Reviews
The buried encounter
Josie Sigler's living
Living Must Bury
Living Must Bury
In her debut book of poems, Josie Sigler links life with violence, love with loss, and mourning with the natural progression of time. Published by Fence Books as the 2010 winner of the Motherwell Prize, Living Must Bury is a mixture of repeated phrases, historical flashes, and tragic endings linked by the universal experience of living. In these poems, it is the living who must exist in both the present and the past simultaneously, and Sigler’s poems provide ample space for both while challenging us to find beauty in the process of grieving.
Sigler reminds us that we, the living, must bury a host of people, objects, and memories, even (if not especially) the ones that cause us the most pain. The world she creates carries a heavy message for the living. We are repeatedly informed that we must bear the burden of interring all that the dead leave behind. This reality comes through a safe system of poems linked by traditional poetic devices and references to everyday encounters. Designed to guide the reader as we come to terms with the weight we share as members of those still here, Sigler’s book provides a number of lists of what it is the living must bury:
those who are infidels, who in summer once / turned wide circles in grass.
those who would be skewered like hogs if they failed.
those who covet coral
those who will discover trace amounts of urine in their Mountain Dew.
those fighting causes they disbelieve,
those lost, those anonymous, those dream-singers
Through the repeated phrase “those who,” an extensive inventory creates a sort of respite for the reader. Rachel Zucker calls this book a “strange, archaic, 3-D prayer; a lucid palimpsest,” and I agree: Sigler has crafted a work rich with layers. She has moments in which she places religion on top of nature on top of domestic violence:
those who sit through the piercing test for life in Christ’s side.
As in stigmata, the part of the pistil that receives the pollen,
9) the portion of a body that can withstand the hard pew
& after church, my grandfather prying the knife
from our drunken neighbor’s hands & the man weeping
on his knees to the howl of sirens. […]
Sigler frequently employs the couplet to create a meditative space for mourning and remembrance, a place where chanting these memories makes them more powerful. Throughout the book she catalogs violent acts and carnal pleasures, sits them squarely in the memory of the speaker, and recalls relationships and painful places — both her own and those of a distinguished sampling of figures. Dickinson, Plath, Sappho, and Woolf (to name a few) share spaces with Holocaust victims and those affected by war:
those with yellow fever. those whose bones surface like fans,
including those fornicating in places where there is such mud, […]
those shivering on the deck, those who were once stars.
those for whom crumbling is not an instant’s act,
a fundamental pause in which enlightenment:
a mother might sell herself.
It is the union of beauty and brute that brings Sigler’s work to life. She contrasts that which we cannot clearly define with that which we can only define with negative meaning, like the “rusted plow left in winter’s field” or the idea that “hoping love will save you” is a problem. It’s clear that one focus of Sigler’s work is death and its aftermath, but the book also pulls us into a space in which responsibility and desire are at odds.
those wives in church clutching their hankies, their purses, their children.
You know the women who hold onto the world like this.
They’ve married the wrong man, taken the wrong job,
walked down the street during the hour of wolves.
No white-knuckled embrace can save them, no good deeds,
no casseroles left steaming on porch steps.
This contrast provides a familiar dichotomy placing Sigler’s work in a position to redefine the conventions of palimpest-inspired poetry. Moving between figurative language and literal descriptions, the poems seem to have no true beginning or end. This recursive discourse forces the reader to move between the common and the uncomfortable for sixty-three pages. But Sigler does not attempt to trick or deceive her readers; she begins the collection with an epigraph from two poets, Jorge Luis Borges and Sylvia Plath. Together, the two provide an entry point into the idea that Sigler is creating a universe for her readers, one that is quick-moving like Plath’s poem “Getting There,” and one made up of a language Sigler intends to teach us by the end of the book. From Jorge Luis Borges: “If there is [a universe], we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.” And from Sylvia Plath: “I shall bury the wounded like pupas, / I shall count and bury the dead.”
These kinds of moments ground the reader in sometimes earthy and other times transcendent moments blended so seamlessly that one is not sure if the encounter is with triumph or tragedy. And so the living are celebratory in that we continue to enumerate what must be buried while attempting to exist in the moments that Sigler so aptly defines as “the dank smell at the bottom.”
But there is a person there
A review of 'The Morning News Is Exciting'
The Morning News Is Exciting
The Morning News Is Exciting
Okay, okay. I’ll admit it. I definitely judge a book by its cover. And Don Mee Choi’s debut, The Morning News Is Exciting, is no exception. The front cover sports a large, white exclamation point, penetrated by hundreds of colored bands that seem to explode from the spine. Yes, exciting, to say the least! Robert McKenna’s cover design is conceptually derived (the process is described in the end matter) and quite arresting, but I actually spent more time considering the back cover. Like any curious reader, I wanted to know what I was getting myself into, and who had recommended it.
Three customary blurbs stand in neat contrast to the dark background and declare a great many impressive things about the book. A quick scan of the names and some adept Googling reveals that three venerable scholars blurbed the book, including my friend and fellow poet Craig Santos Perez. Craig uses heady phrases to entice readers, such as “exiles against empire” and “demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes” to describe the work the book is doing. As generous and intelligent as he is, all these doctors and doctors-to-be raised my hackles a bit. Would this be another book that aims to do some conceptual task that, according to our academic sages, needs to be done? The poems, as described by others, seemed to be for something other than poetry itself. Well, of course, you might say. Perhaps, dear reader, I wasn’t in the mood for any upheaval, whether in the world of events or in the world of language. And so I began The Morning News Is Exciting, confident in my ability to simplify it into an overly vitriolic, self-pitying, poetic package of political hatefulness.
Ah, but Choi begins by making the reader bow and submit to her syntax. The collective imperatives jump off the page with what seems like a frightening and inappropriate whimsy, capped by the oft-appearing exclamation point. A string of absurd commands are delivered to us in nonsensical sentences to open the first piece, “Manegg” (which we later discover is a homophonic translation of Monchoachi):
At least sit well, we command:
Men say he but tally saying no, lame!
Who can respond. None say none. My wind, way low.
Lie, Egg, more lonely and bare, a callous lock.
Truly true Lass pause and care.
When I first read these lines … well, I was frustrated. Probably an immature and hasty response, but it’s true. Looking back on these lines after having spent time with the entirety of the book, I see so much more emotional heft at work, even in the lines’ weirdness. Who can respond, the poem declares, simply stating a poetic dilemma that many of us have grown accustomed to, but still experience as terrifying. The internal rhyming gives off the sense that someone is behind (or underneath, really) all this nonsense. And it’s not long until we encounter what appears as a reliable lyric speaker. The second section, “Diary of Return,” immediately anchors the reader in the familiar first-person narrative context that we crave:
arrived below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tile-roofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home.
Choi hands the reader over to a speaker, presumably from South Korea, who links the border between the Koreas with a metaphorical waistline, perfectly setting up the “feminist politics” which Craig praises her for on the back cover of the book. And she mentions empire. By name!
Ellen reads Choi (as part of Wave Books' Summer Reading Project)
The themes are evident enough: postcolonialism, violence (upon countries, upon women), domination achieved through language and syntax, and the book would not be without value if this were the extent of its merits. But there is a person there. There is a person there who breathes, who looks for home, who is sometimes many persons, but she is there. In “Diary of Return,” Choi embodies this female speaker in a series of vignettes about women who are presumably taken advantage of by American servicemen during and after the Korean War. In the following section, “The Morning News Is Exciting,” Choi takes a more abstract approach by comparing nations to girls:
Everyone is born wanted or unwanted, but some may be born exceptionally unwanted or wanted. A nation may be wanted or unwanted depending on what the other nation is thinking about.
And then later:
Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting.
If we read this with the earlier trope of a country’s waistline in mind, Choi not only illustrates the role of desire in invasion, but also how baser (literally, lower) desires can also be pretense for invasion. That is to say that the girl or country who is not desired for possession is still invaded and left for dead, “legs spread with the Cola bottle in her vagina and an umbrella up her anus.” And the speaker eventually admits this:
She has written that nothing happens to the unwanted girl. What an error. She’s an errorist.
Choi is often striving to resolve the difference between colony and home, wanted and unwanted, woman and nation, by interacting with “invader” texts, which are noted at the end of every poem: Foucault, Spivak, folktales, Dickinson, etc. The Morning News Is Exciting refuses to be either assimilated or impermeable and integrates these speakers into its collage of loss.
I find the use of Emily Dickinson particularly interesting. I mean, it’s a bit funny that Choi, who has heretofore been involved in translation of contemporary Korean poetry, would cling so tightly to a hermetic, dead, white woman. But she does. And Emily’s notion of the dialogical self is a fitting companion since it makes the self’s split explicit:
She went to Hong Kong in 1972. She was ten and knew only Korean then. She imagined there were two of her. She imagined me. I grew up in South Korea while she grew up in Hong Kong. I stay where I am.
The irresolvable distance surfaces again and Choi copes with it by speaking as two (sometimes many) girls, by writing letters between her selves, by transcribing diaries, poem-songs, and through a correspondence between three figures called Twin Flower, Master, and Emily.
It’s a bit disorienting, but once the reader has accepted disorientation as a possible aim of the book, The Morning News Is Exciting unleashes its power. The thirteen poems, which hover around eight pages each, flit from one form to another. If there are sustained queries, they are not borne through the means of a consistent tone, technique, or even the way the words look on the page. In fact, I would argue that the central question is: What is truly home? I am here but I remember there. The shifting form seems suited to Choi’s subject, though the book is dominated by prose blocks. And the self-contained poem-worlds offer the comfort of ordering devices (dates, numbers, headings) and footnotes, but these transitory anchors do little to prevent the poems from continually spinning their own “errors” and mistranslations into new injunctions for the reader:
Life begins now
Have no doubt
Have no door
This is not your fault
Run the rinse cycle twice
Don’t let the bubbles flow over
Life begins now
Have no doubt
Tea and Language
They say it’s a sensation
In her charmingly detached way, Choi moves from thing to thing with all the winsomeness and poignancy of a distracted child. The erratic mode seems second nature to a contemporary reader, possibly even calming. Despite her quick turns and changes, she frequently returns to basic symbols with a relentless obsessiveness that I admire in so many great poets. Sometimes these strange and simple things she carries through the book — moon, egg, star — lead her to stunning sentences that are not destinations in themselves, but are striking landmarks nonetheless:
Finally the child spoke. What is truly home? I am here but I remember there.
Either dissolve a genre or invent one
A review of 'Bluets'
Bluets
Bluets
In an interview with Bomblog, Maggie Nelson says she began writing Bluets because she wanted to spend time thinking and writing about something she loved — in this case, the color blue — rather than something she found despicable and frightening. “But because I am who I am,” Nelson says, “or because pleasure is what it is, the book quickly slid into dealing with pain too.” Consequently, Bluets reaches far beyond the constraints of its subject, resulting in a series of delicately associative numbered paragraphs investigating a broken romantic relationship, a friend’s chronic nerve pain, the writing process itself, and the deceptive elements of perception and color. The result not only defies easy categorization, but also leans toward Walter Benjamin’s famous declaration that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. Thus, the only way Bluets can accurately be labeled “essay” (as the back cover suggests), it is only in the context of that word’s formal definition, which is to make an attempt. Just as one of Benjamin’s general attempts was to suggest the profound connections between mysticism, materialism, and idealism, Nelson is attempting to connect diverse subject matter, while also creating a form which is not only conducive to her exploration, but generatively compatible as well. Additionally, Nelson’s awareness of form and elements of closure helped synthesize her various subjects.
Nelson’s intense thematic engagement altered the very embryo of her project, which, in its final state, leans heavily on the structure of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks. For Nelson, as for Wittgenstein, the proposition is a discrete vehicle for thought experiments whose outcomes are proposed by the author, and then challenged in a way that suggests why the author’s or reader’s proposed outcomes may have been originally misguided. Bluets also supports Wittgenstein’s idea that it is impossible for a writer to say anything about the world as a whole, and that whatever can be said, can be said only in reference to its bounded portions. According to Wittgenstein, “Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.” Therefore, according to Bertrand Russell in his introduction to the Tractacus, it is inaccurate to say, “There is this and this in the world, but not that.” Such a statement presupposes that one excludes certain possibilities to go beyond the boundaries of the world and to possibly contemplate these boundaries from the other.
It is tempting, but ultimately problematic, to suggest that Bluets’ propositions are an attempt to create 240 “bounded portions” of the world, because the book also contains the negative space between propositions, which tends to further the idea that our experiences are never fully formed, but are instead open-ended experiments or investigations. This white space physically houses the unbounded portions of the world, each portion providing a silence during which one can begin to formulate relation.
No matter what happens to our bodies in our lifetimes, no matter if they become like “pebble’s in water”, they remain ours; us, theirs.
(Proposition 109)
In Tender Buttons, Stein seems particularly worried about color and pain that seem to come from nowhere, for no reason. “Why is there a single piece of any color…Why is there so much useless suffering…”
(Proposition 110)
Goethe also worries about colors and pain, though his reports sound more like installments from the battlefield: “Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.”
(Proposition 111)
Conversely, one of the fundamental and necessary risks of Bluets is that such silences might actually come close to failing to make relation, as evidenced in the following sequence of propositions:
In one application, written and sent late at night to a conservative Ivy League university, I described myself and my project as heathen, hedonistic, and horny. I never got any funding. My blues stayed local.
(Proposition 64)
The instructions printed on the blue junk’s wrapper: Wrap Blue in cloth. Stir while squeezing the Blue in the last rinsing water. Dip articles separately for a short time; keep them moving. I liked these instructions. I like blues that keep moving.
(Proposition 65)
Yesterday I picked up a speck of blue I’d been eyeing for weeks on the ground outside my house, and found it to be a poison strip for termites. Noli me tangere, it said, as some blues do. I left it on the ground.
(Proposition 66)
Between the above sections, the importance of such failure is evident. If we read the transitions paratactically, that is to say, without connective clauses, phrases, or statements logically leading from one proposition to the next, then we realize the book’s lack of a narrative arc, which is a way of establishing an expected mode of closure; one wonders, therefore, whether the book could go on forever. Will Nelson conclude only once she has exhausted all the different ways in which the color blue can be investigated through the machine of the proposition? Will she finally reach some kind of emotional resolve around the broken relationship? Will she simply run out of blue factoids?
While a paratactic reading presupposes that the book simply lacks a thesis, it also fails to consider the fact that the propositions are numbered, which, at face value, suggests that the book should be read chronologically — as if to suggest reading propositions randomly is for naught. It also fails to consider the following proposition which may provide a clue to the book’s organizing principles:
Writing is, in fact, an astonishing equalizer. I could have written half of these propositions drunk or high, for instance, and half sober; I could have written half in agonized tears, and half in a state of clinical detachment. But now that they have been shuffled around countless times—now that they have been made to appear, at long last, running forward as one river—how could either of us tell the difference?
(Proposition 184)
Because Nelson’s propositions seem to represent a finite period of her life — the dimensions of which may have only arrived through the accumulation of day-to-day experiences filtered through a variety of linguistic, social, personal, and physical sensations — the governing principle for closure that seems most plausible is that this particular phase of Nelson’s life has reached its end. The ordering of Nelson’s propositions then, are paramount, and, when ordered most effectively, allow the reader to move inside the color blue, wandering through its terrors and sympathies while exploring its depths and hues with an awareness that is singular.
One of the more remarkable intervals (within the larger interval of “blue” that is the entire book) occurs between propositions 76–104. Here, Nelson addresses various states of depression, her broken relationship, and her friend’s chronic nerve pain. In these sections she allows the reader to exist within the color, embodying it with Nelson, rather than merely observing her commentary. Because of this, the reader experiences a more nuanced overlapping of subjects and at the end of the interval the reader finally steps back outside the color to observe, once again, how it is returned to its shelf as a vehicle for curiosity:
There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no “color thermometers.” How could there be, as “color knowledge” always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver? This didn’t stop a certain Horace Benedict de Saussure, however, from inventing, in 1789, a device he called the “cyanometer,” with which he hoped to measure the blue of the sky.
(Proposition 105)
Though rare, there are moments when Nelson’s self-awareness gets the best of her. As if anticipating a critic inclined to dismiss the book as just another literary meditation on the color blue, in proposition 155 she writes: “It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue, or that that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it. I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share.” This and other overt and hyperaware affirmations temporarily draw the reader away from the core experience of the text which, in its finest moments, is like being led through a natural hot spring whose temperatures vary in accordance with the warm and cool water seeping out from tiny holes in the earth. Similar to the way a bather might experience these varying sensations, the reader fully immersed in this book (without those occasional moments of self-awareness) participates in the complementary pleasures of emotional and intellectual discovery while being led by an enlightened guide capable of weaving intensely private and painful experience. Not only that, but Nelson’s exhaustive research and earnest attempt at understanding crisis, longing, and redemption creates enough white space to allow readers to enter into her world, which, in the end, represents both the intimacy and distance that exists between all of us.
Throughput
A review of 'The Port of Los Angeles'
The Port of Los Angeles
The Port of Los Angeles
As Frank O’Hara wrote, “You don’t refuse to breathe do you.” As he implies, life in an urban environment requires a person to be absorptive, to breathe it in, to absorb all forms of toxicity into ourselves. Of course, O’Hara would be quick to remind us that the toxicity is precisely what we come to the urban environment for, because toxicity is exciting. Emotional toxicity is dramatic and narratively engaging; many forms of toxicity are pleasant to inhale, imbide, swallow, snort, or otherwise absorb; and the second-hand smoke of mass transportation and mass electrification is pernicious, pervasive, and essential to our evening plans. The insight that toxicity is the price of pleasure is what makes O’Hara’s poetry so characteristic of the cultural zeitgeist of the 1950s: O’Hara describes a world where our dearest attachments are a little bit poisonous, and all the more charming for it.
But Frank O’Hara never lived in Long Beach, California, where a new arrival might get advice like this:
when you get lost, just orient yourself by the refinery
when you get turned around, look for the port
you can see the cranes from just about anywhere
around here
The poet Jane Sprague’s first full-length collection, The Port of Los Angeles, immerses the reader in the sights and signs of a city dedicated to throughput, a city where trucks and trains exchange containers with cargo ships. Whereas New York is presided over by monuments to commerce, civic life in Long Beach is overshadowed by monumental transportation infrastructure. Despite its nominal independence from Los Angeles, Long Beach is the site of LA’s port, where kilotons of goods from China and other Pacific Rim nations enter the US and are shifted to land transport.
We all might want to live in a city that was designed and administered for the benefit of human living, but how many of us do? Most cities (and certainly all large ones) are administered with the cash value of commerce in mind, and the urban population are either incidental or subordinate to these concerns. Jane Sprague’s poetry manifests anger and grief at this state of affairs. She meditates on the precarious lifestyle of incidental people, as well as on the commercial infrastructure that shapes her city’s public space. Oil derricks, cranes, yachts, and (of course) Ikea serve as symbols of alienation as well as economic facts that explain the indifferent landscape. Sprague grieves the city’s failure to be responsive to fundamental human needs, the toxic indifference of its administrative agenda. She writes:
the goods waited in their precious and stained ways
their ways of chipped edges and past fights
Sprague describes these same goods as “parsed into sectors or boxes of labeled and specific function or rooms of / disbursement.” Central to these descriptions is an assertion that the goods flowing through the port are “not indifferent.” This assertion springs from a need for connection, to find some way that our surroundings care about us, and by that means to dramatize a meaningful relation between citizens, their city, and the city’s business. In O’Hara’s work, this collective relation is figured in terms of toxicity; to him, urbanites were connected by a common willingness to be exposed to pollution. In Sprague, the connection is found in the underlying human value of goods. But this should not be misunderstood. For Sprague, the value of goods is not that they satisfy human need (human need is more like a constant, a sign of life, in these poems). Rather, goods announce the priority of human needs; each good represents a need which it is (in most cases) unable to fulfill.
Building on her equation of goods with needs, Sprague writes:
were we we or were we
containers contained
moving
mingling and all within our each
our metal porous borders
remembering almost nothing of what we told ourselves
whether we were Los Angeles Seoul New Orleans Beijing
whether we agreed or did not agree with the expansiveness of our we
The problem with this “expansiveness of our we” is its nonconsensual nature. The web of commerce imposed on her forces Sprague to recognize the humanity of distant others caught in the same web. And yet this recognition grants no power of action, is a form of conscience without agency.
Ultimately, Long Beach is a place of entrapment for Sprague, a place where human need is shortchanged or deferred. It is a place where the goods emblematic of human need arrive and depart, in a series of exchanges that damage the quality of life while providing little benefit to the residents. Of course, some consolations are available. Sprague writes:
California insinuates itself through our veins through our beds
through our children through the constant hump and suck of the
waves
as the derricks continue to drill
we find ourselves called to Ikea again and again
strange comfort Scandinavian curves
On the very next page, Sprague adds “our child falls in love with Ikea and wants to move in,” reminding us of the limits of comfort, since, like the port itself, Ikea is dedicated to throughput. Above all, Sprague’s poetry is haunted by a sense that contemporary life can only be moved through, never inhabited, that imperatives of commerce take precedence over “our narrow beds full of sweat” and “our goods broken by anger and drunkenness.” Sprague suggests that we ourselves are the goods (in other words, that our collective need is the measure of what is good). In her analysis, our ability to conceptualize value has been frustrated by the very systems designed to satisfy us.
In response, The Port of Los Angeles seeks to define “the necessary / emotional architecture” to respond to a place where dead animals wash up on the beach each day. Other daily sights include:
a long thigh a long thick
finger of grease
spill leak from something …
left offspring
eke out a living at the edge of such
opening gaps
layers of oil
one shiny magenta yellow blue
not distinct
Refusing to become accustomed to the damage done, Sprague’s poetry is that of a reliable and demanding witness.
The Sickbed
On pain, love, ekphrasis, and Craig Dworkin's 'Dure'
Dure
Dure
Ekphrasis
“It is extraordinarily enduring.”
— v. to last; to suffer continuously. Or, to harden. In good sense, to make sturdy or robust; to strengthen. Also, of things, to permit of, or be compatible with. Drawing from scar, from mirror. Verse formed from the heart’s tear. A letter that one is scared into. Afraid for. “We are nostalgic not for what we no longer have, but for what we never had in the first place, and what we never, at the time, thought to miss, or even notice.”
It is the measuring of time that causes each pain to remain.
*
The subject
The ekphrastic subject of Craig Dworkin’s Dure is a painting titled The Sick Dürer, created in the early 1500s with the assumed purpose of sending it to an out-of-town physician for a medical opinion. The small self-portrait shows the German artist Albrecht Dürer — nude from the waist up — pointing to a sickly yellow, circled area along the lower side of his chest. The painting is considered by medical professionals to be the first “pain map,” and is labeled with the phrase: Do der gelb fleck ist und mit dem finger drawff dewt do ist mir we, or, “Where the yellow spot is and where I am pointing with my finger, that is where it hurts.”
The Sick Dürer, by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), held at the Kunsthalle, Bremen. Copyright © 2004, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
The subject is pain.
The subject is language.
The subject is art.
The ekphrastic subject is pretense. Dressing, devise, disguise. “There is no poor subject.” Its purpose is “to mask more deeply operative structural elements, such as rhythm, parallelism, and juxtaposition … not only to hide but also to entice …” Shield, sham, charade. “A mask is something made to be passed through …” The subject of the poem is not purely material, or simply a slippery surface — but an opening for the eyes, for the mouth, for the heart or soul. Lure, allure, a draw. The revealing of a common “poetry of intellect.” An intersection of address. The gesture of pointing. A suppressed “it” — instead, a “this.”
*
History and tradition, part I
“The history of literature can be written as a history of its perennially conflicted response[s] to visual art.” Dure proposes an expanded sense of the possibilities of ekphrasis. The work indicates a relationship that is less concerned with a conflicted, challenged, or confrontational stance between visual art and language, and more interested in the aesthetic, intellectual, and thematic techniques suggested by a particular piece. There is no fixed, reliable “I” apparent (except as a grammatical exercise) — instead, his contemplation is a communal commune, a cacophony, and a clutter of quotations, appropriated texts, and references. An inhabiting of the I-thou relationship. The intention is, “not to explain the work, not to translate it, but to meet the work with writing … to meet in time … a kind of fusion.” Combine, join, yoke. “All real living is meeting.” The prosaic lines are spliced with definition, interrogation, poetic parcels. He moves quickly — fluidly, even — between history, theory, verse, quotation, innuendo, juxtaposition, rhythm, rhyme, complication, research, play, and contradiction:
Dürer’s treatise on ellipses is the first book of
mathematics published in German. Followed by a
fourth book of shadows, with chapters on the secrets of
vanish and converge. Sent, ject, jure. “Let none who
want geometry enter through these doors.” Sensual,
censure, sural …
… Cloud theory covers
the syntax of mists, a grammar of water vapor,
etymologies of rust. “The next step we must take is to
see in how many ways one thing is said to be in another.”
Dense, the text is sonically energetic, explosive, and exploratory. We hear “jure” rhyme with “door” and “Dürer.” Notice weather as pattern. We look for the relationships between “sent, ject, jure” — all missing the prefix “con” (“with”) — and all circling, in some etymological way, back to the poem’s possessed thinking:
consent (v.): to agree together, or with another, in opinion or statement; to be of the same mind; to agree to a doctrine or statement, [and] also to the author of it
conject (v.): to form the hypothesis, suppose; to forecast by signs, augur, divine, prognosticate; to contrive, devise, plan, plot
conjure (v.): to swear together; to make a privy compact by an oath; to form a conspiracy; to conspire; to invoke by supernatural power
We might interpret this spiritual, lyrical triplet as echoes of the poet “agreeing” with the artist, “forecasting” meaning through dissection of aesthetic qualities and gestures, or even “conspiring” with the visual artist toward a shared vision, an alternate version. The three-suffix set may also refer back to the previous fragment, and evoke issues of linguistic and visual meaning, confusion, shadow, apparition. Or, it may “divine” the following appropriation’s ominous warning. Dure demonstrates mathematical strategies, and language that is obsessively reduced to its lowest common denominators. The poem, at a rapid pace, leaves a series of clues, cues, ruses that when pulled apart provide entire, separate, and complicated threads, threats, thrusts of thought pattern. Read as a record of relations. “A surgery theory of grammar” that exposes “the sonic bones of the medium.”
Dure is not a “classical” ekphrastic poem. It is not merely “about” a painting. Dworkin resists the role of a ventriloquist — as someone who voices, mimics, or “speaks out” the concerns of the subject, image, genre, or artist. Nor does Dure work as only a “contemporary” ekphrastic work, or a “painterly poem” — one that “activates strategies of composition equivalent to but not dependent on the painting itself,” and, where, “instead of pausing at a reflective distance from the work of art, the poet reads the painting as a text, rather than as a static object …” Dworkin’s “particular relationship with the dead” urges the poem to conceive of “how many ways one thing is said to be in another.” If we imagine the history of ekphrasis as shifting from Classical to Contemporary to Conceptual — from “about” to “along with” to “as” — then Dure fits into the latter category. Dworkin’s poem is a creation for a form, of many tones, and one that recognizes that, “individual minds are not self sufficient, independent entities, but part of complex networks incorporating communities and objects.”
“Dour, hour, door.” “Hisp, molar, cusp.” “Draught, graft, grief.”
An accumulation, arrangement, range, display. Or, in other words, “Everything, right now, is nearer than you think.”
*
The pain map
Dure searches for pain’s location — in language, love, and art. In the mind and body. Each of the poem’s difficulties is incorporated by the text’s inquisition into the nature of pain. Yet, we are reminded that “nature abhors a fact” — and are left with an unrelenting amount of complications and questions. Textually, formally, these ambiguities become the loose shadows and transformative shapes of a map. The traced — plotted but not permanent — geography of hurt. We ask: can a body become sick with love? (“Love is put to the test, pain not.”) We ask: can drawing explain where each ache originates? (“But what sort of doctor would diagnose a sketch?”) We ask: how does one gesture to the true source of pain, or the speech to explain? (“Can this sort of pointing be compared with pointing to a black spot on a sheet of paper?”) And — we must ask — what is pain’s relationship to belief? “Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to believe … I’ll carry my ideas out yet —” “I am a sick man … I am an angry man … I don’t understand the least thing about my illness …” “One drop more from the gash / that stains your Daisy’s / bosom — then would you believe?” “You see he does not believe I am sick.” “A strange sickness came over me, such as I have never heard of from any man …” Dure questions art’s bond to proof. And proof’s boundaries. Does a picture of damage make it true? Might physical harm ignite in the mind? And — importantly — does Dure’s chorus intend to bear Dürer’s pain with its attention? To say: we believe you, that you ache. We make art of the heart’s scar — and it forms a mark. “Our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame … rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with … pleasure and … pain.”
The question arises: why did Dürer not write a letter? The drawing certainly took more time to compose than a note. Did Dürer believe that an image would more genuinely convey pain, or invoke sympathy? That a drawing could hurt the viewer, or that it could invoke a relevant phantom physical sensation? Distress, struggle, suffering. Agony, anxiety, apprehension. An apparition. The question becomes a ghost: what won’t the word hold? What might a gesture say better? The painting — appropriated by Dure — shows that a pain still endures within the inerasable circle that Dürer is destined to infinitely point to.
Everyone can read a circle. It forms a zero, an “oh!” or an “Element of Blank —”
*
Conceptual art
“What is important in what we must call a work … is not exactly what one has before one’s eyes but the stimulus that this sign provokes in the mind of the onlooker. The worth of a work of art does not come so much from what its creator condensed in it through his talent and experience as from the unexpected resonances and harmonics that it sets loose in the reader or viewer.”
*
Sound, form, song
In Dure, the intense, tangible rhyme — as well as attention to sound and cadence — is what produces a physical room to move around in. A body. Sound creates time, time creates space. “The more we move into space, the more we recognize its vastness as it expands before us, helping us to understand our own smallness and producing an attitude of humility.” Space is an integral quality of concept. Short bursts of rhythm punctuate Dure with, “the lexical significance of a snare drum snapping out a flourish before the reader’s execution.” Staccato consonants create breaks — crags, gaps, streams — as well as certain strange tonal variations, textures, grains. “The poetic function is not to produce new writing — we have too much already — but to force us to see what the language environment we live in looks and feels like, to make it strange.” “Every force evolves a form.” The poem is rich with resonance, materiality, echo, and honed lines intricately woven among various tones and histories. Importantly, Dure resists the temptations of strict constraint, and as with the painting or body to which it refers, it admits flaws, rawness, error by refusing absolute or pure structure. The democratic nature of its song denies firm ruling by unbreakable poetic law. It moves within individual organic boundaries, and has an “ecological sensibility.” “One recognizes that a work has style if it gives the sensation of being self-enclosed; one recognizes … the little shock that one gets from it or again from the margin which surrounds it, from the special atmosphere wherein it moves.” A poetic envelope. A free song in form.
there is free song
a free weaving of many songs
song against song and other songs clustered/spun out in a
blending of wavy pitches
*
History and tradition, part II (self-portraits)
Contemporary experimental ekphrasis began as Ashbery did it. One of the distinguishing traits of Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror was that “Ashbery advertise[d] his sources.” In Self-Portrait, he quotes and converses with scholars and art critics — “he draws into the poem his experiences …” For Ashbery, poetry is “a conversation … we are constantly in.” “How many people came and stayed a certain time, / Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you … / Those voices in the dusk / Have told you all and still the tale goes on …” In Dure, the poem takes over, an engine fueled by community. Text is prized over author, placement over original meaning, and materiality over the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Dure refuses to present the poet as a solid, omniscient being. “Against the glazing of the cased display, my reflections on the pane distort, and throw back my image in shivers.” The “I” is in threads, loose ends, feathers. “Dure … replaces the expression of subjectivity that is still central to Ashbery by a written record …” The overwhelming variety of participating sources includes bits, pieces, puzzles of philosophical texts, poems, diaries, medical journals, dictionaries, sculptures, musings. Figments, fragments, tangents. “Poetry is never a personal possession,” and in this poem there is no private property. Quotations and allusions are not prominently cited within the text — instead, almost-anonymous voices appear, creating a multitonal, multidimensional, democratic work. A work without designated ownership of language. “E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.” The obligatory citations are listed in the final pages of the book; however, we are not required to flip to the end for footnotes while reading. The language prioritizes procedure and process, not the author. “The mode of Dure is … transplant.” From transplant, to transformation, to transcendence. Each voice resuscitates its original urgency, and collaborates with surrounding calls in surprising relationship. “In appropriation of texts, in subsistence on the words of others, even from the contemporary world, imagination must have its proper position, because only imagination can return the texts to life.”
*
Scar
We pick, we poke, we prod. “The fingertip testing its sensation, and that lack, with an unreciprocated pressure …” We assess the spoil. “The scar, in essence, is simply the deformation of any particular breaking the surface of its abstraction …”
The rhythm of our breath in verse. The pulse in hands; the measured heart. What does one do with love but worry it? What does one do with art but mark it?
“If a scar is always a citation, are citations, themselves, always scars?”
*
The letter
“The assumption is that Dürer drew it for a consultation with a foreign physician: the page examined, and passed, through the post.” Hoping for a note of diagnosis. A seal of approval, a crease, or an address: Dear Sir, I see you. Dear Sir, I respond with solution. Medicine, alchemy, antidote, remedy. But what kind of letter — returned — cures? (“I’ve got a cough as/ big as a thimble — but/ I don’t care for that — / I’ve got a Tomahawk / in my side but that / don’t hurt me much, / <If you> Her Master / stabs her more —.”) After all, during the time it takes to wait for reply, the sore might restore itself. As does the medical patient or the eye’s attention, Dure demands the art of patience. “Wait! Is it not yet time for my pain-killer?”
Time heals all wounds, we learn, and correspondence ruins. “There is any difference between resting and waiting.”
In the The Sick Dürer, we begin to wonder why no clear cut is detailed; no absolutely alarming harm is apparent, or forefronted. The painting presents, instead, a region of injury, a vague area of ache. The poem, too, presents options. “It could be the frontispiece to a lost treatise on the melancholy of anatomy.” Or: memory, exercise, paranoia, error. The result of sleepless nights, pining, hypochondria, fear. Fear of health, bad news, the muse. Fear of mortality, disease, passion, doubt. “[Fear …] causeth oftentimes sudden madness, and almost all manner of diseases, as I have sufficiently illustrated … [it is] digression of the force of imagination … fear makes our imagination conceive what it list, invites the devil to come to us …” It is possible, of course, that Dürer’s drawing was never opened, not received, that it remained unread, unaddressed, alone. “The greater the distance, the clearer the view.” “Time, sensitive, materials.” Perhaps the image risked to relay another process.
Note: An earlier version of this review first appeared in 1913 a journal of forms #4 and is reproduced in Jacket2 with permission.
Sources and Notes:
Ekphrasis
“It is extraordinarily …” James A. W. Heffernan, introduction to Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 1.
“—v. to last …” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “endure.”
“We are nostalgic …” Craig Dworkin, Dure (Brooklyn: Cuneiform, 2004), 25.
The subject
The Sick Dürer, Albrecht Dürer, 12cm x 11cm, watercolor, 1509–1521 (possible dates). Additional details from the British Medical Journal, December 2004.
“Do der gelb …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 1. (Dürer.)
“There is no poor …” John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, And His Work,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 99. (Rauschenberg.)
“to mask more …” and “a mask is something …” Cole Swensen, “Ekphrasis that Ignores the Subject” (presentation, Conceptual Poetry Symposium, University of Arizona Poetry Center, May 2008).
“poetry of intellect …” “The Ubuweb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing,” ed. Craig Dwokin, 2008.
History and tradition, part I
“The history of …” James A. W. Heffernan, introduction to Museum of Words, 2.
“not to explain …” Susan Howe, interview, in Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews, ed. Edward Foster (Jersey City: Talisman House, 1988), 50.
“All real living …” Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1958), 11.
“Dürer’s treatise …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 6.
“consent …” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “consent.”
“A surgery theory …” Gregg Biglieri, press release (Brooklyn: Cuneiform, 2004).
“the sonic bones …” Cole Swensen, “Ekphrasis that Ignores the Subject.”
“not merely ‘about’ …” James A. W. Heffernan, introduction to Museum of Words, 2.
“speaks out …” Ryan Welsh, University of Chicago Glossary, s.v. “Ekphrasis,” 2007.
“painterly poem … contemporary …” Michael Davidson, qtd. in James A. W. Heffernan, introduction to Museum of Words, 2.
“particular relationship …” Cecilia Vicuña, interview by David Levi Strauss, in Cloud-Net (Art in General, 1999), 21.
“how many ways …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 6. (Aristotle.)
“individual minds …” Cole Swensen, “Ekphrasis that Ignores the Subject.”
“Dour, hour. Hisp …”; “Everything, right now …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 7, 11, 16, 23.
The pain map
“Nature abhors …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 4, 25, 16. (Appropriations from: David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein.)
“Sick! Sick! …” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910). (Italics in the text are mine for this and the next four entries.)
“I am a sick man …” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (New York: Norton, 1989), 3.
“One drop more …” Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters, ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 32.
“You see he …” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973), 10.
“A strange sickness …” J. C. Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 162.
“Our mental life …” William James, “The Emotions,” in The Principals of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 467.
“Element of Blank —” Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 323.
Conceptual art
“What is important …” J. H. Levesque, in Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 10–11.
Sound, song, definition
“The more …” J. Scott Bryson, “Find the Way Back: Place and Space in the Ecological Poetry of Joy Harjo,” Melus 27, no. 3 (2002): 171.
“the lexical …”; “A surgery theory …” Gregg Biglieri, press release (Brooklyn: Cuneiform, 2004).
“The poetic function …” Kenneth Goldsmith, cited in Marjorie Perloff, “Conceptualisms, Old and New,” 4.
“Every force …” Guy Davenport, Every Force Evolves a Form: Twenty Essays by Guy Davenport (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987).
“ecological sensibility …” Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 17. (Wendy Wheeler.)
“One recognizes …” Max Jacobs, “Commentary,” in Poems for the Millennium, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1:3, 115.
“there is free song …” John Taggart, There Are Birds (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2008), 2.
History and tradition, part II (self-portraits)
“Ashbery advertise[d] …”; “a conversation …” James A. W. Heffernan, “The Museum Goer in The Mirror: Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait,’” in Museum of Words, 169, 174.
“How many people …” John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Penguin, 1972), 71.
“spontaneous overflow …” William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800).
“Against the glazing …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 17.
“Dure … replaces …” Marjorie Perloff, “The Pleasures of Déjà Dit: Citation, Intertext and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry,” in The Consequence of Innovation: 21st-Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008), 267.
“Poetry is never …” Susan Howe, “These Flames and Generosities of the Heart,” in The Birth Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,1993), 147.
“E pluribus unum …” Barack Obama, keynote address, 2004 Democratic National Convention, Boston, MA.
“The mode of Dure …” Marjorie Perloff, “The Pleasures of Déjà Dit,” 267. (Antoine Compagnon.)
“In appropriation of texts …” Barbara Guest, Forces of Imagination (Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003), 6.
Scar
“The fingertip …”; “The scar …”; “If a scar is …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 4, 12.
The letter
“The assumption …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 2.
“I’ve got a cough …” Emily Dickinson, The Master Letters, 26.
“Wait! …” Samuel Beckett, End-Game (New York: Grove, 1958), 35.
“There is any …” Gertrude Stein, “Identity a Poem,” in Poems for the Millennium, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1:3, 47.
“It could be the frontispiece …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 20.
“Fear causeth …” Robert Burton, “Fear, a Cause,” in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Longman, Reece, and Co., 1832), section 2, part 3, no. 5.
“The greater …” W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions, 1995), 19.
“Time, sensitive …” Craig Dworkin, Dure, 4.