Exchange On Robert Kelly’s Poem Looking

 Looking 

Robert Kelly, 1935 –

Once when I read the funnies

I took my little magnifying glass

and looked too close.

Forms became colors and colors

were just arrays of dots

and between the dots I saw the rough bleak

storyless legend of the pulp paper

empty as the winter moon

and I dreaded it.

I had looked right through,

when I wanted a universe

that sustains

looker and looking and the seen

forever, detail after detail

never ending. And all I had found

was between. But between

had its own song:

Find it in the space between—

it is just as empty as it seems

but this blankness is your mother.

R:

Interesting, since I like to look "too" closely at paintings and the paint becomes a painting itself, abstract but its own little world.  Many are even more interesting looked at closely.(Riopelle is an example.)   So I thought I understood up to "its own song."  And liked it. 

But why then "empty?" And the last line is completely baffling. What is the "blankness," and how is it "your mother?"  

If he just means that looking closely means one loses the 3-D illusion, that doesn't seem either expressive of anything.

Me:

Isn’t it in effect, or like, the inversion of Pascal’s 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me'? It captures some blend of the experiences like looking so hard at something it becomes as nothing as it loses all sense of anything, or repeating a word over and over till it loses all sense and is just meaningless sound, or staring at a blank page wanting to write something but being stuck or mired in the blankness. 

But then, as you note, you see something, hear something, think something in and amidst all that meaninglessness, which is an emptiness, and creating begins, whether it’s in apprehension or the making of something. 

And so, the blankness is likened to your mother. IE, the poem reframes this emptiness as something significant and nurturing, and, so, again, the "blankness" is likened to a mother. The emptiness becomes a source of origin and potential, like the creative void from which new art, ideas and perspectives come forth.

R:

You are very generous in your idea of what is implied by "your mother."  Perhaps my problem is that a common insult where I came from was "your motha," as in motha fucker.  To which the standard reply was "at least I got a mother."  But even without that it comes as an utter surprise.

And the "your" sounds like the speaker is talking about another person's mother.  It seems weird to me, and your explanation goes quite a way beyond what it will imply for most readers---I would guess. 

Me:

The poem feels conversational, but like an immediately initial casual conversation that quickly grows serious and thoughtful. The speaker works something through. He starts with how he read the funnies, as innocuous as he can get. 

And then, poetically, he thinks things through, culminating from the reversal on to his final summarizing insight. And now, having that, he addresses the reader, who he’s been “talking to”. The “your” is just that. I can’t see any plausible connection to “motherfucker”, “your mother”, as in the dozens, “you mother”, or anything else along those lines.

This may be just me extrapolating too much, but really I don’t think so. I think it’s a plausible reading of the poem and its final metaphor.