by Danielle Dutton
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2007
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman
Easy Does It
Danielle Dutton’s Attempts at a Life is an extended meditation on the pleasures of reading—primarily that vicarious experience of trying on the lives of the characters that one encounters in fiction. The book begins with the poem “Jane Eyre,” a stripped down version of the familiar novel, in which the basic outlines of the plot and character are presented with quick and careful sketching:
It started out I was hungry and smaller than most. Not pretty, but passable. Rest easy, for this is not another story about a girl and her father; I never even knew mine.
The poem continues with the same remarkable ease that it begins with. The poem is ultimately less about the experience of reading Jane Eyre than the experience of re-reading Jane Eyre—the poem moves forward with an intimacy that can border on fatigue (familiarity breeds what, dear reader?)—but the final effect is something that’s hard to describe. It’s not quite elegiac, although it does have that slight obituary quality of covering the full life in a tiny space. It’s also not quite exhaustive, although it does dip into all of the crucial contours of the novel. It’s most like love—the way that something familiar and known can continue to excite past the point of discovery. That the fact of the beloved remains a source of wonder even after it has ceased to be a source of surprise.
Her poems often approach familiar texts by condensing the personality of the characters. One of the strangest things about trying to talk about Dutton’s work is that everything I want to say sounds like an insult, but I don’t mean it that way. For instance, her poems often feel like what remains you with you long after you’ve read the book—the personality and the plot boiled down to its most basic outlines—but it’s actually a rather serious accomplishment. Her aims here are quite modest, but represent a kind of embodiment that I think is quite difficult to accomplish, where she manages to strip down certain texts to a kind of embodied personality or core. Why can’t I praise someone for thoroughly making a modest achievement? Why doesn’t that sound like real praise?
As the book moves forward, it becomes clear that Dutton is not only exploring the vicarious pleasures of reading—she is also discovering the limitations of those pleasures. The selves of the poems begin to shatter as the book moves on, and how could they not when the second poem is composed of collaged lines from Celine? There’s the knowledge here that trying on other people’s lives is dangerous and shattering stuff. Once the boundaries of the real and the fictional start being crossed, there’s a way that the self is in danger, and Dutton manages to work these transformations and breaking with great ease. The poem “Landscapes” ends:
“Oh, dear me! I’m sorry to hear that,” said the literary gentleman in a shocked tone.
It’s a playful rebuke to the reader at the same moment that it invokes the clichés of hastily written novels. The collection touches on a number of authors—Alice James, Louis Zukofsky, Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and others. But each of them are incorporated by Dutton’s voice. She’s able to work with their material while keeping her own authorial voice vibrant and clear.
Having been seduced by the familiar, I found myself able to enjoy Dutton’s more disorienting and disjointed work. The tone of the final poem “Sprung” is clear, even if the subject matter is not:
Once upon a hard-pressed twiggy stuff, under spectacles of small trees, a gorgeous modern promiscuity made a pretty rare bird. “With respect to your work,” said the congregation of men at a useless festival under a hard-to-think sky, “Hey, death shaves me sideways under an anarchy root. Just pull a thread so the world can worship the dictatorship of the Warblers.”
The poem continues in this manner, using “material,” the notes inform us, “from William Carlos Williams’s ‘Spring and All.’” It’s a fitting tribute to Williams’s explosive and fascinating volume, much of which is concerned with finding the boundary between poetry and prose. I think that Williams would approve of these as poems—particularly for their refusal of pure exposition in favor of what he might call “imagination.”
The back cover of the book unequivocally demands that it be shelved with Fiction (that charming “keyword” in the upper left hand corner), although the copy from the press begins by telling us that these pieces are, “Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory…” Even without Williams, I would want to claim these pieces firmly as prose poems—in large part because of the way that poetry has become the big tent where everything that doesn’t fit somewhere else is welcome. To the extent that these poems live in the realm of what we now call “theory”—it’s a remarkably friendly version of the term. Most of us who spend time doing/reading “literary theory” know it is a somewhat prickly terrain, full of untranslatable French (“jouissance” anyone?), arcanely nuanced distinction (Foucault is not an existentialist because he believes that power precedes the subject), and gleefully pronounced paradox. Dutton is certainly at home in a theoretical universe—one could discuss many of these poems—and quite profitably, I think—in terms of contemporary literary theory. However, Dutton’s work is incredibly inviting—she’s able to inhabit the insights of theory and then perform them without having to get bogged down in the sort of jargon or explanation that might deter the general reader (whoever you are). Dutton’s work is “accessible” in the best way possible. She’s working at a remarkably high level of insight while still inviting you to enjoy yourself.
Confession: I’m almost seven months behind on this review. Why? Because I find these poems as hard to talk about as I find them pleasant to read. Who said that poetry is always pressing forward the boundaries of what can be thought and said? I think she’d be glad to see that it’s still true.
*
The Cheeseburger Test measures the degree of concreteness in the work: is the reader given a cheeseburger, or ideas about a cheeseburger? Is the cheeseburger a cheeseburger first, before it is made to symbolize anything else? Is this language I want to eat, or is scentless mental air? Am I grounded or floating? You can tell my biases already: I like cheeseburgers and beer. I like my abstractions organized spatially like tangrams or maps, so I can find more places to get cheeseburgers and beer. But there is more to it than that.