I didn’t just mark a couple of mortises yesterday. I also started cutting them. I’m still working on this saw-bench Bent, a small wooden frame that supports one end of a board while the other is the target of the attentions of my saw blade.
Each of these mortises is supposed to be two inches (2″) deep, about five-sixteenths (5/16″) wide, and two inches long. I’ve made mine about one and a half (1.5″) deep, and five-eighths of an inch (5/8″) wide. I hope it’ll be all right; I don’t really want to cut these again — and I don’t have a chisel that can work into a space that’s supposed to be 5/16″ wide.
Mortising, particularly blind mortising, is the act of cutting a square or round hole for a similarly sized peg on another board. Except, when we think of the word hole we either think of a hobbit-hole which is a comfortable and well-made burrow, or a drill-hole which can be ragged above and below, and may or may not be at a 90° angle to the board’s surface. A mortise has straight walls and a flat bottom — a through-mortise goes all the way through the board, while a blind mortise is more like a fox-hole: a four-sided chamber with no roof and an obvious floor below. This project I’m building has both through and blind mortises. It also has another kind of joint called a bridle-joint, which is a pair of vertical prongs like a tuning fork, separated by a space just barely wide enough for the board that will go in it.
The obvious comparison, of course, is a wall socket and electrical plug. The mortise is the ‘female’ part of the woodworking joint; the tenon is the ‘male’ part. In a through-mortise, the end of the tenon is visible in the window of the mortise; in a blind-mortise, the tenon’s cheeks (wide parts of the rectangular peg) and shoulders (narrow parts of the rectangular peg) both become invisible within the chamber or negative space that has been prepared for it. Ideally, and realistically, glue weds the two parts together for as long as the object survives.
When I think about this poetically, of course, especially in the context of thinking of hand-crafted things as “poetry in the world of materials,” I try to remember that this is one of the things that we as poets try to do — we want to create a sound-sculpture or a prose-map that leads the reader into a three-dimensional experience of time and space. A poem is a mortise, of sorts, which the careful poet has prepared as a void into which the reader or hearer presses themselves.
John Keats (d. 1827) in a letter to his brother, said something like a good poem wounds the hearer in a way so that they’re never quite whole again. Similarly, I as the woodworker have “wounded” a piece of white pine in such a way that it will never be whole again — it requires a properly prepared tenon to slot home, the errors of my chiseling filled with the glue and sawdust of a meeting of minds between the writer and the hearer. A mortise unfilled is simply a hole, like a World War I trench or foxhole, a yawning chasm in some material that was once alive and whole. By application of the ruthless geometry of a cutting edge, I have scoured out a place where some other thing may find refuge. But if I never make the opposing part, the tenon, then it remains a void — a wound in the world. A mortise acquires power by becoming the place where something else fits. Making the mortise encourages us to make the tenon in response — to become the hearer, as it were, and to listen to the poem-in-materials that we have written.
I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of a poem before as a hole in the world. The act of writing a poem has always seemed additive — transforming ink in the pen into ink on the page, and making an explicit or explicate order out of the implicate disorderliness of the liquid in the pen cartridge. But the pen is used up in the process of cutting a poem out of time and space, as the wood from inside the mortise is transformed into splinters and flinders; the bar of wood that has a mortise in it is rarely good for anything else except what we planned for it to become. And maybe that’s a better way of thinking about a poem — as a hole in the world that receives the attention of a prepared and thoughtful reader. The very best poems, of course, are prepared well enough that they can help more than one reader slot home and feel thoroughly known and completely enclosed by the words that surround them.
But maybe it’s the case that every poem in the world has just one true reader, who comes into the void prepared for them alone. The grain and lines of its language receives the reader even as the reader is pressed in with vigor — and the glue of the feeling and the moisture of that relationship and the perfection of the fit, welds them together, reader and poem, so that they can never again be parted.
