by Daniel Brenner
Fence Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming
Tracked by Evil Cube
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, winner of the 2006 Fence Modern Poets Series, is one of the best poetry books this year in the way that it demonstrates a poet comfortable scribbling on the walls in a world of his own. Daniel Brenner doesn’t give us total access to his world, but he lets us know it exists, and that’s enough. If he were too forthcoming, satellite spies might intercept and translate his code.
Nevertheless, the poems comprising The Stupefying Flashbulbs beg for repeated reads. The book, Brenner’s first, offers a mild rethinking of language across 65 short lyrics, each punchy and modern, celebratory but with a sense of ceaseless surveillance and impending doom. “It’s time to put the cloth on the cage,” he writes in “Satellite Photography,” and proceeds to burrow in his own language.
I find it obnoxious when writers use “2” instead of “to,” use “u” instead of “you,” and so forth, because the device is not nearly witty enough to justify the mutilation of language. But when Brenner pulls similar tricks, there’s no sense that he’s trying to reinvent language or be fiendishly clever; he simply reminds us, in the age of the instant message, that language is eternally capricious. These lines from “McLight Pottery,” for example, show that though his words can be construed as senseless; they might also probe the conscious decision-making and scrutiny we face daily:
For all the time it’s still a diminishing option
Down ancient lines into myths or 2 be ridden
About the prophecy when it gets slalomy
At first glance, “2” does the work of the word “to”; but it might also represent a second “option.” Ultimately it doesn’t matter; each line is strange, and Brenner lets the language sit and deconstruct itself. The letters “N” and “U” even seem to become characters in the book.
But what makes The Stupefying Flashbulbs excellent is less Brenner’s language play than his fusion of wiseass sarcasm and masked dread. The poems appear impulsive, but present the need to be read in sequence. In the first section, Brenner employs a technique reminiscent of Matthew Rohrer. Absurd repeated images—a whirlpool, an evil cube, Phoenicians—become main characters:
The cube returned and it made me nervous
You too I see & yet you read on
Recovering a sense of blurry theft
A Simic-like sense of mystery is fused with an Ashberyan sense of inventiveness and associative-thinking. When you’re in this book, after a while, you realize you’re in a secret place. Brenner almost decodes his letter-play for us in “Sunsets Too,” but stops just short, perhaps because there’s really nothing to decode: “That I/you are un/an / & ancient like a ritual.” Sometimes he’s able to dazzle, sometimes his sarcasm is just funny as hell: “The main goal is still to rock and appear extra-excited.”
But in the end, his sarcasm and absurdity are a fitting way of responding to dread, and amid Brenner’s chaos, there are some beautiful lyrical moments, as in “Wonder Rocket 1840”:
Sometimes the haze is so bad I am biting at the rest doubled
Down by the river where the apples fall with the hail under
The wreathed swamp figures the ones with sage plastered
All over the muck and seed and condyle caught in their hearts
In each of these small poems, there’s the sense that something’s chasing every one of us, be it government, a lover, an evil cube, fate, or anything in between. “We all make mistakes,” Brenner’s able to conclude in a moment of lucidity, perhaps nodding that no matter how much you want to hide, as long as you’re not dead, you have to respond to the world in some form. As a price for being alive, something’s always bearing down on you, there are always more mistakes to be made. In the end, his fear is finally transmitted: “I’m afraid of looking back from the perspective of being chased / & doing whatever it is that the perspective of being chased urges.”
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