rapture, surely one of the most exciting collections published in 1992, is full of titled perspectives and beautifully written, unconventionally proportioned passages.
Here's the passage Hoagland quotes from Susan Mitchell's poem "The Cities" from her collection Rapture. I've included an additional two verse paragraphs from the poem:
Where other portraits of saints focus on attaining rapture through self-sacrifice and redemptive suffering, Mitchell's Saint Isidore gets his through a sensuous devouring of text, a theme appropriate for a book about the erotics of language.
Paradoxically, Mitchell's avoidance of pain in these poems about rapture--a subject, a state-of-mind, that in Christianity requires a crash course in Suffering--creates an aura of discomfort, of dynamic disequilibrium (or, as Tony Hoagland would have it, "disproportion"): the reader might argue that while Mitchell's extended "dionysian" moments don't feel rooted in any reasonable cause-and-effect, Rapture's whacky charm derives from its unreasonableness, its flaunting of conventional story-telling for an associatively driven narrative.
Though rapture-poetry might seem a high-risk art, challenging staid workshop concepts of the self, in many rapture poems, no big emotional risks are taken, no psychic rivers are forded.
Though rapture poetry is one of margins, of psychic frontiers, it doesn't follow that these borderlands are unpatrolled or that forays into the territory haven't been attempted before.
Though jazz is the vehicle in this last poem, it isn't about jazz so much as about a kind of self-imploding rapture. One might substitute a Chopin, a Keats or Van Gogh for a Baker or Holiday; one might adjust the setting to arrive at the same poem, just as one might substitute a romantically wasting disease for drug addiction.
In almost all rapture poetry her suffering is willing, passive, submissive.
A form well-suited to the poetry-and prose--of rapture, mosaics work through chunks and fragments and move from scene to scene in jump cuts, rather than through smooth transitions; they abandon--save in short informational blips--any pretense at exposition.
Mendelsohn's novel swoons the way mosaic writing swoons--spasmodically, in fits and starts, rather than in eddies and swirls, like the poetry of rapture which rushes on in aural and imagistic sweeps of association.
Anne Morrow Lindberg's A Gift from the Sea, a mosaic written as journal, a sort of eco-journal, was an early--though perhaps unintentional--prototype for Mendelsohn's form and includes every moment of rapture her pilot husband would have eliminated from his flight-book.
There's no space to excerpt Dillard's brilliant essay "The Death of a Moth," but her meditation on solitude, self-immoloation and rapture--with its centrally juxtaposed figures of "Rimbaud burning out his brains in Paris," and a moth toasting itself on a guttering candle--is mosaic-like in its pyrotechnically (pun intended) leaping logic and--especially relevent to this essay--its focus on drug-induced rapture.
As a celestial presence, she inspires us intellectually while Rapture is that smelly, half-dwarf/half-gargoyle Lorca celebrates in his essay on the Duende.