Jacket 37: Eight Pages on When You Bit...

You can read an eight-page review of my book When You Bit, written by UK poet Jeffrey Side, in Jacket 37 here.

Many thanks, Jeff.

Larissa Shmailo: In Paran

Over the last month, I have spent a good deal of time with Larissa Shmailo's In Paran, released by Blazevox this year. I have had a hard time coming up with a workable angle, although I like the book very much. Shmailo incorporates elements of many different strains and styles, but I think the overriding characteristic of the book is its affirmative tone. This does not preclude a tragic element, but the book wraps its tragedies in a gauze of playfulness and whimsy. There are many poems in the book that, if one were being uncharitable, one could call cute; it would be more charitable (and more accurate, as far as I am concerned) to call them charming. Shmailo's extensive use of rhyme and anaphora tie the book in to what is commonly known as spoken word poetry; but this is spoken word with chops, from a poet who has clearly done her homework. Much of the book addresses real-world themes directly- love, aging, poverty, an engagement with different mythologies (often with a sense of them being debunked.) The book is enjoyable for a variety of reasons, but there is a fundamental pleasure that Shmailo takes in language that is impossible to hide and impossible not to be seduced by. Language is found to be redemptive, a means by which the poet can transcend the bounds of material reality. There is not a sense of futility at work, but of triumph. Writing these poems seems to have been palliative for Shmailo, and the joy of a kind of release shines through every line. Because she has the chops to make them stick, the poems not only convey this sense of release but allow us to share it. The book, as a whole, is cathartic, and takes us on a journey where pain is acknowledged but pleasure is never forgotten.

The first poem in the book, Personal, is characteristic:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

Tell me

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

which villanelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you'll bite from
which hither you'll welcome

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

What I especially like about this poem is the way that edges of maturity show up to redeem what would otherwise be child-like. There is a dark subtext in lines like "unlearn all the learning" and "ignore the guilt-ridden" that let us know in no uncertain terms that this is a voice of experience. Yet all the gravitas is balanced by a kind of delight in rhyme and anaphora, which gives an unmistakable impression of the upbeat. This is the rare kind of poem that can be equally good read on a page and spoken aloud. Shmailo has just the right blend of savvy and smarts to create something accessible enough to work this way. Shmailo's mastery is not the kind that comes easily, and in fact this is a deceptively simple poem. It would be easy to say that the atmosphere of the thing is rather cliched, until you look at the anaphoric bits and realize that not one cliche is included. All the "ions" and "neural nets" are not there by accident; they are the work of an excellent craftsman who knows how to construct something interesting that yet breezes by as naturally and easily as you please. In fact, this is a poem that on a certain level encourages us to take it for granted. You can breeze through it without noticing all the intriguing bits, but it takes time and effort to fully appreciate the care that went into its construction. It cannot be anything but the product of many years of hard work. In poetry, as in everything else, making it look easy is a very difficult trick to pull off. Shmailo does it here. An even more bravura demonstration of this complexity-that-seems-simple is in The No-Net World:

Deep in your heart, you always believed
There was a barrier, a secret shield
Keeping you safe from the street
Secretly, you knew
Your good shoes and your warm lined gloves
Kept you apart, and safe
From the man with the cup in his hand
And the boy with the cardboard sign
And the woman with the bloated legs
And the girl with the begging eyes
From the weathered madwoman railing at God
And the shadows at the ashcan fires
From the need to ask, no choices left:
Mister, can you please...?

What did you, from the cushioned world
Of buffers, alternatives, other ways to turn
Of loans from family friends
Of credit cards and healthy children
Of grocers who smiled because they knew how well you ate:
What did you have in common with the concrete world of need?
Secretly, you knew, so surely you believed
You could never fall so low

Welcome to the no-net world.

Then I got fired one day
I got fired one day
Lost my job and then my house
I got fired one day.

Now your debts mount up like garbage and a layoff's coming soon
And you have to see a doctor and insurance just pays half
And your folks who lent you money just can't help you anymore
And the loans are coming due; still, the force field is there,
In the lining of the gloves, in the good if now used shoes
You will never stand like that goddamned bum
Holding the door at the bank
Too tired to whore or steal
Saying, Please ma'am, please ma'am, please...

Then I got HIV
I got HIV
They found out
I lost my kids
I got HIV

You would never see
Hunger on the face of your child
When she came home from school there would always be
Apples and rice and chicken and beans
Milk and carrots and peas
Now there's two days left till payday and just one last can of corn
And she's home, laughing hungry, hi, I'm home, ma, what's for lunch?

Welcome to the no-net world

Are you hungry? Good:
Ready, set, line-up, let's go:
You can get on line on Monday for the lunch meal that's on Tuesday
and the shelter line's for Thursday but you have to sign up Monday
But you stayed there just last Wednesday so you can't come back till Friday.

And the Food Stamps place is downtown
And the welfare place is uptown
And the Medicaid is westside
And the hospital is eastside
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
No I can't give you a token
Don't you know you'll only drink?

Hell, yes.

Like a child praying to god
You believed in forever
You thought home and hearth were,
Not for everyone of course,
But surely for you:

Only in the nightmares
Rare unremembered dreams
Did you stand by the door of the bank
Saying
Yes ma'am, God bless you ma'am
Please.

Don't get sick.
Don't let anyone you love get sick.
Don't be mentally ill.
Don't lose your job.
Don't be without money for a second.
Don't make any mistakes.

Welcome to the no-net world.

The essence of this poem to me is how it is simultaneously very now and also very universal. We are in the middle of a Depression in America, and the reality that Shmailo paints, while not pretty, is accurate for a large number of people. There are few things less humane I can think of than the way America deals with its sick and impoverished. Millions of people run around without health insurance, and to live in this day and age without health insurance is very much a no net existence. So I can comfortably call this an American Depression poem, circa 2009. The refrains and repetitions give the poem a jazzy edge, that lightens things up significantly, and reminds me of Auden's Refugee Blues. Yet the poem seems too earnest as a whole for me to call it post-avant. I do not consider this, however, to be a problem, as the earnest quality of the poem makes it more engaging and (let's face it) we don't want creepy all the time. This poem has many things about it that align it, not only with spoken word poetry but with all forms and manners of oral poetry, going back to Whitman and through the Beats, and in fact Shmailo has recorded this. It is incantatory in the best sense of the word, a poem that could knock an audience dead at a reading. Maybe this is because, unlike many spoken word artists, Shmailo sneaks sophistication in the back door- there is an edge here of self-consciousness, a "you" speaking to "you," implying a continuing interior monologue. The "I" is not a typical lyric "I" either, but a generalized I meant to signify characters in the poem, is if this were a kind of Greek chorus. All in all, as with Personal, this is a complex construct that seems simple. It may wind up being one of the signature poems of our era, and I feel that it deserves to be.

Brooklyn Copeland: Longing/Belonging

The best way to extend the terms of the discourse is to apply them to new works of poets who fit under the post-avant rubric, as they arise. I was thrilled to receive in the mail Longing/Belonging, the new chap from Brooklyn Copeland. It is a collection of ten brief poems that seem to focus on the natural world as a metaphor for a troubled marriage. The edges we see in this collection are what could be called natural edges. A natural edge could be a number of different things, but in this collection natural edges manifest in three ways: as something broken or fractured in nature; as some kind of remnant of life/death processes; or as anything odd or disfigured. Natural edges function here to represent a failed or failing relationship; as a way of expressing frustrated sexuality indirectly; and as a reflection of internal/cognitive discord. A look at some of the particular poems will help to elucidate what I am talking about, where natural edges are concerned. This is the seventh fragment in the piece:

A robin's egg, shocking
blue. Inside, the yoke is green
as snot. The egg did not
fall: it was pushed
from the eaves. Husband,
a nest is no
mere rustic thesis
to nail above
our apartment door.

The exquisite delicacy of these lines is reinforced by assonances and rhymes: robin's/shocking, not/snot, eaves/thesis. The yoke of the egg being likened to snot is, indeed, "shocking," and what gives the fragment its peculiar edge. Once the edge is in place, the dissonance of the situation (and the dissonant affect behind it) becomes clear. Eggs are a symbol of fertility; here, we see a cracked egg. There are overtones of waste and the squandering of natural resources, that seem to have a personal resonance. The "nest" functions on a dual level; it is something seen outwardly by the protagonist, and also something referred to indirectly, in a suggestive way. Whatever the protagonist is living through, it seems that the comfort and safety of a nest is inaccessible to her, something that either her husband is not providing or that she herself is unable to create. This usage of eggs is a prime example of what Eliot calls an objective correlative, a concrete symbol that embodies an inward reality. What is surprising (as always) in Copeland is how deftly she manages to present her objective correlatives, how seamlessly interwoven they are in her constructs. Yet Longing/Belonging is quite laconic, and this is how it ends:

You aren't discouraged by how little
I have to say? Be furious,
instead. Be the winter
sun, the unlit white
flare. My heart's not where
I feel this little
towards you, for you've
shattered me back years.

The final three lines take us to a rather different locale, as we see the protagonist "a happy trauma shivering/ down Peru Street/ on my banana seat." Though this is not overtly stated, it seems like the happiness of the trauma has to do with the protagonist's ability to express herself. Notice that the Other never finds a voice; Copeland either silences him or does not deign to repeat the things he says. In Mary Walker Graham, this has to do with solipsism and self-contained sexuality; there is an element of that here, but there is more affective vulnerability at work with Copeland, a sense that a maintained silence is a way of keeping control (perhaps on/for both sides of the relationship equation.) In any case, the poet's sense of Longing/Belonging has much to do with finding ways to represent the reality of longing and the perceived inability to feel a sense of belonging in marriage. There is a bravery at work here, the courage to tell a certain kind of truth, not only with raw data but with imaginative imagery. "Be the winter sun" sounds less like a threat and more like a sort of resigned encouragement, the protagonist's way of being generous with someone who is not being generous back. The poems ends with a "shattered" protagonist "shivering," but awash in liberation. It is the achievement of Copeland's chap that she shows us this deliverance into liberation happening in so many palpable, "naturally edgy" ways.

Sex and Terror

I do not necessarily know why we are seeing an outbreak of writing that reflects sex and terror, but that it fits under the rubric I have created seems beyond question. The poems I would like to feature today belong to Boston's Mary Walker Graham. Graham's poems adopt the stance that the protagonist seems either to be a sort of victim, or in the process of self-castigation. Graham veers towards the straight Confessional, but always with an added dimension and depth that places her (to my eyes) squarely within the confines of post-avant. The following is a prose poem, it is entitled A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever:

When I say pit, I'm thinking of a peach's. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings- the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern- an ocean's inside us- a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the flourescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I'll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can't touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

This poem practically oozes creepiness. Among the aspects I find most notable: the way that Graham's protagonist self-infantilizes (regarding herself not as a woman but as a "girl"), the imagery that conflates the sexual with the horrific (Vaseline butting against a decapitated head, broken jaws, fevers), and the intimation that what is at the heart of this confrontation is some sort of compulsive relationship. Yet the poem intrigues because, despite its intimations, it never abandons the first person singular. Whomever the "you" happens to be, we never see them, they are never addressed, and the poem contains no "Other." There is solipsism at work, that cuts the implied "you" down to size; the narrator may be involved in an unhealthy relationship, but the primary feeling we get is one of self-loathing and self-disgust. The generalized phrases that are addressed to men serve to illustrate the narrator's alienation from whatever specific man is involved in the situation. There is also an unlikely quality to Graham's metaphors: what exactly could "balloon" imply, in this context? How can it be connected to the "peach" that Graham puts it up against? At one point, Graham creates a metaphoric chain, all meant to represent the same thing: dark peach, night cavern, ocean, balloon. The most obvious interpretation is that the metaphor is meant to signify the female sexual organ. However, the metaphoric chain is distorted, disturbing, and weird. It would seem incongruous that all these signifiers could be referring to the same thing. You have to stretch to allow the metaphoric chain to work, just as Graham stretches to convey what she wants to convey, which is equally brutal and surreal. The following poem, Double, has roughly the same feel:

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away...

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that this poem places itself in a realm on infantile sexuality. Yet that it is written from an adult perspective gives it a kind of double edge. If there is terror here, it is terror of the protagonist's own sexual power. The pleasure for the reader is in trying to understand the different levels of self-evaluation that are going on, and how they tie in to the narrator's sense of herself. As in A Pit, there is a level of sexual solipsism going on that becomes a maze, in and of itself. There is also a level on which the poem exteriorizes its own discomfort through the use of "gross" imagery: box(es) of fish, blades, surgeons. What is the nature of the operation? What necessitates it? The poem is given added depth because it is presented in the second person: not "I" but "you." It takes on the quality of a narrator talking to herself about herself, and makes the poem an exercise in self-consciousness, more so than the first one. I find this compelling because it picks up the tone of Confessional poetry but puts it through a new kind of light filter. What Graham sees as "Double" could be a split between her body and her mind, or between her sexuality and her intellect, or even between herself and an Other. Whatever it is, it has left her in pieces, and the poem seems to be an attempt to put herself back together again. Both of these poems present a consistent persona: a polymorphously perverse girl-woman lost in the never-land of her own body. It would be difficult to get more edgy than that.