by Ethan Paquin
Salt Publishing 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
Thoughts That Linger Abrain
Decision-making is a bitch. Accordingly, the what-to-leave-in/what-to-leave-out tap dance implicit in any creative enterprise will inevitably leave the creator, at some point, looking down at his/her vulgar “artist” body and mistrusting anything it manufactures.
But whatever the number of contradictory and compulsive selves the poet behind Ethan Paquin negotiates on a daily basis, a treaty seems aloft in his latest; in My Thieves, no single self has stolen anything from any other. More simply put, it is the most varied collection of poetry I’ve seen in a long time.
Paquin is all over the place; tight couplets, indulgent narratives, obsessive flashes of wordplay, ekphrastic illuminations and the uncompromising chew of archaic English charge apace in the 115-page Thieves. The easiest determination to make is that where pretty much every reader will find something they dislike in the book on aesthetic grounds alone, they will likely find at least three pleasures for every displeasure—and the “good” and the “bad” will vary in this way from person to person.
Yet the more important determination—what really drives this book—is that amidst the chaos there is, almost impossibly, a focused consistency. Our poet is asking, not telling; the word-per-line across four adjacent rows in “Simplicity” doesn’t read like the vapid, selfish imposition of experimental ingenuity for its own sake. The lines offer instead genuine inquiry, and however varied the book, as the pages fly, it becomes a splintering inspiration and obsession that relies upon variation for its very survival. The poet finds all the answers he needs simply by asking questions: “What / is / mine, / afterall?” and doing his best to propose answers, however fleeting, however contradictory.
I’d say that, yes, this book is a little too long, and runs the risk of overwhelming its readers. But it rewards attention and re-attention with incredible staying power. In this way Paquin challenges us; the good poems linger and confound, lending a mysterious gravity to those that seemed at first less effective; the reader is purposed to try them again. And again. And at last, becomes leveled by the consistencies that permeate amid inconsistency.
There are many. For one, Paquin is unabashedly archaic. This unique quality is one of his best, supplying both irony and readability in nearly every application; here’s an example from “So You Want to Be a Sailor”:
you can’t handle home as it sinks
in some far-fogged thinness broken
by birdcall’s spray of seablight,
pilings battend all Novembre and you
you haven’t a need for Novembre
What makes the “bre” of Novembre, the “birdcall” and “seablight” so appealing isn’t so much the extent to which they are jokey and sarcastic; it’s the extent to which he’s serious about them. He doesn’t want them but needs them to supply, in only one word, a static blend of tones.
Of the “almost indulgently long narratives,” my favorite is perhaps the longest and most indulgent, the nine-page, text-heavy behemoth “Hampton.” The poem is an associative, sitting-on-the-beach-and-scribbling-in-a-notebook kind of affair. Paquin is up front about the approach and convolutes his language enough to validate it: “Come see what I’m doing: writing this / beach, staring its lines.” The carefully trimmed language fuses the reader with the scene. Paquin’s able to encapsulate the broadness of the ocean by talking very little about the ocean itself and expanding internally, notion to notion. Early on, two old friends are witnessed/imagined strolling the sands on beach cleanup duty:
And it keeps rushing back—the trail’s
roots, smell of height, the only-one-place-ever feel of skylight streaming
aface
from betwixt the conflated branches of krummolz and beaten summit
spruce. Yes, they are close friends, and good workers. Articulate men, one
reads Keats and the other, something by Elias. The friend-of-34-
years has a way of finding—always with toothpick amouth…
And on and on. Dead-convinced as I’ve been that it was impossible, Paquin has rescued the “sitting on the beach” poem from its hardcover coffee table shell-on-the-front malaise; he goes all over in this poem—from the horror of an eight-year-old boy’s murder to a remark on the poem’s own runniness—circling around and around, stretching the poem to the brink before leaving it alone. Rather than wearing on you, the poem wears you in.
So does the book. Any time the impulse draws near to flag him for variation or experimentation, he sucks us back with “some onyxified craterscape,” with language so hilarious and delightful it can only be spoken with a straight face. To that extent, nobody else writes like Paquin, and that’s what makes him so intoxicating in the end: he experiments, but doesn’t need radical experimentation to sound like himself. The books deals heavily with the idea of stealing–with the notion that no artist is truly “original” in a sense, but instead elaborates on the accomplishments of other artists. The poet’s “thieves,” are those who came before him. He steals from them, they stole from their giants, and so on. This is an idea you’ve heard before many times, but it’s important to Paquin’s book because the sheer variety of his “thieves” may or may not inform the controlled chaos implicit in the book’s variety.
Decision-making is never easy for the artist, and every artist has abandoned or considered abandoning an effort at some time or other—as Paquin offers, “many artists’ works linger abrain.” Many, many works linger apage here instead. But thoughtfulness and uniqueness of language and voice make My Thieves a winner; the poet is contemplative; he is sad but not despondent; he is rescued by images, by language, and by other people. In the final poem, after so many attempts, he admits to “no real way of explaining his sadnesses”—which I think any astute reader will take as explanation enough.
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