by Ken Rumble
Carolina Wren Press 2007
Reviewed by John Deming
Grinning Like Faith
Key Bridge, which crosses the Potomac and connects Arlington, VA to Washington D.C. (more specifically, to Georgetown), is kind of an underwhelming bridge when compared to, say, the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridges. This adds a peculiar degree of levity to Key Bridge, Ken Rumble’s book-length abstract ode to the U.S. capitol.
When Hart Crane wrote his famous ode to the Brooklyn Bridge, he did so with authority—authority somehow in sync with the illusion of majesty the bridge itself commands—that the city commands, that a country commands. Less than a Ra Ra America poem, Crane’s ode had (has) a way of impressing empowerment from citizen to citizen. In Rumble’s poem there is little command over D.C.; the city, it seems, has its way with him and with everyone else. What Rumble has conceived of is a personal map of Washington D.C., as it pertains to his experiences, his memories, and his contradictions about the city’s contradictions. It’s an attempt to map out his psychic relationship with the city, if only to command some kind of meaning out of it in a time when D.C.’s shining symbolism feels more and more vapid.
The book takes the form of a journal. Each small section is given a date, beginning with 15.May.2000, and taking us (vaguely) through 9/11 and the Malvo sniper attacks. In any journal entry-style book, there are inevitably poems (sub-sections of a book-length poem, whatever) to cut—the trivial, the Poetic, the annoyingly fun, the sweet—and Key Bridge is no exception, though for the most part Rumble’s done his job. On April 1, 2001, he allows himself to be haunted by various ghosts:
Then they emerge all black & white
& glittering & I ignore them as they
stand in front of the TV
kiss me & wish me goodnight. MOVE
I say &
they’re gone.
Rumble, in these poignant lines, presents the conflict all people face when contending with the ghostliness of the dead. There’s more room for reflection in the open form Rumble’s created for himself; he remembers being younger in D.C.:
Summer nights the punks come here
(& me when I was one
on hopes for unannounced Fugazi
shows…
But Rumbles after more than just surface-level reflection on the city. He is, for example, not afraid to tackle the race issue. Mapping the city and cataloging its racial divide seems of the utmost importance to young D.C. poets; I’m thinking specifically of Thomas Sayers Ellis, who organized his first book The Maverick Room according to the city’s quadrants. In Key Bridge D.C. is found
to have the first black majority
in a major U.S. city.
Chocolate city.
D. Chocolate City: the first one.
In addition to the race issue—which he pushes further than you may expect—Rumble’s idiosyncratic language and cut-and-paste abstraction evoke the image of a person astonished by the capitol city and at the same time, frightened by it; how, for example, does one quantify the fact that while America is involved in a dubious overseas war, there are people in the city willing to kill their own? The Malvo sniper attacks are apparently beyond reason and control, and the murderous pair behind them is likened to stars in the sky: “that they could be compared, the man & his boy— / his boy doing all the killing.” It’s all so complex that he’s helpless to avoid reducing it to a simple quandary:
It’s cold there today I know, cold all through
the Potomac like metal.(I put my thanks in Washington
[D.C.: the ease of it all)
Unfortunately, you will from time to time find yourself distracted from lucid moments like this. Parentheses are slippery little fish and Rumble uses them with such freedom that you can’t help but think, at some point, that enough is enough (you’ll say, “that’s enough,” for example, when they are used to evoke “(d(i(s(t(a(n(c(e(”). Occasionally, especially towards the end, he’s too liberal with the word “love”:
There are places with many roads
to love near places with many trees
to love near many you
to love near many birds
to love near many me
to love near sounds like love
to love.
The point—that you can feel at once overwhelmed by love and confused the contradictions of the person/thing you love—is made too explicit here; instead of the vague, ghosted hints from the book’s better sections, I feel in these “love” lines like I’ve woken up inside an Easter basket. He almost ends the book with the enthralling image of Malvo “hung on the cover of Time” before giving in to the unfortunate impulse to comment again on the nature of love:
You are here
is always true
except in love.
A bit too much for the conclusion of the book; the D.C. obsession is far more interesting than the love obsession, entwined as they may be. Every now and then you’ll also come across a throwaway section as well; for example, when our poet is so hungover he could “eat a live cat.” But a crowd larger than that of the D.C.-philes will find a lot of pleasure in this narrator’s willingness to be aware of confusion, and to engage the capitol with an intelligent and discriminating eye: “Where am I? Where am I now?” And toward the end he does use the bridge and stake enough command over the capitol city to give you a chill:
Key Bridge in D.C. at night:
grey, blue & black—
the piers sweeping from the river
an arch as an afterthoughtD.C. at Key Bridge with night:
the old bridge’s abutments grin like faith—
Whitehurst Freeway peels off the bridge early to drop
into Georgetown’s Foggy Bottom
The wordplay—Rumble’s a Steinian at heart—mixed with the domineering image of the less-than-domineering bridge gives you the sense that the poet is willing to control as much as he can while conceding most else to question and chance. The all-important word here is faith; and conflicted as he may be, it could be said that Rumble’s got enough of it to go around.
*
