by Peter Jay Shippy
Rose Metal Press 2008
Reviewed by P.J. Gallo
Skeletal
Peter Jay Shippy’s book-length narrative poem, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic, follows a would-be normal day in the life of Isaac Makepiece Watt—from the cow that initiates the poem by falling through Watt’s roof to the transfer of Watt’s father’s brain into that of a mountain gorilla, and importantly, amidst the odd Oedipus story that floats around on televisions in the background of the poem—through an alternate galaxy that fluidly combines elements of ancient Thebes, contemporary America, and an imaginative, technologically advanced future. If the setting and literal events of the poem are not strange enough, the poem is also conceived in a sort of watered down Nadsat which, in its loud and twisted way, both justifies and undermines the peculiarities of its events.
Skeletally, the poem chronicles a simple, mundane event: a son visiting his father in a hospice. Without the poem’s glaze of language, such a visit would seem undistinguished. For a poem at least partially set in a contemporary culture that spreads families geographically and emotionally thin, if visiting an ailing parent has not become a rite-of-passage, it is at least a colloquial event. But when Shippy packs his disjointed world of Pekingese-mauling robots and mythological beasts onto this skeleton of a plot, the experience becomes something stranger, something closer to the weirdness of experience an actual Isaac Makepiece Watt might have as he makes his way to his father’s infirmary.
The strangeness in watching a living parent make a slow, sad transformation into a dead one is certainly more gutturally bizarre than Shippy’s universe and more disorienting than his syntax. Shippy establishes Watt’s bafflement by enacting his confusion in the juxtaposition of unusual events and turns-of-phrase with his commonplace visit to his father. Through this exaggeration, Shippy makes a statement about language’s ability to mislead toward the truth, which he continues with his with fleeting references to Oedipus, both criticizing and rationalizing Oedipus’s story in the recognizable stupidspeak of television. Shippy describes one of his world’s news shows:
They’re debating
our current crisis.
One is for the Oedipus
one is against
the king.
One digs Pythia
one is versus
the oracle.
One admires Creon,
but one is in animus of all royals.
The commentary here is as much spectacle as the Oedipal event itself, and this nearly describes Shippy’s M.O. When he puts Oedipus’s story on a peripheral television among what appear to be contemporary pundits, he lends a familiar story a familiar tabloid twist—one that, by the nature of tabloids, exaggerates truth into mythology. As Shippy’s universe heightens the strangeness of the experience, it diffuses its emotionality. Isaac Makepiece Watt never seems genuinely sad, and his world is jovially constructed. This is perhaps reflective of an external experience with death; it is so foreign to us that our sadness must be irresolute (hence Watt’s incongruously punning middle name, hence the poem’s title). After Watt returns home from visiting his father, he points out his unfamiliarity with a new and ambiguous role:
I’m ready for my cue.
Tomorrow I’ll have to begin saving
my father.
Isn’t that what a son doeswhen his old man has been transformed into a mountain gorilla?
While the lines here refer to the literal transformation of Watt’s father into a mountain gorilla, Watt expresses a reluctance and confusion that transcends the ridiculousness of the literal situation and parallels real human loss. Though that loss is shaded by an event that has clearly and purposefully been contrived to buck the reader from emotion, it asks, by comparison, if we can know anything about the unique events that surround each death or about each death itself. This is at the core of Shippy’s poem. It is a valid and interesting assertion, but the poem’s language and syntax are so idiosyncratically constructed that they sometimes undermine and confuse the poem’s goal.
Some of Shippy’s more tangential phrases are rooted in humor (Watt remembers “the Thebes Sox loss to East Argos”) or sound (“a dollar for a dollop of cranium uranium”), and some are completely nonsensical (“I try to boo her limbus to etch through/ her spyglass”), but the strongest are the beautiful, though often impertinent, aphorisms he sprinkles among his triplets. Aphorisms like, “The best masks are the ones the mob forgets” or “The heart/ is a bird cured of flight.” These are the moments that reach the most consistently out of story and into poetry. In fact, at times, the plot becomes a burden on the poem.
Early sections of the poem maintain the kind of meandering consciousness of a Lynne Tillman novel. In these sections, Shippy’s speaker’s own meanderings, of thought and language, fit nicely. Later sections, though, pursue plot more aggressively, and the poetry suffers. But even in these less cohesive sections, after the capricious and sometimes contrived literal events of the poem can be sorted out and separated from Shippy’s language, they stand as a pleasurable testament to the idiosyncrasies of his speaker’s voice. Take this passage from the end of the poem’s fifth section:
All I wanted was a father
to hate and punch and defenestrate
like all the other kids?I Jeffersoned the Hancock line. I moved to the Heckett, where
I stare at the wall
and it stares back.Walls!
Can’t live with them:
can burn them to ash.
These three stanzas contain a handful of Shippy’s conventions of voice—ambiguous punctuation to further indicate irony or sarcasm, manipulated historical references that glancingly utilize pun, nonsensicalities (what is a Heckett?), unprovoked exclamations, and actively anti-cliché philosophical statements. Certainly for some readers this kind of language will come across as a solipsistic annoyance, and sometimes Shippy tends toward an off-putting self-consciousness of strangeness in which he is aware that the world he creates is bizarre, and cannot fully commit to his characters or his universe. In these moments, his speaker seems unable to exist exclusively as a storyteller and must hint unabashedly at its existence as a creator of its own false world. Such moments stand out as beacons of retrospective artifice in a world that ought to instead arch toward the future.
The poem is over-the-top, as it is meant to be, and the universe Shippy has created is extremely well suited to its restrictive but airy stanzas. It is sometimes hard to see the poem’s serious philosophical and poetical arguments around all its hullabaloo of presentation, and it’s harder for these arguments to take the reins of the poem as they most certainly should. While they intermingle effectively at times, in some ways the language props up the poem as a kind of exoskeleton which has an inevitably hollow inside. In other ways the events of the poem form an endoskeleton, unable to stand without the muscles of more obvious transition and logic. Even so, at times Shippy achieves a necessary balance. His voice expresses ethereally connected, literal events that somehow coalesce into a believably miniaturized galaxy. He clearly takes great delight in the twists and turns his poem takes, and the poem is at the very least a prolonged glimpse into an imaginative and worthwhile world.
*
