by Samuel Amadon
University of Iowa Press 2010
Reviewed by PJ Gallo
“each country has made these phrases for / us”
Samuel Amadon’s new book, Like a Sea, is like a sea in that, when you are floating out the middle of it, you have no idea where you are. It is also like a sea in that nothing but a sea is really like a sea. The book’s twisted intelligibility comes together over pieces of language that are not strictly supported by meaning or uninterrupted relay of information. It is easy to trip over the big, heavy things Amadon hides amid his poems’ scrambled logic. The poems obsess over the limits of language, moving from clarity into complicated washouts of prepositions, copulae and pronouns. They do plenty of philosophizing. “Each H,” a series of poems that provides a strong, philosophical skeleton for the book, is a premiere example of the book’s overarching mode. “Each H (IX),” for instance, begins with the simple first line, “That it could sound like him.” The speaker then folds the line under itself with, “That it could sound like him / sounding like he knew / what he sounded like.” By the final stanzas of the short poem, we are racing to keep up; it disintegrates into ambiguity:
we all sounded saying that
was it, but that was it
again, and then wasn’t this moreit anyway, or just it with more
people, more to say
that it could sound like people.
Because the speaker begins clearly, it is easy to imagine the rest of the poem as an intricate word puzzle. The “it” and “that” and “was” are ordered so they lose their original points of reference. The words become less specific, opening them wide for interpretation. The idea that these two, three, and four letter words might veil some earth-shattering revelation is itself a revelation. There are underlying forces—unidentifiable forces—that push all the components of language together into its primary use as a communicative tool. The poem implies that language can seem to make perfect sense without the burden of meaning.
This implication brings to mind a telling adage that Wallace Stevens, whose influence is made explicit through an epigraph, slipped into a short essay defending the artistry of one of Marianne Moore’s poems: “Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing.” It is tough to know what Stevens meant by “aspect.” One suspects it refers to a kind of aura of connotative and denotative meaning that exists around very real, hard things. The ambiguousness of some of Amadon’s poetry fulfills this definition. But applied strictly to Amadon’s book, “aspect” might mean something like “component.” In the middle of “Cognitive Burr,” the effect is kaleidoscopic:
This is the scene for the less-
than-casual gardener. The gardener of import
is not the gardener of intrigue
which is why we have levels rewarding the non-native English speaker works for a mapmaker
who strikes that those are not
the phrases I would use cultural to assumeeach country has made these phrases for
us.
The effect is kaleidoscopic because the poem breaks the world into disconnected bits of language (words, phrases, idioms, points of view), holds these bits up against one another, and argues which is the purer, prevailing thought. It is also kaleidoscopic because it fluidly forces those components back together into something fractured but softened, something that avoids simple representations of time and space but takes on an “aspect” of reality. When the speaker in “Cognitive Burr” explains “why we have levels rewarding the non- / native English speaker,” we can’t be sure what he means by levels or by rewards. We can be sure that some kind of hierarchy exists—one that seems to parallel the hierarchy inherent in an economy. We are given a bit more guidance with the words “import” and “strike.” Ideas about money, the economy, and personal relationships hover here, suspending the pressure each exerts on the other. The lines are like individual thoughts pulled from a collective consciousness; the complexity of the relationship between these thoughts and the finiteness of language allows the poems to seem bursting with meaning.
From its opening line, “I could not sound like anyone but me,” Like a Sea is possessed by its fascination with the limits imposed on communication by the concept of “voice.” The voice Amadon lends his speakers is just one more restrictive container of thought and emotion. It is one more thing his speakers must overcome to communicate clearly. In most cases, the poems exemplify these constraining elements of voice, but there is a definite, self-aware desire to explain these limitations. In “Like an Evening,” Amadon’s speaker makes a fumbling attempt to characterize his own awareness:
I could go several ways
with how best to put everything
should come together is no longer available
now that I am aware I govern
what makes what I govern
differ not from how it must seem
In a book of poems that takes every opportunity to shrug off intelligibility, moments like this are attractive. But even when communication is intended, language can prove a flimsy system. It takes much effort to understand how the “govern[ing]” is occurring here, though the lines are likely worded in the clearest possible language. Parsing out the kind of reflection found in “Like an Evening” (and elsewhere) is still not easy, and Amadon has made the distinct decision to avoid clear-cut, nostalgic adventures in aphorism. In avoiding making perfect sense in perfect syntactic units, the big emotions, the ones that make us cry or punch people in bars, have been set aside. By forgoing manipulation of the big emotions in favor of initiating nervous laughter or confusion, Amadon avoids simplification and approaches a portrait that seems much closer to the emotional and intellectual environment in which we–always a little claustrophobic and scatterbrained–live our lives.
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