by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2009
Reviewed by Matt Hart

“Good for us who walk among the ghosts.”

Today isn’t Wednesday.  It’s Sunday.  And it isn’t sunny.  It’s actually really cold and rainy out—a perfect day to stay inside and scribble out a few words on Noelle Kocot’s Sunny Wednesday, a book I’ve been carrying around with me since I got it last Spring.  Between then and now, I’ve read it many times.  It was one of only two books I took with me to Europe this past summer (the other being Renato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde—another story entirely), and it’s been with me this Fall wherever I’ve gone—Houston, Louisville, New York.  A couple of times, I’ve thought to take it out of my bag and replace it with a different book, but something (not the thought of writing these remarks) has always stopped me.  What something?  I don’t know.  I’m not really sure I care.  Can I say the book is haunting, perplexing, electric?  I can.  I do.  Do I have some big thesis to make here?  I do not.  Or maybe.  Yes.

Sunny Wednesday is a book in the middle of something, halfway between the end of time (the end of a certain time—with double emphasis on “certain”) and the next thing, as yet in the shadows.  I think about this next thing (these next things) a lot (both in relation to the book and life), the past and the future as seen from that momentary and ever-shifty, yet perpetual middle ground of the present—that Wednesday between Sunday and Saturday, the midway between absolutes—the birth salute and the death salute.  And it’s sunny, too, this Wednesday, this green-y middle meadow, but don’t let that fool you.  Rather, think about it as ambiguously as possible, i.e. that “sunny” doesn’t necessarily mean things are (figuratively speaking) looking up—only that someone is (literally) looking up into the sky and noticing there a brightness, perhaps in marked contrast to the way the looker actually feels:

The study of heat blinks
In the midday sun.
Soon, a blaze of rhyme
Will cast an artificial glare
And sunset on the windowsill.
Good for us who die in flames.
Good for us who walk among the ghosts.

(“Nature Poem”)

And yet, with so much goodness at hand, the feeling remains complicated.  The world remains a haunted place: half-sensations, and echoes and traces.

So now, with all that in mind…

***

At the center of this collection of 59 poems is a massive absence, the loss of a beloved—a spouse—producing a gargantuan swell (or perhaps shock after shock) of mourning, longing and ekstasis.  To read these poems is to experience a terrible, though often beautifully wrecked and crushing, embodiedout of body strangeness, “I saw my love shoot up the intravenous moonlight, / Vanished in a Milky Way of negatives” Kocot writes at the beginning of “Neptune,” an image which is simultaneously fucked-up and lush, galactic and romantic, flooded with light and sucked into darkness. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, dispersion, fade-out and negation (both formally and subject-wise) are the prime movers of these poems, for example in these lines from “Rite”: “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you / And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  What’s weird about so much of this book is how the poems seem in a constant state of vanishing, and yet they never blink out entirely.  Their radiation imprints a spirit on the air itself:

I predict the end of my predictions
And the loss of the whole world
At your brilliant shadow
And I will continue to hum
Your buried music like a refrigerator
Deep into the night

( from “Tribute #2”)

What I love about these poems is that they’re brimming with personal metaphorical gestures, which, at their best, don’t come off as secret-code making—and even when they do I usually could care less, because the images themselves are so arresting, stirring, and/or devastating:

Too often, you are only a shadow cast

Across an endless sunny Wednesday:

Trapezoidal sleep, spell-check aflame with saints,

Roseate silo, the arrows are dark, the moment sharp.

(from ‘“You Will Always Be My Animal”’)

That said, I’m also intrigued by the fact that reading these poems I’m not able to set aside—the way as a “good” reader I’m supposed to be able to set aside—what I know and have read about Noelle Kocot, the person—that she was married to Damon Tomblin, a composer who died as the result of a heroin overdose—a loss which has had an understandably profound effect on Kocot and her work.  References to “Damon” and “shooting up” abound in this collection, along with constant reminders of a deep separation of souls.  It seems that autobiography is the scaffolding upon which Sunny Wednesday’s poems (not to mention those in Kocot’s previous book Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems) hang both their grief and amazement at the fact that anything exists at all.  And while it’s the personal that provides the poems’ stability, it’s the universality of the larger human issues here that give the work its visceral power.  These poems aren’t what one might typically think of as confessional lyrics.  For one thing, they don’t confess or divulge the personal beyond the scaffolding I’ve already mentioned. Rather, they take note in the midst of the scaffolding—as if, weirdly, to build it up imaginatively, so as to be both wholly inspired/mired in it and also transcend it entirely, often floating or collapsing—resolutely unresolved:

Now, as I wait, miles ahead of and miles behind

My time, a train that hovers here suspended

Over a warm pool of numbers, never adding up

Or subtracting delicately away.

(from “This Is What You Get”)

And whereas, the more I think about, for example, Robert Lowell’s poems, the more I’m drawn to think about Robert Lowell, in contrast, the more I think about Noelle Kocot’s poems the further away from her I get.  Rather than being therapeutic explorations of the facts, Kocot’s poems explore the possibilities—emotional, imaginative, and intellectual—of what the facts point to—something beyond, “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you/And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  In other words, these poems are, more than anything else, physically moving responses to the swirl of existence and its constant barrage of beginnings (surprise) and endings (loss).  As such, the poems in Sunny Wednesday are an assertion of BEING in the face of our having to live with and against its antithesis, GRAVITY/NOT-BEING.

Furthermore, whereas many poets use poetry as one of the ways to organize, make sense of, and explode the presences and experience of the overwhelming fullness of life, Kocot seems to be using it to make sense of this fullness in the face of the Void, an unshakeable and overwhelming emptiness/absence, one brimming simultaneously with meaning and meaninglessness, breath and breathlessness, ritual and randomness, aloneness and loneliness, music and silence, darkness and light.  Nowhere in the book is this more mind-blowingly and beautifully demonstrated than in “Once Upon a Time in America” where Kocot begins the poem addressing her deceased husband:

Here in this room I slept
As you lay dead and alone
After you died, while I, superstitious
Peasant slept, slept through
Phone call after phone call from
Detective after detective, finally
Waking to Daniel’s simple and beatific
Damon’s dead […]

From here, however, the poet, after making arrangements “like a cop/Or fireman” and saying “I love you to the morning sky” flies into the imaginative ether:

Never having been one of the fully
Living, I live, half of me in
a cornfield filled with skyscrapers,
Half of me in that place we are
Before we’re born and after we die.
Tonight, I was outside thinking
Of that holy drunken terror
Jackson Pollock. Fuck you moon,
He’d shout and cry. A big dog
Came running up to me and his owner
Shouted, Jackson, come back here.

It’s as if Kocot’s associations and imagination become REAL LIFE—from saying “I love you to the morning sky” to Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” to the rather mysterious/mystical appearance of Jackson, the dog—as if Kocot’s own associations have come instantly TO BE.  The poem ends with the poet once again addressing her husband:

You are a dead musician who died
Alone.  I wait to go to you,
Smoking and breaking curses under
The Jackson Pollock fuck you moon.

What’s so blindingly weird to me here is that the poem leaves off with everything blundered-up-the-same: the musician has died alone, the speaker waits alone, and Jackson Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” has been transformed/transferred to the moon itself, which presides over everything in anger, defiance and recognition/resignation.  It’s as if all the stuff of life is just one shifting mess of strangeness and witchcraft.

And yet, the book is not without its own antidote, as words themselves not only describe and articulate, but make, meaning—which is always a kind of connectedness, one thing to another to an other.  Or as Kocot puts it in “To You, the Only”
 

And when I am lost
Your scent wafts toward me
Like the notes of a vibraphone
And I shake off the muck of existence

[…]

To remind you that before all else we are animals full of music
Tethered to the contradictions of this world.

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