Pleats // Seedlings

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Sledmere, Maria (2026) Pleats // Seedlings. English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, 30 (30). pp. 1-10. ISSN 0719-9139 (https://doi.org/10.7764/ESLA.101420)

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Abstract

In his poem “Seedings,” Jerome Rothenberg presents a cat whose face is that “of death,” whose mind we might enter to understand how “it moves through space & time” (6). This cat can pass between realms; this cat is a line of fl ight between life and its aftermath. Is the cat a witness or a conduit to what happens on either side? No one can really be in the “cat’s mind” and so the cat too “becomes a distant echo” (6). Death fl ickers through the impossible mind of the cat. It slinks, enjambed, in space. Rothenberg sets out the problem of knowing death through intuition or experience: “but death abolishes / all space & time ... like the cat’s mind / where no there is” (6). Where “no” – the negative – is – there. Presence repeats itself in absence as insistence. The aporia I instinctively feel when trying to relate to the cat is a pirouette into elsewhere, or perhaps a reversal. How to gather back in? How can we know what’s “beyond us” (7)? Where, if anywhere, is “there”? The cat leads me to an open fi eld of déjà vu. What is this “memory of garden” the cat takes into death (7)? Do I know it? Do you? Does it need tending, or collected like fl owers? My sense of “gathering” commences from the dreamwork of seeding set out in this poem.

ORCID iDs

Sledmere, Maria ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5492-1652;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)