Beside the Dumpsters, Furiously Sorting

K.B. The Suspect by Marcelijus Martinaitis, Tr. Laima Vince,White Pine Press, 2009.

I always feel bereft when I read in translation.  The nature of the original language, the music, double meanings, whoever the translator, are necessarily unlisted—unknowable, ripped—as if the poetry has been flayed.

So I find it hard sometimes to allow myself to respond to translated work in the same way I sink into native language. However, either because of Vincė’s skill or the nature of the original material, it’s easy to forget this book is translated. Once Martinaitis straps you in, you ride until the wooden doors bang open.

This sequence of persona poems chronicles post-Soviet Lithuanian Everyman K.B. as he drifts from scene to disquieting scene and reports on his own thinking.  In a tone simultaneously desperate and ironic, with the hyperawareness of the sleep-deprived, Martinaitis guides us through a shadowy I Spy world packed with vaguely menacing, sometimes surreally incongruous objects.

K.B.’s problem is this: how can he resurrect himself from a lifetime of repression? For as long as he can remember, K.B.’s main goal has been to avoid calling attention to himself in any way, so as to avoid being subject to any kind of police action or abuse. Over time, he has scrubbed away his very identity.

I could watch how I was disappearing:
an infant, a teenager, a young man,
a soldier in uniform, a lover in a car
huddled against a woman,
walking a dog, surrounded by well-wishers,
and almost the way I am now, like the day before yesterday—
none of it coherent,
an endless chain of losing myself.
(“About the Hidden Mirror”)

Years of adaptive paranoia—about police investigations, interrogations, beatings, buggings, torture, and random acts of violence—have left him with only a single, hypertrophied emotion: fear. If K.B.’s situation seems alien to our own experience at first glance, it’s really not. We see this sort of emotional bankruptcy in our own lives. Martinaitis’ words constitute a wake-up call; K.B.’s heightened vigilance proves communicable.

And if being stifled in this life doesn’t pose enough of a challenge, K.B. suffers also from its corollary—a problematically elaborate fantasy of how things must be in a different sort of life. The mysterious Margarita seems to represent this ideal world, along with art, mirrors and fine, old interiors. That world, “not of this time and not of this place” ("K.B.’s Dream About Closeness"), is the only world, he believes, in which passion might occur. But there’s a catch.

We experienced incredible lightness.
We could pass through each other,
merge into one.
Only when we did,
we were suddenly shut down.

We are all guilty, at times, of living for some future which may never arrive. And even though we know there is no such thing as perfection, that the world is messy, and that nothing ever turns out exactly as expected, we are all subject to disillusionment. In K.B., we recognize ourselves. We live in a world not governed by order, but rather, by the likes of “trash angels”:

As though they were the final judgment,
angels from the shadow world—
beside the dumpsters, furiously sorting—
they complete history.
(“K.B. and the Trash Angels”)

Life, as Martinaitis shows it, is so poignantly absurd that perhaps the best we can hope for is some sort of salvage operation. This may seem pathetic, but at least it’s something. And it is entertaining. 

Scattered Remains

bk of (h)rs by Pattie McCarthy, Apogee Press, 2002. (from Hyde Park Review of Books.)

Mystics, heretics and saints abstract themselves across the pages of Pattie McCarthy’s book-length poem. In a “syntax of the miraculous,” disparate details intertwine and pin themselves to surfaces, as if assembled from rescued shreds of illuminated manuscripts. This is not narrative but mist/mythmaking, a vehicle ecstatic; a metaphor for the fragmentation of human existence and also for the swirling mass from which all being ensues.

The book begins with the section, “bell (h)rs”—liturgical hours, but also a pun on belles heures, as in the medieval illustrated volumes of the Duc de Berry and others.  matins:

blue then. again she is—bending. against
a gilt-checked backdrop, palm fronds.
there is the denial of the senses & then
there is the obliteration thereof.

In her poem McCarthy seems to describe actual tableaux somewhere, but we are never told where or who the creatures in the pictures are. We have to guess. Mysterious pronouns abound: she might be saint, mystic, figure in the picture; you—generic reader, creator of the picture, book itself; I—poet, observer, character in the picture; he—Christ, or artist. These definitions vary from page to page. There are clues: “she is collaged c. the turn of the seventh” or “she confides forties of Solomon/water turned to silver in his hands.” For the hagiographically-challenged (e.g. pagan/Protestant, like me) reader, playing the parlor game Who’s who? can become quite a distraction. I identified the heretic Marguerite Porete (lauds) from the date 1310, and the double burning. Because I garden I guessed Saint Veronica from “a decorative cluster of speedwell/ makes you a rebus” (psalm 2451738 from the second, “(p)salter,” section.) Still other protagonists remain anonymous.

All hairsplitting aside, we realize: had the poet named names this would have been an entirely different book.  McCarthy leaves her mystics cryptic, for as the poet says, “the map is not the territory.” Strict identification is beside the point.  Beauty here locates itself in language and mystery. To read one of these pages is to stare and stare through the fluctuant zoom of a hidden picture. Some moment, the lens-length jives and an icon reveals itself, if only for an instant. From the section, “bk of (h)rs”:

                                         . . . the kind of air a cloister arranges in clusters and arches. some
language barely disguised in retreat. promises rise of faint illumination in crescent phases.

McCarthy’s is the alchemy of not having to choose between apparent and conjectural, between the world of the book we’re in and the world outside:

                                                                            . . . what were the chances. to wake knowing
outside  the  skin  is  that  inescapable.  mythological  to  the very  last  crumbling  chunk.

Her tone is ecstatic but self-aware, the echo of the cavernous cathedral twittering with absurdity, or at least, idiosyncrasy. Trains, streetlights, timetables and disgruntled orchestras interlock with recipes for herbal cures and anatomical notes (“I’m a big fan of the clavicle. the fingerboard of the body”); the treatment of heads is “eccentric”; the verso bleeds through.  If person is uncertain, so are time and place. All of this comes at us in a series of mood windows, cadenced snapshots piled with detail—living proof that meticulousness does not equal clarity. Even language itself is unreliable: there are puns.  “(p)salter” section .ii, “juli/an” refers to July, year (an in French,) as well as the Julian calendar;  further along we see “a town at the mouth;” “intercoastal” stands in for intercostal— between ribs; and the title section says this: 

vir dolorum—mistaking delirium
which has nothing to do with nothing herein.

It is a delirious trip McCarthy takes us on, in which contradiction signals earnestness as well as falsity. “(p)salter” .iv reads as a composite of possible saintly activities and attributes. Though the clue “converted clovis” seemingly pins this account on Clovis’ wife, Saint Clotilda, there is too much here for one person to have done. The modernity of “stopped answering the phones” confirms this notion: not only is this piece a fine example of the poet’s wayward imagination and synthetic genius, but it also indicates how little any of what precedes or follows may be taken at face value— 

                                                                                                     . . . chewed on lemon seeds. did
not  swallow them.  lingered.  starved   to  death.  anticipated encounters  with  wax.  made
proclamations. became weary of them. feared unread books. named names. made the index.

—that is, if there is a face value. This is one of the more focused pieces in the book. The last, title, section tends more toward obscurity, which may be part of the point but around page 50, we as readers give up believing the roil of detail will add up, and realize this is an ABSTRACT mosaic. Which can be okay, but there may not be, in the end, enough meaning to keep some of these pictures from merely papering the walls. Sooner or later, nonsequiturs numb (“(p)salter” .vi):

this has been our lot since pigeon domestication, since
it’s one of the perils of our subway line 
            :for we are, needless to say, in a skull, but I have no choice but to add the following
few remarks.  I am looking for a suitable hat in the rain.

I am the first to admit I may have missed something, but to me, much as I like the line about pigeon domestication, these details don’t hold together. I believe poetry requires some thread of association, however slim, to make it work. I don’t find one here.  McCarthy, herself, says, “how long can I/ reasonably expect to go without saying. answered in abstractions at the base of our spines.” Maybe not quite so long?

This is a minor quibble, though— a matter of degree. Remarkable about this book is its use of language, words as apparition, excess, sound—all for their own sakes. How McCarthy keeps this intensity up as long as she does, “French verbs in the mouth as a bowl of buttered peas,” “to know by fixed stars, to turn inequal to equal, to know southly,” is astonishing. See for yourself.

Not By the Text

Louise in Love by Mary Jo Bang, Grove Press, 2001.

The adage goes, love is blind. But is it blind, or is it dumb? Not dumb really, just unconcerned with logic. Impervious. Dreamy. As in dreams, the lover roams the world, open to suggestion. Now is all there is. It is a naïve state, infantile, in which reason, cause and effect do not figure, in which everything, even nothing, seems new. Louise in Love is a study of this condition, the transcendence of subjectivity over objectivity, aesthetics over logic, instinct over sense. 

From the beginning, Mary Jo Bang does not tell us what’s going on. We keep reading because the language and imagery are fascinating on their own, story or no story. This is the point of the book. It is Cannes without subtitles. We have to go by body talk, soundtrack, cinematography. Bang explains this in the text: “Inane nexus of speech, never quite capturing/ the what invoked” (“The Medicinal Cotton Clouds”) and later,

but finally a gown
of ambiguity, shimmering and more fitting
than a shift of drear reason,

a Come in, come in. We’re having a party.
                                                (“Louise Sighs, Such a Long Winter, This”)

Purposely ambiguous, Louise’s goal is to evoke and amuse, not to inform. 

            In a book-length manuscript, how can Bang get away with not exactly telling, and not showing either? “The mind says no,/ Louise admitted, but the heart, it loves repetition/ and sport” (“Time Speeds, Said Louise, When a Fever Rises”). Sport is at the heart of this poetry. The narrator in Louise’s head flaps from one idea to another in a style both dizzy and clever, with the spirit of repartée that seems to embody the jazz age, at least from our post-Fitzgerald perspective: Gatsby, glitter and gin. Louise is skittish yet elegant, breathless, adrift—

—a lovely skin, a mind that knows nothing
of boundaries, the singsong of motion.
                                                (“Captivity”)

Indeed, this book jitters with sound, leaps with surprise associations.  Bang takes the dictum every line a poem seriously.  Images and fragments jostle on the page like kernels in a popper. 

To appreciate how dense and complex this writing is, look at “Belle Vue”.  It starts out,

Gorgeous that pillar, that post—both spiraled
with lashes of laurel. And between the two, four
couples fashioned past fumble.

Bang doesn’t bother with “It is", bypasses the mundane, heads straight for the meat—gorgeous. She stretches its long o, and those of post and both, around the symphonic pillar, spiral, and laurel, interweaving sound, form and sense. Lashes has a double meaning here, the obvious tendrils and the cosmetic eyelashes. Line breaks are strategic. Pausing after “between the two, four” leads us off on a momentary multiplication run before finishing with more soundplay—the rhyme of lashes and fashioned, and the alliteration of four, fashioned and fumble—with its enigmatic implication. Does Bang mean the couples were impeccably dressed? Does she mean they were entwined, past the fumbling stage of making out? Does it matter? Another purposeful line break comes in line 4, “The party wanted the night/ sand to swallow their prints”. Bang means one thing in line 4, which changes when you read line 5. With all the double meanings it’s as if there are two texts, a twofer.  

But despite its ambiguity this book does not drown the reader in a vat of incomprehensibility. Though Louise in Love never quite does yield a story, its poems are grounded in everyday detail. There is humor, irony. We feel, if we read just a little farther, a story must come to the surface. Lines 6-9 of “Belle Vue”:

Back home, the filament blinked in the lamp

by which Louise sat reading a book about sleep.
Six knobs controlled the night but the day,
the day, she read, was rudderless,

Bang gives the impression of a story, with local and temporal cues—“Back home”— and household detail—the flickering lamp, Louise reading. We soon come to realize, these devices lead nowhere. Time is unreliable. There are clues throughout the book about later dates and passing seasons, but all are vague. The language is antiquated—“vexed”, “base”, “nostrum”, “high dudgeon”, “April angelus tolling its sixes”—but then, in contradiction, there is a reference to Clint Eastwood. In “Raptured”, one of the last poems in the book, Louise carries a copy of Mrs. Dalloway, another hint. Hamilton is Louise’s opposite, her practical boyfriend and foil; he sees things head on, states facts. “The play will not go forward, he said, and it didn’t despite their tears” (“They Chirp, They Whistle, and Words”). Time has been derailed. Furthermore, even seemingly normal details mutate toward the weird. In the above excerpt, the book about sleep seems reasonable, but Louise’s interpretation of it is fantastic. Her interpretation of day concludes,

an eggbreak knowing no bounds but becoming
an edgeless eye fluttering open at the sound of a siren,
a peony shaken—each petal a shower of instant truths.

Metaphors like these—the six knobs, the sound substitution of eggbreak for daybreak, the edgeless eye—occur with astonishing regularity throughout this book.

The peony line is an example of one of Bang’s most interesting constructions. It is a jumbled image, its logic false as an Escher drawing. If you read it quickly, impressionistically, it makes sense. If you think about it too carefully, you realize a shaken peony would yield a shower of petals, and that each petal, while it might yield a shower of dewdrops, would not be a shower, itself. Another such expression occurs later,

The wrist’s tiny veinlets sunk

while gravity’s gooseherd gathered the minion
capillaries.

Gravity’s gooseherd? Physiologically, this makes no sense. As a loose interpretation it makes perfect sense, or at least as much sense as it needs to. More than that, it is tuneful and funny, graphic, very right-brain; in short, high entertainment.

“Belle Vue” ends with

In the everworld of art, even the lettuces’ red leaves
stayed suspended between dissolves. Eye and idea, a rope
at the waist. She was held—

not by the text, but by the pretty pictures.

These oppositions, eye versus idea, picture versus text, are the keys to these poems. When Bang writes, as with Lynn Emanuel in Then, Suddenly, the book is the subject of the book. Louise is art. In her “everworld”, time doesn’t matter because art is the consolidation and perpetuation of feeling. We, like Louise, harbor collections of impressions within an infinite number of possible tableaux or emotional frames. But these passions are fleeting; if not recorded in some way they must move “into the electric connections/ that traipsed the chiasm between synaptic clefts” (“They Were That and Then”.) In other words, our moods are fugitive and will sink back, lost in our brains’ swamplands. With Louise’s love, though, this well never happen; it lives, suspended in Bang’s beautiful dreamscape.

Just the Book

Then, Suddenly by Lynn Emanuel, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

There are novels in which all action transpires in a single day. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway ponders, procrastinates, and reads the paper. Events from her newspaper replay through the eyes of other characters, in recursive fashion.  Not much happens. Still, by the end of the story the protagonist has at least managed to throw a party. Virginia Woolf merely slows the clock. Lynn Emanuel, on the other hand, smashes it.

In Then, Suddenly, nothing at all happens. On the title page is a quote: “The book is the subject of the book”. Emanuel means it. There is no action, no story. All that remains is poet, reader and verbiage. What appears to be literal or real at first is not, is merely an artifact of writing. In a carnival of imagery, narrative gives way to anti-narrative. One might think such a clever concept would become cute. It is a testament to this poet’s skill and ingenuity that it never does. In fact, this is the kind of book you cannot put down.

If there is no story, what holds this poetry together? In “Ode to Voice,” Emanuel says, “A voice is not a story but a way of presiding over a story, if one were to happen by.” This whole collection could be considered an ode to voice. It is the voice that controls this book, as if voice has taken over and, lacking any story to tell, talks about itself and about other things on pages of books. It is playful, opinionated, endearingly narcissistic, can be tyrannical, mocking and generous.  It describes itself as a river, as “in my hydroelectric mode” (“Walt, I Salute You,”) and compares itself to a “dizzying freshet,” “spiffy” and “impudent” (“In Search of a Title.”) One of the most remarkable things about this voice is, it keeps reminding us that it is one, often in witty or ironical ways. In “Elsewhere,” the poet writes twice, “I’m nearly 50.” We finally think we’re getting somewhere, finding something out about the actual poet, which we may be. However, all is thrown into doubt when we realize “nearly fifty” appears on pages 48 and 49. It is the book, talking about its page numbers! 

These self-conscious intrusions are what make this book fascinating. Actually, they are not intrusions: they occur with such regularity as to make up the fabric of the book. Emanuel challenges the accepted boundaries between writer, reader, literary content and device, astounds and sometimes confounds us by sneaking back and forth across them. We readers are expected to be active participants, and the Voice (as I will call the speaker) tells us our place. In “Like God” she says,

Like God,

you hover above the page staring down

then later,

But you know this story about the galoshes
is really About Your Life, so, like a diver
climbing over the side of a boat and down
into the ocean, you climb, sentence
by sentence, into this story on this page.

By speaking to us directly and describing our every move, the Voice lets us know she has control not only over the book, but also over us, for once we start to read we are in her territory. In another poem she says (“Dressing the Parts,”)

Like you, my pig.
I’m your truffle and

for you
reading is eating.

Is too.

The emphatic, “is too” implies we are inside the book with her, talking back, denying our cannibalism. Elsewhere she brings the reader into the book even more literally. In “The Book’s Speech,” the reader becomes “the hard, dark bulk looming at the end of a sentence.” At first this appears meaningful in some vague way— the reader is a presence, a judge. Then it dawns on us: the dark bulk is a period. We are print. Other things also become text. In “Dressing the Parts” the Voice says, “I am a kind of diction.”  In “Like God’’ a train is approaching the station “in three long sentences.” Emanuel turns concrete objects into parts of writing.

This abstraction continues on a larger scale in “The White Dress” and “The Corpses.” “The White Dress” is an object poem about what it feels like to be a dress. We’ve all seen such poems before. But Emanuel leaves us a clue in the preceding poem: the dress is “not a dress really, it is a heartache-waiting-to-happen.” As with everything in these poems, the dress is not what it seems. It is a story. The Voice says, “When we’re in it we’re machinery, a cutter nosing the ocean of a town.” Now the poem has a split personality. It is a very good object poem if taken at face value—a woman in a power dress could feel like a ship cutting through the ocean. Just as easily, a voice could see itself as the machinery of a story. Of course, Emanuel has already told us this book is not going to have any stories, which explains why the dress is doomed to dangle in the closet. By the time we reach “Corpses” we have become wary. We know the corpses probably aren’t corpses. But what are they? Emanuel lets us know in the next poem: “I had given up and become the dead man.” The Voice is now a corpse. Not only can objects become artifacts; artifacts can also become objects.

Even more disconcerting, the Voice can be two things at once. In “Portrait of the Author,” which starts out sounding like a story, the Voice ends up taking over the parts of both lovers, simultaneously. Emanuel has been teasing us. She has led us on, allowed us to think she’s slipped up and told us an actual story, only to make clear at the end it is all artificial by turning her characters into puppets, which is in fact what all fictional characters are, to their creators. 

Emanuel uses other techniques to throw us off. She allows herself to wander off track, as in “These Days”:

 …the fire turned on me like a sick dog.
Bitch. Bastard. What’s fire’s gender?
Bachelard says fire is the daughter of two
logs. Okay, so, I am writing a poem...

This sort of stream-of-consciousness side-trip enriches the poem and also distracts us. With similar effect the Voice often interrupts itself, as in “Ode to Voice” in which she uses the word “firmament” then says, “I love that firm word for such a fuzzy and loose experience as sky,” before continuing with the poem. 

Of all Emanuel’s strategies for blurring reality, the most striking is her lava flow of imagery. In “Elsewhere,” she writes about “heaping up the elaborate scenery” in order to disappear into it. In “Walt, I Salute You” she says,

Nothing is too small for my interest in it.
I am undone in the multiplication
of my perceptions.

This is what she wants for the reader: to get lost in the morass of unreality she has created. Emanuel has wonderful vision. She stuffs her poems with imagery no one else could dream up. For example, “The Burial”:

              …{I’ve} watched the brown-plus-gray
deer compose into Cubism the tree whose name I don’t know
(pine, I think); after I’ve holed up in my loneliness staring
at the young buck whose two new antlers are like a snail’s
stalked eyes and I’ve let this conceit lead me to the eyes-on-stems
of the faces of Picasso …

The images Emanuel uses are so interesting and prolific, it’s easy for the reader to lose sight of what the poem is about—in this case, writing a poem. The ostensible subject ceases to matter. For Emanuel, the poem is a framework from which to suspend as many abstractions as possible. She says, “I want images to inherit the earth like kudzu spreading its ooze” (“Soliloquy of the Depressed Book.”) 

How does Emanuel control all this imagery? Why don’t these poems, overflowing as they are with extraneous detail, plunge into kaleidoscopic chaos? As I’ve already said, the Voice is a very strong presence and does a great job directing traffic. For another thing, Emanuel is not overly concerned with being in control. Imagery packed in the way she does it is likely to become absurd, but she welcomes absurdity: the “kiss as wet and mobile as a gourami” (“Dressing the Parts”); the cinematic hyperdrama of “Portrait of the Author”; or even, emphasis of what is absurd all by itself, like Starter Logg (“The Burial.”) 

Furthermore, images within a single poem are not as random as they seem; they usually bear some relation to each other. In “Soliloquy,” the images all have to do with landscapes as seen from indoors—scenery, vistas, sky, mountains, vegetation, panes of glass, avenues, cardinals, sunset—all these might be seen from a room with a view. Similarly, “These Days” is unified by recurrent images of logs and other things made of wood, as well as by funereal, filial and fire themes.  Sometimes bits of imagery interact, get mixed up with each other. At the end of “These Days,” interment and incineration combine, with “I heard the roar of earth falling on the coffin” and “I just fed (the fire) a log big enough to choke a horse.” “Roar” is a word often used with fire, but here Emanuel uses it with earth. The log, which should burn, she associates with asphyxiation, something more akin to burial. The burying and the burning have turned into a kind of mixed metaphor for annihilation, the main theme of this book.

In “These Days” Emanuel writes, “what interests me most, I can see, is the disappearance of matter.” Preoccupation with things going away is not a typical source for poetry. Or is it? Death! The speaker’s reincarnated father is whiny and destructive—a personification of that little voice of negativity that haunts us all. She buries him repeatedly but he keeps popping up and she struggles to get rid of him, cajoling him as one would a child. Her struggle to settle him into memory echoes her struggle to bury the book, to bury her own writing, indeed her own self, in so much camouflage that for all we know she does not exist. It is the exact opposite of confession: it is sheer denial. Emanuel challenges our expectations of what a poem or book of poems should be. Perhaps Then, Suddenly is a metaphor for life, and death. Then again, perhaps it’s just a book.