“Alejandra Pizarnik” By Scott Burton

The 20th century, and it is not unique in this regard, is filled with forgotten women who, in different ways attempted to live lives that were their own, outside of the patriarchal noise. One such woman was Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 to Russian Jewish parents. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1955. Pizarnik continued to write poetry and criticism while living in Paris between 1960 and 1964 before returning to Buenos Aires, where she would write and publish some of her best-known work. She committed suicide by taking an overdose of Secobarbital in 1972 at the age of 36. This is an overview of her biography. Much more, I believe, can be uncovered about Alejandra Pizarnik by reading her poetry. Until recently, Pizarnik’s work was only scantly translated into English. In 2016 New Directions published the first English language collection of Pizarnik’s work under the title Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert. 

To be a woman is to be marginalized. To be a woman who is also an artist writing about themes of madness, alienation, and death is to be doubly diminished. In a 21st century context the writer has been largely incorporated. The image of the writer as an eccentric outsider is no longer a thing. The substance of Pizarnik’s poetry would have made her, in the eyes of polite society, an eccentric or perhaps worse. Pizarnik is just one example of many who have tried to relate their life experiences honestly through art and have been ostracized or even persecuted for doing so.

Pizarnik’s life was hampered by depression, insomnia, self-esteem issues, negative body issues, and drug addiction. These issues are afflictions that have become common in the modern human experience. To be a woman is to be subject to the critical eye of society, a society with a distinctly male gaze. These symptoms suffered by Pizarnik will surely be familiar to many women living under its control. Pizarnik’s outlet was to write about them, and she did so in a clear, dazzling, and often dreamlike way. To communicate a feeling, is in a sense to relieve oneself of some of the burden of the feeling’s intensity. Pizarnik communicates her own emotions and pain in an urgent and immediate way that never ceases to hit the reader right between the ribs. These are her dispatches from the fog of sleeplessness and depression. There is a poem in Extracting the Stone of Madness whose title translates to “Dispatches.” It reads:

The wind had eaten away 

parts of my face and my hands.

They called me ragged angel.

I lay waiting.

Anyone who has experienced mental illness will relate to the feeling of being eaten away at. And what can one do in the face of the ravages of mental illness but wait?

The title Extracting the Stone of Madness comes from the title poem in the collection and is an allusion to Cutting the Stone, also called The Cure of Folly, a 15th century painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting depicts a scene of trephination, a medieval medical procedure in which a surgeon drills a hole into a patient’s skull. It was believed that madness was caused by a tumor or stone lodged in the skull, and the only way to relieve the patient’s madness was to remove the stone. Pizarnik’s poetry was her version of trephination, her way of attempting to extract her own stone of madness. The stone, in both cases, is of course imaginary, making any attempt at excision futile.

“Extracting the Stone of Madness” is a dizzying prose poem that can be read on loop. The opening line of the poem sets the tone, “The bad light is near and nothing is real.” When reading the poem, one gets the sense that one is stumbling through some impenetrable mist, seeing a myriad of images, images that seem somehow unreal or illusive. The poem describes a dream and adeptly conjures the feeling of strangeness one at times feels when dreaming. This feeling is best exemplified for me in the following passage:

Clumps of grass, headless dolls; I call for myself, I call myself all night long. And in my dream, there is a circus wagon filled with dead corsairs lying in their coffins. A moment earlier, in their finery, with black patches over one eye, the sea captains leapt like waves from one brig to another, as beautiful as suns.

The poem is littered with references to silence and sleep, perhaps allusions to death. An early line in the poem goes, “Silence, always silence; the gold coins of sleep.” A line later in the poem reads, “It’s so dark, so silent, this process that grips me. Just speak of the silence.” The poem ends with the question, “Why the great silence?”

There seems to be longing everywhere in Pizarnik’s poetry. A longing for things she couldn't find. Like for silence, the voices in her head that she couldn't quiet but instead wound into beautiful lines of poetry. Like for sleep, something that she found illusive and would become a source of her madness. “The wolf deposits her cubs on the doorstep and vanishes. The mournful light of the tapers quakes from the threatening gusts. The female cub whimpers. No one asleep can hear her. Let every plague and pestilence befall all blissful sleepers.” And for death, the ultimate sleep, the ultimate silence.

Pizarnik writes in her poem “Silences:”

Death always at my side.

I listen to what it says.

And only hear myself.

Only in death was Alejandra Pizarnik able to silence the voices in her head that she had for most of her life allowed to flow through her pen and onto the page. Her voice wasn’t silenced by death, however. It is still heard in her poems — a reminder perhaps of all the other silenced and forgotten voices we are unfortunately unable to hear.