by G.C. Waldrep
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Interchanging

The poems in G.C. Waldrep’s One Way No Exit are not poems exactly. They are more like postulations, little logical deductions that prove themselves one cog at a time. An easy way to decipher these postulations would be to declare them ekphrastics, as the pieces in this book are derived from the 1989 exhibition “One Way: Fotografien” by the German photographer Peter Rathmann.

This seems like a sensible thing to do on some levels. It can help one come to terms with what is ultimately difficult, theory-driven writing. Their relationship could most easily be called impenetrable and of little consequence (the photographer is, incidentally, very obscure, the majority of his work difficult to find, even on the internet or in the NYU library). Whatever its impetus, this is writing that attempts to achieve its own specific ends.

While it would be wrong to say that these poems don’t revolve around the first person, as they are most certainly based on and around the subject’s “real” life, their scope is terrifyingly ambitious. I say terrifying because their ambition is realized by taking things as they come (i.e. the photos in the exhibition that you will never see) and being “realized consistently in one direction” (i.e. One Way), as Waldrep declares in his prologue. The brief prologue introduces some ideas behind not only Rathmann’s aesthetics, which Waldrep borrowed from the exhibition’s catalog, but some ideas about Waldrep’s own aesthetics, and theories about the way places and their people happen repetitively, happen “consistently in one direction.”

The place he means is America. The people he means are Americans. America’s interchangeability is what we as readers come to understand about these unseeable photos; it is their inherent nature to be interchangeable. The titles of the Rathmann photos are all in the form of “City, State, Year.” Example: “XXII. Snow Hill, Maryland, 1989,” “XXIII. Charleston, South Carolina, 1989,” etc. In sum, banal. At one point I found myself writing in the book: “am barely reading the titles anymore.” But this wasn’t exactly true. I was interested in the years, the way they made me recall the look of places I inhabited looked during those years. I imagined Waldrep did this as well.

The imagined places differ only slightly. If someone came by and switched the titles on any of these pieces, I wouldn’t have noticed. Though the individual pieces do in some sense serve as representations of the absent photos (“more wall, more lines, more curbs, driving on the left,” in “XXVI. Dorchester, 1984”), I imagine that they are mostly imaginings by Waldrep. Exaggerations of what the photos succeeded in capturing, the way these bland photos of the American landscape by a non-American end up declaring Americanism, the way they lend themselves to Waldrep’s postulations.

In “VI. Daytona Beach, Florida, 1987,” consider “An American photo would avoid boredom the way popcorn avoids hot oil. / An American photo would draw [sic] in inaccurate map in the sand. / An American photo would not suggest the possibility of an electromagnetic front, / which this photo does. This is not an American photo.” Waldrep “consistently and in one direction” questions and redefines America. It is sometimes a place, sometimes a people, sometimes a habit. Its ubiquitousness lends its definitions to the landscapes, lends itself to the Buick, the car which serves as the automobile-elect in these photos and poems. It is 1987 after all. There are many such metaphorical layers throughout the book and I suppose it would be foolish for me to believe that relaying them all here would be possible, or sensible.

What I can tell you is this: The prologue states: “The surprisingly uncomplicated nature of Americans is apparent in their trivial architecture.” Though physical architecture is assumed, it results in more than that. We create an architecture by living in each other’s proximity; an architecture develops as a result of people living close together for long stretches of time. The photos and the writing concern themselves with “the ‘relentless banality’ of America’s small towns,” and the idea that “to be American is to believe in exits.” Believe in them, even if they aren’t there; Waldrep is able to strengthen his point in “XIII. Monterey, California, 1988” by saying “An exit is an uncomplicated avoidance of the necessity of the collective. / An exit is a form of worship if approached consistently and in one direction”–so says the chorus of the book again and again.

Waldrep philosophizes the classic suburban nightmare; think Revolutionary Road. What one thinks to be a release or an exit ends up not being so, ends up in fact fating those in constant search to a life of repetitive circles. To be American is defined over and over again; he employs new metaphors each time, lessening the possibility of escape each time. Things are further complicated by the fact constantly obsessing about defining what it means to be an “American” is very…American.

Much of this book is beautiful for its grace alone; these pieces have wonderful moments which are akin to, as the poet describes in “XVI. Long Beach, NY, 1989,” “grass growing up from between the seams of a concrete patio.” There is unexpected beauty peppered through out the already interesting and intelligent landscape of these poems. In certain pieces, “the air tastes of nickel” or certain photos are described as having “swallowed a sweater.” There is a confident beauty to reduction, to imagining someone imagining something that someone else said yes to—someone else said, “I pick this here landscape and this here time, under this here sun to take home with me.” And though this is an exercise for Waldrep to better understand Rathmann’s aesthetics, it is also an exercise in tangentials for the reader. What is ancillary to what is provided. We makes sense of things by giving them names and seeing how they relate. Waldrep does this with Rathmann’s photos. We do this with Waldrep’s poems. Then we draw conclusions.

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