It’s easy to be silent; it’s hard to be quiet. If you want the former, just don’t say anything. But if you want the latter, you will have to figure out how to control for how we register sound. It isn’t simply a matter of volume. A whisper, for instance, can prove even more distracting than speech pitched at a normal register, just as the whine of a single mosquito or the buzzing of a lone fly can provoke attention where we might successfully drown out a louder but less differentiated racket.

On the page, a poetic analogue to sound is rhetoric. Rhetoric doesn’t get yoked to poetry very often any more; when the term appears at all, it’s so closely in the company of political speech that one now means the other. This isn’t just because politics is persuasion. It’s also because we think of politicians as talkers, and we have ill sentiments about talkers, even when they use the same abbreviated store of words everyone else does. So what, then, is the relationship between our attitudes about talkers and our attitudes about literacy, the literary—especially when we couple literary fluency and eloquence, and eloquence to rhetoric?

Hearing sounds and words and cadences and rhythms is not the same thing as hearing (or performing) the sound of someone talking, especially someone talking deliberately and with intent to persuade, paint, seduce, inspire. And I suspect it just isn’t possible to experience talking without rhetoric, tagging along uninvited, to complicate matters. Much can be made of that complication, of course—arguments with others, arguments with self—but what cannot be done is the reversion of eloquence to its elements without the presence of the eloquent.

In Rae Gouirand’s first collection, Open Winter, about twenty-five of the poems are eight couplets each, with most couplets interrupted by colons. Several other poems experiment with alternative punctuations, or extend the number of couplets, but this basic form comprises approximately one-quarter of the book. These poems look, more or less, like this:

Ask Both

What area is a word if you
ask: for wind you get stones if you

ask: for stones wind: ask both
and stones in wind stones: in wind

wind passes: on its way
to being wind: and walks out the hills

to bend them: it whistles
what is not stone: or wind or fence

the bird: stands midair
a constant line: the stillness of stone

the only thing reminding
of moving I think: back what you said

about cold stones and dirt
holding in your ears and cast: some

tones if you ask: the words
turn so ask: just one word to fold

“Ask Both” cannot be eloquent, because it cannot be easily elocuted; you can say it, but in saying it, you are not speaking, at least not in a fashion that lends itself to rhetoric. If that seems like a sacrifice on Gouirand’s part, consider what she gains. Wind is an ungainly word; locked in discursive syntax, polysemy makes it too easily mistaken for its verb doppelganger. Barring that, even the noun form poses metonymic challenges, because as a thing it only achieves descriptive urgency as an action. Altogether, then, wind doesn’t hold much promise: it’s airy, indefinite, too hearty a symbol, too poetic.

Unless, of course, you conjure a way to include it as a subject while prohibiting the structures that activate the abovementioned risks, which is exactly what “Ask Both” does. In fact, the poem’s replete with words that pose equivalent risks: stones, fence, stillness, cold, dirt, tones. If you warned a judiciously grim reader to expect a sixteen-line poem built from that lexicon, they wouldn’t hold out much hope. All of which simply accents how smart a poem this is, smart in solving a problem and smart in seeing the problem requires solution. By making “Ask Both” an impossible complication of elocution, Gouirand divests the words of their rhetorical familiars and thereby reintroduces them as both simple and strange. That’s an uncommon combination, but it’s also one that seems elemental, of a world of word-as-thing.

The choices she makes in this poem, and this form, are particularly vital for Gouirand, because her capacity for eloquence is as vast as her rhetoric is supple. When she’s working free of the syntactical limits enforced by the form of “Ask Both” she’s capable of things like the following, from her long poem “Sfumato”:

Inside La Specola, a woman’s neck graced
by pearls, comma between face and science.
Entirely wax, aside from that string, as though
A woman sculpted on such a cold table deserves
Something for the borrowing. Hair, also real, kept

In braids, some warrant of care or purpose for this
Surrogate, a sample years passed her one stopped
Utterance for Florence, its students of bodies
& service. The city stands, wax intact,
but I learned my veins from books,

guessing faint hairpin turns in blue
x-ray, and a house where things pulsed
without the rise of sight.

This is, if such a statement can still intelligibly be made, classically eloquent. I prefer rhetoric in chains to rhetoric gloriously unleashed, but I admit that Open Winter would be a weaker book had Gouirand chosen either the liberated or bound form to the exclusion of the other. The advantage here isn’t simply that of variety—variety for its own sake is simply a mess—but the establishment of pinned if polar techniques between which she can weave poems according to the density the subjects demand. That claim, too, is a very traditional presumption, that both the poet and the poem can have a subject, and that the subject can be well—or ill—served by compositional choice or “style”. The problem is that admitting this is a conservative way of talking about a poem often shoves poets into either repudiation of the terms or a reactionary embrace of them. It’s of no consequence to me to which side of the road any given poet chooses to jump, because either way they end up in a ditch. The alternative Open Winter presents isn’t an aesthetic centrism or meaningless “hybridity” so much as it is a reasoned and ultimately evocative concession to the treacheries and sweetnesses of what prompts figural language. Just as distrust of rhetoric doesn’t mean you can eliminate it, distrust of selfhood doesn’t make you disappear. Managing these distrusts, narrating them without making stories of them, is Gouirand’s great strength. She can work the regions between like key changes in chromatic harmonies, each suited to the tone or mood fit for the degree to which the subject is or has potential for rhetorical elaboration. For example, her poem “Finger” uses the rhetorically-exhausted symbol of the moon to remind us that the moon actually exists, literally above and beyond human use—but she does so in a way that avoids reproducing that kind of use.

Finger

Ask once and no response:
can mean no response: ask twice

and the same only points:
like a finger to the moon: silence

indicates: the keeping
of space: as yes it must be known

when unsaid: twice
the telling happens: only when one

is ready: to be alone with
what is told: the work of rope:

a cast a discipline
a letting: I want to desire nothing

more than the state
beyond need: recognize the moon

bow speaking: the word
after the edge after: the felt point

That’s impressively done, but it is at least as impressive that Gouirand saw that it could be done, that someone could try without forswearing any of the options language presents. It’s possible that she has chosen subjects that of necessity force her into invention: she writes about beauty but doesn’t want to write “beautifully” when she does; thus, she can write beautifully when she writes about lust, which she doesn’t write about lustfully, although she does write lustfully when she writes about language, which doesn’t write about as if it were speech but rather matter. Lo, a pattern grows discernable.

Some poems in Open Winter hint at the other ways Gouirand finesses the pattern. In “Adequate Dissemblance” she keeps the full syntax array, trading out punctuation devices for actual letters until the letters become shape, symbol and phoneme, all in the context of the unapologetically—forgive me—lettered.

In the earliest scrawl of human pursuit,
scratched on an antler in a rock house

in Auvergne, the naked hunter, approaching
the ample Urus, who is eating a little grass,

pulls his spear back in the air. This clutch
will become the D, the fist of motive.

An R emerges from the predacious rip
of the open mouth. The creature

will vanish, but the antlers, V.
What of this to I the child, left to

the dining room table long past the clearing
of the dishes, the plate of cold eggs

leaking, m n m m n against the edges
of the vegetables and the quiche,

the serum of barely solid foods.

If in whatever she writes next Gouirand proves that she can build from these occasional deviations poems as focused and considered as those in Open Winter but without reliance on any predetermined technique (which is really just the carapace of ethos) then I believe she’s capable of anything and I look forward to seeing what that anything looks like: you don’t often watch someone pull the rug out from under themselves and remain standing. In any case, Gouirand’s work with words won’t be limited to a theory of how language ought be used but concerns itself with how it is, both within speech and verse and without, sometimes even above and between. Sometimes a label, sometimes a lathe.

Allegedly, the earliest forms of writing were actuarial: lists, of inventory, accounts, transactions, rules, laws. If so, the lists should be as familiar to us as any form of text could be. And they are, of course, but that doesn’t prohibit them from being strange or even illogical, despite the aridity of the listing act. A list presumes its own justification; all these items belong together because you can list them, but you can list them because they belong together. That belonging is fertile, for between the literal lines springs forth ways of meaning that the listed items themselves permit. In this sense, reading between the lines is the only possible method of reading: the more items on the list, the greater number of lines, and the more lines, the richer and more complex the meaning. Thus, the mathematical specificity of the list can conceal or imply sentiments that themselves cannot be reduced to number or name.

If the first of writing is a list, then the first of books is a ledger. In a long piece of prose that occurs in the middle of Ed Bok Lee’s Whorled, in which he tells the story of his relationship with his father as the latter approaches the end of his life, Lee introduces a word I was unfamiliar with—jokbo—a Korean genealogical print record that features prominently in “Mourning in Altaic”:

One night I searched his bookshelves for something to read in Korean, and came upon the tattered jokbo my mother had presented me when I’d turned sixteen. Four bound volumes of my particular Lee (Yi) clan genealogy. My paternal grandmother had given them to my aunt, to give to my mother, to pass on to me when she deemed the time was right. In the jokbo, as my mother explained, my family’s bloodline was recorded by birth date, hometown, education, titles, and accomplishments, if any— seven centuries back to the Koryo Dynasty.

Reading this description, which places a jokbo squarely in the same function of a ledger (lives added, lives subtracted), summoned memories of my grandmother’s Bible, which served a similar purpose, though in her case executed with far less depth and precision than the Yi family genealogy. But the key, shared feature of both is the fact that even as the text annotates family, it inevitably leaves out more than it can include. Just as there’s no room in my grandmother’s Bible for speculations as to the madness of a possibly syphilitic aunt, the Lee family jokbo cannot accommodate that Lee’s father’s older brother would have turned, as “Mourning in Altaic” tells us, “into a black sheep and drunkard, bearing only one boy out of wedlock, then died shortly after the war under mysterious circumstances.” It is is precisely this kind of information that explicates or enriches the list; without this kind of data (micro-historical in noting the drunkenness, macro-historical in citing war) the listing function is hollow. Yet the more complex the annotations become, the greater grows the gap between the facts and their lived consequence.

When the speaker of “Mourning” seeks to succor his dying father, his list of proffered comforts includes visualization therapy, meditation techniques, and finally a chant in a language the Korean-speaking father cannot recognize. The son, by his own report, lives a life both cluttered and desolate in (of all places) Fargo, North Dakota, where he consorts with “stunted types of single parents, Edgewood trailer kids, mixed-race mongrels, military brats, Bible refugees, drinker replicas, druggies, vandals, thieves” whose recreational activities range from fighting, drinking and flirting to snorting lines of powered sleeping pills to the inconsistent sounds of “Zeppelin, Marley, N.W.A.” Though “Mourning in Altaic” is a singular prose work, with a section all to itself, its methods and concerns color the whole book: the ill-ease created by superficially contradictory or exclusive elements that are, in fact, the closest the speaker can come to a sense of a synthetic whole.

This commonplace multiplicity—the one that is the many—can be a property of nouns and adjectives both: a polymath, polymorphous. So what I’m just going to call the poly-, is now an assumed condition of what we keep identifying as modern life. Its hallmark is the kite trail of necessary listings which yoke together nominally distinct things: hyphenated nationalities, multiple ethnicities, myriad occupations, mixed martial arts, largenesses that contain multitudes. The spirit of Lee’s poetry hovers in the paradoxical space between markers of identification and actual identity. He makes wry and rightly skeptical use of the noun cluster and the adjective train, but does so in service to something elusive, something more precious. It’s as if he glues together shards of glass to make a bottle only to celebrate what that bottle cannot hold.

One of the ways Lee does this is to attend to where his subjects actually are, not in terms of geography or nation but at the more mundane level of discrete physical space. Many of the poems in Whorled occur in bars, hospitals and casinos, the last of which Lee writes about with dizzying fluency and speed, as in “John Henry Tran (a.k.a The Terminator) vs. The System”, which follows the appalling adventures in ill fortune of a one-handed Viet down and out in an Indian casino:

But in ten minutes flat dude dropped
$1200 on a barbed chain of hits,
until homeboy on third finally says
Yo dawg, ain’t no race;Handless Man’s eyes now glassy—
Down 13 grand,
he explained & shook
his head,peeling five more c-notes
from a silver clip with his good hand’s
feral fingertips

Lee frequently returns to scenes like these, perhaps because what casinos, bars and and hospitals have in common is that they at all places that increase the visitor’s odds of seeing the human parade in all its poly- glory. That such places are often depressing sites of confusion, deprivation and bad judgment in both its larval form and as a scarlet-winged butterfly of bloody ruin is no accident; even though any given casino of course exists in a specific place, it more fully represents a sort of superspace. Each casino resembles every other casino far more than it shares an aspect with wherever it is located. Lee, no fan of unchained capital or its imperial master, doesn’t shy away from the cost of global catholicity, but neither is he nostalgic for some pre-lapsarian state. The energy of the poems doesn’t count as an endorsement of the world as is, but it does suggest that there’s life to be extracted from it.

This country
isn’t ready for us, you said,
luxurious, recidivistic; I remember
thinking your dream-yelps
must be your Viet father on fire
But maybe your Hmong mother’s third marriage
equally fixed you for life
TomboyTwo nooses of black braids
all July tempting the entire Metro barGone
Torched one Sunday dawn for the insurance

Every world has its devils
You won’t escape these anymore
than you’ll capture them

Now I see what you meant when you said
we should have another superpower
after invisibility or
absolutely nothing

Blacks & Indians

in this town billeted inside white guilt
We should have pain-love & longing-anger
like ice cubes in warm beerWe should
have women who don’t destroy their men
as if soldiers trained by their jungle-soaked fathers
We should expect no one
will understand this; press our own
sweet confections from the inverse molds
of these stale dark emotions
no American History book will ever reference

This is grim and despairing, but Lee concludes “The Book of Blackouts” with the promise that the speaker will “finally understand / All this sadness / did not eventually drown / our love— “. There’s something post-Romantic about this—Lee writes frequently and without irony about love and friendship—but it is not indulgent or salvific. Even at his mooniest, Lee is more than a Matthew Arnold, a figure who cannot help but take the cacophony of the world as a personal insult.

If the modern world is a problem, it’s a fascinating one, both despite and because of its crimes, both large and small, and Lee does this truth better than justice. I don’t always enjoy every last element of his verse (I think his language is sharpest when he cuts the comic with the tragic, but when he tries the reverse, the results can be too purple for my taste), but I think he’s deadly accurate when it comes to characterizing the difficulties of committing to a single point of view, even when the self under consideration is one’s own. In one of the poems in Whorled that best showcases how attuned Lee is to temptations and flaws of easy, self-satisfying answers, “The Riddles”, the speaker tells the story of how, when he was six years old in Seoul, “Jimmy Riddle, son of an American / businessman, five-fingered / cash from my mother’s purse / while hiding in our closet.” Over the years, the narrator turns over every possible reason for this literally petty larceny:

There had to be
some other impulse, some reason
why
a rich white boy playing in a native’s humbler apartment
would pocket cash
then deny, pretend, blame,
and never once cry—

and in struggling to answer that question, Lee considers all the relevant variables: class dynamics, represented by his mother’s exasperated refusal of Riddle Sr.’s cash remedy, an act equally evidential of racist and nationalist norms. He also wonders if simple familial psychology explains Jimmy’s theft. In short, he makes a list, but also explodes each item on it, which is the inexorable result of examining anything at length. Every interpretation marks a location on a map of possibilities, but spend too long at any one marker and you get lost. As both list-maker and collection of listed attributes, Lee finally asks

Or is this all too easy?
Is the blinding dynamo here my own inner rationale—

Not only for Jimmy Riddle,
and his misplaced, dysfunctional family,
but also my own
small spun soul
Tangled there, with his, somewhere
over that cold, inscrutable ocean?

Note that Lee doesn’t answer his own question. Maybe it is all too easy, the formulation of answers, the compression of complex facts into simple lists. Maybe that isn’t too easy at all, and Jimmy (as can be much of the world) can be explained away with a thorough enough catalogue of impersonal factors. But the more likely case is that Lee is right to answer first and ask questions later. Whorled is not a book of clean lines and sharp corners, a book that’s also a box. It spills and erupts and makes a mess, but its lists expand and grow, as living things do. A ledger is an enumeration, but what it enumerates is transactional and thus a record of exchange, intimacy, the trace evidence of the social. Lee sometimes experiences listing as exasperating (how many adjectives, after all, does it take to adequately describe a noun? How many elements of the world must one name before one can simply call it the world?) but he is also aware of how much more beautiful and vital are the many than the one. It’s this truth to which he is inclined. It’s fitting, because while to list does mean to enumerate, it also means to lean towards. List, which comes from the word we once used to describe what it means to love.

The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky
lucky coat anywhere by Michael Burkard
Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin

If your mother or father or the wolf what raised you fulfilled her or his or its obligation to make you fit for civilized company, she or he or it taught you not to be a show-off, a braggart, a gloater. Of course, if whoever or whatever initiated you into this world also met the obligation to make you hold your civilization to account, she he or it also demanded that you have pride without acting prideful. But the difference between the two isn’t graven in stone; one person’s honesty is another person’s ostentation.

For this person, Evie Shockley’s the new black is a textbook example of how to be bold without being base. I distinguish between virtuosity and vanity in terms of what the performer wants: an artist of the latter shrieks look at me! while the former says look at this. Wielding an instrument clarifies the difference between performer and performance, but voice is an instrument, even if it easily mistaken for an aspect of self. A conscientious performer’s work instructs us by being, so when I call the new black a textbook, I mean it takes the reader to school for their own edification and entertainment, not to shine a spotlight on the instructor. Whether you are looking for a school of twentieth century verse norms, a school of American history, a school of how to move around those alma maters and master your inheritance of them at the same time you stand in suspicion of their provenance and possibilities, whether you are simply looking for a great good time: the new black is going to credential you in every last one.

Shockley’s well aware that her age (and Our Age) demands that she be suspicious of the falsely simple or the disingenuously complex at the very least. One of her dedications is to Lucille Clifton, and the devotion is true and whole, but an epigraph quotes Thomas Sayers Ellis’s justly famous “All Their Stanzas Look Alike,” the essential instructional document of how to summon, name, manifest and subdue poetic fear—″Even this, after publication, / Might look alike. Disproves / My stereo types.” Yet another epigraph, however, comes from Harryette Mullen, from whom Shockley has learned much without ever risking the hazard of imitating the inimitable. The range of these acknowledgements reveals how cannily Shockley manipulates the perhaps inevitable question of black identity as expressed in matters of artistic tradition. She knows, as does Ellis, how intricately designed a trap such questions can be, and her response occurs throughout the book, stepping into and out of that trap, springing its mechanisms as a way of perpetually defying it. In “duck, duck, redux” she warily and wisely demonstrates how the push-and-pull of racism changes these terms even as it re-establishes these terms. “this is the way we wash our face, wash our face, wash our face, this is the way we wash our face, so early in the morning,” the poem begins, and ends with “this is the way we wash our hands of you historically, throw you into the atlantic, spray you with Birmingham hoses, this is the way we wash our hands of you today, with jerry-rigged levees, so early in the millennium.” In terms of tradition and identity, then, Shockley knows that making everything old new again also requires we confess that everything new is old again, as well.

This is a ferociously complicated truth, but Shockley is more than its equal, both in terms of what she can do with verse and how she thinks about what she can do. Thus, the first poem in the first section of the new black, “my life as china,” reads in part simply as a wonderful exercise in literalized metaphor:

i was baptized in heat :: fed on destruction :: i was not destroyer :: i was not destroyed :: i vitrified :: none of me was the same :: i was many : : how can i say this :

The poem answers its own question when it concludes with the following promise, as the speaker says “: i will not give : : i will give you what you have given me”—and I love this icy bargain, both threat and fact. As a poet, Shockley contains the proverbial multitudes; as a person (a condition sometimes incompatible with that of being a poet) she’s heir to all she has lived, heard, seen, learned, embodied. Like a funnel’s taper, she focuses a flood. Sometimes this expresses itself in disciplined displays of formal and editorial observation, as in “a sonnet for Stanley Tookie Williams”:

mary bled

for the december miracle, as some-
one must. did you imagine sacrifice
as you called the crips to life? Did they come,
those youngbloods, at the crackling of your voice,

like lazarus to christ? vigilant night.
on the road to san quentin, candlelight.

At other moments, however, Shockley slows down or speeds up the compositional act, and shows us not just the result of her formal gifts but the ad hoc methodology of writing itself. Thus, in “Celestial,” a poem drawn from Shockley’s discovery of Marilyn Monroe’s advocacy on behalf of Ella Fitzgerald, she writes

her name was ella, elle, French for all woman,
everywoman, she, the third person, feminine

and

her name was norma,

she wasn’t normal, blonde, her name was marilyn,
the i in an angelic, first person

and

the effort between the effortlessness, the exercise,

the training, the makeup that made the woman,

her name was norma, marilyn, ella, est-elle, the star.

then annotates the poem by identifying it as a form called the gigan, invented by the poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Whatever this thing is—I had previously associated the word with a particularly puissant foe of Godzilla—it suits Shockley and the new black perfectly, because the type of showing off it provokes allows the poet to foreground process and product in a way that mirrors both her mind and the mind of artistry, of association altogether. While the poems in this collection gather an unbelievable diversity of styles, they also fall into one of two general categories: the perfect lockdown of a tradition, as with the sonnet, and an effervescent, lively and playful destruction of the idea of tradition, which sometimes occurs in forms Shockley is inventing and dismantling simultaneously.

Of these categories, while I respect the authority and skill of the former, it’s the latter that makes the poems I love best. She can do amazing things with the prompt of the riddle, which is metaphor unconstrained, metaphor that embraces rather than disguises its logic. In “where’s carolina?” Shockley tells us how to graph a map that renders everything in equal detail:

east of childhood, north of
capitol offenses, just west
of a big blue treasure chest :
wet coffin of neglected bones.
in the veins, unnoticed as
a pulse, at a counter : sitting in
varicolored eloquence.

And the consequence of this is that our map becomes as big and complex and gorgeous and awful as the thing we hoped it would help us navigate. Likewise, in the ghazal “where you are planted,” she picks apart the tapestry of her own childhood with the device of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to indicate how a self emerges from countless strands of otherness:

one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss-
dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.

the maples in our front yard flew in springs on helicopter wings. in fall we
splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.

frankly my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly
plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i:
it’s part of what makes me evie : i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

In much the same way she reaches into and across poetries as a matter of technique, Shockley embraces everything as a legitimate subject. If all forms are hers to charge with life, so are the expressions of those forms. In “a background in music,” she praises

the elementary chorus performing a patriotic medley
for the bicentennial, the high school madrigals wringing
the carol of the bells out of our overworked throats each
december, W V O L simulblasting car wash or little red corvette
out the windows of every deep ride rolling in the black
neighborhoods, melodies to carry over the clap *slap* snap
of our hands clocking time (miss mar-y mack mack mack)
or to keep us out of trouble with the jump rope, pep squad
cheers to perfect, spontaneous spirituals in the church
parking lot, and, yes, some country, the mandrells, the oak
ridge boys, tuning in to hee-haw’s banjo humor and gloom,
the music was howdy and whassup, hell naw! and aw yeah!

and if this doesn’t declare itself as the ars shockley I just don’t know what could. Plenty of contemporary poets might agree, in principle, that the whole point of a past is to use it, and that the whole point of one’s culture is to live it, but very few can effectively write to that principle. One must be willing and able constantly recall, and render, the truth that the key feature of an individual mind is that its operation is always happening right now, a perpetual present.

Because of that mindfulness, there exists a true joy in watching Shockley do her thing. There’s not a trace of self-inflation in the prodigious display of skill in the new black, and there isn’t a gesture towards self-denial, either. The playful, barbed, bitter and bemused irony compressed in the very phrase—the new black, whatever it is, cannot be divided from or mistaken for the “old” black—gives Shockley an opportunity for brilliantly complex and defiant homage. As she concludes in “ode to my blackness, “without you, I would be just // a self of my former shadow”.

It occurs to me as I wrap this up that the last three examples I’ve chosen only come from three pages of the new black. I hope that gives you some idea of how rich and delicious it is; it’s so abundant that the last section, “the fare-well letters” (thirteen valedictory poems of fourteen lines each, epistles to an ace bandage, ink jet, quaalude residue, an untimely violet) is itself an entire book’s worth of brains and beauty and vicious, goofy wit.

the new black doesn’t need the likes of me to explain or sell it: it shouts, with glee and a kind of genius, its own achievement. But I do want to make a final case in defense of its unapologetic figuration of Shockley’s skill. It’s easy to look askance at soloing, especially in musical terms, as self-indulgent. But in the best solos it isn’t the self that is being indulged. It is the instrument, and all that has issued from it previously. A true solo is also a chorus; singing, as Shockley writes, everything there is to say. In Art Blakey’s “A Night in Tunisia,” a voice responds to a solo with the command to get mad—and the soloist’s response is the sound of skill bought with great effort, now given away freely. Sometimes getting mad and getting happy sound alike. Sometimes they sound like bliss.

I have often wondered, because I clearly have too much free time, if there is anything upon which contemporary poets could agree. The only candidate I’ve found thus far is “Chicken Bucket,” a poem from Jennifer Knox’s A Gringo Like Me. “Chicken Bucket” has earned me lots of new friends, “Chicken Bucket” has eased me through tense encounters with would-be enemies, “Chicken Bucket” has convinced my students that if I am not awesome myself, I am only one degree away from awesome, and “Chicken Bucket” has required lots of explanation when people find out I read it to students at all. I’ve lent out many copies of the book in which “Chicken Bucket” appears, and I’ve never gotten any of them back.

So who is this Jennifer Knox Person, this savior unexpected, this salty redeemer we didn’t know we needed? Maybe it makes more sense to answer the question of who she is by noting when she most resembles.

Confused citizens of the United States of America recently celebrated (or, in smaller, numbers, lamented) the centennial birth of Ronald Reagan, our two-term fortieth president, preceded in this office by Jimmy Carter. The years between 1976 and 1989 possess what I like to identify as low production value, as if our national budget for fantasy was so limited that it became difficult to misperceive how shitty our affairs truly were. Cheap things looked cheap, expensive things looked gaudy, and it took a colossal act of will to obscure these truths. If you slid into your El Camino after a hard day’s work and rewarded yourself with a Very Special Episode of B.J. and the Bear, you knew in your soul that your civilization had failed, and that it couldn’t possibly last much longer, but that was okay, because when it finally collapsed you could break into the mall and make Orange Julii and have fun until the zombies came.

This gallows realism didn’t last, of course. A confluence of technological seduction, increasingly strategic civic distractions and desperate fear led us to unreasoning, jingoistic hope, drove us to pretend sunshine even though darkness still ruled the land. We gained self-esteem at the price of self-awareness, a bad bargain from which our current woes derive. But we lost much, as well. Eventually, we lost, for instance, Don Ho, as Jennifer Knox laments in “Don Ho’s Funeral”:

Great Shaman Mickey read the eulogy. Mickey’d only come down from his hut on the volcano’s slope one other time: the 1969 moon landing. Mickey told us many things we’d never known about the man Don Ho, the husband Don Ho, the father Don Ho—and one thing we did: Don Ho was a really good guy and everybody liked him.

This is ridiculous. It’s also funny. But unlike most other poetic marriages of the ridiculous, the funny, and the (insert reference as obscurely populist as Don Ho), it isn’t ironic, or at least not in the sense that an ironic speaker sucks the bitter marrow of pleasure from alleged superiority to their subject. Of the multiple ironies in which we currently flail, all require a subject stripped of any unconsidered virtue. But sometimes this results in self-congratulation—I see through you, Don Ho!—and Knox’s irony is of a different kind, in that it asks what kind of tool could muster pride from “seeing through” the likes of Don Ho. After all, if it is ridiculous to stand up for Don Ho, only an egomaniac or an asshole would dismiss this kind of valediction:

Now Don was nestled in the always-86 degrees, breezy bosom of the Lord where everybody’s gonna get paid, everybody’s gonna get champagne—the good stuff—with tiny bubbles zipping off like pricked balloons, like cells unwinding in the blood.

The most destroying detail here is “the good stuff,” a qualifier that proves that nobody’s going to get the good stuff, no one knows what the good stuff is, everyone just hopes and believes in a later and better world, you know, where they keep the good stuff at, where all it takes to be heavenly is a paycheck and fancy folk’s fancy wine. Primary irony would disallow any longing of this type, no matter how modest it seems; Knox goes better than to allow it, and suggest a sort of wistful nobility.

Straightforward as this poem is, Knox is better known for bringing the weird, as she does when prophesying one of the seventies and early eighties’ icons of manliness, in “Burt Reynolds FAQ”, which begins by telling us

Reynolds is he son of six grizzly bear brothers and the Holy Goddess of Cherry Trees. He was born from his mother’s nose, which ensures lifelong charisma. Before he could walk, alligators would gather to watch him wrestle other babies.

and concludes with the deadpan assertion that “In the summer, his mustache still grows unruly with lily of the valley.” If you didn’t know any better, you could call this surrealist, though most surrealists wouldn’t bother with the velvety trochaic beauty of that back-half of the line. More importantly, surrealism would shove the impossible onto the field to compete with the reduced capacities of realism, which suggests a kind of hierarchy in which the real suffers by comparison.

But Knox insists the playing field between the bizarre and the mundane is fully level, and doesn’t really recognize or care that the teams wear different colors. So in the very short novel-poem “Red/Green Color Blind Madness,” when the antagonist, Pokey, says

Whoa there, Stretch. Hands
off—the madness stays right
where I left it,

and offers, by way of justification,

See it’s a philosophy, really—
a conscious choice to be this way—
though it’s costed me dearly…

the narrator responds with

It’s rabies, you dolt—you’re
Drooling all over the place

I am given to trust the narrator over Pokey, simply because of the contrast between the deluded rhetoric of self-inflation and the cranky facticity of the speaker, even though she then proceeds to worry over a spider’s egg buried under her scalp, predicting that “Soon it would hatch / and its scorching righteousness / would pour forth like lava.” Well, better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths, says Pushkin, but I stand with Knox, who says it’s rabies, you dolt. It isn’t that extraordinary things don’t or can’t occur; it’s that they don’t justify or deserve a philosophy, nor do they at all imply a conscious choice. The extraordinary is thus very ordinary indeed.

It would be harder to qualify this laconic, resigned irritability if The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway were not so well balanced in terms of the colorful derangements and stark ones. For example, the bizarrely incomplete narrative of “Red/Green Color Blind Madness” sits opposite “”Battle of the Network Stars: “Dream Team”" quoted in its entirety below:

She asked if she could
Sing a song for us
In the bathroom.

It was about love,
A lover,
Life,
And being Irish.

The sound in the stall:
Like she’d opened
A box of wasps
Onto our faces.

Later we laughed about her song
As we were charging the fattest
Hooker in the stable
On a credit card we stole
From my mom’s purse.

This is breathtakingly cruel, and with only a few tweaks, could easily be mistaken for one of Ai’s dramatic monologues, spoken from some dim afterlife of the American West, peopled by spectral fuck-ups of one kind or another. Except, of course, Ai would never have thought to name-check a televised “sporting event” that at its apex featured a showdown between Gabe Kaplan and little Robert Conrad.

We should pause here to ask whether or not it matters if the reader knows anything about Gabe Kaplan or Robert Conrad. If you know enough to recall what a joy it was to see a lanky self-deprecating schlub outrace the bantam rooster of unjustifiable vanity, all to the good. The conflict accidentally reproduces the fight between drolly accurate ‘70s defeatism and the insanely misguided and hateful optimism of the 1980s. But if you don’t know anything about the grand donnybrook to which I refer, it doesn’t matter, because the very title “Battle of the Network Stars” presents you with all the information you need. For you know, at least, that there were things called networks, and people called stars, and someone thought it was a good idea to send them to battle, and whether with shame or pride or no thought whatsoever, we watched.

So if it bears asking what all that stuff is doing in there, what’s Quizno’s doing in there, Knox asks and answers the question herself, by asking about Beverly Hills Cop III, about which she says

This again, but way lamer. We started out
Outlaws, now we’re law (in chichi suits, yet).
Why does every bright, rare thing we are boil
Out like wine’s kick in a simmered port glaze,
Leaving only virgin vapors, Ghost of Badass?

This captures the essential dynamic perfectly. You don’t need to have any special relationship with the Beverly Hills Cop franchise to experience a perverse nostalgia for crap that had the dignity of its own crappiness, the sanity of no real ambition. All you need is the ability to detect the madness of the present. Knox’s writing will always be contemporary, because there will always be a past.

In her previous poems, this relentless reverse-polishing—she works hard to restore rust to a bent fender painted with chrome—Knox simply wandered from one scenario to another, happy to show us disconnected vignettes of the dumb, bludgeoning power of human wishes. But the long second section of The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, “Cars,” tells a story of sorts, or at least draws a portrait of the relationship between a young woman and her dad, a flip-book of automotive mishaps. In one segment, the daughter notes that her father brought a ’66 Corvair, a shapely relic of a vehicle famously marked unsafe at any speed. But it’s the daughter who can be characterized in those terms as well: she drinks, she gets stoned, she smokes crack, she chews Tropical Bunch Bubble Yum, she trips all the way across the desert after a Dead concert on her tire rims. Her dad, for his part, shares her potential for catastrophe, though his springs more from an apparent disinterest in his own well-being. Yet the pair, on Sundays, “go for long rides all day.” On one of these, when he is angry at her for some reason the daughter cannot even remember,

He hadn’t spoken a single word for hours, then he pulled over and asked, “Do you know why you do the things you do?” He left the motor running. I knew that meant he didn’t think it would take long. I also suspected there was no right answer. And I was right.

Rightness, denied and possessed. Knowing that there’s no right answer, refusing to pretend to greater control or wisdom or power or meaning than is possible, is as close to right as we can get. This is why Knox’s humor is kind, for all its sometimes-surly thuggishness. She reminds us that the destination of better is unreachable. When we aren’t crashing, we are simply going nowhere, very fast.

So of those pop monsters made monstrous by virtue of their habits of consumption, consider these four:

The Thing. In the act of consuming you, The Thing—like its cousin, the Body Snatcher
—replaces you.

Our contemporary fetishes are the zombie and the vampire. Both of these bespeak a fabulous narcissism. Zombies project onto others an explicit mindlessness, so that the difference between the zombie and you is strictly hierarchical. You’re better than a zombie. A vampire, however, is markedly superior—but that superiority manifests as a preference for the exquisite delicacy that is you, darling, tasty grass-fed veal that you are. Not just any flesh; your flesh. These vanities are the errors of the age, because the sad fact is that our totemic horror is neither of the undead, but the very opposite of the undead, the over-alive: The Blob.

Consider The Blob, friends, if you dare gaze upon the undulant whorls of its grotesque, glistening surface. When The Blob first appears, it is met in battle by Steve McQueen, whose efforts to alert the people of Phoenixville (no, really) suffer because the townsfolk cannot, at first, decide which is the greater menace: The Blob or Steve, a binary most often read as Communism versus Teenager-dom. Inevitably, of course, the citizens realize that, while irritating and unpredictable, teenagers are just the un-tempered ore from which independent, individualized citizens are forged, and harness teen energy to resist the literal advances of The Blob.

Electing The Blob as a metaphor for communism is every bit as vain as projecting onto or extracting from the undead a justification for our inexplicable self-esteem. Communism (theoretically, daffily, incorrectly) assumes collective agency for collective good, as opposed to capitalism: the show of individual greed as collective evil. For The Blob, as Guy Debord would tell you, best describes the action of capital, which turns everything into itself, suborns selves into selflessness via the transformative magic of selfishness.

Zombies lurch, vampires speed, things sneak with vegetal slowness, but the motility of The Blob is the ooze. Internally undifferentiated, with a malleable perimeter that allows prepositional motion over, under, through, around and within. It’s a liquid, albeit a slow one. But you don’t have to be fast if you are inevitable. Immersion within The Blob is to be The Blob. If there’s any comfort to be found in such a fate, it’s that once immersed, selfhood dissolves, so at least one cannot suffer as The Blob.

But what if this isn’t true? What if awareness persists after absorption? Liquidity, after all, doesn’t presume the liquidity of whatever the fluid suspends. And fluid, of course, simply means uninterrupted in movement. Liquidity refers to the relative flow of capital, as well.

Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation ponders multiple anxieties induced by his suspicion that ours is a monstrous society, but they all share the same fundamental concerns: what if you do retain selfhood within The Blob—what does it mean to be a person inseparable from the operation of capital? Of what use is fluency (of intellect, of language) in fighting a liquid of which you are a part?

The Cloud Corporation has earned reviews in venues usually disinclined to praise younger poets; the book is only Donnelly’s second, and it has been seven years since his first. Part of what accounts for this celebration (which is wholly due, I think) is the book’s fearless cerebration. I agree with this assessment, but not because brains are good for their own sake—that’s zombie logic—but rather because the unfolding of Donnelly’s thoughts, as beautiful as a bolt of silk flung down a marble staircase, is central to his subject. Think about that action, though: in any individual example, it’s an apotheosis of skill. Taken in aggregate, however, it can become, well, monstrous. One bolt of silk unfolds with liquid loveliness. Billions of bolts of silk unfolding in slow motion begin to inspire organic unease. The machinery of life is elegant at scale; expand the scale and it becomes gross, horrible, cancerous, Blob-like.

Donnelly’s plenty smart, but it’s his focus on the plenitude that matters here. We don’t lack for smart poets; many, most intriguingly the conceptualists, engineer artifacts of divine design. But the general difference between refusal and denial persists even when applying intelligence. Denial pretends away the thing denied; refusal admits but also rejects. A poetics that channels intellect—as, say conceptualism must—isn’t the same as a poetics that minimizes intellect for sake of achieving some other end—usually justified by the claim that too much unfiltered Brain interferes with feeling. Yet intellect itself is a filter, if an odd one; it’s made of the very matter it concentrates. The means by which a mind develops discrimination actually engenders more mind, just as Blob makes more Blob, as life makes more life.

Raw intellect is thus a bit of a paradox, but that’s what Donnelly is working with, because here’s a poetry that denies nothing the poet knows and makes a point of displaying that knowledge while also performing and judging it. And just like the omni-directional agent he confronts—the theatre of late capital, in all its Lovecraftian multiplicity, the goat with a thousand young—the performance and the judgment are indistinguishable. His lexical dexterity would be more ostentatious, in fact, were he to constrain it. I’ve always found Donnelly’s verse skills truly impressive, not least because he knows that only the most pompously disingenuous of jackasses hides his light under a bushel if he knows the radiance will beam through the sheaves. He doesn’t bother with making his intellect seemly. Why should he? Intelligence doesn’t have a set moral value, and to struggle to fix the boundary between too much thinking and too little pretends to an impossible knowledge of what intellect “should” be for.

So let’s take a look at one of those bolts as it rolls down the palace steps, the first of “The Night Ship”:

Roll back the stone from the sepulcher’s mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as if some sorcery

had shocked the occupant’s hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish

that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,

begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture

that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport of your birth,

that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, draw by the spell

of the sea’s one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.

One sentence, friends. Well, some sigh, that’s quite the cascade of clauses. Prepositionally progressive as The Blob itself, one might assume that because any child asked to diagram that sentence on the chalkboard would fly into spasms, its complexity only offers clinical, analytical pleasures. But go ahead and read the passage out loud: those are among the most beautiful sounds you will ever utter. Yet the beauty describes the very condition the experience of which drives Donnelly to a kind of ecstatic, exhaustive despair.

Brains and beauty: an embarrassment of riches. What I admire most about The Cloud Corporation is Donnelly’s frank yet elaborate acknowledgment that these riches are, essentially, good for nothing. A view from the top is a view to the apocalypse. From without, The Blob is a threat; from within, it’s a womb the comfort of which is compromised by the individual’s sense of how their privilege and their predicament are one. In “The New Histrionicism” Donnelly writes

When the actor on stage slams his fist against the table
One last time, his other hand holding a worry-heavy brow,
Half-shadowing his eyes, we can almost taste the thumb
Of circumstances bearing down on him, and we know what now
He has to become: a man of action, opponent to the forces
That brought him to this crisis. We’ll watch as he chooses

His moves with caution, demonstrating as never before
What we have come to call free will, his plight felt so acutely
We have no choice but to believe in it, even if we know
That the path our hero manages to cut through the hedge
Maze of opposition was actually penned forth centuries ago
In the looping longhand of an author now conveniently

Apart from the drama which seems to reveal the illusory
Nature of free will even as it attempts to excite our faith in it.

That is what it feels like to be Steve McQueen within The Blob. Santayana’s warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it is thus revealed as pure, Baudelaireian irony: they may be condemned, but they won’t know it. The true condemnation is a hapless comprehension of a perpetual present, undeniable understanding of a belief that cannot be resisted in action that cannot be realized. Every paradox is a trap, a trap that springs only once you know you’re in it. You cannot get out of something that you are. Allegory becomes a trap, eloquence, effort, everything. In the same way that the opposition was made centuries prior to the taking up of arms against it, the maze has always been closed, will always be closed.

The Cloud Corporation is a big book, big and sublime in that it inspires a kind of queasy awe. Its strengths are considerable, even as the poet dissolves the distinction between macro and micro to tell us how it feels to be all wound up with nowhere to go. But I treasure it in terms I rarely apply to art: this book is great because it’s true. In reading it I regularly shuttled between the satisfactions of the verse (“That’s that!”) and admiring dread (“Fuck. That is that.”)

If you’re foolish enough to read the correspondence and journals of poets long dead, you may occasionally find a hateful desire to destroy both prior poetics and the possibility of subsequent ones. The Cloud Corporation, merciless only in its accuracy, goes one better: a book that destroys itself, autophagy as moral accounting of capital expanse. What does The Blob do? It makes more Blob. Phoenixville fights it first in a theater, Phoenixville fights it in a diner, Phoenixville—capital of infinite fire—ironically tries to freeze it out. The movie concludes with a question mark: The End?

And ending’s impossible. It isn’t tragedy, then comedy; the difference isn’t. Fluency is superfluous.

Is it all too much? Of course. If something so polyformal and alive cannot have a point, then that, in a majestic and morally acute display, is the point.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/the-cloud-corporation/feed/ 2 http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/bird-lovers-backyard/ http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/bird-lovers-backyard/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:03:46 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=1278

And now I persuade you to acquire a book from which any quote or sampling is both wholly representative and of no indicative use whatsoever. Let’s!

Were I to ask the Lord why Bird Lovers, Backyard is not one of Barnes and Noble’s 100 Best Sellers of the Hour (this list, it does exist, it does), where Nelson Mandela’s Conversations with Myself sits a few rungs down from The Lost Hero (Heroes of Olympus Series #1), The Ugly Truth (Diary of a Wimpy Kid Volume #5), and American Assassin (Mitch Rapp Series #11), the Lord might respond thus:

What does Thalia Field have that those books don’t?

Alternately, the Lord, really on task, could ask:

What doesn’t Thalia Field have that these books do?

Nice rally, Lord, but here’s the thing: I’m not suggesting Bird Lovers, Backyard belongs in the list. I submit that it ought replace that list.

Because it has everything in it.

At which time the Lord might see fit to remind me of the cherem issued against Spinoza for suggesting substance doesn’t require the Lord as previously understood. Point, point, but look: even a duality is a kind of hierarchy; equivalency is just a binary tipped on its side. To the degree that this is true—a degree that obliterates degree—that truth begins to elude the mind as soon as the mind registers it. That’s how you get from Spinoza to Hegel, from Hegel to Marx, from Marx to a host of political actors and ideologues about whom little good can be said. Mud baked into bricks, bricks to build a building, a building from which to throw bricks. If it’s a choice between the neglect of Barnes and Nobles 100 Best Sellers of the Hour and enmity, bless neglect.

While I hope you find that shiny and meritorious, you, and my editor, likely want to know something about Bird Lovers, Backyard. Although that desire smothers much of what Bird Lovers, Backyard, does, I’ll give it a go, just so you won’t accuse me of shifting off my duties.

So.

A pigeon problem, as articulated by persons on behalf of persons and pigeons both;

Many introductions to what isn’t a ghost story on, under, about and embodied in what once was Bikini Island, slowly experiencing radiological decay, or not;

An essay, of sorts, on the glorious history of the failures of naming;

An approximately lyric population ecology portrait of seeing sea-shells by the sea-shore, if by population you refer to the organic and the organic and by ecology you mean beauty;

Discussion questions;

A long expository accounting of Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of ethology, and his smartness-wrongness;

A transcript, kinda; well, no, not really;

A testament to and of Vicki Hearne, human crux of rigor and compassion;

A discussion group;

A return to the pigeon problem, which we now see is more than pigeons and much more than a problem.

Does that help?

Field includes all of these. And her method of inclusions enfolds far more. Sometimes it looks like this:

Pigeons try to fly home. Taking advantage of this, Egyptian sultans, ancient Greeks, Persians, all established Pigeon Posts. A desire for homecoming feels familiar, and might explain why flies are nuisances while pigeons bother us so completely: reflection over time. Pigeons have been seen hitching rides on subways and buses, knowing which stops to get on and off. They know so many of our tricks.

and sometimes this:

CHAPTER ONE If this were a ghost story, precautions might be better taken. it was once believed that burying scandalous folks—murderers, pagans, suicides—at a crossroads would be the only way to get them in the ground. But it could also be true that carrying the dead to the crossroads and turning them around, creating a maze, or burying them facing down (or the wrong way), then walking home by another route—all this might ensure that the ghost who felt unfinished with you couldn’t follow and take up where he left off.

and sometimes this:

There are no extant writings of the Name-Disputer, Hui Shi, though he appears in other people’s texts. It is told how he relied on analogy. (“If you don’t let him use analogies, he won’t be able to speak!”) The King once asked Hui Shi why he wouldn’t just talk directly. If you want a definition of a bird, Hui Shi replied, and all you get is “a bird is a bird,” you haven’t learned much. But if you say “A bird is like a person, except with wings,” then you can expand what is known by pointing out the unknown, using the same to extend into difference. But even though he was a successful politician, Hui Shi’s lackadaisical relativism offended more ethics-minded Confucians.

Each, in isolation, presents something of interest in prose felicitous enough to justify further reading. In these discrete forms, they sometimes resemble the wandering annotations of Eliot Weinberger. But where his reports and speculations progress towards a whole, Field’s question the very idea of the whole even as they pleasingly approximate the same. For example, Hui Shi’s observations about the naming of birds encapsulates and expands upon the pigeon problem, while the changing fortunes of the pigeon’s reputation predicts the discomfort and strategic disorientation of the tactical burial.

So the inclusion of Lorenz (the “discoverer” of biological impression patterns and possessor of racially-inflected ideas) and Hearne (ethicist of animal essence, especially as regards the definitional and reciprocal relations between human and animal) makes perfect essayistic sense. Yet while they could and do work in those terms, they do much more, because Field refuses to conclude a line of inquiry once opened, just as she sees an affinity between any number of points as something more than a set of lines.

I could do this all night.

Guy Davenport once drew a useful distinction between Joyce and Pound by insisting that the latter focused on the origins of energies, while the former concerned himself with how those energies were used. The system works for any number of modernists: Moore v H.D., for instance. And it likely could be made to work all the way up to Olson.

But it doesn’t work anymore, because the energies of which Davenport spoke have so receded from ready reference that their use no longer describes a lineage. You cannot find the well, but you can fall into it—which doesn’t even count as discovery. Because the “nature” of the contemporary is that one can get anywhere from anywhere else, but can’t distinguish between getting there and being there, the contemporary writer either capitulates to this or pretends it isn’t true. There’s no real point to the latter strategy, however, because the pretense cannot persuade. Elective falseness persists in human imagination, but the conditions thereby resisted persist as well.

It’s Field’s peace with this, her ease with shuttling between the products of hierarchical thinking and the methods that dismantle them, that makes her such a pleasure to read and such a pain to justly describe. Bird Lovers, Backyard owns the most elegant geometry of any book I’ve read in, oh Lord, many a year. In the same way that Davenport’s above/below, origin/execution template disappears via the simple magic of rendering it lateral, Field does equally weird and edifying things to the allegedly necessary gravity of contemplation.

Sometimes it’s like this:

A falling body does not fall in a straight line, it falls in a curved parabola of space-time. In other words, a straight line of space-time is curved, so things don’t land directly where they fall. Aristotle made provisions for things high and low in his physics, things in their rightful or borrowed places. Physical laws make rocks fall, go back to their natural place—″to know the earth.” A rock can’t be a rock high off the ground. In falling it regains its essential rock-ness. Architects might become more edge-adept if they spent time lying on sidewalks looking up, taking it all into account.

Up, then, becomes around. Field’s advice for architects is equally sound for writers, thinkers, all those who see genres as aspects of, rather than things themselves. That’s a lot to ask of the Barnes and Noble’s 100! Top! Sellers! Of the now! But it isn’t a list, anyway. As Field herself writes, this isn’t what we think it is. This is thinking, what is everything, we as storytellers are a fiction-making fiction, it isn’t, but is, is. Assassins, heroes, ugly truths, Olympus and America, conversations with one’s self, another’s other. Bird Lovers, Backyard is so ahead of the parabola it describes that it’s impossible, which makes the fact of its existence even more delightful. If you don’t believe me, buy a copy. You’ll see.

(Spinoza ground glass, made lenses. Natura naturans. Field, too, grinds her lenses. She makes what is.)

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/bird-lovers-backyard/feed/ 0 http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/each-and-her/ http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/each-and-her/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:10:02 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=1169

The world is filled with appalling things, impossible to rank or even count. But difficulties of enumeration don’t make the horrors equal, even if each must remain distinct to those who endure them. That said, some injuries elude comprehension. The abnormal is easy to understand, because it refers to the normal, it presumes a normal exists and can be known. The difficulties occur when the abnormal displaces the normal. How do you think about things so wrong that all standard registers of meaning lose traction? This is one of many questions that haunt Each and Her, which is Martínez’s effort to confront the persistent travesties of Juárez.

Of the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez, much has been written, which is itself part of the horror, because the crimes have been occurring since the 1990’s—long enough to provoke outrage and commentary, neither of which seem capable of arresting the loss. The decay of local legal and civic structures means that it is not even remotely possible to determine the number of victims. For their families, an exact accounting matters terribly; the fact that there cannot be one both compounds and summarizes the atrocity perfectly, for when there are so many murdered in a context so intractably broken, injustice has come to replace even the possibility of justice as the norm.

And there’s no effective way to think about this, because it fails miserably simply to say that’s awful or that’s wrong. The problem is that fidelity to the facts, while admirable, also leads to a numbing, a kind of cognitive exhaustion. In addition to the nature of the crimes, the scale is also a violence, since it makes it impossible to accurately track the lives affected. The facts are too vast to catalogue, even if they were fully known, which they are not and never can be. But the truth, which the facts both obscure and elucidate, is that hundreds of women are dead because men wanted to kill them, and could, and did.

Some have objected that the focus on the murdered girls and women is fetishistic, and ignores the larger problems of Juárez. And it’s true that murder is terrifyingly common there, as is the fear that prohibits the citizenry or government from even acknowledging the destruction of civic life even as that destruction creates not only death but mass derangement. But I think it is important to draw attention to the femicide, because while it is concurrent with the general chaos, it differs in that there can be no pragmatic shield (however specious or disingenuous) to explain the murders other than fear and hatred of women.

The victims, mainly maquiladoras driven to the border cities by the promise of factory wages, were not in the wrong place at the wrong time, they did not see things that might compromise someone’s trade, they did not inform the police of missing persons, they did not witness any crimes other than the daily crime of de facto slavery in the service of American and international corporate power. They were simply vulnerable and female.

How does one approach this, how does one approach it anew, when the reality of the problem is well-known? Widespread familiarity has done nothing to improve things, as Martínez notes in her spare introduction:

According to press reports, 28 women and girls were murdered in Ciudad Juárez and he surrounding areas in 2004. The number was 58 in 2006 and 86 in 2008.

Press reports, of course, are only the most conservative estimate; many locals place the number into the thousands. Whether or not that’s accurate, the fact that the figure cannot be disproven or even set is proof of how lethally bizarre the situation has become. But Martínez is right to take the more cautious approach, because inflation—of rhetoric, of reportage—doesn’t communicate the wrongness; in some ways, it hides it.

This careful, minimalist approach characterizes all of Each and Her. Martínez employs several methodologies, but embraces none fully; she steps away from completion repeatedly. For instance, her primary use of metaphor is the flower—Martínez quotes from gardening manuals and materials to great effect. She cites antiseptic or canned language in a context that makes the banal both ironic and horrific:

“…the best way to manage the disease is by inspection and sanitation. Remove faded or blighted flowers, blighted leaves, or entire plants infected at the base.”

or

“It Really Is Amazing How Many Different Enemies Are Out There To Get Your Roses!”

But these passages, deliberately unsubtle as they are, prime the reader for more ambiguous referents. Flowers appear in ekphrasistic description,

Rivera’s girl on her knees
sky-blue-bound shoulders

behind

his thick feet

enormous bale of calla lilies
lifted to her back

and they also recur in Martínez’s recollections of her own family’s border crossing, as a “yellow and indigo / paper-flower bouquet”. And then they appear as yet another aesthetic, literal adornment:

the bodice is corset-like, exquisite,
intricately adorned with tiny roses
stitched by little hands

the plant manager calls them
his beauty queens

Yet before this becomes too neat a formulation, an equation the solution of which could satisfy the reader’s need to make sense of the parade of tragedies Martínez presents, she explicitly undermines her own efforts. “Is there no way,” she asks, “to avoid the clichés”?

woman-flower
man-monger
fear-fever-control?

This is entirely the right question, since cliché is simply the lowest common denomination of comprehension, and illusory or shallow understanding is exactly what Martínez wants to resist. In fact, that cursory thoughtfulness—the tsk, tsk, that’s terrible response—is (if I’m reading her correctly) what she wants Each and Her to make impossible.

This is why her floral metaphors, her Castilian roses, are so much more than her suspicion of them suggests. For in each poem the flowers occur, they do so in such a way that indicates another point of reference or scale. So in the wedding dress fragment, the flowers return us both to the economic and labor realities of the maquil, as well as the pervasive, paternalistic misogyny of the plant manager, emblematic of a culture that values women as objects, as extensions of male dictates.

As with the roses, Martínez plays this in alternating major and minor chords. The relative subtlety of her representation of the plant manager stands against a quote like this:

“Sometimes, when you cross a shipment of drugs to the United States, adrenaline is so high that you want to celebrate by killing women!”

which in turns stands against

“What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species? The one explanation is as good as another. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictataphone in certain relations.”

Now consider the effect of these two quotes on this lightly-drawn fragment:

In the desert of Lote Bravo

two teenage boys
and their dogs

follow a trail

in scraps of women’s clothes

All of Each and Her acts in this fashion. Martínez disorients the reader with raw, grievous data, and then offers orientation via an organizing principle (whether metaphoric or symbolic or theoretical) and then disorients yet again, by embedding in each of the possible explanations the seed of an alternative meaning, which also presents the temptations of easy accounting only destabilize in turn.

Martínez has chosen her materials well. There’s no room to cite them all, but they include her own memories, including those of Amalia, from Juárez herself, who cooked and cared for Martínez and her siblings in San Ildefonso; lists of names and facts drawn from online archives; economic data about the life of the maquiladora; newspaper articles; even other texts that address the Juárez murders directly. Make no mistake: Martínez has stripped each of these from its original context, but it would be wrong to indict her for doing so, since the fragments she assembles create an effect that none can achieve singly. She hasn’t replaced the original context; she’s simply pointed out that there’s a bigger picture, one so vast that it cannot be seen so much as felt. She won’t allow the haunting to cease, because as long as the murders persist, as long as the world that allows and even encourages them maintains, everyone should be haunted.

Because her technique is to alienate her sources from their original function, it’s worth noting that Martínez is just as merciless with the material more traditionally understood as “hers”. She respects all of it, but trusts none of it to complete the task of resolving the challenge Juárez makes to the mind and the heart. As she steps into and away from aspects of comprehension, Martínez creates space for silence, which is of course the very thing lost in efforts to make “sense” of the murders. One of the poems in the book is, in fact, nothing at all, a blank page, which is as stark as the partial lists of names, Rosa Isela Corona Santos and Rosa Maria Gonzalez and Rosa Rivera Barajas and too many others.

Each and Her is an immaculately reserved book, a work of lace as strong as steel. It’s grotesque that it must exist, but I also think it is impossible that it not. Sometimes I wonder, as I’m sure everyone who bothers to think about poetry at all, what poetry is for. (I think I ask that question on this site every other review, actually.) It’s fascinating stuff, sure, but can it do anything worth doing, other than compelling interest? It can. Each and Her does something necessary, something that cannot be done by any other means.

mis hijas
?por que están peleando?

Martínez writes in an early fragment, and concludes

she’s your sister
you have to protect her!

Yes, we must.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/each-and-her/feed/ 0 http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/volume-one/ http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/volume-one/#comments Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:08:32 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=955

I usually have no sympathy for readers (suddenly tempted to end the sentence right there) who voice their objections to poetry they don’t like by fretting about how the poems don’t seem to care about the reader, or serve the reader, or give the reader a happy ending and a box of chocolates. One of the reasons I reject these plaintive moans of readerly victimhood is because I find it at least as oppressive to have a poem smother me with its concern for the sugar-fine fragility of my intelligence or the bloated sensitivity of my sentiments. Who’s a good reader? You are! Yes you are!

Is it too much to ask that the poem just shut up and play?

And yet, I do understand how a reader could grow irritated at the poem that pretends the reader isn’t there, all the while conducting itself with the kind of icy deliberation that gives the lie to the posture of disinterest. Ignoring someone is the most conspicuous way of paying attention to them. Miles Davis never did, exactly, turn his back on an audience while playing, but when the audience suspected he was, they turned on him.

Of course, once you are aware of this dilemma, you’ve snapped it into being, since management of awareness is, itself, the problem. The ideal solution would be the poem that cannot betray awareness of a reader because it was never actually written, which is the pleasure of found poetry. A poor name, that: found poetry really should be called not-poetry, to be read as if it were.

What this little device of the imagination circumvents is the writer. Anyone who has ever met a writer knows that writers deserve circumvention, even though – like snakes – they are more afraid of you, reader, than you are of them. But in the formulations I make above, it’s logically impossible to spurn and berate the poem for its neglect of your welfare; it is really the writer you resent. You cannot quite come out and say so, however, because you know that the writer doesn’t exactly exist the way a person does. Even the most preening narcissist might have a hard time vocalizing a complaint about a writer in terms selfish enough to suggest that any given writer has a personal obligation to any given reader. You can fuss about the writing, then, or you can expand the trembling membrane of your selfhood to include, a la The Blob or communism, all readers.

(The stalking horse of the writing as ridden by the writer = the illusion of a you as a proxy for the act of reading: yes, got it.)

Personhood, on either end of the equation, thus presents a problem. A great jolly big dumb exhausting problem.

Liam Agrani, whose Volume One is so anxiously personless as to forego photo, substantial bio, blurb and justifying note, understands the appeal of not-poetry so well that he doesn’t even identify himself as the author of the book, but rather its editor. A sweetly ironic gesture: he isn’t claiming to have written these not-poems, but by claiming editorship he slyly admits that his method (he collects marginalia, just as the title indicates) suggests a more self-conscious authorship on the part of the writers of the marginalia than is perhaps appropriate. But what his “editorial” choices reveal is that marginalia itself is a kind of dress rehearsal for authorship. Whoever writes in the margin does so with at least as many motivations as whoever writes for publication, but obviously without the limitation of presuming readership (however, pardon me, “marginal” it might be). Whatever motivates the note-taking thus influences the adoption of whatever tone or function corresponds to that motivation. Reading these not-poems is like watching someone try on different outfits and practice their flirt, or listening to someone try multiple vocal registers to find out just which sound induces what effect. Because they presume no one is there, they can commit to the imagination of otherhood more freely, and in some ways more effectively, than can the writer who must either solemnly pretend readership or ignore its possibility.

In “Transcription of Selected Marginalia Found in a Copy of Dante’s Inferno…” the marginaliaist or marginaliaista notes

p 31the
moral
death

p 37Instrument of grace, elevation of beauty

p 60embarrassment
of oneself

and in this we hear an approximation of a certain critical tone and rhetoric, a version of literary criticism redolent of the classroom. Yet later on in the same not-poem the marginaliaist writes

p 210Bad news
for
Dante

This takes the question of authenticity and authorship and pulls it inside-out, a twisty taffy knot of how impossible, and possibly how stupid, it is to invest unduly in the aura of the writer and wonder about what the writer wants. Bad news for Dante: it’s unlikely this matches the diction of the classroom, and it doesn’t much “go” with Dante, but it does create a sweet immediacy in terms of our fabrication of the margin-writer, who seems to have let a little concern for Dante into this rehearsal for a clinical analysis of his work – a care pleasingly and confusingly doubled, since there’s no way to distinguish the fiction of Dante the poet from that of Dante the protagonist, two illusions equidistant from the auctorial “fact” of Dante.

And sometimes, of course, the marginalia doesn’t match a traditional diagnosis of the text at all. Even better! “Transcription of Writing Found on the Inside Cover of a Copy of The Trial by Franz Kafka…” begins with an annotation of an assignment:

(inside front cover)

Write an essay exploring the underlying
meaning of the weird relationship between
Huld and Block

But this rapidly shifts to a more conversational exchange.

(title page)

Now the school thinks Sarah Clark was the 3rd person last night they want to drug test all of them Sarah should go to Shauna and tell her that she should confess because of Sarah is tested well you know

(back cover)

I’m really surprised Shauna
didn’t do this. She thinks
she has a really
good voice

This fits more elegantly with “The Trial” than intent could ever allow. You simply cannot make shit like this up, though I don’t know if that is because you don’t exist or because making prohibits serendipity. Chance may favor the prepared mind, but a prepared mind chases all chance into contrivance.

Most of the pieces in Volume One, however, hew more closely to the kinds of notes meant to keep track of thoughts about the text, perhaps because their, uh, authors will have to write about it later – for the audience of an instructor, maybe – or perhaps because they want to explain what they are reading to themselves, for themselves. Sometimes these purposes intertwine in ways that are both charming and insightful, and I can only assume that Agrani edits to accentuates those relationships. For instance, “Transcription of Marginalia Found in Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir…” includes more or less conventional notes, such as

p 34Mrs. Wilkes’ distress at her portrait

and

p 111on his qualities as a reviewer

but the writer also admits more raw and uncritical responses:

p176C. on sex is painful.
impossible—

and

p 254famous encounter w/
V. Woolf – nobody can
outdo the English in this

p 296wonderful
fantasy monologue

No matter how well-conceived the contrivance of auctorial invention, an idea for a poem cannot replicate this, I think. Yes, there are many things that sustained, self-conscious and reader-directed can do that these kinds of assemblages cannot, but there’s tremendous value in the presence of the private, even if by the irony of acquisition (or the agent of textual accident that is Agrani himself) they have become public.

Flarf, recently institutionalized in our newspapers of record, does recognize the vitality of these energies. And Conceptualism excels in designed contraptions for harnessing them. But Flarf, wonderful as it can be, is like a little brother who tells knock-knock jokes ad nauseam and then farts on you when you tell him to scram, and Conceptualism is like a big sister who sits on your chest and pummels you with your own fists, all the while asking why you keep hitting yourself. Both siblings are dear to my heart, but sometimes I just want! To be left! Alone! – a desire equivalent to wondering whether the poem can just shut up and play.

Unfortunately, we cannot actually achieve a sense of solitude by pretending to be alone when we know we are not. And that’s exactly what “immersion” in poetry, particularly lyric poetry, asks us to do. To circumvent the artificiality of this request, we would have to secret a recording device under our sibling’s bed to catch whatever they mumbled to themselves. These mumblings, mundane as the may seem, can compete (on some levels, at least) with the most powerfully articulated and thoroughly buffed poems. To demonstrate this, consider the whole of “Transcription of Marginalia Found in a 1963 Copy of Robert Henryson’s Poems…”

p 2Nonsense

You know you’re in for human
degredation, perversion through ignorance’s
human perversity.

p 4waxes, lyric,
carried away
by his own
logic.

p 5science
likened
learn
gets nervous

p 7arm in arm
pilferers
manner
womb
stomach

p 10again, negative humor

p 11the extra dishes
bring on trouble

p 13lusty?
sexy?
courageous?
proud?

p 15In Chaucer there
is a great animal
chase at this point

p 16No great
lover is ever
jealous
who

p 90dismal
full of care

caused
to fall

p 91sexual desire

p 93in haste
outcast

p 94oh Blasphemy!

p 95down
shows off
hope vs. despair
one eyelaughs
one weeps

to comb your golden hair
a sign of idleness

p 97the moon closest
to the earth is the
most fickle of
planets.

It’s hard to say who is responsible for this. Agrani, to a certain extent, certainly, and of course one Mr. John Collins (well, presumably), one-time owner of the book. And we shouldn’t neglect Robert Henryson. Or maybe we should neglect all of them.

Hard to say, and irrelevant. Not quite found, not quite made. A mechanistic theology states that a god or divinity acts as a watch-winder or domino-pusher; this precludes the void of the random and preserves the comfort of authorship, without making the author or god sit through the humiliating trial of our preferences and judgments. Of course, what good is a god we cannot judge? It is easy enough to claim that all writing is conceptual, and that the only distinction is between those who confess to merely selecting which domino to tumble and those who insist they are the actors and the actions, the inventors of the tiles, the lines they describe, gravity itself. What you gain if you believe this is someone to blame or praise, but what you lose is control. Why should a poem erase the reader in the idolatry or demonization of the author? Marginaliaist, writer, editor, poet. I would rather surrender my idea of each and all, of poetry itself, if I thereby gain the action of the not-poem above. Indeed! One of my favorite not-poems of the year.

Poetry’s just fine, as long as we don’t ask after it. As long as we can continue to find cures for poets, remedies for absentee gods. I think I’ll call them readers. I think I’ll call them you.

]]> http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/volume-one/feed/ 2 http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/clamor/ http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/clamor/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 17:29:21 +0000 ccadmin http://www.constantcritic.com/?p=823

I get a lot of books of poetry in the mail. Since I know how hard it is for poetry presses to stay in the black, how hard it is for poets to get their books reviewed, how hard it is to realize how very few people will read one’s poetry even if it gets widely noticed, I read each book that arrives (even though many of them come to me from people who have clearly never read a review I’ve written) simply because someone took the trouble to send it to me. I could build a small yet sturdy dwelling out of the books I’ve received, and living inside that edifice would be like inhabiting a little igloo of guilt, for the dismay of not being able to review them all is only compounded by my appreciation of how few of their authors would even want my attention if only they knew how unpleasant it might be.

Don’t get me wrong: it isn’t that I dislike most of these books. I just have no use for them. That has everything to do with my experiences as a reader and very little do with the work itself. I can usually identify what aspects of any individual book might appeal to a certain subset of readers, which means that I can engineer what preferences and convictions a reader would need to have in order to extract that value. While that might seem like useful skill for a reviewer to have, it actually complicates the act of reviewing immeasurably, because it enables the reviewer to at least attempt an occupation of the mind of both the writer and the reader, and set them up on a kind of aesthetic date. This is a complication because Jesus, God, why would anyone want to spend a Sunday night doing that?

Of course, some reviewers just settle for using those skills as a kind of targeting mechanism, and savage books that they wish hadn’t been written as a way of punishing readers who they wish didn’t exist. While it might be understandable, if not excusable, to do this every once in awhile, anyone who makes a career out of it is simply an ass. They may claim to be serving the greater good, but since there is not and never can be agreement as to of what the greater good obtains, they are simply serving their own delight in being an ass, a creature that brays its love of itself loudly, with no tonal variety, at extraordinary length.

Unfortunately, it’s equally indulgent to write only about those books with which you share notions of that indeterminate good, not least because the books which you consider are likely to make the case for their arguments and preoccupations via the poems they contain more effectively than can your prosaic assessment of them.

Thus, many critics find themselves working the margins, waiting for books that represent an interesting trend, or pose a provocative question, even as they ignore the reality that with a little attention and ingenuity, any book can be made to represent any trend or ask any question the reviewer wants.

Of what use is the reviewer? What is the reviewer for? How is it possible that this review can be 550 words in without having once mentioned the title of the book under review?

Every now and again a book arrives in the mail that so perfectly concentrates the reviewer’s dilemma that it deserves scrutiny, even as that scrutiny must inevitably suffer either one of the problems listed above or else result in claims of such competitive and exclusionary provenance that the review will offer no direction whatsoever. Well, I warned you.

Elyse Fenton’s Clamor is a primer on the temptations of lyricism. You want the poet to surrender to those temptations, you see beauty; you want the poet to resist, you see beautification. Too mechanistic? Let’s take a look, then: “Outside, light // and snow clung to the windows like the paper / edges of a hive crushed in” and “(…) frost whittles the grass // to shards, the pear tree breathes / beneath a shroud of ice” and “Ice cauls our windows. Snow / paraffins the trees.”

Yeah. Okay. See? If you think of the pre-lyricized object as inert, you might see these lines as necessary upgrades, activations of the mundane into the poetic: beautiful, striking, strange, rich. But if you don’t think of any language or object as inherently inert, or as inherently anything, you might find these formulations precious, twee, unnecessary, distracting. If the former, your defense could run as follows: what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost and snow is snow! If the latter, your attack could ask what? Ice is ice! Frost is frost! Snow is snow!

Don’t look at me. I can’t help you.

Unless, of course, you find it helpful to know the context from which I’ve extracted those lines. However, you’re only likely to find that helpful if you believe context exists. So for those who do, know that Clamor marks the spot where war poetry meets love poetry at the sub-genre of war bride poetry. If you would prefer that I place those categories in scare quotes, then you don’t believe in the categories at all, and what I tell you next won’t move you an inch, for when I say that its disingenuous of us to refer to “the speaker” of these poems, since it’s damn well obvious that she’s Fenton herself, and that her subject is not a merely a lingual representation of an army medic but her lover and husband, you’ll likely retort that such truths are irrelevant, because the poems must either prove themselves as felt or stand as constructions unfortified by truth-value. Which would make sense, sort of, were it not for my suspicion that the very readers who would insist on the unimportance of real-world context would be those very same readers who would roll their eyes at the ice-cauled windows.

Too mechanistic? Okay, let’s try again. Here’s a lengthy excerpt from “Word from the Front”:

His voice over the wind-strafed line
drops its familiar tone to answer,
Yes, we did a corkscrew landing down
into the lit-up city, and I’m nodding

on my end, a little pleased by my own
insider’s knowledge of the way
planes avert danger by spiraling
deep into the coned center of sky

deemed safe, and I can’t help but savor
the sound of the word – the tracer round
of its pronunciation – and the image –
a plane corkscrewing

down into the verdant green
neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night (…)

Let’s assume some suspicion of the lyrical. Note, with that suspicion, of how the professed pleasure of the “insider” (which, were you as cynical as you were suspicious, you might consider a warning sign) quickly gives way to the pleasures of the immediate lyric upgrade. Instead of corkscrewing, they spiral, not down into the lit-up city but down first into the coned center of sky. The speaker, or Fenton, cannot help but return to corkscrew as an occasion for poetry: she savors its sound, and even goes so far as to characterize its tracer round (another bit of “insider” knowledge?) sound, though it might be odd even to the generous to liken an optical effect to a word’s sound, even as one mixes one’s military metaphors. In any case, the plane isn’t landing in the lit-up city anymore, anyway; it’s the verdant green neck of Baghdad’s bottle-glass night. A heartless reader might well ponder the effect on military operational language such fancies might have, but if you think a reader heartless for such a speculation, I reckon you don’t even think it’s appropriate to wonder.

So do you regard the translation of the soldier’s report of fact into the war bride’s lyric elaboration of it as a central function of poetry? Or do you read that excerpt and wish fervently that poetry would cease functioning in that way? Beauty, or beautification?

Fenton, or the speaker, nods towards this question in “Refusing Beatrice,” in which she suggests “Maybe it’s time to stop comparing–” though the comparison she refers to isn’t between the experiences and their lyric component but between she and her husband and Beatrice and Dante. But immediately after, she writes

I could never be Beatrice, couldn’t harbor such good faith.

And I won’t be there in the Tigris basin to watch
heat flake cinders of paint from the Chinook’s body
like a rug shook out

or see it hasten to the sky’s surface
like an untethered corpse –

My curse or gift is blindness;
I’ve never read this story before.

My response to this is to suspect that however heat flakes cinders off a Chinook, it is almost exactly not like shaking out a rug, just as I think it hastens to the sky’s surface in a fashion that almost but not quite fails to resemble that of an untethered corpse. To which you may reply: Yes! Exactly! The power of poetry! Ha ha! Or perhaps you may simply wonder, as does the speaker, or Fenton, whether the blindness those lines accidentally describe is, indeed, a gift or a curse. It isn’t hard at all to decide which you believe is the case, but it’s hard to prove, if the evidence you muster for the defense is indistinguishable from that of the prosecution.

A few years ago I noticed that people had begun to terminate conversations about upsetting or uncertain matters by claiming “It is what it is.” I noticed shortly thereafter the rage this inspired. Really? It is what it is? There’s a work of fucking deductive genius. Neither point can be disputed. I can see the ways in which Clamor is a deeply serious book as well as a silly one. It is what it is, even when it isn’t.

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