Lots and lots of neat

Ross Gay's Against Which

Against Which, by Ross Gay
(CavanKerry Press, 2006) 

Is poetry the genre that has the most fraught relationship with autobiography? It would seem not. There is an entire classification of poem just for confessing. There are entire poetries existing as testaments to experience and identity. My issue is that people compartmentalize what certain poetries are supposed to be doing. The poetry of autobiography can speak most emphatically to the condition a poet is born into. He or she has no choice to live in the world gay or as a woman or African-American or Native American. And it is through their experiences, through a singular examination of their identity, that they come upon insight and truth--a truth that can speak to the larger human condition. But to what degree must the poetry of autobiography remain faithful to and unfailing in its factuality? If it does not come directly from the poet's experience does that mean the poet is lying to us? I'm not sure if this is a resolvable question. I couldn't possibly read Marie Howe's What the Living Do if I thought she was fabricating her brother's death. However I may appreciate the fictional or the fantastical in poetry, I fear what I would feel about Howe's book if it weren't based on fact. 

In terms of Ross Gay's Against Which, how should I incorporate what I take to be poems from an imagined speaker, or poems of an exaggerated truth, when it feels that one of the book's central events is Gay's father's death? The effect is not to cause a dissonance as fact runs against fiction. Instead, what I find is a book whose overwhelming argument is life. And the humanity that roots that life to us will use whatever means necessary to testify to its existence. Violence. Ego. Racism. Adoration. All sentiments, every sentiment is at play here. And so that each registers, Against Which openly straddles the line between autobiography and fictionalized speaker. Who are all these speakers? Can all of them be Ross Gay? Is he the one who would have killed the Drunk Man in a 7-11 parking lot? Is he the 14-year-old who had to train a 38-year-old new hire at Burger King? Remarkably, when I read these poems I believe they might be Gay. But correlation is unnecessary. All that matter is the deeper sense of all that life embodies. If that, at times, need be addressed by a dramatic speaker, then that dramatic situation functions as complement to the book's overall theme. 

"What is the florid burden of living?" Gay asks. Gerald Stern, in his introduction to the book would approximate Gay's answer as rage and tenderness. I would agree. Against Which is a farewell embrace, with all that life of these speakers struggling to let death be death. My first introduction to Gay's work came a few years after Against Which was published. His poem in Ploughshares, "The Lion and the Gazelle," describes a child who has to witness his dog being shot in the head. The description, whether Gay has ever witnessed something like this, felt factual. And the feeling that lasted with me involved the child, and the reality death became for him. To me, a similar sentiment underlies Against Which, at least in its capacity to describe that life which survives the death of a loved one. Between tenderness and rage, it survives.

Recommended Links:
Against Which
Recording page at From the Fishouse
Ross Gay talks about How one of his poems happens 

Heather Christle's The Trees The Trees

The Trees The Trees, by Heather Christle
(Octopus Books, 2011) 

You know that omniscient narrator you read about in your Introduction to Literature class? The one who knows everything that's happening in the story? Imagine what would happen if you gave that narrator a microphone. And you said, Now, you're a speaker. Speak! Now, you're a tree. Speak! Now you're lonely or funny or 8 years old or a nail-gun or an enemy or the kind of person who dwells on having enemies or water or a hand-bag. And now none of us care what you are, we just want you to speak. Speak! Speak!!

Because that's the impulse behind The Trees The Trees. Speech. Whatever comes to mind. Whatever realistic boundaries can be blurred or eliminated or redefined. And, to be clear, with a declarative sentence, it's very convenient to set anything to be anything else. Language is that easy. It's the most efficient thing in our language! I mean if you're half-hedgehog, half-man, and you want to become a tree, use your words. Say it, don't draw it. Drawing it makes it too complicated. And let me assure you, these are Christle's instructions. My instructions: be grateful this book of poems exists! Get thee to Christle!

In fact, with The Trees The Trees, saying anything feels like the easiest, most fantastic activity anyone ever thought of. It's like saying could get you out of anything. Are you stuck inside a room? Just say you're not in the room. Do you miss your friends? Say you're eavesdropping on them from a safe distance. Are you afraid of flying? Say the sun. It's like that omniscient narrator I mentioned at the beginning has been given the chance to experience a more realistic self who has boundaries, who's maybe human. Maybe not human, but a tree instead. Maybe a tree with a long list of things to do. Either way, or any way, the omniscientness really appreciates getting to try something new, even while it slips out of that realistic self into another reality. There are other realities! 

If you're fortunate enough to be a reader of Christle's book, you'll feel like you're trying on something new all the time. It might be that's what reality is supposed to have been all along. It's like you're taking a yellow highlighter to all of Russel Edson's poems and coloring in everything. Or it's like you put Dean Young's poems into one of those hot rods from the Fast and the Furious movies (I think I prefer Tokyo Drift on the merit of movie previews alone), and you're like, Dean Young! Step on it! Not to put too obscure a point on it, but Christle has uncovered that poetic note where everything feels as though it's constantly blooming, and the blooms that just bloomed have blooms inside them blooming. There is an unimpedable, unquenchable, unbelievable energy in these poems. Take a picture of your favorite person smiling, tape it to your computer monitor and then smile back it. Everything in Christle's poems is that easy. And enjoyable. Even grief. Even alienation. Love is probably one of the things that makes the world go around. Read Christle's book and you'll find out what other parts of life are involved.

Recommended Links:
The Trees The Trees
The Believer Is Up on Christle
Heather Christle Is Up on Christle 

Fanny Howe's Gone

Gone, by Fanny Howe
(University of California Press, 2003) 

I know I’ll never actually get to see the pistons in my car engine turning. No matter how many 70mph trips I might make between Huntington and Charleston, no matter how I assume that they will turn, and they will make the wheels turn, and I will be sent hurtling between these West Virginia mountains, those pistons will remain elusive, implied, and understood. Fanny Howe’s Gone functions like this car. The grammatical mechanics always have movement in mind, and momentum. Gone goes. As in, if there are 14 Stations of the Cross, then Gone is going to see the spiritual sensibility each station should represent. These are not your 1980's poet's Ekphrastik responses, though. Instead, they are spiritual interrogations between the speaker and some Other. Who that Other is typically dictates the kind of interrogation. All this to say, the 14 Stations of the Cross, though central to what is "gone" in the book, they feel only incidental. They're more mile posts for the speaker's spiritual exploration. 

In this light, should Gone be labeled as religious poetry? Usually, "religious poetry" calls us to mind liturgical textbooks. It assumes a reader who is fluent in or at least appropriately curious about the various codes and language tags that are ingrained into the grammar and exposition of Scripture. Namely, religious poetry will likely be read only by a religious reader. Gone is more a book of lyric poetry, asking for a reader equipped with an understanding of the contemporary lyric.

However, for a religious reader, the lyric of Gone reveals something that's hard to describe. The spirit in pursuit of identity? The resolved will of God? Howe is writing about a love that necessarily weaves in through doubt, and passion, and identity best framed? In the opening section “The Splinter,” Howe sets her speaker on a journey to find some alternative "she." She identifies that search as her theology, making this journey more personal than overtly religious. When I read it as a believer, I feel she opens the concept of spiritual search to a new and fresh language. There is a surrealistic juxtaposition between the speaker and her mirrored self. There is grammatical slippage and confusion. The speaker wants to find this "she," even when the trip required for finding that "she" is rooted in alienation. The speaker understands “she” is out there, and she can find “her,” but they are always going to be separated.

From a religious perspective, it seems only natural that this would lead to The Passion, the central poem of Gone. Christ's sacrifice, the need to trust in God's will, the bountiful grace available to the believer are all invested in this pivotal event. As a Christian, the narrative is familiar. It is ritualized. It is also the peak of illogic, as the Father insists His Son be killed with such viciousness and inhuman violence Why would something so terrible be at the center of the Christian faith? Howe doesn't resolve the illogic, but she touches on the dilemma with modern examples. In "Doubt" the artistic struggles of Virginia Woolf and Simone Weil situate Howe's own struggle with Christ's Passion. For her, "The Passion" is personal, though it's not clear whether the speaker of the poem is consistently a modern-day speaker. At many moments, I feel the speaker may be Mary Magdalene.

What is clear, though, and what animates the spiritual struggle in the poems, is the relationship between the speaker and this sometimes shadowy male figure. What is also clear is that this male figure at least alludes to Christ, while still exceeding the human figure of Christ. In fact, it's Howe's treatment of this male figure who is at times filthy, at times fragile, and at other times wholly divine, that distinguishes Gone as a religious book, but not a book of "religious poetry." Meaning Gone has every intention of investigating what a personal relationship with Christ would look like, but it it needless to fetter that investigation to the language of the religious Christian. 

Recommended Links:
Gone
Jordan Davis reviews Gone 

Kathleen Graber's The Eternal City

The Eternal City, by Kathleen Graber
(Princeton University Press, 2010) 

In the opening poem to The Eternal City, Kathleen Graber describes a mirror she finds in an abandoned building. After she sees her reflection, she smashes the mirror, collects the shards, and, when she gets them home, pours the shards into a milk bottle she casts as an idol for her home. I can think of no better analogy for the poems in The Eternal City. But it’s not an analogy based on the violence of smashing a mirror. Instead, it’s Graber collecting these shards that had held her image, significantly, her kept memory of whatever that image represented to her alongside the physically fragmented evidence that that image at one point existed.

It’s difficult to touch the complexity of this milk bottle filled with mirror shards. For it possesses a stillness and a tragic memory and a self-reflection that infuses nearly every fragment in Graber’s poems. The image of the milk bottle refers to an order and artful arrangement accomplished as the fragments of each poem coalesce to become a complete thing. For instance, in the poem “The Third Day,” fragments about Augustine and his friends stealing pears are juxtaposed to the fragments about a bunch of kids the speaker sees rough housing after school, and both of these fragments reflect on the Senator who makes a speech about “Islamo-fascist terrorists.” The speaker of the poem explains that sin is the absence of good, and when I weigh this statement against the accumulation of the different images of the poem, then I must reflect personally on what circumstances exemplify an absence of good, and at the same time whether I have lost sight of what animates the most adolescent versions of evil.

This is the kind of thick and textured meaning that Graber creates in her poems. And to what effect? To touch on, to reconsider, and to remythologize the conventional conversion narrative. The Eternal City starts with St. Augustine’s shattering conversion in the garden, moves to Aurelius’ late-life contemplation and concludes with a speaker actively interrogating her peace with the world. Any peace is going to be coarse with circumstances, and I want to be able to point at that image of the mirror shards in a milk bottle for some satisfying explanation of how this explains the complications surrounding the conversion experience. I want that to be explanation enough for how Graber creates meaning, because the meanings she accumulates in her poems always seem to refer to something implicit, below the deepest layer of meaning I am sensing in any one of her poems. For instance, the Marcus Aurelius poems that are the centerpiece of The Eternal City, where Graber takes such a full accounting of the act of accounting. Where would it end if it needed to? Why would it necessarily need to end there? Is this the process of finding peace? Is this how one lives at peace?

In the title poem of the book, Graber offers another analogy that might help to explain this act of accounting. She describes an attic fan rattling in its housing. But she asks us not only to hear the fan, and to imagine its shaking. She also wants us to picture the blades and even the air the blades are cutting. It’s this gesture to totalize, even while she speculates in the subsequent poems how futile any totalizing gesture might be, that gives The Eternal City a sense of capaciousness, even while the speaker admits to her own isolation amidst the world’s great effulgence.

Recommended Links:
The Eternal City
Graber reading two poems from the book 

 

Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation

The Cloud Corporation, by Timothy Donnelly
(Wave Books, 2010) 

You see there is this logic that has taken over the world. A logic capable of every imaginable feat: transforming the world into a math problem, producing clouds and inspecting those clouds for their profitability, producing furniture that grows nostalgic for its manufacturer, figuring parts of “him,” the speaker, because he is so innately a part of this world. But that logic, when given reign, is disorienting. Or maybe living through that logic doesn’t guide the speaker so much as leave him more acutely aware he needs guidance, like if you logically found yourself submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, and you got stuck there, it wouldn’t be all that comfortable. It would be nice if you could find a way out, even though everyone has pretty much consigned you to that one place. The fact of The Cloud Corporation is that logic will forever be a force of and with and contrary to the imagination. And these poems indulge that relationship to its utmost.

So how are you going to do make a poem where logic can be both pliant and structured? Logic, by definition, is complete, because it’s logical. It’s the statement part of a sentence. Logically, however, there must be a point in logic’s history, in its thoroughly redundant perspicuity, in the absolutely finite quality of this world that keeps opening to us until we’re reminded we don’t really know it completely, where all the things we believe whole and logical must eventually be found at least incomplete if not also wanting for more logic. Marilynne Robinson touches on this in her book Absence of Mind, where the presumption of having solved the world is always met by pure science or imaginative art with a shrug. Not quite, says the artist. Not in my research, says the scientist.

To describe the sublime as represented by The Cloud Corporation, I would draw an analogy where logic is a glow stick. Donnelly snaps the logic of late capitalism open, and yet keeps it intact as a system, because as a system it is breathtakingly thorough and insidious and possessive. It makes an excellent vehicle for writing poems. At the very least it gives no end to probing analysis and presumptive solutions.

What do you do in the face of this? It seems the most subversive action is boredom. But how does this speaker reconcile boredom with an obviously strident intellect? How does a speaker negotiate the stimulation available in the market with an eager and active and insular imagination? For the poems of The Cloud Corporation, these dilemmas are inexhaustible. And utterly insoluble. Of course, rest assured, this speaker endeavors to perform some sort of solution. The entire book is a project of proving. There is no end to proving. As a poetics of argument this book is treatise and Sears Christmas Catalogue and neighborhood covenant and profound delight. In this late capitalism, where every conceivable argument purports to have already been conceived, where every impression can supposedly be accessed, we are healthy provers. The Cloud Corporation guides us to the very threshold of proving. And at that threshold Donnelly looks out, like Keats’s Cortez, to show us a whole new landscape awaiting its proving.

Recommended Links:
The Cloud Corporation
NNDB (linking the world) - It's very ironic to me that this page exists and The Cloud Corporation exists. 

 

Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw

Angle of Yaw, by Ben Lerner
(Copper Canyon Press, 2006) 

Here is an homage to logic, a la Ben Lerner: “Monsieur, please accept this hole we have cut into your chest. Accept this hole as a gift. For your chest has asked for a place to store air.” To be clear, the preceding was not written by Ben Lerner, only mechanized by the logic he uses in Angle of Yaw. Here is Ben Lerner: “The public is outrage. Kindergarteners simulate bayonet fighting with the common domestic fowl. Does this blood look good on me? Does this blood make me look fat?” You can hopefully detect the common mechanics between the two quotations. The juxtaposition as self-defeating and self-vindicating logic. The comfort with the absolutely ridiculous.

This is Ben Lerner in all his majesty. And quite honestly, Long live the logical love brought in under cover of all absurdities! And long live the logic of loving contradictions. And for Lerner’s benefit, Long live the dark line drawn on white paper, and the negative lyric, and the logical structure evacuated of content so that all that’s left is a logical scaffold that may or may not warrant appreciation. And, maybe, expletive to every appreciation you might want to pay here.

Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw is a land run on this giant, imaginative plane that resides inside his talent. Each of those little prose blocks in the “Angle of Yaw” sections is just one of the lots he’s staked out for his performances. They’re little plots where he can fail, fail miserably even. It’s OK. His poem “Didactic Elegy” should make that point clear. Because he’s put the critic in her place. And he’s put the poem in its place. And he’s put historic events that my cause you to reevaluate the poems in their place. And he’s even determined what should happen so that a work can be considered a masterpiece.

Reading Angles of Yaw is akin to walking into an art installation, with all the pieces fit along one wall of imaginative space, or multiple imaginative spaces, if you’re counting. And what you should feel while you’re standing there is that you’re part of the American public, an American public that lived through the Reagan Era, who is vulnerable to advertising culture and political rhetoric. There is a mission statement: “The right to have it both ways is inalienable or it isn’t.” And as soon as you can see how that mission is not a contradiction, then you have finally settled on an impossibly inhuman existence that is at the very base of appreciating Ben Lerner’s poetry.

Essentially, whatever might be said about Angles of Yaw will have already been addressed by Lerner. He is a logic that is clearly illogical, and yet in his illogic, he can be used in an argument, and when the argument is finished the reader will feel as though there is just now a very logical statement that Ben Lerner made. It is the nature of tense contradiction that Frederic Jameson claims is the promise of our postmodern experience. It is a contraction akin to the imaginary number in mathematics. It can’t exist, and yet it does exist, and it is regularly calculated for. 

Recommended links:
Angle of Yaw
Leaving the Atocha Station
PennSound Recordings from 2008 and on. 

 

Hillary Gravendyk's Harm

Harm, by Hillary Gravendyk
(Omnidawn, 2012) 

First, evacuate time. There is no time. There’s only object. And when you think of object, you should be thinking about the object’s relationship to a human body. How does the “glass needle bright / as a small sun” reveal the body as a feeling thing? More specifically, how does it reveal the body experiencing harm? In fact, this comparison, where the body as biological machine is exchanged for or replaced by an image, informs the metaphorical logic of the book. Or at least, while moving through the poems of Harm, the reader should carry the assumption that every image can be seen as a reflection of the body harmed. The sight of a piercing bright light coming from a small sun is equivalent to a harm being felt by the body. The small scents of coyote mint, sage and dust is equivalent to a harm being felt by the body.

In grammatical terms, this means many of Harm’s poems exist outside verbs, or at least outside predicates. For instance, the collection of poems, “Botanica,” relates a series of nature images that are often doing nothing at all. They exist. “The rock chalked with mineral lines; the monstrous plant life. Imagine a carriage wheel turning on sand. Crest of every rise on fire.” This “Botanica” is mainly nouns. You read through them, and they of one landscape. Is this harm? Should we equate each phrase as an illustration of harm? All the phrases together? Does that make harm a stasis? If we keep harm independent of time, does it allow for more accurate analysis?

I am reminded of middle school physics class, where the teacher was basically responsible for making us see that math problems occur in an ideal state. A body is falling from 100 ft. off the ground. It is falling through the space of a vacuum, not air or sky. Yet it experiences the earth’s gravitation, which means that its speed increases 32 ft/sec every second. And so middle school students can quantify the earth’s gravitational pull. And, by association, they can understand how to distinguish the gravity of one planet from another.

I don’t know, though, if Gravendyk’s impulse to isolate harm gives me greater insight about the body experiencing harm. Elaine Scarry describes how helpless a person is when he or she tries to describe pain, and I can appreciate the gesture in Harm to resolve that. But this noun-thick project isn’t necessarily affecting. I have a similar issue with Kerri Webster’s We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone. The fragmented lyric is immersive and honest. But to what affect? Both books remind me of a painting by Agnes Martin. They have that control, that intensity of restraint. And yet Agnes Martin affects me. What is on the other side of Martin that I don’t feel in the Gravendyk and Webster?

There is more to Harm than just nouns. There is this You, though he, she or it is never identified. At about midway through the book, the You passes from vague verbal gesture to someone or something that could be considered part of a We. But who are We then? In Brenda Hillman’s introduction she indicates Gravendyk wrote many of these poems around an operation. Is You, then, the healthy body? Is You the committed spouse? Is You the vague self felt during sickness? Gravendyk leaves the identity vague, which I believe is preferable.  

Recommended links:
Harm
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone
Video of Gravendyk and Claudia Rankine. Reading together!

 

Donna Stonecipher's The Reservoir

The Reservoir, by Donna Stonecipher
(University of Georgia Press, 2002) 

There were a few summers during my late 20s when I was a fanboy astronomer. The first Friday of every month, at the archery fields of Forest Park, the members of the Astronomy Club of St. Louis would set up their telescopes and invite people to come and look at the moon, at Jupiter and Mars. It is an odd feeling to give shape to what you thought was supposed to be a star. But it’s odd that even with the more powerful telescopes, a planet looks like a paper cut-out of a planet. Jupiter looks like someone is standing right by the lens holding up a paper puppet of the planet. The telescope supposedly brings me closer to the planet, but I walk away trying to understand which impression of the planet is actually more real. Similarly, how does a star that I can only see through a telescope really exist in my world? For instance, the Pleiades cluster. I have seen them through a telescope, but I can never see all of them together. They don’t fit into one arrangement, like fruit in a bowl. No matter how hard I look, there is at least one star of the cluster that falls out of my focus, as though it were sinking back into space. It is a common experience to look at the stars and realize the earth is not the center of existence. But, in reality, that isn’t how I have experienced the night sky all my life. I look up at the sky, and the stars are there. Then I look through a telescope, and I have to understand that each star is uniquely distant from the earth. The sky has depth. Perhaps I will be incapable of fathoming it.

It’s the analogy that comes closest to my experience with Donna Stonecipher’s book The Reservoir. What is the depth of an aphorism? How do you sound the authority of a secret? What dimensions do we give certainty when we finally come to a decision? There are words we use, valuable words, that carry weight. And the poems in The Reservoir give that weight an anatomy. They shape that weight and figure its depth.

Stonecipher gives body to ideas, like a secret, identity, adolescent sexuality. She forms these ideas by preparing a careful accumulation of images. Though the images aren’t fully formed, they’re not so fragmented that the poems feel like a collection of splinters. In fact, what most characterizes the poems is the way these images cohere. There exists some associative thread connecting the images, though that connection at first feels arbitrary. In this way, it appears Stonecipher starts a poem by collecting random items. For instance, “White Mouth” starts with the star of an apple core, judging “each heart,” and the speaker filling herself with milk. But it is the consistent notes of white, center and evaluation that let the poem hover over a deeper, implied meaning. Is that meaning about “forgiveness the liquid eating away at the cool white stars”? Is it about purity? Is it some hybrid cross of the two? The pleasure of the poem is not knowing while still having a sense you do.

It makes sense, then, that magnetism should be one of the recurring ideas in the book. The night has to be attached to the day by something. A boy has to be drawn in by a girl by something. What is that attraction? How is it implication can feel like the consistently arranged hints that populate these poems? And, finally, as these poems stand in one book, what nature makes cohesion, and by extension, coherence, at all likely and possible and inevitable?

Recommended links:
The Reservoir
Conjunctions 55 (buy this issue, it has a poem called "Model Cities") 

 

Tessa Rumsey's Assembling the Shepherd

Assembling the Shepherd, by Tessa Rumsey
(University of Georgia Press, 1999) 

What if you could use a map to document the usual map-things, like places and landscapes. But then you could also use it to account for time and individual people and the feelings you had when you were seeing the landscape and being with the other person there? There are meadows that might give you a different feeling depending on whether you visited them with X, and whether they were blue meadows or yellow meadows at that time. And what if you could designate a specific city on the map as the capital of all this emotional history? It could be like the city is existing in the abstract while also existing in the your memory. The city would probably be the main feature of this map, because it’s the easiest point of reference. And it would fit conceptually with the map, because it’s where most of the emotionally relevant experiences happen.

It’s useful to think of Tessa Rumsey’s Assembling the Shepherd as a map like this, made as a four-dimensional document. Remember, the map covers time, so this map requires a kind of gigantic imaginative leap away from the two-dimensional. Isn’t a book of poems good for these kinds of imaginative leaps? Yes, that’s why Tessa Rumsey wrote this map as a book of poems! Assuming, of course, that this four-dimensional map is possible. Fortunately, it is a book of poems. And considering a book of poems’ normal facility with emotional landscapes, it seems a fairly natural step to designate it a four-dimensional document as well.

However, Rumsey’s book is more a thoughtfully geography when it comes to the subject of lost love, and of the dilemma inevitable when the speaker is moving past that loss even as it’s continually present to her. In particular, Rumsey’s reference to this city as a place where love happened, where the memories still feel fresh and alive to her, helps explain why it’s so hard to “move on” from this past. After all, who could possibly remove an entire city, especially when “Our city begins with a description / of heaven?” (from “Parable for the Sundial”)

To poetry’s great benefit, Rumsey is smarter than some mere city. For if a city represents meanings that she had made for herself, then it’s going to face the same skepticism as any meaning-making enterprise. For instance, in “The Smallest Effective Distance,” Rumsey explicitly refers to the romance that has passed. “You are my ex & thus / the past must outshine the present in a way that hurts / just to look at.” Romance is a sharp and ingenious craftsman capable of the most durable presences. But Assembling the Shepherd is not only romantic. Let’s call it romantic-conceptual. Like in the version of “Diagram of Faith” on page 30, “the rush hour of eternal return of eternal / renounce, as if multiplicity were the answer to ambivalence, as if / a wheel’s point of stillness hinged upon its spokes’ psychotic dance.” To call romance a system of passions connected with pronouncements connected with attitudes might be a modest description. Rumsey likes causal chains, especially when they’re reorienting meaning. And especially when they express the struggle that usually attends letting go of love.

Perhaps the causal chain is one of the ways you go about destroying a city.  You propose a new link between cause and effect. If planting the bomb in “Bluebells” might seem a bit violent, how about if the bomb creates a series of flowers in bloom? How about if you were to erase that old city where love happened, and replace it with Spring? Assembling the Shepherd is aggressive and often byzantine in its style. Losing love is confusing, though. Especially when love never leaves of its own volition. So then “a bystander explodes, inside my brother’s laughter, into springtime,” and all is better. The shepherd is ready to be assembled, and to usher in springtime, and to materialize new romantic-concdeptuals.

Recommended links:
Assembling the Shepherd

 

Deborah Digges' Late in the Millenium

Late in the Millennium, by Deborah Digges
(Knopf, 1989) 

If I could have a contest for which lyric poet burrows more deeply into the earth, more completely voices what I consider the earth part in me, I wouldn’t care for the contest to end. I would just care who was allowed in as a contestant. In my review of Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, I mentioned the Stadium Arena Voice, which is this figuration to describe how I hear the poems. They are aggressively confident and logical, and they encompass me. And what I mean by that is they are inescapable. I don’t question how his narratives fit into one another. Why would I need to? I know that beneath these narratives lies an implicit truth which cannot be exhausted. It is deep and plentiful and more. That’s all I can think while I’m reading it. I want more, even if it means Doty has to live through all that tragedy and pain.

The figuration I would use for Deborah Digges’ Late in the Millennium appears in “Tartarchos.” The speaker of the poem is a girl. Her mother has just beat her sister with a brush, and so she runs to the pond where there are hills, and ruts in those hills have been eroded deep enough that the girl can hide inside them. “Eye-level with the earth,” among an entire inventory of rusted sled runners and old scarves, she can hide. In a book of poems that uses the turning of sycamore leaves as a statement of logic, or the extinction of angels to explain why we’re lonely, seeing a young girl “eye-level with the earth” seems the most appropriate figure for picturing the book’s voice. It is safe. It has found a place to be brave. It is fully consumed by whatever those rhythms or mineral qualities or dark subtleties are. And, like Doty, I feel Digges’ voice encompass me.

But the encompassing is different. In Doty, I feel subsumed by the logic arising from each of his narratives coinciding with one another. Late in the Millennium draws from something different. It takes that dark poem-feeling I get when I read a Mary Oliver or a Jane Hirshfield poem and extends it past the neat poem-lite container they keep their poems in. Digges’ work feels colossal. It feels borne. It doesn’t know what a poem-container would be. She has two sestinas in the book, and I find their maneuvers through the form to be only a small part of their work as poem. It’s like when she makes reference to the Tower of Babel in “Secrets,” she isn’t using that easy poem-allusion-as-guiding-analogy-for-the-poem method. The poetry I’ve read by Mary Oliver seems to operate on this level. The point of the poem is to make the reader see the equation of allusion and circumstance. For Digges the poem is a tapestry of allusion, narrative, circumstance and wildly submersed sentences. Those sentences that continue past the line break, where you thought it would end, past the last qualifier, where you thought it might rest. Her sentences will not tire.

This might be the quality that leads me to say that these are poems of the earth, because they are tireless. They begin as naturally as holding the door open for someone who’s coming in right behind you. And they are earnest, though I’m not entirely sure the subject they are so earnest of. Is it the unknowable origin of human intention? Or the inevitable circularity of human activity? Maybe it’s something in the book’s two sestinas, something about the muscular rhythms innate to that form could be what informs the earnestness of these poems. 

Recommended links:
Late in the Millennium
Her obituary (most unfortunately) 
A video of her reading