Posts Tagged ‘James Cihlar’

Essentials: Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language”

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

W.W. Norton 1978

“…a whole new poetry beginning here.”

Rereading Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language is like listening to a favorite album from my youth: I’m tempted to sing along. In my teens I probably recited these poems aloud in my sister’s off-campus apartment as frequently as we played Ella in Hollywood on the turntable.

Six more volumes of classic and enduring American lyric poetry, including a Selected Poems, followed Adrienne Rich’s 1951 debut A Change of World. But the publication of Diving Into the Wreck in 1973 changed everything, signaling a new urgency, awareness, and fearlessness in her poetic voice. Rich followed this National Book Award-winning tour de force with a compilation of selected and new poems in 1974 and with her first nonfiction book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Not until 1978 did we get a new, completely original volume of verse with The Dream of a Common Language, and the wait did not disappoint. This book is the logical but unpredictable deepening of the exploration begun with Diving Into the Wreck. As Olga Broumas noted in Chrysalis at the time, Rich paradoxically enfolds the personal (“dream”) into the public (“common language”). Dream shattered the conventional dialectic approach in poetry, documenting the search for a lexicon of true connection between women even while creating one.

Rich’s work in the seventies was an antidote for the disillusionment of the Watergate generation. The Dream of a Common Language was poetry for community, poetry meant for use, poetry meant to be marked up in the margins, poetry meant to be read over the phone. After this generation’s witnessing of the prostitution of language in media and politics, readers hungered for a sense that language itself was real and that expression could be trusted. How fortunate that Rich’s poetic talent answered this call. Like the enduringly innovative recordings of Nina Simone referenced in this book’s Twenty-one Love Poems, The Dream of a Common Language is both a benchmark of its era as well as the precursor of many poetic approaches to follow—including the more politically varied content of Rich’s own work as well as the fragmentary, polytonal, and caesura-filled work of many contemporary poets publishing in journals today.

–James Cihlar

Find The Dream of a Common Language here and here.

See all essentials.

James Cihlar is the author of the poetry book Undoing (Little Pear Press, 2008) and chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House Press, 2010). His new volume of poetry, Rancho Nostalgia, is forthcoming in 2013 from Dream Horse Press. His poems, interviews, essays, and stories have been published in American Poetry Review, The Awl, Coldfront, Court Green, Smartish Pace, Mary, Lambda Literary Review, Verse Daily, and Forklift, Ohio. His work appears in the anthologies American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village, 2011), Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Writers on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry, 2011), and Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012). The recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, Cihlar is a Lecturer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a Visiting Professor at Macalester College in St. Paul.


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‘Touch’ and ‘Pierce the Skin’

Monday, September 12th, 2011

by Henri Cole
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2011/2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

“…to the whiteness of death”

Henri Cole’s new book of poetry, Touch, follows Pierce the Skin, which selected poems from his six collections published between 1987 and 2007. In the context of his work-to-date, Touch only gains in significance.

Although Cole’s The Visible Man was perhaps his most notable encounter with autobiography and gay identity when it came out in 1998, many of his abiding concerns and conceits have been present from the beginning. Despite the ongoing evolution of style and substance in his work, Cole has consistently written contemporary lyrics. Sometimes commemorative, as in “To the Forty-third President” in Blackbird and Wolf, sometimes occasional, as in “The Annulment” in The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, Cole’s verse finds meaning in the luminous skin of the world.

Cole’s lightness and delicacy, his reserve and restraint, also unify his work. Situated on the branch of modernism that extends from Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Stafford, Henri Cole operates a poem through the senses, figures out the world through imagery. His lines are “tempered and formalized,” like the “Poppies” of Blackbird. His elegy for his father in Middle Earth, “Radiant Ivory,” shows humble objects doing heavy lifting in service of the poem:

After the death of my father, I locked
myself in my room, bored and animal-like.
The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face,
chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air
white, insane, slathery.

Underneath the hood of these pristine poems roars a combustion engine, “memory, the motor of everything,” as Cole describes it in “Self-portrait with Red Eyes” in Blackbird. In “Chiffon Morning” from The Visible Man, he could be describing the sustaining act of writing when he says, “the mind replays what nurtures it.”  Blackbird’s “American Kestrel” offers an ars poetica:

…This is my home:
Woof-woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate within one poem, as “the essence of self emerges / shuttling between parents” (“Self-portrait in a Gold Kimono,” Middle Earth), and “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s” (“Apollo,” The Visible Man). With each new book, the poet reveals more of the violence of his childhood. But these seeds were planted in the beginning, including “The family squabble, the bruised cranium” of “Ascension on Fire Island” in Zoo Wheel.

In his newest book, Henri Cole stretches the limits of his minimalist style, delves deeper into family memory, and widens the scope of the tensions he explores. Touch is divided into three sections, moving from the poet’s mother’s death to a troubled relationship with a younger man addicted to drugs. The volume begins with “Asleep in Jesus at Rest,” a poem of long lines laid out in overlapping caesuras, a looser and more expansive form than what we’ve come to expect from Cole. He repeats this form later in “Legend,” a bit further into the volume. And he includes “Grebe,” a poem that he translated from the French with the author, Claire Malroux. Although he continues his familiar syllabics, Cole includes more experimental pieces in Touch, such as the free verse collage of “By the Name of God, The Most Merciful and Gracious,” which gives voice to a victim of torture. If Blackbird’s “For the Forty-third President” signaled a more engagé stance, Touch does not disappoint, with additional anti-war poems such as “Quai Aux Fleurs” and “Sleeping Soldiers.”

Like his seniors—Glück, Gilbert, and others—and like his contemporaries—Frost, Powell, and others—Cole explores aging, loss, maturity, and mortality. If self, identity, and body have been enduring concerns throughout his work, then in “Myself Departing,” he treats the issue of age humorously:

My hair went away in the night while I was sleeping.
It sauntered along the avenue asking, “Why
should I commit myself to him? I have a personality
of my own.” Then my good stiff prick went, too.
It opened the window and climbed down the escape,
complaining, “I want to be with someone younger.”

This is in stark contrast to the stunning pathos of the first section of Touch, which is devoted to the poet’s mother’s illness and death and his affectionate care (as well as guilt and melancholy). Read Touch if only to appreciate the powerful poem “Shrike” in its full context. Cole begins by watching a bird capture a cricket, and then through association makes a poetic leap worthy of a trapeze artist. The cricket

. . . holds up
pretty good in a state of oneiric pain.
Once, long ago, when they were quarrelling about money,
Father put Mother’s head in the oven.
“Who are you?” It pleaded from the hell mouth.

In our inured age, we have ready clichés to describe abuse in families. Repetition has numbed their impact. Through understated elegance and direct simplicity, Cole makes this image indelible. In this section, Cole accurately captures the complexities of grieving, elaborating on the simple human truth he had first presented in “Paper Dolls” from The Look of Things: “goodbye / in a scene / at first holy, / then lurid.”

As a minimalist, Cole comes by ingenuousness naturally. An unlikely subject, such as a “Taxidermied Fawn,” leads to the discovery of a resonant truth:

A minor smear on the white spots is the only
evidence of a violent passage from bridal innocence
to the whiteness of death, which is the absence
of everything, and, in the end, all there really is.

After a career of deftly conjuring evocative imagery, Cole has earned the right to utter plain speech, as in the poem “Ulro”: “Cigarettes, love, work, liquor, brooding, despair— / one thing not controlled can destroy a life.”

More of the poet’s dexterity is on display in “Mechanical Soft,” which doubles and triples imagery, twisting the strand, while describing a son feeding his mother in hospice:

I am not
a typical son, I suppose, valuing happiness,
even while spooning mechanically soft pears—
like light vanishing—into the body whose tissue
once dissolved to create breast milk for me.

Cole’s Touch justifies the poetic obsession with childhood. As we age, circumstances call forward past experiences. We are never done remembering, or for that matter, discovering, as in “Dolphins”: “Recently, among Mother’s things, I found this: / ‘I am afraid of him. He need psychiatric care. He lead me / to believe strange things. He ignores me, threats me.’”

The dynamic tension of opposite forces evident in Cole’s previous books acquires deeper significance in Touch. The image of his mother’s hands in “Broom”—“hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair”—underscores how we know tenderness through cruelty. Other poems help extrapolate: we know peace through war, age through youth, closeness through isolation. But these are not simple binaries, as Cole explains in “Hens”:

There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Through the accumulation of images of “the push-pull thing, the polarity stuff” (“Ulro”), we perceive the balancing act of walking a web of connections, the risks and rewards, pains and pleasures, and every subtle variation in between, tied to each step. Cole’s menagerie of poems grows with several more additions besides “Hens,” including “Pig,” “Hairy Spider,” Bats,” and more, in Touch. Animals tend to be more humane than humans and humans more bestial than beasts in Cole’s cosmology.

The tradition of story and storytelling encourages us to assume that those who suffer in youth find happiness—or at least escape—in age, like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk. The poems in the last third of Touch help subvert those expectations. In “Passion,” Cole begins with the ending: “Our love has ended. / We only have a little time, darling. Let’s read / swim, and sleep in one another’s arms.” Ending and beginning run simultaneously, as do pleasure and pain. If “a son’s life is punishment / for a father’s,” then here we see a mature son engaged in a troubled relationship: “I watch you emerge from the bathroom, / having breathed your fix” (“Laughing Monster”). Cole may be the first poet to incorporate a partner’s texts: “‘Loser old man u r a cheap cunt,’ he wrote, ‘I need coke. Unless ur buying, answer is no’” (“Resistance”).

Cole’s elaboration of two additional themes from his previous work—gender identity and language—helps broaden the focus of Touch. The last poem in the book, “Swimming Hole, Buck Creek, Springfield, Ohio,” takes forward the questioning of masculinity and femininity that Cole started in such early poems as “The Marble Queen” and “My Father’s Jewelry Box.” Or the exploration of language and writing in “Apollo” from The Visible Man resurfaces in Touch, with the poet’s reassurance that “writing this now, / sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought, / I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.” No mere ephemeral beauties, Cole’s spare, masterfully controlled poems are a sustaining activity, a necessary function to help keep the poet, and the reader, safely positioned in the world.

*

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Malilenas

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

by Garrett Kalleberg
Ugly Duckling Presse 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

7.5
“And it all comes crashing down, / or worse, that it, the poem works ”

Kalleberg Cover 2

Few poetry books define their parameters as rigorously as Garrett Kalleberg’s Malilenas, and fewer still find within a system as generative. A slim poetic catalog of weights and measurements, Malilenas examines how we impose order through routine quantifiers—from binary code to cellular biology, from calendars to stock markets, from gender to semiotics—and yet how artistic expression and human connections transcend order. These tight, funny, aphoristic lines search for the hole in the language, the open door through which meaning emerges. Acknowledging the pervasiveness of numbers in the human psyche, Kalleberg questions where true originality and inspiration may arise. Exploring eternal questions of the sequentiality of experience in terms suggested by this country’s recent economic meltdown and military escalation, Malilenas is a book of fiscal existentialism.

Because measuring systems are so frequently binary, the book opens with the notion of refraction, using numbered poems in notebook form throughout. Twinning and mirroring, the self multiplies and expands, but also becomes dilute:

I grow increasingly
bright and dull, alternately
adding up to alternately
taking away (3.)

 
In this early poem we also get a sense of direct address to both the reader and to a partner, seeding the metaphor of artistic creativity battling language as two people battling circumstances, which is more fully developed later in the book. Using the systems our culture has provided for us, whether that includes actuarial charts, the NASDAQ index, or language, Malelinas posits whether it is possible to escape the assumptions buried within to find true meaning, and if meaning is owned by the individual or by the culture.

“In all things are numbers.” Finding puns and metaphors at virtually every turn, these poems are about how we count. On one hand, to quantify and measure is to separate, make discrete, or reduce. On the other hand, to quantify and measure is to seek essence, being or unity. The invented system that breaks down meaning into units, that divides, is also shared; how much does its operation connect us, and how much does its existence limit discovery? Taking us through various levels of quantifiers, Kalleberg praises the democracy of the cell, and discovers promise in the cycle of creation.

Temporality has long been the province of poetry. How the mind knows and how the self interprets the world is regarded as a sequential experience. Moments come to us one after the other, thoughts come to us in order, and we lay words down in rows. This incremental nature can explain how otherwise smart or good people can do dumb or bad things; being at midpoint in their trajectories, they only have part of the picture, half of the story, on which to base their actions. Poets often aspire to ascend beyond chronology, capturing a fulsome glimpse of eternity, some reassuring sense of pattern, or what the medievals considered God’s knowledge. Unfortunately, human approximations are clumsy tools for handling the divine:

                 The first garden in the god
wrote the leaves of your letter
perverted by language (11.)

If language itself is sequential, Kalleberg jokes that perhaps “advance penance reverses penury.” Grammar itself can be at odds: a “sentence” is both a unit of thought and a punishment. Meaning comes in at unexpected turns, when language degrades or syntax dissolves, or when poems take off on their own:

          A misplaced comma,
an unmatched parenthesis, an error
in spelling, or worse, calling an object
without first instantiating the object.
And it all comes crashing down,
or worse, that it, the poem works

but an incorrect result is produced (12).

Kalleberg questions authority at its most basic level: where does meaning come in? Does it reside in the poet’s original intention or the reader’s perception? Is it weakened or strengthened by the shared systems of language, etymology and syntax? The nature of systems is adherence; play by the rules and we will be rewarded. Ironically, mistakes, slips of the tongue, lead to new insight: “now on one can hour you.” But perhaps the poet is so steeped he gives voice to something larger than himself and his original intention: “I’m asking you, / am I so manipulated / to get it?” The outcome is always unpredictable, and may simply leave “a poet / on the verge of poetastisizing.” Perhaps in desperation, he offers a contract between writer and reader:

                19.

                The diseased hand in the good hand
holds the pen.

               The good hand in the diseased hand
holds the book.

The book holds the bilious inks
in a book called Bile.

It is a good book
and good bile even so
unable to relinquish spleen.

And the ink squishing in the word
unable to discharge of all debts the good
hand that put it there.

Malilenas is itself a product of its era, humorously observing the vicissitudes of the stock market and our conception of money:

34.
The sun moved:
it’s 3:05 PM—money in the bank!
Spent by 3:07 trying to hold on to 3:06.
Thank you for having been there.

Influenced by the past decade’s militaristic parlance of escalation, surge, and reduction, Kalleberg offers funny and biting critique throughout. Taking aim at the obvious faults in the wall, Kalleberg also embraces the productive failures of language and relationships, discovering that beauty may result:

             

27.
I’m glad we met,
says the joy of fucked-up luck
to a beautiful disaster.

In regards to which beauty, wounded,
remains silent.

Inspiration results from breakdowns and accidents. Love is an ineffable collision of beings, a collusion of motives, just as creativity is some collision of intention and tools, a collusion of artist and culture. The contract between writer and reader is that the process, once finished, starts all over again.

*

 

 

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How to Live on Bread and Music

Monday, June 28th, 2010

by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Perugia Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

8

“the world is possible / and beyond human”

Sweeney Cover

Lyrical, autobiographical poetry sometimes takes a beating from the critics—or maybe that’s just my defensive assumption, as I tend to write and admire lyrical and autobiographical poetry. The unassuming poetic voice of How to Live on Bread and Music, mixed with occasional references to her life as a daughter, wife, and teacher, could invite Jennifer Sweeney’s Laughlin Award-winning second book to such criticism. If so, the criticism would be unjust. Lucid, fluid, and lovely, How to Live on Bread and Music is a compendium of experiments in advancing the imagination.

Far from being “emotion recollected in tranquility,” in Wordsworth’s formulation, Sweeney’s poems originate in memory, but advance through hypothesis. “Maybe you hear a song or maybe you don’t. / That’s the choice we are always making,” the opening poem asserts, urging the reader to look (or listen) beyond the surface. Divided into five sections, the book progresses from realism to abstraction. Sweeney makes short work of childhood, giving readers just enough to ground us through her later, more fanciful, forays. Featuring functional poem titles such as “Adolescence,” only the most productive reminiscences are put to work, as in the story of a student who jumps from a second story window and walks away:

At 22, I accepted a job teaching junior high.
Not far enough away from the hollow years
of my own shifting body, the seventh and eighth-grade girls,
slight and doe-sprung, drifted down wide industrial
hallways, bones jutting sideways from their skin.
One girl chose my second-story classroom
from where we’d see her fall past the window. . . .

Notions of the body inform this volume, not simply as a container for the spirit, but as the shifting surface of things, our transitive nature, and our inability to fully read the world at any given time.

Poems such as “Ballad for the Daily Condition” could be seen as list poems, as static catalogs of quotidian observations. For those who listen harder, they reveal themselves as successive waves of discovery, resurgent efforts to reach new territory, despite our inherent containment:

That mostly we do our living in houses,
rooms inside houses within rows of houses
and everyone is a supporting character in the story
of your life and the story is an unevenly written mystery
with unearned existential leanings,
dreams clinging to you until dinnertime
eclipses the afternoon.

Seemingly an adult recapitulation of Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon, these lines attempt to mediate the self and the world by both separating and joining container and thing contained. The poem proceeds through other available image banks—including train trips, a recurring motif—in an active inquiry into the human condition. Sweeney uses similar approaches in “Fragments for the End of the Year,” and “In Praise and Apology” to good effect.

Set off in its own section, the poem “The Listeners” is a mélange of song lyrics, a meditation on music, and a tribute to the poet’s father. This poem is remarkable for juxtaposing the Jackson 5 with Beethoven, Madonna with Dylan, without evoking camp. The desultory approach of discrete sections in seemingly random order belies the investigative nature that drives the poem. Sweeney’s gift for selection is evident in this poem, particularly in her retelling of the story of a record player her father bought from two brothers in Australia, brothers who “devoted their lives / to perfecting the art of playing a record.”

Their turntable was a bed of thick felt over glass,
the needle, platinum sharpened to an eyelash
then wrapped in cat intestines. . . .
The day #38 arrived at our house,
my father unpacked the turntable
and as the needle barely skimmed,
Donna Summer sang a note so perfect
it was turquoise.

A bittersweet tale of craftsmen who can only imagine perfection within the confines of current technology, this poem repeats the motif of the smallness of the human mind in the moment befuddled by the world’s expansive future.

Poem titles echoing the book’s title also recur throughout the book, such as “How to Uproot a Tree,” “How to Grow a Mushroom” and “How to Make a Game of Waiting,” adding unity to the collection. “How to Feed an Orchid,” for instance, includes the lovely, abstract lines:

Like your thoughts without television,
the columns will harness the underestimated air
into calyx and corolla.

A pleasant strain of the subjunctive floats through this book, adding a distinctly Romantic note.  I admire Sweeney’s deftness with syntax, as in these lines from “Erie Central Station”:

I’d like to think every night contains a fissure
where a couple of strangers are cast
in the grand light of an approaching train,
not the station where the train stops
but the station where the station stops,
and they choose something for which
they are completely unprepared.

“I, scientist of not-much-data,” Sweeney describes herself in “The Listeners,” and in fact her approach is empirical, constructing experiments on the fly, recording the results, and moving on to the next. If lyric verse is sometimes saddled with the burdens of commemoration, observation, and aphorism, How to Live on Bread and Music is a marvelous corrective, for those who choose to listen.

*

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Undoing

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

by James Cihlar
Little Pear Press 2008
Reviewed by Scott Hightower

8
“How can we live like this?”

cihlar coverThe poems in James Cihlar’s first book, Undoing, do not roust or jostle themselves onto the page. They do not screech for the reader’s attention. Undoing is a quiet and clear book that begins in the reflective glow of a dashboard and with granite stones beneath white fence posts:

Start with the granite stones
laid at the base of the white post fence
with grapevines wound through.
Someone had to place them there.

(from “Lincoln Avenue”)

Divided into four sections, the collection takes its footing in the wake of a failed marriage, paternal betrayal and the false starts and “dodge ball” of other people’s lives. But there is more to life than a choice between two houses. A lone boy who lives in the backyard is really

Superman in a blue bath towel
safety-pinned at the neck

the boy who lives in the backyard
has the courage to split an eyebrow
against a table edge as he pretends to fly

the courage to sit on a ten-foot wall
cupping an ocher kitten in his palms,
wearing white shoes and belt for the bleary photo

white adhesive tape over the split eyebrow
always healing, kitten cupped in his palms
always safe over a ten-foot drop.

(from “The Boy Who Lives in the Backyard”)

The poems do not jostle about, yet the lad at their center is surrounded by a catalog of appearances: aunts, sisters and a brother, blood stains on the playground, a variety of domiciles, a kitten, a runaway dachshund, and of course, while laying in bed… “that long, skinny green hand coming up from the heat register.”

In the second section, the Nebraska landscape, among other things, is backdrop for a glide in a sixties Impala. Wheels and the radio take the youth out into a world where there are new beauties, new risks of intimacy, new dangers and “new things to be bitter about”:

the way breath in winter rises
and is trapped in the branches of a linden tree

[...]

I could speak the words linked to this place
if I could trace the feathery pattern
of evergreen past the bough,

past gestures the branch will make in the wind.
The elms have been here longer
and can see farther than I,

past saw-toothed leaves to bare, black horns of winter.

(from “Walking Home”)

Section Three is committed to new beginnings, new findings. There is a scene of a grandmother’s red, scarred chest, a couple nesting in a first rental, the new seat of adventure, Minneapolis, the tedium and economic liberation of the job run, and the unencumbered and immediate gratification of shopping expeditions in second-hand stores, the “sift through the wreckage of unknown neighbors’ past lives” for residuals which will make up the new elements of the new foundation of a new life (“Start with the granite stones / laid at the base of the white post fence… / Someone had to place them there.”) Each person comes to the promise of the new with “self” marked “as is.” Minneapolis proves to be the seat of a new economy (Ethan Allen) along with being the seat of new personal melodramas (bad home-repair work) and community tragedies (AIDS). Cihlar’s artistry is quiet; the thoughtful poems rivet together seamlessly.

Section Four abounds with poems attempting to snap the book, and its assorted griefs, shut. But the genie of domestic happiness is not one easily bottled. It is more like the image of a slinky in one of the opening poems of the book:

refusing to lose its spring
expanding and snapping shut
like a slinky down a staircase

The dualities established earlier in the collection begin to become burdensome: mother/father; past/present; story/lyric flight; old instability/comfort in new order; received frame/achieved frame. In some ways, the poems in the last section—while more mature in their logic—are less poetically revealing. They are more sociologically centered; their shapes more mannered, and as a result, less dynamic. The poet in one particular poem, “Twin Cities,” comes closest to peeling to the quick, presenting a more ambivalent must/may divide. When a damning pamphlet surfaces, the poet asks,

How can we live like this?

Maybe by knowing
I live in a city that is one half
Of a whole,

And by knowing the rule here is change—
Where something is removed,
It must also be returned…

in the places
where I once have received,
I may later give.

Undoing is a poetic journey to reach a state of “always healing.”

*

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Chronic

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

by D.A. Powell
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

 
9

“I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until –”

powell cover

Chronic speaks to the obsessions of the imagination, the intellect, and the heart, as well as to the modern “deranging” of the landscape and the body. Eschewing the conventional prologue poem, Powell structures the book in two sections, the title poem framed in the center, followed by a coda of two linked poems. With medical valences apparent (underscored by a torso X-ray in place of a traditional author photo on the jacket flap), he names the first section “Initial C,” referencing the first letter of Chronic, and the last section “Terminal C,” the word’s last letter. Together they form a twisted set of parentheses, framing the idea of the self in the eternal present, but revealing that despite the power and immediacy of the here and now, it is simply a piece of something larger, a fragment or intrusion into a longer sentence or composition. Faced with the finite nature of life and the fickle nature of inspiration, given over to the needs and rewards of the body, where do we root our hopes for permanence? Powell considers mortality and eternity; he considers the limits of the individual and the ego alongside the limits of existence on a planet that humans are guilty of infecting:

and always, the sandbars eroding at the periphery
where freshwater meets saltwater, and sawgrass swamp
drains into estuaries and bay.       and always the balance

upset, as herbicides eradicate cat’s claw vine
which has choked out carrotwood, which has displaced cypress
and the sea absorbs the toxins and eliminated matter

what does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak
or who does not speak, whether the poems get written
whether the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all

(from “cancer inside a little sea”)

Breathtakingly frank and dark, lyrically beautiful and passionate, Chronic attains wisdom while resisting false consolation.

Powell follows through on the conceit of his title and structure by tweaking readers’ expectations in visual and concrete ways. In “early havoc,” a poem recalling youthful inclinations to the theater, opening quotation marks signal the beginning of speech – but no closing marks follow, and the sentence redirects due to faulty memory. Known for his expansive lines, Powell pushes the physical constraints of the book by including a foldout poem appropriately titled “centerfold.” Distracted by the innovation, a reader might be tempted to dismiss the content as secondary, but in fact the poem is an eerie reminiscence occasioned by a magazine photo of an AIDS protest. Conjuring the promiscuity of youth with vivid imagery, including “on the steps of city hall at the yearly die-in: he was a body . . . you heaved upon like amphibious d-day craft quitting the ocean,” Powell infuses his lines with genuine, understated regret. The flip side, “cinemascope,” contains brackets and cross-outs. Turning to the committed and somewhat stifling domesticity of age, the poem ends with an echo of the biography of Sylvia Plath. It is a powerful statement on the guilt of surviving: “nearly everyone else, pissed off passed away / past and past and past.” Far beyond gimmickry and cheekiness, these subversions of convention support the underlying curse/hope of this book: What if the unexpected happens? What if the world surprises our imaginations?

In part, this has already happened, as indicated by the beautiful love poem “continental divide.” At the middle of life, with youthful indiscretions a distant memory overlaid by years of loneliness, the poet offers a moving, measured praise of love. Several poems explore love as a resolution to the book’s thematic questions of temporality and eternity. In signaling a relationship in trouble with the opening poem, “no picnic,” Powell sounds the themes of artistic manipulation and the fallibility of memory. In “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” the lovers shelter from the rain in a cavity caused by lightning in a sequoia’s trunk, mirroring in miniature the emblem of the book’s title and structure: if it is temporary, there is still peace. In “coit tower & us,” Powell seems to say our memory of comfort is permanent, even if the experience of it is not. The demands of illness and the body, the essentially solipsistic nature of pain, may be what drive a relationship to its end, “that night in the foxhole with the pfc” suggests, a theme repeated in a later poem, “scenes from the trip we didn’t take to the antarctic”:

say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray
today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential
today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body

at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why
beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter
didn’t you hear it all along?     or did you think it was just the wind

But “even the business of dying must be set aside occasionally,” Powell says in “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic,” reasserting memory’s dominance over pain in some stern self-talk: “go away, you bitter cuss.     it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded.     and love is in the chorus waiting to be born.”

Although now it may seem commonplace for poets to incorporate popular references from commercial culture into serious work, Powell helped to pioneer this approach, and remains its best practitioner. In “confessions of a teenage drama queen,” he seems to refute his critics who have called him confessional in a hilarious string of B-movie titles and clichés. With endless source material, the challenge of writing such a poem is to be selective, and Powell has the best ear in the business:

I was a male war bride.     I was a spy
so I married an axe murderer.     I married joan
I married a monster from outer space

I am guilty, I am the cheese, I am a fugitive from a chain gang
maybe I’ll come home in the spring.     I’ll cry tomorrow.
whose life is it anyway?     it’s a wonderful life.

[...]

I was a burlesque queen, I was a teenage zombie
I was an adventuress, I was a convict, I was a criminal
I did it, I killed that man, murder is my beat, I confess

The poem also serves as a warning, forbidding too much autobiographical interpretation of the work. In a poem published in a recent issue of Poetry, Powell offers lines that may shed light on his creative process, in the persona of a student addressing a master:

I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches
of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon
at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.

In contrast to the experimental poems included in Chronic are poems written in traditional form, such as terza rima for “come live with me and be my love,” and a hybrid of the English and Italian sonnet with “coal of this unquickened world.” In fact, classical mythology informs the structure of Chronic, providing rich counterpoint to the poet’s innovation. If a thread running through this book is the relationship of an older and younger man, it draws meaning from the tale of Corydon and Alexis. Powell further bookends the work by beginning with an epigraph from Virgil, and ending with a coda of two poems titled after these figures.

In Virgil’s story, the unrequited desire Corydon feels for Alexis transports him from the literal world to a fantasy realm of the imagination, where he engages in a dialogue of his own making. Finding that he loves the figment of Alexis more than the real person, and struggling to fit his emotions into his pastoral setting, Corydon awakes from his dream and upbraids himself. Doubting that the music he has created is appreciated, he attempts to express his desire in sanctioned ways by using an image of Pan’s pipes as a metaphor for coupling. Powell playfully echoes this image in the racy poem, “lipsync [with a nod to lipps, inc.]”

However, all Corydon’s attempts to find other paradigms that will fit his desire into his surroundings achieve only ambiguous results, with the implication that the effort continues beyond the story. This myth is a powerful engine that fuels Powell’s thematic explorations of temporality, mortality, and eternity; desire, art, and impermanence; and artistic ego, self-doubt, and the creative process. In the book’s final line, he encapsulates the abiding questions that result: “as if banishing love is a fix.    as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.”

If the pastoral world order did not allow Corydon’s desire to find justification, in Powell’s book the adversary is the suburbanization of the California landscape. In “republic,” he comments that the processed land of industry and agriculture removed some of the causes of catastrophic illnesses such as malaria and typhoid, and yet clearly the chronic illnesses we have inherited in their place are a result. Placing the relatively feeble yet enduring activity of creating art in stark contrast to the poisoning of our world and our bodies, Powell steers clear of conventional consolation:

you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere
that the time of flourishing is at hand? I should like to think it

meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling

it began like:

            “the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . .”

Powell has said that the photo on the cover of Chronic shows river waste from a paper mill. At first glance it appears cellular, as if we are seeing a sample under a microscope. Upon closer inspection, we see the indicators of scale and human habitation, including a tiny building and power line in a lower corner. This seems a fitting emblem for the crux of human issues so masterfully covered in this book, the easy transport from macro to micro and back that Powell achieves.

*

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The Bride of E

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

by Mary Jo Bang
Graywolf Press 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

7

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.”

bang bride of e coverOften in her previous books, Mary Jo Bang used a variety of formal structures to organize metaphysical exploration, including the character pieces of Louise in Love, the ekphrastic verse of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, and, most effectively, her thorough sounding of the poetic tradition of mourning in Elegy. Of course, the latter book also gave expression to her very real grief over the loss of her adult son. A rigorous philosophical workout, Elegy is remarkable for its discipline, focus, and lucidity. Ransacking the familiar sources of consolation and finding them wanting, the poet goes for several punishing rounds before staring down fate, emerging two-fisted and disillusioned. In her latest book, The Bride of E, the organizing principle is the alphabet, and the results, predictably diffuse, nevertheless contain some rewards.

In the spirit of dictionary entries, these poems provide lists, catalogs, of associations that benefit from the implied narrative of sequential order. Often composed of short, declarative sentences, they take sideways turns, resulting in staccato bursts of stories that seem to revise themselves as they progress. The result is a layering of fragments, an overwriting of the surface, as if one is looking at a wall with scraps of wallpaper of successive vintages showing through.

This approach suits Bang’s exploration of the metaphysics of time, as she illustrates in “The Wake Was a Line and We Watched”: “the nature of looking / at the future while married to the moment.” Collaged fragments mimic time’s operation, with one minute overwritten by the next:

Time-like layers

Of the sheerest substance stacked one atop the other
And finally forming a substrate
Never quite solidifying but after the fact forming a z

(“Z Stands for Zero Hour”)

This revisionist nature enhances our perception of the insecurity of the persona, and her honest unreliability:

It’s April again. It’s October,
That’s what I said.
It’s over, like a ghost in the going to go

(“Outnumbered at 0”)

“There is wreckage. / There is reiteration.” Evoking palimpsests or automatic writing, the fragments of The Bride of E also return to the same obsessive concerns. “Let’s take the wiring apart and see how it works” from “D Is Dying, As One Going in the Dark,” recurs in “For the Final Report” as “I would take the wiring apart / And see how it works.” Bang acknowledges the once-removed aspect of phenomenology: we are capable of examining the history of knowledge, the tropes and conceits that attempt to phrase philosophical concepts, but incapable of coming face to face with those philosophical concepts:

This is the world
When it is reduced down to a moment.

The mind doesn’t halt but goes halfway up
In the elevator and then finds itself stuck.
This is the entirety. Eternity. Made of a material
That is unlikely to change but is forever.

(“F Is for Forgetting”)

The time necessary to understand experience is longer than the experience itself, so the problem must lie in the engine of the human brain, “the gray one” (“For the Final Report”), whose default position is fear:

Terror of being. That mysterious conceptual nothing.
A worn electrical wire connects all the lights.
They go and you say, Good,
That little irritating suspense is over.

The hollowing wait. The stupid puncture of rejection
That, in the moment, wears a human face.

(“O Is in Outside”)

If dialectic is the standard method of philosophical interrogation, the mind’s ability to make distinctions is key. But this leads to separation, alienation, and detachment: “now you’ve divided yourself / From yourself. Now you’re something simple.” (“H Is Here Is a Song, Now Sing”)

What results from division is a gap, the difference between the self and the world, one moment and the next, with the challenge to “negotiate the question of the space / Between the two.” (“P Equals Pie”) This daunting task is perhaps not accomplishable through simple determination applied to a rigorous progressive program. Instead, we encounter meaning through accident, through slips of the tongue: “The sea of the present kept meeting / The vast.” (“Heretofore Having in Mind”) This is true in the prose pieces of the short second section: “I’m tied. I mean tired.”; “And now a scar. Okay, a car.”

Any poetic method is only as good as the lines that result, and in poems such as “W Is for Whatever” and “U Is for United,” we see the rewards:

May I please have a short-term loan
Of agate to build a house against thunder and thirst.
Yes, I know, the gold star is tarnish in the cap
On the coffin lid. An oil-spin iridescence

Catches the dying light. “Sorry,” says Cerberus,
Each mouth moving in unison.

Vestiges of literary and popular culture — Alice in Wonderland, James Joyce, Little Orphan Annie, Six Feet Under, Fargo — mingle with Mao Zedong, Max Beckmann, and Alexis de Tocqueville in The Bride of E. With obvious and slant rhymes at end stops, and consonance and onomatopoeia sprinkled liberally throughout, some poems read as demented nursery rhymes. But the short staccato lines, repetition, and interrupted trajectories create an effect opposite to the expansive ambition of the content itself. In this loose abecedarius, readers might understandably hunger for the open-ended luxuriance of D.A. Powell rather than the insularity of John Ashbery, the latter seeming to influence this volume more. But perhaps most of all, remembering the power and focus of Elegy, with its amazing ability to connect with readers and provide clarity to anguish, we may be disappointed by the occasional solipsism and obfuscation of these lines, resulting in a sense that this volume, an accomplishment in its own right, may appear premature and incomplete when seen in the poet’s oeuvre.

Drawing on personal history, the second section’s prose pieces suggest that a more generative mining of meaning is possible, including this acute description of depression: “Every day would be the same. Waking on the dot to that repeated realization. The crosshairs of a hidden life.” (“G Is for Going”) Revelations also dot the narratives here, increasing their power, including an apparent act of child abuse by an aunt’s boyfriend: “And I’m left with him. I’m six. He says do you want to sit in my car. I never say. We sit side by side on the seat. I look at the dash. I leave myself somewhere else.” (“G Is for Going”) These pieces hint at a new approach to come from this signature poet.

*

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A Village Life

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

by Louise Glück
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by James Cihlar

9
“And the adults, they’re all dead now.”

gluck village life coverHow do you follow a book like Averno? Distilled, evocative and crystalline, Louise Glück’s previous title seemed to be the consummate modern re-imagining of the myth of Persephone. At first glance, the expansive lines and colloquial tone of A Village Life may appear very different from the austerely beautiful verse of Averno. As her new book proceeds, however, we see that these deceptively loose poems revolve around a talismanic set of images. Even the multiple personas who impart their various narratives use a shared lexicon: mountain, window, fountain, plaza, night, earth, sun, leaves, fire. What emerges is an incantation, a rosary, a mandala. Not unlike Averno, this meditation on aging and mortality uses narrative to speak archetypal truths.

A host of narrators populate this Village, and plot lines recur with circadian rhythm. Children swim in a quarry, leaves burn in a pile, and husbands resort to the bottle, among others. The opening poem, “Twilight,” deftly establishes tone and method, framing through the home window of a mill-worker “not the world but a squared-off landscape / representing the world.” If aging is a progression, then this speaker advances by embracing the subconscious: “I open my fingers— / I let everything go.” Seemingly everyone takes a turn at the microphone, including worms and bats, who happen to offer some of the most elevated metaphysical observations in the book. Locating her speakers in an unnamed village, with a fountain in a plaza at the center and a mountain on the edge, where figs and olives grow in the summer and snow flies in the winter, Glück establishes a hierarchy of story, with rank based on the speaker’s position in beginning, middle, or end. In “Tributaries,” personal trajectory is reflected in proximity to a fountain: children and mothers near the water, old couples at the tables at a safe distance away:

They’re alone at the fountain, in a dark well.
They’ve been exiled by the world of hope,
which is the world of action,
but the world of thought hasn’t as yet opened to them.
When it does, everything will change.

These poems phrase dynamic tension through approximate contrasts: work perverts the human character, leaves conceal the winter, the mountain cleaves from the village, the city overwrites nature, anticipation ends virginity, estrangement undermines marriage, lies pollute truth, and, if we are lucky, the spirit learns to manifest itself in the body. If an aggregate narrative emerges from the multiple perspectives, it is that of the prodigal daughter restored to her hometown, having made the journey through virginity and marriage and career, disillusioned and dispossessed, and able to glimpse, through a comparison of the human life span with the seasonal aspect of nature, what comes after mortality.

You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you
           can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.

(“Midsummer”)

Through the observation of rituals at the passing of seasons, the villagers aspire to a higher understanding of temporality. Put simply, time as a concept feels much different to the young than to the old. When we are young, we wait out life, and expect to forget mistakes.

It seems a strange position, being very young.
They have this thing everyone wants and they don’t want—
but they want to keep it anyway; it’s all they can trade on.

(“Noon”)

The girls who accompany the boys to the quarry’s swimming hole treasure the sexless democracy of adolescence, uneager to leave behind the broad suspension of inexperience. Limitless in potential, youthful imagination is better than reality, the way that the ephemeral reflections of the stars in the river are better than their real correspondents: “they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas, / not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike” (“At the River”).

But even this static expanse of time must end, and we find that our omissions or indiscretions survive to haunt us, “because whatever you did then you do forever” (“At the Dance”). In youth, the broad expanse of the present is interrupted by premonition; in age, by memory. Glück seems to say, a life’s expenditure of moments is simply incremental, not cumulative, leaving us no better off. To avoid decay, one would have to be like the shape-shifter, the incubus of “In the Café,” the serial boyfriend who takes on the likes and skills of his current paramour, then discards her. Instead, the enlightened seek erasure. In the second of two poems titled “Earthworm,” Glück subverts expectation by uniting earthiness with holiness, putting wisdom in the voice of the reincarnated:

It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric.

The unity of the spirit and the body takes a form beyond human ken, describable only as “wholly physical,” and visible only in a reverential study of the world.

Eroding the distinction between novel and verse, A Village Life bucks recent trends by embracing narrative, even if fragmented. Glück avoids the triteness of small town catalogues like Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Classically disciplined, her imagery arises directly out of the setting, evoking an austere, timeless, and archetypal community. Sometimes Glück astounds with loving descriptions of nature: “The sky above the fields has turned a sort of grayish pink / as the sun sinks. The clouds are silk yarn, magenta and crimson” (“March.”) Her infrequent similes provide insight while staying close to home: a pile of burning leaves is “a small thing, controlled, like a family run by a dictator” (“Sunset”); the sun hangs steady “like an actor pleased with his welcome” (“A Warm Day”). Despite maintaining a measured, contemplative tone throughout, she is also able to capture personal inflection: the bartender runs the television with the sound off, and “we spend hours watching this junk” (“Via Delle Ombre”). I caught only one instance of melodrama, at the end of “Hunters”—“the cries of love drown out the screams of the corpses”—although this is in persona for the poem. A Village Life is a wise statement about the body’s relation to the earth, and rewards with beautiful if, of necessity, fleeting glimpses of eternity, as in “Sunrise”:

Between them, the hills and sky took up all the room.
Whatever was left, that was ours for a while.
But sooner or later the hills will take it back, give it to the animals.
And maybe the moon will send the seas there
and where we once lived will be a stream or river coiling around the base of the hills,
paying the sky the compliment of reflection—

Blue in summer. White when the snow falls.

*

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