by Sandra Simonds
Bloof Books 2008
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman
Avec Papiers
A friend of mine used to go out with a bipolar guy, and she would get really frustrated at how much people would encourage the early stages of his manic episodes. She’d come home and find her friends covered with post-it notes, all of them chuckling about what a goof he was, making them all wear post-it notes. No matter how hard she tried, they could never quite get it through their heads that these events weren’t wacky fun, but warning signs—and of course, they all got to go retreat to their own spaces as his madcap fun escalated to full-on scary. Sandra Simonds pitches her work to that very narrow line between zany-fun and scary-crazy, always trying to push the language to the place just before it falls apart or attacks. She’s looking for that moment just before the poem stops being a good dinner guest and starts breaking the china.
At her best, Simonds plays with the making of meaning, slipping around in the language until you both see how language can’t not mean, even though those unavoidable meanings are deeply unstable. The first poem is called “I Serengeti You,” setting up precisely the kind of play she intends to engage in. And who doesn’t want to be Serengeti-ed? It sounds exotic and dangerous and intimate. A quick review of the poem’s titles make the books feel a bit like “Graduate School Confidential”: “These Days are Malthusian Foonotes”, “The Truth About the Pills I Took,” “I Don’t Deserve Your Riesling,” and “Ponce de León as Floridaphile” are a few of my favorites. Her sense of humor is on display in almost all of the poems. As she says, “There is teaching / and the taut.”
The poems tend not to move forward as meditations or narratives, but rather as accumulations of affect. Simonds’s work often feels like a playfully angry refusal to divide the intellectual and the emotional. The body and its demands are often pushed into and out of the brain and its thoughts. “Bon Voyage” begins with something like an erotic journey:
The path from the throat
to the nipple is too longa journey to take without
handkerchief and water
But it quickly moves into the associational, before returning to the body:
so goodbye
bulky redtrain—pulse sack of meat,
metal and nailbecause my flesh is an artificial
field of feel where each cellis a different
explanation…
For Simonds, the body is an intellectual question, the intellect a bodily one. Simonds’s work has a kind of ferocity that barrels each poem forward of its own accord, never quite allowing the reader to find clear footing. Perhaps a better description is that the poems are seeking a reader who’d rather have the footing shift. She addresses this concern in “The America You Learn From (A Poem for Grocery Workers)” as she enters the second section: “Enough! / What am I talking about? I have no house.” But the poem ends in perhaps the most metrically perfect evocation of the last eight years that I’ve seen so far: “Hey Missy England, it’s all the rage and/ —thumbs up, Abu Ghraib.” It captures a near decade of flippancy, distance and horror in one quick couplet.
In some ways I feel that our current “book culture”—by which I mean the pressure for the book to be the basic unit of poetry’s circulation, and for that book to have an arc that carries the reader through a unified experience—seems an ill fit for Simonds’ work. At times, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the poems would be happier in magazines, chapbooks, or broadsides. The work is so frothy, rich and dense that the poems in sequence don’t really carry the reader through an emotional arc across the manuscript. It’s all desert; there’s no main course. The poems in sequence repeat themes and double back on themselves and the experience of reading the poems is fairly stable. The development that does occur across the book is mostly formal. Watching Simonds play with the varieties of lines and stanzas is quite remarkable. She has a strong sense of the page as a field of play, and the multiple ways that the poems play out are accomplishments in their own right.
Simonds is brilliant at capturing the shallow and casual patterns of contemporary American speech and thought, putting pressure on them and presenting them back to us. But when she tries for a clearer emotional directness, it often gets lost in her style. “Tokyo Elegy for Zach Over Okonimyaki” can never quite confront the loss that motivates the poem—though it begins to emerge in the details of his space. At those moments where sincerity might be welcome alongside specificity, she pulls back, staying in her perfected space of the detached. The book is primarily social—the relationships and concerns are nation-sized—but it leaves the personal poems feeling unfinished.
Warsaw Bikini may be notable for having the strangest blurbs I’ve ever seen. Cal Bedient references the author’s “terrific nihilistic dislike of herself and others,” not even pretending to assess a difference between speaker and author. Since Simonds has her BA from UCLA, it seems a good bet that Professor Bedient has first hand knowledge. R. M. Berry’s comment that “Every outset projects a lack the sequence must undo, overturning postponement our wanting’s askance with preposterous now,” seems so to convolute his suggestion of how to read her more that it offers an endorsement. And why would Barbara Hamby call her “La belle dame sans papiers”? Yes, it’s the title of one of the poems in the collection, and the reference to Keats is funny and accurate—Simonds indeed seems merciless—but “without paper?” She just wrote a book. But it is unfair for me to focus only on the weird. Hamby does say that her poems “are hyperactive conduits into the chaos of our lost-at-sea moment in time,” and Bedient compares her to Plath before saying that her subject is one “that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power.”
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