by Jennifer Firestone
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark
Going Places
To Travel!
To Change Countries
To travel! To change countries!
To be forever someone else,
With a soul that has no roots,
Living only off what it sees!
To belong not even to me!
To go forward, to follow after
The absence of any goal
And any desire to achieve it!
This is what I call travel.
But there’s nothing in it of me
Besides my dream of the journey.
The rest is just land and sky.
–Fernando Pessoa
Depending on how you read the above poem, travel could sound like an illuminating experience, accentuated by actual exclamations and Buddha-like certainness: nothing ever belongs to the self, the self forever becomes someone new. In a sense this sounds appealing to me, as it also does to many others who seek to organize their lives by some tired but true maxims. Who could deny the allure of living without deadlines and responsibilities, without waking up every morning to roughly the same routine of coffee and packed lunch? It seems though, that there is a deeper psychology at work. On second look, the exclamations in the Pessoa poem read frightfully, “The absence of any goal / And any desire to achieve it!” Read in this way it sounds like the lament of someone who is stuck in the bell-jar. Perhaps the speaker who reflects that travel has “nothing in it of me” realizes something that most Carnival cruise guests don’t: the moral quandary of ourselves as empty vessels, humping further and further away to exotic places where some type of fulfillment will be beheld. Travel inherently poses existential questions to those self-conscious enough to notice.
Jennifer Firestone’s book Holiday acts as a travelogue documenting more than just the sights and sounds of far away places, as Firestone pays little homage to any place in particular. The book is divided into six sections, all without titles. Judging from the context and description of some poems, I understand when she is writing about a specific place, but without reference to mainstream tourist destinations, which Firestone more or less leaves out, it is hard to determine which small city she is wandering around in.
These poems make use of spacing instead of punctuation in most places and in turn offer no clear determination as to how they should be read. Each poem relays something different: a definite location full of references to Michelangelo, an imagined history of what may have taken place on the very street on which the speaker currently stands, overheard conversations of other travelers—there is almost no end to the differences captured in these vignettes. But regardless of this difference there is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.
The voice in Holiday wavers back and forth between the silly exaggeration of “vacation[ing] the hell / out of things” and the very real disappointment in the way “other images / felt visited / always something letting you down: / at the artifact breath held / you whistles it out / assuming there was more / you were missing.” The conceit of the book manifests toward the end when a woman touring the same historic building is overheard as saying “Is it worth / going down these steps / are the bottom rooms worth it?” Such a question embodies the real tension of vacationing, or taking a “holiday” as the book is aptly titled, and the true sense of traveling as an existential experience. Is it true that traveling means the soul has no home? Or is it rather that the soul is open to developing into something that it would not have been able to had it just stayed put in one place? I’m not suggesting the book pretends to answer this, only that the poems in the book as savvy enough to recognize this moral ambiguity and that the poet thinks enough of herself and her experience to make record. The last poem in section 5 begins by saying “I can’t lose my body. I’m membered by its attachments,” reminding us that no matter where you are you are always there. Ultimately this is a lesson that everyone (traveler or not) comes to realize. Try as best you can but there will always be something of you in it, whatever that it may be.
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Susan Tichy’s third full-length collection, Bone Pagoda, is an elegiac travelogue. The title (which is also the title of the final poem in the collection) refers to an ossuary in Vietnam, constructed from the bones of 30,000 massacred Buddhist monks. Tichy’s emotional and metaphorical location is Vietnam—the poems weave through tropical scenes, mosquito nets and monks in saffron robes, and instantly flash to glimpses of burning flesh and severed limbs, all the while maintaining a self-conscious formal grip on the ineffability of it all. Tichy seeks to memorialize and speak what cannot be spoken: loss. There are many gaps, spaces and holes within the text and imagery. Her language is ever-conscious of its own failings, “In stuttering etcetera.” The book is intellectually stimulating, and Tichy creates many striking images for the mind’s eye; however, I never hit on an emotional center.
Most girls that I know who graduated from a liberal arts college with a BA in English/Literature more often than not have a story about what a big crush they had on one (or more) of their English professors. As an undergrad, my crush’s name was Professor Jarrells. In truth, he was really one of the first “guys” I had ever met who enjoyed reading writers like Kerouac and Calvino for fun (having not had too many “ambitious” friends in high school) so you can see how easy it was for my imagination to get swept away with romantic possibilities, especially after learning that he was also a huge Wilco fan.
Most everything about this book is dark. It contains five sections, each with a cryptic title: I. Wounded; II. Death; III. In the Shape of a Storm; IV. All Night: Forever; V. Holy Land. Though there is little hope that these grimly titled sections will contain heartening poems, one still turns to the first poem with an open mind. Here are the first two lines of the first prose poem: “There’s a child in the ditch by the side of the road. She’s the source of every drop of blood.”
Maybe human beings never really know what to do, not for certain. There’s intuition, there’s careful planning, but to some extent, even decisions rooted in experience and practice can seem arbitrary, dependent largely upon luck.
Cecilia Woloch’s chapbook Narcissus is divided into two sections. The first of these is introduced by a quote from “Narcissus” by Patricia Hooper: “Didn’t I stand there once? / Didn’t I choose to go back?” The inclusion of this makes me think that the author found more inspiration from Hooper than from the rather conspicuous Greek myth (thankfully). True to form, the poems in this section highlight the selfsame nostalgia and wistfulness of Hooper’s quote; there’s reminiscence, desire, sentimentality in “Anniversary”:
Matthew Langley’s chapbook Letters Toward Jim is a collection of correspondence poems between a narrator and someone named Jim (potentiallly Jim Goar, editor of Past Simple and Catfish Press). Whereas other notable correspondence projects such as Jack Spicer’s After Lorca use the oblique relationship between sender and receiver as a justification for compiling and categorizing the collected poems, in Letters to Jim, the motivation behind the letters is open-ended and the relationship between sender and receiver is left unspecified. In this sense Jim becomes an idea rather than a real person. Who Jim is and what he represents remains to be embodied by the letter-poems and not by historical context or narrative explication.
Anyone remember the video game Q*Bert? Sort of a 3-D Pac Man with better characterization. You controlled a tube-nosed character springing up and down a pyramidal staircase of squares, changing each square to a different color while avoiding the coiled demons and making sure not to jump off the stairs. Sometimes, if you were trapped in the bottom corner, you could jump on a magic disc and get transported to the top of the stair pyramid again, and the demons chasing you would spring into the void, stretching uselessly for a recoil that never came. Sometimes there was no magic disc, and you jumped off the staircase into the void, spouting cartoon curses like #$@!. Jeffrey McDaniel’s poems in The Endarkenment are like playing a double game of Q*Bert, as if you controlled tube-nose with your right hand and its mirrored opposite with your left.
In one poem in her new book, Jan Beatty imagines taking a “vacation” from her own body: “Just give me a wife/ beater & an AK-47 & I’ll be Nic Cage/ bustin up Con-Air, fuckin A,” she writes. Beatty doesn’t attempt to develop this scene. She writes in the next lines of a “theoryhead” she knew in graduate school and a friend named Aaron who chants, “panties, panties, panties” when he’s “irritated.” Yet we linger there with her – or her and Nicholas Cage.
