by Chad Sweeney
BlazeVOX [books] 2007
Reviewed by John Deming

“Green burns in the green cloud”

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.

Consider then the indefinite article “an” in the title of Chad Sweeney’s book-length poem An Architecture. A mind constantly processes and buries information, and it’s all anyone can do to keep up—to allow lessons from experience and to call upon them when making decisions. A motion south rather than north means a wholly alternate set of experiences, of people met and decisions made. The word “an” reminds us, architects of our own lives, that small decisions pile up—that things are one way, but feel as though they could easily have been another way.

In the course of living and decision-making, Sweeney offers, one leaves plenty in one’s wake. Places, tastes, people:

Today I saw two old friends
in the street—passing

but did not know them, did
not stop

to talk. No longer the

self
who loved these men

among the crowds, this sidewalk

longer than I thought.

Here we’re reminded that a human life constantly reinvents itself; people who were once familiar, even important, often begin to lose relevance. But these lines also suggest the converse: that if certain elements of chance had fallen into place, any stranger on the sidewalk might have been a close, valuable friend.

Such is the power of Sweeney’s airy fragments. Unknowing and unrelenting confusion are our burden, but at least we aren’t without an intrinsic understanding of value. This poem, an assemblage of 56 fragments across 56 pages, seems less interested in solving the problem of perpetual wonder and regret than it is in presenting the problem, in trusting (to borrow Ashbery’s phrase) snapped-off perceptions as a more reliable guide through reality and experience. The poems themselves are as cryptic as their subject matter:

too many choices
give me a shovel and a pit

let it be a stranger pays me

I will bury mountains
in this red sleep

The lines are dreamlike, spare and spacey. Why does he need the shovel if he’s also given the pit? Is it to refill the hole once he’s buried the mountains? Life itself is a dream, makes no sense, and comes with a wide variety of choices that lead to a wide variety of regrets. Yet our poet avoids cynicism; he is curious, detached, maybe a little frustrated, but mostly awestruck. Some fragments record abstract perceptions, but importantly, others lend equal gravity to physical perceptions:

the hillside
collapses toward the water
                                         clutches of briar
nettle

inhabit the marsh reeds
cow parsnip

clamors from spring mud

Sweeney’s pacing allows us to take these in, to see them hard, as he sees them: apparent facts that have resulted from a series of small, seemingly insignificant changes. Things mesmerize our poet with their very thingness: “Green burns in the green cloud.” Sometimes “diamonds lie unfound” in a rock; the “mineral fact” of something is both arbitrary and fated. A thing’s underlying form is its own explanation, and doesn’t need some obtuse notion of god to prove its worth; the fact of it, its underlying architecture, explains itself.

Understanding this is one thing; putting it into perpetual practice is the whole human predicament. The person that one builds oneself into is always subject to regret and nostalgia, hurrying through an abstract life presented under abstract circumstances, forced to make abstract decisions while time, neutral, advances. Yet perhaps this isn’t such a terrible thing:

The meteor shower
inside the man
maintains his equili-
brium.

People tend to make decisions with the hope that right choices will mean finding some level of balance. The architecture of a human life, surrounded by the architecture of rocks, buildings and sky, is not without its own underlying physical architecture (“—the double // helix”). “The world,” Sweeney concludes, “marries itself  in the small.” The nature of free will is at the center of this book; wind doesn’t “choose” to blow northwest the way a person “chooses” to drop an atom bomb (indeed, something apocalyptic looms in Sweeney’s book; his ending regards a “quiver / of instability” in a molecule, and earlier, what might be viewed as survivors “search the cities / in ones”). For all his complexity, Sweeney is never excessively conversational or didactic, which is refreshing these days. His touch is careful and mysterious, so much so that you perceive along with him, that you forget, in an instant of reading, that his perceptions aren’t your own.

Arbitrary as they might be, these small, even molecular marriages are carved in stone the instant after they’ve taken place. One might as easily lift a right arm as lift the left—but once the right is lifted, it’s a fact and, at least according to our limited means, can’t be changed. In the end, we find, it might be an architecture, but when all is said and done, it can’t have been otherwise. Free will or not, humans aren’t the only things reinventing or attempting to balance themselves— “the metamorphic surfaces / of air and rock”—but there’s plenty of satisfaction to be had in the notion that the struggle that maddens is likewise the struggle that balances.

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