The Dabbler

Twelve-Twelve-Ten Review: August 2010

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:10:28 -0400

Burn Lake, by Carrie Fountain

“A road is the crudest faith in things to come,” concludes the poem “Progress” in Carrie Fountain’s debut collection Burn Lake. The progress the poem describes is both historical and personal: as the streets of Mesilla, New Mexico are plotted and paved, so too are the lives of the speaker and her family laid out in exacting detail. Workers dig a trench along the road for the sidewalk, and in this trench the speaker’s young brother spends the summer “alone down there in the silt and shade,/finding out what he was.” The speaker, too, is finding out something about herself as she pretends to read a book on the porch in order to watch the workers “in their plain blue shirts or not.” The suggestion of her attraction to these men barely breaks the surface of the poem (she seems not even to be fully aware of it), and yet it looms large over the goings on. Everything, down to the very mind and body, is being remade, but for an uncertain future.
Many of the poems in the book center around such moments from the speaker’s past when she or her family are teetering on the sharp fulcrum of some powerful change. She and her brother or a friend are often wandering along some parched road between their childhood and adolescence, transfixed by a wildfire in a vacant lot or wandering the mall, “a couple of ideas forming ourselves/against the certainty of merchandise.” Of this latter experience, in “Heaven,” the speaker reflects on what she and her friend must have looked like at the time: “newborn horses: stunned and exhausted,/still slick with the cumbersome fluids of birth.” The powerful poem “The Change” captures the growing rift between a mother and daughter. The mother, who is undergoing menopause, approaches the daughter, who has just begun having sex, at the end of the poem with a “fistful of tampons”:
her mouth saying jovially
“I guess I don’t need
these things anymore,”

though by the time
the sound reached me
from those many light-years

away, what I heard was
“Take them, you fool, and run
for your life.”
The separate orbits occupied by children and their parents play out in many of the poems, as in one in which the speaker sneaks down to the bar where her father works and catches a glimpse of “my mother with a peacock feather/in her hair, her full breasts lit by the face/of the jukebox.” Another follows a mother and daughter through Mesilla Valley Mall, the teenage girl “pulled from rack to rack//by the bored points/of her thin hips” as the mother “waits, lips/pursed, at a distance,//for her daughter to choose//something, anything” (the deftness of Fountain’s lines, their spareness and the precision with which they break, is in full effect here). “What do you think it would take,” we are asked, “for this girl to, say, touch/her mother’s hand/as they wait for the elevator”? (The end of this poem—I won’t spoil it—is a piece of suggestion so brutal it feels like a knife in the guts.) In the memories and anecdotes that Fountain provides us, parents seem like alien beings—distant, indecipherable—to their children. The recurring figure of the speaker’s brother is more immediately felt—more fully understood, both admired and feared—and his malice and intensity drive many of the poems. In “Starting Small,” as they eat burgers and watch a vacant lot go up in flames, the brother
...leaned in to me
and said, with the satisfaction of someone
who has won a long, ongoing argument,

“This is a miracle.”

His mouth was an O
of grease and ketchup

his cheeks red
with heat and admiration.

He looked—I’m tempted to say—
like an angel.
The brother’s later, teenage malevolence is chillingly captured in “Getting Better,” in which he hands his sister a bucket of paint and says “Open it. Just open it.” Inside is a mouse: “writhing there,/dying, eyes coated, face coated, mouth/opening and closing.” Again, the sister is not so much horrified as transfixed, rapt.
Echoed in the brother’s violence, and the other small violences throughout the book, are the exploits of Juan de Oñate, the late sixteenth-century Spaniard tasked with exploring (and staking a claim on) New Mexico. Oñate’s campaign is the historical backdrop against which the personal and contemporary stories of the book unfold. In “Oñate 2,” after nearly dying of thirst, Oñate and his party reach water again, drinking until they are “swollen/as toads.” That night, after waking from a dream, he sees the moon, which was “just/hanging there, unclaimed, milk/that would go bad. So I drank it.” The way in which Oñate lays claim to everything he sees mirrors, of course, the continuing, reckless development of the Southwest. The vacant lot that the speaker and her brother watched burn as children in “Starting Small” is an extension of the same process: “Something big was built/on that vacant lot, something/indestructible//that wasn’t big enough/and was torn down/so something bigger/that would go immediately out of business/could take its place.” The book’s titular lake is just as pointed: the lake is the unintentional result of progress. A bulldozer, clearing earth for an interstate bypass, “slipped its thick blade beneath/the water table, slicing into the earth’s/wet palm.” The lake wells up, unstaunchable, just as the cruelties and mistakes (and joys) of adolescence drive Fountain’s characters irrevocably into adulthood.
The past is always eroded to make way for the new—it is in the face of this fact that so many of the book’s poems are focused on memory and history, which, no matter how vividly recalled, are lost nonetheless: “that is the precise heartbreak/of the past: that it doesn’t return, not even when you don’t want it to.” Fountain’s fantastic book is heartbreaking for the clarity with which it teaches us this lesson.
—Nick Lantz

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Did you read this book too? Tell me what you thought. If you’d like to see my list of books scheduled for me Twelve-Twelve-Ten reviews, click here.

Twelve-Twelve-Ten Review: July 2010

Mon, 2 Aug 2010 20:00:00 -0400

Note of apology: This review is a few days late, as I’ve been busy moving to Pennsylvania.

Here Be Monsters, by Colin Cheney

The syntax of the opening sentence of “Ars Poetica with Vulture” gives a sense of the twistings and turnings of Colin Cheney’s poetry in his debut collection, Here Be Monsters:

Diclofenac, prescribed for gout or arthritis,
wends its way into the poem to explain the thousands
of vultures—long- & slender-billed, oriental

white-backed & griffin—& owls
who carrion-clean what the vultures
of northern Indian skies leave

on skinned cattle shot full of the drug,
& I find myself speaking another poem’s tongue,
saying something about rosemary

& salt butter, how my friend dressing haddock,
or how her break-up—they’re back together
now, or might have broken up again,

we haven’t spoken in months—is like witnessing
a sky burial, Parsi, not American Indian,
but Zoroastrian, which is endangered,

the ceremony that is, because the vultures
migrate from the plains into the mountains—
at least I imagine they do, I haven’t

looked it up—to become the burial
& they are almost extinct, the birds.

In this single sentence, clauses nest inside clauses, and the line of thought/speech interrupts itself over and again—to elaborate, to clarify, to equivocate, to contradict. The speaker’s authority, impressed on us in his knowledge of the specific chemical name, the specific varieties of birds, is contravened by his later admission that he and his friend “haven’t spoken in months” and that he hasn’t bothered to verify another key piece of his narrative, the migration of the vultures. That sort of elaboration mixed with doubt, which is so deftly expressed in the structure of the sentence itself, runs throughout Here Be Monsters. And the disjunction of each comma or dash opens the way for something else to “[wend] its way into the poem.” Considerations large and small, personal and academic, start to rub up against each other in the space of these tercets, and in that friction, Cheney discovers fresh connections.

As a book, Here Be Monsters wends its way from Greek myth to Elliott Smith, from Darwin to dark matter, but the odd connections forged within individual poems in the book are often even more startling. In “Dress Rehearsal for Bestiary,” Cheney leads us from the selective breeding of plants (“Crossing, we call it”) to a child’s misunderstanding of his mother’s pregnancy (he offers water “For the seed...growing inside you”). From this misunderstanding, we are led to another: the fossils of dinosaurs that paleontologists believed to bear live young until they realized that what had seemed to be fetuses were actually cannibalized remains of juveniles. From here, we leap to descriptions of taxidermists’ chimeras, most notably Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid (the upper torso of a monkey sewn onto the back half of a fish). The resurgence of this scam after the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia leads to a consideration of the victims of that disaster, and this, in turn, pulls us deeper into a memory of a different, more personal disaster: the speaker’s regretted sexual encounter with a woman. The exact nature of that regret is never clearly articulated (“Let’s pretend.../that what happened later didn’t happen”), though the recurrence of (often sinister) pregnancy and fertility imagery throughout the poem strongly suggests a particular reading. The speaker picks up these various threads at the close of the poem, braiding them together into a profound consideration of, surprisingly, memory, which he calls, among other things, “a bestiary of the sea.”

The movements of this poem, and the many others like it in the book—private memories nested within academic explorations of history and science, long chains of linkages joining the most disparate of subjects—challenge and surprise. Rarely does Cheney follow the promptings of his images and ideas where we might expect. In “Dress Rehearsal for Bestiary,” that the speaker would come to meditate on memory—and not, more predictably, on the vagaries of human procreation—is worth noting. The recurring themes of the poem—the mistaken, the fake, the artificially spliced—suggest in the context of the poem a trajectory aimed at a particular revelation about sex, love, parentage: that what seems at first as love may come to harm, that we humans are ourselves chimeras of accident and disaster. But Cheney largely sidesteps this more obvious point in favor of something else. When Cheney posits “some glimpsed creature//...distorted to embody something/neither of us could name” and recounts “How sailors turned a fleet dorsal fin, a fluke/into a kraken signifying everything/they couldn’t know the water’s dark/contained beneath them,” the lines describe the capriciousness of memory—in all its slippery, unrecognizable fraudulence—but they do also retain the poem’s association with the perils of procreation, an idea that’s powerfully expressed in the poem’s closing image:

Diana’s son puts a water pistol to her stomach
& pulls the trigger & runs away, the soak
across her T-shirt spreading.

I shot the baby, he laughs, I shot the baby.

The earlier image of water in this thread of the poem is a generative one: “her son, knowing she’s pregnant, insists she drink water/before bed—For the seed, he says, growing inside you.” At the end of the poem, the significance of water (now part of a gun) is made more menacing, a reversal that mirrors the revelation about the dinosaurs earlier in the poem—what seems like kindness can turn out to be, in fact, carnage.

Cheney’s strongest poems hinge on such moments of reversal and doubt. The book’s title itself, as the epigraph reminds us, is taken from a phrase that is “believed to have been inscribed” over uncharted areas of ancient maps, though the epigraph also makes sure to point out that “no surviving map seems to bear such an inscription.” Cheney’s poems generate terrific energy from interrogating our taken-for-granted myths and narratives. The riveting poem “Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds” provides a strong example. Like almost all of the poems in the book, it braids together multiple narratives, in this case the Alaskan explorations of Georg Wilhelm Steller and Vitus Bering, a friend’s death from cancer, and the life of Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz. Cheney deliberately muddies the waters of each story, even as he recounts them in savage detail: he presents two versions of Stroud’s story in which Stroud is either a murdering pimp or a man fighting to defend his raped lover; he recounts how his friend’s mother tells everyone that her son was struck by a drunk driver rather than killed by cancer; and he admits that he can’t “remember/if Bering was buried on that island/or if they brought him home, & why it matters.” Cheney invites the reader’s doubt, too, when he writes: “You believe me, don’t you?/That I am here, my friend dying upstairs?” Such doubt, however, is not troubling. Cheney’s poems present an implicit answer to a fundamental postmodern problem of endless subjectivity. He doesn’t seek to supplant doubt with authority (though he’s clearly an intelligent poet, capable of great, authoritative gestures), but rather to focus on the beauty of narrative and image, history and memory—whatever their flaws.
—Nick Lantz

***
Did you read this book too? Tell me what you thought. If you’d like to see my list of books scheduled for me Twelve-Twelve-Ten reviews, click here.

And do check out Colin Cheney’s web page. It’s probably the nicest poet’s web page I’ve ever seen.

Twelve-Twelve-Ten Review: June 2010

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:00:10 -0400

Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague

In “Levels,” a poem in Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography, the speaker recounts a song in which an eloping girl sings from her window down to her lover: “James, James, hold the ladder/steady.” That moment captures much of the anxiety and delight of Teague’s debut collection, which frequently returns to characters balancing on the edge of uncertainties both large and small. Later in the poem, the speaker says: “I didn’t yet know the edges of my life/so well I’d want to climb outside it—hanging/on only a promise; I still get lost on familiar/blocks.” Life, the poem suggests, may be so achingly familiar that one longs to escape, but even in those familiar city blocks, a wonderful strangeness is lurking. The pleasure of reading Teague’s poems is that they acknowledge both sides of such experiences, as the girl in the poem goes “stepping off/backwards and singing into the rest of her life,” an act that is both joyful and reckless, terrifying and redemptive.

Many of the poems start smaller—for example, with the slipperiness of language. In “Adjectives of Order,” a Vietnamese student struggles with the logic and illogic of English syntax, wanting to change not just the words but the experiences they refer to (“he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before/older”). In “The Sociologist Dreams” we are told:

25% of the homeless are insane, and one of the signs
is believing the same words mean something different each time.
What about believing the same words mean the same thing?

The unease floating beneath the surface of that question is that even what seems most constant, the very words out of which the poem is made, can slip or blur, that our faith in their consistency is misplaced, even naive. In the closing stanzas of “Explanation to a Student,” the speaker, who is teaching Shakespeare, advises that

When the time comes to navigate
the shoals inside soliloquies, you’ll have to trust
not all words will deceive you. Not all are false

as water, which you’ll remember
Othello calls the dead Desdemona, to explain
why he has killed her, why he would not listen
to her vow she had always been true.

The poem is implicitly occasioned by a student’s frustration with Shakespeare’s use of figurative language. When the teacher says “not all words will deceive you,” she speaks to the student’s anxiety that the otherwise stable referentiality of words has been proven unreliable, that nothing means what it seems to mean. The teacher’s tacit admission is, of course, that some words will deceive us, that we cannot always rely on their easy correlation to the world of concrete objects in which we live. Othello’s murder of Desdemona is not a cautionary tale about the dangers of losing faith in language so much as it as an enlargement of that same emotion, of the fear that what we most dearly wish to be dependable may betray us, may prove to mean something other than we thought. Othello’s anxiety is the student’s anxiety writ large, made deadly.

While poems like “Explanation to Student” suggest a life-and-death relevance metaphorically, others are more literal. In “Dead Reckoning,” the poet’s grandfather sends letters from the ship on which he is stationed during World War II, and the letters keep coming, every day, even after he dies at sea. Literally, a “dead reckoning” is an estimation of one’s current location calculated from known past coordinates and measurements of wind, current, speed, and so forth. The letters, then, map the points were the poet’s grandfather has been. His current position is unknown (“He was allowed to write the names of songs/but not of places”), his continued existence to those at home as much a matter of faith as of knowledge, a fact brought home by the fact that the letters continue arriving even though he has died some days or weeks earlier. Again, what seems to be a dependable referent is proven fallible.

The fallibility and uncertainty of love is also a running theme in Mortal Geography. In “Bay Window, with Divorce and Pigeon,” the speaker returns from signing divorce papers to find the window of her apartment broken (“as if the sky itself had exploded at the third story”) and in her fireplace, “eyeing me through cold black eyes, a single pigeon.” The pigeon (a “single” notably, given the speaker’s recent divorce) is of course a reminder of all that can go awry in the world. We empathize with the speaker’s fear that if a marriage can end so casually, so easily—“my husband unbecoming my husband/(I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t/been there)”—then anything can be unmade, that the sky might in fact explode, that “in love’s shelter,/we forget the most luminous rooms have thin glass.”

In “The Whole Story of Winter,” ice-bound arctic explorers lose all sense of direction: “Wherever placed,” the speaker says, “our compass needle stood.” Their Inuit companion tells them “that in their tongue/all numbers—whether much or little—have one name.” Just as the technology on which they depend for navigation fails, so too is the logic of language itself—the tool they use to make sense of their experience, to count the days of their captivity—proven artificial. But even as they settle in, the frozen landscape transforms into something more familiar:

We saw white hummocks resolve
into walls and hedges, frost smoke rising above pastures,
a pinnacled berg convert to a church with spire and belfry.

Here again, Teague captures both the anxiety of uncertainty and its beauty. Though our compass may fail, the land in which we lose ourselves is full of wonder.

Perhaps the most exciting, surprising, and formally intriguing poem in the book is “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Poem,” which, true to its namesake form, directs the reader to leap ahead to later stanzas (“To find a bird metaphor go to stanza twenty”). Here the uncertainties that the book concerns itself with are both reflected in the form (which allows different readings) and explored on a metatextual level, as the very manner in which the reader progresses through the poem is questioned and reinvented. Many of the choices turn out to be false ones, options we are offered only when it is too late, because we have already chosen otherwise, much like the choices presented in real life. For example, several lines into the poem, we are told: “If you are seeking only the lines that launched the heroine//into this poem...then stop at the first couplet, although now that you have chosen to go further, you can learn that their original author...appears again in what will later be revealed as a love story.” And indeed, the story that the poem threads us through is a story of love, and again, it is a love mixed of danger and excitement: “you may also arrive on that slippery clay trail, roots breaking apart the stairs/of civilization itself.” Reading such stories, we are like that girl backing out of her window onto a shaky ladder with her future, for good or ill, waiting at the bottom.
—Nick Lantz

***
(Did you read this book too? Tell me what you thought. If you’d like to see my list of books scheduled for me Twelve-Twelve-Ten reviews, click here.

Twelve-Twelve-Ten Review: May 2010

Thu, 27 May 2010 12:02:48 -0400

Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path

In his third book, Mean Free Path, Ben Lerner writes: “my teachers are mainly/Particles bombarding gold foil or driving rain/It’s the motion, not the material, not the nouns/But the little delays.” That’s an apt description of the book’s guiding aesthetic, which continually fractures and recombines the same syntactic fragments in surprising ways. Much of the book’s lyric strength comes from the lacuna created when a phrase cuts off or in the moments when two of these fragments collide. Here is a stanza from one of the two cycles that share the book’s title:

Then, where despair had been, the voice
Of Nina Simone. Parentheses open
On a new gender crossed with stars
Ari removes the bobby pins. Night falls
There is no such thing as non sequitur
When you’re in love. Let those who object
To the pathos swallow their tongues. My numb
Rebarbative people, put down your Glocks
And your Big Gulps. We have birthmarks to earn

These poems are meditative, somber, and comic, often in the same breath. Phrases like “Ari removes the bobby pins” surface repeatedly throughout the book. Here its juxtaposition with “Night falls” invites an implicit metaphor between the poet’s beloved letting down her hair and night’s descent. Such moves are the book’s bread and butter. These poems both play to and against the mind’s tendency to assemble, to make sense of the ambiguous and the accidental. While Lerner often breaks his sentences mid-thought, untethering their phrases, he also deftly recombines them in significant ways, so that each apparent non sequitur actually reveals an unforeseen connection.

An exemplar of such recycled language is the phrase “Night-vision green,” an image loaded with complex connotations: it captures the sinister undertones of military surveillance, the philosophical issues of the invisible vs. the visible, and even the tacky prurience of certain celebrity sex tapes. Lerner’s poetry is adept at playing the different registers of culture and language against each other, and he threads this particular image again and again throughout the first “Mean Free Path” cycle: “After the storm, the sky turns/Night-vision green. The color of murder”; “All these flowers look the same to me/Night-vision green”; “The color of money is/Night-vision green”; “In total war, the front is continuous/Night writing, from which descends/Night-vision green”; and so on. The effect is that this image, and its connotations, begin transposing themselves onto other imagery. Once the image has been established (and reestablished), even partial gestures can connect it to new objects: “Like those fireflies whose bodies are night-vision/Neither do I” evokes that same fraught color palette without even using the word “green.” By breaking down and recombining his central images again and again, Lerner makes all of the book’s images more reactive, more likely to bleed into one another. As “Night-vision green” attaches itself to various objects, those objects acquire an affinity with each other. A dollar bill looks not just night vision green, but also like the sky after a storm, like the repetitive greenery of flowers. And once we, the readers, are invited to transpose a single descriptive phrase onto several discrete objects, all descriptions start to lose their fixity. So we even begin to see the same color when we read “I dyed what’s-her-face’s hair with lime/Kool-Aid” or “The capitol lawns/Sparkle with poison,” even though these descriptions lack the same explicit syntactical connection to the source phrase.

Despite their apparent chaos, formally, these poems pose a strong counter-argument to Frost’s quip about writing free verse being like playing tennis with the net down. While the forms at work in Mean Free Path aren’t received from tradition, the book is nonetheless formally rigorous. The two cycles titled “Mean Free Path” are both composed of 36 ten-line stanzas/sections, while the two cycles titled “Doppler Elegies” are both composed of 8 three-stanza sections, each stanza 9 lines long and following a strict, repetitive system of indentation and arrangement. The poems aren’t strongly or obviously metrical, and the lines often break against both sentence and syntax, but their formal orderliness, in the way that it contains the syntactical slippages and erosions of the poems, creates a powerful tension.

The novel forms of Mean Free Path also have affinities derived from their thematic and subjective content. The stanza shape employed in the “Doppler Elegies” evokes its namesake Doppler effect (in physics, the change in frequency of a wave perceived by an observer moving relative to the wave’s source). The stanzas expand and contract, pulling apart some images and ideas and bringing others into close proximity. The stanzas in the “Mean Free Path” sections entrap the disjunctions of the lines within rigid-looking boxes. The collisions and jumps of these poems are made legible by their constraint to form. Apparent disorderliness is just another element of careful formal design here. Though I can’t say for sure, I suspect that Lerner composed more discrete, thematically unified poems and then intercut them in a deliberate, deliberative process. That is, the zinging particle chaos here is carefully orchestrated. The sentences that drop off mid-phrase often do so in order that they can attach themselves to what follows. By capitalizing the first letter of each line in the “Mean Free Path” cycles, Lerner makes it hard to distinguish between a surprising enjambed line and two unrelated phrases that he has deliberately positioned together. Such ambiguity begs the question of whether the distinction is even a meaningful one. Continuity and recombination are one and the same in the blended world of Lerner’s poetics.

If all this makes Mean Free Path sound a bit cerebral, well, it is a bit cerebral. But there are plenty of more visceral rewards at play here. Lerner may claim he’s loyal to “the motion” and “not the nouns,” or that “There are six pages left/Of our youth and I would rather swallow my tongue/Than waste them on description,” but his poems abound with deeply resonant images and concisely powerful scenes:

An old man weeps in the airport
Over a missed connection

And while Lerner’s cut-and-paste aesthetic lends itself to wordplay, such wordplay fades us in and out of dark psychological territory:

I’m sorry, sorrier
Than I can say on such a tiny phone. You’re
Breaking up. No, down. I held the hand
of a complete stranger during takeoff
Unaware it was my own

These poems aren’t verbal fluff, by any means. Lurking around every corner are incisive allusions to the traumas of our culture:

I’m writing this one
As a woman comfortable with leading
A prisoner on a leash

And what resurfaces again and again, what binds these poems emotionally, is the poet’s voice (or voices) struggling to speak of love--love of the beloved, of deceased friends, of language, and of the mind itself. These poems don’t churn culture and language merely for fashionable effect. Lerner works like a prospector trying to sift flecks of gold from so much muddied water.

Still, one might be tempted at first glance to assume this book is another postmodern erosion of traditional, authorial poetics. But the reality isn’t so simple. While many moments in the book are surprising, even counter-intuitive, very little feels accidental. The author’s calculations are apparent everywhere. No matter how many voices or masks the poet puts on, no matter how many times he fractures his narratives, a clear organizational force is at work, between the lines, as it were. In this way, Lerner marries many of the technical innovations of postmodern poetics with a more traditional authorial role. A hybrid poetics like this has serious advantages. It shakes up the staid, moldy formalisms that poetry can settle into, but it doesn’t spiral out of control into the territory of inscrutability, into an occult poetics only decipherable (if it can be deciphered at all) by its author. Lerner’s poems are clearly written with great care, and such apparent care engenders a reader’s trust. The reader does not feel abandoned within the poet’s dark forest of language but rather feels that the path(s) he is following, while convoluted and at times broken, will indeed lead somewhere. Though even this characterization has its problems. Mean Free Path isn’t a novel, by any means, with some cathartic climax awaiting the reader in the final pages. Its delights are cumulative. To explain just how cumulative, I’ll borrow another concept from science: emergence. Simplified somewhat, emergence is the term used to describe how complex phenomenon can emerge from a multitude of simple events. The intricacy of the mind, for example, is built on the messy coordination of billions of neurons. Look for a human being in a single neuron, and you won’t find anything more than a binary switch: on, off. But, taken together, a brain’s neurons create, and sustain from moment to moment, a complex consciousness, a personality. Look to any individual section of Mean Free Path, and you won’t find a great deal. This isn’t a book that you can pick up and read an individual poem from at random. The book’s grace and insight arise out of the connections that it forges (and complicates) across its entire span, the way that recurring images connect and reconnect to what has come before, and what is to come. As Lerner says, “It’s the motion, not the material.”
—Nick Lantz

***
(Did you read this book too? Tell me what you thought. If you’d like to see my list of books scheduled for me Twelve-Twelve-Ten reviews, click here.

Twelve-Twelve-Ten Review: April 2010

Sat, 1 May 2010 12:06:23 -0400

Jennifer Boyden, The Mouths of Grazing Things

This April, Jennifer Boyden and I read together in Madison in promotion of our books, which had won the Brittingham Prize and the Felix Pollak Prize, respectively. Many of the poems from Boyden’s book, The Mouths of Grazing Things, embody a kind of rapt attentiveness. “The Listener” (the book’s opening poem), begins with this riveting stanza:

I begin each day blank as an uncut key,
but in the shower I start hearing
neighbors twelve blocks over
washing the body of their mother.

Here the consciousness of the speaker—not entirely by her will, it seems—is thrown open to a world inhabited by multitudes of hidden voices, from those of “the mannequins shamed by their frozen wrists” to “the seeds of the bloodfruit—/words so red they enter/only at knifepoint.” The experience that the poem describes is by turns ecstatic and horrifying. What struck me, listening to Boyden read her poems, is that this profound openness, which takes in and seeks out the many voices of the world, is very much the necessary position of every poet, who must cultivate exactly this kind of receptivity. The poet, like so many of the speakers in Boyden’s poems, must see the world as a place haunted by invisible significance. In “Vandals,” the suggestive, sinister directives of graffiti—“how to take it, what number to call/for a piece of your own, and what happens/if you’re not there to get it”—take on an almost scriptural significance for the speaker, who finds herself searching for the authors of these messages, watching and waiting for them “in my rented room with the walls painted red/and my little bit on and the curtains/more than slightly parted.” The graffiti becomes more than mere casual scrawl, and the vandals themselves demand the speaker’s complete devotion.

Conveyed in both of the preceding poems is the vulnerability entailed by this sort of attentiveness. Listening in this way opens us to danger, disaster even. And no wonder, since such acute receptivity is itself often rooted in damage and deprivation: the excisions and distances of life open us, render us more sensitive. In Boyden’s “Twin,” a boy’s in-grown sibling is surgically removed from his stomach, after which he finds he can “hear the hidden thoughts/of strangers.” In “Phantom Limb,” an amputated arm is “messaging a code more Morse than pulse,/tapping a tattoo of arm into the air.” And in “I’d Have Presented a Cup of Water or My Own Small Ax,” villagers imprison their seer in a box underground, where she can interpret the dreams of objects. Absence, injury, and lack are synonymous with (or at least necessary to) attentiveness here, and that conflation speaks directly to a central tension of poetry itself. Like the imprisoned oracle in Boyden’s poem, to be a poet is to “read the dream/of anything,” to imbue the mundane with the fantastic. This sort of magical thinking is essential to poetry; without it, a Grecian urn would be nothing more than old pot. But this sort of thinking is restless—once the mind begins imputing hidden meanings to the world, it’s hard to stop, and this can leave one crazed, insatiable. Or perhaps it is the symptom of those who are already a bit crazed and insatiable to see the world in this way. It would be a mistake to overstate the stereotypical image of the tortured artist, but even the most well-adjusted poets by necessity possess an off-kilter approach to the world. The poetic eye looks at things sideways; it searches beneath the surface of the visible world because, at least on some level, it finds the world-as-given lacking.

For some poets (and I would include myself here) this form of perception is best characterized visually, but for others, the perception is primarily aural. Such is the case with Boyden, whose poems continually seek out the “voice” hidden in every strata of experience, especially in nature. Far from being a naive pastoralist, however, Boyden doesn’t romanticize the impulse of listening to trees and rocks; rather, she confronts the reality that such searching is often rewarded with disappointment. In “This, Too, One Kind of Voice,” for example:

The egret in the pond of a mountain
asks this, too: she tips back her head
and calls out a sound like the length of her throat.
Nothing she can hear answers, but weeds
shiver on the banks.

And in “North”:

No one told me
I was alone and singing to a growing darkness
in which no dark bird preened, no bird
called out a tether to the light.

Thus, the poet’s call rarely receives a response. And even when a response comes, it is often less than comforting, as in “Churn”:

Even as the buds were struggling to open their pink mouths
to say—

But their voices froze and fell into the dreams
of worms who uncurled themselves and began to eat.

In these poems, the voice that reaches out either falls on deaf ears or is swallowed up, consumed. Sometimes the human mind does find its complement in the world around it, but the parallel turns out to be an alarming one, as in “Regret,” where the “spinning whetstone/inside me” finds its partner in the “grip and roar” of a chainsaw cutting up storm-felled trees. Such identifications are not flattering, but they are apt. The saw only knows how to cut, to open, to separate. The dissections of poetry can feel much the same way, and the poet’s way of seeing/listening, too, like that implement, struggling against its own tendency to always break the surface of what it encounters, searching for something deeper and hidden.

In the closing lines of “Admission,” the speaker touches elegantly, brutally, on this central dilemma when she says: “Every outer thing/has a voice, and none of it is human.” The human mind, particularly the mind inclined toward poetry, constantly searches outside of itself. It calls out and listens for a voice like its own to answer back. But what answers is wholly unlike it—not hostile, exactly, but not friendly, either. These are the voices of those difficult, alien objects whose dreams the poet must interpret, which is precisely what Boyden does.
—Nick Lantz

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(Disclosure: My second book won the Felix Pollak Prize, which is paired with the Brittingham Prize—which Jennifer Boyden won in the same year. Both of our books were published this April through the University of Wisconsin Press.)

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