Schizophrene, Bhanu Kapil
Nightboat Books, 2011
“You are inverted, always, above the place at which you are caught. Caught living.”
-Bhanu Kapil, in an interview with Katherine Sanders, BOMBLOG, Sept. 2011
In a September 2011 interview on BOMBLOG, Bhanu Kapil told the story of her first book, published a decade ago. She was an hour into labour, less than twelve hours from giving birth to her son. The phone in her kitchen rang and she picked it up. It was Patricia Dientsfrey from Kelsey Street Press, telling Kapil that they were going to press immediately, and needed a title for her book. She had been having some difficulty titling the manuscript, but when Dientsfrey called, Kapil impulsively said “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.” And then she hung up, to give birth. Kapil recalls that at a certain point, during labor, she thought, “This isn’t pain. It’s intensity.”
One feels much the same affect when consuming Kapil’s newest work from Nightboat books, Schizophrene. The emotion elicited while reading is not so much suffering as it is a beleaguering sense of fervency and magnitude. In the book’s opening “Passive Notes:” Kapil writes:
For some years, I tried to write an epic on Partition and its trans-generational effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence, relational disorders, and so on. Towards the end of this project, I felt the great strength of the page: its ability, as a fibrous surface, to deflect the point of my pen.
While this introduction of sorts sounds systematic enough, the italicized words create echelons in the mind, a type of ranking of ideas and subjects. During these “Passive Notes:” other words are highlighted –the screen, reflective, touch, had failed, house, winter, fragments, decayed—which produce a layered representation on the page, a painted image by way of words. Through this accumulation of thoughts we come upon a telling narrative: one night, when she knew this manuscript had failed, she threw the notebook in her garden. It snowed that winter, into spring, when she finally retrieved her notes again and began to re-write, “from the fragments, the phrases and lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages.”
This idea of time and decay is central to Schizophrene, which haltingly, in prose, traces the junctures of migration and schizophrenia in diasporic communities, primarily in India and Pakistan. I say haltingly not in slight, but rather to illustrate the subtleties in recounting experience which is communicated in sparse sentences on the page, hemmed in by an exquisite use of blank space. One page from the section 4. ABIOGENESIS reads as follows:
Dreamed I left my coat on the aeroplane.
This sole sentence appears at the top of the page, the rest which is left blank, yet it conveys key points which reappear in the collection: the sub-conscious, journey, and personal property. Throughout the text, inquiry is elected (rather than a straight recounting) to explore the trauma (in the context of racism and violence) experienced by immigrant women. Even though the questions are not voiced directly, the demand is clear: in a diverse world how does an artist reconcile oneself with the suffering of affected sectors of society, is reconciliation even possible, and how then to communicate in a scientific yet emotionally relevant context?
Those are large concepts, and Kapil handles them well. In eight sections, written in first-person quasi-poetic and intellectually rigorous prose, Kapil guides the reader from her garden in Colorado (where the manuscript was discarded) to South Asia, and to affluent neighborhoods in the United Kingdom where she grew up. Hardly any distinction is made between the “I” of the book to the author herself, positioning Kapil as one of the recipients “the displaced” as Karla Kelsey stated in her review of the book. The immediacy of the first person abolishes the partition between author and subject, using the self as a sounding board and also as a medium:
My mother’s mother put a hand over my mother’s mouth, but my mother saw, peeking between the slats of the cart, row after row of women tied to the border trees. “Their stomachs were cut out,” said my mother. This story, which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many bedtimes of my own childhood.
Sometimes I think it was not an image at all but a way of conveying information.
In Schizophrene, narrative is conveyed through an ancestor or an interview (such as the one mentioned in the book taking place at London’s Institute of Community Health Services), through a notebook holding corroded sentences which survived the snow, or through dreams, which the author describes in startling cinematicism:
I dreamed of a tree uprooted by the river and instinctively, I climbed up. In the roots, I saw a velvet bag knotted with string, bulky with jewels. I wanted to give it to the family who squatted on the land. They were white. They had long, brown and knotted hair…
These moments, intimate and sensual, create a fractured portrait. They allude to—without articulating directly—a fragmentation of the self and society. Can exploring racism and trauma begin to mend history, or at least come to terms with memory? Kapil writes:
A schizophrenic narrative cannot process the dynamic elements of an image, any image, whether pleasant, enriching or already so bad it can’t be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.
In an interview in TINGE magazine, Kapil says: “In this sense, to throw away the book is to stop the book. To stop is an act of proprioception; it gives the book a severe limit. In the arc of a book’s flight into the dark garden, nothing happens and nothing can happen. This is my anti-colonial stance, my anti-colonial desire, in retrospect.” After the self and the text are displaced, what remnants of language persist? Kapil doesn’t give us answers, yet she doesn’t need to. In the end, Schizophrene is as much about the impossible task of writing such a narrative, and the intricate virtue of that impossibility.
The Wasteland and Other Poems, John Beer
Canarium Press, 2010
What prompts a contemporary poet like John Beer to title his first full-length collection The Waste Land and Other Poems? Is it wit or self-deprecation, mimesis or admiration? Perhaps it is none of these things, or a combination of all of them. What few may know is that when T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922 there already existed a poem by Madison Cawein similarly titled “Wasteland” and published in a Chicago magazine in 1913. That Eliot read this poem seems likely, his friend Ezra Pound was an editor there and wrote an article in the same issue.
Yet what Beer is aiming to accomplish seems more consciously intentional. Even the cover of Beer's book looks maddeningly similar to Eliot's 1923 Hogarth edition, with its equivalent colour scheme and typographical rendering. The first edition of Eliot's book was hand printed by his friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and in 1923 Virginia wrote to her friend Barbara Bengal: "I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliot's poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles."
Perhaps it is Beer’s ultimate aim to unduly exercise our memories, racking our own individual histories for traces of Eliot, but what is pleasantly surprising is that Beer accomplishes to write a poem that is notably imprinted with his own idiosyncratic and intelligent panache, while at the same time paying a strange yet extraordinary homage to his predecessor. The title poem is in five sections, like Eliot's, and is not so much a mimetic work as a “song of atomic decay,” taking a line for Beer's "The Wasteland". The first section is aptly entitled “The Funeral March (Chicago and Orleans)” and true to form this section—and all the other sections for that matter—are infused with a type of despondency, yet not without an ironic post-modern flair:
All the actors have been in car crashes,
and they’ve added an orgy—it’s a little derivative,
but what isn’t, these days? OK, got to run,
ciao, I’ll see you later, love to all.
The poet is writing of his own experiment, quickly parsing in and out of poetic actions and observations. And with an obvious nod to Eliot, must of course update the famous line (which was an update itself of Chaucer) and inject a hipsteresque aura to its tone: “April is the coolest month, which brings happy policemen the pleasant dreams of spring.” It is Beer taking a swing at Eliot, taking a swing at Chaucer.
Yet, ultimately Beer’s poem belongs to Beer, and he has attired it with contemporary flourishes so that it gives off a slight, albeit recognizable, whiff of the post-modern. The references to the twentieth and Twenty-first Century are there: oblique mentionings of “the early Pixies,” “the discount bin of the Princeton Record Exchange,” the “bodegas, taquerias, vintage stores.” The narrator is a flâneur, an urban man, an iconoclast. He stitches together—Flarf style—lyrics from pop songs, phrases from Eliot, and Chicago street names into a lyrical treatise which suggests the superficiality of contemporary poetry while upholding a style similar to a pensive, mid-century, quasi-narrative poet.
This isn't to suggest that Beer is a predictable poet. Even though allusions to his predecessors run amok, his own informed and somewhat quirky voice streaks through the entire collection, especially in poems like “Flowers,” “J. Beer 1969-1969” and the prose series “Theses on Failure” which begins with this ardent opening declaration: “1. I wanted to announce the chief defect of red.” Beer’s preoccupation with colour, throughout the book, echoes the synaesthesia of another one of Beer’s precursors, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The experience of meaning as it is attached to colours lends itself to more of a conceptual-related discussion, as does Wittgenstein’s. The title of the poem, “Theses on Failure,” could intimate that the colour red is synonymous or at least conceptually related to failure, which Beer later on in the poem connects with the love: “I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love.”
But that seems too straightforward for the author’s circuitous faculties. Red here could also act as synecdoche for Communism or Karl Marx, as some of the quotes included in the poem are from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (Feuerbach, incidentally, features prominently in Beer’s poem, sometimes in a dream, sometimes eating pasta). Much in this poem remains intangible yet glorious: the slap-dash array of characters, including Charles Bernstein, who has a cameo appearance “framed by “shark-jaws”, the winks to Marx and the Young Hegelians, and most notably, Beer’s masterly forms of badinage—sentences such as “I walked from Leningrad to Prague for you, under one arm a ladder, under the other a taxonomy of vegetables” or “You told me that I couldn’t translate “Das Wesen des Christenthums” as “Christian Thumbways.” You said it was too dumb.” As in most successful poetry, everything in "Theses on Failure" needs to be chewed a bit, absorbed. And what colour accomplishes in this poem and in other poems such as “Mary, Color Scientist” is that it creates an aura that persists amidst Beer’s heady and often stunningly clever philosophical explorations. The subject of the poem is dubious, perhaps there is no subject at all; colour and language in themselves being conclusive ways of experiencing the world.
Kent Johnson has written of Beer and his poetry: “There is in John Beer, as I have known since our days in London, a bit of the last younger American poet living the tragedy of Europe. Thus, I was pleased when he sent me the manuscript of The Waste Land and Other Poems (originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices), asking for my editorial suggestions.” This sounds like it was written in 1920 on York Way on a drizzly afternoon. American poets will always tend to speak in their poems, knowingly or not, of this "tragedy of Europe" but never as soundly as European poets themselves. Thus Beer has taken it upon himself to translate the tragedy into an updated American idiom.
Eliot was constantly accused of pilfering lines from other writers. With Beer, it’s not a discussion about plagiarism, as it was in Eliot’s time. Collage, quotation, pastiche, erasure, Flarf are all widely accepted in today’s literary world. Beer’s collection, as homage to such now-institutionalized techniques, exposes a writer who is deeply steeped in poetic history; his modernism does not stem from making something new, but in challenging the form in such a way that the past looks postmodern. This can even be seen as early on as in the dedication, phonetically copying and at the same time updating Eliot's il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman," dedicated to Pound). Beer writes: "for Jack Spicer--the fabber craftsman". Significant here is the rare word "fabber," which is in fact a small machine capable of making three-dimensional copies of almost anything, simply from digital data.
The shadows of Beer’s predecessors—Eliot, Wittgenstein, Spicer—tint the way the reader experiences the poem, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. This looking back, Orpheus-style, is a theme that recurs throughout The Waste Land and Other Poems (Beer). In the fifth section of "The Waste Land”—a prose section called “Death to Poetry”—Orpheus is the subject of the poem:
Orpheus awoke in the poem of disguises, the poem once
called “The Waste Land.” Friends, listen up. He gathered the
remnants of the life he had dreamed. He renounced the burden
of the name he bore. He began to walk.
Orpheus proceeds to walk through Chicago, down Milwaukee Avenue, towards the Flatiron Building. He meets a hustler with a beer can and some anarchist kids. He “walked past the cabdrivers trading insults in Urdu, and he walked past convenience stores…And the sky was the color of eggplant and tire fires, the sky was the field that resisted exhaustion.” It sounds like pure cinematic sheen. It could be the backdrop of an opera, the new cacophony which is America. It is Orpheus, but it is also the author, walking us through the Midwest: his cities, his puddles and gutters. Beer shows us what it is like to walk through his world. But it won’t be the same for us when we walk through it, nor when we read the poem. Nothing is the same way twice. As Beer writes in the second section of the title poem, called “Don’t Look Back:”
…No song can bear
the weight we need to place upon it;
nothing returns as we ask it to return.
~JMB
Yet what Beer is aiming to accomplish seems more consciously intentional. Even the cover of Beer's book looks maddeningly similar to Eliot's 1923 Hogarth edition, with its equivalent colour scheme and typographical rendering. The first edition of Eliot's book was hand printed by his friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and in 1923 Virginia wrote to her friend Barbara Bengal: "I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliot's poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles."
Perhaps it is Beer’s ultimate aim to unduly exercise our memories, racking our own individual histories for traces of Eliot, but what is pleasantly surprising is that Beer accomplishes to write a poem that is notably imprinted with his own idiosyncratic and intelligent panache, while at the same time paying a strange yet extraordinary homage to his predecessor. The title poem is in five sections, like Eliot's, and is not so much a mimetic work as a “song of atomic decay,” taking a line for Beer's "The Wasteland". The first section is aptly entitled “The Funeral March (Chicago and Orleans)” and true to form this section—and all the other sections for that matter—are infused with a type of despondency, yet not without an ironic post-modern flair:
All the actors have been in car crashes,
and they’ve added an orgy—it’s a little derivative,
but what isn’t, these days? OK, got to run,
ciao, I’ll see you later, love to all.
The poet is writing of his own experiment, quickly parsing in and out of poetic actions and observations. And with an obvious nod to Eliot, must of course update the famous line (which was an update itself of Chaucer) and inject a hipsteresque aura to its tone: “April is the coolest month, which brings happy policemen the pleasant dreams of spring.” It is Beer taking a swing at Eliot, taking a swing at Chaucer.
Yet, ultimately Beer’s poem belongs to Beer, and he has attired it with contemporary flourishes so that it gives off a slight, albeit recognizable, whiff of the post-modern. The references to the twentieth and Twenty-first Century are there: oblique mentionings of “the early Pixies,” “the discount bin of the Princeton Record Exchange,” the “bodegas, taquerias, vintage stores.” The narrator is a flâneur, an urban man, an iconoclast. He stitches together—Flarf style—lyrics from pop songs, phrases from Eliot, and Chicago street names into a lyrical treatise which suggests the superficiality of contemporary poetry while upholding a style similar to a pensive, mid-century, quasi-narrative poet.
This isn't to suggest that Beer is a predictable poet. Even though allusions to his predecessors run amok, his own informed and somewhat quirky voice streaks through the entire collection, especially in poems like “Flowers,” “J. Beer 1969-1969” and the prose series “Theses on Failure” which begins with this ardent opening declaration: “1. I wanted to announce the chief defect of red.” Beer’s preoccupation with colour, throughout the book, echoes the synaesthesia of another one of Beer’s precursors, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The experience of meaning as it is attached to colours lends itself to more of a conceptual-related discussion, as does Wittgenstein’s. The title of the poem, “Theses on Failure,” could intimate that the colour red is synonymous or at least conceptually related to failure, which Beer later on in the poem connects with the love: “I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love.”
But that seems too straightforward for the author’s circuitous faculties. Red here could also act as synecdoche for Communism or Karl Marx, as some of the quotes included in the poem are from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (Feuerbach, incidentally, features prominently in Beer’s poem, sometimes in a dream, sometimes eating pasta). Much in this poem remains intangible yet glorious: the slap-dash array of characters, including Charles Bernstein, who has a cameo appearance “framed by “shark-jaws”, the winks to Marx and the Young Hegelians, and most notably, Beer’s masterly forms of badinage—sentences such as “I walked from Leningrad to Prague for you, under one arm a ladder, under the other a taxonomy of vegetables” or “You told me that I couldn’t translate “Das Wesen des Christenthums” as “Christian Thumbways.” You said it was too dumb.” As in most successful poetry, everything in "Theses on Failure" needs to be chewed a bit, absorbed. And what colour accomplishes in this poem and in other poems such as “Mary, Color Scientist” is that it creates an aura that persists amidst Beer’s heady and often stunningly clever philosophical explorations. The subject of the poem is dubious, perhaps there is no subject at all; colour and language in themselves being conclusive ways of experiencing the world.
Kent Johnson has written of Beer and his poetry: “There is in John Beer, as I have known since our days in London, a bit of the last younger American poet living the tragedy of Europe. Thus, I was pleased when he sent me the manuscript of The Waste Land and Other Poems (originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices), asking for my editorial suggestions.” This sounds like it was written in 1920 on York Way on a drizzly afternoon. American poets will always tend to speak in their poems, knowingly or not, of this "tragedy of Europe" but never as soundly as European poets themselves. Thus Beer has taken it upon himself to translate the tragedy into an updated American idiom.
Eliot was constantly accused of pilfering lines from other writers. With Beer, it’s not a discussion about plagiarism, as it was in Eliot’s time. Collage, quotation, pastiche, erasure, Flarf are all widely accepted in today’s literary world. Beer’s collection, as homage to such now-institutionalized techniques, exposes a writer who is deeply steeped in poetic history; his modernism does not stem from making something new, but in challenging the form in such a way that the past looks postmodern. This can even be seen as early on as in the dedication, phonetically copying and at the same time updating Eliot's il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman," dedicated to Pound). Beer writes: "for Jack Spicer--the fabber craftsman". Significant here is the rare word "fabber," which is in fact a small machine capable of making three-dimensional copies of almost anything, simply from digital data.
The shadows of Beer’s predecessors—Eliot, Wittgenstein, Spicer—tint the way the reader experiences the poem, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. This looking back, Orpheus-style, is a theme that recurs throughout The Waste Land and Other Poems (Beer). In the fifth section of "The Waste Land”—a prose section called “Death to Poetry”—Orpheus is the subject of the poem:
Orpheus awoke in the poem of disguises, the poem once
called “The Waste Land.” Friends, listen up. He gathered the
remnants of the life he had dreamed. He renounced the burden
of the name he bore. He began to walk.
Orpheus proceeds to walk through Chicago, down Milwaukee Avenue, towards the Flatiron Building. He meets a hustler with a beer can and some anarchist kids. He “walked past the cabdrivers trading insults in Urdu, and he walked past convenience stores…And the sky was the color of eggplant and tire fires, the sky was the field that resisted exhaustion.” It sounds like pure cinematic sheen. It could be the backdrop of an opera, the new cacophony which is America. It is Orpheus, but it is also the author, walking us through the Midwest: his cities, his puddles and gutters. Beer shows us what it is like to walk through his world. But it won’t be the same for us when we walk through it, nor when we read the poem. Nothing is the same way twice. As Beer writes in the second section of the title poem, called “Don’t Look Back:”
…No song can bear
the weight we need to place upon it;
nothing returns as we ask it to return.
~JMB
Ordinary Sun, by Matthew Henriksen
Black Ocean, 2011
At the beginning of Ordinary Sun, the debut collection of Matthew Henriksen, the author begins with a line regarding the work of the eye. The reader may do well to turn as well to the opening poem of Frank Bidart’s Desire, which repeats a similar line: “as the eye to the sun.” Henriksen’s line “An eye is not enough” is as definitive and confident as Bidart, who turned to Plotinus for thesis-making: “To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it” (Plotinus). Though Henriksen may never explicitly conjure Plotinus, Ordinary Sun harkens back to such thinking as explicated by the philosopher and opened further by Bidart. This cycling of logical thought constitutes Henriksen’s project, a type of circling-down-the-drain to a purer experience of thought or, on a more instinctual level, emotion in relation to the tactile.
The voice in Ordinary Sun, which is dense and prolific, asks a great deal from the reader: to give over his or her faith to the logic ascribed by the work’s language. The author himself states in the penultimate stanza of the title poem:
I love the way metaphor can corrupt
but so seldom allow it.
Though each allowance is
an interruption.
I sing loud enough.
(“Ordinary Sun”)
This is the type of tongue-in-cheek self-estimation Henriksen permits. At first glance, metaphor and figurative language seem superfluous throughout the collection. The words, nevertheless, are teasing to be used at face value without the separate layers of reference that metaphor requires.
The long poem “Corrolla in the Midden” resembles a manifesto; it pieces together, through declarative sentences, the availability or willingness of the narrator’s actions in experience and thought, especially in the face of love and its problematics.
For complexity or worse, the clustered
knots of desire makes our minds undo
betters the dialect of shrubs
and so teaches us to love wholly
the fuck of pain and the doom
of love, which has no place.
…
I didn’t say I see everything
in the dark, and I’m not inclined
to explain that when I say
“dark” as I nod off I get lost.
I’m not inclined to the earth
or to what ruined us or what
we became. I can only say
we cherish ruins.
(“Corolla in the Midden”)
The “I” assures us “I am not conjuring // but curl my eye’s arms around / these tree tops and trees in the past”, and further on, “harmony has taught me to stop loving // because the most disfigured eye / swells with love with // or without seeing the mangled face.” Balancing the creative aspects of perception with a disjuncture between “harmony” and imperfection (“mangled face”) dislodges a sense of the self and what may be trusted in the self’s perceiving. The section “Corolla in the Midden” is angst-ridden and perpetually forward-moving in tone, as if the narrator/poet is all too aware of some cleaving that has happened in life or in all of humanity. There is a type of beautiful frustration with not being able to reconcile the ordinary and the metaphysical in this world:
…where the world works out
what the world will between
fuel and flash, as shape
color…
…Each leaf denies
Another nightmare in its scent.
So in general Henriksen is presenting a problem not only of perception (“An eye is not enough. / The hand rubs an unpainted fence” from “Copse”) but also one of perspective. If there is a narrative to behold by the reader, it can only be circumstantially assembled at best because of this. There’s a similar sense in the narrator’s ability to comprehend and convey the reality expressed in the world of the poems. This isn’t necessarily a double separation from reality (which would be problematic and annoyingly obscuring), but a point-by-point representation, philosophically almost, of reality translated onto the page, into a poem: “The world began in wrong. The clouds / prove this by their leniency. As grace // disturbs our sentiment for violence / so the bush lays its ambush of lilacs” (“Afterlife Ending As a Question”).
Whereas it may appear at times that Henriksen is seeking images to bear the weight of multiple interpretations, it is in fact the aim of the poems to reach a moment of specificity whereby the reader may transcend the “ordinariness” of described objects/images, thus elevating said objects/images to the more metaphysical or sublime. Such a feat is accomplished with an overwhelmingly lyrical focus on and of language; not so much a creation of an original syntax, like Carl Phillips or Susan Howe, but a musicality of word relations that eschews simple wordplay.
Not to want the origin of light, to want its myth.
To want the stroke across the jaw without the fist.
Walked among unplotted ways.
Made maps to joy. Waited near birds.
Liked haloed fury made of things.
Foraged through the brain, begot a bird
(“New Sparrow, New Sorrow”)
Or later, in “Resolution”:
The drift of horses magnifies the dust of dusk.
An owl condoles the house with a loud retch.
I made a whisper to make her body blink.
…
I shooed the last blackbird from her limbs
and brushed the snow from her torso.
The word choices throughout these poems is such that if the language were to go slightly askew either to the left or right, up or down, the poems may fall to banality or nonsense. Think of the line “I made a whisper to make her body blink” and the use of the verbs “made” and “blink” as opposed to “spoke”/”move”. The distance between the poems’ compositions can be felt in places, as Henriksen has spoken in interviews about the poems being written at varying times over a seven year period. And this gives way to the book feeling a bit long, primarily due to the language getting away from Henriksen, slipping into unbridled inattentiveness (“A whale tenderly descends from a star, / another regurgitated sweater on the sidewalk”) where the thought might best be conveyed in more coherent terms. But this is something every poet is guilty of from time to time, and it is a minor complaint of Ordinary Sun. In relation to such a complaint is the book’s excellence, when the thought, language, and representation cohere to an exacting communication of lyric and sensibility.
Countless poets publish countless books every year in which attempts are made to sublimate the ordinary to the metaphysical through a purposeful (usually lyrical) manipulation of language. And many do succeed. What sets Henriksen’s work far apart, though, is the pure control of craft and language by which he changes what is being looked at, what is being read. These poems are well-wrought but not over-wrought, beautiful but human, accessible but refusing. The project here is to make the ordinary and the concrete something more “angelic” or infinite, but if the reader squints hard enough, he or she might see that even the poet himself cannot escape the beauty of bringing down to earth such things as heady and abstract as love and loss. Not to say that this is an accident on the poet’s part. Rather, it is a byproduct of the committed focus of the senses, which comprehend that this is not all that constitutes being human:
Sometimes she’d touch
a body in her empty bed.
A stranger’s face, a dark
spot on the wall, watched
her as if from a mirror
and behind the face a hand
held a brush for her hair.
(“Gorge”)
As Wallace Stevens once wrote, “I am the angel of reality… / …I am the necessary angel of earth, / Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.” Metaphor, and all poetic language for that matter, may act as filter through which reality is better understood, or at least seen anew. Like Stevens’s “angel of reality”, Henriksen’s poetry is a channel of comprehension, an attempt of the self and the imagination to seize upon the intangible but not get lost in the intangible, to prove that that which may not be seen is nevertheless graspable in the here and now: “Though each definite person, like a body, was the opposite of an absence.” ~RS
The voice in Ordinary Sun, which is dense and prolific, asks a great deal from the reader: to give over his or her faith to the logic ascribed by the work’s language. The author himself states in the penultimate stanza of the title poem:
I love the way metaphor can corrupt
but so seldom allow it.
Though each allowance is
an interruption.
I sing loud enough.
(“Ordinary Sun”)
This is the type of tongue-in-cheek self-estimation Henriksen permits. At first glance, metaphor and figurative language seem superfluous throughout the collection. The words, nevertheless, are teasing to be used at face value without the separate layers of reference that metaphor requires.
The long poem “Corrolla in the Midden” resembles a manifesto; it pieces together, through declarative sentences, the availability or willingness of the narrator’s actions in experience and thought, especially in the face of love and its problematics.
For complexity or worse, the clustered
knots of desire makes our minds undo
betters the dialect of shrubs
and so teaches us to love wholly
the fuck of pain and the doom
of love, which has no place.
…
I didn’t say I see everything
in the dark, and I’m not inclined
to explain that when I say
“dark” as I nod off I get lost.
I’m not inclined to the earth
or to what ruined us or what
we became. I can only say
we cherish ruins.
(“Corolla in the Midden”)
The “I” assures us “I am not conjuring // but curl my eye’s arms around / these tree tops and trees in the past”, and further on, “harmony has taught me to stop loving // because the most disfigured eye / swells with love with // or without seeing the mangled face.” Balancing the creative aspects of perception with a disjuncture between “harmony” and imperfection (“mangled face”) dislodges a sense of the self and what may be trusted in the self’s perceiving. The section “Corolla in the Midden” is angst-ridden and perpetually forward-moving in tone, as if the narrator/poet is all too aware of some cleaving that has happened in life or in all of humanity. There is a type of beautiful frustration with not being able to reconcile the ordinary and the metaphysical in this world:
…where the world works out
what the world will between
fuel and flash, as shape
color…
…Each leaf denies
Another nightmare in its scent.
So in general Henriksen is presenting a problem not only of perception (“An eye is not enough. / The hand rubs an unpainted fence” from “Copse”) but also one of perspective. If there is a narrative to behold by the reader, it can only be circumstantially assembled at best because of this. There’s a similar sense in the narrator’s ability to comprehend and convey the reality expressed in the world of the poems. This isn’t necessarily a double separation from reality (which would be problematic and annoyingly obscuring), but a point-by-point representation, philosophically almost, of reality translated onto the page, into a poem: “The world began in wrong. The clouds / prove this by their leniency. As grace // disturbs our sentiment for violence / so the bush lays its ambush of lilacs” (“Afterlife Ending As a Question”).
Whereas it may appear at times that Henriksen is seeking images to bear the weight of multiple interpretations, it is in fact the aim of the poems to reach a moment of specificity whereby the reader may transcend the “ordinariness” of described objects/images, thus elevating said objects/images to the more metaphysical or sublime. Such a feat is accomplished with an overwhelmingly lyrical focus on and of language; not so much a creation of an original syntax, like Carl Phillips or Susan Howe, but a musicality of word relations that eschews simple wordplay.
Not to want the origin of light, to want its myth.
To want the stroke across the jaw without the fist.
Walked among unplotted ways.
Made maps to joy. Waited near birds.
Liked haloed fury made of things.
Foraged through the brain, begot a bird
(“New Sparrow, New Sorrow”)
Or later, in “Resolution”:
The drift of horses magnifies the dust of dusk.
An owl condoles the house with a loud retch.
I made a whisper to make her body blink.
…
I shooed the last blackbird from her limbs
and brushed the snow from her torso.
The word choices throughout these poems is such that if the language were to go slightly askew either to the left or right, up or down, the poems may fall to banality or nonsense. Think of the line “I made a whisper to make her body blink” and the use of the verbs “made” and “blink” as opposed to “spoke”/”move”. The distance between the poems’ compositions can be felt in places, as Henriksen has spoken in interviews about the poems being written at varying times over a seven year period. And this gives way to the book feeling a bit long, primarily due to the language getting away from Henriksen, slipping into unbridled inattentiveness (“A whale tenderly descends from a star, / another regurgitated sweater on the sidewalk”) where the thought might best be conveyed in more coherent terms. But this is something every poet is guilty of from time to time, and it is a minor complaint of Ordinary Sun. In relation to such a complaint is the book’s excellence, when the thought, language, and representation cohere to an exacting communication of lyric and sensibility.
Countless poets publish countless books every year in which attempts are made to sublimate the ordinary to the metaphysical through a purposeful (usually lyrical) manipulation of language. And many do succeed. What sets Henriksen’s work far apart, though, is the pure control of craft and language by which he changes what is being looked at, what is being read. These poems are well-wrought but not over-wrought, beautiful but human, accessible but refusing. The project here is to make the ordinary and the concrete something more “angelic” or infinite, but if the reader squints hard enough, he or she might see that even the poet himself cannot escape the beauty of bringing down to earth such things as heady and abstract as love and loss. Not to say that this is an accident on the poet’s part. Rather, it is a byproduct of the committed focus of the senses, which comprehend that this is not all that constitutes being human:
Sometimes she’d touch
a body in her empty bed.
A stranger’s face, a dark
spot on the wall, watched
her as if from a mirror
and behind the face a hand
held a brush for her hair.
(“Gorge”)
As Wallace Stevens once wrote, “I am the angel of reality… / …I am the necessary angel of earth, / Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.” Metaphor, and all poetic language for that matter, may act as filter through which reality is better understood, or at least seen anew. Like Stevens’s “angel of reality”, Henriksen’s poetry is a channel of comprehension, an attempt of the self and the imagination to seize upon the intangible but not get lost in the intangible, to prove that that which may not be seen is nevertheless graspable in the here and now: “Though each definite person, like a body, was the opposite of an absence.” ~RS
Find the Girl, by Lightsey Darst
Coffeehouse Press, 2011
“I knew I was dangerous: razor in a soft fruit”
(“Aria,” 55)
Society’s morbid fascination with the trope of missing, raped and murdered girls is the driving force behind Lightsey Darst’s debut collection of poems, Find the Girl. Darst is interested in both parts of the title equally: “the girl” and the “finding.” Referring to the hope of finding a missing girl alive and the need to find a dead girl’s body, and on a shadow level, the urge felt by a killer to “find the girl” (Darst writes: “Find the girl in time. Find her/and you stop her future”). Though obsession is behind the stories, reading the collection doesn’t quite feel like experiencing obsession. Darst creates an interesting distance in Find the Girl, which reflect the dehumanizations these girls undergo as they are transformed from people to headlines or myths, or worse, warnings:
“Let her suffer it, since someone has to,
some to be the stories
others survive, learn.”
(“[Methods, listen],” 21)
Darst weaves together girls and women from myth (Helen, Persephone), fairy tales (Snow White, Gretel), ancient history (the Yde girl), history-turned-lore (the prostitutes killed by Jack the Ripper), modern-day headlines (Jon-Benet Ramsay) and many other unnamed or less famous girls. She takes words from the stories, including the alleged killers, and pieces their stories together. Fittingly, in many of Darst’s poems lines dance visually across the pages. Sentences intersect each other and sometimes remain unfinished. This lends a dream-like, at times unsettling quality to poems, where ideas exist without boundaries, and remembrances collide with projected realities. The collection in whole possesses an open-endedness—poems are separated out and given their own titles, but they run into each other like watercolor. Even the habit of titling poems in italics or in brackets seems a nod to the ephemeral nature of the girls and that this narrative, that, like all other narrative, is only a version. There is no proclaimed truth, just an offered and splintered narrative.
* * *
Julia Kristeva, in her work “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” describes the abjection of self: “the abject … is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the subject.” The power of the abject can be seen in our confrontation of it; by confronting the abject, we are forced to find ourselves within it. The bodies and characters Darst resurrects in Find the Girl force us to do a similar thing: our social fascination with the real-life stories of young women who are raped and killed is in part because we can find ourselves within and attempt to differentiate ourselves from these stories. For women in particular, the moral lessons that play out are unavoidable, and reminders of how to act, and what is at stake.
To be a girl is to bleed, to constantly confront mortality through expectations of blood and bleeding. From birth, to menstruation, to losing one’s virginity, to giving birth. All of these socially important markers—of development, of growth—for women, are marked by blood. Darst: “Yesterday I found blood on my sheets/for the first time in years. Felt like being/a girl again.” Blood and bleeding indicates innocence and extreme femininity, but also the voyeuristic reality that comes with being female (a family waving a newly wed couple’s bed sheets out the window to show that the young bride was indeed a virgin.) Bleeding indicates a woman’s humanity, but again, because it needs to be validated by another, also becomes a double bind of proving life at the point of death.
Thus, being female is a physical experience. Historically, philosophically, psychologically, in theory and in practice, women have been identified, reified, and validated by their physicality—through and because of their body. Darst’s collection is primarily about the girls, but a secondary theme running throughout is the science behind finding the girls or finding out what happened to the girls through their bodies. The dissection of a body, its reduction to chemical reactions and scientific proofs, becomes another form of objectification placed on the female body, another way to remove their humanity. The crime scene specialist or medical examiner who states, “It’s not my affair to judge, I just take notes” (“Unsolved,” 65).
* * *
If women cause brothers to turn against brothers, if they cause kings to act like commoners, if they force rational men to turn into jealous murderers, if women can cause wars, their danger is located is in their sex, in their body, that “razor in a soft fruit,” as Darst writes.
The narrative of blame within the girls’ deaths inevitably becomes tangled with gender expectations and emotional judgments. Fault is found in everything about them, even if contradictory: in the clothes girls wear, in the way they sit, in their beauty, in how good they are.
“Beautiful as a plum, my girl--
& just as keen to be bitten.” (“[Follow the red silk thread]”)
Here, Darst points out how a girl’s beauty becomes reason enough to lead to her death. A girls’ beauty is equated to her active search to be seen, to be “bitten.”
Catharine MacKinnon asks, “Across cultures, is whatever defines women as ‘different’ the same as whatever defines women as ‘inferior’ the same as whatever defines women’s ’sexuality’?” Considering the question through Darst’s collection and the subject matter she explores, the interest in these girls from all angles derives from our perception of their difference, and in certain ways, our desire of this difference: the serial rapist or killer’s desire to possess the girls (Darst writes, “ladies are being murdered/by a man who’s searching for … something he lost/ inside them”), and our desire to define the who and whys and what behind their lives and deaths. What, then, does it mean to be a girl? Can it be separated out from the body, from the things your body wants, from the things others want to do to your body?
“We all had cravings, fingers, throbbing to music.
Then I didn’t know it was sex, would deny
When boyfriends asked me. “That’s gross.’”
~(“[A few things I learned about sex],” 18).
And ultimately, can one’s physicality exist without sexuality? What does the knowledge of your own physicality lead to in the definition of your self? In another’s definition, and consumption, of your self? MacKinnon, again:
“Dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its masculinity, submission eroticized defines its femininity. So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class—the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation and requisite presentation of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation—are made into the content of sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it.”
“They separated us for sex ed. ‘Wipe
Front to back,’ the man said, as if he tried it and it was easy.
We asked about erections, not about pleasure.”
~ ([A few things I learned about sex], 18)
Is it possible to be a female body without being sexualized?
* * *
“All this suggests that what is called sexuality is the dynamic control by which male dominance—in forms that range from intimate to institutional, from a look to a rape—eroticizes and thus defines man and woman, gender identity and sexual pleasure. It is also that which maintains and defines male supremacy as a political system. Male sexual desire is thereby simultaneously created and serviced, never satisfied once and for all, while male force is romanticized, even sacralized, potentiated and naturalized, by being submerged into sex itself.” (MacKinnon)
To identify something or someone as erotic is to acknowledge its position under a gaze. MacKinnon’s observation on sexuality, of course, is heteronormative, rooted in the power dynamic that exists in a heterosexual pairing, the interaction between a male gazer and a female gazee. The girls and the killers in Darst’s collection, too, reflect upon girls or women targeted by, defined by, eroticized by men.
The connection between the erotic and death intimates the objectification that happens when something is gazed at—in extremes, the objectification is so intense that life is necessarily expelled. Mike Featherstone notes in his essay, “Love and Eroticism” that “the erotic provides a glimpse of the realm beyond existence, it brings us into contact with death” (15). But the erotic, or the eroticzing of a body, seems to do more than just bring us into contact with death—it seems to extend life. Darst’s poems explore the triangle relationship between the erotic, love, and death, particularly within the context of the gaze and the desired. “[N]ot everyone will mistake you for a fairy princess—“ she writes in “Young Gretel,” a line packed with several levels of gender expectations: that a girl wants to be a fairy princess, that a girl wants someone to think she is a fairy princess, that we want to see girls as fairy princesses, and in her choice of the word “mistake,” Darst points out that the reality is that girl is not and will never be a fairy princess. This interaction between intention and interpretation, between desire and the desired becomes the point of eroticization.
Eroticization and love are not the same thing, but the conflation of the two—and similarly, the conflation of love and sex—is a pivotal point within the relationships between the killers and the girls, as well between society and the girls. We are aware that death is the only way for a girl to maintain her purity, that only in martyrdom can a girl become truly saved (“a saint is a girl who dies young,” Darst writes in “[Highway],” though it seems possible to mirror image that statement: the only way a girl can be a saint is to die young). The girls themselves, too, are aware of this: “how good// (we are) do you have to be/ before they melt your nails for soap?” (“[Fourth of July],” 29). But is death the only way for these girls to obtain love? In “Yde Girl,” whose body found in 1897 in the Netherlands after being in a bog for two thousand years, Darst writes: “Today someone loves her enough to remake/ her face with his fancy equations.” Love, idealized, packaged and sold to young girls; as Diane Ackerman notes, “Without love, a woman was worthless. … The ability to drive a man crazy with love was the only real power a woman had.” Darst:
“But everyone gets groped
by boys who say they love us, fingering
she cries in homeroom but she’s a slut. We aren’t: everything
we hold tight”
~(“[Fourth of July],” 29)
For girls, growing up with warnings and lessons all around, it can be confusing to determine clearly between what is “good” (read: desirable) and what is “bad” (read: unwanted), how to “be loved” and how to “have sex.” Desire, after all, is defined differently by context and person, and it exists on a continuum, not a binary. In a later poem, “Beautyberry,” Darst explores the old story of a girl whose drowned body is discovered by a harpist, whose are made into a harp, and when played, plays only one song in which she reveals her killer. Death becomes salvation—the girl can only achieve a voice in death, and through the love of a male harpist.
It would do a disservice to Darst to say that she chooses a side; perhaps it would be a disservice to Darst to say she maps out sides at all. There is no moralization to simplify narratives into their own version of fairytale: the Little Red Riding Hood of men being big bad scary wolves, and girls innocent flower-pickers visiting grandmother’s house. What, then, becomes the point of writing these poems? Perhaps it is enough to give these mythologized, martyred females and their killers a voice, to re-envision possibilities, to identify these things we do to each other. Or is it more about looking at the search itself to uncover exactly what we are looking for, what makes a narrative, what is imagined? If the girls are already lost, what are we trying to find? “A remembering place will be sore,” Darst writes in “[Safe],” and in “[Snow White],” “do you have/scars / if not the hurt is mostly imagined.” Soreness is unseen, and scars are visible—even when the body is found, is the girl still invisible?
~AVW
(“Aria,” 55)
Society’s morbid fascination with the trope of missing, raped and murdered girls is the driving force behind Lightsey Darst’s debut collection of poems, Find the Girl. Darst is interested in both parts of the title equally: “the girl” and the “finding.” Referring to the hope of finding a missing girl alive and the need to find a dead girl’s body, and on a shadow level, the urge felt by a killer to “find the girl” (Darst writes: “Find the girl in time. Find her/and you stop her future”). Though obsession is behind the stories, reading the collection doesn’t quite feel like experiencing obsession. Darst creates an interesting distance in Find the Girl, which reflect the dehumanizations these girls undergo as they are transformed from people to headlines or myths, or worse, warnings:
“Let her suffer it, since someone has to,
some to be the stories
others survive, learn.”
(“[Methods, listen],” 21)
Darst weaves together girls and women from myth (Helen, Persephone), fairy tales (Snow White, Gretel), ancient history (the Yde girl), history-turned-lore (the prostitutes killed by Jack the Ripper), modern-day headlines (Jon-Benet Ramsay) and many other unnamed or less famous girls. She takes words from the stories, including the alleged killers, and pieces their stories together. Fittingly, in many of Darst’s poems lines dance visually across the pages. Sentences intersect each other and sometimes remain unfinished. This lends a dream-like, at times unsettling quality to poems, where ideas exist without boundaries, and remembrances collide with projected realities. The collection in whole possesses an open-endedness—poems are separated out and given their own titles, but they run into each other like watercolor. Even the habit of titling poems in italics or in brackets seems a nod to the ephemeral nature of the girls and that this narrative, that, like all other narrative, is only a version. There is no proclaimed truth, just an offered and splintered narrative.
* * *
Julia Kristeva, in her work “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection,” describes the abjection of self: “the abject … is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the subject.” The power of the abject can be seen in our confrontation of it; by confronting the abject, we are forced to find ourselves within it. The bodies and characters Darst resurrects in Find the Girl force us to do a similar thing: our social fascination with the real-life stories of young women who are raped and killed is in part because we can find ourselves within and attempt to differentiate ourselves from these stories. For women in particular, the moral lessons that play out are unavoidable, and reminders of how to act, and what is at stake.
To be a girl is to bleed, to constantly confront mortality through expectations of blood and bleeding. From birth, to menstruation, to losing one’s virginity, to giving birth. All of these socially important markers—of development, of growth—for women, are marked by blood. Darst: “Yesterday I found blood on my sheets/for the first time in years. Felt like being/a girl again.” Blood and bleeding indicates innocence and extreme femininity, but also the voyeuristic reality that comes with being female (a family waving a newly wed couple’s bed sheets out the window to show that the young bride was indeed a virgin.) Bleeding indicates a woman’s humanity, but again, because it needs to be validated by another, also becomes a double bind of proving life at the point of death.
Thus, being female is a physical experience. Historically, philosophically, psychologically, in theory and in practice, women have been identified, reified, and validated by their physicality—through and because of their body. Darst’s collection is primarily about the girls, but a secondary theme running throughout is the science behind finding the girls or finding out what happened to the girls through their bodies. The dissection of a body, its reduction to chemical reactions and scientific proofs, becomes another form of objectification placed on the female body, another way to remove their humanity. The crime scene specialist or medical examiner who states, “It’s not my affair to judge, I just take notes” (“Unsolved,” 65).
* * *
If women cause brothers to turn against brothers, if they cause kings to act like commoners, if they force rational men to turn into jealous murderers, if women can cause wars, their danger is located is in their sex, in their body, that “razor in a soft fruit,” as Darst writes.
The narrative of blame within the girls’ deaths inevitably becomes tangled with gender expectations and emotional judgments. Fault is found in everything about them, even if contradictory: in the clothes girls wear, in the way they sit, in their beauty, in how good they are.
“Beautiful as a plum, my girl--
& just as keen to be bitten.” (“[Follow the red silk thread]”)
Here, Darst points out how a girl’s beauty becomes reason enough to lead to her death. A girls’ beauty is equated to her active search to be seen, to be “bitten.”
Catharine MacKinnon asks, “Across cultures, is whatever defines women as ‘different’ the same as whatever defines women as ‘inferior’ the same as whatever defines women’s ’sexuality’?” Considering the question through Darst’s collection and the subject matter she explores, the interest in these girls from all angles derives from our perception of their difference, and in certain ways, our desire of this difference: the serial rapist or killer’s desire to possess the girls (Darst writes, “ladies are being murdered/by a man who’s searching for … something he lost/ inside them”), and our desire to define the who and whys and what behind their lives and deaths. What, then, does it mean to be a girl? Can it be separated out from the body, from the things your body wants, from the things others want to do to your body?
“We all had cravings, fingers, throbbing to music.
Then I didn’t know it was sex, would deny
When boyfriends asked me. “That’s gross.’”
~(“[A few things I learned about sex],” 18).
And ultimately, can one’s physicality exist without sexuality? What does the knowledge of your own physicality lead to in the definition of your self? In another’s definition, and consumption, of your self? MacKinnon, again:
“Dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its masculinity, submission eroticized defines its femininity. So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class—the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation and requisite presentation of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation—are made into the content of sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it.”
“They separated us for sex ed. ‘Wipe
Front to back,’ the man said, as if he tried it and it was easy.
We asked about erections, not about pleasure.”
~ ([A few things I learned about sex], 18)
Is it possible to be a female body without being sexualized?
* * *
“All this suggests that what is called sexuality is the dynamic control by which male dominance—in forms that range from intimate to institutional, from a look to a rape—eroticizes and thus defines man and woman, gender identity and sexual pleasure. It is also that which maintains and defines male supremacy as a political system. Male sexual desire is thereby simultaneously created and serviced, never satisfied once and for all, while male force is romanticized, even sacralized, potentiated and naturalized, by being submerged into sex itself.” (MacKinnon)
To identify something or someone as erotic is to acknowledge its position under a gaze. MacKinnon’s observation on sexuality, of course, is heteronormative, rooted in the power dynamic that exists in a heterosexual pairing, the interaction between a male gazer and a female gazee. The girls and the killers in Darst’s collection, too, reflect upon girls or women targeted by, defined by, eroticized by men.
The connection between the erotic and death intimates the objectification that happens when something is gazed at—in extremes, the objectification is so intense that life is necessarily expelled. Mike Featherstone notes in his essay, “Love and Eroticism” that “the erotic provides a glimpse of the realm beyond existence, it brings us into contact with death” (15). But the erotic, or the eroticzing of a body, seems to do more than just bring us into contact with death—it seems to extend life. Darst’s poems explore the triangle relationship between the erotic, love, and death, particularly within the context of the gaze and the desired. “[N]ot everyone will mistake you for a fairy princess—“ she writes in “Young Gretel,” a line packed with several levels of gender expectations: that a girl wants to be a fairy princess, that a girl wants someone to think she is a fairy princess, that we want to see girls as fairy princesses, and in her choice of the word “mistake,” Darst points out that the reality is that girl is not and will never be a fairy princess. This interaction between intention and interpretation, between desire and the desired becomes the point of eroticization.
Eroticization and love are not the same thing, but the conflation of the two—and similarly, the conflation of love and sex—is a pivotal point within the relationships between the killers and the girls, as well between society and the girls. We are aware that death is the only way for a girl to maintain her purity, that only in martyrdom can a girl become truly saved (“a saint is a girl who dies young,” Darst writes in “[Highway],” though it seems possible to mirror image that statement: the only way a girl can be a saint is to die young). The girls themselves, too, are aware of this: “how good// (we are) do you have to be/ before they melt your nails for soap?” (“[Fourth of July],” 29). But is death the only way for these girls to obtain love? In “Yde Girl,” whose body found in 1897 in the Netherlands after being in a bog for two thousand years, Darst writes: “Today someone loves her enough to remake/ her face with his fancy equations.” Love, idealized, packaged and sold to young girls; as Diane Ackerman notes, “Without love, a woman was worthless. … The ability to drive a man crazy with love was the only real power a woman had.” Darst:
“But everyone gets groped
by boys who say they love us, fingering
she cries in homeroom but she’s a slut. We aren’t: everything
we hold tight”
~(“[Fourth of July],” 29)
For girls, growing up with warnings and lessons all around, it can be confusing to determine clearly between what is “good” (read: desirable) and what is “bad” (read: unwanted), how to “be loved” and how to “have sex.” Desire, after all, is defined differently by context and person, and it exists on a continuum, not a binary. In a later poem, “Beautyberry,” Darst explores the old story of a girl whose drowned body is discovered by a harpist, whose are made into a harp, and when played, plays only one song in which she reveals her killer. Death becomes salvation—the girl can only achieve a voice in death, and through the love of a male harpist.
It would do a disservice to Darst to say that she chooses a side; perhaps it would be a disservice to Darst to say she maps out sides at all. There is no moralization to simplify narratives into their own version of fairytale: the Little Red Riding Hood of men being big bad scary wolves, and girls innocent flower-pickers visiting grandmother’s house. What, then, becomes the point of writing these poems? Perhaps it is enough to give these mythologized, martyred females and their killers a voice, to re-envision possibilities, to identify these things we do to each other. Or is it more about looking at the search itself to uncover exactly what we are looking for, what makes a narrative, what is imagined? If the girls are already lost, what are we trying to find? “A remembering place will be sore,” Darst writes in “[Safe],” and in “[Snow White],” “do you have/scars / if not the hurt is mostly imagined.” Soreness is unseen, and scars are visible—even when the body is found, is the girl still invisible?
~AVW
Sight Map, by Brian Teare
University of California Press, 2009
Brian Teare’s Sight Map is a breathtakingly precocious foray into the natural world, yet the poems—some of which respond to nineteenth century poets Emerson, Manley Hopkins and Thoreau—are not run-of-the-mill pastorals. Contemporary society rarely values nature for nature’s sake, by which I mean the “There will we sit upon the rocks /and see the shepherds feed their flocks” Christopher Marlowe sense of the word. The modern view on the natural world is ecological rather than romantic, tinged with an apocalyptic flavour which would befit a Greenpeace advertisement more than a poem. In light of all that, I find it remarkable that Teare supersedes the campiness of the genre without abandoning lyric forms, albeit forms that he challenges with a stunning proficiency.
Teare is no stranger to the tools of contemporary poetry. His syntax is an amalgamation of fragments, utilizing sleek enjambments and chiasmas to create a type of seamless movement which illuminates ideas without sounding either hip or postmodern. Take for instance, this section from “Emerson Susquehanna”, the opening poem in the collection which takes subtitles from portions of Emerson’s journals:
…Subzero, months
from thaw, we walk—o trees, trouble,
tremble at the roots of being, underneath,
under laws, the order of things
so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.
There is a sequential legato, even in his use of punctuation and gaps, which signals the sensual pleasure he derives from manipulating language. In “Lent Prayer” he goes further to suggest a type of organic metonymy between language and nature. Nature is language, and vice versa: “rain all spondaic and unrelenting. Pallid nouns look familiar but they’re dead.” and “fog erasing syntax that holds nouns in the sentence called landscape, looks like: streetlight tree…” Material objects become second to nature and nature becomes artifact just as words are artifact, lasting mementos of a moment or a history that lives on the page after the moment is passed.
Of interest is Teare’s use of the word precarious in “Lent Prayer” which begins:
The way prayer is root to precarious : two crows creep
the steeple.
This juxtapositioning of images, “root” and crows creeping up the steeple, suggest a dichotomy which makes itself manifest in many of Teare’s poems: the always present polarity between objects and emotions, nature and language and material things. “Lent Prayer” is filled with these contrarieties: “The way soul has no certain etymology, how weirdly what’s rootless goes wrong-like…”
It is in these contrarieties that the precariousness of the poems make themselves felt, an ever-shifting balance between knowledge and vulnerability. Teare’s use of colons in this poem further emphasizes the separation of clauses and ideas, and between the objects he compares.
in the mind like fish flick water open, switchblade-
quick : weathervane
horse-cart milk-pail police-tape
farmhouse snowplow : if
I put them back, I’ll hate the tableaus
they make : cows
The landscape of the body figures largely in the last section (37:48:9 N, 122:15:4 W). The poem “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” begins with the lines “I loved him, but not without ambivalence when he pushed inside me…” This revelation is followed by a onomatopoeic description of the lake: “The lake water ends with an i in it, slip lisping to lip and, stalled, it sticks.” The body and lake appear and reappear, the images and sentences repeating in a type of bizarre time loop which would be aggravating in the hands of a lesser poet. Teare deviates the margins and length of line to such an extent that on the page, the poem itself looks like a foreign territory. The replaying of the narrator’s walking around the lake and simultaneously circumnavigating the geography of his memories strikingly demonstrates the obsessive and highly visceral quality of physical love.
I think of Teare’s poems as constellations of sorts, bright points which shine separate from each other, the reader drawing lines to connect one to the other. Even the title Sight Map suggests a diagrammatic representation of area, the eye distinguishing the physical features, whether it be on land or sea or the body. Furthermore, the titles of the book sections are longitude/latitude coordinates (i.e. 42:53:6 N, 71:57:17 W) except for the section “Pilgrim” which features Teare’s version of prose poems. It is in these short works that a pull toward abstraction occurs. Always teetering on the edge of composure, the assonance of the lines shines through his fragmented sentences, the interstices between images confronting the reader to create her own map of sorts, suggesting an openness and an urgency towards a further knowledge that Teare insinuates but never fully imparts. This is where the precarious enters in these poem, and therein resides this collection's startling intricacy. ~JMB
Teare is no stranger to the tools of contemporary poetry. His syntax is an amalgamation of fragments, utilizing sleek enjambments and chiasmas to create a type of seamless movement which illuminates ideas without sounding either hip or postmodern. Take for instance, this section from “Emerson Susquehanna”, the opening poem in the collection which takes subtitles from portions of Emerson’s journals:
…Subzero, months
from thaw, we walk—o trees, trouble,
tremble at the roots of being, underneath,
under laws, the order of things
so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.
There is a sequential legato, even in his use of punctuation and gaps, which signals the sensual pleasure he derives from manipulating language. In “Lent Prayer” he goes further to suggest a type of organic metonymy between language and nature. Nature is language, and vice versa: “rain all spondaic and unrelenting. Pallid nouns look familiar but they’re dead.” and “fog erasing syntax that holds nouns in the sentence called landscape, looks like: streetlight tree…” Material objects become second to nature and nature becomes artifact just as words are artifact, lasting mementos of a moment or a history that lives on the page after the moment is passed.
Of interest is Teare’s use of the word precarious in “Lent Prayer” which begins:
The way prayer is root to precarious : two crows creep
the steeple.
This juxtapositioning of images, “root” and crows creeping up the steeple, suggest a dichotomy which makes itself manifest in many of Teare’s poems: the always present polarity between objects and emotions, nature and language and material things. “Lent Prayer” is filled with these contrarieties: “The way soul has no certain etymology, how weirdly what’s rootless goes wrong-like…”
It is in these contrarieties that the precariousness of the poems make themselves felt, an ever-shifting balance between knowledge and vulnerability. Teare’s use of colons in this poem further emphasizes the separation of clauses and ideas, and between the objects he compares.
in the mind like fish flick water open, switchblade-
quick : weathervane
horse-cart milk-pail police-tape
farmhouse snowplow : if
I put them back, I’ll hate the tableaus
they make : cows
The landscape of the body figures largely in the last section (37:48:9 N, 122:15:4 W). The poem “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” begins with the lines “I loved him, but not without ambivalence when he pushed inside me…” This revelation is followed by a onomatopoeic description of the lake: “The lake water ends with an i in it, slip lisping to lip and, stalled, it sticks.” The body and lake appear and reappear, the images and sentences repeating in a type of bizarre time loop which would be aggravating in the hands of a lesser poet. Teare deviates the margins and length of line to such an extent that on the page, the poem itself looks like a foreign territory. The replaying of the narrator’s walking around the lake and simultaneously circumnavigating the geography of his memories strikingly demonstrates the obsessive and highly visceral quality of physical love.
I think of Teare’s poems as constellations of sorts, bright points which shine separate from each other, the reader drawing lines to connect one to the other. Even the title Sight Map suggests a diagrammatic representation of area, the eye distinguishing the physical features, whether it be on land or sea or the body. Furthermore, the titles of the book sections are longitude/latitude coordinates (i.e. 42:53:6 N, 71:57:17 W) except for the section “Pilgrim” which features Teare’s version of prose poems. It is in these short works that a pull toward abstraction occurs. Always teetering on the edge of composure, the assonance of the lines shines through his fragmented sentences, the interstices between images confronting the reader to create her own map of sorts, suggesting an openness and an urgency towards a further knowledge that Teare insinuates but never fully imparts. This is where the precarious enters in these poem, and therein resides this collection's startling intricacy. ~JMB
R's Boat, by Lisa Robertson
University of California Press, 2010
Who is to say what a sentence really is? Must it end with a punctuation mark? Is it essential to have a subject and a predicate? Does it consist of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses? Grammatical rules aside, can it be defined simply as a set of words that is complete in itself? Lisa Robertson (in an interview on the Poetry Foundation website) states that she has always been seduced by sentences. “I’m a sentence-lover before I’m a writer,” she stipulates. Is this akin to saying something along the lines as I have a foot fetish or I prefer the lyric song rather than the symphony? Perhaps. It certainly sheds light on the contrapuntal texture of R’s Boat, a dizzying, refractive array of sentences. “Much of my earlier work has been testing the internal structure of sentences as wildly psycho-sexual-social units,” Robertson adds in the interview, and true to form R’s Boat is filled with phrases that seem to exude a type of virile autonomy.
By early June, I lost speech.
What about the conceptualized trees?
What about the phosphorescent sexes that took my strength away?
and later:
I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple.
Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment.
Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses.
The section that these excerpts are from, UTOPIA/, is a heady continuum of arresting phrases, separate yet strung together by a non-narrative, philosophical arch that approaches a quasi stream of consciousness. Robertson capitalizes the beginning of each line, the majority of which end with a period. Lines are double spaced except between stanzas, after which there are three spaces before the next stanza commences. The overall architecture of the section—and of the entire book, in that case—is like that of an edifice with few walls and many windows. Sentences hover through white space, space which becomes as essential as the text. Punctuation is sparse and never unexpected, acting only as fermatas through which the jouissance and liquidity of each phrase detaches and attaches itself to the next.
This fluid quality of the poems must have something to do with R’s Boat itself, the vessel of Rousseau which Robertson has used both as a muse and a sounding board off which the patina of her text reflects. Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, describes floating directionless in a lake, perceiving the flickers of his consciousness at one with nature’s patterns of light, water, sound and foliage. His writings featured a focus on subjectivity and self-examination which would greatly shape modern philosophy. Yet Robertson is not a philosopher in the literal sense, she is a poet, and therefore these poems are archival and at the same time autobiographical, mapping out the experience of daily life in a method that relies on collage and a certain morphological layering.
The cell which Robertson layers, manipulates, and ultimately has her way with is of course, the sentence. “It is always the wrong linguistic moment/So how can I speak of sex?” she writes at the beginning of A CUFF/. In that first sentence is the only question mark in the entire twelve page poem, which does not contain even one period.
And if I degenerate into style
It’s because I love it very much
All week long
Like a first thing
Like a technique or marriage
Where conditions are incomprehensible
Thus satisfying the narrative of the body
It is interesting to note that she writes of narrative when the poem seemingly is devoid of a conventional narrative itself, and more remarkable that she writes of it in juxtaposition with the body. The aura of this poem is somewhat sexy, but faintly clinical, as if from a biology student’s point of view as he dissects anatomical parts from the whole. I believe that this dissection is key to Robertson’s work here. It is widely known that Robertson gleaned text from sixty of her personal notebooks in writing R’s Boat, yet her aim was not confessional, but rather to create an “autobiographical book that was not self-referential.” Therefore the sentences are like amputated extremities of a whole, an odd assemblage of parts that is not imbued with the innate pulsation of a narrative or coherent body but which rather finds its embodiment in its fractured, indexical quality. ~WSW
By early June, I lost speech.
What about the conceptualized trees?
What about the phosphorescent sexes that took my strength away?
and later:
I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple.
Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment.
Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses.
The section that these excerpts are from, UTOPIA/, is a heady continuum of arresting phrases, separate yet strung together by a non-narrative, philosophical arch that approaches a quasi stream of consciousness. Robertson capitalizes the beginning of each line, the majority of which end with a period. Lines are double spaced except between stanzas, after which there are three spaces before the next stanza commences. The overall architecture of the section—and of the entire book, in that case—is like that of an edifice with few walls and many windows. Sentences hover through white space, space which becomes as essential as the text. Punctuation is sparse and never unexpected, acting only as fermatas through which the jouissance and liquidity of each phrase detaches and attaches itself to the next.
This fluid quality of the poems must have something to do with R’s Boat itself, the vessel of Rousseau which Robertson has used both as a muse and a sounding board off which the patina of her text reflects. Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, describes floating directionless in a lake, perceiving the flickers of his consciousness at one with nature’s patterns of light, water, sound and foliage. His writings featured a focus on subjectivity and self-examination which would greatly shape modern philosophy. Yet Robertson is not a philosopher in the literal sense, she is a poet, and therefore these poems are archival and at the same time autobiographical, mapping out the experience of daily life in a method that relies on collage and a certain morphological layering.
The cell which Robertson layers, manipulates, and ultimately has her way with is of course, the sentence. “It is always the wrong linguistic moment/So how can I speak of sex?” she writes at the beginning of A CUFF/. In that first sentence is the only question mark in the entire twelve page poem, which does not contain even one period.
And if I degenerate into style
It’s because I love it very much
All week long
Like a first thing
Like a technique or marriage
Where conditions are incomprehensible
Thus satisfying the narrative of the body
It is interesting to note that she writes of narrative when the poem seemingly is devoid of a conventional narrative itself, and more remarkable that she writes of it in juxtaposition with the body. The aura of this poem is somewhat sexy, but faintly clinical, as if from a biology student’s point of view as he dissects anatomical parts from the whole. I believe that this dissection is key to Robertson’s work here. It is widely known that Robertson gleaned text from sixty of her personal notebooks in writing R’s Boat, yet her aim was not confessional, but rather to create an “autobiographical book that was not self-referential.” Therefore the sentences are like amputated extremities of a whole, an odd assemblage of parts that is not imbued with the innate pulsation of a narrative or coherent body but which rather finds its embodiment in its fractured, indexical quality. ~WSW
